Cloudways Review (2024) | Why I Use Cloudways?

We all know that finding the perfect match hosting for your website is challenging work.

If you landed on this article, it’s probably because you are researching for the next hosting service you will buy for your website.

If my guess is correct, congratulations, because today I will talk about Cloudways hosting. I have been using Cloudways for quite a long time.

In this Cloudways review article, I will cover Cloudways features, pricing, my opinion, and whether it suits you. And, of course, I will list the pros and cons.

If you want to buy hosting services, knowing about Cloudways will help you to compare those hosting with others. So without further due, let’s know about Cloudways.

About Cloudways

The first question is, what is Cloudways? Cloudways is a managed cloud hosting solution.

This hosting provider lets users choose from five top cloud hosting providers: DigitalOcean, Linode, Vultr, AWS, and Google Cloud.

When I was first introduced to Cloudways, I was surprised because it works differently from other hosting service providers, like Liquid Web, WPX, and Nexcess.

Its main work is to set up the infrastructure with these cloud providers on behalf of the users. I needed clarification about how to use it and about the functionality of this hosting.

But like standard hosting, it also supports various open-source tools, including WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Laravel, Magento, and PHP.

The first thing I liked about when I planned to buy hosting from Cloudways is that it offers a flexible “pay-as-you-go” pricing structure.

When I first bought Cloudways, this website was a little bit small, so it was suitable for my small-sized website.

Why am I considering purchasing this uncommon hosting service? The reason is their modern technology and the features they are offering.

When I researched them, I found out they provide fast load speeds, free SSL certificates, advanced caching technologies, SSD-based servers, CDNs, dedicated firewalls, and IP whitelisting.

These features were more than enough for me. It would be wrong if I said that it is enough for me because the features Cloudways offers are more than enough for any new website owner.

The speciality of Cloudways is that its users can quickly scale services up or down as needed.

So why is Cloudways user-friendly? Just because it offers features?

No, that’s not because when I dived deep into the Cloudways, I learned that it simplifies server management, allowing users to focus on growing their businesses.

It offers a range of tools and services for managing e-commerce stores and business websites.

Another significant fact about Cloudways that surprised me is that it allows me to select cloud providers, hosting applications, SSL options, and workflows that suit my needs.

Cloudways Key Features

Cloudways is a game-changer in cloud hosting, offering many powerful features that make it a top choice for businesses and individuals alike.

With its user-friendly interface, robust performance, and exceptional scalability, Cloudways has revolutionized the way websites and applications are hosted in the cloud.

Now, I will explore the key features that set Cloudways apart from its competitors, enabling users to manage and optimize their cloud hosting experience effortlessly.

WordPress Made Easy

The first feature is that it makes WordPress easy. If you’re interested in WordPress hosting, CloudWays makes it incredibly easy.

WordPress is the most popular CMS, so beginners usually use this. So, I always recommend WordPress-friendly hosting for new users, too.

I was stunned to see that it offers one-click WordPress installation, backups and restores, and a built-in cache app.

After seeing this, I thought, this is all. However, I was surprised to find out that they allow the migration of as many WordPress sites as I want for free with the WordPress migrator plugin.

If you use Cloudways hosting, it will give you the ability to scale your WordPress server.

It’s super easy and user-friendly, even for those who may need to gain more experience in WordPress. What if I told you I have discovered a secret feature of Cloudways?

The secret feature is that Cloudways has a fantastic staging area. With this feature, you can test everything you put on your WordPress website before it actually goes live.

Cloudways has done more than enough to make the life of WordPress site users easy. Basically, it’s more WordPress-friendly than most of the hosting service providers.

Team Collaboration

If you’re running a business with several other people, this is also a great option here for teams and account management.

Basically, I like to work with a group. I am a software reviewer with the side hustle of affiliate marketing. So, I work with SEO and writers. As a result, this feature helps me a lot.

This feature allows me to create different accounts for different team members, and it will enable me to set limits on their access to other aspects of the server.

This is a great feature, and I ensure that my team members only have access to some things. There is also an adjustment option, which you can adjust based on your needs.

Advanced Security Measures

I was astonished after seeing the security system of Cloudways. I was speechless when I saw the tons of tons of security options of Cloudways.

Cloudways also has tons of security features. These features are excellent in protecting me and my users. They have two-factor authentication, regular OS patches, and Firewalls.

They also offer auto-healing servers, which means if your website starts to slow down for any reason, the servers will take pre-programmed steps to get your site back up and running.

Also, there are automatic backups here so that you can keep all of your work. It’s a pretty good feature, which I see on costly hosting services.

You can also adjust the frequency of these backups depending on what your needs are, from every hour to every week or whenever you choose.

Now, let’s see some security features of Cloudways, which made me speechless.

1. 1-Click Free SSL Installation

They offer an SSL certificate to improve website security. More or less, every web hosting provider gives it, but they offer you this completely free.

Cloudways will provide you with a Free SSL certificate, which is always a bonus. This will help you keep your website encrypted, and it will protect all of your site visitors’ data.

2. IP Whitelisting

White IP makes it easy to collaborate with networks or regions with unrestricted access to SSH and SFTP.

Cloudways also offers this fantastic security feature. Regular Security Patching To maintain proper security, Cloudways performs standard OS patches on its user’s server.

As a result, its users will get a secure, managed cloud server. This regular checkup is a great way to avoid vulnerabilities.

3. Bot Protection

A bot is an irritating and harmful enemy of website owners. Cloudways protect your WordPress websites from traffic congestion caused by malicious bots.

There are many types of bot attract a website owner will face in their journey. The most common of them is brute-force login attacks.

Cloudways will make you safe from these attacks with the help of their technology partner, Malcare.

4. Advanced DDoS Protection

This is a unique feature for people using Cloudways’ hosting services. If you don’t know what DDoS means, it’s a website defense system.

This feature is made to stop cyber-attacks (DDoS attacks) within 3 seconds rapidly.

As a result, you can tell that it’s a bodyguard of your website because It safeguards your website or app from various types of attacks on different levels of the internet.

This feature is also helpful to ensure your online service stays up and running, even during attacks.

5. Web Application Firewall (WAF)

This firewall does exceptionally well when it comes to protecting your website.

It looks at data from millions of websites and processes a whopping 32 million requests every second.

It uses this data to determine who’s trying to harm your website or app, stopping them. As a result, your site becomes secure from the loss of cyber attacks.

6. e-Commerce Security

To especially highlight its e-commerce security feature, I don’t combine it with all the security features of Cloudways because its E-Commerce security is something special.

If you are planning to buy hosting for e-commerce, I suggest Cloudways for it. Cloudways’ app library has many e-commerce tools, including the popular Magento and PrestaShop platforms.

In terms of security, Cloudways engineers protect your installation from attacks by releasing regular operating systems and firmware upgrades as a managed cloud hosting platform.

Furthermore, Cloudways provides free SSL certificates, which are essential data protection if you plan to sell products.

I have never seen any hosting service offer security measures, especially for e-commerce.

User-Friendly Control Panel

How easy is Cloudways to use? If you are a beginner, you can ask me this question. Well, the answer is it’s straightforward and very user-friendly.

It’s designed to make your life as easy as possible. The control panel has everything you need and has excellent features like one-click WordPress installation, storage, and RAM Scaling.

Their dashboard made my work smooth as butter when I started using it.

An easy-to-use dashboard is essential because it will give beginners an opportunity to test every part of the dashboard without doing something wrong.

Beginners can confidently manage their site if their hosting service provider gives them access to an easy-to-use dashboard.

Site Migration

I was surprised when I found out Cloudways offers free WordPress site migration. This can be more complicated if you’re looking to migrate your website.

If you want to migrate your hosting from one hosting provider to another, they will make you go through a complicated process.

But the thing I like about Cloudays is that experts will do everything for you if you want to migrate.

This is a great feature, and it means that you don’t have to stress about doing it correctly.

Nowadays, most of the popular hosting companies, especially ChemiCloud, FastComet, and HostArmada, allow this type of free and easy site migration.

Performance and Speed

Before using any new web hosting, I am always concerned about its speed and performance. I researched their speed and performance before purchasing their service.

So let’s talk about what I learned about the performance of Clouwdays.

First of all, I realized that Cloudways has a really cool technology called ‘ThunderStack,’ which combines several features from several server technologies.

This feature will give you fully optimized WordPress hosting and better speed. So it doesn’t give me the chance to complain about their performance.

To know the exact speed of their hosting, I have run some tests with the Shofikulislam.com site on it. Have a look at this:

In the Gtmetrix speed test, the LCP score is 634ms. And if you talk about the TBT score, it has 5ms, which is pretty good. And I think it can compete with popular hosting providers like Liquid Web and Nexcess.

I was amazed by the load-bearing capacity of Cloudways because the average response time during the load test was 263 ms, which indicates efficient performance.

Also, peak response time reached 40.67 req/sec, showing the hosting’s ability to handle high traffic.

I have seen in the past that most of the hosting service providers have two or three data centers, most of which are located in America.

But CloudWays has more than two dozen data centers around the globe, allowing you to choose the region best suited for your website.

As a result, you will get the best possible speed. Here are some features Cloudways offers to improve the performance of their hosting service.

1. Cloudflare Enterprise CDN

This feature is more straightforward and more effective than the traditional CDN feature. Because with the help of this feature, you can improve performance compared to a traditional CDN.

With its help, you can make your content load faster worldwide using a network for big businesses.

Overall, it makes your website load more quickly and consumes less data from your users.

2. SSD-Based Hosting

SSDs are new technology. And they are 3x faster than a hard driver.

Cloudways uses SSD as the storage system of their hosting service, which reduces page load times for your dynamic websites and makes your website super fast.

3. Built-in Advanced Caches

It’s a new feature that Cloudways offers an optimized stack with ready-to-use caches. These include Memcached, Varnish, Nginx, and Redis to deliver expedited responses.

4. PHP 7.4 & 8.x Ready Servers

Cloudways claims that all their servers are PHP 7.4 & 8. x ready. So, what is good about PHP 8?

The good thing about PHP 8 is that it is known to be significantly faster than its predecessor.

5. Dedicated Environment

Unlike shared hosting, the company claims that all their servers launched on Cloudways have dedicated resources, which will allow you to maximize server and app performance.

6. Auto-Healing Managed Cloud Servers

If you are running a website for a long time, you will likely notice server issues. For this, you have to face downtime or crashing on your website.

But if you use Cloudways, you don’t have to worry about your website crashing.

Because they have a technology called Auto-Healing, because of this feature, most server issues are resolved with auto-healing restarts.

7. Free WordPress Cache Plugin

Breeze is a WordPress plugin. The plugin is designed to offer better WordPress performance.

If you are using WordPress, you will find Breeze better than any other plugin in the industry.

Why am I talking about Breez? Because Breeze comes pre-installed on Cloudways.

8. Redis Cache

A fully working, organized database will improve your website’s performance.

Cloudways offers a feature called Redis. This feature will enhance the performance of databases.

9. Free Magento Full Page Cache

Cloudways offers you a Built-in Full Page Cache. And they call it Magento Full Page Cache.

This will give you one of the fastest hosting stacks in the industry. It dramatically enhances the functionality of Magento 1. x stores.

10. Pre-Configured PHP-FPM

What if PHP FPM? The complete form of this is FastCGI Process Manager. PHP-FPM dramatically speeds up your website.

It also improves the loading times of your PHP environment by using much faster processes.

Excellent Uptime

Website uptime is one of the most important aspects of a hosting service. So, if you buy a hosting service, you will always want the best uptime possible.

While your site is down, clients or customers are unable to find you or access your products or services, and they might not come back.

As a result, it will bring your website visitors down, and Google won’t like your site. As a result, you will lose your position.

After using it for several years, I am confident that Cloudways offers excellent uptime. Why am I telling this so confidently?

From the time I have been using Cloudways, I have never encountered any downtime issues. I have been using their service for almost three years.

So, if there are any issues with Cloudways uptime, I would face them during these years.

Though I didn’t have any problems, I assure you that you don’t have to worry about the uptime of Cloudways.

Customer Support

Now, if you do run into any issues, there are several support options available to you. Cloudways does offer 24/7 support for guaranteed peace of mind.

This support is available through email. You can also request a call or do a 24/7 live chat with customer support staff.

It’s fantastic that they provide multiple ways to contact them. As a customer, this is a good thing for me.

The response time of their customer support is quick, and it usually takes around 30 to 60 seconds to get a response.

Just note here that only full accounts can submit help tickets. Trial customers need to upgrade to access that feature.

Personally, I wouldn’t say I like this system because I think giving full service to a trial customer is as important as serving a paid customer.

If you are interested in getting advanced support on some of the more heavy technical things, you will need to purchase an advanced or premium support add-on.

This is total business. Most of the hosting services do not do that. If you talk about hosting like KnownHost or other hosting service providers are much better in this.

Now, in terms of the chat experience, my experience was good, and the agents were friendly and took the time required to ask specific questions and clarify what I needed before making recommendations.

It could have been more flawless. I only got some of the information I needed, but the agent tried their best. Overall, I was still impressed with the service.

Hosting Plans Customization

Some of the cloud providers that Cloudways offers are ‘DigitalOcean,’ ‘Amazon Web Services,’ and ‘Google Cloud‘.

Cloudways will let you choose from several pre-designed hosting plans, each with a unique bandwidth and storage combination.

This will save you time and make your cloud hosting purchasing hassle-free. At first, I was impressed by this option, and because of this, I purchased from them.

You pick your hosting provider, choose your plan, and you’re all set. If you want more details, you can visit their site, Clodways.com.

Not only this, but one really cool feature here is you can even decide whether you want to pay by the month or by the hour, and no matter what you choose, you can host as many sites and applications on that plan as you wish, of course depending on your bandwidth and storage limits.

This gives its users flexibility and is suitable for every type of customer base.

Pros and Cons of Cloudways

Now, if you ask me to describe the pros and cons of Cloudways in this section, I have done this. These pros and cons will give you a short summary of Cloudways.

Pros

• Cloudways offers outstanding website loading speed and performance.
• Cloudways provides a straightforward setup process.
• Offers managed services like automated backups and security. 
• Supports a wide range of applications.
• Free trial available.
• You have control over your hosting costs.
• Provides multiple customizable account tiers.
• Allows easy cloning of websites for testing and development.

Cons

• No domain registration
• No free Email hosting
• Extra costs for add-ons
• Not ideal for beginners
• Limited backup inclusion
• No phone support in Basic Plans
• No free trial for phone support

My Personal Recommendation for Cloudways

First of all, I am satisfied with the service of Cloudways. As a cloud hosting provider, they have done all the things to satisfy customers.

Not only this, they are constantly improving their services. As an old user of Cloudways, I assure you you won’t have any compile after using their service.

My favourite website is Shofikulislam.com runs using their hosting, and I am confident about the security of my website because Cloudways has my back.

Sometimes, beginners think cloud hosting is complicated and want their fast hosting to be something other than cloud hosting.

But after using Cloudways, they will change their mind, and beginners should start with new technology like cloud hosting for their first website.

Why Should You Use Cloudways?

Cloudways is genuinely a pioneer of cloud hosting. In the market only, they are serving customers with complete satisfaction when it comes to cloud hosting.

With that, cloud hosting comes with tons of advantages that are going to be very helpful for your website.

You will get things like excellent uptime, extremely flexible scalability, and better performance from Cloudways.

You won’t get the perfect combination of this in any traditional web host. Isn’t this combination of features enough for you to start using Cloudways?

For me, it’s more than enough. But you want more. They are ready to offer you that.

There are also some great features. Regarding performance and reliability, as an old user of Cloudways, I can give you a 100% satisfaction guarantee.

So, let’s see some extraordinary options for Cloudways:

• The pricing of cloud hosting is reasonable. 
• It has tons of features and options. 
• It performs well. 
• Offers some newer technology.
• Continuously improving their service. 

So now tell me why you should choose Cloudways if you want cloud hosting.

Last Thoughts

After reading this Cloudways review content, I hope you have a clear view of Cloudways. They are providing a new technology, so it’s common to have some downsides.

But they are continuously improving their service. Cloudways is a better option than other hosting in the market if you want to purchase cloud hosting.

I prefer continually adopting new technology. Because in this era of modern civilization, the person who will adopt newer technologies fast will shine in the future.

So, my strong recommendation for beginners is to start your website journey with Cloudways.

FAQs about Cloudways Hosting