Cloudways Website Hosting Review
$10 / mo.
- 3-Day Free Trial Without Credit Card
- Free SSL certificate
- No lock-in — cancel anytime
- 24/7 Customer Support
About Cloudways
Selecting a web host for your website is one of the most crucial decisions for any business. And getting the right one from the start will save you from a lot of trouble later. One of the dependable and reliable web hosting providers to set up your website is Cloudways. The company adds all the essential features that other hosts usually sell you as add-ons. So, above anything, Cloudways gets you good value for money.
Cloudways is not as big on popularity as GoDaddy, Bluehost, and Ionos. This could be because it is a relatively new name, does not aggressively market its products, or it being only limited to cloud hosting. However, the performance stats, features, and quality cloud hosting plans make it a worthy choice. Read on to explore everything you will need to know for an informed hosting decision.
Pros & Cons of Using Cloudways Hosting
Pros
- 24/7 Customer Support
- Dependable Uptime
- Good Loading Speeds
- Multiple Server Choices
- 3-Day Free Trial without Credit Card
- No Lock-ins
Cons
- Only Cloud Hosting Options
- No email hosting
- Complexity for beginners new to web hosting
Cloudways Up Close
Cloudways is a web hosting company by DigitalOcean that started its operations in 2012. Today, the company has more than 280 employees working in 20+ countries. As for the customer base, the host is offering its services to more than 80K customers that include SMBs, individuals, and agencies. On top of that, the company flexes an NPS (net promoter score) of 73 and a CSAT (customer satisfaction score) of a whopping 95%.
The host offers its services from 60+ data centers including those of AWS and Google Cloud. Not to mention the company uses DigitalOcean’s (parent company of Cloudways) servers too. With such a solid infrastructure, quality services are expected from the host.
Pretty Fast Loading Speeds
Loading speeds of a web hosting provider are one of the most important features. The time it takes for your website to load has a lot to do with the browsing experience. You can optimize a website for fast speeds, but your server has a massive role in it.
Thanks to quality hardware and SSD storage, websites on Cloudways can load within 2 seconds. These are some really fast speeds that make the browsing experience more pleasant for visitors and your site more suited for SEO (search engine optimization). Since Cloudways offers cloud hosting options, the loading speeds of your sites are not likely to be affected because of other websites on the server. So, not just the speeds are fast, they stay fast.
Dependable Uptime
A website only benefits you the time it is accessible to users on the web, right? What’s the point of investing time and money if your site is not serving the purpose? Therefore, checking a company’s uptime before buying its hosting plan is crucial. A rule of thumb is that anything above 99.9% qualifies as good uptime. Cloudways offers a solid uptime that will keep your website available to every visitor. It is thanks to the company’s own data centers and those of Google Cloud and AWS servers. Some web hosting providers offer an uptime guarantee.
Customers are often compensated with free hosting for the day or hours of disrupted service. Some others have a more generous. Though, it is not a lot and won’t make up for the time your site goes down. Still, it shows a company’s confidence in its service. Cloudways does not offer such compensation but the company does something better. Cloudways takes a more transparent route and shows you the status of service online. For instance, if there is a problem, the status is shared along with an overview of what the company is doing to resolve the issue. The status is changed after the resolution. Also, you can see the status from a few days back too. How cool is that?
24/7 Customer Support
Available No matter if it’s your first website or hundredth, good customer support is always nice to have. And bad customer support can make a service a nightmare. It is highly advisable for you to weigh customer support when you are choosing a web hosting platform. Someone knowledgeable to answer your queries can save you from a lot of frustration. Where a lot of hosts only offer limited hours of customer service, Cloudways answers customer queries 24/7. It doesn’t matter if you contact them at 9 in the morning or midnight, an agent will attend to your query and help you with a resolution. You can reach out to them via calls, live chat, and tickets.
One thing slightly different with this host is how you reach the agents. It is not as straightforward as clicking the chat support icon on the side when you are not signed in. But once you create an account on the platform, reaching customer support is easy. The customer support is evidently pretty solid because of the 95% CSAT mentioned on the website. Besides reaching support agents, the company has a knowledge base to answer your queries. Plus, there are other resources you can check out on the company’s blog. Everything considered the company has solid customer support. However, it is not on the level of SiteGround and InMotion Hosting.
Complete Variety of Cloud Choices
As mentioned before, Cloudways is a niche hosting best suited for the needs of SMBs. To make up for the missing types of web hosting, Cloudways offer cloud hosting like no one else. You have the option to choose from the servers of 3 companies. Also, the quality of service on the managed cloud hosting plans and the services you get with every plan make the host worth trying. Free SSL, free migration, auto-healing, dedicated firewalls, staging environment, and automated backups. Whatever plan you pick with the host, these features come in for free.
On top of that, the plans are very straightforwardly priced. The prices are mentioned for hourly use as well as monthly charges. This means you can pay as you go. Unlike most providers, you do not have to pay for 3 years of affordable hosting. Plus, there’s no mention of revised prices once the first year passes.
A feature that people who are still thinking if Cloudways is for them or not, there is a three-day free trial. And you do not even have to put your credit card details. Many hosts have a money-back guarantee but with a catch. So, Cloudways’ free trial may actually be a better choice.
Cloud Hosting with DigitalOcean
Cloudways offers a variety of cloud hosting plans on the servers of DigitalOcean, AWS, and Google Cloud. Since DigitalOcean’s servers are the company’s own (in a way), these plans are slightly more affordable. You can get started with the plan with the lowest specs and scale over time as your budget increases.
All four cloud hosting plans on DigitalOcean’s servers have two variants called premium and standard with the standard being slightly low cost for the same plan. The only difference is that premium has faster cores. The rest of the offerings are literally the same.
The lowest-priced plan of the lot comes at only $12 per month ($10 if you choose standard). This plan gets you 1GB RAM, 1 Core Processor, 25GB SSD storage, and 1TB bandwidth. It is a good starting point and can be a good replacement for a VPS hosting of the same type.
The highest specced plan on DigitalOcean’s servers gets you 8GB RAM, 4 Core Processor, 160GB SSD storage, and 5TB bandwidth for $96 per month ($80 if you select standard). Besides these, you can also scale your hosting to up to 192 gigs of RAM against a custom quote. In other words, the host offers you scalability in the truest sense.
Cloud Hosting with AWS
To leverage the servers of Amazon for web hosting, you can select from four plans by Cloudways. The most affordable one of the lot starts at $36.51 per month. You have 2GB RAM, 2vCPU, 20GB storage, and 2GB bandwidth which gives you a pretty solid set of specs. But if you want to go all the way up, the most expensive plan comes at $274.33 and gets you 16GB RAM, 4vCPU, 20GB storage, and 20TB bandwidth. Again, you can scale up to even higher specs and get prices.
Cloud Hosting with Google Cloud
Google Cloud has an intermediate cost of hosting but between DigitalOcean’s and AWS servers. You can start with 1.70GB RAM, 20GB storage, 1vCPU, and 2GB bandwidth at $33.18 per month. And for the highest tier plan, you will have to pay $225.93 per month with 15GB RAM, 4vCPU, 20GB SSD storage, and 2GB bandwidth. Again, you can increase the specs as per your need.
Conclusion
Considering all the positives and negatives, a question arises: is it for you? The answer is yes. Cloudways is a solid web hosting provider that gets you good value for money.
It saves you from much of the confusion and gets you started with your sites suitable for small to medium-sized businesses. But if you need a site to start blogging, then the costs of cloud hosting are on the expensive end. So, understand your needs and then get started.