Cloudways Overview

Author : Hardeep Singh
April 18, 2024

Cloudways Hosting Review

Web hosting services are extremely important to businesses. They help to improve the website’s speed, which is now a Google ranking factor. In today’s blogging world, having good web hosting is essential. With so many web hosting options available, new businesses may be hesitant to select any web hosting service. Cloudways’ primary infrastructure suppliers are AWS, Google Cloud, Linode, and DigitalOcean. Visitors have the right to change their minds at any moment without consequence. Everyone is aware that cloud hosting is difficult to maintain and setup and this is where Cloudways comes into the picture. Cloudways acts as the intermediary for all of the hosting servers available to customers, making hosting experiences easier and, as a result, encouraging standard performance and empowering people, teams, and companies. The company has a distinct approach, and the platform is based on advanced technologies and industry-leading infrastructure providers, resulting in seamless managed cloud hosting experiences.
Cloudways is one of the few cloud-based mediators to hosting companies with a reasonable price-to-capability ratio. Cloudways offers completely managed to host, ensuring that websites run smoothly so the customers are not bothered about hosting issues. Their cloud platform-as-a-service servers come with several handy features, and customers may scale up or down their hosting resources as their website expands. They prioritise speed, efficiency, and security in their infrastructure. There are several web hosting alternatives available, but choosing one that is both worthwhile and feasible can be difficult. Cloudways, for example, is remarkable alternative because of its creative yet simple approach to web hosting.
The objective of Cloudways is to provide managed cloud hosting solutions that allow clients to focus on their companies while Cloudways takes care of their hosting needs. When it comes to cloud-based managed WordPress hosting, the firm is one of the few that offers a good price-to-feature ratio. Clients select the cloud provider, and Cloudways links their platform to it, making management a simplicity. Clients (Consumers) pay a monthly charge in exchange for access to the management platform and help when required.

Overview of Cloudways

Cloudways, a completely bootstrapped next-generation multi-cloud managed application hosting platform for SMBs, Agencies, E-commerce, and Entrepreneurs was created in 2012 on the European island of Malta by Uzair Gadit, Pere Hospital, and Aaqib Gadit. Their 30+ employees worked with 8,000 people from 43 different countries to develop 12,000+ servers and 25,000+ online applications.
The founders began by engaging with advertising agencies and e-commerce businesses, which they discovered were their perfect clients. They realised the importance of client satisfaction early on. The founders of Cloudways would spend hours each day talking to consumers to see how they might improve customer service and make the product more user-friendly. As they expanded from a modest firm to a corporation that manages over 250,000 websites, they never lost sight of this fundamental goal: client feedback and happiness. Cloudways’ initial priority was to improve its platform to better serve its customers.
To start with, DigitalOcean, Linode, Vultr, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Google Cloud partner with this Malta-based company. These five businesses provide the infrastructure, but the advantage is, people do not need to establish an account with them because Cloudways will takes care of everything. As a managed hosting platform, Cloudways aidsits buyers with installing their website in only a few clicks and minutes. In addition to WordPress, it supports Joomla, Drupal, Larvel, Magento, PHP, and other open-source technologies.Another noteworthy aspect is Cloudways’ flexible pricing. Cloudways has a “pay-as-you-go” model, making it an affordable alternative for small-to-medium-sized enterprises and consumers.

Cloudways Hosting

Cloudways Offerings

  • Custom Control Panel: Customers that sign up for a Cloudways account may control their servers using the administrative interface. Unlike the cPanel used by other providers, Cloudways’ control panel is simple and modern in its own right. The panel’s menu allows users to access Servers, Applications, Teams, and Projects.
  • Staging and Cloning: Users that wish to test changes before making them permanent on their website can benefit from Cloudways’ staging. Users can create a staging area, test their modifications, and then publish them to their live website if everything seems OK. They won’t have to be concerned about inadvertently causing negative alterations that they won’t be able to undo. Cloning is comparable to staging in several ways. Users can create several clones of your website when changing servers or exhibiting it to clients.
  • Advanced Caching: Cloudways’ server infrastructure is hosted by five cloud providers: DigitalOcean, Linode, Vultr, AWS, and Google Cloud. All of these businesses are well-known for providing SSD-based virtual private servers and dedicated servers with exceptional server performance. To improve server speed, Cloudways employs a variety of caching techniques in addition to the cloud architecture. The company employs Breeze, an in-house caching plug-in. This plug-in is simple to install, activate, and deactivate. CloudwaysCDN, Cloudway’s own content delivery network, is also supported.
  • Vertical Scaling: If users need to increase their server for whatever reason, they may do it with a few mouse clicks using Vertical Scaling. Users may find the feature under Server Management as a tab. Scaling is beneficial in both ways. If necessary, they can revert to their previous hosting package.
  • Customer Support: Cloudways offers live chat support 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Users may also reach Cloudways via phone or email, read their blog and knowledge base, and interact with them on social media. Cloudways also provides CloudWaysBot, a server monitoring tool that alerts administrators when there is an upgrade or a problem.

Cloudways vs. Traditional Hosting

In contrast to conventional hosting, which retains a customer’s site on a single server, cloud hosting distributes a user’s site over several servers (with a backup). Given the reason that the user’s site is hosted on many servers, if an issue develops, it can simply be relocated. Cloud hosting improves uptime by allowing a network server to take over in the event of a failure. The server can recognise your customers’ location and provide information from the server nearest to the user’s client, it is typically faster than traditional hosting.SSDs (solid-state discs) are used by several cloud hosts to improve site performance. Cloud hosts are, on average, more secure than traditional hosts. When it comes to WordPress sites, Cloudways employs a variety of security measures. Cloud servers can easily grow, which is advantageous if their company’s website has an unexpected surge in traffic. Pay as you go pricing gives users more control over their hosting expenses. With dedicated resources, SSD-based WordPress Hosting keeps their site quick.

Key Features of Cloudways Hosting?

Like any other hosting company, Cloudways’ servers provide varying degrees of processing power, memory, bandwidth, and storage space. A cloud server with 10 GB of RAM, 25 GB of storage, a single core processor, and 1 TB of bandwidth is included in the most basic hosting subscription.

Some of the features of Cloudways are as follows:

  • Two-factor authentication offers an extra layer of security against hackers.
  • With a simple click, you may install an app.
  • Faster site speeds are critical for online shops.
  • If users shift hosts, Cloudways handles the site transfer.
  • It lets Encrypt SSL comes preinstalled and encrypts data transmitted between the user’s website and other users.
  • The auto-healing feature handles any issues, lowering the probability of their site crashing.
  • The Cloudways CDN improves server speed.
  • WordPress has become a target for hackers since it is the most widely used content management system on the globe. Cloudways protects its users’ websites using a specialised firewall.
  • Expert assistance available to users, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Launching Your Server is Easy

Users may customise the characteristics of their desired server using the Cloudways hosting management panel. Cloudways offers several benefits. The service offers a variety of cloud hosting choices, quick setup periods, great web-based customer assistance, and high uptime. It is a business users can rely on to keep their website accessible to services that provide such services.During high-traffic product launches, a server built for product launches can handle 10,000+ visitors per second.As part of their basic web stack, Cloudways Platform includes a web server named Nginx. To serve static content requests, Nginx is installed on all of the users’ cloud servers. Since it only uses a little number of resources, it allows users to serve more clients faster while placing less stress on our server.

Choose From 5 Top Cloud Providers

Prior tostart setting up’ server, users must first pick their chosen cloud provider from the Cloudways portal. A cloud provider is just another firm that provides Cloudways with Infrastructure-as-a-Service (in this example, access to data centres and cloud-based servers for hosting websites). Cloudways collaborates with a number of high-end IaaS providers to make app migration straightforward, including.

  • DigitalOcean: DigitalOcean is a cloud computing company that offers an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform to software developers.DigitalOcean’s cloud service is primarily aimed at developers, but it also gives anybody who wants to utilise it with a globally accessible, high-performance public cloud service. The DigitalOcean cloud offers Linux and Unix servers across 12 data centres.
  • Google Cloud Platform: The Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is a platform that provides over 90 information technology services (sometimes referred to as products) that organisations, IT professionals, and developers may use to improve efficiency, flexibility, and/or gain a competitive advantage.
  • Vultr: The sophisticated cloud platform from Vultr missions to make infrastructure deployment easier for developers and enterprises. Vultr has 19 datacenters across the world, allowing for seamless public cloud, storage, and single-tenant bare metal deployments.
  • Linode: Linode is a cloud hosting company that specialises in Linux-based virtual machines that can run a variety of software. You may use the Linode Cloud Manager to manage your infrastructure, user accounts, billing, and payments, as well as to create and monitor support tickets. The Cloud Manager is based on our open APIv4 and allows you to access all of our latest products and services.
  • Amazon Web Services: Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a secure cloud services platform that helps organisations develop and flourish by providing computing power, database storage, content delivery, and other services. Dynamic websites are hosted on cloud-based web and application servers.

IAAS stands for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) and refers to the cloud-based infrastructure of your organisation. Cloud service providers deliver virtual computing resources through the Internet. Leading IAAS providers utilise powerful cloud servers to keep your web applications operating all year.With the help of an IAAS provider, users would be able to grow their businesses without investing in any efforts. It is not necessary for users to learn about cloud server administration or to become server administrators. That will be handled by their IAAS supplier. All they have to do now is configure and run the cloud infrastructure to meet the demands of their business.

What Can You Do with the Cloudways Console?

The Cloudways dashboard’s “Server Management” section offers a plethora of extra choices. Customers may access more options as they scroll down the page, which they can use as needed.
Here’s a quick rundown of the Server capabilities available to Cloudways users that host a managed WordPress site:
It provides security: This security feature keeps track of which IP addresses from your “white list” you use to connect to your server.
It provides backup provision: Cloudways allows users to set up automatic backups of their cloud server images. They may set the server to backup itself once a day, twice a day, three times a day, etc., up to once a week. They may also manually back up their server at any moment by pressing a button.
Capable of easily handling traffic surges: Due to vertical scalability, users may change the amount of server resources available to them at any moment with only a few clicks. When there is a traffic jam, this is a fantastic function. If they are just scaling for a short time, Cloudways offers a “Pay as you go” option so that clients are not charged for server resources that they will not use.
Provides monitoring solutions: Server monitoring is among the most functionalities included with Cloudways’ cloud hosting services. This section includes a graph that will assist you in keeping track of the load on your cloud server. A simple drop-down menu allows you to monitor over 15 indications, including inbound traffic, idle CPU, and readings per second.
Other settings and tools additionally available: Cloudways provide far more than simply the tools mentioned. Users may alter services such as MySQL, Apache, and cache memory using the “Manage Services” option. Cloudways provides a WordPress Migrator tool under the “Migrator Tools” option to assist clients in migrating an existing WordPress site to their cloud hosting platform.
Users can install application-specific add-ons for DNS management, transactional email services, and so on under the “Application Add-on” area. Backup restoration, SSL certificate installation, and GIT integration are just a few of the features available through the Cloudways interface.

Is Cloudways Good for E-Commerce Hosting?

E-commerce cloud hosting is one such solution, which offers a variety of advantages for both businesses and customers. It provides a scalable and long-term structure for an e-commerce website, ensuring growth and profitability. Cloudways Hosting provides a number of e-commerce-friendly options to assist you in selling your items online. The company presently hosts over 10,000 e-commerce shops.The majority of businesses now rely on online marketplaces to provide their customers with an easy way to buy and sell products over the internet. The primary goal of an online marketplace is to bring together buyers and sellers from all over the world to buy and sell things at reasonable prices. The marketplace business model is a type of business strategy that allows buyers and sellers to exchange goods and services.
The server provides 100 percent uptime and super-fast page loading speeds as low as two seconds thanks to a mix of Memcached, Apache, Varnish, and Nginx.
E-commerce solutions offered by the host include a user-friendly interface, unlimited storage, controlled security and backups, and round-the-clock assistance.Cloudways Hosting supports a wide variety of popular e-commerce platforms, including Magento, WooCommerce, and Prestashop, allowing you to sell your products and services online.
Cloudways is a web hosting programme that provides assistance 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It’s a whole platform that allows businesses to manage their websites as if they were a turn-key solution. It aids in the management of users’ website in the same manner as a well-organized workplace does. It enables users to monitor and control website data and e-commerce transactions. Cloudways is an excellent cloud platform for hosting your business’s websites. Cloudways is a free cloud platform for hosting and optimising websites.

What About Performance and Uptime?

Page loading times are especially important for small businesses since they might damage your company’s Google search rankings and drive away angry consumers. Cloudways’ cutting-edge technology stack, which was built with speed in mind, leads in extremely quick page loading times.
Customers may experience uptime of more than 99 percent while hosting their website on Cloudways’ WordPress cloud servers since Cloudways has collaborated with some of the industry’s best cloud providers. WordPress blogs hosted on Cloudways have load times that are 40-50 percent faster. This is made possible by Cloudways’ unique VMAN technology, which boosts site speed by using Varnish, Memcached, Apache, and Nginx.
Cloudways outperforms SiteGround (Cloudways is cloud hosting, and SiteGround is shared hosting). Cloud hosting from SiteGround is similarly slower than cloud hosting from Cloudways.
Users can also use the StackPath CDN (content delivery network), which has over 65 locations across the world (points-of-presence). On these datacenter nodes, copies of their website are stored. When a visitor comes to their website, the system detects their location and provides their content from the closest network node.

Will My Website be Safe from Hackers?

A secure website not only protects against cyberattacks, but it also provides peace of mind to business consumers when they submit sensitive information or make a purchase from their online store. End-to-end encryption safeguards the Cloudways platform by guaranteeing that all data in transit is protected and encrypted via the HTTPS protocol, limiting access to data as it moves between computers.
Cloudways prioritises server security, which is why the new WordPress Managed Hosting Click and Go platform protects cloud servers with strong firewalls. Cloudways’ technical specialists use “security hardening measures” to protect servers from hacker assaults. Cloudways, as previously indicated, provides automated site backups, and you can specify how frequently your server backs up data.Security services from Cloudways are activated at the application level rather than at the network level. It offers an extra layer of security to any online business against external threats.

Compare popular web hosting plans offered by Cloudways

  • BlueHost starting at $2.75 per month
  • DreamHost starting at $2.59 per month
  • SiteGround starting at $3.99 per month
  • A2 Hosting starting at $2.99 per month
  • GreenGeeks starting at $2.49 per month
  • Hostinger starting at $2.59 per month

How is Their Customer Support?

Cloudways offers several benefits which have always been a worth of value addition to the cliets. Flexible cloud hosting choices, quick setup times, great web-based customer assistance, and high uptime are all features of the service. It is a company that users can trust to keep their website up and running, as well as the services that support it. If their company manages mission-critical sites where every second counts, this plugin allows you to work even closer with Cloudways. All of the benefits of Advanced Assistance with the addition of a personal Account Manager, a private Slack channel, and direct phone support. Cloudways provides support in a clear manner. Customer service may be reached by phone, live chat, or email and the company prioritizes the customers satisfaction at all cost.

Pros and Cons of Cloudways

Pros:

  • A 3-day free trial is available for cloud servers with 512MB or 1GB of RAM. The good thing is that users are not required to submit any credit card information.
  • The Cloudways Console provides a straightforward server management interface. It comes with a number of useful features, the most significant of which are server monitoring and scaling tools.
  • In contrast to WPEngine, which limits the amount of WordPress sites that may be installed, Cloudways allows customers to install as many as they like.
  • Apart from WordPress, Cloudways also offers hosting for Magento, Joomla, Drupal, and Moodle, among other content management systems.

Cons:

  • Plesk and cPanel are unavailable to users. Cloudways provides its own dashboard for controlling apps hosted on cloud servers because it is a Platform-as-a-Service provider.
  • Cloud-based hosting is not for everyone since it requires a certain degree of expertise. For individuals who wish to avoid technological complexities, a basic managed WordPress hosting package from a reputable company such as SiteGround, WPEngine, or InMotion is an excellent alternative.

Summary
Cloudways is a cloud-based web hosting company that is scalable and completely managed. While the price may look perplexing at first, the plans offer a great degree of flexibility, allowing customers to select the best plan for their needs. The “pay-as-you-go” approach offered by Cloudways is perfect for enterprises and individuals with a restricted budget for website hosting. Cloudways is one of the few companies that offers a good mix of pricing and functionality for cloud-based managed WordPress hosting. Their WordPress cloud servers provide a wide range of helpful features, and customers may scale up their hosting capacity as their site expands. If they are still unsure about hosting your WordPress site on a cloud server, they may take advantage of Cloudways’ 3-day free trial.Clients that are unfamiliar with command lines or have never created a website can benefit from Cloudways’ one-of-a-kind control panel. Cloudways is one of the cloud-based hosting providers that achieves a good price-to-capability ratio. Cloudways works with five of the industry’s finest cloud providers to provide cloud-based hosting services that are optimised for speed, performance, and dependability.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are some of the advantages of using Cloudways?

Independent bloggers, digital agencies, designers/developers, and small enterprises can use the Cloudways platform. Cloudways’ simple application console enables them to deploy and manage their chosen application with a few mouse clicks. This service is available to clients that want Cloudways to install, maintain, monitor, and resolve any website/app difficulties so they may focus on other parts of their business.

How long is the contract for the cloud hosting plan?

Whatever plan you select, you will be charged monthly for the services you utilised the previous month for using Cloudways.

When I don’t use my credit card, what happens post purchase?

Your credit card information is protected by Adyen, a reputable third-party payment system based in the Netherlands that is PCI certified.

What Sets Cloudways Apart from Other Web Hosts?

Cloudways’ Click&Go cloud hosting service replicates your website over several cloud servers and using innovative caching techniques to improve load speeds and performance.

Cloudways collaborates with what cloud providers?

DigitalOcean, Vultr, Google Compute Engine (GCE), Linode, and Amazon Web Services are the five cloud providers that Cloudways presently supports (AWS). Depending on the cloud provider you pick, you may host your website in datacenters in the United States, Europe, Asia, or South America. The StackPath CDN, a worldwide network of 45 datacenters, is also used by Cloudways.

When should I contact customer service and how should I go about doing so?

If users want assistance, they may contact a Cloudways support expert via live chat at any time. Email ticketing is also accessible 7 days a week, 24 hours a day. Users may also “request a call,” which will connect them with a Cloudways employee during regular business hours.