Cloudways Review
The Power of the Cloud, with None of the Hassle
As a pioneer in – and popularizer of – cloud hosting, Cloudways offers users serious advantages, including incredible uptime, extremely flexible scalability, and overall better performance than traditional web hosts.
Why should you even consider cloud hosting in the first place? Well, clouds allow multiple servers to host your site, creating a built-in redundancy that amplifies the speed and security of your site. Plus, cloud hosting allows you to quickly scale your site up or down in response to traffic surges. But if you’ve ever tried to set up cloud hosting on your own, you know it isn’t always the easiest to understand or use.
Cloudways allows you to ignore the annoying technical complexities and focus on building your site. In other words: you can choose Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services, or one of several other infrastructures to host your site, and Cloudways will actually manage your cloud hosting for you.
You could be an individual freelancer building your portfolio or a self-employed entrepreneur who sells robot pants and needs an online store. You could be the manager of the local hair salon and bait shop, and you just need to get your WordPress site on some reliable cloud hosting. Whatever the case, Cloudways’ managed hosting plans are designed to help you get your content onto the cloud easily and reliably.
Flexibility, WordPress Specialization, and Strong Security? Check, Check, and Check Again!
One of Cloudways’ strengths is its flexibility. Not only can you choose from a range of top cloud providers, Cloudways also helps you manage everything, including WordPress and your server security.
But before we get into the good stuff, there’s one downside to note: Unlike most traditional hosts, Cloudways does not offer email or domain registration. So if you want your own email address on your domain, you will need to find an outside email solution. However, Cloudways does have an elastic email add-on and an SMTP add-on that you can use to configure an external SMTP service for email delivery and management.
Simple, Affordable Hosting Plans Keep Things Simple
Cloudways offers hosting on top of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud providers such as DigitalOcean, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Linode, and Vultr. Like with traditional shared hosting, Cloudways lets you choose from several predesigned hosting plans, each with its own combination of bandwidth and storage.
Just pick your cloud hosting provider, pick your plan, and go.
You even get to decide whether you want to pay by the month or by the hour. And no matter what you choose, you can host as many sites and applications on that plan as you wish (provided, of course, that you don’t exceed the bandwidth/storage limits).
Dead-Easy, One-Click WordPress Hosting
Cloudways is designed to make WordPress hosting mindlessly easy. You get:
- One-click installation, backups, and restores
- A built-in cache plugin
- The ability to migrate as many WordPress sites as you want for free with the WordPress Migrator Plugin
- The ability to scale your WordPress server
WordPress hosting with Cloudways is easy as pickle pie. Okay, that’s not a thing as far as I know, and it probably shouldn’t be. The point is that it’s very easy.
And if you want to test your WordPress website (or websites) before you go live, Cloudways allows you to create a staging area. Here, you can clone your site and test to your heart’s content without disrupting your site visitors’ experience.
Account Management Is Here for Teams
Cloudways allows you to create different accounts for team members and, if necessary, limit their access to different aspects of your servers. This makes it perfect for development teams where, for example, your system administrator needs access to the actual hosting settings, but your web designer only needs access to the actual WordPress files.
Being able to adjust the level of access for different team members is useful both for security and simply for preventing accidents.
You Can Never Have Too Much Protection
Cloudways also covers your financial and technological backside with commonsense security features.
This is accomplished with two-factor authentication, regular OS patches, firewalls, and “auto-healing servers.” (Basically, “auto-healing” means that the servers themselves will take pre-programmed steps to get your site back up and running if it goes down.)
If the worst ever happens, there are automatic backups too (though they’re not precisely free – more on that below). You can set the frequency of the backups, anywhere from every hour to every week, or on demand.
You also get free SSL certificates, which is always a bonus. (For the non-nerds, that means all information sent to and from the website is encrypted. This protects your site visitors’ data. Also, Google gives an SEO bump to sites with SSL.)
EASE OF USE
One-Click Users Everywhere, Rejoice
I’d say Cloudways is designed to make your life as easy as possible in general. The control panel consolidates everything you’ll need, from the aforementioned one-click WordPress installs to storage and RAM scaling. Let’s have a closer look at some of the details:
Free WordPress Site Migration
While Cloudways is not totally beginner friendly, it’s still a lot easier than doing everything yourself. For example, if you don’t have the time to teach yourself website migration, the Cloudways engineers will migrate your site for you.
They’ll only do this for free once, but it’s still a very useful thing. If your current host just can’t handle the popularity of your Frank Sinatra* fan blog, Cloudways will get your site back up and running with little fuss. If you’ve already used your one free migration, Cloudways has its own dedicated plugin so that you can migrate your own sites with ease.
*I feel like I shouldn’t need to tell Gen Z to look him up, being the ultra-famous singer he was… but just in case, there you go.
The Control Panel Keeps You Up to Date
Cloudways’ control panel has a monitoring feature with more than a dozen real-time options to keep an eye on your server, which is something that few other providers give you. In addition, its control panel features vertical scaling, advanced app control, server cloning, cache controls, and more perks that Plesk and cPanel do not include.
CloudwaysBot Has Your Back When Those Humans Are Busy
Cloudways also has CloudwaysBot, the world’s first personal smart hosting assistant that keeps you up to date on the health of your website and cloud server. CloudwaysBot can be integrated to deliver notifications through Slack, email, or an API.
These alerts can be about anything from auto-scaling your storage and bandwidth to the general health of your hosting. It’s stuff you’ll want to know.
And if you’re confused about anything, Cloudways’ knowledge base contains comprehensive information about everything related to the platform and services.
PERFORMANCE
With Its Own Customized Caching System, How Can Cloudways Go Wrong?
Cloudways offers users a unique optimization technology called ThunderStack, which combines features from several server technologies to give you fully optimized managed WordPress hosting, and guarantees better speed.
The Cloudways CDN also improves server speed, as does the fact that Cloudways has more than two dozen data centers around the globe, allowing you to choose the region best suited for your site.
Note that Cloudways does not have a specific guarantee or any compensation if it does not meet a certain uptime goal. That said, each cloud hosting provider does have an uptime guarantee that you’ll want to check out before signing up. To help you make your choice, Cloudways keeps an up-to-date log of its performance on a special dedicated page.
In the end, your actual site performance will be dictated only partially by Cloudways. It also has a lot to do with how your site is built and which cloud infrastructure your site is on.
SUPPORT
Cloudways’ Agents Are Eager to Help, If Not Always Able to Help Completely
Cloudways offers 24/7/365 support for “guaranteed peace of mind.” Cloudways customers and prospects can email support, request a call from Cloudways support, or chat live with customer support staff. Response times are quick, usually between 30-60 seconds.
However, only customers with full accounts can submit help tickets. Trial customers need to upgrade to access this help feature. All paying customers get access to standard 24/7/365 live chat support from a trained team member… but for advanced support, you’ll need to purchase an Advanced or Premium support add-on.
My Live Chat Experience Was Pretty Great
Cloudways’ friendly customer support agents are more than ready to answer your questions. My exchange with a Cloudways agent began on a friendly footing and only got better from there. The agent took the time to ask questions and clarify what I needed before making a plan recommendation.
Without being asked, they even gave me a clear definition of what a CDN is, just in case. This sort of attention to beginners is not only helpful, it’s essential to running a good business.
The support agent wasn’t always quite as helpful as one might hope. That is, there were a couple of things the agent didn’t get around to explaining. It didn’t completely ruin the experience for me, but it was disappointing nonetheless.
PRICING
Cloudways lets you pay monthly or by the hour – it’s your choice.
Of course, if you go through Cloudways, you’ll be paying more than if you went to the cloud providers directly. However, what you’re paying for is the Cloudways control panel, security, and support assistance. You’re paying for the WordPress-specific features that will help your site load faster and run smoothly, like an R&B singer covered in butter.
With Cloudways, you can easily scale your hosting plan up or down as needed, so you’re never paying for more server resources than you’re actually using. This feature isn’t unique to Cloudways, but it’s good to keep in mind. At the end of the month, Cloudways bills you for the amount of resources you’ve used in that period of time.
You can test out Cloudways’ services for free with its three-day trial. Three days isn’t a lot, but you’ll at least get an idea of how the service works. Also note: Cloudways does not offer a standard 30-, 60-, or 90-day money-back guarantee, but it’s kind of moot anyway thanks to the pay-as-you-go pricing.
You can also add funds to your account to prepay for the services you need. In this case, you can sort of get a refund. Cloudways will refund unused prepaid account funds, if a request is made within three months of adding the funds.
And another thing: Cloudways does not offer free backups. You are charged per gigabyte of storage used, no matter what server provider or data center location you choose. Again, this makes sense for the company’s pricing model, but it’s something to keep in mind. You may want to clean out old backups periodically, to save money.
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But first, let’s delve a little bit into how Hostinger came about as a web host.
A long time ago in the faraway city of Kaunas, Lithuania, a small company by the name of “Hosting Media” was formed, with dreams of making waves in the web hosting industry. 6 years and 1 million users later, that dream was realized and the company formally changed their name to Hostinger.
Since then, Hostinger hasn’t stopped growing. They’ve set up shop in 39 countries, established 6 data centers all around the globe (with one more being built in their home country of Lithuania), have accumulated over 29 million users as of 2017, and they show no signs whatsoever of slowing down.
They aim to help their users learn, create, and grow, and they might have done just that with their level of services and crazy affordable prices.
10 Reasons Why Hostinger Is The Right Host For You!
1. Hostinger Is REALLY Fast
We put our Hostinger US test site through a speed stress test using our proprietary server speed checker (still the best and only server speed checker in the world #shamelessplug), benchmarking it against Google’s recommendation of 200 ms.
2. 99.9% Uptime Guarantee!
Few people out there take uptime guarantee seriously, but to us it can make or break our opinions on a web host. Small business sites need to be up as much as possible, as any sort of downtime means loss of potential sales.
Extended downtimes can lead to our sites losing rank on Google, which is bad news for the business.
While some web hosting companies provide uptime guarantee, some of them can be rather sketchy, sliding in terms like “release of payment is up to our due discretion” which means that they can choose not to reimburse whatever they guaranteed.
We combed through Hostinger’s TOS and found no traces of such nonsense.
If your site’s downtime dips below 99.9% due to Hostinger’s faults, just contact them to get 5% of your monthly fee back.
3. Faster Loading With Cache Manager
We’re just so happy that Hostinger has come up with so many ways of improving loading speeds. One of them is their very own Cache Manager. Enabling it allows for quicker load times and improved speeds!
Here’s what you need to do to turn it on.
Enter hPanel and hit “Manage” on the site you want to turn it on. Scroll down to “Advanced”. You’ll see “Cache Manager” listed as one of the options. Click on “Cache Manager”
Once you’re inside, all you have to do is click on “Change” and you should see the “Automatic Cache” button turn green, indicating that it’s On. Click on “Purge All”, and you’re good to go!
5. Excellent Custom Dashboard
Hostinger is one of the very few web hosting companies with cajones big enough to mess with the UI of cPanel. Better yet, they managed to get everything done right.
Branded hPanel, Hostinger’s custom dashboard is clean, a breeze to use and very intuitive. All the features are sorted by categories, and their well designed minimalistic icons give an almost Muji like feel to the dashboard. You get the feeling that there’s a place for everything and everything is in its place. It’s so intuitive that i think someone with no experience will be able to use cPanel quite effectively.
Kudos to Hostinger’s UI & UX team for their excellent custom dashboard!
6. Responsive Support (They’re Fun Too!)
Sometimes, communicating with a web hosting company’s support team can make one want to physically reach through the phone and strangle the useless donkey on the other line. Other times, it can pleasant, productive, and even downright awesome. We are pleased to say that from our experience with Hostinger’s support team, they belong to the latter category.
We didn’t get a chance to submit a ticket (our installs went off without a hitch) so we just contacted their live chat to see how they responded to some basic issues, and we were impressed!
Not only did the support team respond to us almost immediately (we had to wait a few seconds, but that’s pretty amazing considering we had to wait close to 30 mins with some other web hosting), they were knowledgeable, patient, and get this – they were FUN. They will also hold your hand and soothe your troubled soul as they assist you in fixing your problems step by step.
7. Free Domain!
If you folks didn’t already know, to start your website, you need to buy a domain name from a domain registrar on top of paying for web hosting. Little expenses like these can add up and snowball, and it can really hurt small business owners especially when they’re just starting out.
Getting a free domain name from your web hosting can really help, and Hostinger is truly making a difference by supporting new entrepreneurs by giving a domain for free!
The only thing is that with domains, you’ll also want to get WHOIS protection which protects your online identity. Some domain registrars like Namecheap provides WHOIS protection for free, but this isn’t the case with all registrars. More often than not, you’ll have to pay for it, and unfortunately, this is the case with Hostinger.
But look on the bright side – you’ll be getting a FREE DOMAIN! Paying $5 a year for WHOIS protection really is peanuts compared to that. It’s a worthy investment!
9. Great Introductory Price
Last but not least, Hostinger’s introductory prices are really what sets this web hosting company apart from the competition.
Hostinger has almost all of the same features as a premium web host, but at a fraction of the price; our Premium Plan only costs $2.89/month, and their entry level Single plan is only $0.99/month, while our current favourite web host, SiteGround, charges $6.99 for their entry level account.
In terms of value, we have to say that Hostinger provides one of the best bang for your buck in the industry, especially for those that are just starting out!
10. They Own The Zyro Website Builder
Expanding an already impressive product range, Hostinger recently added on to their inventory a website builder. Zyro is aimed at the real beginners among users and takes simplicity to a whole new level.
What Zyro offers is a more holistic experience. They’ve further simplified the basic website builder and added on external features that will help users build complete websites quickly. These include the ability to auto-generate content, streamline design, and more.
Things We Were Disappointed With Hostinger
So far, we really like Hostinger as a web host but it’s just not realistic if we say that they’ve got no flaws. Here are some of the things we weren’t too pleased about.
1. No Daily Backup
The lack of this feature broke my heart and made me cry a little inside. We were so accustomed to daily backups with other web hosting that the lack of it made us feel a little insecure.
It only comes free with their Business Shared Hosting plan (which costs more, obviously) or it can be bought at $0.95/month. It sucks that it doesn’t come free with the premium shared hosting account, but think of it this way – Hostinger’s introductory prices are already the lowest in the market. They deserve to make a little more money off certain features.
If you don’t want to pay more for backup services, you can still rest assured – Hostinger provides free WEEKLY backup for all their accounts.
It’s not as good as a daily backup but hey, it’s free.
2. No Free SSL Yay! Let’s Encrypt Is Available Now
An SSL certificate is really important because it establishes a secure connection between your customer and your site. This creates trust, prompting them to feel more secure when making purchases from you. It’s also the thing that puts the “S” in “https” which helps instill confidence in your site (how likely are you to make any transactions when you don’t see “https”?).
Google will also display the text “this site is not secure” when loading any sites without SSL in the Chrome browser, which makes it less likely for people to buy things off your site.
SSL is also one of the easiest ways to boosts your site’s SEO rankings, hence the importance we place on the feature. It sucks that Hostinger doesn’t have it for free, but here’s a little tip – hop on over to Cloudflare and sign up for an account to get free SSL. Problem solved!
Verdict: Is Hostinger The Right Web Host For You?
After messing about with our test sites, playing with the features and getting an overall feel of Hostinger’s web hosting services, we’ve gotta say that Hostinger truly is a very solid host!
Their user interface is easy to use, they’ve got convenient 1-click set ups for WordPress (and other popular apps) and their server response times can hold its own against some of our top tier A+ ranked web hosts.
We found their service to be incredibly beginner friendly, thanks to their outstanding support team! Trained with their “zero-tier support” system, they’ll gladly guide you step-by-step in solving any issues you encounter.
Compared to our favorite web hosting company, SiteGround, we found that Hostinger’s speed is on par with SiteGround leading by a little bit. It’s important to note that these two companies serve very different markets.
If you’re just starting out or thinking about getting your feet wet in the blogging business, you won’t have to worry about a thing when going with Hostinger. Their excellent services combined with their insanely low price points makes them the host with the best value for money. If you find that you’re not getting enough down the road, you’ll always have the option to upgrade to premium features!
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Cloudways Pros
- Exceptional Uptime
- Live Chat Support 24/7
- Free Trial Available
- Fast Page Load Time
- Free Site Transfer
- Free SSL Certificate
Cloudways Cons
- Premium Support Costs Extra
- No Domain Registration
- Extra Cost for Email