Cloudways.com review

Cloudways discounts and promo codes

First impression

Founded in 2012, Cloudways has 280+ employees from 20+ countries and they are proud of their industry-leading customer support ratings, exceptional value for money, and diverse choice of plans from leading providers that include Google Cloud, DigitalOcean and AWS.

When it comes to finding the best cloud hosting platform for your business or personal projects, the options can seem overwhelming. However, there is one name that consistently rises to the top; Cloudways.

With its robust infrastructure and intuitive user interface, Cloudways has become a go-to choice for anyone looking to harness the potential of cloud hosting. Offering a seamless experience and unmatched performance, 

This platform has gained a reputation for its reliability and flexibility. This review will delve deeper into the features of Cloudways that made it a standout player in the cloud hosting industry.

One of the standout features of Cloudways is its use of SSD-based hosting. With SSD drives, your website will experience sufficient performance improvements and reduced page load times. This is especially important for dynamic websites that rely on quick response times to engage visitors and keep them on your site. Cloudways also provides built-in advanced caches, including Memcached, Varnish, Nginx, and Redis. These caches are optimized and ready to use, ensuring your website delivers expedited responses to user requests. By leveraging these caches, you can further enhance the performance of your website and provide a seamless user experience.

Trial period

Cloudways makes hosting easy from the start. When you sign up, you get a free three-day trial period, so it’s risk-free. As part of your onboarding, it migrates your site for free while you follow the simple one-click process for getting set up.

In order to Signup for a Free trial, just click on the START FREE button and you will be redirected to the Singup page. Fill up the registration form with your Name, Email, and Password, verify your account by clicking the verification link that will be sent to your email address and that’s it.

Billing cycle

Cloudways offers cloud hosting services from several companies for which you can pay monthly or by the hour. With an hourly pay-as-you-go system, you’ll be charged for what you’re actually using, which means you can upscale/downscale a plan or add/remove features from your account and be charged only for the time you were using them.

With a monthly billing system, DigitalOcean’s plans start at $14.00 per month,  with AWS $38.56 per month, and with Google Cloud it starts at $37.45 per month.

Since Cloudways offers all the same features on all its plans, whether you went with DigitalOcean’s lowest-priced plan or highest-priced from Google Cloud, you can expect to get the following features: 24/7/365 customer support, 24/7 real-time monitoring, a free SSL certificate, one free managed migration, unlimited application installs, automated backups, staging environment, advanced optimizations of cache, auto-healing, regular security patching, HTTP/2 enabled servers, and SSH and SFTP access.

Control panel

Cloudways uses a different kind of control panel system that manages servers, applications and more. When you first sign up to Cloudways, you’ll be prompted to launch a server and deploy an “application”. An application is any software that you want to install on your server – e.g. WordPress, Magento, Laravel, and so on.

Once you’ve chosen your application and entered some basic details, you can make three key decisions. You can choose…

• Your cloud hosting provider;
• The resources for your server;
• Your server’s physical location. 

You’ll see a summary of the price at the bottom and then you can click Launch Now to create your server:

And that’s it!

Managing Your Server Cloudways dashboard has two main tabs:

• Servers – this is where you manage all of your cloud servers.
• Applications – this is where you manage your individual websites.

If you open a server’s dashboard, you’ll be able to manage all of the server-level details including:

• Monitoring – keep an eye on your server’s resources.
• Vertical Scaling – easily increase the resources of your server.
• Backups – take backups of your entire server.
• SMTP – you can set up an SMTP provider for transactional emails at the server level.

Limits

What you’ll pay for Cloudways depends on the cloud hosting provider that you choose and your server’s resources. In general, the cheapest option is the $10 entry-level DigitalOcean server, which will already offer excellent performance.

You do not need to pay separately for the cloud hosting. The price that you see at Cloudways includes both the underlying cloud hosting charges and the charges for Cloudways.

For the Basic Plan that costs $14 you will get 1GB RAM, 1 Core Processor, 25GB Storage, and 1TB Bandwidth. As for the Premium Plan you will get 8GB of RAM, 4 Core Processor, 160GB Storage, and 5TB Bandwidth.

Security

Cloudways takes care of server maintenance with auto-healing managed cloud servers. This feature automatically resolves most server issues through auto-healing restarts. You can rest assured that your website will continue running smoothly, and you won't have to worry about frequent crashes or downtime.

For WordPress users, Cloudways offers a free WordPress cache plugin called Breeze. This plugin is designed in-house to provide superior performance compared to other plugins in the industry. With simplicity at no cost, Breeze comes pre-installed on Cloudways, making it easy for you to optimize your WordPress website.

To further enhance account security, Cloudways provides two-factor authentication (2FA). This additional layer of safety protects your Cloudways account from unauthorized access, adding an extra level of protection to your server.

With the help of Cloudways' technology partner, Malcare, you can protect your WordPress websites from malicious bots, brute force login attacks, and Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks. This ensures that your website remains accessible to legitimate users and prevents performance issues caused by such attacks.

Cloudways offers advanced DDoS protection through the Cloudflare Enterprise add-on. This add-on provides enterprise-grade mitigation of DDoS attacks in under 3 seconds, protecting your application/website and keeping it online at all times. It defends against attacks on layers 3, 4, and 7, providing comprehensive protection against various attack vectors.

OS

Cloudways hosting services offer Linux, Windows, and MAC operating service servers.

Support

Cloudways offers multiple channels for customer support, ensuring that you can easily reach out for assistance whenever needed. The live chat support feature enables real-time communication with a Cloudways support representative. 

This can be accessed directly from the Cloudways website or within the control panel. The live chat option is particularly beneficial if you require immediate assistance or have urgent queries.

As for self-support, you’ll find most of the common questions covered in their FAQ section, while everything else is answered in the knowledgebase. Besides bristling with how-tos, the knowledgebase is remarkably beginner-friendly as it features a “Getting Started” category as well as a collapsible section that explains all basic technical terms that are used throughout the guides.

Cloudways also provides a system status page where you can get informed about outages and scheduled maintenance, and a community forum where most of the questions are answered by the employees. Unfortunately, the forum has seen better days in terms of activity.

Conclusion

With a wide range of cloud hosting options, fast servers, a user-friendly interface, and 24/7 support, Cloudways offers great features, however, it lacks email hosting, and domain registration, and imposes limitations on multisite SSL, making it a big challenge for potential users.