Cloudways 2022 review: The good and the bad – Get 50USD Free VPS

Considering using Cloudways to host your WordPress site or another type of site? In our hands-on Cloudways review, we’ll help you decide if this popular hosting provider is right for you.

Cloudways is a bit of an outlier in the hosting space because it uses a unique approach to hosting. Instead of providing your own infrastructure, Cloudways lets you choose from five different cloud hosting providers: DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode, AWS, and Google Cloud.

Cloudways then handles proper server setup and maintenance, as well as providing you with many useful tools to manage your site.

The result of this approach is that you can get very good performance for a low price. However, it is a bit more complicated than traditional hosting, so we do not recommend Cloudways to all users.

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Cloudways Review: Here’s How We Tested Things

We always want our hosting reviews to be completely unbiased, which is why we signed up and paid for our own Cloudways account to write this review. Our experience is exactly the same as what you will experience and Cloudways did not provide us with any special treatment or even know that we are writing this review.

All the tests we run, the screenshots we collect, and our general thoughts come from our direct experience of using the Cloudways account we purchased.

With that out of the way, let’s dive deeper into our Cloudways review.

Cloudways Key Features

While Cloudways does use the unique cloud hosting approach that we mentioned in the introduction, Cloudways still offers a suite of features that compares favorably with more “traditional” hosting providers.

First, let’s talk about the hosting environment itself. Cloudways configures your server with a hybrid “Apache + Nginx” stack. It then offers multiple caching layers to improve performance including Nginx, Varnish, and Memcached. There’s also an option to easily install Redis.

When Cloudways sets up your server, it will automatically implement all of this, along with securing your server and keeping everything updated.

Beyond that, Cloudways offers the following useful features:

• Automatic server-level backups and on-demand single-site backups
• Staging sites
• Free WordPress performance plugin called Breeze
• Site cloning
• Free SSL certificates
• Built-in content delivery network (CDN)
• SMTP at the server level for transactional emails
• Bot protection
• Cron job management
• Basic server monitoring
• Option to add team members for collaboration

You’ll see a lot of these features in more depth later in our review.

Cloudways Performance Tests

To start our Cloudways hands-on review, let’s run some performance tests. After all, performance is one of the most important considerations in any hosting provider.

To test the performance of Cloudways, we set up a real test site using the popular Astra theme and a full demo site. Our test site also includes the Breeze performance optimization plugin, which Cloudways installs by default.

For our server, we are using the cheapest $10/month DigitalOcean server.

Then, we ran it through two website speed test tools:

• WebPageTest with a throttled FIOS connection to collect one-off performance metrics. We ran nine tests and took the median value.
• Load Focus to see how Cloudways holds up under scale. We hit our site with 20 visitors in a 60-second period.

WebPageTest

Cloudways performed excellently in the one-off WebPageTest analysis, with a median load time of under half a second. This is one of the best results from all of the WordPress hosts that we’ve tested:

In the Load Focus testing, Cloudways also performed excellently. The mean average response time was just 582 ms and the 90th percentile time was 611 ms. This is one of the better results we’ve seen from all the hosts that we’ve tested, though Nexcess and WP Engine performed slightly better.

Still, Cloudways is way ahead of other budget hosts, which is pretty impressive given that our test site is only $10 per month.

Overall, Cloudways did very well in our tests, especially when you consider how cheap it is.

Cloudways User Experience

Because Cloudways has a unique experience, let’s start at the beginning with setting up a server and installing WordPress. Then, we’ll take you through some of the tools that you get to manage your sites and servers via Cloudways’s custom dashboard.

Launching a Server and Installing WordPress

When you first sign up to Cloudways, you’ll be prompted to launch a server and deploy an “application”. An application is any software that you want to install on your server – e.g. WordPress, Magento, Laravel, and so on.

Once you’ve chosen your application and entered some basic details, you can make three key decisions. You can choose…

1. Your cloud hosting provider
2. The resources for your server
3. Your server’s physical location

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 it!

Managing Your Server

Your Cloudways dashboard has two main tabs:

• Servers – this is where you manage all of your cloud servers.
• Applications – this is where you manage your individual websites.

If you open a server’s dashboard, you’ll be able to manage all of the server-level details including:

• Monitoring – keep an eye on your server’s resources.
• Vertical Scaling – easily increase the resources of your server.
• Backups – take 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’ll see a list of all of your WordPress sites. If you click on a specific site, you’ll open its dashboard. This is where you can access all of the site-specific information and tools including:

• Viewing access credentials for WP admin, FTP, MySQL, and so on.
• Associating domains with your site.
• Setting up cron jobs.
• Installing the free SSL certificate.
• Taking and managing backups.
• Deploying a site via Git.
• Integrating the Cloudways CDN.

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 cloning/staging tool, which you can access from the main Applications list. You can either create a true staging site or just clone your site to the same server or a different server

Cloudways Support

Support can be a bit of a tricky subject at Cloudways.

Cloudways support is good for what it does, but you need to realize that the scope of Cloudways’s support isn’t as broad as it might be at another host, especially a managed WordPress host.

By default, Cloudways supports your hosting server and the Cloudways platform. If you have a problem with the server or something with Cloudways itself, Cloudways will definitely hop in and help you.

You can get in contact with them 24/7 via live chat support.

However, Cloudways does not provide application support by default. That is, they don’t officially offer support for any applications that you install on your server, such as WordPress.

For example, if you’re having problems with the WordPress installer that Cloudways offers, their support will help you. But if you’re seeing an error on your WordPress site, that’s outside the scope of the free support (though Cloudways will sometimes help anyway).

If you do want this type of advanced application support, you can pay extra for premium support, but it’s not cheap.

Cloudways Pricing

What Cloudways will pay depends on the cloud hosting provider you choose and their server resources.

All in all, the cheapest option is the $10 entry-level DigitalOcean server, which already offers great performance. If you use our Cloudways coupon, it will be even cheaper.

You do not need to pay separately for cloud storage. The prices you see on Cloudways include both basic cloud hosting and Cloudways fees.

One thing to note is that the total price is generally a multiple of the price of the underlying hosting.

For example, here’s a break-down of the DigitalOcean plans:

• Total Price – includes both the underlying and Cloudways’ fee. This is what you pay per month.
• DigitalOcean Price – the price for the unmanaged VPS if you bought it directly from DigitalOcean.
• Implied Cloudways Fee – what you’re essentially paying for the Cloudways service alone (total price minus DigitalOcean price).

Tier (RAM)	Total Price	DigitalOcean Price	Implied Cloudways Free
1 GB	$10	$5	$5
2 GB	$22	$10	$12
4 GB	$42	$20	$22
8 GB	$80	$40	$40

As you can see, the premium you pay for Cloudways compared to basic cloud hosting increases when you upgrade your hosting, leading to a strange situation:

For servers with fewer resources, Cloudways is very affordable. For example, if you’re buying an entry-level server (which should be fine for most sites), Cloudways offers great value as you’re basically only paying $5 per month to have Cloudways manage DigitalOcean’s servers.

However, if you’re considering buying one of the more resource-heavy servers, Cloudways can be pricey for what it offers. You go from paying a $5 premium on basic hosting on a 1GB plan to paying a $40 premium on an 8GB plan, even though the Cloudways platform is exactly the same in both cases.

Which Cloud Hosting Should You Use?

If you’re not sure which cloud hosting provider to choose, we recommend starting with the Vultr High Frequency servers. They’re a little more expensive than the entry-level DigitalOcean servers, but the small added fee is worth it for improved performance.

You can start with the lowest resources (the cheapest server) and then scale your server if needed.

Cloudways Pros and Cons

As we get near to the end of our Cloudways review, let’s talk about some of the pros and cons of using Cloudways for hosting.

Pros

• Excellent performance for the money. Even the cheapest Cloudways plan can offer excellent performance even under scale.
• No arbitrary limits. Cloudways doesn’t put any arbitrary website limits. As long as your server has the resources, you can host as many sites as you want.
• Useful WordPress tools – you get helpful features such as staging sites, backups, a WordPress optimization plugin, and more.
• Server-level SMTP – this is a really useful tool for reliable emails, as many other cloud server panels make you set up SMTP services for each individual WordPress site.

Cons

• A little bit more complicated than traditional hosting. Again, you definitely do not need to be a developer, but total beginners might want to stay away.
• Pricing isn’t as good for high-resource servers. Because Cloudways charges a multiple of the underlying hosting cost, it can be expensive for high-resource servers.
• No email hosting. If you want to create a custom email address ([email protected]), you’ll need a separate email hosting service.

Cloudways Review 2022 FAQ

To finish out our Cloudways review, let’s go over some FAQs.