Cloudways Review Pay As You Go Hosting For Your Site

Cloudways Prices

Ok, as mentioned above, the first thing to understand about Cloudways is that you can choose between the five different data center providers: DigitalOcean (which we used for our tests), Linode, Vultr, AWS (from Amazon), and Google Cloud.

Every provider has a minimum of 10 plans, but for simplicity’s sake, I’ll only mention the four key featured plans from each provider. Let’s call them Entry, Standard, Advanced and Pro to make things easier. This is what it looks like in table form:

Then, don’t forget that you can always go up one level. For instance, with Google Cloud, you can go up to $1332.65 per month. This would give you an insanely performant 120GB of RAM and 32 vCPUs.

(Vultr also has special High Frequency plans, which are slightly more expensive than the ones listed above, but give you extra storage.)

Also, Cloudways is the only affordable hosting provider I know who lets you buy hosting on an hourly basis.

For instance, with DigitalOcean, the entry plan would be $0.0139 per hour; Standard is $0.0306 / hour; Advanced is $0.0583 per hour, and Pro is $0.1111 per hour.

This is obviously best for agencies and resellers that manage client websites, or website owners who know when traffic spikes are coming.

Now I know it’s a lot to take in, so the best place to compare all the prices is probably directly on the pricing page of the Cloudways website.

What can you expect from each Cloudways plan?

This is the nice thing about using Cloudways, they offer all the same features on all plans. So whether you use the cheapest Linode plan or the most expensive AWS, you will get:

• 24/7/365 Support
• Free SSL
• One free migration
• Unlimited application installation
• Team management
• Dedicated firewalls
• 24/7 real-time monitoring
• Automated backups
• Staging environment
• Optimized with advanced caches
• Regular security patching
• HTTP/2 enabled servers
• SSH and SFTP access

And the main advantage, of course, is that you can use the services from multiple providers without being locked into a contract with them.

There’s just one extra thing worth mentioning about the individual server providers, and that’s the datacenter’s locations:

This can be useful to know in advance if you plan on targeting certain specific markets worldwide. And as you can see, Amazon and Google, for instance, are the only one with data centers in South America.

Cloudways Pros & Cons

When to use Cloudways hosting?

Cloudways is definitely geared towards the for more tech-savvy users. It’s for businesses who understand their traffic cycles, the kind of performance they need, and where they need to deliver content. Agencies and resellers will know how to make the most of the performance and options.

The performance, by the way, is excellent, and ideal for websites that need to auto-scale based on seasonal traffic spikes, like online stores.

The pay-as-you-go nature of their plans can also be a benefit for those who don’t want to commit to a year-long plan with some of the big name providers out there, like AWS or Google Cloud, or expect peaks of traffic.

When not to use Cloudways hosting?

If you need to host a simple website like a personal blog, small online store, WordPress portfolio or basic business page, I’d recommend looking at other options.

It’ll be much easier to get started with, say, DreamHost or SiteGround.

Cloudways specifications

Cloudways Backups

The Backup section is easily accessible in the left menu of your main dashboard. As you can see, the main options are to do with the frequency of the backups. It’s nice that you can schedule the timing yourself.

The local backup option lets you create one copy of your site. For some puzzling reason, Cloudways doesn’t let you download it directly from the dashboard - you’ll have to use SSH or SFTP to access it. And more importantly: it isn’t free. Cloudways charges $0.033 per GB of data that you backup offline.

Cloudways Vertical Scaling

One of the key benefits of having so many options is that you can scale your resources based on traffic spikes.

With Cloudways, this is done via what they call “vertical scaling”. You can increase your server size, but also CPU and memory, depending on the provider you have chosen.

It is a cost-effective solution, because you can keep all your data and web applications in one place, without having to migrate anything.

But there are a few things to note:

• Storage scaling is permanent: so you won’t be able to scale back down if you only want to increase disk size. The workaround is to clone your server and move it to a scaled down plan, then cancel the upgraded one.
• Scaling will take your server offline: make sure you do it during off-peak hours.
• Different providers have different options: AWS and Google Cloud let you scale your server CPU and RAM independently. DigitalOcean, Linue and Vultr only let you scale the entire size of your server, including CPU, RAM and disk space.

Testing Cloudways’ hosting

As you can guess, measuring Cloudways’ performance is a bit tricky due to the number of server options. Still, this is what we found from our independent tests.

Uptime tests

We tested Cloudways’ (DigitalOcean server) uptime for the 12 months, we were very impressed with the results. As you can see in the chart below, those results of couldn’t be much better.

Compared to the last two years, there was a slight dip in performance this year, but 99.99% uptime is still very good:

To monitor uptime, I use StatusCake, a tool that checks each website every 5 minutes.

Note, however, that Cloudways doesn’t offer an uptime guarantee, unlike some of its competitors.

Is Cloudways fast?

Yes! Once again, note that we’ve only used the DigitalOcean data centers, but according to our series of independent tests, the average page loading speed was very good indeed.

With an average page load time of just 1.46 seconds, Cloudways was the one of the fastest web hosts we tested.

As you can see in the table below, Cloudways has got consistently faster, (both absolutely and compared to other web hosts), over the last three years:

Results in seconds

Although there are many things you can do to fix a slow website and make WordPress faster, your web host is the biggest contributor to the speed of your site.

So these numbers are a big deal!

Key takeaways: is Cloudways right for you?

Well, if you’ve been confused by any of the more technical terms in this review, such as CDN, staging, or server customization, you should probably look elsewhere. There are simpler alternatives that will host your site with good performance, and much fewer technical options. SiteGround or DreamHost come to mind.

If you’re after WordPress hosting, Cloudways is good, but there are alternatives like WP Engine or Kinsta, where you get support and infrastructure built especially for WordPress, and there are also cheaper WordPress hosts.

Now, Cloudways is probably one of the better options for managing and getting the most out of a hosting stack. That is, if you’re an agency with hundreds of sites in your portfolio, or a reseller, you’ll be able to move sites to the best data centers, hop on a different hosting plan when needed, and use the scaling options to meet the demands of huge traffic spikes.

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