Complete CloudWays Review – Features, Pricing, Alternatives

If you’re planning to shop for Premium WordPress Hosting for your WordPress website then I’d suggest you go through this complete and detailed CloudWays Review as this is the WordPress Hosting service that has made a good name in a relatively short span of time.

In a relatively short span of time, they’ve amassed healthy reviews and most importantly, rated favorably by numerous web hosting review websites.

So what makes this web hosting company that popular? Well, read the review below to find out. But before that, here’s an important disclaimer.

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CloudWays Review – What is CloudWays?

CloudWays is a premium website Hosting platform that provides premium-level cloud-based managed hosting services to clients. Although, they are not restricted to just WordPress as they provide hosting for other apps as well such as Drupal, Magento, etc., however, they’ve made a good name for themselves when it comes to providing web hosting services to mission-critical WordPress websites.

History

CloudWays was founded in 2011. Although the company is registered in Malta but all their human resource is based in Pakistan which enables CloudWays to maintain the quality of their services without having to transfer cost to the customers.

To date, CloudWays has served over more than 250,000 websites on their platform which definitely is a significant number. Cloudways today is trusted by a range of different businesses all the way from individuals to small and medium enterprises to agencies.

CloudWays Pricing – How Much Does CloudWays Cost?

Since CloudWays offer multiple cloud-based environments, the pricing is not straightforward as is the case with other WordPress Hosting websites. plans that CloudWays offers and for this reason, CloudWays Pricing keeps changing depending on the usage and most importantly, which cloud-based environment a user chooses.

Just to give you an idea about CloudWays pricing, I hope the below chart will help you a lot.

CloudWays Features & Benefits

Once we’ve got hold of CloudWays pricing, let’s see what features does it offer against this price and most importantly, how can these features benefit your website.

1. Premium WordPress Hosting at Affordable Rates

The major turn-off while looking out for WordPress hosting is that many have to settle for the Cheap WordPress hosting as they simply cannot afford the fancy services offered by the Premium WordPress hosting.

However, CloudWays is different. With the rates as low as $10/month, you can afford CloudWays even if you don’t have deep pockets. With more storage, bandwidth and ability to handle more visitors, CloudWays simply provide the best bang for your bucks when compared to its competitors.

Moreover, the ability to host multiple websites on a single server also brings down your monthly bill as you now have more websites to spread the cost.

2. Choose from Multiple Cloud-Based Environments

CloudWays currently offers the 5 most popular cloud-based environments on which you can host your WordPress websites which means that they act as intermediaries to these platforms. These platforms are:

1. Amazon AWS
2. Google Cloud
3. Linode
4. Vultr
5. Digital Ocean

Although all these platforms are quite remarkable in their own right but Vultr has really become popular in the high-performance SSD (Solid-State Drive) realm providing premium-level cloud hosting services to clients. However, you may also want to go through a comparison between aws vs azure vs gcp to learn more about the various cloud computing services before planning on investing in one.

3. Free Trial Period

Just in case you prefer testing water first before jumping right in, CloudWays offers a free 3-days trial period. You don’t have to submit any credit card information whatsoever.

Just sign up and see if CloudWays is actually a good fit for your needs.

Even if you don’t have a domain to test CloudWays, it provides a temporary domain to jumpstart your trial period.

There are a few limitations with the trial period tough. The maximum server size allowed is 2GB and the trial period is only allowed for Digital Ocean, Linode and Vultr instances.

4. 99.99% Server Uptime

Due to arrangements with the industry’s best cloud service providers, CloudWays has a history of 99.99% uptime which means that barring any exceptional event, CloudWays servers never go down.

Keeping in mind that CloudWays is trusted by mission-critical websites where going offline means a loss in revenue and most importantly, a dent in the prestige which is more or less, unrecoverable.

Therefore, it’s important to host your website on a platform that guarantees almost 100% uptime and this is what CloudWays does.

Since they offer to host websites on the 5 most popular cloud providers, you can rest assured that your website is in safe hands.

5. Super-Fast Servers with Awesome Average Response Time

One of CloudWays underlying features that have made them stand among the giants when it comes to WordPress hosting is its super-fast servers. At this point in time, CloudWays servers are performing better than other web hosting services like Kinsta and WP Engine.

That’s a remarkable achievement especially when we keep in mind that the experiences of both these companies are way more than CloudWays and this is the reason that many veteran webmasters have switched to CloudWays.

For instance, I normally follow Tom Dupuis’s blog, Online Media Masters on WordPress-related issues. A few days ago, his article on why he switched to CloudWays sheds light on how he improved his overall speed by making the switch.

The crux of the matter is that if you want to rank higher on search engines and given the weight that the search engines, especially Google have started to give to the overall website speed, CloudWays could be your best bet.

6. Enhanced Website Security

With the types of online attacks on the rise and the attackers getting more sophisticated after each passing day, CloudWays place special emphasis on their customers’ website’s integrity.

CloudWays offer numerous top-notch security features that ensure that your website not only thwarts any harmful attacks but also keeps running at optimal settings.

Some of the security features offered by CloudWays are:

1. Firewalls
2. Login Security
3. Bot Protection
4. Database Security
5. SSL Certificates (See below)
6. OperatingSystem’s Security and Patching
7. Two Factor Authentication
8. End-to-End Encryption
9. Suspicious Device Login Control

In addition to these, CloudWays also partners with the famous Crowdsourcing Cybersecurity Platform, BugCrowd so that any vulnerability is found out and communicated in time by a huge number of international “bug finders”.

7. FREE SSL Certificates

Given the importance of the SSL certificate and how they’ve become next to necessary to rank well in the search engine results, installing them free on your websites is a useful feature one can ask for and being a CloudWays user, this is just the right cut for you.

CloudWays offer free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates for all your websites. Doesn’t matter how many websites you install on a single server, all of them will have the protection of SSL encryption.

8. Auto-Healing Servers

Equipped with auto-healing capabilities, CloudWays ensure that your apps and websites keep running without any latency or downtime.

What this means (without dwelling too deep into the technical mumbo jumbo) is that as soon as the CloudWays server detects any problem in the app, it automatically restarts to avoid any pro-long crash or downtime.

9. Application Performance Monitoring for Apps

CloudWays provide a comprehensive dashboard to its clients so that they can monitor each and every aspect of their apps and perform necessary tweaks to fine-tune the performance of their websites.

Using CloudWays APM, you can monitor your website and apps performances, resource consumption and even the performance of your databases. In short, you have access to a complete and holistic view of your website. From front-end to back-end which provides greater control to the users.

10. One Free Website Migration

If the biggest concern of migrating your current website to CloudWays is that you’ll mess up during the migration process then you don’t need to worry. CloudWays support staff is always there to help you out.

CloudWays offer free migration to transfer your WordPress websites from the old hosting provider to the CloudWays. And you don’t even have to lift a finger.

All you have to do is to contact their team, provide them with the relevant information and they will take care of everything in a seamless manner.

However, do keep in mind that although you can host multiple websites on a single server (account) but the free migration is only available for one website per account.

11. 24/7/365 Support

CloudHost’s support team is available 24/7/365 via live chat and email and ticketing system. But wait, these troubleshooting channels are provided by almost all the premium-grade web hosting services so what’s the big deal with CloudWays anyway?

Right?

Absolutely true. After all, they’re charging extra bucks just to make sure that their customers are not left hanging in the middle.

So what’s something different that CloudWays is doing?

Well, in addition to the above mediums CloudWays also provides two additional support-related add-ons to keep you up and running. These are the Advanced and Premium Support Add-On.

With these extra support add-ons, you will have access to a dedicated support engineer, access to 24/7/365 private slack channel and phone support.

12. Transparent and Pay-As-You-Go Pricing Model

One of the key aspects that play a vital role in scaling is how CloudWays Pricing works.

In addition to the traditional monthly billing, they offer Pay-As-You-Go (PAYG) pricing model that ensures that there’s no disruption in services in case the website uses more than its resources.

Additionally, the clients can always see their total bill right within their dashboard which means that there are no hidden charges whatsoever.

13. Easy Vertical Scaling of Resources

CloudWays provides a very useful feature, what they call, “Vertical Scaling”. The benefit of this feature is that you can upgrade or downgrade resources based on your traffic needs.

This feature works best for the websites such as those that publish viral content, e-learning websites, e-commerce websites with seasonal spikes in traffic, etc.

With vertical scaling, you can upgrade your web hosting resources by adding more computing power (CPU, Memory and Storage) when you need them most without your visitors experiencing any 502-Error and then downgrade back to normal resources once the traffic settles down.

This way, you won’t end up paying for unused resources that you’d normally do for any other shared hosting plan where the resources are pretty much static.

14. Server and Application Side Caching

CoudWays deploys prominent server and app-side caching software such as Redis, Memcache and Varnish in what they call, Thunderstack. All these battle-tested servers and caching apps turn your website into a high-performance app with a boost up of almost 10 times when compared to the other web hosts.

For this reason, users who switch to CloudWays see a dramatic boost in their website speeds and improvement in the average response time.

15. Choose from 65+ Data Center Locations Worldwide

If you want to serve your web pages swiftly to your visitors, it’s recommended to always choose the data center closest to the visitor’s location. This not only ensures fast loading times but also a great user experience.

Since CloudWays has its data centers in more than 65 different locations distributed in 4 different continents, you can easily leverage location hosting to serve web pages as fast as possible.

In addition to the already existing 65+ locations, CloudWays has plans to increase this number in the coming days. So as far as the server hardware infrastructure is concerned, you can rest assured that CloudWays is not going to leave you hanging in the middle.

CloudWays – Pros & Cons

Keeping in mind that there’s always room for improvement, with all the upsides of CloudWays that we’ve discussed above, now let’s also have a look at some of the downsides where CloudWays can really focus to become even better than what they are.

Here are some pros and cons of CloudWays!

Who Should & Should Not Use CloudWays?

Just like any other web host, CloudWays clearly has its particular customer segment. Although CloudWays serves a wider customer base due to its over-the-top features, still, there are very few users who won’t find it comfortable. So let’s see who should and should not use CloudWays.

CloudWays is Best for…!

1. Bloggers who want high-quality or premium level WordPress Hosting services at affordable rates
2. Those for whom speed is utmost priority
3. Website ownerswith at least bignners level technical knowledge of server management
4. Web Designing agency who also offer web hosting as a part of their overall services. They can use CloudWays reseller services to promote web hosting

Who Should Seek CloudWays Alternatives?

1. Those looking for cheap WordPress Web Hosting solutions
2. Those who have no technical knowledge of server management. Not even beginner level.

CloudWays – TrustPilot – User Reviews

CloudWays enjoys quite healthy reviews on one of the most popular user-review websites, TrustPilot. To this date, staggering 1,188 users have left their opinion about this web host company where 91% have rated it as Excellent and 2% as good. Whereas, just 7% consider it either poor or bad.

What this means is that out of every 10 CloudWays users, at least 8 users are overwhelmingly satisfied with their services. That’s quite remarkable especially when you consider other WordPress Hosting and that’s why, overall, CloudWays enjoys 4.7-star ratings out of 5.0 on TrustPilot.

Now, let’s have a look at what the users have to say about CloudWays by first starting with the negative reviews.

Top Ranking (#2) in G2’s Grid

To add further to CloudWays accolades, famous software review website, G2 ranks CloudWays among the top leadership position in Managed Hosting category.

Now, let’s see some customers’ feedbacks from different users coming from different backgrounds.

Negative Reviews

The following negative review is important as it gives you insights that for whom CloudWays is suitable and that is why I included it here as the criticism is quite informative.

Here’s some more from a different website

Positive Reviews

As seen above, there are literally hundreds of positive CloudWays reviews and feedbacks sprawling all around the web so I had to choose very few of them. I hope that still, these will give you a good idea about the overall quality of CloudWays as a web hosting company.

Here are some more feedbacks from satisfied customers on the website, HostAdvice.

And here are are some random customer feedbacks from different websites.

Mixed Reviews

In the end, here are sort of mixed reviews taken from different websites that discuss both the ups and downs of CloudWays in a single feedback.

How do Other Web Hosting Review Websites Rate CloudWays?

So what do the other web hosting review websites say about CloudWays and how do they rate them according to their own criteria?

Well, here’s the answer.

Website Name	Score
WHTOP.com	4.7 / 10.0
WebsiteRating.com	3.5 / 5.0
HostAdvice.com	4.6 / 5.0
ToolTester.com	4.2 / 5.0
PCMag.com	4.0 / 5.0
WPBeginner.com	Not Found
TrustPilot.com	4.7 / 5.0
HostingManual.net	3.5 / 0.0
TechRadar.com	4.0 / 5.0
Digital.com	4.0 / 5.0
HostScore.net	Not Found
G2.com	4.9 / 5.0
WebsitePlanet.com	4.7 / 5.0
Average Rating	3.9 / 5.0

CloudWays – Sentiment Analysis

Granted that the above overall ratings can be muddled as these websites have to promote their affiliate links and the chances of visitors buying through their affiliate links will be a lot lower if they rip these web hosting apart.

Although, I’m not accusing the above websites to be guilty of unnecessarily inflating their ratings as some of them have really made their names in giving useful advice to their visitors.

I’m just saying that it won’t harm to get verdicts from neutral sources and that’s why I’ve performed a basic sentimental analysis just to shed light on the emotions that pertain around CloudWays. Although not entirely foolproof but I’m sure this will give you a much better insight.

Platform	Positive	Negative	Neutral
Twitter	44.6%	5.0%	50.5%
Facebook	N/A	N/A	N/A
Reddit	35.0%	12.0%	53.0%
Instagram	21.0%	1.4%	69.4%
DailyMotion	66.7%	11.1%	22.2%
Flickr	27.0%	4.0%	69.0%
Vk.com	28.0%	2.0%	70.0%
Vimeo.com	20.0%	0.0%	80.0%
Average	34.7%	5.1%	60.2%

So What’s the Verdict? Do I Recommend CloudWays?

So, is CloudWays legit and worth your time and money?

Or if you already have a WordPress website hosted elsewhere then is it worthwhile to have it migrated to CloudWays?

No doubt, CloudWays has managed to make its name within a relatively short time span. They provide reliable infrastructures at affordable rates. Their servers are quick and seldom go down. Furthermore, they have a helpful team of support engineers who are available to help you out just in case you get stuck.

Even better, they do not charge obnoxiously high when compared to its cheaper and slower alternatives which means that the value they provide against the premium is much higher than the overall cost.

So, YES, I’d definitely recommend CloudWays.

Interested in CloudWays Alternatives…?

Do you want to try CloudWays Alternatives?

If you’re one of those skeptics who just don’t get convinced quickly and prefer testing all the options before settling on one then I have a bunch of CloudWays Alternatives that are either (more or less) the same as CloudWays or are a bit cheaper. Of course, then you’ll have to settle with a relatively lower quality of services.

Here are some of these CloudWays Alternatives that you can try!

Alternatives Similar to CloudWays

1. Kinsta
2. WPX Hosting
3. Pressidium
4. FlyWheel
5. WP Engine
6. Media Temple
7. Liquid Web

Cheaper CloudWays Alternatives

1. A2 Hosting
2. InterServer
3. DreamHost
4. InMotion Hosting
5. Blue Host
6. iPage
7. GoDaddy
8. HostGator

Final Thoughts

Finally, while approaching the end and wrapping up this CloudWay Review, what I’d say is that CloudWays is definitely worth giving a shot.

In fact, if cost is not your prime concern and you have a little technical knowledge, I believe you should host your website on CloudWays.

However, if you feel that undergoing the grueling drill of going through all the features or even if you have no idea that what and where to actually look for as you don’t think to be a techie or geek, then I’ve written an article that addresses your concern.

Have a go at it here: How to pick the best web host for your WordPress website?

Moreover, if you find all these details a bit too overwhelming and you want me to recommend any web host straight away then you can also contact me!

Let me know your details, requirements and I’ll help you figure out the best WordPress web hosting company.