Cloudways Review 2024: Affordable & Faster
Cloudways Review Summary
Cloudways is an excellent all-round WordPress hosting service. Based on our 12-month data, It excels in TTFB and load-handling performance. Cloudways pricing starts at $11/month and comes with unlimited site installs, but backups and CDN are add-ons. Cloudways support is excellent in most cases, with fast resolution available through chat.
Cloudways WordPress comes with a speed-optimized setup, offering faster performance by default. It offers a 3-day free trial and coupon code. The migration is handled by the Cloudways migrator plugin in a few clicks. Cloudways offers pay-as-you-go pricing, so you only pay for your resources. Plus, no long-term commitment is required.
Cloudways Pros
Cloudways Cons
Starts at $11/month
Cloudways Plans and Pricing
Cloudways plan starts at $10/month with a free three-day trial. There is also our Cloudways Promo Code that offers $25 free credits. The Cloudways plans from each cloud provider are:
- DigitalOcean: Starts at $11/month
- Linode: Starts at $14/month
- Vultr: Starts at $16/month
- Amazon Web Services: Starts at $36.51/month
- Google Cloud: Starts at $33.63/month
The Cloudways plans differ based on server resources like RAM, CPU, Storage, and Bandwidth.
Cloudways Performance Test
Cloudways performance is tested by hosting a test site on their DigitalOcean servers. The sites are monitored from 22 USA locations for 60 seconds once.
TTFB
The Cloudways site recorded an average server response time of 332 ms. The Cloudways TTFB is better than WP Engine and Kinsta.
Last 12 months average speed of Cloudways:
- September 2024 average TTFB: 405 ms
- August 2024 average TTFB: 435 ms
- July 2024 average TTFB: 410 ms
- June 2024 average TTFB: 387 ms
- May 2024 average TTFB: 399 ms
- April 2024 average TTFB: 402 ms
- March 2024 average TTFB: 366 ms
- February 2024 average TTFB: 384 ms
- January 2024 average TTFB: 383 ms
- December 2023 average TTFB: 381 ms
- November 2023 average TTFB: 352 ms
Uptime
Cloudways’ site recorded an average uptime of 99.99%, making it one of the few companies offering such a high uptime.
Last 12 months average uptime of Cloudways:
- September 2024 average uptime: 100%
- August 2024 average uptime: 100%
- July 2024 average uptime: 99.87% (scheduled maintenance)
- June 2024 average uptime: 100%
- May 2024 average uptime: 100%
- April 2024 average uptime: 100%
- March 2024 average uptime: 100%
- February 2024 average uptime: 100%
- January 2024 average uptime: 100%
- December 2023 average uptime: 100%
- November 2023 average uptime: 100%
Load Testing
Cloudways site recorded an average response time of 266 ms while handling 500 Simultaneous visitors. A total of 56069 requests are processed without any error.
Global TTFB
The Cloudways site recorded an average global TTFB of 446 ms, with the fastest TTFB in all the places.
Core Web Vitals
I tested the Core Web Vitals of my Cloudways site, and the site recorded
- Largest Contentful Paint: 595 ms
- Total Blocking time: 0 ms
- Cumulative Layout Shift: 0.07
Cloudways Features
1. Datacenters Locations
Cloudways allows customers to choose from five cloud providers: DigitalOcean, Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services, Linode, and Vultr.
Cloudways can provide services from over 65+ global data center locations. No other service has achieved this flexibility in choosing data centers.
2. Cloudways Control Panel is excellent
Cloudways offers users a custom control panel with an easy-to-use user interface. All the options are neatly arranged, and users shouldn’t have any problems with navigation and usability.
Users can conveniently manage every aspect of their hosting account from a single point of control. This includes Server Settings and Packages via UI, 1-Click Backup & Restore, Cron Job Manager, WP-CLI Pre-installed, 1-Click Stop App, App Settings via UI, and Advanced/Custom Varnish Settings.
Cloudways is also an excellent platform for team collaboration and offers many advanced collaboration tools. These tools include Git Integration, SSH and SFTP Access, Application, and server Cloning, One Account Multiple Teams, Projects, Staging Area and URLs, and Server Transfer.
If you come from cPanel, the Cloudways control panel will significantly improve your productivity. The tasks can be done in less than 1 – 3 clicks, whereas they took at least 5 – 7 clicks in cPanel.
3. Cloudways Migration
Cloudways does unlimited site migration through their Cloudways Migrator Plugin. You can simply install the plugin on the existing site and enter the Cloudways server details. The transfer might take some time based on your site size, but most blog site migrations get over in less than an hour.
4. Staging Environment
Cloudways offers customers a simple and stress-free staging environment that allows you to test your changes relating to plugins, themes, and code within a sandbox.
Besides, the staging site is connected to the live site to quickly push and pull operations. The staging environment is password-protected and SSL-enabled.
5. Cloudways Security
Cloudways’ security is highly robust, characterized by Dedicated Firewalls, Let’s Encrypt SSL, IP Whitelisting, Regular Security Patching, Two-Factor Authentication, and Bot Protection.
Besides, Cloudways’s track record so far shows no security issues.
6. Cloudways Cloudflare Enterprise CDN
Cloudways and Cloudflare team up to offer an Enterprise CDN solution that promises to speed up content delivery and improve website security. The service is available through the Cloudways platform at an affordable price of $4.99/site.
The Cloudways Cloudflare Enterprise CDN is powered by Cloudflare’s Anycast network, which has over 200 data centers worldwide.
7. Cloudways Support
Cloudways has a very reliable and dedicated support service, mainly 24/7/365 Live Chat and Online Ticketing, to assist customers with Server Customization and Configuration and Application-level Issues.
The assistance is pretty fast and friendly. Cloudways also has a Premium Support add-on, which comes with enhanced SLAs, Phone Access, a Private Slack Channel, and shorter ticket response times.
8. Cloudways WordPress optimized Setup
For new site installations, Cloudways offers speed-optimized WordPress installations. Thus, by default, the sites offer the fastest hosting experience. However, customers can opt out of this optimized setup and use a regular WordPress installation.
9. Breeze Caching Plugin
Cloudways comes with a free WordPress Caching plugin called Breeze. Breeze is a hassle-free WordPress cache plugin with no technical complexities. Further, the plugin comes with a user-friendly interface.
Breeze works smoothly with Varnish Cache and CDN. The plugin also comes with internet and static caching features to boost page loading for WordPress sites. Further, the cache plugin optimizes databases. This reduces the size of the databases and helps them have a good response time.
10. Free SSL
Cloudways provides customers with a free SSL Certificate by Let’s Encrypt on all plans. SSL Certificates encrypt the traffic communicating between browsers and the website.
Been on CloudWays for about 3 weeks now. Service is great so far, but the WordPress admin backend is going so slow. My server CPU and memory resources are frequently maxed out. Not sure why.
I’m glad you liked Cloudways. If you are running multiple applications in a single server, try to disable cron and enable them only for required applications (source)