TrustRadius: an HG Insights company

Cloudways

Score9.9 out of 10

19 Reviews and Ratings

What is Cloudways?

Cloudways, by DigitalOcean, offers a range of managed hosting solutions, including managed Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla, Magento, and others, with a choice of infrastructure providers and media delivery via CloudwaysVPN, and CloudwaysBot notification system.

Categories & Use Cases

Media

Managed Services
Team Management

1 / 2

Cloudways Review

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Cloudways for most of our international clients. Hosting, malware control, easy management, easy spin-up of sites. Overall we love Cloudways for a good service. The customer support is great. It has solved a lot of our server-upkeep work costs, because the system is very intuitive to just click around, less knowledgeable people can manage the hosting now.

Pros

  • Wordpress Hosting
  • Email through Rackspace
  • ElasticEmail setup

Cons

  • It could be easier to configure many wp installs on one domain
  • It could be easier to migrate apps between servers or accounts
  • Access to apps could be one-click from the main dashboard view instead of three-clicks

Return on Investment

  • It simplified our systems, it's Cloudways + mainwp for maintenance and hosting now.
  • It allowed us to save on server maintenance work costs.
  • The email is easy to spin up around it if someone doesn't want google workspace.

Usability

Alternatives Considered

DigitalOcean, GoDaddy and HostGator

Other Software Used

Cloudflare, v0 by Vercel, Zoho Mail, Zoho Calendar, Wordpress.com

Cloudways has helped our company grow and scale over the last eight years

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Cloudways has been our primary web hosting provider for the last eight years hosting all of our websites. We have multiple sites running on the Cloudways platform that utilize WordPress and Joomla. We switched to Cloudways after our previous provider was unable to scale at the pace of our growth and we outgrew their capabilities.

Pros

  • Their Tech/Customer Service is top notch
  • Their flexible pricing
  • Their stability
  • Their scalability
  • Slack integration

Cons

  • More flexible notifications

Return on Investment

  • Their $250/month service plan is beyond well worth it.
  • The ability to scale servers up and down has allowed us to stay within budget.
  • Their realtime billing lets us know exactly where we are throughout the month.
  • Their recommendations are always spot on.

Usability

Alternatives Considered

SiteGround

Other Software Used

Slack

Dependable and easy to understand hosting for Wordpress.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

A client was using

Pantheon hosting for their website; we needed an environment to support us with

two aspects.

1) Scaling website resources to support seasonal spikes in

concurrent users easily

2) Reliable uptime and consistent bandwidth and

latency. I looked at a number of suppliers and tech stacks (cloud, VPS, shared

hosting)etc.

Finally, I concluded Cloudways as the top choice as they would

host the site with the vendor of our choice and provide us with an easy-to-use

solution for management and scaling. The website is connected to native Android

and ioS Apps, and there are a lot of API requests to sync with the apps. With

all of this going on, Cloudways has been dependable and one less thing to worry

about.

Pros

  • Server Management (visual intuitive tools)
  • Scaling Servers (through peaks and troughs)
  • Customer Service has been consistent and patient

Cons

  • Their free alternative to WP Rocket could be made more user-friendly and easier to understand
  • Create a function to automatically report heavy usage to specific email IDs

Most Important Features

  • Easy rapid scaling
  • Cloud server management made easy
  • Easy to manage beta environment

Return on Investment

  • Increase in consistent uptime
  • Increase in speed optimisation

Alternatives Considered

Hostinger and SiteGround

Other Software Used

Hostinger, SiteGround

A good abstraction over complex cloud server setups

Pros

  • Easy to set up
  • Inside user dashboard is amazing.
  • Live chat support is too handy.

Cons

  • Costly - Adds up additional cost over same servers that u can buy directly from Linode, AWS, Google etc.
  • Live chat support agents can access your code. Thus server access is not limited to the original user/owner.
  • Less control over certain features such as turning off PHP FPM

Return on Investment

  • We were able to reduce load on our main server.
  • By migrating social sentiment platform to cloudways, we were able to scale and run it effeciently.
  • It saved lot of time as well in terms of server management.

Alternatives Considered

Linode, DigitalOcean, SiteGround, GoDaddy and Bluehost

Other Software Used

Linode, DigitalOcean, Amazon Web Services

Absolutely Hands Down THE Best

Pros

  • Automatic Daily One Click Restore Backups
  • Integrated CDN
  • Easy & Intuitive Alternate Interface to cPanel and WHM
  • Very Affordable for High Specs
  • 24/7 Customer Support is Extremely Helpful
  • Serve & Application Management is a Breeze
  • Choose from Multiple Server Locations

Cons

  • CDN isn't free, but reasonably priced

Return on Investment

  • Massive ROI compared to Go Daddy's Server

Alternatives Considered

GoDaddy, SiteGround Web Hosting and Bluehost

Other Software Used

Affinity Publisher