Cloudways Review

Cloudways Review-Is It Worth Buying In 2020?

When you think of high performance yet affordable managed WordPress host, Cloudways instantly comes to mind. The managed cloud hosting platform delivers maximum speed and fool-proof security for your WordPress website.

Founded in 2009, Cloudways claims to focus on building great websites. The hosting platform gives digital agencies and e-commerce businesses flexibility and choice in how websites are hosted.

Cloudways offers experts 24/7/365 problem-solving for everyone. You can also choose the Advanced Support add-on that enhances your support experience or the Premium Support add-on where the senior support engineers work as an extension of your in-house team.

Read our Cloudways review and decide for yourself if it caters to your needs.

Cloudways Hosting Overview

Cloud hosting

The web hosting platform lets you select from one of five platforms, including Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform, offers wallet-friendly pay-as-you-go plans, and even lets you sign up for a free trial run.

Cloudways deliver fast performance, ironclad security, and seamless scalability for your websites. The cloud hosting platform takes away the complexities of setting up your website and allows you to go live in minutes.

Cloudways helps agencies and businesses to build and manage web apps more collaboratively and efficiently. The speed and performance of the hosting platform is also no joke.

Cloudways’ 3-day free trial alone entices the users to risk the site once. But once you get to know the innumerable features of the hosting provider there’s no turning back. Cloudways has set out to make cloud hosting simpler.

Give Cloudways Hosting a try

Cloudways Hosting Plans

The monthly web hosting plans come at four basic rates to balance both performance and the customers’ budget. This expands to $1,035/mon as the highest rate.

  • $ 10 /mo: At this rate, you can avail 1GB RAM, a single-core processor, 25GB of storage and 1TB of monthly data transfers. You can see the plans in detail as per your choice.
  • $ 22 /mo: This comes with 2GB RAM, a single-core processor, 50GB of storage, and 2TB of monthly data transfers.
  • $ 42 /mo: This is the most popular rate out of the four. It comes with a 4GB RAM, a 2-core processor, 80GB of storage, and 4TB bandwidth.
  • $ 80 /mo: The final rate offers 8GB RAM, 4-core processor, 160GB of storage, and 5TB of monthly data transfers.

All plans come with 24/7/365 support, free SSL, CDN Add-on, free migration, unlimited application installation, team management, dedicated firewalls, 24/7 real-time monitoring, automated backups, and staging environment. They are optimized with advanced caches and regular security patching. The other features include auto-healing, HTTP/2 enabled servers, and SSH, and SFTP access.

PROS

3-day Free Trial

Cloudways lets you sign up for a three-day trial account by creating a username and password, or logging in using either Github, Google, or LinkedIn credentials. After logging in you are given a wide range of CMS to choose from.

The sources are trusted including Drupal, Joomla, Koken, Magento, Media Wiki, PHP Stack, Prestashop, and WordPress.

Site Migration

Cloudways moves your first website to Cloudways from any web host for free and that too without breaking your live site hosted on the old host. So you can relax without worrying about migration complexities & technicalities.

Excellent Uptime

Uptime is the most crucial thing you need from a hosting service. And Cloudways doesn’t disappoint in that aspect. The optimized stack, built-in CDN, auto-healing servers,and PHP 7 ready servers result in unparalleled performance.

If your server or stack is down, Cloudways will go beyond sending you alert and proactively start investigating. The built-in cache mechanism includes Varnish, Memcached, and Redis that enhance the speed of your WordPress websites.

24/7/365 Customer Support

Cloudways provide three levels of customer support to assist its users. The first level, Standard Support is more than enough for most of the service users. It’s free and includes 24/7/365 access to Live Chat guidance through any operation on the Cloudways Platform. Every request is routed to a specifically trained Support Team member.

One level up, Advanced Support add-on speeds up response times and opens up a wider range of Cloudways expertise. You get expert answers, deeper application troubleshooting, customization support, and proactive monitoring, etc.

The Premium Support add-on is for businesses that run mission-critical sites. It offers all of Advanced Support with even quicker response times, a dedicated Account Manager, a private Slack channel, and direct phone support.

Maximum Security for Worry-Free experience

Cloudways provides 24/7 real-time monitoring and regular firewall upgrades. The support engineers help users troubleshoot errors and conflicts with plugins and themes.

In addition, Cloudways offers free Secure Socket Layer (SSL) certificates, which should be considered essential data protection if you plan to sell product.

The security is enforced with the aid of dedicated server IP and Firewall. The plans also include free SSL certificate, regular security patching, server auto-healing. With that and automated backups, security threats are a rarity.

CONS

No Domain Registration Option

Cloudways doesn’t offer domain registration, so you have to secure a domain from some other seller.

Cloud-based hosting requires a certain degree of expertise. It is better for the beginners to go for a traditional managed WordPress hosting service.

Email Costs Extra

Cloudways’ plans do not come with any electronic mail accounts. The hosting provider expects you to pay $1 per month for the email services.

If you use other WordPress services, they offer this service whether at a basic level or higher.

Best Managed Cloud Hosting for WordPress

WordPress is the strongest point of this hosting platform. The managed hosting for WordPress and WooCommerce nullifies the cloud server related hassles. It gives the users a choice to scale their website according to them.

The Cutting-Edge managed web hosting features include advanced caches coupled with Breeze, a simplified Cloudways cache,and CloudwaysCDN for fast performance. They all come together to provide a seamless web hosting experience.

CloudwaysCDN helps to reduce latency and improve response times when serving a WordPress website worldwide. It supports PHP 5.6.x and the latest versions of PHP 7.x so you can test compatibility and switch versions accordingly.

Conclusion

There’s no denying the fact that when it comes to functionality at an affordable price Cloudways takes the trophy. And even when cloud-based hosting platforms are tricky, Cloudways is quite simple to use.

All Plans of Cloudways come with unlimited WordPress installs, SSD-based hosting, Varnish, Memcached, and Redis. The other features include HTTP/2 enabled servers, free WordPress cache plugin, staging area,and URLs.

The plans also include SSH and SFTP access, 24/7 real-time monitoring, and team management. The plans support multiple PHP versions and come with server and website cloning.

The customer support of Cloudways is praised by many. The 24/7/365 priority Live Chat and ticketing support from the Senior Engineers, with improved SLAs will forever guide you through all the complexions.

The Premium users can call Cloudways’ senior support engineers any time for in-person support. Another Premium feature constitutes private slack channel. It connects the user’s team directly with the senior support engineers.

SSD disks offer maximum speed and reliability than traditional disks while accommodating modern websites’ demands.And if you are still skeptical about Cloudways you can always hook up for the free trial.