Cloudways is one of the best web hosting providers for websites looking for Cloud hosting. Whether Your website is on CMS like WordPress, Magento, Drupal, Laravel, Prestashop, Joomla, etc., or even on Custom PHP, Cloudways will handle everything for you with a fast loading time.

So, In this post, I have shared a detailed Cloudways hosting review with plans, features, customer support, Breeze plugin settings,  Users reviews from Facebook groups, Twitter & Reddit. 

So, let’s get started.

Table of Contents

• 1. Cloud Hosting Vs Shared Hosting
• 2. Speed Up Your Site
• 3. Cloudways Pricing
• 4. Free Website Migration
• 5. Cloudways ADD-Ons
• 6. Staging and Cloning
• 7. Configure Breeze WordPress Cache Plugin For Optimal Performance
• 8. Cloudways Customer Support
• 9. Cloudways Vs Siteground
  • Watch Our Video Comparison on Cloudways Vs SiteGround (2022)
• 10. Security
• 11. Sign UP For Cloudways
• 12. FAQs

Cloudways has partnered with top cloud hosting providers like – Digital Ocean, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, Linode, and Vultr. Unlike other hosting providers, there is no yearly plan in Cloudways. You can either choose a monthly or hourly plan. The lowest monthly plan starts from $10/month whereas the lowest hourly plan starts from $0.0139/hr.

One of the best parts of Cloudways hosting is their “pay-as-you-go” pricing model which means you have a pay monthly & if you are not happy with their service, you can cancel your account.

1. Cloud Hosting Vs Shared Hosting

Cloud hosting is a type of web hosting where all your website files, resources, data, and bandwidth are on multiple different servers that are networked to act as one system to balance the load time. With cloud hosting, you can upgrade or downgrade your hosting resources at any time & you have to pay only for the resources you use.

If we compare it with shared hosting where everything is stored on one server along with other websites & all the websites use the same resources. If any website hosted on servers is infected with malware, then there is a high chance that your site will also get affected.

So, to set up your cloud server, we need an IT professional who can set up & handle our Cloud server. This is where Cloudways comes in. They are not a web hosting company, instead, they have partnered with top cloud hosting providers, helping us to set up our own cloud server & monitor our servers. 

If you know how to set up your server & have time to monitor your server, then you can directly go to Digital Ocean & the same which starts at $10/month will only cost you $5/month. Setting up a cloud server is very technical & I don’t have time to monitor my server. That’s why I have chosen Cloudways hosting.

2. Speed Up Your Site

My site is hosted on Cloudways with Digital Ocean and after migrating my site to Cloudways my website speed has improved a lot.  Here is the speed test of my Home page where my site is loading at 0.9 seconds & the TTFB is 264ms.

My Speed Test report on Google Page Speed Insight.

If you don’t believe in these above speed test reports then you can test my site by yourself.

Also, check out the post on how to optimize WordPress website speed where I have shared 26 ways to improve your WordPress website speed.

Backups:

You can easily take a backup of your site but it’s not free.

Vertical Scaling:

With just a few clicks you can scale your server at any time to include more storage or resources.

3. Cloudways Pricing

You can choose your cloud hosting plan from any of the five different partners – Digital Ocean, Linode, Vultr, AWS & Google Cloud. Check out the complete pricing by clicking here.

The starting plan is $10/month under the Digital Ocean. If your site traffic increases then you can easily upgrade your plan.

All the Cloudways hosting plans include 24/7 support, Free SSL (Lets Encrypt), and free website migration (only for 1 website, if you have more than one website, then you have to pay or do it yourself using the Cloudways migrator plugin). 

Cloudways also offer a 3-day FREE TRIAL, If you want to try out their service, then you can take their 3-day FREE TRIAL offer (no credit card required).

Use Promo Code – DIGIROCK20 & Get 20% OFF

If you are unhappy with their service then you can cancel your hosting at a time.

4. Free Website Migration

Cloudways offer free website migrations support to all the new customers but for that, you have to request Cloudways from their free migrations page. They only migrate one website for free & if you have more than one website then you can either pay for website migration or you can use Cloudways WP Migrator plugin. Here is a video tutorial on how to migrate your site from your old host to Cloudways using Cloudways WordPress Migrator Plugin.

5. Cloudways ADD-Ons

DNS Made Easy – With Premium DNS service, if your site goes down then all the traffic will be redirected to a preconfigured secondary IP.

Rackspace Email – Cloudways does have its own email hosting service like other web hosting providers. So they have partnered with Rackspace to provide Email hosting & the plan starts from $1/month for every Email You create. It’s not the best choice for those whose website owners need more email ids. Another web hosting offers email hosting for free.

Elastic Email – best for sending automated emails.

Application Migration – free for 1 website & then $25/site.

Application Upgrade – For application upgrade, you can pay Cloudways $50/month. But I don’t think anyone will pay for an application upgrade as you can do it for free with just a click.

Cloudways CDN – For Cloudways CDN you have to pay $1 per 25GB.

6. Staging and Cloning

If you want to test a new feature or a new design on your site, then you can easily test it by cloning your website. All you have to do is to go to Application & then click on the Clone APP/Create Staging.

7. Configure Breeze WordPress Cache Plugin For Optimal Performance

Breeze plugin is a basic cache plugin with minification, database cleanUp, Gzip, CDN URL & Varnish options. This plugin does not have all the features that WP rocket and other popular cache plugins offer. But I will suggest you give it a try with your cache plugin but avoid duplicate functionality.

Breeze Plugin Settings:

Basic Options:

Cache system: Check this option.

Purge cache after Let it be the default.

Minification: Check all the options.

Gzip compression: Check this option.

Browser cache: check this

Enable cache for logged-in users: uncheck this.

Advanced Options:

Never cache these URLs: If you have to exclude any URLs from caching then you can add that URL here like the cart page.

Group Files: Check both CSS & JS. But if your site breaks then uncheck these options.

Exclude CSS: If you want to exclude any CSS file from caching then add that URL here.

Exclude JS: Same as the CSS file, Here you can exclude any JS file from caching.

Move JS files to the footer: You can move any JS file to the footer by adding the JS file URL here.

JS files with deferred loading: If you want to defer any JS file then you can add that file URL.

Database:

Make your Database file lighter by cleaning post revisions, spam & trash comments, etc. You can’t schedule database cleaning in the breeze plugin. I prefer the WP-Optimize plugin to clean my database & we can also schedule database cleaning.

CDN:

If you are using any CDN then you can link it with the Breeze plugin.

Varnish:

Auto Purge Varnish: check this option.

I have also used the Breeze plugin but in my case, I got better results with the Autoptimize plugin. You can try both the plugins one by one and your result performs better for your site.

8. Cloudways Customer Support

Cloudways customer support is not as fast compared with other Hosting providers like WPX, Kinsta, or even Siteground. 

They offer 3 levels of customer support:

• Standard Support

Standard support is completely free and includes 24/7 support. You can also contact them via Live Chat. 

• Advanced Support

This is an add-on feature where you will get priority support along with plugin/theme troubleshooting, server error investigation, Performance/database optimization, etc.  The advance support starts from $100/month.

• Premium Support

Premium Support includes all the features of standard & advanced support along with private slack channel & phone support. The premium support starts from $500/month.

Here is the comparison between all these support add-ons

Cloudways Bot:

Cloudways has its own smart assistant to solve your queries.

9. Cloudways Vs Siteground

Cloudways is much better than Siteground if you compare it with Siteground’s renewal price, website speed, No CPU Overages, etc. The renewal price of Siteground’s startup plan is $14.99/month but in the case of Cloudways, there is nothing like the renewal price. The starting plan of Cloudways hosting is $10/month & they work on a pay-as-you-go model.

In terms of speed, Cloudways is much faster than Siteground. Mainly Siteground users are now migrating to Cloudways mostly because of the high renewal prices.

Because of all these, many Siteground customers have migrated their site to Cloudways hosting.

Watch Our Video Comparison on Cloudways Vs SiteGround (2022)

If you want to know more about WordPress hosting then you can join this Facebook Group [most of the screenshots are taken from this FB group].

10. Security

In terms of security, Cloudways offers many security features to protect you from bots & hackers. They have dedicated firewalls that filter out malicious traffic.

For bot protection on WordPress websites, they have partnered with Malcare which will block malicious bots, brute force login attacks & DDOS attacks.

Cloudways also has some other security features like IP whitelisting, two-factor authentication, etc. to secure your website.

11. Sign UP For Cloudways

• Start by signing up with Cloudways Free Trial. Use our Cloudways Promo Code – DIGIROCK20 & get 20% OFF on the 1st Invoice.

• Under Servers, click the + Add Server button.

• Now select the application that you want to install, it can be WordPress, Magento, etc, or even any PHP script. Then name your app, choose your server, then select your server size & choose your data center based on your audience. Finally, click on the Launch Now Button.

• Start your new website or If you want to migrate your site from your old host to Cloudways, then you can request for free migration (only one website migration is free, after that it is $25/site) or you can use the Cloudways Migrator plugin to move your site.   

12. FAQs

Conclusion: Cloudways Hosting Review 2022

Cloudways is one of the best-managed cloud hosting providers that are easily scalable. Their plans are also affordable if you compare them with the renewal price of other hosting providers.

Cloudways is offering cloud hosting from the Top 5 Cloud hosting providers to offer the best experience in terms of speed, security & support.

Cloudways has a “pay-as-you-go” pricing model where you have to only use the resources you have used & you don’t have to subscribe for long terms. These are the reasons, I recommend Cloudways hosting. But if you need more email ids for your business, then Cloudways will be an expensive choice for you. You can consider Gsuite or another email hosting provider.

You can start using Cloudways with a free 3-day trial (no credit card required) to try out their services.

Don’t forget to use our promo code – DIGIROCK20 during Sign Up. If you have any queries regarding Cloudways hosting or anything related to WordPress, then fill free to comment below. Don’t forget to share this post on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, etc.