Cloudways Reviews

• Cloudways is a managed hosting provider for WordPress, WooCommerce, and other PHP websites and apps.
• It lets you host your projects with cloud providers, including its mother company DigitalOcean, as well as Vultr, Linode, Google Cloud, and AWS.
• A 3-day free trial lets you try the hosting service, its 24/7 live support, and free 1-time migration.
• In 2023, we built and launched our new Best Reviews website on the Cloudways platform, and have been hosted there since.

The Cloudways platform houses a multitude of features to scale a single website or multiple projects as they grow. Besides their proprietary solutions, they let you toggle on popular solutions such as Cloudflare, Imunify265, and DNS Made Easy as your tech stack evolves.

• 1-click app install: Rapidly deploy WordPress, WooCommerce, Laravel, and Magento with no CLI work.
• Server-level caching: Redis, Varnish, and Memcached can be toggled on.
• Vertical scaling: Upscale and downscale a server’s specs with no down-time or overbilling.
• Backups and rollbacks: Cloudways takes reliable backups with convenient rollbacks.
• SSL and security: Free 1-click SSL certificates and server-level firewall by Imunify365.

While Cloudways takes care of everything related to the hosting, security, and performance of your PHP websites, you can’t consider it the one-stop shop for your WordPress website or ecommerce store. Domain names, email hosting, and other digital essentials that are bundled with traditional hosting providers are not available with Cloudways.

Despite the need to turn to a domain registrar to handle your domain name registration and update your name servers there, Cloudways has proven to be very user-friendly, even for those who aren’t web developers or have prior website building experience.

The Cloudways control panel makes managing your servers and web apps easy, with 1-click app installs to set up new websites and a free 1-time migration with the Cloudways WordPress migration plugin. The Cloudways support team is happy to help out with migration requests to ensure any end-to-end migrations or new setups happen smoothly.

Professional web developers, agencies, and other companies managing multiple websites and online apps have plenty of ways to ensure the best setup for each of their projects. At Best Reviews, we’ve been relying on Cloudways for the managed hosting of this very website and various other websites since 2023.

Cloudways Flexible is the most accessible hosting option, offering a wide range of cloud hosting options for basic blogs, company websites, and testing environments. As your PHP websites and apps start to scale, you have plenty of options to flexibly ramp up your vCPU, storage, and RAM. Your server type options vary depending on the cloud provider you choose.

Cloudways Autonomous is powered by Google Kubernetes Engine for websites that need to be able to scale quickly to accommodate spikes in traffic.

Deploying with Git is one of the first features that has helped our web development team rapidly deploy new updates to our websites. The Cloudways MCP lets you manage your servers and apps from Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, or any other preferred AI coding assistant.

It lets you do Git deployment workflows to set up deploy keys, browse branches, pull commits, and handle other actions. Cloning servers, installing packages, rotating credentials, and managing Block Storage if you’re on DigitalOcean servers.

We’ve been witnessing how Cloudways has embraced its MCP to empower web development teams to move fast with the latest capabilities that the AI revolution brings.

Cloudways offers reliable reports and add-ons to enhance the security and performance of your website, with the same convenience you experience when managing the other aspects of your managed hosting.

Cloudways provides free SSL certificates issued by Let’s Encrypt, ready to be installed with just a few clicks. The SSL protection installation never failed for us, and the easy certificate management removed the fear of certificate expiration and related issues.

• Cloudflare: Simplified and lower-priced access to Cloudflare Enterprise features such as WAF, cache purging, AI crawler blocking…
• Immunify360: Cloudways partners with Immunify360 to provide access to malware scans of your website, eliminating the need for clunky security plugins that often cause performance issues.
• Varnish: Caching with Varnish is one of the performance services available out-of-the-box with Cloudways.
• Lightning Stack: Cloudways’ latest feature designed to boost your website’s performance. Built by Cloudways on NGINX + PHP-FPM architecture, it processes requests faster for websites that don’t use complex .htaccess logic but instead rely on simple redirects and header changes in the platform’s Web Rules.
• Object Cache Pro: Reduce database queries by storing data using Redis.
• WP Cron Optimizer: Rely on faster server-based crons that replace the WordPress native crons.
• WEBP Redirection
• ElasticSearch or OpenSearch
• RabbitMQRedis
• Supervisor

One feature that further increased the speed at which we roll out updates to our WordPress websites and other PHP sites is Cloudways’ steady backup and restore capabilities. It’s helped us release new features and updates quickly, with the security and convenience of knowing we have reliable backups that have never failed us.

Companies managing different servers and sites for a variety of clients, each with its own structure, may at times wish that the Cloudways control panel offered better organization. The availability of using Projects still makes the organization feel a bit clunky.

Beyond that, the Cloudways UI is clear and easy to use, with fast load times that help web developers move quickly and manage hosting reliably.

Especially for a managed hosting provider, speed is not only a factor in the loading times that visitors to your websites and users of your apps perceive. Cloudways speeds up your web development and enables you to scale existing projects and roll out new features. The Git integration for pushing from GitHub, Bitbucket, and GitLab is a feature you’ll use day to day to roll out new technology. We find pushing and pulling updates with Cloudways very reliable, making it a key feature we rely on.

Prices for Cloudways Flexible and Cloudways Autonomous vary depending on the cloud provider and subsequent server type you select. When you opt for DigitalOcean as your data center of choice, you can choose between Standard or Premium servers.

The most affordable option is Cloudways Flexible, hosted on a DigitalOcean Basic Standard server for $11 per month with 1GB RAM, 1 vCPU, and 1TB of transfer bandwidth. The higher-tiered plans let you bump the RAM and vCPU. If you ever exceed your bandwidth, you’ll pay $0.12 per additional GB. Extra GBs of disk storage for files and your database are available at fair rates, depending on the region.

Cloudways does offer a discount and keeps it simple. Instead of having you scour coupon codes for the best deal, Cloudways offers a generous 30% discount for the first three months with our exclusive Cloudways coupon code, regardless of the hosting plan you choose.

Their pay-as-you-go billing keeps you in the clear on what you’re currently paying, and what your accrued costs over the coming period will be. Cloudways isn’t trying to lock you in with long-term commitments. Over the past years, we’ve had an active client account with Cloudways, and we have never been subjected to pushy marketing and sales tactics from their team.

The 3-day free trial Cloudways offers doesn’t require any credit card details, making it a good opportunity to see if managed hosting with Cloudways is the right move for your business.

The Standard support from Cloudways is the default level of free customer support, available 24/7 via live chat and support tickets. At Best Reviews, we have relied on the Standard customer support level ever since we started hosting at Cloudways.

Their support agents are capable, responsive, and provide competent support and transparent feedback. The live support chat lets you interact with an AI agent initially and quickly connects you to an available support agent if human support is needed.

The Standard support plan covers the needs of many small businesses and agencies running multiple SMB web apps. Ecommerce companies and web apps requiring fast support can turn to the Advanced support option for $100 per month, raising the level of support to a 30-minute high-priority SLA level with assistance from support engineers. Premium support costs $500 per month or 10% of your monthly bill and includes phone support, private Slack integration, and other features that make it feel as if Cloudways support is sitting at a desk in your office.

Cloudways provides transparent reporting on its status page, offers up-to-date support documentation, and is active and responsive on its social media channels. They interact and co-create with their community, and an example of that is our collaboration on a Customer Story and a Customer Case Study.

Cloudways stays on top of the latest AI developments with its MCP and Cloudways Bot to propel your web development team. Migrating and vertical scaling, paired with their hands-on tech support, enable you to move forward rapidly without any friction. Their transparent pay-as-you-go billing, 3-day free trial, and our exclusive 30% off the first three months of service allow you to try their hosting offer without a long-term commitment.

We’ve been working with the Cloudways control panel and have adopted the latest workflow upgrades introduced by Cloudways over the past few years, during which Best Reviews has been hosted by the company.

With DigitalOcean’s ownership, we can rest assured that Cloudways will remain a reliable WordPress managed hosting provider, committed to staying competitive on pricing and innovation.