Jimmy ParkerCloudways
Cloudways is a very powerful cloud hosting platform that offers reliable, fast, and secure hosting services. It offers a wide range of features and benefits that make it a great choice for website owners who need a reliable hosting solution without breaking the bank!
4.5
Pros
- Easy setup and deployment
- High performance
- Flexible scalability
- 24/7 technical support
- Free migration services
- Optimized for WordPress, Magento, and other popular platforms
- Affordable pricing
- Cloud-based hosting
- Advanced security features
Cons
- N/A
Table of Contents
About CloudWays
CloudWays, a cloud hosting service, was founded by Pere Hospital in 2012. Its headquarters is based in Mosta, Lija and their services target web developers, business owners, bloggers, and online stores, among others.
To use CloudWays, you first have to choose among their 5 major hosts – DigitalOcean (who recently bought the company), Linode, Vultr, AWS (Amazon), and Google cloud. You then need to choose a plan and finish checking out – and that’s about it. The whole setup can be completed in about 15 minutes (give or take a few).
In this review, we’re going to show you all of the major hosts’ starting packages.
Pricing
1. DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean’s starter plan is CloudWays’ cheapest offering. You can get this package for only $10 per month or $.0139 per hour. It comes with 1GB RAM, 1-core processor, 25GB storage space, and 1TB of bandwidth.
2. Linode
You can get the Linode package for $22 per month or $0.0306 per hour. The plan includes 2GB of RAM, 1-core processor, 50GB storage space, and 2TB bandwidth. It’s CloudWays’ second-cheapest plan. You’ll observe that most of its features are double of what DigitalOcean has to offer – but their price is doubled as well.
3. Vultr
For $42 per month or 0.0583 per hour, you can get Vultr’s startup plan. You’ll get 4GB RAM with it and a 2-core processor. It also comes with 80GB storage space and 4TB of bandwidth.
4. AWS
You can get Amazon’s starter plan for $42 per month or 0.0583 per month. Its main features are exactly the same as that of Vultr’s – so you’ll also get 4GB of RAM with it and a 2-core processor. Like Vultr, the package also includes 80GB storage space and 4TB bandwidth.
5. Google Cloud
Google’s starter package is CloudWays’ most expensive plan (it’s also their most powerful). It will cost you $80 per month or 0.1111 per hour. You’ll get 8GB RAM and a 4-core processor with it. Also, the package comes with 160GB storage space and 5TB of bandwidth.
Here are some notes to consider with regards to CloudWays’ pricing plans:
- We listed CloudWays offerings from the cheapest to the most expensive. It makes it easier to see their differences – and you’ll notice that the more expensive packages carry bigger everything (RAM, processor, storage space, and bandwidth). Note that more expensive packages ultimately carry more advanced features and have more powerful performances.
- Check out the prices per hour. You see, CloudWays allows you to pay as you go and pay for the actual resources that you consume.
- Unlike other hosting providers with introductory prices and contracts to lock you in for a certain period of time, CloudWays presents their prices in very clear terms. Those are their regular prices – so there won’t be any price increase when you renew your plan. There’s no lock-in period for all their plans.
- Do take note that Vultr and AWS carry the same main features. You’ll have to choose between the 2 if you’re keen on their plans.
- All the above plans come with unlimited app installations, free SSL certificates, and free site transfers.
Support
First of all, CloudWays has a vast knowledge base of helpful articles, guides, tutorials, FAQs, and what have you. You can go to their website if you simply want to figure things on your own or learn your way in their system (by going directly to the source). They have really good materials, by the way.
CloudWays also has an active community of users (like a forum). You can discuss topics and problems with other CloudWays customers and also offer your help in any way you can.
Now, if you want to contact their support team, you have lots of avenues to choose from – from e-mail (send them a ticket) and live chat to phone support. These are all 24/7 services and their customer service people are all well-trained and friendly. Rest assured that they’ll be able to help you with anything.
Pros
1. Great customer support
Well, we just told you about CloudWays’ customer support. We put it as the number 1 pro because of the many options they have in providing help and services to their customers. Their response times are also very good.
2. Several options to choose from
With CloudWays, you get to choose from 5 of the best major cloud hosting companies in one place. They have cheap but powerful options available and you can also get plans from the really big ones (e.g. Amazon and Google).
3. Usage-based plans
Your subscription to CloudWays is usage-based. It means you get to pay for resources as needed. It’s a unique, cost-effective formula that will benefit their customers.
4. Great uptime
CloudWays has a 99.99% uptime guarantee and they’re really good at it. First of all, it’s already given that all the major hosts on CloudWays are reputable on their own. CloudWays itself has also proven itself reliable all these years.
5. Fast loading times
Cloud hosting is meant to be fast – and you can expect the same from CloudWays. In fact, their page load times are typically less than a second. This is partially because with all the hosting providers they support, they have access to data centers all over the world. So it doesn’t matter if you’re looking for top UK web hosting services, website hosting for Canada, Singapore web hosting, Malaysia website hosts, or web hosts for Australia, Cloudways has you covered.
6. Free SSL certificates
You want your website to be trustworthy, right? Well, search engines want that too – that’s why SSL certificates have become a standard requirement on websites. With CloudWays, SSL certificates are free (unlike other web hosting companies that don’t include them in their packages).
7. Good security features
CloudWays doesn’t want the websites they’re hosting to be vulnerable to threats. That’s why they’ve set up automatic firmware updates, patching, and the like in their system.
8. Easy installations of major apps
CloudWays have 1-click installation procedures for WordPress, Magento, Drupal, and more.
Cons
1. Servers are inaccessible
Since CloudWays directly manage all the packages under their hosting plans. You won’t have root access to the servers used by your website. Beginners probably won’t mind this setup as they can totally depend on CloudWays to handle this stuff. However, this might prove to be a disappointment to you if you’re an advanced user (and want root access to servers).
2. They don’t use a standard cPanel
This would probably be another issue with advanced users who are used to the standard control panel. You see, CloudWays happens to be one of those hosting companies that have their own cPanel format. We’re telling you right now that it can get a while to get used to their setup at the backend, but it’s doable.
If you’re a first-timer or a beginner in creating a website, you probably won’t pay special attention to CloudWay’s control panel – which is good. You can learn how it works just as how you would have learned the standard cPanel.
3. Not very beginner-friendly
CloudWays is not as beginner-friendly as we want it to be. If you’re technically challenged and have zero patience for learning new things, CloudWays may not work for you.
Now, for advanced users, this is not to say that it will be a piece of cake for you. However, if you’ve handled technical stuff before, you’ll probably be able to figure out how to work your way with CloudWays.
Conclusion
What we like best about CloudWays is their overall setup. With the availability of 5 major cloud hosting providers under your fingertips, you can easily compare their features and offers.
Note that all the plans included in CloudWays are powerful and feature-filled. Their storage spaces are in large Gigabytes and their bandwidth are in terabytes. Imagine that.
If you’re particularly looking for cloud hosting, we’re sure you can find something on CloudWays’ offerings. In fact, you can start at a very low price of $10 per month with their DigitalOcean package. And if your demands are great – then go for Amazon or Google.
Another thing that we like about CloudWays is the scalability of their plans. You see, you need to prepare for the eventual growth of your site (it’s a good thing to grow and expand) – and you have everything you need in CloudWays. Their resources are unlimited and you can easily upgrade your plan as needed.
Look again at the pros and cons. Compared to other hosting companies, CloudWays can surely deliver big-time. They have a 99.99% uptime guarantee which means your site will always remain online. In reality, cloud hosting rarely goes down – so CloudWays has got your back on this aspect.
CloudWays’ speed is also outstanding – and this feature will benefit your SEO efforts and customer satisfaction ratings. While statistics say that people tend to hit the back button when page loading times take 3 seconds or more, CloudWays’ performance for loading speed is less than a second.
CloudWays also includes lots of freebies on all their plans (e.g. SSL certificates, security measures, and more). These are all equivalent to saving money.
Perhaps the only real con with CloudWays is that it’s not very user-friendly. We’re quite sad about this, but confident that persistent individuals can overcome the difficulties of figuring (and learning) CloudWays. And remember, educational materials on CloudWays are found all over the internet (including their very own site). You can look at tutorial videos and guides to help you on your way to great cloud hosting. You can also count on CloudWays’ expert and helpful customer support team (which is reachable 24/7).
Yes, we highly recommend CloudWays, so do consider getting your hosting from this company.