What is Cloudways?
A good web hosting service plays an essential role in the success of your website. Accommodation is a topic I've talked about a lot on this blog.
After numerous tests and research, I present to you the Cloudways hosting review! Cloudways is very different from all the other hosts we've reviewed here. How, you ask?
Cloudways is one of the best managed hosts in my opinion. It gives you superior performance in terms of speed, scalability, uptime, and load management. If you are looking to host high traffic websites, Cloudways may be a good option.
Features
1. Inode Count
The number of inodes corresponds to the total number of files stored on your hosting plan. In my $10/month DigitalOcean plan, I get 16 lakh inodes, which is about 4 times higher than other hosting providers like Hostinger, ChemiCloud, and FastComet which offer 3-6 lakh inodes.
2. Sandbox
Cloudways offers a staging environment with all of its plans. This environment allows you to create a copy of your entire website and test the changes made to it.
These changes are made locally and are not reflected on the online website. Once you're happy with the changes, you can implement them on your live website with just one click.
So, if you want to test a change, you'll need to clone your live website first.
You can do this using the “Push” operation. All you need to do is:
- Select the Staging app and tap the Push button.
- Select whether you want to clone only the application files or the entire database.
It will create a clone of your website. You can now edit it and test the changes on it.
Once you're done, you can use the Pull operation to copy data from your clone site to the original site with a single click. Sounds easy, right?
Cloudways offers 2 types of options when copying your files.
- Overwriting copies the changes over the previous ones. So, it completely replaces your original data with the new ones.
- Incrementing only copies the changes you made to the files and all other files remain as they were originally.
3. Self-healing servers
Cloudways has these unique, self-healing servers that automatically reboot if something goes wrong.
So if the server goes down, you don't have to do anything. It will automatically start working by itself.
You can also check the status of processes running on your server from theManage Services tab under Server Management. In case of problems, you can manually restart or stop any service with a single click!
4. Website traffic metrics
With the Cloudways console, you can control your website traffic and other important parameters such as:
- IP requests : It indicates which IP address accesses your site the most.
- Robot traffic : It shows a list of bots that consume your website's resources, so you can block them instantly.
- URL requests : It shows the most visited URLs on your site.
- Status codes : It helps you keep an eye on web pages that are inaccessible due to a 404, 502, etc. error.
Here's good news for Cloudways customers! Recently, Cloudways partnered with Astra to provide Astra Pro for free for a full year!
With Astra Pro, you'll have access to hundreds of well-designed templates, sticky headers, white labels, blog layouts, advanced color controls, and more, on an unlimited number of websites for one year.
After one year, you'll be billed $4/month for an unlimited number of websites on your Astra Pro plan.
5. Email hosting
Unfortunately, Cloudways doesn't offer free email hosting on any of their plans. Their add-on called Rackspace Email allows you to host a professional email account for $1 per month.
6. Team collaboration
Team collaboration is a unique feature for a hosting provider. Cloudways allows you to add team members to your account and grant them access to your console.
You can either grant them full access to your hosting account, or restrict their access to specific categories like billing, console, support, a specific server, etc.
All of these permissions are useful in situations where you need to give access to your account to your customers, manager, support staff, etc.
7. Domain name
Cloudways is not a domain name registrar, so you won't find the functionality to register domains with them.
However, if you have not yet connected your domain to your hosting, Cloudways provides you with a temporary domain that you can use as a website. This is a preview URL that you can use for free and forever!
8. Backups and recovery
On Cloudways, you can create three different backups.
1. Scheduled backups
These are automatic backups made by Cloudways Hosting. However, you are free to customize backup preferences as you wish.
For example, you can set a backup frequency, time, and retention frequency, and all of your subsequent backups will be done according to this schedule.
2. Backups on demand
You can manually create a backup of your database and files before implementing a major change on your website.
3. Local backups
It makes a copy of the last data you backed up using the methods above and stores it on your server.
However, the Cloudways backup service is not free. They charge $0.033 per GB of backed up data, which comes out to $/€2.43. Opting for the backup service is mandatory by default if you buy Cloudways hosting. Backups are stored on a different server for better recovery management.
When it comes to recovery, you can restore your backups with a single click thanks to their restore service. Simply select the version you want and click Restore.
The number of entries stored in the backup depends on the preferences you mentioned earlier.
9. Server recovery
Recently, Cloudways also introduced a server recovery feature that allows you to restore a deleted server within 15 days!
Launching a server and installing WordPress
When you first sign up for Cloudways, you are prompted to launch a server and deploy an “application.” An application is any software that you want to install on your server - for example WordPress, Magento, Laravel, etc.
Once you've chosen your application and entered some basic information, you can make three key decisions. You can choose...
- Your cloud hosting provider
- Your server resources
- The physical location of your server
You'll see a summary of the price at the bottom and then you can click Launch Now to create your server:
And that's all!
Managing your server
Your Cloudways dashboard has two main tabs:
- Servers - this is where you manage all your cloud servers.
- Apps - this is where you manage your individual websites.
If you open a server dashboard, you'll be able to manage all the details at the server level, including:
- Oversight - keep an eye on your server resources.
- Vertical scaling - easily increase your server resources.
- Backups - make backups of your entire server.
- SMTP - you can set up an SMTP provider for transactional emails at the server level.
Managing your WordPress site
If you go to the Applications tab, you will see a list of all your WordPress sites. If you click on a specific site, you will open its dashboard. This is where you can access all site-specific information and tools, including:
- View access credentials for WP admin, FTP, MySQL, etc.
- Associate domains to your site.
- Setting up cron jobs.
- Free SSL certificate installation.
- Take and manage backups.
- Deploying a site via Git.
- Cloudways CDN integration.
10. Console
As soon as you sign in to your Cloudways account, you'll come across an interface like the one mentioned below.
Everything about your hosting will be managed from this page.
Cloudways doesn't have the usual cPanel like other hosting providers, but its custom control panel allows you to access both the application level and the server level!
This means you don't need to install third-party applications to access and make changes to your server.
You can do all of this from the Cloudways console in just a few clicks!
If you go to the Server tab and select your server, you can access the following settings at the server level:
- Statistics on the use of server resources.
- Check the status of the services running on your account such as Apache, Nginx, Varnish, Memcached, etc.
- Change server level settings.
- Black/white list of IP addresses.
- Increase the size of your server by scaling vertically.
- Manage your backup preferences.
- Add an email service.
In addition, the Application tab allows you to manage the settings of specific applications such as WordPress. You can access it:
- Staging the website.
- Analyze web traffic and disk usage.
- Security services such as SSL certificate and robot protection.
- Domain management settings.
- Backup, recovery, and migration services.
- Cloudways CDN at additional cost.
Overall, the Cloudways console may seem a bit complex at first, but believe me, it's not!
11. CDN
Well, Cloudways doesn't provide a free CDN with their hosting plans. The Cloudways CDN add-on is not included in the hosting package but can be activated at a cost of $1 per 25GB.
If you are looking for a CDN free, you can connect to Cloudflare CDN. Or you can also access the Cloudflare Enterprise Grade CDN with Cloudways now.
Cloudflare Enterprise CDN
Cloudways has now partnered with Cloudflare to provide you with their enterprise-grade CDN at extremely affordable rates! Cloudflare's enterprise CDN is the most expensive and costs between $1,000 and $5,000 per month.
However, if you have Cloudways hosting, you can get the same enterprise-grade CDN with all of its advanced features for only $5/month! And if you have multiple websites hosted on Cloudways, you only have to pay $2/month for each site.
12. Exploring some useful WordPress tools
Now, let's take a look at some of the most useful Cloudways features for managing your WordPress sites.
First, Cloudways offers an easy clon/staging tool, which you can access from the main application list. You can either create a real simulation site, or simply clone your site on the same server or on a different server:
If you create a preparation site, it will appear as a fully-fledged application and you can easily transfer data between your real site and your preparation site:
On the Backup and Restore tab, you can create on-demand backups for a specific site in addition to the server-level backups that Cloudways automatically performs:
The Cron Job Management tab provides a very simple interface for setting up your own server cron jobs:
Finally, the SSL Certificate tab allows you to install a free Let's Encrypt SSL certificate in a few clicks:
This is by no means a complete list of tools, but we are especially looking to highlight that Cloudways offers you a comprehensive suite of management tools that compares favorably to more “traditional” hosts.
Customer Support
With Cloudways, you get email support, 24/7/365 live chat support, but no phone support.
Their Live Chat is available in 3 different steps.
- Standard support is free and available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
- The advanced support add-on promises faster response time and more thorough troubleshooting. It is offered for 100 dollars per month!
- Premium Support offers 24/7/365 day phone support, a dedicated account manager, and a private Slack channel. This option costs $500/month!
They also have an extensive knowledge base of useful annotated articles, a community forum, and a blog where they post content about startups, e-commerce, affiliates, apps, and the latest Cloudways updates.
I personally found their live chat support to be quite fast, technically sound, and humble. They even gave me detailed answers to all my questions, and didn't just send me links to articles on the subject! Overall, I had no problem getting my questions answered quickly and effectively.
Security
Security is the most important aspect of your website. Cloudways offers the following security features.
- 2FA : With two-factor authentication, you can protect your logins with security codes generated by Authenticator applications like Authy or Google Authenticator.
- New connection alert : When a new device connects to your Cloudways account, you can enable email notifications or receive a security code to verify that device!
- SSL : Let's Encrypt's free SSL certificates can be installed on any website. They also support third-party SSL certificates.
- Protection against robots : It actively blocks hackers and bots and prevents them from harming your site.
- Server monitoring alerts : If the unavailability time of the server or one of the resources exceeds 10 minutes, you are automatically informed by email.
- Firewall : It protects your website against malware and cyberattacks.
- IP blocking : You can create a block list or a white list of certain IP addresses to prevent them from accessing your website.
Pricing
Cloudways offers a variety of pricing plans for all 5 web hosts.
Their DigitalOcean plans start at $10/month where you get 1GB RAM, 25GB storage, and 1TB bandwidth.
They also apply the unique “Pay as you Go” payment model. This means that if you use a server for 2 days, you will have to pay the amount for 2 days!
Their lowest specification server, (1 GB DigitalOcean plan that costs $10/month) costs $0.0139/hour, which comes down to only R$1.02, which is extremely affordable!
The best part about Cloudways is that the renewal rates stay the same across all of their plans. Another important thing to note here is that Cloudways charges you for double the plans established by individual hosting providers.
Alternatives
If your work mostly revolves around the WordPress CMS, then Cloudways is a great option for you. However, if you want to look for alternatives, you can check out the few sites mentioned below.
1. WP Engine.
WPEngine is a managed WordPress hosting platform that offers 24/7 support, free SSL, regular backups, site staging, and automated migrations.
You also get access to 10 premium themes across all of its plans, which you won't find on Cloudways. Its hosting plans start at $30/month!
2. Kinsta.
Kinsta is another managed WordPress hosting site with competitive pricing and features. It offers 24/7 support, a free CDN, SSH access, security services, and manual and automated daily backups across the board.
Its 30-day refund policy and unlimited free migrations give it a head start on Cloudways. Kinsta hosting plans start at $30/month.
3. Flywheel.
Flywheel is a managed WordPress hosting that is primarily focused on customers. So, it would be a good option for corporate websites. You get a free CDN, an internal cache plugin, free migrations, and 24/7 support.
Its numerous workflow management tools and 10 StudioPress themes make it stand out from Cloudways. Flywheel hosting plans start at $13/month.
FAQs
Is Cloudways good for e-commerce?
Yes, Cloudways eCommerce plans are exceptional! They offer an innovative combination of Nginx and Apache servers that promise better performance.
For e-commerce, I recommend going for Vultr HF servers on Cloudways.
What are the main features of Cloudways hosting?
Key features of Cloudways Hosting include its unique managed hosting infrastructure, over 65 data centers, one-click vertical scaling capabilities, fast speeds and uptimes, and its “Pay as you go” payment model.
Final Verdict
Cloudways is one of best web hosts in my opinion. It gives you superior performance in terms of speed, scalability, uptime, and load testing. So, I think it's totally worth every dollar of your money spent!
Small and medium-sized businesses, professional bloggers, resellers, resellers, agencies, agencies, seasonal websites, or users with a limited budget can certainly be interested in Cloudways.
Basically, anyone who knows what they want from their hosting and wants to have more control over it can use Cloudways.
In my experience, Cloudways is much better than its alternatives like WP Engine or Kinsta.
