Cloudways: Overview
There are many web hosting solutions out there, but choosing one that you won’t regret afterward is difficult. Among the different providers, Cloudways will surely catch your attention with its unique but simplified approach to web hosting.
First, this Malta-based company works with five top cloud providers—DigitalOcean, Linode, Vultr, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Google Cloud. These five provide the infrastructure, but you don’t need to set up a direct account with them as Cloudways will set things up for you. As a managed hosting platform, Cloudways will help you deploy your website in just several clicks and within a few minutes. It supports not only WordPress but also Joomla, Drupal, Larvel, Magento, PHP, and other open-source tools.
Another attractive aspect of Cloudways is its flexible pricing. The company operates on a “pay-as-you-go” structure, making Cloudways an excellent choice for small-to-medium-sized businesses and users with a limited budget. Read this Cloudways review to learn more about this cloud-based hosting provider.
Common Problems with Hosting Services
When it comes to speed and reliability, dedicated servers and virtual private servers (VPS) are always the better choices over shared hosting solutions. While many providers do offer dedicated servers, only a few offers managed hosting support.
For instance, if you go directly with dedicated server providers like DigitalOcean, AWS, or Google Cloud, expect to do the heavy lifting yourself. You need to set up the hosting environment manually or install a cPanel. Besides, you also have to oversee the maintenance and the day-to-day operation of your server. If you don’t have the experience and skills for such tasks, expect to get unfortunate headaches whenever there are glitches, slow loading speeds, or worse, downtimes.
This is where Cloudways comes in. As a fully-managed hosting provider, it will free you from worries and hassles of operating a server. Cloudways is designed to make things simpler, without costing you a lot or sacrificing the must-have web hosting features.
Key Features of Cloudways
Cloudways is mainly known as a WordPress hosting platform. Whatever you need for your WordPress site, you can expect Cloudways to be able to do that for you, like SSL installations, HTTPS redirects, backups, and other tasks that can be tricky for not-so-experienced users.
Here is a rundown of Cloudways’ features:
Let’s tackle in detail the key features of Cloudways.
1. Custom control panel
After you created an account, you can manage your servers through Cloudways’ control panel. It’s unlike the typical cPanel of most hosts, but Cloudways’ custom control panel is intuitive and modern by itself. Through this panel’s menu, you can access Servers, Applications, Teams, and Projects.
Application Management
Let’s talk about the settings found under Applications. Once you have set up a server, you can add applications any time; for instance, WordPress.
You will then enter the Applications page. You can set up many things here through the tabs. One relevant tab is for domain mapping.
If you don’t have a domain name to be mapped or you haven’t registered one yet, you’ll be provided a temporary URL by Cloudways. This way, you can start building a website and access the control panel, as shown here.
There’s also a page for one-click SSL installation where you can install free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates. You can also get your certificates then install them here.
Recovery is also a one-click operation, and it’s located under the Restore tab.
Server management
Once you’re done with setting up an application, you can now work on running the usual aspects of your website under Servers.
You can check your login credentials under Server Management.
There’s a page for monitoring CPU usage. This is very important as consistently high usages could affect your website’s performance.
The services running on your server are listed under Manage Services. Here, you can start, stop, and restart one or many services at any time.
You can configure PHP settings, PHP and MySQL versions, and other server-level settings under Settings & Packages.
In the Security section, you can block certain IP addresses from gaining access to your resources.
If this isn’t enough, any expert users can log into the server via SSH to check and tweak the settings. Cloudways also provides cloud-based firewall as protection against malware and other types of cyberattacks.
Backups will run daily by default, but you can change the schedule.
Lastly, there’s an SMTP tab for setting up outbound emails from your server.
Team management
A great collaboration feature, Team provides you a way to add team members and assign them full or limited access to your website.
2. Staging and cloning
For changes you want to test first before making them permanent on your website, Cloudways’ staging will be a handy feature. Deploy a staging area, do the test, and when the changes look good, you can push the changes to your actual website. This way, you won’t need to worry about introducing harmful changes that you can’t reverse.
Cloning is somewhat similar to staging. You can make several clone sites when you’re changing to new servers or showcasing your website to clients.
3. Advanced caching
Cloudways gets its server infrastructure from five cloud providers: DigitalOcean, Linode, Vultr, AWS, and Google Cloud. All these providers are known to provide SSD-based VPS and dedicated servers, which ensure fast server performance.
Apart from this cloud infrastructure, Cloudways takes advantage of several caching mechanisms to optimize servers. The company uses an in-house caching plug-in called Breeze. This plug-in can be easily set up, enabled, and disabled. More importantly, it supports Cloudway’s own content delivery network called CloudwaysCDN.
CloudwaysCDN adds more speed and reliability by caching your web pages on different servers located across the world. While this feature is not available for the free trial account, you can avail it with any of Cloudways’ paid plan at a low cost. This feature is accessed under Application Management and can be added with just one click.
Cloudflare CDN can also be used on websites deployed on Cloudways; Cloudfare will work alongside Breeze. Other popular caching mechanisms Varnish and Redis are also supported, but Cloudways recommends not to use both.
4. Vertical scaling
If for any reason you need to upgrade your server, you can increase your server resources in just a few clicks through Vertical Scaling. The function is found as a tab under Server Management.
Scaling works both ways, which is a good thing. You can downgrade if you need to revert to your previous hosting plan.
5. Customer support
Cloudways has 24/7 live chat support to provide you instant assistance. You can also request a call, send an email, check the blog and knowledge base, or visit the community forum and Cloudways’ social media platforms. Cloudways also has CloudWaysBot that monitors the servers and gives notification whenever there is an update or any issue.
Cloudways Pricing
Cloudways offers flexible pricing plans and operates on a “pay-as-you-go” model. You may find the pricing complicated at first, as Cloudways has several plans based on its five different partners—DigitalOcean, Linode, Vultr, AWS, and Google Cloud. Here are the plans:
The basic plans under DigitalOcean and Linode are enough for starters. However, if you’re a heavy user, you should get one under the AWS or Google Cloud plans.
You may ask yourself: If Cloudways is using the infrastructure of these cloud providers, why can’t I go directly to these five companies? While you could get a lower price if you set up directly with these five providers, remember that you’ll be left to set up everything by yourself. With Cloudways offering managed hosting support, you’ll be free from the burden of doing complicated tasks.
If you want to give Cloudways first a try, then take advantage of the free three-day trial. It’s short, but you can build servers and test Cloudways’ features right away without providing your credit card details. This trial, however, is only available for DigitalOcean, Linode, and Vultr plans.
I liked the flexibility and affordability of these offered plans. With the “pay-as-you-go” structure, you will only need to pay what you need and avoid locking yourself into costly plans that can run for year or more. Better yet, if you need to upgrade, you can easily do so with Cloudways’ Vertical Scaling.
Cloudways accepts payment through major credit cards and PayPal. The company will also refund unused funds if the request is made within three months of fund addition.
Cloudways: What I Liked About It
Cloudways is quite easy to use. Building websites and adding apps are done with just a few clicks. WordPress, Magento, and other apps can be automatically installed. If you have an old site, Cloudways can quickly help you migrate through the custom plug-in.
Some users who are more familiar using cPanel, however, may get some surprises here. However, I’m sure they won’t get lost with Cloudways’ control panel. The Monitoring and Vertical Scaling tabs under Server Management are worth the mention. These two will let you monitor your server’s performance at a glance and provide insights when it’s high time to scale up.
Unlike shared hosting, Cloudways is a managed hosting provider so you won’t have to worry about your website all the time. It uses several technologies, like its own CloudwaysCDN, to ensure speedy page loading and site performance. Moreover, the staging, cloning, and the temporary URL are features that should be welcomed by new users.
Lastly, there’s the flexible, “pay-as-you-go” pricing which you can tailor depending on what you need. You can scale up or scale down your hosting plan as desired. There’s also a free three-day trial which, while short, should be enough to test Cloudways’ features.
Cloudways: What I Don’t Like About It
Cloudways is a fully-managed hosting platform. So if you want to have control over how your site runs (like having root access), then Cloudways might not be suited to your liking. Moreover, you’re out of luck if you want to create a custom app in a programming language not named PHP. However, I think these issues would only affect developers and advanced users.
Cloudways also doesn’t have domain name registration, though you’ll be given a temporary URL for a start. Some people may not like the fact that Cloudways doesn’t have email hosting, though lacking such a feature is arguably beneficial in some situations.
While there are several support channels, this is one area where Cloudways needs to improve on. During those times I contacted support, I am getting an inaccurate or a too technical response, or my ticket takes a long time to get resolved.
Cloudways: Final Thoughts
Cloudways is a scalable, fully-managed, cloud-based web hosting provider. While the pricing can be confusing at first, the plans offer great flexibility so you can choose the right plan that will meet your demands. The “pay-as-you-go” model makes Cloudways ideal for businesses and users who have a limited budget for hosting their websites. Moreover, such a pricing structure ensures you won’t get locked up in a lengthy, expensive subscription plan.
The custom control panel of Cloudways makes things easy for users who are unfamiliar with command lines and are entirely new to website building. While Cloudways offers several one-click integrations, it still lags behind some of its biggest competitors.
Overall, Cloudways is one of those cloud-based hosting companies that strike a nice balance between affordability and features. By partnering with five of the top cloud providers out there, Cloudways offers cloud-based hosting services that are made for speed, performance, and reliability. If you’re still unsure about Cloudways, there’s always the free three-day trial for you to test out its services.
57 thoughts on “Cloudways”
Hi Adam, I’m deciding between Cloudways (Vultr HF) and NameHero for hosting LearnDash.
Is Cloudways much faster than NameHero?
I’m afraid if I keep upgrading plans, the most expensive plan ($29.95) on NameHero is less expensive and has more resources (4 Core, RAM 4GB ) than Cloudways’ middle plan ($50, 2 Core, RAM 4GB).
Am I comparing different things? Should I think about other aspects too?
I would appreciate your advice!
I think you will be fine with either if it’s just LearnDash you have on your website. My personal prefrence is Cloudways, but I think you will fair well with either.
Cloudways is definitely way to go. Very reasonable pricing and plans. Plans are flexible for every need, quick setup and wonderful customer support.
Hi Adam,
I’ve been using Cloudways for more than a month now, on your advice on a vultr/hd server. I started with the 26 dollar plan, and it could run on that plan, but for now I upgraded to the 50 dollar plan.
I find the result is fast. My TTFB is now less than half what it was and the response time for users is fast relative to the functionality.
Only thing I don’t like there is the php error log. It is cluttered with non-actionable messages that, when I ask about it, are said to be just generated by stuff passed through from NGINX to Appache, so they are not really errors I should look at. I’m not used to such a cluttered log and it means the important (actionable) errors are less visible. I would really like to get just the application errors in the php log not the infrastructure based errors.
Cloudways support says they are working on filtering those kind of messages out, but until that happens I don’t like the logging part of the service. This is the first log I have this issue with. So they should do better there.
In the end, the most important requirement is that it all runs smoothly and that it performs. That part I like so much, that I’m going to migrate my other websites too. I already had my e-mail service and my domain registration separate from my website hosting, so that was no issue for me.
And when I need more resources, it is easy to scale up. I like that too.
Thanks for the advice.
Regards,
Hans
Just wanted to say that I came from your Cloudways/Vultr High Velocity YT video. I was super skeptical because I’ve tried all the Big Names and my Woo site always ran like donkey butt. But I figured, three-day free trial? Yeah, okay, you got me.
The Cloudways plugin transfered my site over in less than five minutes and the SPEED. I ALMOST CRIED. I’ve never had a website load under a second, EVER. Literally ditched my old web host after fifteen minutes with Cloudways and Vultr. The speed is outstanding. Thanks so much for your video.
Oh how I love this comment. I had so many naysayers in that video when I was just challenging people to try. I am so glad you tried it out and now have seen the light that VultrHF is game changing for all websites, especially demanding ones.
I also try the Vultr High Velocity. you think it is suitable for one website that run eCourse (with Tutor LMS) and manage 100000 users (I hope reach that number) ? and if you think its suitable, the 1 GB ram will do the job?
thanks!
If you are legitimately going to have that many users, you need to be on a much more powerful server than 1 GB of ram.
Cloudways is the best hosting solution for anyone who is looking hassle-free hosting with great speeds. I always prefer Cloudways for the people who are looking best WordPress Managed Hosting.
Only problem with cloudways is the lack of file manager.
CloudWays for me is still the best solution. I think they improved the support because a month ago the helped me with a little problem with my server in just a few minutes.
Coming from a shared hosting the difference of loading time of my blog is big.
When you decide to choose Cloudways Hosting for your server, you are essentially signing up with a giant web hosting company that will handle your site. There are many benefits to choosing them. The biggest reason is they offer a really cool business opportunity, which is reselling. You can run a blog or website on the Cloudways Hosting service that is hosted by them and get paid each time someone clicks through. You will get paid a commission from the service if someone is served from your site and there are no set pay per click (PPC) programs offered. Instead, you will be able to have a big ad out there for your company and it will pay for itself within weeks, months, or even years.
Cloudways Hosting is the most popular hosting services among big companies like IBM, and Cisco, and many other big names. They also offer paid advertising to their customers, which will pay the revenue to the host in exchange for advertising on their site. One of the main benefits is that you get an unlimited number of domains registered to you for one low monthly fee. You do not have to worry about high bandwidths or different servers as long as you register a single domain, and you will never be over your allotted bandwidth by any means.
While you may consider this kind of hosting to be complicated, it is really very easy and will allow you to have a simple web site that is designed just for you. This is what most people are looking for when they go online. They want to build a site that is attractive to the eyes of the internet users so that they can find them easily. Plus, a website needs a lot of traffic to make it worthwhile, which means that having Cloudways Hosting can really help you get the visitors you need.
Cloudways looked like an excellent host solution until I read this:
https://support.cloudways.com/how-does-cloudways-payment-system-work/
where they bill you for any excess without any caps. It would be nice to be able to put a limit on that so I don’t get a surprise invoice at the end of the month. Almost a deal breaker. I’m going to ask sales support about this.
Bill
Hey Bill, the potential of an extra bill is extremely limited. As someone that has used the service for many years, I have never been billed for anything over what I knew was coming.
I guess if you went over the included bandwidth which is in the terabytes, then yea you potentially can have an extra charge but it would be so minor.
The other possibility is if you are using their CDN, but even with that, it’s $1 per 25 gigabytes. So you know that going in that it may start adding up. For me, the highest charge for that was only $2.50.
So I think any potential additional charges would be very limited and very rare.
For anyone reading. the review doesn’t cover all the stuff.
Advanced Developers Should Not Consider This Hosting.
You Are Stuck On Whatever Version Of Stuff They Provide.
latest mysql version they have is 5.7 which is old. that means (amongst many other things) no json stuff which is quite stressful.
support is good. but if you move away from wordpress and stuff and want to do some custom applications, it feels like a bottleneck; they are missing quite a few features like git hooks. custom nginx configuration and stuff. really frustrated with lack of features and customizability.
Also, Wanted To Deploy And Angular Application in private_html then copy the dist folder contents to public_html. guess what. they don’t have anything to do that.
One Hacky way is to do webhooks (inside github/bitbucket/…).
But If You Use Their “Git Deploy” No WebHooks Would Be Triggered Obviously.
Advanced Developers Stay Away From This Mess.
I don’t think you are their target customer. You should probably just have a cloud server without a control panel.
Hello sir,
Can you pls write how to setup rackspace migrate to Gmail account?
Yes I do need to do that.
Unfortunately, the review is completely misleading. For advanced users STAY AWAY from Cloudways. They use AWS instances T type with burst balance. They do however NOT monitor burst balance which means you’ll be throttled on AWS and you won’t know about it.
So when you see for a long time your CPU on 100% that’s most likely because your instance in the background have no CPU credit balance on AWS and it took Cloudways 2 days to learn that.
Now put yourself in perspective and how much money you’d lose having your website down for 2 days and having no support because they do not understand how AWS works.
Stay away from Cloudways unless you have some personal blog or small landing page.
How is it misleading in any way? Do you see anything related to AWS bursting in my review? I sure don’t.
You just sound like an upset customer because one small intricate feature doesn’t work the way you want it to. It’s more of an AWS thing. Most Cloudways users go with Vultr or Digital Ocean.
Hi Adam. Thank you for your great work. When you say you do not get root access with Cloudways does that mean you cannot access your server via ftp? If not then how do you let’s say disable a plugin that has knocked your website offline after an update?
You can access via FTP and even SSH into the server. Root access enables you to install packages on the server, it’s a very technicial thing.
Nice review, signing up for a server, hopefully you will get something from Cloudways from me using your link….an unrelated question: what app do you use to display the banner of your “More videos”? thanks.
I have a pretty complicated setup on my website. Lots of custom post types, custom fields, custom post relationships linking content together. That is mostly how I am accomplishing it.
Hey Adam
I have a digital agency and I am hosting around 20 websites, Some Ecommerce and some Informational sites total websites have less than 15000 views per month.
I need a good hosting company that will be very fast and will give great customer support.
I am thinking of getting Cloudways or Siteground and not sure what one to get.
Could you please help me decide and give me your recommendation?.
It would depend on 1 question, do you need to host the email as well. If the answer is no, I would go with Cloudways because its gonna be higher performance at a lower cost. But if you also need to host the emails, SiteGround will be the better option because it’s included. Both are great hosts though.
Hi Adam,
Thanks to your great review we believe Cloudways would best suit our needs.
Are you aware of any major differences in performance when it comes to the 6 cloud hosting services? (Besides the costs and the specific details they give on their pricing page) Would you recommend any specific cloud hosting service over another?
Also, we notice that Cloudways offers “Enterprise WordPress Hosting” that uses the Google Cloud Platform. Have you used this service and is it any good? And do you know the reason why they power this service with Google Cloud Platform over one of the other cloud hosting service options?
Any help you can give will be much appreciated,
Thanks a lot
My personal preference is Vultr, but the performance of all is going to be really close.
I have recently tried to sign up for cloudways after doing a little bit of research online for a good WP hosting solution. After filling a short form they prompted me to a chat bot and assigned me an assistant who asked for some info. After chatting with him, they put me on ‘Pending’ and I waited days with no response from them.
So after a few days I tried to talk (very politely) with another chat assistant to see whats going on with my sign up application process. He requested AGAIN the same info, and assured me I will shortly get a confirmation message. Ok, so after waiting another hour I got a little bit annoyed and initiated another chat – with the same guy – he told me not to worry, he will check my application and get back to me.
As soon as he said that, he closed the chat and blocked my IP so I cannot contact the chat again. That was very rude and disrespectful and I got pretty pissed. So from my own experience, I totally NOT RECOMMEND them. They are very unprofessional and wasted my time as I waited days for trying to do a simple sign-up which should only take 10 minutes.
That sounds very odd. I will pass this message off to them.
Very similar to an experience I had with Cloudways a few months ago. I really wanted to sign up, but the chatbots or the chat people were rude, weird, and totally unhelpful…and made me wait and wait and wait…for nothing. In over 20 years of dealing with hosting services, I’ve never run into anything like it.
I’m definitely considering this route, although it scares me because of the notable differences from all traditional VPS systems. Namely, the fact I can’t offer someone a CPanel feels strange. I keep feeling like some functionality I am accustomed to suddenly won’t be there — and what if a client i’m reselling to wants access to their server and their server only?
Lots of questions remaining for this big leap….
I totally understand that. Really though, if it’s clients, are they really going to log in? Also, you can create an account for them and assign permissions.
In my limited experience talking with webmasters who manage client websites, the thing I’ve heard most often is that the customer hardly ever actually goes into the admin of their website – after all, that’s why they hired you – BUT, quite a few of those same clients who would never actually go into the admin area of their site seem to get quite nervous about not having access, just in case they would ever want to get in themselves. Just what I’ve heard from several people in the business.
You can create logins with Cloudways for each client.
You should let people know that Cloudways will delete their server and all the work they have done at the end of the free trial. My trial was up, they told me to upgrade, I did and they deleted everything. They recovered the server but there is nothing on it.
I figured it out and fixed it. I had to reconfigure the dns.
Glad to hear you got it all sorted out.
Things can fall apart quickly if the customer support is lacking, especially if the UI is customised (and WordPress instal). For me that was also the problem with Flywheel. I went with Siteground and haven’t looked back
Yes I do think Siteground has good support. Not the best I have experienced, but better then some in the same price range.
Yes I do think Siteground has good support. Not the best I have experienced, but better than some in the same price range.
Hi Adam,
I signed up for a Cloudways account via your link and am really liking it so far (;
Anyhow, just wondering how you have setup your emails with Cloudways? I want to have multiple websites on the same server and for each of those sites will obviously need a bunch of different email addresses. In the past I set these up via CPanel, but this hosting does not work with CPanel so was wondering how you set things up with regard to email?
Thanks,
Dan.
For anyone that has used shared hosting in the past, we were spoiled with having our email hosted on the same server as our website, but for performance, it’s a bad idea. So with Cloudways and all managed WordPress hosting providers, they host the website only.
There are many email hosting providers, many just use paid Google Apps accounts. That may not be feasible in every situation, but there are many affordable options to host emails.
I thought cloduways was the answer to my prayers…super fast servers, staging environments, easy to upgrade php etc. UNTIL I needed support.
As you’ve mentioned in this review, this is were they fail – miserably!
Their support is reeeeaaaalllllllly slow! Yes they have live chat, however, they can’t really do much and you get passed to 2nd line and then expect to wait for hours, even if your sites are down. And without very little communication from them about what is going on.
I would not recommend these for critical services or client sites. I’m now looking at other solutions.
Yea I have had better experience from their ticket desk, but you have to wait a few hours for a response.
Hi Adam,
For a new startup company we want to have 1 or 2 eCommerce site (developed in WP /Woo commerce)within India. Currently I ended up wrongly subscribing with Bluehost.in . Not comfortable with their support. Kindly best and low cost option but should have better speed and support.
Regards,
Vigneswaran
You may want to checkout Siteground or Cloudways.
Don’t go to siteground. Their servers are in Singapore. Data localisation policy is going to amend in India. So your data should not stay out of India. Try Cloudways platform with digital ocean Bangalore servers. I personally use this. And I’m from Tamilnadu, India.
Hello Adam,
How about their customer support? Because, it is not cPanel, then we might their help often. Do, they hesitate to help?
Their support is adequate. They do have live chat and a ticket desk. I don’t find myself needing support often, but when I do I really need support.
Hi Adam! Just wanted to ask about Mautic install on Cloudways. It wasn’t difficult to install it in C-panel using your example video but what about Cloudways?
I didn’t find it difficult to install.
Hi Artan, just an afterthought, but a risk free way to dip your toes with Cloudsays would be to migrate a site and rename as staging.yourdomain.com. that way you can safely play with installing SSL, adding an smtp provider live Sendgrid etc. and see what performance feels like.
Cloudways bill at the start of every month, but you are charged by the hour, so if it isn’t for you, it won’t have cost much to experiment.
Hey Adam
I’m willing tu purchase a hosting service from your links the upcoming month.
Which one do you recommend, cloudways basic plan or siteground go geek?
I have 8 websites with less than 100k monthly traffic overall.
Thank you
You will end up with better support from Siteground, but you will have better performance with Cloudways, but you will also pay a bit more with Cloudways. I wouldn’t recommend the lowest plan with Cloudways for 8 websites. Well if they are basic it may be ok, but I have this website on the $85 per month plan.
Hi Adam,
I want to switch to CloudWays because of the speed improvements with cloud hosting. Still hesitating because off future potential issues. What can I expect by ‘support can be technical?’
Do you have a simple example.
Thank you for the great content.
What I mean is, they lack a personal touch and will use technical terms with you that may be confusing.
Hi Artan,
My recommendation would be to create a small 1gb Vultr VM in your region and test migrate one of your sites to Cloudways. The Cloudways migration plugin is superb. It is actually provided by Blogvault.
You might want to disable the Varnish cache if you dont have a caching plugin capable of clearing it. I have it disabled on all of my servers.
Once migrated, keep an eye on the server monitor for cpu load and memory usage. Also self healing restarts in case it has had an issue and had to restart a service.
If the website shows np signs of pressure, you can migrate another site. I have found the sweetspot to be 6 low traffic sites per 1gb server. The only time the server shows any significant cpu or memory usage is when I install updates across multiple sites or if Im working n the backend.
I previously had a larger VM before realising that it was overkill. I prefer to start small and spread my sites (and risk) between different servers and even providers. That way one server going down wont take out all of my client sites. If one site does demand more resources, you can step it up to the next server and monitor.
Good luck!