Rocket.net offers faster TTFB and load handling than Cloudways. While Rocket is tested with Cloudflare Enterprise edge caching, Cloudways is tested without CDN because it wasn’t included in the base package. If you can buy their $4.99/month Cloudflare Enterprise CDN add-on, then you can achieve a performance similar to that of Rocket hosting. Cloudways comes with affordable pricing of $11/month with unlimited site installs, whereas the Rocket plan starts at $30/month. Overall, I believe both Rocket and Cloudways (with CDN) are good options for getting started. If pricing matters, Cloudways will be the winner. There is also a Cloudways coupon available.
Rocket.net Vs. Cloudways: Performance
1. TTFB
The server Response Time (TTFB) is a crucial test to check the performance of any hosting service.
I tested the TTFB of my sites hosted with Rocket and Cloudways. Each test site is set to get monitored for 60 seconds once in Pingdom (1440 checks in a day, 43,200 checks in a month, 2,60,000 checks in 6 months, and 5,18,400 checks in 12 months)
Based on 12 months of data, my Rocket site recorded an average server response time of 279 ms, while my Cloudways site reflected an average server response time of 332 ms. The Rocket hosting comes with CF Enterprise CDN edge caching, giving the fastest TTFB to the sites hosted.
However, at Cloudways, it was tested without a CDN because their CF Enterprise CDN should be bought separately. Hence, Rocket has a better server response time (TTFB) than Cloudways.
2. Uptime
Uptime is another crucial factor. Any site with a sales motive can’t afford to have poor uptime. I tested the uptime of my Rocket and Cloudways site over 12 months.
While my Rocket site maintained an uptime of 100%, my Cloudways site recorded an uptime of 99.99%. With Cloudways recording a single outage lasting only for 2 minutes, we consider both Rocket and Cloudways to be equally reliable.
3. Load Testing
Performance checks would be incomplete without load testing, and I performed load testing by sending 500 concurrent visitors to the site.
The result shows that Rocket handled the load with an average response time of 19 ms, and Cloudways took 266 ms. Rocket took the lowest time to handle the load, making themselves the fastest hosting to handle the load.
4. Global TTFB
Global TTFB is an important test to check how well a hosting service performs in different international locations. The test is especially essential for those sites that get traffic from multiple global locations.
I tested the global TTFB by pinging the site from 40 global locations. As expected, Rocket hosting scored better than Cloudways due to the Edge Caching on Cloudflare network.
Rocket’s had an average global TTFB of 191 ms and Cloudways site had an average global TTFB of 445 ms.
5. Core Web Vitals
Better Core Web Vitals mean better user experience. I tested the Core Web Vitals of the two services using GTmetrix. My Rocket site reflected a
- Largest Contentful Paint of 507ms,
- Total Blocking Time of 0ms and
- Cumulative Layout Shift of 0.
My Cloudways site had a
- Largest Contentful Paint of 560ms,
- Total Blocking Time of 0 ms, and
- Cumulative Layout Shift of 0.
Rocket Vs. Cloudways: Features
Data Center Locations
Rocket hosting comes with eight data center locations in the USA, UK, Europe, Singapore, and Australia to host your sites. Cloudways, as partnered with five major cloud providers, provides access to host your sites from 60+ global data center locations.
Control Panel
Rocket hosting comes with a cool, neat, and no-nonsense control that provides access to most features like managing site updates, overview area, backups, logs, etc. The dashboard is much simpler; it won’t take more than two minutes to explore all the settings.
Cloudways comes with its own control panel, kind of advanced control panel which helps you to manage even the tinnesiest settings of your server. However, for most common site owners, you will be accessing between four or five tabs majorily to manage your site for regular settings.
CDN
Rocket has an Enterprise Cloudflare CDN solution available for free on all plans. The CDN gives sites the advantage of Brotli file compression, image optimization, tiered caching, and Agro smart routing while serving your content from the closest server. The best part is users don’t have to configure it at all. Rocket would take care of everything about the CDN.
Cloudways comes with a built-in CDN powered by Cloudflare Enterprise with features such as built-in Asset Optimization, Low TTFB, and exceptional caching. Cloudways offers a CDN add-on on all plans for easy CDN integration. However, it charges $4.99/month for 100GB bandwidth.
Backups
Rocket has a reliable backup system and free automated daily backups on all plans. The backups are usually taken at night and saved on the Rocket server for disaster recovery. The host also allows customers to restore any backups at any time. Further, Rocket also offers on-demand backups on all plans, which means you can get a complete backup of your site before performing any site maintenance. All the plan comes with 14 days of backup retention.
Cloudways doesn’t offer free backup and charges $0.33 per GB of backup. The backup system is reliable, and the host takes automated daily backups of sites and saves them to an external storage network.
Staging
Rocket offers a straightforward staging site creation, and it’s free on all plans to help you create staging sites, test your changes and deploy significant changes from staging to live site.
Staging is free in Cloudways, and the process is pretty simple, from creating a staging site to pushing the changes to the live site.
Discounts
The Cloudways Promo code gives you 25% OFF for first-month billing, which is more than enough to test their hosting services.
Support
Rocket offers customers brilliant support through 24×7 live chat, phone, and email and a comprehensive knowledge base. Most importantly, the support team has the most experienced WordPress executives to assist the customers.
Cloudways also has one of the best support teams in the industry, and the team does a great job of assisting customers through 24×7 live chat and ticketing. One can access customer support inside their dashboard. Further, the host also has advanced and premium support add-ons for customers who need quicker assistance.
Rocket.net or Cloudways – Which is best?
Rocket and Cloudways are both pretty popular hosting services. However, choosing between the two isn’t easy unless you know all the aspects of the two services. I spent some hours studying the various features of the two services and testing their performance.
Reading this post, you must have noticed that Rocket has a leading edge over Cloudways in many places. Cloudways is cheap to start as their pricing starts at just $11/month. However, for better performance and an easy-to-use dashboard, then Rocket.net is the ultimate choice.
In core web vitals you have written the wrong winner
Have you run any performance tests since Cloudways added full page caching last month (July 2023)? Curious to see how they stack up against Rocket.net now.
Hi Travis,
I’ve been testing Cloudflare’s Full Page Caching since mid-June 2023. Looking at July’s data, Rocket had a quick load time of 261ms, while Cloudways took 297ms. The gap narrowed, but Rocket remains the top choice. Check out data here and here.
Awesome! Thanks for the update. A bit surprising they aren’t both similar now if they’re both powered by Cloudflare Enterprise.
Looks like Rocket had a big blip on Jul 25-26. Other than those two days, Rocket continues to hover at 250ms as you originally reported.
Nice catch. I digged the data for last 6 months and that’s the only spike, ever happened at Rocket.net. If that’s not the case, Rocket just kept scoring around 250ms. Pretty neat!