Cloudways Review 2024: Check Out 10 Pros And 4 Cons

1. Affordable Pricing With Free Trial

Who doesn't like free stuff? I do and I am sure you do too. Cloudways offers a risk-free 3-day free trial so that you can try their services before upgrading to a paid plan. You don't need to share your credit card details to enroll for their free trial

And beyond that too, Cloudways is priced quite affordably starting at just $11/month for their 1GB RAM Digital Ocean. Offset backups are extra with minimum $0.5 charge.

Also, like a cherry on the cake, when you upgrade to their paid plan, Blogging Ocean readers get $20 worth free hosting credits; that's almost 2 months of free hosting. Just make sure to use our exclusive Cloudways Promo Code HB20 during signup to get the credits.

Alternatively, you can claim a discount of 25% for 3 months with coupon BOCEAN25. This coupon is suitable if you want to get their VPS worth $27 or more so that your discount exceeds $20.

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.

Of course, scaling up is very easy and can be done anytime you feel the need to add more resources. So, if you are looking for scalability of Cloud Hosting and don't want to get into the hassles of managing your server, Cloudways is a great option for you.

Please note, Vultr and Linode servers are not available for new users.

3. Worldwide Data Centers

When I say worldwide, I mean it. Since Cloudways brings together the best Cloud Hosting Providers, you are more likely to find a server near your target audience than any other hosting provider. With Cloudways, you get data centers on all the continents except Antarctica. (Who needs a server in Antarctica, though?)

4. Free Object Cache Pro

Another freebie? Yes, that's right. Cloudways customers with 2GB RAM or higher VPS can get the Object Cache Pro plugin for free. You can read more about the benefits of Object Cache Pro on Cloudways Blog or visit the official website of Object Cache Pro.

5. Managed Magento Store and Managed WordPress Blog On The Same Platform.

Admit it, most Shared Hosting or VPS don't optimize their servers for a specific application. As for managed hosting, they usually restrict you to hosting only a specific application.

For example, you can't host a Magento store on a Managed WordPress Hosting

However, Cloudways separates each app on the server and individually optimizes it for performance. Thus, you get an optimized Magento website along with a Managed WordPress blog, all on the same server. 

So you no longer have to rely on multiple hosting companies or plans for your requirement.

6. No Long-term commitment

Cloudways charges you per hour. So you only pay for the time you host with them. This is great considering the fact that most Managed VPS Hosts will try to lock you into annual or longer-duration plans by offering higher discounts only for long-duration plans.

7. Developer Friendly

Most Managed Hosting providers don't offer root access to clients, thus severely restricting the developers from making any tweaks. Although Cloudways does not provide root access, it does give considerable freedom in managing your server. 

Apart from that, at Cloudways, you can deploy applications via GIT as well as transfer your servers to your client's account after project completion. 

Although Cloudways does not provide root access, they make sure to provide SSH access at the server as well as application level.

8. Good Customer Support

I'd be honest here, Cloudways had been one of the worst when it came to customer support. However, in the last few months, their support quality has improved leaps and bounds. They are now more quick and more reliable when it comes to customer support.

9. Good Uptime

Since Cloudways has a tie-up with only the best Cloud Hosting Providers in the industry, their uptime is highly stable. Even the maintenance and software upgrade-related downtime is minimal and almost zero.

10. Good Speed

Cloudways offers a customized server stack that they refer to as Thunderstack that uses Apache Webserver with NGINX as a reverse proxy. Memcached is enabled by default whereas on a 1GB RAM server Redis cache is optional.

However, on 2GB RAM and a higher server, Redis cache is activated by default and managed by the Object Cache Pro plugin. All of this helps you greatly improve the speed of your application.

In our tests, Cloudways's 2GB RAM server outclassed similarly priced WPX Hosting which comes with a fast LiteSpeed Webserver. You can read more about it in our comparison of Cloudways Vs WPX Hosting

1. No Free Email Hosting AND SMTP Server

Cloudways does not allow you to send any emails through their servers. So for email hosting, you will have to go with their paid add-on, which although cheaper, will still cost an additional $1/month/account. You can alternatively use your own email hosting

As for transactional emails, you can either go with their Elastic Email Addon or use your own SMTP server, whatever suits you the best.

2. No File Manager

Another major drawback of Cloudways is the lack of a file manager. So you'd have to stick with SFTP with Cloudways. While most developers won't mind it, beginners moving from cPanel hosting will find it to be a bit unfriendly.

3. Custom Control Panel Is Confusing

Cloudways comes with server-level as well as application-level management. So, the control panel interface looks confusing as you often have to move back and forth between Application Settings and Server settings to find the right option.

4. Offsite Backups Are Chargeable And Cannot Be Turned Off

Unlike competitors, Cloudways charges you for offsite backups. However, if you are using your own backup services, there is no way you can turn it off. So, you will end up paying a minimum of $0.5 even if you don't use their service and reduce the backup duration to the longest possible time.

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

In 2022, Digital Ocean acquired Cloudways. And in 2023, Digital Ocean decided to drop Vultr and Linode options while selecting a server at Cloudways. Though, existing users can spin up new servers on Vultr and Linode.

Technically, Cloudways is not a Web Hosting provider, rather it's a Programming-as-a-Service (PaaS) company that procures servers from top cloud hosting providers like Digital Ocean, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and adds their own server stack and firewall to it.

Cloudways also provide you with an easy-to-manage control panel that comes with the 1-click install of several applications as well as SSL.

Cloudways allows you to get servers from 3 IaaS Cloud Hosting Providers including Digital Ocean, AWS, and GCP. There are at least 10 plans available for each of the hosting providers. Therefore, it's not possible to sum it up all here.

However, the below table shows the configuration and pricing for the lowest and highest plan for each of these Cloud Hosting Providers.

Like pricing, the available data centers too vary greatly for Cloudways. Below are the data centers available with each of the Cloud Hosting Providers.

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 take you to the below page where you will be asked to enter a few details. Clicking on the "Start Free" button will activate your 3-day free trial and take you straight to the Dashboard

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

Overall, registering with Cloudways is a breeze. It's one of the fastest I've seen for any web hosting company.

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, If you aren't logged in, you can log in to go straight to your Cloudways Dashboard where you can see the list of all your servers. 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.

Once you select the application you want to install, you will then have to Name your app and the server that will make life easier for you if you have several servers and apps. You will also have to create/select a project for better organization.

Once you enter the above details, you will be able to select a Cloud Hosting Provider of your choice along with the size of your VPS server. As you use the slider to select the server size, on the bottom left you also see your hourly pricing as well as its monthly cap.

So for Digital Ocean Premium Intel servers, it is $0.0194/hour with a cap of $14/month. You can also select the location of your server from the location drop-down menu

Surprisingly, as you can see in the image above, there is an upsell here. Although a 1GB RAM server should be sufficient for most small-sized websites, they somehow scare their users into buying a 2GB RAM Server by displaying a clear warning. And once you upgrade, there's no scaling down. However, you can clone the server to a smaller sized server

I've previously tried using Cloudways for my blog which was getting a rough real-time of around 40 and the RAM never exceeded 300MB. Though mine was a lightweight blog and I was using Cloudways CDN, which might have further reduced load on the origin server. 

Anyway, once you enter all the details, the Launch Now button will be activated which you can click to deploy your selected application on the selected server.

For me, the application setup time shown by Cloudways was 7 minutes. However, the server along with the application was ready in about 4 minutes which I feel is fairly quick considering they add all the optimizations to your server.

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

Navigating through Cloudways 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

When you log in to Cloudways, you will by default be redirected to Cloudways Dashboard in Server Mode where you can see a list of all your 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 on the right 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. So, 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 basic 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.

3. Manage Services

Manage Services allow you to control core services that you might otherwise need root access to manage. With Managed Services, you can restart Apache Webserver, Memcached, MySQL, Nginx, and PHP FPM. You also have the option to Enable New Relic as stated earlier and purge the Varnish cache. 

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

4. Settings and Packages

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

The Advanced Settings 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 of the server which includes updating your OS and applying security patches.

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. You CANNOT scale down the server. However, for scaling down, you can clone your server to a lower plan.

You can also choose to attach Block Storage within the Block Storage tab.

7. Backups

Cloudways allows you to take offsite backups. Somehow Cloudways has made taking offsite backups mandatory and they charge you a minimum of $0.5 for the same. There is no way you can disable the same.

However, if you have a large website, under the Backups Option you can choose the frequency and time of backup as well as the retention period for the backups to keep your backup costs in check.

Under the Backups section, you can also manually take offsite backups as well as enable or disable local backups on the server.

8. SMTP

Cloudways does not allow you to send emails from their servers. So, you have to use SMTP Servers for your transactional emails. However, Cloudways make it easy for you to set up SMTP servers.

You can either use your own SMTP server or use Elastic Search, which comes as a paid add-on with Cloudways

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 my Blogging Ocean which is hosted on 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 VPS at extremely affordable pricing. Their base plan starts at just $15 per month for a 2GB RAM Server. So that's even cheaper than Cloudways.

However, if you consider the fact that Liquid Web includes a cPanel 5-site license in the pricing, it's literally a steal deal as a cPanel License would cost you more than the price of VPS.

And if you are willing to shell out an extra $5, at $20 you can get the Liquid Web VPS bundle. With the bundle, apart from 2GB RAM VPS and cPanel license, you also get a free Cloudflare Pro License worth $20 and 100GB Acronis Offsite backup. 

So, if you are a cPanel lover and find the Cloudways Dashboard to be too confusing, there's no reason you should look beyond Liquid Web.

2. WPX Hosting

If you are looking to host only a WordPress website and are here searching for a good Managed WordPress host, WPX Hosting would by far be the option for you. They have an excellent customer support team that is faster than the fastest with an average response time of under 30 seconds.

As for the performance, WPX Hosting uses LiteSpeed WebServer. So, it is as fast or better than Cloudways. However, their basic plan starts at $25/month. And if you pay in advance for a year, you get 2 months free, which brings down the monthly cost to $20.83

Related Articles You Might Like

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, I have included a couple of alternatives.