Cloudways Review

Cloudways is a cloud hosting platform that lets you create, deploy, run, and handle websites and applications on managed servers built upon trusted and leading cloud infrastructures. These ecosystems include Google Compute Engine, Amazon Web Services, and DigitalOcean. Cloudways makes the cloud hosting experiences of SMEs, agencies, eCommerce businesses, developers, and individuals simple, innovative, and seamless. This way, they’ll be able to focus more on unlocking their digital assets’ full potential and accelerating business growth.

Its managed cloud hosting solutions are packed with advanced features that aid you in achieving the level of speed, performance, scalability, control, and security you need for your projects and assets. You can host your websites and applications on SSD cloud servers built with dedicated amounts of resources, ready-to-use caching mechanisms, and content delivery network capabilities. Cloudways also uses FastCGI Process Manager (PHP-FPM) and HTTP/2 network protocol for faster website loading speeds and client-server communications.

The platform improves the security and safety of your cloud hosting environment through security patches and firewalls deployed at the operating system level. Moreover, it provides protection against suspicious and dangerous IP addresses, Denial-of-Service attacks, malicious bots, and compromised hosting accounts. You can implement smooth, efficient, and collaborative work processes as well. Cloudways permits you to assign projects, jobs/roles, and permissions to teams and individuals regardless of their locations. Additionally, you’ll access an undisruptive staging environment, connect and synchronize code between Git repositories and your hosting servers, and establish secure SSH and SFTP connections. 

Cloudways gives SMBs, eCommerce businesses, agencies, and professionals the opportunity to build and handle their projects on efficient, collaborative, and high-performance cloud ecosystems with a 99.99% uptime guarantee. It offers advanced and innovative managed cloud hosting features that optimize your websites and applications’ availability, speed, scalability, and security without technical hassles and complexities on your part. 

The platform’s managed cloud hosting servers have automated self-healing capabilities. Thus events, processes, or actions will be instantly executed, logged, or recycled/restarted when the servers detect certain issues or anomalies. For example, automated self-healing can be applied in case your websites and applications are receiving large volumes of requests, requests are being processed too slowly, or resource limits are reached or exceeded. This helps you avoid server downtimes and website/application crashes.  

Cloudways also supports in-memory data storage and access using a stack of ready-to-use caching technologies composed of Redis, Nginx, Memcached, and Varnish. These caching technologies store datasets in the servers’ RAM or main memory instead of keeping them in the underlying storage devices like SSDs. Your websites and applications can gain faster loading and response times and better performance, as read and write operations don’t take much time to execute.

VPS Hosting Plans:

Cloudways doesn’t use third-party control panels. However, it has its own easy-to-use admin interface that provides you with some features not found in other control panels like cPanel. For instance, using Cloudways’ own control panel, you’ll be able to access and use collaboration capabilities that make it easy for you to handle your projects and teams.

You can organize your websites and applications into various projects, assign workloads to globally distributed team members, and manage users’ server or app access permissions. The intuitive control panel also enables you to modify and test your websites and applications and immediately implement all changes made via a dedicated staging environment without disrupting the live versions of those websites and applications.

Pros

• Managed SSD servers
• Leading cloud providers
• Technology stack
• PHP app hosting
• Staging environments
• Ecommerce-optimized
• Collaboration features
• OS-level firewalls & patches

Cons

• Third-party control panels are not supported
• Doesn’t offer dedicated cloud server hosting
• Some add-ons require extra costs
• No server control & customization

Cloudways offers reliable support through phone, email, and live chat. In addition, the support page on their site hosts FAQs, knowledgebase articles, and answers to technical, sales, and billing queries.

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5/5

Overall impression

My reviews after using cloudways for more than 6 months.

I have spent a lot of time trying to find a good Hosting service for my blog [pmfias(dot)com]. Godaddy was expensive. Bluehost and Hostgator had no genuine reviews. Finally one of the nice guys on Quora recommended Cloudways [Which hosting plan/company is best for predominantly Indian Traffic website with 5,000 - 10,000 visitors a day? goo(dot)gl/PDvJiq]. After testing and using it for a month... Pros 1) Don’t have to be a geek to manage a server via cloudways. Basic knowledge of shared hosting is more than enough. 2) Migration is a breeze. They have a wonderful plugin that does all the heavy lifting. 3) Support is top notch (both pre and post purchase) 4) Cloud infrastructure means downtime is ZERO. 5) Transparent Real Time billing. [No hidden charges. Payment is postpaid. I got 10$ credit too (coupon stuff)] 6) Server management is a layman stuff. It is just pressing few buttons. [Cloning, Vertical Scaling are all pretty simple and straight forward. Downscaling is a bit complex in DO and few more] 7) Has various layers of caching. Varnish caching is wonderful. Varnish + WP Rocket + Cloudflare = Below 2-3s load time can be easily achieved for any ordinary website. [Varnish has compatibility issues with WP Rocket CSS, JS magnification and Concatenation. Merge + Minify + Refresh plugin should be used for this purpose] 8) Straightforward SFTP credentials to use Filezilla. 9) Cloudways can store upto 8 backups outside the server (They use Amazon Cloud Infrastructure to store backups). Both Real time backups and scheduled backups are allowed. 1GB backup takes only few minutes. 1 on demand backup can be stored on the server for downloading via SFTP (Filezilla). 10) Every type of resource usage (CPU, RAM, Disk space etc.) can be monitored in real-time. 11) One can analyze the overall performance of the website (load times of each plugin, page and more) using New Relic (Basic, free add on) 12) Free SSL certificate

Cons 1) The server doesn’t send transactional emails. One has to look for external services like SendGrid (12k emails free/month. No credit card required. It can be added as a free add on cloudways). 2) Documentation is not comprehensive enough (In most of the cases it may not matter).