Cloudways is a web hosting service that uses its powerful servers to provide its customers with high quality web hosting without breaking the bank. In this Cloudways overview, we’ll look at what it does well and what it does not.
While the service is praised for how easy it is to set up and the power of its hosting abilities, some customers critique the service for missing some features that its competitors have like emails and domain registration.
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Pros And Cons Of Cloudways
One of the best qualities of Cloudways is how easy it is to set up with you being able to get started with this product in a very short amount of time.
On top of this, the service is highly commended for how good its uptime is, as well as its support for a variety of different apps.
Cloudways also features flexible pricing options with different account tiers, including a pay as you go payment plan.
As well as this you can even try the service free before paying anything, and finally, its site cloning abilities are very well rated.
The main issues with Cloudways have already been mentioned in the introduction with the lack of any domain registration, and no emails in base tiers with them needing an extra cost.
While Cloudways is now in a relatively saturated market with web hosting services and even cloud based web hosting being relatively common, luckily, Cloudways manages to stand out with some of its unique features.
The free trial and pay as you go payment options make it, so you can get a good feel of the service before having to pay which is a bonus above its competitors.
Cloudways lets you choose from different hosting platforms like Google Cloud Platform and Amazon Web Services.
Setting Up Cloudways
As mentioned above, one of the reasons why Cloudways is so popular is how easy it is to set up, and one of the best parts of this is how it lets you completely build a website without having to spend anything.
This is part of the 3-day trial account which lets you either make an account from scratch or log in using external sources like Github, LinkedIn, or Google.
Once you have done this, you choose which CMS (content management system) you want to use. The choices include:
- Joomla
- Drupal
- Kokan
- Media Wiki
- Magento
- PHP Stack
- WordPress
- Prestashop
Because of all these choices, Cloudways is often praised for the level of flexibility available in the service.
After you have chosen your CMS, you also get a choice in the type of server you want to use with the options being; Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, DigitalOcean, Linode, Vultr, and Stackpath.
As well as the choice of servers you get to choose where the server is located.
Cloudways Pricing
Cloudways works by leveraging the resources of different servers to balance the website load without using a shared VPS hosting plan.
As mentioned in the introduction, Cloudways uses a pay as you go cloud hosting package which works at an hourly rate and charges you for how much you use it.
If you cancel it, you will not have to pay any extra for the time you have used the plan.
Cloudways is more flexible than some of its top competitors like HostGator and DreamHost.
A monthly plan can start off as low as $10 for 25GB of storage as well as 1TB of data transfers, 1GB of RAM, as well as a single core processor.
And this can go all the way up to $1035 monthly which goes up to 3840GB of storage with 12TB of data transfers, a massive 192GB of RAM, and an impressive 32-core processor.
These higher offers outclass many powerful server plans, which are offered, making Cloudways have some of the best specs available in this market.
What Is Missing?
Consumers’ biggest issue with Cloudways is that it does not offer domain registration. You must get your domain from a different service like Google Domains or NameCheap.
On top of this URL related issue is that connecting your purchased URL to Cloudways unconventional design can sometimes be quite bothersome and add an unnecessary hassle to the setup which is supposed to be relatively simple.
If you are just beginning with web hosting, setting up your URL with Cloudways can be quite a daunting task and will need a fair amount of patience and research.
As referenced previously, Cloudways email offering is quite poor compared to its competitors with no email accounts included in its plans.
Instead, you have to pay RackSpace which works with Cloudways to get an email account for a nominal monthly cost.
Cloudways Security And eCommerce
Cloudways library includes many eCommerce tools with Prestashop and Magento being great examples of this.
Cloudways security has also been safeguarded by their engineers to protect from any potential problems with the security getting regular upgrades and an SSL certificate is available for those who plan to sell products using Cloudways.
For additional security, you can install most security plugins for most CMSs and set up Cloudflare to act as denial of service (DoS) protection and a web application firewall (WAF).
Cloudways Overview Wrap Up
The best thing about Cloudways is its relatively simple and focused setup with a flexible way to pay for it to make it accessible for anyone interested in using Cloudways as their web hosting service.
It has good customer support as well as good uptime.
If you are interested, the 3-day trial is a great way to work out how you get on with the service, so trying this first is recommended.