Cloudways Review: Is It the Best Managed Cloud Hosting Platform?

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Cloudways Review: Overview

The managed cloud hosting programs are taking over the traditional cloud hosting programs. There are many different cloud hosting programs, but how do you know which one is the best?

If you're reading this review, then you are at the right place to begin with. Cloudways hosting stands out in the crown because of its amazing tools and services. It is currently working with some of the top providers that include Google Cloud and Amazon Web Series. 

To improve the performance, simplicity, and maintenance of your business websites, Cloudways is a perfect choice. It is best in functionality and is also affordable (Check out Cloudways Pricing Plans).

Most of the companies providing web hosting solutions do so on VPS or shared server environments. But Cloudways hosting broke that tradition and provides top notch services because of its advanced tools and services.

Cloudways Review: What is It?

Cloudways is a managed hosting platform that supports open-source tools like Joomla, Larvel, PHP, and WordPress. It helps you start a website and run it successfully within a short time. It works as a virtual server that holds many resources, and it rarely goes down, which means it saves you financially and timely.

Cloudways hosting was founded in 2009 by Uzair Gadit, Aaqib Gadit, and Pere Hospital. It is a Malta-based app. Headquarters are in Europe, but they also have offices in Dubai and Spain. A staff of 30+ people helped 8,000 users from 43 different companies to launch various servers and web apps.

Users with small or large businesses are benefited from it since it can also be operated even if you have a small budget. It is flexible in terms of price, often termed as 'pay as you go.' It is the most secure platform that is available for your assistance 24/7/365.

Why Choose Cloudways?

Developing and then maintaining a website is not a piece of cake. It requires a lot of effort. There is a large network of hosting platforms, but why is Cloudways hosting the best choice?

1. Cloudways provide the best website hosting services as it offers the best uptime and is also the most reliable platform. Your data stays secure and is never lost; if by any chance there is a technical issue and the server goes down, another one (server) will carry the job.
2. Cloud hosting platforms allow you to use a third party applications that efficiently helps you work on your website. For instance, you can create a particular server within a few minutes and clicks.
3. It is most ideal for bloggers and creators that want to run their websites with lesser complications. Cloudways hosting is capable of tracking the visitor's location, which means the closest server will help the site load faster.
4. A strong infrastructure is a must for developing your website, and you need a stable and secure hosting service that works with little or no errors and high performance. Cloudways hosting reviews show the satisfaction of the current users and their appreciation for the best web hosting.
5. Cloudways hosting services use Solid-State Drives (SSD) to improve your website's performance and speed up your site with dedicated resources.
6. Cloudways provide the users with a wide range of tools, including better memory, storage space, processing power, and bandwidth. With this hosting features, your website will always remain up and running with no down-time. 

Due to the above mentioned strong features, benefits and affordable pricing plans, it is seen in many web hosting reviews, people show their complete trust on Cloudways hosting. At Trustpilot.com, Cloudways has received an incredible 4.7 out of 5 from 1100 plus real customer reviews.

Cloudways Review: Key Features

Using Cloudways could be the best hosting decision you have ever made, but you need to understand all of its features clearly for that. Let's have a quick look at the features offered by this site.

User-friendly interface. Cloudways save the users from the hassles of long procedures of application management. A single click can solve many problems, which means you have direct control over managing your website.

Security. When you start using a server or a platform, you might be worried if it is secure or not? Is all of your data safe or not? Cloudways solved the problem and assured you 100% safe usage without fear of being interrupted or hacked. WordPress is more likely to face hacking issues thanks to its number one position in the website hosting world; the firewall offered by Cloudways is perfect protection.

Free site migrations. It takes time to move your website from one server to another. And if not done right, it may cause you unnecessary hassles. Cloudways offers free site migration. If your site already exists in some other hosting platform, Cloudways will move it to its platform for free. You are saved from the big trouble of copying and collecting your data this way.

Vertical scaling. This feature handles your hosting plan resources. With 1-click feature, you can scales resources - RAM, CPU and storage. You can easily upgrade or even downgrade the server based on which hosting services you like the most since it goes both ways. It is one of the unique features of managed cloud hosting.

Clone and stage. This is the feature that allows you to test the server before converting to it. You can first prepare a stage, apply the new features there, and then use it permanently for your website. Cloning allows you to create operational copy of your server. On the other hand, Staging allows you to create a dummy website where you can test any variations before they go live.

High-speed server performance. Who likes a website that takes lots of time in loading and works slowly? The connection of Cloudways hosting with the top 5 cloud providers solves the issue. It uses servers that are distributed geographically, which leads to faster service without delays and lags. High-speed servers are quite important for online businesses.

App installation. Users are more likely to enjoy the services when the features are just one click away. App installation comes with many problems, and users might be directed somewhere else while trying to install an app using a traditional hosting server. But with Cloudways, it's just a single click that is needed to install the app.

Auto-healing. Websites face different issues now and then. This feature of Cloudways self identifies the error and resolved it with auto-healing restarts. This prevents a website from going down.

Free SSL Certificate. Cloudways installs free SSL certificate on your site and along with its ThunderStack optimization you get a secure and high-performing website.

Two-factor authentication. Although the system is entirely secure with the firewall, if you are still doubtful that someone foreign might break into the set-upset-up, you ought to use the two-factor authentication, which adds another security layer to the website or business.

Easy website setup. You can deploy a website within few minutes. Most Cloudways.com reviews appreciate the precise development and setting up of websites just with one click.

Advanced caching. Caching plugins like Breeze, Redis and Varnish are easily accessible by the users. It helps in the betterment of performance and optimization of the server.

Backup and restore. This feature is enabled by default, and you can also get more of it by paying an additional fee, like a local backup option. If any fault occurs by chance, this feature helps recover your data, which is already backed up, thus minimizing the loss.

Flexibility. While using Cloudways you are not bound to any limitations or contracts. You can take the easy route and get hold of things step by step by using this tool.

Easy on pocket. There are five partners of Cloudways hosting system, Google Cloud, AWS, Linode, Vultr, and DigitalOcean. They offer affordable packages for you. If you find a plan expensive, you can always change it, and you don't have to pay it all at once since it works on a pay-as-you-go basis.

Customer support. Good customer support and its 24/7 availability is a big catch. Cloudways no doubt provides the best expert customer care. You can email them or sort it out using DIY solutions or with the help of a live chat feature.

Hosting types

Your website's working depends on the quality and standard of the hosting assistance you are using. Better hosting solutions better the management of your business.

Hosting has three types in general

• Shared hosting
• Dedicated hosting
• Cloud hosting

What is Shared Hosting?

When the same server resources like bandwidth, disk space, and memory allocation are shared by several websites, the solution is shared hosting. It is the most economical solution which offers you great administration with a pocket full of essential features.

What is Dedicated Hosting?

If you have a dedicated server for your website only and no other websites share it, it is dedicated hosting. It is best for the websites generating huge traffic.

What is Cloud Hosting?

Cloud hosting relies on servers that are spread over wide geographical areas and are interconnected. It helps in the transfer of data over wide ranges. It is, in fact, the most secure, scalable and suitable type of hosting service.

Cloudways' use of cloud servers offers the best facilities for you! Sign up for the free trial below.

Visit Cloudways

Cloudways Review: Plans & Pricing

A variety of premium and standard plans is offered by Cloudways hosting. The hosting plans are user-friendly, and most of them are affordable.

This is because of five partners of Cloudways hosting system - Google Cloud, AWS, Linode, Vultr, and DigitalOcean that offers affordable packages for you.

1. DigitalOcean - Starting at $10/month
2. Linode - Starting at $12/month
3. Vultr - Starting at $11/month
4. Google Compute Engine - Starting at $34.17/month
5. Amazon Web Service - Starting at $36.04/month

Plans offered by Digital Ocean

Plans offered by Vultr

Plans offered by Linode

Plans offered by Google Cloud

Plans offered by AWS

Breakdown of prices

The pricing works well and is quite clear to understand. If you have a server that costs 10$/month, then the server cost is exactly 10$. However, if you open a server in the middle of the month, you have to pay just for the days you used it instead of the whole month's charges.

The offsite backup costs 0.335$/GB. But do remember that they round it up to 0.5$. (i.e. $3.85 will be rounded to $4, $1.22 to $1.5)

Cloudways Review: Control Panel

After creating an account on the platform, you can manage your servers through Cloudways' control panel. It's not like the typical control panel of most hosts, but Cloudways' custom control panel is intuitive, modern, and convenient. You can access Servers, Applications, Teams, and Projects using the menu of his control panel.

There are two basic types of management - Application and Server.

Application management

There are different settings users can find under the application panel. Once you have set up a server, you can add many applications whenever you want, for example, WordPress.

After entering the application area, there are different tabs for setting up different options.

Domain mapping comes in a separate tab. Cloudways will provide you with a temporary URL if you have not registered your domain yet. It makes the development and management of your website much easier.

There's a page for one-click SSL installation, and you can install free Let's Encrypt SSL certificates there. Under the restore tab, you can also find a one-click recovery option.

Server management

When you're done setting up your application, you have to run all the other aspects of your website under Servers.

Using Server Management, you can check your login credentials. There's a page that monitors CPU usage. This is very important as constant use has a bad effect on the website's performance.

The services your server is providing are available in Manage Services. You can start, stop, and restart one or many services at any time, configure PHP settings, and other server-level settings under Settings & Packages.

In the Security section, you can block certain IP addresses from accessing your resources to secure your system. Any expert user can log into the server via SSH to counter-check the settings if this isn't enough.

Cloudways provides the cloud-based firewall as protection against malware, hackers, and other types of cyberattacks. Backups run daily by default, but you can change the schedule and add local backups too.

Cloudways Review: Pros and Cons

Pros

• Cloudways is an easy-to-use platform with a little bit of learning curve. Building websites and adding apps are clicks away. WordPress, Magento, and other popular apps can be automatically installed within instants. If you have an old site, Cloudways will quickly help you migrate through the custom plugin without any data loss.
• Users who are more familiar with the user control panel, however, may get some surprises here. The Monitoring and Vertical Scaling tabs under Server Management are the features you cannot just find everywhere. They let you monitor your server's performance at a glance and provide insights when it's high time to scale up, and you can manually upgrade or downgrade the scale according to your requirements.
• Hosting by Cloudways is different from shared hosting services offered by other hosting companies. Cloudways is a managed hosting provider that works on cloud hosting, so you won't have to worry about your website all the time. It uses different modern technologies, like its own Cloudways CDN, to ensure speedy page loading and site performance. Moreover, staging, cloning, and the temporary URL are features that take users by surprise since they are new.
• Lastly, there's the flexible, "pay-as-you-go" pricing which you can administer depending on what you need. You can scale up or scale down your hosting plan according to requirements. There's also a free three-day trial which, while short, should be enough to test Cloudways' features, and since it doesn't offer a free plan, users tend to take advantage of this feature.

Cons

• Cloudways is a fully managed website hosting platform. So, in case you need to have look over how your website runs online (like having root access), then Cloudways won't be appropriate for your liking.
• Cloudways additionally doesn't have domain name registration, although you can use temporary URL offered by Cloudways for a start.
• Some people won't just like the fact that Cloudways doesn't have email hosting; this is something they must consider adding in their hosting plans.

How to Buy Cloudways Hosting?

Getting started with Cloudways is quite easy. You will get step by step guide to get started with the Cloudways hosting platform.

You join the free trial, test the services and features and buy yourself the plan that suits you the most.

Cloudeays offer everything you need to create a website that is perfectly optimized for speed and performance. You'll wonder if there's something unlikable about this hosting service. From the speed to flexibility to pricing to management to security, everything is excellent.

Buying hosting at Cloudways involve the following few steps:

1. Register Your Domain
2. Launch Your Application and Server
3. Map Your Domain & Manage DNS Records
4. Secure Your Site Using HTTPS
5. Configure Email Add-ons
6. Set up Cloudways CDN (Optional)

If you need help in setting up your blog, you can always contact the Cloudways Support. It provide the easiest and quickest help.

You can contact the support team via phone call, live chat, or email, and you will be responded to within seconds. You can also find answers to billing, sales, or technical queries on their support page, which came along with knowledge-base articles and answered FAQs.

Wrapping Up

Cloudways is among the few companies that offer a great balance in being affordable and greatly functional for cloud-based managed WordPress hosting.

Their WordPress cloud servers come with a fantastic set of features that help them stand out in the crowd, and you can scale hosting resources as your website grows.

While you may have to devote some time to get use to their cloud hosting service, it offers outstanding features and comes at a very affordable price.

If you're still undecided about hosting your WordPress site on a cloud server, then sign up for the 3-day free trial that Cloudways offers to test their platform. You will see yourself buying its plans soon after. No credit card is required to sign up for the free trial and try Cloudways.