Cloudways Hosting — Honest Review (2023)

Web hosting services that use the cloud are now common, but Cloudways’ cloud hosting provides a few interesting features that make it stand out in this competitive market. It lets you choose from platforms like Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform. Cloudways offers low-cost pay-as-you-go plans and gives you a for a trial after signing up.

The domaining field dulls the shine that it doesn’t come with extras like domain registration and email. Still, you should think about its other unbeatable features.

Getting Started

Cloudways is different from most other web hosting services because it lets you host a site for free. You can sign up for a three-day trial account by creating a username and password or logging in with your Github, Google, or LinkedIn credentials, which is a nice touch.

After you log in, you have to choose a content management system (CMS) from Drupal, Joomla, Koken, Magento, Media Wiki, PHP Stack, PrestaShop, and, of course, WordPress. This shows great adaptability.

You can build a website on cloud services like AWS, DigitalOcean, Google, Linode, Stackpath, or Vultr, among other infrastructure-as-a-service solutions. You also choose a server location, which is a place where the server is hosted.

Cloudways Plans

Cloudways spreads the load on your website over a group of servers that work together. It doesn’t offer shared, VPS, or dedicated hosting plans. Instead, the provider offers a number of pay-as-you-go hourly cloud hosting plans that only charge you for the time you use. For example, if you cancel a plan 10 days within a month, you’ll only be charged for 10 days of hosting. Some hosts, like DreamHost and HostGator, will charge you for the whole month even if you cancel after only a week.

Web hosting plans start at $10 monthly for 25GB of storage, 1TB of data transfers per month, 1GB of RAM, and a single-core processor. It goes up to $1,035 monthly (for 3840 GB of storage, 12 TB of monthly data transfers, 192 GB of RAM, and a 32-core processor).

The high-end plan is better than many web hosts’ most powerful dedicated server plans. In fact, Cloudways’ top-level specs are more like those of Liquid Web, which is good for small and medium-sized businesses and lets you equip a server with a crazy 512GB of RAM. The hourly plans start at $0.01 and go up to $1.43. Cloudways has a lot of good points. It offers powerful dedicated cloud hosting, quick setup, great uptime, and excellent customer service through live chat.

Building A Website With Cloudways

I chose WordPress as my CMS, and the service set up a server in just a few minutes. I signed in to WordPress, chose a theme, changed how pages and posts looked, and added pictures. It went well, and there were no problems.

This managed WordPress installation automatically updates the CMS, backs up the site every day, keeps an eye on it in real time, and adds security features that are developed for WordPress.

Cloudways also has staging areas and one-click cloning, which lets you quickly make copies of your apps and servers (so you can test website elements without placing them live on your site).

Cloudways lets customers keep track of each application on a server in its own way. There are two parts to this application-level monitoring: analytics and logs. Analytics shows information about traffic, PHP requests, MySQL requests, and the amount of space used on the disc. The access and error log for your site is shown in the logs.

Unbeatable Uptime

The duration of a website's uptime is one of the most important aspects of a hosting service. While your site is down, clients or customers can’t find you or use your products or services, and they might not come back. I’m happy to say that Cloudways has excellent uptime.

For this test, I used a website monitoring tool to track the uptime of my test site, which was hosted on Cloudways. The tool checked my website every 15 minutes and sent me an email if it could only reach it for up to one minute. I look at the data from the last 30 days for each site’s review. The last tests I did on Cloudways showed that it was very stable. In fact, it never went down at all.

E-Commerce Website and Security

Cloudways’ app library has many e-commerce tools, including the popular Magento and Prestashop platforms. By dragging and dropping website parts, I was able to use Magento to make an attractive store in just a few minutes.

As a managed cloud hosting platform, Cloudways keeps your installation safe from attacks by regularly updating the operating system and firmware. Cloudways also gives you free Secure Socket Layer (SSL) certificates, which are a must-have for protecting your data if you plan to sell products. Also, the recommended Rackspace email comes with security features like the Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM).

Negative Points of Cloudways

Cloudways doesn’t offer domain registration, so you’ll have to buy a domain from Godaddy, Dynadot, NameCheap, or another seller. Another problem with URLs is that Cloudways’ back end is strangely designed, which makes it hard to point the URL you bought to your hosting setup. If you are complete newbie with these things you can buy their addon “DNS Made Easy”, and they will manage the DNS records for your domains.

When I looked at the online documentation, it was easy for me to connect the dots. Still, the process might take a lot of work to understand for beginners.

Cloudways, in partnership with RackSpace, will charge you $1 per email account per month. Depending on what you need, that could cost you. Even the most basic plan from other web hosts includes at least some level of service. But there is also a way to set up emails for free, you will have to do some settings manually.

PROS

Pay-as-you-go plans

Very easy to set up

Excellent uptime

Site cloning

Supports numerous apps

Several flexible account tiers

You can try the service for free before signing up.

CONS

Additional fee for email

No domain registration option.

Customer Support

Cloudways has customer service available 24/7, so you can always talk to someone. But there’s a catch if you want to talk to a person. You must fill out a form to ask for a phone or Skype call.

You can also use web chat to talk with a customer service representative. So you’ll be able to get answers right away. I never had to wait more than a few seconds for a Cloudways chat representative to answer one of my questions. The team also has a lot of knowledge. The members gave me accurate information about how cloud hosting differs from traditional hosting and how the company handles payments. I also got an introduction to infrastructure-as-a-service.

I really hope you liked it and learned something from it. Here’s the deal: if you sign up for Cloudways through my referral link, we’ll both get $25 in free credits.

Thanks for staying till the end.

Have a wonderful day :)