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This is the list of alternatives to Cloudways hosting based on performance, pricing, features and customer support.

If you are for any reason looking for a Cloudways alternative, then you are in the right place.

Best Cloudways Alternatives

1. Templ

Templ New Home

After analyzing multiple Cloudways alternatives, we have concluded that Templ is the best option available. Having used both Cloudways and Templ to host over five websites, we can confidently say that whenever we require better performance, we switch to Templ.

Templ and Cloudways have comparable pricing, starting at $15/month and $11/month, respectively. However, Templ provides better features, including Google Cloud Platform, Google DNS, Nginx, and MariaDB. Templ also offers free Google CDN, while Cloudways offers Cloudflare CDN as an add-on.

Templ offers automatic scaling with no downtime, while Cloudways requires manual server upgrading, which can lead to downtime.

Our independent testing revealed that both Cloudways and Templ had an average response time of 309 ms, making them the fastest hosts in terms of response time.

During load testing, we sent 500 simultaneous visitors to the site, and Cloudways completed the requests in 180ms, while Templ took just 50ms. In fact, a lower response time indicates a faster server; Templ is the better option for high-traffic websites.

Check Templ Review

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Another advantage of Templ is its access to 24 Google Cloud data center locations, which guarantees faster response times for global traffic. Templ offers 24/7 customer support via live chat, which is better than Cloudways customer support.

The only downside of Templ is its limited server resources, such as disk space. This is because Google Cloud is more expensive than Digital Ocean or Linode, which are used in Cloudways.

Pros of Templ:

  • Faster performance than Cloudways hosting due to Google Cloud platform
  • Better customer support compared to Cloudways
  • Affordable pricing, which includes CDN
  • Automatic scaling with no downtime
  • Faster global TTFB than Cloudways, making it better for websites with global traffic

Cons of Templ:

  • Limited server resources like disk space compared to Cloudways due to the expensive Google Cloud infrastructure.

Overall, Templ is the best option for websites that require the best-in-class performance and features, as well as great scalability.

2. Scala Hosting

Scala Hosting works very similarly to Cloudways. Recently, they introduced Managed Digital Ocean plans to start at $9.95/month, much similar to Cloudways pricing. Scala hosting was founded in 2007, with over 700,000 websites hosted on their platform. They operate their own data centers in Dallas, United States. In recent years, they’ve partnered with DigitalOcean to offer hosting services through DigitalOcean’s global data centers. 

Scala Hosting uses its own proprietary control panel called “sPanel,” and it comes with great user management. The most highlighting thing between Cloudways and Scala hosting is their pricing. Scala hosting placed their pricing cheaper than Cloudways, although both will use the same DO’s servers. Here is the comparison of plans.

HostScala HostingCloudways
Digitalocean 1 GB RAM$19.95/mo.$11/mo.
DO 2 GB RAM$25.95/mo.$24/mo.
DO 4 GB RAM$41.95/mo.$46/mo.
DO 8 GB RAM$77.95/mo.$88/mo.
DO 16 GB RAM$149.95/mo.$135/mo.

If you look into the pricing, the 4GB RAM/8 GB RAM plans of Scala hosting are cheaper than Cloudways. But Scala hosting offers free unlimited daily backups while it was an add-on in Cloudways and a free domain. So, I think the pricing of Scala hosting is justified here. 

Pros of Scala Hosting

  • The pricing is affordable to some plans compared to Cloudways. Also, it offers free daily backups while it costs $0.33/GB with Cloudways. 
  • Options to choose Scala Data Centers, which gives you the flexibility to build your own cloud VPS.
  • Being in the industry since 2007 operates their own data centers, so the company is reliable to put our trust on.

Cons of Scala Hosting

  • Their spanel is great to use but comparable to Cloudways as the latter company does a lot of integration with Premium CDN, email services, and more, lacking in Scala hosting’s sPanel.  

In simple terms, If you find Templ hosting resources are limited, then Scala hosting should be your ultimate choice. 

3. Rocket Hosting

Rocket Hosting Home

Rocket hosting is an interesting Cloudways alternative hosting service to use. Powered by Cloudflare Enterprise, Rocket hosting comes with Cloudflare’s CDN and WAF security enabled by default. While Cloudflare Enterprise costs you $200/month/site, Rocket does a great job bringing their hosting plans starting at $30/month. 

Focused on speed, some of the best features of Rocket host are

  • Cloudflare Enterprise CDN
  • Optimized Google fonts, save 100 ms in load time.
  • Hack and malware removal.
  • On-demand and automatic daily backups for free.
  • WordPress 24/7 customer support.

If you’re using Cloudways, you need to pay for CDN and backups, an additional charge, but Rocket includes everything inside their plan. If you look deep, Rocket doesn’t include just the CDN but does a full page caching enabled by default. That means, no matter where your data center is present, the TTFB will be the fastest throughout the globe. Also, Rocket allows you to host from 20 data center locations in the United States, United Kingdom, Asia, and Australia. 

Just like on Cloudways, Rocket hosting provides services from 20 global locations so that you can host your sites based on your targeted customers. 

During our test, Rocket secured 268 ms average response time, and Cloudways recorded 309 ms. Rocket is faster because it comes with CDN enabled, and Cloudways was tested without CDN. Rocket hosting got 16 ms in load testing while handling 1000 requests, while Cloudways took just 10 ms. However, in constant load testing, Rocket recorded 60 ms in handling 500 constant client loads while Cloudways took 168 ms to handle the same load. Thus, Rocket is most suitable for high traffic sites.

Pros of Rocket

  • Powered by Cloudflare premium CDN and security network
  • 24/7 WordPress customer support via live chat
  • Free migrations and a simple to use dashboard.
  • Server-level Google font optimization reduces 100ms load time
  • Affordable as you host more sites.

Cons of Rocket

  • The new company, but the founder has over 17 years of experience in the hosting industry. 

4. Nexcess

Nexcess Review

Nexcess is the most affordable Cloudways alternative hosting for agencies. If you host more than 25 sites on Cloudways and look for an alternative, then Nexcess will be a great fit for you. Coming from the Liquid Web family, Nexcess offers managed WordPress hosting solutions that come with a feature-rich control panel, expert support, powerful server resources, and 24/7 customer support.

Some of the important features of Nexcess are

  • Visual based Automatic WordPress updates
  • Unlimited Email Hosting included
  • Nexcess CDN for free
  • Unlimited image compression 
  • Server-based cache

Nexcess is not an affordable alternative to Cloudways if you need to host 10 sites. The charge for Nexcess/Cloudways 10-site plan comes around $100/month, so there is not much difference. However, The Builder plan of Nexcess allows you to host 25 sites and is priced at $149/month. In the case of Cloudways, you need to pay $250/month to host 25 sites. Likewise, the plans of Nexcess go cheap if you want to host 25/50/100 sites.

Performance

Coming to performance, Nexcess is so close to Cloudways. In server response time, Cloudways secured 309 ms while Nexcess recorded 374 ms in our test. I’ve sent 500 users to the site in terms of load testing, and Cloudways took 168 ms to process the request while Nexcess took 182 ms to handle the same request. As you can see from the results, Nexcess is not that fast as Cloudways, but the difference is negligible. 

Pros of Nexcess

  • Cheaper alternative if you need to host more than 10 sites.
  • Includes free & premium speed optimization plugins.
  • Nexcess CDN with global POP locations comes included.
  • Unlimited Email hosting 
  • Free automatic scaling

Cons of Nexcess

  • Not recommended if you need to host less than 10 sites

5. GreenGeeks

GreenGeeks Home

GreenGeeks is the only shared hosting alternative to Cloudways, which I recommend. In fact, their server response time is faster than Cloudways. Though Cloudways is good, it’s not affordable for all, and not everyone needs to spend $10 on hosting per month, especially if you’re a beginner. GreenGeeks comes packaged with great uptime, cPanel control panel, 24/7 live chat support, and LiteSpeed Optimized server setup. Some of the great features of GreenGeeks are

  • LiteSpeed Server and caching
  • MariaDB and HTTP/3 tech stack
  • Container-Based account isolation
  • Automatic backups
  • Scalable computing resources.

GreenGeeks offers equally or faster performance compared to Cloudways. The average server response time of GreenGeeks is 291 ms, while Cloudways recorded 309 ms. In terms of the simple load test, Cloudways took 10 ms while GreenGeeks took 25 ms to handle it. However, in a constant load test, GreenGeeks took just 35ms to handle 500 clients in a minute, while Cloudways took 168ms to handle the same load. 

While I don’t usually recommend shared hosting, GreenGeeks deserves to mention here, as their performance is better than many managed WordPress hosting, which cost $30/month. Simultaneously, our above performance data comes from the cheapest GreenGeeks plan of $2.49/month. Now, you can understand why I recommend them as an alternative here.

Pros of GreenGeeks

  • The cheapest alternative to Cloudways
  • cPanel powered, so comes with email hosting
  • Latest Tech stacks
  • 24/7 USA based live chat support

Cons of GreenGeeks

  • Shared hosting is not reliable as like Cloud hosting.

Which Cloudways Alternative is good for you?

The Cloudways alternative is listed based on the use case.

  • Templ – Recommend for better performance to Cloudways.
  • Scala Hosting – Similar business model of Cloudways.
  • Rocket – Value for money alternative.
  • Nexcess – Cloudways alternative for agencies.
  • GreenGeeks – Shared hosting alternative.

In simple terms, if you’re a blogger obsessed with speed, Templ hosting is the ultimate choice. Nothing can beat the power of Google Cloud with CDN & DNS. Scala Hosting is for someone who needs to host unlimited sites on a single server, just like on Cloudways. Rocket hosting comes with CDN in-built and a high traffic limit. Nexcess is suitable for agencies who need to host more than 10 sites at an affordable cost with a little compromise to performance. GreenGeeks is the cheapest shared hosting option available if you want to control your hosting costs.

Which hosting has a larger number of data centers than Cloudways?

Cloudways provides service through five cloud hosting providers named Digital Ocean, Linode, Vultr, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Amazon Web Services (AWS). Cloudways offers services from more than 60+ global data centers due to the presence of multiple cloud providers. There is no other hosting provider with such large numbers.

Templ hosting uses Google Cloud, so it offers service from 24 global data centers, and they’re the next highest hosting provider on the list.

I’m using Cloudways with CloudwaysCDN. Which Hosting alternative is good?

CloudwaysCDN is powered by Cloudflare Enterprise, which is one of the fastest CDN in the world. Cloudways charge $4.99/site/month. For your question, I recommend Rocket hosting. Since Rocket hosts use Cloudflare Enterprise, it is much more powerful than Cloudways CDN.

Apart from that, Rocket does full page caching, which means the host will cache your HTML pages on all the global POP locations; thus, the server response time will be better than Cloudways as it just caches the static resources in their CDN locations.

Which host is good that comes with email hosting? 

Cloudways provides affordable email hosting addon through RackSpace email hosting. In case if you’re moving out of Cloudways, you need to find an alternative service provider. The two best options are Google Workspace and Zoho, although the latter doesn’t have the best features of Google. In our list, Nexcess offers unlimited email hosting for all sites. No matter which data center or which plan you choose, email hosting comes included for free.

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