Cloudways is one of the best managed web hosts in my opinion. It provides you with superior performance in terms of speed, scalability, uptime, and load handling. If you are looking to host high-traffic websites, Cloudways can be a good option.
Cloudways Hosting is a Managed Hosting founded by Uzair Gadit, Aquib Gadit, and Pere Hospital in 2009. It is headquartered in Malta, Europe.
The primary aim behind creating Cloudways was to offer a perfect mix of managed and unmanaged hosting to their customers so they can enjoy the best features of both worlds!
Recently, Cloudways was acquired by DigitalOcean, which could improve the ability of Digital Ocean to serve small business owners in the various stages of setting up their businesses.
Cloudways marks itself differently from other hosting providers, like Hostinger and A2 Hosting, because it is a ‘Managed Cloud Hosting Provider’. Let us see what that means.
An unmanaged web host basically rents you storage space on their server and offers little or no additional services.
So, everything from software maintenance to backups is your responsibility, which might be a difficult task for non-technical users! Some popular examples of unmanaged hosting are Digital Ocean, AWS, Google Cloud, Linode, Vultr, etc.
Whereas, if you go with a managed web host, apart from providing server space, it handles everything from server maintenance, software updates, security, backups, etc on your behalf. You also get to see more reliable support.
However, these managed cloud hosts cost a little higher than the regular ones. Some examples of managed hosting might be Cloudways, Kinsta, WPEngine, etc.
Opting for a Managed Cloud provider might be a great option for beginners because it offers a bunch of advantages. For example:
Cloudways is a Managed Cloud Hosting company that is built on top of 5 unmanaged web hosts – DigitalOcean, Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services, Linode, and Vultr.
In Cloud Hosting, your data is stored on multiple servers which ensures better uptime and easier site migrations in case of accidents.
Find all the features of Cloudways summarized in the table below.
| Speed | Bangalore: 792.91 ms |
| Uptime | 99.99% (last 365 days) |
| Data Centers | On 65+ locations |
| Servers | Combination of Apache and Nginx |
| Backups and Restoration | Scheduled, On Demand, and Local Backups Partial Restoration Available One-click Restoration Backup Charges: $0.033/GB |
| Migration | 1 free migration on all hosting plans WordPress Migration Plugin for WP users |
| Customer Support | Email, 24/7/365 Live Chat Support, Knowledge base, Community Forum |
| Features (DigitalOcean Starter Plan) | Unlimited Free Let’s Encrypt SSL Certificates, Unlimited Applications, 25 GB SSD storage, 1 TB Bandwidth, Staging, Team Management, Security Patching, Breeze Cache plugin (WordPress), Vertical Scaling, Account Sharing |
| Security | 2FA, New Login Alert, Free SSL, Bot Protection, Server Monitoring, Self Healing Servers, Firewall, Blocklist/Whitelist IP, SSH Access, and SFTP Access |
| Paid Add-ons | Advanced and Premium Support, DNS Made Easy, Cloudways Enterprise CDN, Rackspace Email, Elastic Email, Safe Updates for WordPress, Astra Pro (free for 1 year) |
| Payment Methods | Credit and Debit cards (Visa, MasterCard, American Express), Paypal, Bank Wire Transfer on minimum purchase of $1000. |
| Refund Policy | No Refund policy. 3-day free trial offered |
| Pricing | Starting from $10/month (DigitalOcean) |
The user interface of Cloudways is modern with an attractive design. All the options and tabs are well-organized and easily accessible.
Cloudways does not have the usual cPanel like ChemiCloud, FastComet, or A2 Hosting. It comes with a custom panel that leaves the traditional cPanel behind!
The interesting thing about this custom control panel is that it grants you both application-level and server-level access!
So, you can switch between servers and applications with a simple toggle button. You don’t need to install any third-party apps for accessing your server and making changes to it. You can do all of this from the Cloudways console itself with a few clicks!
If you are a beginner, it might seem a little overwhelming and complex to understand at first. So, you might experience a short learning curve to familiarize yourself with all the features.
Once you get the hang of it, it will feel like the smoothest and easiest experience! And if you still find it difficult, you can check out my Cloudways Training Program! I’ve discussed it in detail below. Keep reading!
For this Cloudways review, I have purchased the DigitalOcean Standard Server (Singapore location). This server is priced at $10 per month.
I have made use of the following services and settings on my website:
Note – This website is also hosted on Cloudways currently.
For presenting an unbiased and honest review of this hosting, I have conducted multiple tests on my Cloudways website. These include the SRT test, Speed Test, Uptime Test, Load Test, etc. I have also shared the results along with my personal opinions and suggestions.
Apart from that, I have also thoroughly tested additional features of Cloudway, like its data centers, backups, staging support, security features, CDN, migrations, customer support, and more.
I have tried to make this review as comprehensive as possible, covering all features of Cloudways hosting.
I have opted for the Singapore servers with the Cloudways Digital Ocean Starter plan. Therefore, you’ll observe better Server Response Time in Asian regions.
When I tested the SRT in Singapore, it came out to be just 1 ms, which is extraordinarily fast! Then, the SRT kept on increasing in other Asian regions, including Japan (68 ms) and Mumbai (82 ms).
Unlike ChemiCloud, TMDHosting, and A2 Hosting, Cloudways does not support Litespeed servers. Instead, they implement a powerful combination of Apache and Nginx servers that guarantee improved performance. Overall, the Server Response Time was quite impressive!
Talking about website speeds, Cloudways hosting offers super-swift speeds. To confirm this, I performed speed tests on my test website from the Bangalore location. Let’s look at the results.
I observed page load speeds of 792.91 ms, which is well under 1 sec. This is excellent considering the fact that I had not optimized the Breeze Cache plugin at all!
Similarly, I tested the speeds of my main website, kripeshadwani.com. It is also hosted on the Singapore servers. Let’s check out the results.
Here, I got to see even faster speeds of 566.83 ms. That is really amazing! The only difference with both these websites was that I had optimized my main website using the WP Rocket plugin. This resulted in quicker loading time.
Overall, the speeds on Cloudways hosting for both websites are well under 1 sec, with or without optimization. This is great for SEO and better audience retention. You can also look at ChemiCloud and FastComet for great speeds!
Even though Cloudways does not offer an uptime guarantee, it’s excellent anyway l! I have been monitoring the uptime of my website hosted on Cloudways for the last 335 days using the Better Uptime tool. This tool checks the uptime of my website every 30 seconds.
Here’s the uptime report for Cloudways Digital Ocean Singapore Servers for the last 365 days.
| April 2023 | 100% |
| March 2023 | 100% |
| February 2023 | 100% |
| January 2023 | 99.97% |
| December 2022 | 100% |
| November 2022 | 100% |
| October 2022 | 99.97% |
| September 2022 | 100% |
| August 2022 | 100% |
| July 2022 | 99.98% |
| June 2022 | 100% |
| May 2022 | 100% |
| April 2022 | 100% |
| March 2022 | 99.99% |
| February 2022 | 100% |
The uptime on my website in the last month has been 99.99%. Along with that, the average uptime that I observed in the last 365 days was again 99.99%, which is highly impressive!
And FYI, my website has experienced no downtime in the last 2 months!
Note : I have an active plan of Cloudways $10 DO Servers. Every month, the uptime will be updated.
So, I loved the uptime of Cloudways. Even their $10 servers of DigitalOcean performed exceptionally well and I didn’t face any issues at all! You can also check out Rocket.net for 100% uptime!
For conducting the load test, I sent 50 virtual users on my website which made a total of 7482 requests. Surprisingly, none of the requests failed!
The average response time was 263 ms whereas the peak response time went up to 40.67 req/sec. Overall, there were no major spikes in the response time, which was amazing!
So, we can conclude that Cloudways is good for handling high traffic. It can handle stress without increasing response time or suffering any downtime. You can also check ChemiCloud, Rocket.net, and FastComet if you are looking for good load management capacities.
Cloudways hosting offers 75+ data centers that are distributed across the globe. On their website, you can view the locations of all the servers for DigitalOcean, Linode, AWS, Google Cloud, and Vultr.
| Cloud Server | Server Locations |
| Digital Ocean | USA, Germany, Singapore, England, Canada, Netherlands, India |
| AWS | France, Germany, Singapore, Ireland, England, Brazil, Canada, Korea, Japan, India, Australia, Bahrain, China, USA, Sweden, Belgium |
| Google Cloud | Singapore, Germany, England, Canada, Japan, India, Australia, China, USA |
| Vultr | USA, France, Singapore, Germany, England, Canada, Netherlands, Japan, Australia |
| Linode | Singapore, Germany, England, Canada, Japan, India, Australia, USA |
Cloudways is not a domain name registrar, so you won’t find the functionality to register domains with them. You don’t get any free domains either.
However, if you have not yet connected your domain to your hosting, Cloudways provides you with a temporary domain that you can use to preview how your website appears. It is also called a Preview URL, and is free to use forever!
If you’re still in the process of figuring out a name for your website or brand, these domain name generators might help you decide on a catchy name!
ChemiCloud offers free domains for a lifetime. So you can check it out if your priority is free domains.
Cloudways has its own in-house caching plugin called the Breeze Cache Plugin. This plugin optimizes your WordPress site and also reduces page load time.
Other than this, they also have several other built-in caching systems like Varnish, Memcached, Nginx, and Redis that are designed to offer fast performance and a smooth experience!
Recently, Cloudways also introduced a Server Recovery feature that lets you restore a deleted server within 15 days!
If you accidentally delete a server from your account, this impressive security feature will help you restore everything back to normal.
With Cloudways, you get email support and 24/7/365 live chat support, but no call support.
I received comprehensive replies from their live chat support team in under 5 minutes. They’re certainly knowledgeable but the frequency of their replies kept fluctuating between 2 to 5 minutes.
Their Live Chat is available in 3 different stages. If you need advanced support, you can check out the following.
They also feature an extensive knowledge base of helpful annotated articles, a community forum, and a blog where they post content around startups, eCommerce, affiliates, apps, and the latest updates on Cloudways.
Overall, I faced no major problems with Cloudways customer support and got my queries solved quickly and effectively.
Cloudways offers a variety of pricing plans for all 5 hosting providers. Their DigitalOcean plans start from $10/month where you get 1 GB RAM, 25 GB storage space, and 1 TB Bandwidth.
They also implement the unique ‘Pay as you Go’ payment model. This means if you use a server for 2 days, you’ll have to pay the amount for 2 days only!
Their lowest specification server, (1 GB plan of DigitalOcean that costs $10/month) costs $0.0139/hour, which amounts to just ₹1.02, which is extremely affordable!
The best part about Cloudways is that the renewal rates remain the same for all their plans. Another important thing to note here is that Cloudways charges you double the plans laid out by the individual hosting providers.
So, if DigitalOcean offers its Starter plan at $5/month, on Cloudways, you will get the same for $10/month. Sure, you could go with the individual hosting providers for a reduced cost. However, then you will lose the ‘Managed’ aspect of web hosting.
Cloudways charges more because it offers top-notch security, support, and maintenance of your server and applications. Basically, it charges for the managed hosting part.
Well, if you’re just starting out with your website, I would recommend going with the Standard plans of DigitalOcean which start from $10/month.
Apart from that, you can also check out Vultr High Frequency servers that come for $13/month. They offer faster speeds and would be worth it if you have an eCommerce store.
You get a 3-day free trial on their DigitalOcean, Linode, and Vultr hosting providers without requiring a credit card.
This might seem very limited, but I think it is enough to test out all the functions and features of Cloudways and then decide if you should purchase it.
It primarily supports payments through Credit and Debit cards (Visa, MasterCard, Amex) and Paypal. However, in some rare cases, you can also pay through Wire Transfer, but the minimum amount has to be at least $1000!
If your priority is Indian payment options, Hostinger and Bluehost would be suitable hosting platforms for you!
Unlike other hosting solutions like A2 Hosting or Bluehost, Cloudways doesn’t have any Refund Policy. However, you get to see a 3-day free trial that does not require a credit card.
This is good for getting a test run of their services to decide if you need them.
Yes, I have a special discount code for you! All you need to do is to purchase a Cloudways hosting plan using my link and enter the coupon code .
This will give you an additional 20% off on your favorite hosting plan for the next 3 months. For more details, keep an eye on my Cloudways coupon code article.
Now, coming to the most awaited part! Well, I have created a dedicated Cloudways Training Program which is currently hosted on Thinkific course creator.
It comprises video tutorials in Hindi language and covers all important topics from setting up Cloudways hosting, to setting up WordPress, creating backups, managing cache, and emails, connecting Cloudflare CDN, etc.
Users who purchase any hosting plan of Cloudways through my link would get free entry into this program. So, check out my Cloudways training program article to know how you can enroll in it!
Cloudways offers to migrate your first website for free. This applies to all of its hosting plans. For WordPress users, you even get their own WordPress Migration plugin that helps you transfer your websites easily.
For more migrations, you are charged on the basis of applications. If your priority is migrations, a better option would be ChemiCloud. It offers 50 cPanel migrations for free!
Cloudways offers a staging environment with all its plans. Staging helps you create a copy of your entire website and test changes over it.
These changes are done locally and don’t reflect on the live website. Once you are happy with the changes, you can implement them on your live website with a single click.
So, if you want to test a change, you will first need to clone your live website.
You can do this using the ‘Push’ operation. All you need to do is:
It will create a clone of your website. Now you can modify it and test out changes over it.
After you are done, you can use the Pull operation to copy your clone site’s data to the original one with a single click. Sounds easy, right?
Cloudways offers 2 types of options while copying your files.
Overall, I was pretty impressed with the quick and effective Staging functionality offered by Cloudways.
Security is the most important aspect of your website. Cloudways offers the following security features.
If you use the WordPress CMS for managing and publishing your blog posts, you might be at a risk! The plugins and themes that we use on WordPress might have vulnerabilities that can result in your entire website getting compromised.
Thus, Cloudways has recently come up with a fantastic solution in the form of Safe Updates for WordPress. It works by taking a backup of your website and creating a staging website.
The updates are performed on this staging site and screenshots are taken before and after the updates. Then various speed and performance tests are performed on the staging site to check for any complexities or errors.
Once all the updates are checked thoroughly, they are pushed onto your live website. The advantage of this update is that your website won’t suffer any downtime, design changes, breakdowns, or performance issues.
Talking about pricing, for 1-3 applications, you would be charged $3/month for every application. Whereas, for more than 6 applications, you’d be charged $2/month for every application.
Here’s good news for Cloudways customers! Recently, Cloudways has partnered with Astra where they are providing Astra Pro for free for a complete year!
With Astra Pro, you will get access to hundreds of well-designed templates, sticky headers, white labeling, blog layouts, advanced color controls, and a lot more on unlimited websites for a duration of 1 year.
After 1 year, you will be charged $4/month for unlimited websites on your Astra Pro plan. You can read my detailed article to know how to get Astra Pro free with Cloudways.
Inode Count refers to the total number of files stored on your hosting plan. In my $10/month plan of DigitalOcean, I get 16 lakh inodes, which is around 4 times higher than other hosting providers like Hostinger, ChemiCloud, and FastComet which offer 3-6 lakh inodes.
If you’re looking for unlimited inodes on your hosting account, Rocket.net would be a suitable option.
Account Sharing is a unique feature for a hosting provider. Cloudways lets you 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 share partial access to specific servers, applications, or categories like Billing, Console, Support, Specific Server, etc.
All these permissions are helpful in situations where you need to give your account access to your clients, manager, support staff, etc.
With Cloudways hosting, you can scale your server, CPU, and storage space as you encounter any spikes in your website traffic.
With DigitalOcean, Linode, and Vultr, this process is permanent and you can’t scale down your resources again. Whereas, if you go with Google Cloud or AWS, you can seamlessly scale your services up or down as per your requirements!
With different providers, you get different services. For example, Google Cloud and AWS let you scale your server, CPU, and storage individually.
But the Linode, Vultr, and DigitalOcean only let you scale up all of them together. This is inconvenient, especially if you have no need for scaling the other factors.
I’ve discussed a hack to downgrade your server on my Cloudways Training Program. Also, Vertical Scaling may lead to server downtime. So, it is always recommended to scale your services during inactive hours.
Cloudways has these unique self-healing servers that automatically restart in case any issue is encountered.
So, if the server goes down, you don’t have to do anything. It will automatically start functioning on its own.
You can also keep a check on the status of the processes running on your server from the Manage Services tab under Server Management. In case of any issues, you can manually restart or stop any service with a single click!
With Cloudways console, you can keep a check on your website traffic and other important metrics like:
Unfortunately, Cloudways does not offer free email hosting on any of its plans. Their add-on called Rackspace Email lets you host one professional email account for $1 per month.
However, there are ways through which you can use email hosting for free. Want to know what they are? I’ve discussed them all in my Cloudways Training program. So, make sure you check it out!
In my recommendation, Zoho Emails would be a pretty good option if you need email functionality on your site.
Well, Cloudways does not provide a free CDN with its hosting plans. The Cloudways CDN add-on is not included with the hosting pack but can be enabled at a cost of $1 per 25 GB.
If you are looking for a free CDN, you can connect the Cloudflare CDN. Or you can also get access to the Cloudflare Enterprise Grade CDN with Cloudways now.
Cloudways has now partnered with Cloudflare to provide you with its Enterprise Grade CDN at extremely affordable rates! The Enterprise CDN of Cloudflare is the most expensive and costs anywhere between $1000 to $5000 per month.
However, if you have a Cloudways hosting, you can get the same Enterprise-grade CDN with all its advanced features at just $5/month! And if you have multiple websites hosted on Cloudways, you only need to pay $2/month for every website.
For more details, check out my article on Cloudways Cloudflare Enterprise.
Talking about technology, Cloudways uses PHP 8.1 along with Apache and Nginx servers. It supports a variety of CMS platforms, eCommerce applications, and PHP-based apps. You can install WordPress, WooCommerce, PHP, Magento, and Laravel with a single click!
Whereas, 13 other applications, including Drupal, Joomla, PrestaShop, OpenCart, etc, can be installed on your server manually through the PHP Stack.
After looking at these results, I would highly recommend Cloudways even for websites with high monthly traffic with over 1-2 lakh viewers per month. Why?
Because with its Vertical Scaling feature, you can upgrade or downgrade your servers whenever you want. Start with $10 plan and upgrade as your traffic grows. In case you want downgrade later then also you can do it easily.
Because of its 65+ server locations and a combination of Apache and Nginx servers, you get to experience excellent speeds on all locations.
Cloudways hosting offers an unbeatable uptime performance. Even the cheapest server of Digital Ocean provides 99.99% uptime.
With Cloudways, you get full control over your server and your apps. You can either create on-demand backups or set your backup preferences for automated backups as frequently as you need.
The load-handling capability of Cloudways is par excellence! It passed our load tests with zero HTTP failures and a stable response time, even with many requests.
It offers a bunch of security features to safeguard your website from malicious software, unauthorized users, malware, and more.
I personally liked their fast live chat support. All their representatives were technically well-versed, and I had no issues with getting my queries resolved.
Because Cloudways is a Managed Hosting Provider, everything from backups to server management, app installation, and resource monitoring is just one click away!
You also get responsive support and automated updates for all your apps!
Cloudways platform is extremely flexible because at any point in time, you can scale your servers up as per spikes in your website traffic.
Cloudways hosting keeps on actively implementing updates and new features frequently on their platform. This is how it maintains its position as one of the best hosting in the market!
On Cloudways, you are charged a fixed amount for purchasing new hosting and its renewal. You don’t need to pay anything extra for renewing your hosting, which is great!
Cloudways offers the unique ‘Pay as you Go’ pricing model. This means users only need to pay for what they use, which is very cost-effective.
Cloudways partners with 5 unmanaged web hosts, including Linode, AWS, Google Cloud, DigitalOcean, and Vultr, which together offer 65+ data center locations to their users.
Sadly, you don’t get free email hosting on Cloudways. You can enable this feature through their Rackspace add-on for $1/month for one email account.
Techno-friendly users would have no problems with operating the Cloudways console. But beginners might experience a slight learning curve with the numerous options and settings. You can check my Cloudways Training Program to understand how to operate it.
Cloudways does not function as a domain registration service. So, you need to register your domain on some other domain registrar like GoDaddy or Dynadot and then get hosting for it using Cloudways.
The hosting prices keep on increasing as you go on scaling up your server size. For example, the Starter plan of DigitalOcean servers with 25 GB space costs $10/month. But their 160 GB servers cost you $80/month!
Cloudways uses a powerful combination of Nginx and Apache servers on all plans. They perform exceptionally well, but I hope to see Litespeed servers on Cloudways in the future.
If your work heavily revolves around WordPress CMS, then Cloudways is an excellent option for you. However, if you want to look for alternatives, you can check out the few mentioned below.
Rocket.net is a fully managed WordPress hosting platform that offers lightning-fast speeds, unbeatable uptime, and good load management capability.
Similar to Cloudways, it also offers advanced security, Cloudflare Enterprise CDN, good backup features, and doesn’t support email hosting. However, its pricing plans are quite expensive for beginners. Its plans start from $25/month.
You can get your hosting plan for merely $1 for the first month by entering the coupon code LAUNCH at checkout! If that doesn’t work, you can get 30% off your hosting for 1st three months by using the coupon code KRIPESH at checkout.
WPEngine is a managed WordPress hosting platform that offers 24/7 support, free SSL, regular backups, website staging, and automated migrations on it.
You also get access to 10 premium themes on all its plans which you won’t find on Cloudways. Its hosting plans start from $30/month!
Kinsta is another managed WordPress hosting site with competitive pricing and features. It offers 24/7 support, free CDN, SSH access, security services, and manual and automated daily backups on all plans.
Its 30-days refund policy and unlimited free migrations give it an upper hand on Cloudways. The hosting plans of Kinsta start from $30/month.
Flywheel is a managed WordPress hosting that is mainly focused on clients. So, it would be a good option for business websites. You get a free CDN, an in-house cache plugin, free migrations, and 24/7 support.
Its loads of workflow management tools and 10 StudioPress themes make it stand out from Cloudways. The hosting plans of Flywheel start from $13/month.
In my opinion, Cloudways is still one of the best web hosts for 2023. It provides you with superior performance in terms of speed, scalability, uptime, and load testing. Apart from that, it also offers powerful options for backups and security.
In the past year, they’ve implemented a lot of updates on their platform. These include Cloudflare Enterprise CDN, Astra Pro Collaboration, Safe Updates, Partial Restoration, and more.
Thus, Cloudways offers you top-quality service with constant updates at a good price point. This is why I find it worth every dollar of your money spent!
If you have good traffic (over 100k+) on your blog or are earning money out of your blog, then Cloudways would be a great choice. Small to mid-sized businesses, professional bloggers, resellers, agencies, and seasonal websites definitely look at Cloudways.
However, if you want a hosting solution on a budget, you can go with Hostinger, Chemicloud, or FastComet.
With Cloudways, you get excellent speeds, uptime, and data centers in 65+ locations around the globe. Along with fast and reliable customer support, you also get top-notch security at affordable rates.
Thus, Cloudways proves to be a powerful hosting solution for 2023. If you want to try out Cloudways, you can use my link and get a 20% discount on any plan of your choice.
Along with this, you will also get a free entry into my training program, where I will show you how to set up and configure Cloudways Hosting with ease. So, go grab this offer right away!
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