Cloudways Review Summary

Cloudways is an excellent all-rounder WordPress hosting service. Based on our 12-month data, Cloudways excels in TTFB and load-handling performance. Cloudways pricing starts at $11/month and comes with unlimited site installs, but backups and CDN come as addons. Cloudways support is excellent for most cases, with fast resolution available through chat.

Cloudways WordPress comes with a speed-optimized setup. Thus, it offers a 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 have to pay for your resources. Plus, there’s no long-term commitment required.

Overall Rating:
4.2 / 5

Cloudways Pros

  • Excellent TTFB, Uptime, and load handling.
  • Affordable managed Cloud hosting
  • Good customer support.
  • Offers the highest number of data center locations.
  • Unlimited sites can be hosted on single server.

Cloudways Cons

  • No email hosting.
  • No free backups, charged at $0.33/GB.
  • CDN is an add-on priced at $4.99/domain.
Try CLOUDWAYS

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.

Uptime

Cloudways site recorded an average uptime of 99.99%. Cloudways is one of the few companies offering such a high uptime.

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 such as DigitalOcean, Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services, Linode, and Vultr.

Ideal way to choose Cloudways server after purchase

Cloudways can provide services from over 65+ global data center locations. No other service has achieved this flexibility in choosing data centers.

Datacenter

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.

Cloudways Dashboard

Users have the convenience of managing 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 are Git Integration, SSH and SFTP Access, Application & Server Cloning, One Account Multiple Teams, Projects, Staging Area & URLs, and Server Transfer.

If you come from cPanel, then the Cloudways control panel will significantly improve your productivity. The tasks can be done in less than 1 – 3 clicks, which 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. Based on your site size, the transfer might take some time, 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 push quickly 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, if we consider the track record of Cloudways so far, there hasn’t been a single security issue.

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 with mainly 24/7/365 Live Chat and Online Ticketing to assist customers with things such as Server Customization and Configuration and Application-level Issues. 

The assistance is pretty fast and friendly. Besides, Cloudways also has a Premium Support addon which comes with enhanced SLAs, Phone Access, Private Slack Channel, and shorter ticket response times.

8. Cloudways WordPress optimized Setup

For new site installations, Cloudways offers a 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. Besides, the plugin 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 with a good response time. 

10. Free SSL

Cloudways provides customers a free SSL Certificate by Let’s Encrypt on all plans. The SSL Certificates encrypt the traffic communicating between the browsers and the website.