Cloudways is my web host of choice. Powerful virtual private servers with high performance and a lot of horsepower for your money.

My Rating:

5 / 5

Pros

  • Powerful and flexible cloud-based hosting for your sites.
  • Virtual private servers for more power and better security
  • Easy web admin panel to make management easy (no cPanel crap)
  • A number of useful add-ons
  • Good support

Cons

  • Can feel a little nerdy for newbies
  • Doesn’t handle email hosting or domains so you need to use outside services

Cloudways is my preferred hosting solution and what I use personally as well as for a multitude of my clients. Simply, you get more power for your money.

Cloudways providers virtual private servers via 5 different cloud providers: Digital Ocean, Linode, Amazon, Vultr and Google Cloud. You pick which provider you want to use and Cloudways takes care of setting up the server and providing a web-based admin panel to easily manage everything.

Basically, Cloudways takes the usually geeky experience of managing a virtual private server (or VPS) and makes it about as easy as any WordPress host you’ve seen. You also have easy, 1-click app installs, staging sites, free SSL, and all the conveniences you would expect.

Unlike most shared web hosts, using a VPS via Cloudways means that your resources are your’s. Your site is not affected by the actions of others and you’re not sharing resources. You’re also not subject to the security issues of other customers. Your server is PRIVATE and you control it.

Cloudways is awesome for dynamic membership sites because you can control and tweak your server environment for the best performance.

As a Cloudways customer, you’ve also got access to a number of optional add-ons that can save you a ton of money. For instance, you can put the full power of CloudFlare Enterprise behind your site starting at only $4.99/month. You can send bulk email using ElasticEmail with prices that aren’t too much higher than using AmazonSES.

One thing to know about Cloudways is that they don’t handle your email or your domains. They are not an “all in one” host. They just do hosting really well. So, you will need to use a separate email service. Also, you will need to use a separate server your domains and DNS. Personally, I use FastMail for my email and CloudFlare for my domain DNS.

As for support, they’re quite good. You can pull up the chat widget and start off with their support bot to see if you can get an automated answer. However, it is pretty easy to talk to a human. That’s what I usually do and typically I am in a live chat with a person within a minute or two. Also, in my experience, their support people actually know what they’re doing. It is pretty rare that I get a scripted answer that assumes I’m an idiot. I’m talking to real people who know their systems.

All in all, I like Cloudways a lot. They are the best hosting solution I’ve used so far.

That’s why I use it.

That’s why I’ve moved so many of my clients to Cloudways.

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