Cloudways Review 2025: Check Out All Pros And Cons

Cloudways is relatively new to the web hosting industry, having been founded in 2012 by Aaqib Gadit and Pere Hospital. It is headquartered in Malta, Europe.

Technically, Cloudways is not a web hosting provider but a Programming-as-a-Service (PaaS) company that procures servers from top cloud hosting providers and adds its own server stack and firewall to it.

In 2022, DigitalOcean acquired Cloudways. However, despite the acquisition, you can still choose servers from several cloud hosting providers in addition to DigitalOcean, including Vultr, Linode, AWS, and GCP.

Cloudways also provides an easy-to-manage control panel that includes 1-click installation for several applications and SSL management.

Below are some of the Cloudways features that I find really useful

1. Choose Your Cloud Provider

Despite being a Digital Ocean company, Cloudways does not force you to use Digital Ocean Servers. Rather, it allows you to choose from several top cloud hosting providers based on your personal preference.

2. Scalability

Cloudways is highly scalable. For Digital Ocean, you can go from 1GB RAM to up to 192GB RAM VPS. AWS, although does not have a 1 GB RAM option, they too support up to 384 GB RAM VPS.

Vertical scaling up the server is extremely easy - you just move the slider to select an appropriate plan. For scaling down Digital Ocean, Linode, and Vultr server, or scaling down storage for AWS and GCP, you have to clone your existing server to a smaller server.

3. Custom Server Stack (ThunderStack)

Cloudways uses a custom server stack, ThunderStack, which combines Apache with NGINX as a reverse proxy to leverage the best of both: Apache’s ability to handle dynamic content and offer configuration flexibility, and NGINX’s efficiency in serving static content and managing high traffic loads.

This, along with option to choose from Memcached and Redis for object caching, Varnish Cache, and MariaDB database improves your website's performance.

4. Free Object Cache Pro

Cloudways offers the Object Cache Pro plugin for free, which provides superior caching performance over Memcached and the free Redis cache by enabling persistent object caching, resulting in faster load times and reduced database queries.

You can read more about the benefits of Object Cache Pro plugin on the Cloudways Blog or you can visit the official website of Object Cache Pro.

5. Developer Friendly Tools

For developers, Cloudways offers tools like SSH/SFTP access, Git integration, staging environments, and support for multiple PHP versions.

6. White Label Solutions

Cloudways offers a Client Billing platform that allows users to manage client billing with ease, enabling automated invoicing, flexible billing rates, and seamless payment processing, all from a single platform. It also offers detailed billing reports to track expenses and profits effectively.

6. Worldwide Data Centers

Since Cloudways brings together the best Cloud Hosting Providers, you get data centers at 50 locations and in all continents except Antarctica. (Who needs a server in Antarctica, though?)

7. Great Security

Cloudways offers managed security features such as firewalls, daily offsite backups with easy restore, vulnerability scanner, regular OS updates, and security patches to negate security threats to your website.

8. DDoS Mitigation

Cloudways provides out-of-the-box Layer 3 and Layer 4 DDoS mitigation for all their servers, ensuring protection against network and transport layer attacks by partnering with top-tier cloud providers.

9. New Relic Integration

Cloudways offers New Relic integration, allowing users to monitor server performance and track application metrics in real-time for better optimization and troubleshooting.

Cloudways is an affordable Managed Cloud Hosting Provider with plans starting at just $11/month for Standard 1GB Digital Ocean droplet. There's also a compulsory offsite backup charge of minimum $0.5 even if you don't use their backup service. 

At Cloudways, Vultr and Linode plans start at $14/month. As for AWS, and GCP, the pricing are higher starting $20.56 and $37.33/month. On the higher side, you can get AWS plans with as much as 384 GB RAM for well over $3000 per month.

You can also get several Addons for extra price. Among the popular addons, Cloudflare Enterprise addon is priced at $4.99/month while Rackspace Email addon is priced at $1/month. You can also get Advanced and Premium support starting $100 and $500 per month respectively.

Note: While I try to keep the pricing up to date, please double-check the the official pricing page of Cloudways for the latest pricing.

Cloudways offers data centers in around 50 cities when you take into account data center locations of all the cloud hosting providers available at Cloudways. However, the numbers will be lower, depending on the Cloud Hosting provider you choose. 

You can check out the the list of available data centers on the Cloudways Data Centers page.

Registering at Cloudways is a simple 2-step process. First, you can visit their home page using the below button

On the home page, you can click on the "Start Free" option as shown in the screenshot below

This will redirect you to a page where you need to enter a few details. Clicking the "Start Free" button activates your 3-day free trial and takes you directly to the Dashboard.

Once into the Dashboard, you will can see an option to confirm your phone number and email in order to activate your free trial. This is done to avoid misuse of the trial period. 

Registering with Cloudways is a one-time process. However, you might need to deploy and destroy VPS instances several times. So how easy or difficult does Cloudways make the entire server and application set-up process?

Let us check the same.

Once you update your billing details or confirm your account for a free trial, you will be able to set up your application and server.

Log in access your Cloudways Dashboard where you can see the list of all the servers you have created. If you are just starting, you will instead see an option to spin up your server as shown below.

The first thing that you need to do is choose the application that you want to install. As of the time of writing this review, the supported applications were WordPress, WooCommerce, Laravel, Magento, and Custom PHP applications. 

The WordPress App comes with three options, Cloudways Optimized version, a Clean WordPress as well as WordPress Multi-site. As the name suggests, the Cloudways optimized version comes with some Cloudways-specific tweaks including Cloudways' own Breeze Cache plugin pre-installed.

After selecting the application you want to install, choose a name your app and server. If you have several servers and apps, this will make life easier for you . You will also have to create/select a project for better organization.

After entering the above details, select a Cloud Hosting Provider of your choice along with the size of your VPS server. s you adjust the slider to select the server size, the hourly pricing and monthly cap are updated in real-time on the bottom left.

Although, Cloudways recommends using the 2GB RAM or higher VPS for production websites, a 1GB RAM server is usually good enough for a small to medium traffic website that uses a CDN.

Once you enter all the details, you can click the Launch Now button to spin up the server with the selected app installed on it.

For me, the spinning up of server took about 4 minutes. This, I feel is fairly quick considering all the configurations it does at the backend.

Once the server is deployed, the red dot on the left side of server name will turn green indicating that the server is live. You will also see a drop-down menu on the right side which you can use to stop, restart and delete the server along with a few more options.

Navigating through Cloudways Control Panel Dashboard isn't as easy as in the case of cPanel Dashboard. There is definitely a learning curve.

Things get more complex mainly because Cloudways offers you two Dashboards, one to manage your servers and the other one to manage your applications.

However, it won't take you more than half an hour to get hold of everything. So, let us briefly go through the various options available in the Cloudways Dashboard and how you can do basic things with Cloudways Dashboard.

Switching Between Server Mode and Application Mode

Logging in to your Cloudways account will redirect you to the Cloudways Dashboard in "Server Mode" where you can see a list of all your active servers.

To switch between server mode and application mode, you use the toggle button that you see above the list of Servers as well as Applications. The same can also be done by clicking on the Servers and Applications option in the top-left corner menu.

Managing Cloudways Server

Let us First Check how you can manage your server and server dashboard settings

1. Adding A Server

If you are in Server Mode, you can add a new server by clicking on the Add Server option located on the right hand side, above the list of servers. This will open up the same interface that we discussed earlier in the Spinning Up VPS Instance section of this Cloudways Review

2. Recover Server

Once your server is deleted, Cloudways keeps the backup of the server for 15 days. If your server was backed up at least once, you can recover your server by using the Recover Server option just beside the Add Server option shown above.

3. Miscellaneous Server Options

You can manage your server by clicking on the three dots towards the right-hand side of any server in the server mode, as shown in the image below. This will open several options that will allow you to Stop, Start, Restart, Delete, Transfer, as well as, clone the server. You can also find the Add Application option on the same menu, which you can use to add more applications to the server. 

Cloudways Server Dashboard Settings

Since Cloudways does not offer root access, they have added a lot of options to their Server Dashboard. Let us briefly go through each of them.

1. Master Credentials

The master credentials are used to access all the applications on the server through SFTP Or SSH. Since it was a test server, I did not care to hide the details.

2. Monitoring

The monitoring option consists of three tabs. The Summary tab option allows you to see basic data like RAM Usage, CPU Usage, Disk Usage as well as Bandwidth Usage.

The Details tab allows you to see more detailed data plotted as a graph.

Cloudways also allows you to use New Relic for debugging problems related to applications. To use New Relic, you need to first activate it under Manage Services  discussed below.

3. Manage Services

The Manage Services option lets you handle core server processes without root access. It allows restarting Apache Webserver, Memcached, MySQL, Nginx, and PHP FPM, enabling New Relic, and purging the Varnish cache.

For purging the Varnish cache, you can also use the Breeze WordPress Cache Plugin by Cloudways.

4. Settings and Packages

The Settings and Packages option contains 5 different tabs. The Basic tab allows you to manage Execution Limit, Upload Size, Memory limit, etc.

The Advanced tab allows you to easily manage your PHP, MySQL, and Nginx Settings. You can also set the lifetime for Varnish Cache which is 4 hours by default.

The Packages tab allows you to select your PHP and MariaDB version. You can also enable or disable elastic search and install Redis Cache which is not installed by default on Cloudways.

The Optimization tab allows you to enable automatic disk cleanup. You can also manually clean up your disk if needed.

The Maintenance tab allows you to select a suitable time for the maintenance activities like updating your OS and applying security patches which might cause a server downtime.

5. Security

The security option allows you to whitelist your IP for SSH and MySQL access.

6. Vertical Scaling

The Vertical scaling option allows you to scale up your server. Scaling down option is available only for AWS, and GCP. However, for scaling down DO, Vultr, and Linode servers, you can clone your server to a lower plan.

You can also choose to attach Block Storage to your server from the Block Storage tab.

7. Backups

At Cloudways, offsite backups mandatory and they charge you a minimum of $0.5 for the same. There is no way you can disable the same.

You can manage backup settings by adjusting the frequency, retention period, and backup time under the Backups option. The Backups section also allows you to manually take offsite backups and enable or disable local backups on the server.

8. SMTP

Cloudways does not allow you to send emails using their servers. So, you have to use SMTP Servers for your transactional emails. The SMTP section allows you to either set-up your own SMTP server, or get the Cloudways Elastic Email Addon at a nominal cost.

Managing Your Application

To manage your application, you must first switch to the Application mode to reveal the list of all your applications.

1. Add New Application

Once you are in the Application Mode, you will see the Add Application option above the list of applications. On clicking the same, a pop-up will open asking you to select a server on which you want to create the application.

Once you select the server, you can then go on select the Application, Name your App as well as select a project for the App.

Alternatively, you can also add a new application in the Server Mode, as discussed earlier.

2. Recover Application

Like servers, Cloudways also keeps a backup of your applications for 15 days provided they have been backed up at least once. To recover a deleted application, simply click the Recover Application option just beside Add Application option as seen above

3. Miscellaneous Application Options

Clicking the 3 dots on the right side of the application will reveal options allowing you to Delete the application as well as clone the application or create a staging for your application

Application Dashboard Settings

To navigate to Application settings, you must first click on the Applications option in the top menu and then select the application whose settings you would like to adjust.

1. Access Details

If you have multiple applications on the same server, you can restrict access to other applications by providing your client or developer with application-specific access details.

2. Monitoring

The monitoring section allows you to monitor your application analytics. You can also check you Access and Error logs for your application.

3. Bot Protection

The Bot Protection option allows you to turn the Bot Protection on or off. Turning on Bot Protection will install the Bot Protection plugin by Malcare on your WordPress Website. You can also see graphs for Traffic Requests and Login Requests.

4. Domain Management

Cloudways allows you to easily manage your domain. You can simply enter your domain name either as a naked domain or with www, whatever you prefer, and Cloudways will add it to your application. If you are using subdomains, you can also add the same here.

5. Cron Management

As the name suggests, the Cron Management option allows you to add and manage your Cron Jobs.

6. SSL Certificate

The SSL Certificate option allows you to install Let's Encrypt SSL as well as your own SSL certificate. One thing good with Cloudways is that, unlike most hosting companies, Let's Encrypt allows you to install Let's Encrypt's Wildcard SSL

7. Backup And Restore

Apart from the Server backup option we discussed earlier, Cloudways also allows you to back up individual applications. Cloudways automatically backups your applications daily. However, you also take manual backups before making any significant changes to your website.

Restoration is just one click with no confirmation prompt. However, Cloudways does make sure to take a backup before restoring to the old backup. As soon as the restoration is complete, you will get an option to Rollback the restoration.

8. Deployment Via GIT

Cloudways allows you to deploy your codes to your application directly from GIT Repositories through SSH. To do so, you need to create and download the SSH key.

9. Application Settings

Cloudways also has application-level settings. You can manage several tasks such as enabling and disabling Varnish and SSH access to your application. You can also completely turn off application access. If you are using WEBP images with a redirect to respective JPEGs and PNGs, you can turn on the WEBP option.

Apart from this, you can also manage your PHP FPM Settings and Varnish Settings.

10. Migration Tools

If you are using WordPress you can download their Migration Tool Plugin to migrate your website to Cloudways.

11. Cloudways CDN

Cloudways provides Cloudflare Enterprise CDN as an Addon. It is nominally priced at just $4.99/month/website.

Cloudways uses a customized Server Stack they refer to as Thunderstack that uses NGINX Web Server as a reverse proxy for apache. Memcached and Varnish cache is activated by default with an option to install Redis Cache. The 2GB and higher plans have Object Pro Cache plugin installed and activated by default. 

For databases, Cloudways uses MariaDB. Although, if your website is using MySQL, Cloudways won't migrate the database to MariaDB. They also use Varnish Cache for boosting the performance of multimedia websites. Below is how Thunderstack looks like

However, does this performance-boosting stack translate into fast page load times? Let us find out the same.

Cloudways Speed Review Tests

For the speed tests, I decided to put up Cloudways against Digital Ocean. Since Digital Ocean also offers one-click Litespeed WordPress Installs, I decided to include that too in my speed tests.

Here was my website setup.

Hosting 1: Digital Ocean, Server: Intel Premium, Server Location: London, Application: Regular Apache WordPress

Hosting 2: Digital Ocean, Server: Intel Premium, Server Location: London, Application: WordPress With LiteSpeed WebServer

Hosting 3: Cloudways, Server: Digital Ocean Intel Premium, Server Location: London, Application: Cloudways Optimized WordPress

For each WordPress install, I used the Starter Templates plugin by Astra Themes to install a basic e-commerce website that generated a total of 62 requests and was approximately 1.54 MB in size. Below is the Waterfall chart from one of my tests

As for the size of the Server, initially, I conducted tests on 1GB RAM Premium Digital Ocean Servers. However, Cloudways failed miserably, especially when compared to Digital Ocean LiteSpeed WordPress Install.

This might be due to additional time lost due to the firewalls Cloudways add. Plus, Cloudways does not recommend a 1GB RAM Server for their production site. 

That's the reason when I informed the Cloudways team about the results, they insisted I carry out the tests on their 2GB RAM or higher server and compare it with their Digital Ocean Equivalent. So I went ahead and conducted these tests

Below are the results of the test I conducted from GTMetrix London Servers. To be noted, I conducted tests from each location three times and then recorded the best of 3 results.

1. Cloudways

2. Digital Ocean Regular WordPress

3. Digital Ocean LiteSpeed WordPress

As you can see, Digital Ocean with LiteSpeed Server returned the fastest load times. However, the difference was minimal between Digital Ocean LiteSpeed And Cloudways as well as Cloudways and Digital Ocean Apache Web Server.

I then conducted the tests from GTMetrix Sydney Servers. Below is the result for the same.

1. Cloudways

2. Digital Ocean Regular WordPress

3. Digital Ocean LiteSpeed

When tested from Sydney servers, Cloudways turned out to be the fastest. This is great considering that LiteSpeed is considered to be much faster than Apache with NGINX as a reverse proxy.

So, if you are looking to go with Cloudways make sure to go with their 2GB RAM or higher servers.

I used Uptime Robot to measure the Cloudways Uptime. I also recently moved my uptime tests to Uptimia as they offer as low as 30 second checks. However, since I only recently purchased Uptimia, I don't have much

Below are the results from Cloudways uptime tests at Uptime Robot for Cloudways 1GB RAM Vultr High Frequency Server

As you can see, Cloudways recorded a 100% uptime since I started monitoring my blog on Uptime Robot. That's 2661 hours and 57 minutes or over 110 days of uptime without recording a single downtime.

As I said, I recently also started measuring Cloudways Uptime using Uptimia with 30 seconds check intervals. The Uptime Monitor was set on 17 December 2022.

And no surprises here too as Cloudways managed a 100% uptime ever since I set up the uptime monitor.

So, overall, Cloudways is quite reliable when it comes to Uptime.

Cloudways support is a sort of hit-and-miss. I had quite a few negative experiences with the Cloudways support team in the past. However, their affiliate manager confirmed that it was the case in the past and more recently they have improved their customer service.

So, just to confirm if that's indeed true I asked three questions to the Cloudways support team. The first time I told them that I wanted to use Redis as my object cache and I couldn't figure out how to disable Memcached.

And their support executive was bang-on to point out that unless I configure my cache plugin to use Memcached, it won't be activated. 

Although it did seem that the executive was handling some other customers along with me, the response time was good and much better than my previous experiences with the Cloudways team. So that came as a pleasant surprise.

However, the second time, I asked a more straightforward question about installing LiteSpeed Webserver on Cloudways. 

For the unknown, Cloudways does not provide root access and LiteSpeed isn't an option with their current offering. In fact, their affiliate manager told me that although their team is discussing about implementing LiteSpeed Webserver, it won't be immediate and they won't even be able to give any ETA for the same or even confirm if they will actually go ahead to offer the same.

So, I was expecting a quick reply that I cannot install LiteSpeed Webserver. However, I was surprised when the support executive offered to create a Support Ticket.

This shows that some of their executives still require a bit more training. Apart from her picture, I have blurred the name of the executive to make sure no action is initiated against the executive.

As for the third question, that was a genuine one as the Cloudways Thunderstack image clearly stated that they offer both MySQL as well as MariaDB databases. However, I was just able to switch between various versions of MariaDB. So, I contacted customer support for the third time.

I was quickly joined by the executive. The response was prompt but it seemed the executive struggled a bit too much with phrasing his answers in English. However, it was decent enough for me to understand that Cloudways offers only MariaDB for new websites. However, for migrated websites that use MySQL, it does not migrate the database to MariaDB.

From the timestamps, you can see the conversation lasted for just 9 minutes. So, overall it's fairly decent customer support. However, if you take into account their quality of support from a couple of years ago, there's a huge improvement.

Cloudways is a great option if you are looking for a budget VPS. However, it is far from perfect. So, if you aren't convinced enough, even after taking their 3 days free trial, below are some options you can consider.

1. Liquid Web

Liquid Web is a premium web hosting company that offers massive discounts on Managed VPS for your first bill. Their base plan starts at just $14.75 per month for a 2GB RAM VPS. So that's even cheaper than Cloudways.

All the Liquid Web plans include a free Interworx panel for unlimited websites. However, if you are cPanel lover, you have to shell out extra for a cPanel license.

2. Scala Hosting

Scala Hosting is another option for you to consider if you are won't mind signing up for long term in exchange for massive first-time discount.

At Scala Hosting, you can get the 4GB RAM Cloud VPS with 2 CPU cores starting just $14.98/month for the first year. Although, the price shoots up considerably if you go with their monthly plan.

At Scala Hosting, you have the option to choose from Apache, Apache with NGINX as reverse proxy, OpenLiteSpeed or LiteSpeed Enterprise web servers. However, for LiteSpeed Enterprise, you have to pay extra for the Licence 

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Final Verdict On Cloudways

If you are looking for a Managed Cloud VPS hosting that is scalable, Cloudways is a great option for you. It is developer-friendly with their hourly billing and ability to transfer servers to other Cloudways account.

So, if you are a developer, you should definitely stick with Cloudways. For Bloggers too, it is a cost-effective solution. However, some non-technical bloggers might find it difficult to use. For them, in this Cloudways Review For 2025, I have included a couple of alternatives.