How Cloudways Works

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Cloudways pricing

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Cloudways offered plans start at $11/month and can go as high as thousands of dollars a month. While it's a huge gap, it can be explained by the different amounts of disk space, bandwidth, CPU, and RAM each service provider includes.

Each hosting solution has its own pricing but the base features in the basic plans are the same – SSLs are free, unlimited daily backups, and you can host unlimited websites or apps.

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If you need a little bit more power for a couple of days, you can scale up for that period. Once you don’t need the additional resources, you can go back to the regular plan. At the end of the month, you’ll be charged for what you’ve used – extra resources will only be added for the time that you’ve used them.

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• You don’t need to pre-pay – no huge stress on your bank account initially.

• You always know what you’re paying for.

• If a busy period comes, you can instantly increase your server resources and decrease them just as quickly after.

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More so, Cloudways offers a 3-day free trial that does not require credit card details. It's a convenient and risk-free way to test if the provider meets your expectations.

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Honestly, the pricing department is the strength of Cloudways. They do charge more for added simplicity, but the billing concept and the possibility to scale up and down whenever is just amazing. Not to mention the absolutely free 3-day trial.

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Hosting management – Is Cloudways easy to use?

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Cloudways hosting uses its own in-house developed panel to manage the servers/applications. The panel itself is clean and comprehensive. Plus, the setting up of the website and installation of SSL certificates is beyond easy. The only thing that may be a little tricky – especially for beginners – is pointing your domain to the server.

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Performance – is Cloudways fast?

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I can confidently say that Cloudways has great performance, especially considering the price that you pay. It aced all the tests I’ve put it through – reliability, speed, and stress. The provider's stability, speed, and ability to handle traffic spikes are exactly what you'd expect VPS hosting to deliver. For my tests, I was using the cheapest DigitalOcean server.

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Cloudways uptime and response time

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In terms of reliability and server speed, Cloudways is almost flawless. In 6 months, it was up for 99.98% of the time, which is a great result.

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Speed-wise, the server was as quick to react as you can expect from any high-performance server. 229ms average server response time puts shared hosting results that are usually around 400-600ms to the sunset.

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Cloudways speed

When talking about speed, Cloudways demonstrated very, and I mean very good results. When tested from the US, where my server resides, the site loaded in 358ms (Largest Contentful Paint). That’s actually one of the best results I’ve ever seen.

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Based on Google’s recommendations of keeping sites LCP lower than 2.5s, this site is doing beyond okay. Even in faraway locations such as India.

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For the same price range, you usually get 0.5s or 0.6s at best with performance-focused shared hosting providers. This shows that virtual private servers can beat shared hosting any day of the week.

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When I installed my regular demo website content and ran GTMetrix again, Cloudways kept on impressing me further. Even though LCP increased to 759ms, the Fully Loaded Time is just 0.9s. For best user experience, this time should be under 3 seconds. Cloudways barely needed a 1/3 of that.

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What makes Cloudways fast?

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One of the main reasons that make Cloudways fast is that they use VPS from top providers in the industry. But that’s just part of the story, and it is possible to make Cloudways even faster.

• One immediate VPS advantage over shared hosting is that you get dedicated resources. Using advanced virtualization processes, the server is cut into virtual pieces. It’s like getting a dedicated server, but much cheaper. This maximizes the potential and performance of your server.

• As Cloudways uses the servers from different providers, you get to make a choice on where you’d like your server to be located. Each provider has at least 8 locations all across the globe so you can get as close to your visitors as possible.

• Together with server location choice, you can also opt-in for Content Delivery Network services. If your visitors are scattered across the globe, CDN will cache your website’s content across different servers around the world. Cloudways CDN costs $1 per 25GB.

• The company offers Breeze – a free in-house caching plugin. This plugin is developed to optimize WordPress websites. It is pre-configured on your WordPress website and is activated automatically on your WordPress. Alongside standard caching, you can also configure it to minify and group files to reduce file size.

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Altogether, Cloudways' performance is top-notch. Well, that’s mostly thanks to the providers that Cloudways is partnering with. Nonetheless, you’ll get exceptional reliability and speed for your website.

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Security – is Cloudways secure?

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When it comes to security, Cloudways isn’t the most bulletproof provider. Although it does come with some extremely practical security features like SSL certificates, firewalls, automatic backups, two-factor authentication, and bot protection.

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• SSL certificates – Every one of Cloudways’ plans comes with a free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate. You can set it up via its one-click installation. Besides that, Cloudways also offers a free Let’s Encrypt Wildcard SSL certificate. This allows you to secure your root domain and all subdomains with a single certificate.

• Firewall – All of Cloudways’ servers are protected by OS-level firewalls. This helps to filter out malicious traffic and keep out intruders. What these firewalls do is allow access only to specific ports that are necessary for the applications to function properly. Besides that, Cloudways also offers a paid option: Sucuri Website Security Firewall (WAF), with prices starting from $149.99/year. Also, there are server providers like DigitalOcean or AWS that do have their own security measures in place.

• Bot protection – Cloudways has partnered up with MalCare to offer application-level security protection. Bot protection aims to identify and block all suspicious or malicious traffic like Brute Force, Dictionary attacks, and DDoS to the site. More so, it helps to reduce server resource usage on WordPress applications this way. Just make sure it’s activated. You can find “Bot Protection” in your Application Management menu.

• Automatic backups – Cloudways performs automatic backups at no extra charge. You can even set the schedule for your backup frequency to hourly, daily, or weekly. Plus, on-demand backups are available, too. So if you need to restore your website, you can do so via its one-click restore. For an additional cost, offsite backups are available too.

• Two-factor authentication – Regular password protection is proving to be less and less effective, therefore two-factor authentication is crucial for the website's security. It guarantees that whoever is trying to access your site will be met with an additional layer of security – a code only you have access to.

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Will Cloudways customer support help me?

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Cloudways offers several support options, the main ones being 24/7 live chat and online ticketing. If you have an advanced or premium support add-on, you can also contact it through the 24/7 Slack channel and phone. Besides that, Cloudways also has a rich knowledge base and a community forum.

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Cloudways – for workflow management

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Cloudways provides a couple of extra useful tools for managing your workflow and a team if you work with more than one person. You can easily create multiple staging environments to match your needs, as well as assign different roles and permissions to an unlimited number of people.

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Cloudways review – the final verdict

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It’s obvious from this Cloudways review that it certainly has a lot to offer. It’s a provider like you’ve never seen before, and it comes with a ton of fun features as well as great server performance. But at the end of the day, it’s not their own servers they are using.

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So is this the next generation web hosting we should all use or… It’s not the time for that yet?

Bottom Line

Considering the ease of use, Cloudways a great option for small business owners or popular bloggers that need powerful hosting without the complexity of it. It’s also an amazing option for freelancers and agencies that collaborate with multiple people to design and develop websites.