Cloudways Review – is it worth buying? & Cloudways Alternative 2021

It is important to know what we consider before choosing a hosting provider and after that we can consider one as a best hosting company for you.

But what do you consider, it is possible unknow to you and that’s why you visit our page to read review.

Easy of Use, Reliably in term of, Support, service quality, Uptime of hosting, Price in comparison with others and overall what is the best in comparison with others like A2hosting, Siteground, WPX, WPEngine. All the above hosting we have tested so far to make this review.

Cloudways: Overview

What is Cloudways? Do you know? it is not a company who build their server to provide hosting service. Eventually, they are hosting management company. 

What is hosting management company? Company who manage hosting in behalf of you. why do they need in out industries? The reason is very simple. Most of the popular VPS cloud hosting provider does not provide hosting management service.

Few of the hosting provider like Namecheap or A2hosting provide manage VPS hosting but they are costly and not so high performance server like AWS, Google Cloud, Linode, Digitalocean, Vultr and many others.

As Managing a VPS server is not easy, it takes a lots of expertise to handle and even you learn things like wordpress installation in VPS with easy panel of Vultr and Digitalocean, there are many thing that cloud happen with your server and your site can go down. Hence, this is a risky game for a establish website like us.

Common Problems with Hosting Services

The mail problem is site speed and the problem occurs due to many reason. Very bad reason is Share Hosting because of low resource and no dedicated IP address. IP play a crucial role in SERP Ranking.

These problem solved with VPS and Dedicated Hosting service provider like AWS, Google Cloud, DigitalOcean and more. But there is another problem occurs with managing VPS and Dedicated hosting because without good knowledge, it is very risky game.

And this problem has one solution is Cloudways hosting management service that is very low and you pay as you go high in a monthly payment system.

For that you don’t stuck in a bad hosting service who takes whole money in one payment.

Key Features of Cloudways

After Creating an account you have to choose one plan of any hosting with location of server and disk space. After that, you can see, your server is being install and Cloudways the control panel. It is not typical cPanel that is most of the hosting company offers.

Cloudways don’t suitable for every type of site. It’s almost 90% website are build in WordPress. And others type of sites that you can host are Magento, Laravel and Custom PHP. As their site control panel is different from cPanel, I will request developers to have a look after with their 3 days trial.

I have tested their and using their platform with WordPress though I am not a developer. And I can bet you don’t face any problem with control panel.

Let’s tackle in detail the key features of Cloudways.

1. Custom control panel

Its control panel is unlike typical cPanel which is provided by all the share hosting provider. cPanel takes charges to provide their service. As Cloudways want to provide affordable service they have made their custom control panel.

I can guarantee you, it is a child play, when you know of using cPanel where is so many option to use. In case of Cloudways control panel, it is minimalistic with minimum option and maximum benefits.

Cloudways control panel is modern by its nature. When you sign up for a new account and active your free trial, you can get complete access of control panel. So, Just sign up here.

From the Cloudways dashboard, you can see all the control of Server Management, Application Management, Team and Project Management. Read More

Application Management

What is a application in Cloudways? Application are mainly website, one application means one site build with WordPress, Magento, Laravel or Custom PHP.

From the dashboard menu option, you will find Application. And from your server window, you can see how many application are being install in your server. And options to install more application.

Just after opening any application you can see many option to do with website. You can active Bot Protection, SSL Certification install in one click, and take backup in a regular interval.

Domain management means which domain you want to add with this wordpress installation. One application is one domain and one site. There will be an temporary sub-domain of Cloudways where you can see your default site of wordpress.

There is also one click SSL Certification system which is completely from Let’s Encrypts. 1st add your domain name, then you will see the highlight in Install Certificate.

Server Managements

After the completion of Server and Application, you can enter in to server management. From server management dashboard, you can add New Server and can watch how many application and website install with how many added team members.

Stop, Restart, Add Application, Transfer Sever, and Clone Server option also be found from 3 dots icons.

Once you click one of your sever you will see many information which really helps every business because users experience matters.

Although it does not required to watch all time that how your server performing. You will not found this with any typical hosting provider. As a result, You can’t know until you experience slow from your site.

But in case of Cloudways Monitoring, you can see following details, Ram Usage 517 out of 1GB, CPU Usage is 0%, Disk Usage 7.03 out of 31.48 in Summary Tab. Constantly high usage of the server affects your site performance.

These are the list of services which are running on your server. Many times they are required to start, stop and restart these.

Server Setting and Package management gives you access to change the version of PHP, MySQL, Redis Cache installation option.

In the Security section, you can block certain IP addresses from gaining access to your resources.

If this isn’t enough, any expert users can log into the server via SSH to check and tweak the settings. Cloudways also provides cloud-based firewall as protection against malware and other types of cyberattacks.

Cloudways sever backup frequency by default everyday which you can configure from this window.

By default PHP mailing system is worst in wordpress as their all mail goes in spam folder. To counter it, you can configure with Elastic Email, one of the popular SMTP provider. But the most popular is G Suite/Google Workspace which you can configure from Your Own SMTP. Cloudways don’t provide any email service.

Team management

Professional team is the gateway of success. Cloudways provide feature to add new member in your team and assign a new task. It is for the agencies and business owners who are going to access them.

2. Staging and cloning

Sometimes we face difficulties in changing or modification in the live site and afraid of doing something wrong. Specially when we decide to change wordpress theme.

Here, Cloudways’ Clone App and Create Staging is a handy features which helps in testing on a duplicate site of the main site. And in one click we can replace the original site if we see everything is good.

Cloning is somewhat similar to staging. It helps web development agencies to demonstrate their same work in different style with multiple Clone App.

3. Advanced caching

Apart from this cloud infrastructure, Cloudways takes advantage of several caching mechanisms to optimize servers. The company uses an in-house caching plug-in called Breeze. This plug-in can be easily set up, enabled, and disabled. More importantly, it supports Cloudway’s own content delivery network called CloudwaysCDN.

Speed matters! Yes, that’s why Cloudways bring mightiest powerful server of Google Cloud, AWS, Vultr, Linode and DigitalOcean.

For a small business owner Vultr HF is enough. All of these providers are known to provide SSD base VPS and dedicated cloud server which ensure fast performance.

Apart from these infrastructure, Cloudways provide several advantage with server caching and performance. The company build a cache plugin called Breeze which is easy to setup but I would recommend to use LiteSpeed Cache for free which give you page speed score 85 to 90 out of 100.

But premium plugin like WP Rocket and Perfmatters really boost speed at extreme level.

Cloudways CDN Review: Most of the user ask how is the CDN of Cloudways?

Actually I would not recommend as it is not free to use. Far better performance you can achieve when you will use BunnyCDN and cost is very cheap.

While you are using trial account, you can’t access Cloudways CDN. This feature is accessed under Application Management and can be added with just one click.

In case you are using Cloudflare and want to hide your IP address you can do it buy using Breeze plugin which has a option to add Cloudflare along site Cloudways CDN.

Other popular caching mechanisms Varnish and Redis are also supported, but Cloudways recommends not to use both.

4. Vertical scaling

It is happened, when your launching a site, you can’t estimate how that how much traffic you will get. So, when your website traffic increasing constantly, you can increase your server resources in just a few click through Vertical Scaling which you will find from Server Management.

It might also, be possible that the increasing of traffic is only due to seasonal sale like Black Friday or Christmas. After that, your site don’t need the additional resources.

Yes! you guess correctly that Vertical Scaling works both ways, which is too good for a business owners. To get risk free promotion in any form during sale that might imbalance your site with increase traffic, just add new resource to your sever and then down grade it after offer end.

5. Customer support

Cloudways has 24/7 live chat support to provide you instant assistance. You can also request a call, send an email, check the blog and knowledge base, or visit the community forum and Cloudways’ social media platforms. Cloudways also has CloudWaysBot that monitors the servers and gives notification whenever there is an update or any issue.

Cloudways: What I Liked About It

Easy to use – Cloudways dashboard is simple and in just few click you able to install different app like WordPress, Magneto and many others. If you want to transfer your old site you just need to install Cloudways Plugin in your site and just put plugin information in Cloudways Hosting panel and change your site DNS/IP and your site is transferred.

Speed Optimization – You will never find better optimization than Cloudways ever in this price in combination with Server Space, Bandwidth, LightSpeed Server, Radis Cache, Gzip Compression and even Powerful Cloudways CDN. Not only that Cloudways knows the importance of site backup they also provide this without any additional cost.

Some users who are more familiar using cPanel, however, may get some surprises here. However, I’m sure they won’t get lost with Cloudways’ control panel. The Monitoring and Vertical Scaling tabs under Server Management are worth the mention. These two will let you monitor your server’s performance at a glance and provide insights when it’s high time to scale up.

WordPress users are familiar with cPanel, however, I can challenge that you don’t get lost in their panel. People always have a doubt of their slow website and when they upgrade hosting.

Hence it is worth to mention the monitoring and vertical scaling tabs under server management as they let you see your server’s performance at a glance and provide insight when it’s high time to scale up.

I generally use Vultr $6 plan and that cost me on Cloudways $13. It is not high as they provide CDN and Site Backup that will cost 2 to 3 dollars additional and it is not provide with Vultr $6 plan.

Many people would like to know how much traffic can host Vultr $6 plan that comes with 32GB NVME SSD and 1TB Bandwidth. It can take a load of more than few million visitors according to your page size easily.

“Pay as you go” this is the payment system that helps to new visitor trust on them. Unlike other hosting provider does not lock you in a heavy hosting plan for a long time of one years. And you have a freedom to change your hosting anytime.

Here you have to pay on monthly basis and whenever you can increase your plan based on site visitor and according to that you have to pay.

Cloudways: What I Don’t Like About It

I don’t like their support because of too technical reply that I can understand but it seems to me difficult for general audience.

Drawback of cloudways is that there is no domain registration system. They provide temporary sub-domains that you need to change by adding DNS or IP in domain level.

We can’t say it is bad, you don’t face any problem with this new system. As many people habituated with domain adding in cPanel, we add it as a drawback here.

If you are developer, it is not for you. There is not available of site root access that are generally developers use to. Hence you don’t able to host custom apps apart from WordPress, Magenta etc. it is generally a wordpress hosting service provider. here hosted 87% sites build in WordPress.

Cloudways: Final Thoughts

When we talk about final thought, first things come about pricing, hassle free managed VPS of Google cloud, AWS, Vultr, Linode and DigitalOcean. If you don’t know about all this sever management knowledge, Cloudways is a blessing in disguise.

As we all know the importance of Cloud VPS hosting. And when we don’t able to manage Cloud Hosting, we have to higher a Costly employee to manage our server. Rather than Cloudways provide affordable service, you don’t find any where.

And it is far more cheaper than WPX and Kinsta. These two are good but when you are searching for a best and cheap, 1st name come definitely Cloudways in my mind.

Another most popular and legacy free model “pay-as-you-go” makes Cloudways a trustable hosting provider in the world. If you don’t things is it suit for your business, you can instantly delete sever and your hosting billing will stop.

In case of more server resource when your business is growing exponentially you can increase your sever resource in just one click and instantly. You don’t to contact customer support and wait for few hours to upgrade and in this time you may loose thousand of visitor.

Ultimately, Cloudways is the best hosting provider of all the time in the world. Its nice balance of affordability and features stand out from others hosting. If you are still unsure about Cloudways service you can sing up for a free trial of 3 days to test how it perform migrate your site.

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