Cloudways Review (2021): #5 Reasons Why I Switched [and you should as well]

Last Updated on March 6, 2021 by Obaro Alidou K.

Well; I’m a huge fan of shared hosting, especially A2Hosting and FastComet. But, when your traffic grows and your site becomes heavy (mine is currently 4+MB), you start getting CPU overage and relatively slow loading time as a consequence. The simplest solution approach is to move to a cheap VPS but, I don’t have the technical knowledge required to manage a server. So I migrated to Cloudways and, it has been a happy experience. In this review, I will share with you #5 reasons why I think you should migrate to Cloudways.

Let’s get started

#5 Reasons why you Should Switch to Cloudways

There are dozens of reasons to be honest. But, I will just focus on the #5 that impressed me the most.

#1. Reliable and secure platform

You have never experienced misery until you try to host your site and manage your server on platforms like Amazon, Google Cloud, and DigitalOcean. This is especially true when you know nothing about setting up and keeping a server running. There are fewer people who manage their server themselves these days. Do you even have time to waste managing it while you could be growing your business? That is where Cloudways comes in the game. They act like a middleman who manages your server while you focus on growing your business. You just select your server and they do the rest.

The most interesting fact is that with Cloudways, you can choose from 5 top cloud hosting providers including DigitalOcean, Linode, Vultr, Amazon AWS, and the chief Google Cloud Platform.

DigitalOcean

• Most affordable cloud provider. Compare with other cloud providers on our pricing page.
• Relatively new but very fast growing cloud provider.
• Reliable infrastructure.
• Scaling up process is slower than with Amazon / Google (typically under ten minutes). Scaling down is not possible (you need to use our clone feature to clone an existing server to a smaller one). Scaling processes involve downtime.

Linode

• Cost-effective, when compared to AWS/GCE. Compare with other cloud providers on our pricing page.
• Popular in the mid-price hosting category.
• Reliable infrastructure.
• Scaling up process is slower than with Amazon / Google (typically under ten minutes). Scaling down is not possible (you need to use our clone feature to clone an existing server to a smaller one).  Scaling processes involve downtime.

Vultr

• Cheaper than Amazon/Google (especially for smaller servers). Compare with other cloud providers on our pricing page.
• Very new but getting traction quickly.
• Reliable infrastructure.
• Scaling up process is slower than with Amazon / Google (typically under ten minutes). Scaling down is not possible (you need to use our clone feature to clone an existing server to a smaller one).  Scaling processes involve downtime.

Amazon AWS

• On the expensive side (especially for smaller servers). Compare with other cloud providers on our pricing page.
• Most recognizable cloud brand with the biggest customer base.
• Extremely reliable infrastructure.
• Fast scaling up and scaling down processes (typically under five minutes). Scaling processes involve downtime.
• Quick backup/restore processes (as we store backups on Amazon infrastructure). Availability of snapshot backups.
• When a server is stopped, We just charge for disk usage.

Google Compute Engine

• Cheaper than Amazon (especially for bigger servers). Compare with other cloud providers on our pricing page.
• Relatively new (in the cloud of course) but an already biggest and most powerful contender to Amazon.
• Very reliable infrastructure.
• Fast scaling up and scaling down processes (typically under five minutes). Scaling processes involve downtime.

The platform I like and which I’m using is DigitalOcean. It is also the cheapest and the most popular.

Here is a clear explanation of how each plan works.

[Get full details on Cloudways]

When it comes to security, it is natural that they got everything from their partners. In fact, Cloudways has proactive security practices to keep your servers safe including:

• Dedicated Firewalls
• Free SSL Certificates
• Regular security patches
• Two-factor authentication
• IP whitelisting

And much more. That is the perfect reliability combo!

See Cloudways Full Features

What people are saying about Cloudways

#2. Cloudways CDN and Breeze Cache

Cloudways has its own caching plugin and it is called Breeze-cache. It comes preinstalled with your applications and includes features like caching, Gzip compression, database cleanup, minification, CDN URL, and of course, the famous Varnish. I’m not sure it performs better than other caching solutions but, it’s worth trying as every website is unique. Here is a complete tutorial for setting up the Breeze caching plugin.

Cloudways also offers its in-house CDN to deliver your cached pages. It’s only $1/25GB; helpful to save your precious bandwidth. However, you can still use your habitual Cloudflare CDN if you want.

#3. 50+ Hosting Locations

This is insane! Cloudways has over 50 hosting locations around the globe when you consider the 5 Cloud Hosting Partners (not 25 as on the screenshot). Just choose the closest to your targeted audience during the buying process.

• DigitalOcean: 8 data centers (London, Singapore, Amsterdam, Toronto, San Francisco, New York, Frankfurt, Bangladore)
• Linode: 8 data centers (Newark, Dallas, London, Singapore, Fremont, Atlanta, Frankfurt, and Tokyo)
• Vultr: 12 data centers (Seattle, Los Angeles, Miami, Silicon Valey, Chicago, New York, Amsterdam, London, Paris, Frankfurt, Tokyo, and Sydney)
• AWS: 14 data centers ( Virginia, Oregon, California, Ireland, Frankfurt, London, Sydney, Seoul, Sao Paulo, Singapore, Tokyo, Mumbai, Montreal, and Ohio)
• Google Cloud: 11 data centers (Lowa, Virginia, London, Carolina, Oregon, Frankfurt, Belgium, Sydney, Tokyo, Singapore, and Taiwan)

See Cloudways Full Features

#4. Unlimited Applications

One of the things I like about cloud hosting is freedom. You are not limited in the number of sites you can host on your server. No matter your hosting plan, you can host unlimited websites. You can either host multiple websites on a single server or only one website per server. It is up to you as you can launch multiple servers.

#5. Cloudways Performance

With Cloudways, your server is founded on a powerful hosting stack. They call it Thunderstack. It is an intuitive mixture of Apache and Nginx web servers, the whole sustained by Varnish, Memcached, and Redis cache. The servers are SSD-based, HTTP/2 ready and you can also select the latest PHP7.x version. I was then curious to know how it performs.

I love using graphics in my articles. They make me feel my writing is alive. But, when you abuse, graphics can also slow down your website. My homepage, for instance, has 9 large images and is 5MB page size. My blog starting guide even contains 50+ images. Though, I have been surprised to see that they load under 2s. That is insane.

Perform the test yourself or just try to navigate through my articles to see how fast they load.

Ok; my homepage was already loading at 325ms with A2 Hosting but it was only 1.15MB page size and hosted on the Turbo plan.

For 5 MB page size and 183 requests, Cloudways is the only host on earth to load under 1s without breaking the bank. I’m more than happy.

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What I don’t like about Cloudways

There are two points where I’m not keen on. The first one is…

Cloudways Support

you won’t fast support as with A2 Hosting but, nothing deceptive.

The support staff from Cloudways is helpful and will solve your issues in a professional way. The only problem is the waiting time. It can often take more than the habitual 15 minutes before they answer to your tickets. Other than that, everything runs professionally in most cases.

No email hosting

Cloudways doesn’t offer email hosting like most cloud hosting providers. So if you want an email address like contact@yourdomain.com, you might get disappointed. However, they have partnered with Rackspace to offer email hosting for as low as $1/month/email account. You can also use Google SMTP. The company has an explicit article about setting up an email address here.

Ultimately, regarding the performance Cloudways delivers, these minor drawbacks are things I can live with.

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Conclusion

When it comes to web hosting, the most important factors are technology, performance, and security. And, Cloudways simply excels at each domain. It is the best managed cloud hosting service I have ever seen from my 10+ years of experience.

If you want fast loading for your heavy and high traffic site, this is a no-brainer.

What do you think about Cloudways? Any question or experience with them? Share in the comments below.

Cheers

Obaro