Cloudways focuses on reliable cloud hosting, offering services from popular providers. It’s not a traditional provider but a reseller of other providers’ cloud hosting services. Regardless of that, it offers an in-house control panel and features that we’ve examined in our Cloudways review for 2026.

Having tested it for months, we can say the service is great overall, with a few caveats explained in this analysis. If you need alternatives, you can check our ranking of the best cloud hosting services instead. If not, it’s time to jump right into the Cloudways review and see if it’s a good choice for you.

Table of Contents

3.5

Cloudways

Cloudways provides fast and reliable cloud hosting options. It is quick and offers basic security at a reasonable price. However, many of its best security features require an additional payment, and the service may not be ideal for beginners.

Pros

Flexible plans
Solid performance
Easy WordPress setup
Responsive support

Cons

Many paid security features
Not the simplest hosting panel

Starting Price	$11 monthly
Money-Back Guarantee	No
Types of Hosting	Cloud hosting (Flexible & Autonomous)
Free Domain for a Year	No
Free SSL	Yes (Let’s Encrypt SSL)
Uptime Guarantee	99.9%
Available Storage	25 GB to 3,840 GB
Bandwidth	200 GB to 11 TB
Number of Websites	Unlimited
Website Backups	Automated daily backups
Customer Support	Live chat, tickets, knowledge base

Plans, Pricing, and Features

We’ll start the Cloudways review with its plans, pricing, and notable features.

As explained previously, the provider offers cloud hosting services from other providers. Therefore, the pricing structure is highly complex. The current offer counts five third-party cloud hosting server offers, such as:

DigitalOcean, whose prices start at $11 monthly
Vultr, whose prices start at $14 monthly
Linode, whose prices start at $14 monthly
Amazon Web Services, whose prices start at $20.56 monthly
Google Cloud, whose prices start at $37.33 monthly

DigitalOcean’s plans are understandably the least expensive. DigitalOcean purchased Cloudways a few years ago, so these offers aren’t technically “third-party,” and Cloudways wants to incentivize newcomers to try them out thanks to attractive and low-cost plans.

As expected, the priciest options are from Amazon and Google.

However, they’re the most flexible and support up to thousands of gigabytes of storage, hundreds of gigabytes of RAM, and dozens of CPU cores. An average user who doesn’t need the fastest hosting will find DigitalOcean plans sufficient; we tested Cloudways on them, too.

We recommend visiting Cloudways’ website for a full pricing breakdown. Each of the five providers offers several plan tiers and types, such as Standard, General Purpose, CPU Optimized, Compute Optimized, etc. Cloudways virtually has dozens, if not hundreds, of possibilities.

Notable Features in All Plans

One thing we found out in our Cloudways review was that each plan has the same features.

Some plans are pricier because of server resources. If you need more RAM, vCPU cores, bandwidth, or NVMe/SSD storage, you’ll pay exclusively for that. Meanwhile, even the least expensive DigitalOcean plan has:

Unlimited visits and hosted websites
Free website migration
Vertical scaling
Firewall with IP blocking
Free Let’s Encrypt SSL
Object Cache Pro and Redis Cache
WordPress Vulnerability Scanner

Moreover, users can enjoy automated and on-demand backups and a free Cloudflare CDN (paid extra), both of which are essential for server security and performance. Cloudways does lack some features compared to WPX Hosting and a few other rivals, but we’ll get there later in the review.

Is There a Free Trial?

Drawing from our experience, Cloudways is affordable and generous.

For one, you can get top-tier cloud hosting for as little as $11 monthly, and two, you can test it for free for three days without a credit card. Cloudways doesn’t have a 30-day refund policy like Hostinger and SiteGround, but they don’t have a no-credit-card free trial, either.

Cloudways thinks, and it may be right, that three days are enough to test the service property. We think it would benefit from at least a few-day refund policy, but hey, we won’t complain because the three-day trial lets you test even beefier, more powerful cloud hosting plans.

Is Cloudways Fast? Speed Test Results

Your mileage may vary depending on the chosen subscription plan.

If you splurge on an AWS server and spend over $100 monthly, you’ll be impressed with what you can do. However, even cheaper plans, like DigitalOcean Micro at $14 monthly, which we tested, performed admirably compared to other cloud hosting alternatives.

This is due to the many server locations, which make finding the one that matches your target audience a breeze. It’s worth noting that Cloudways uses a Nginx/Apache hybrid web server combo, which, in our experience, isn’t faster than pure Nginx and LiteSpeed servers.

Apache was fast back in the day, but now, it’s outdated.

Regardless, the inclusion of multiple caching types makes up for it, rendering Cloudways more than usable, even if you don’t decimate your bank account. Before we proceed with our speed test results, you can take a quick detour and examine our favorite cheap hosting services for more options.

GTmetrix Speed Test Results

We tested Cloudways on GTmetrix using the standard Canadian (Vancouver) server.

After purchasing Cloudways, we installed WordPress on our server and created a small blogging website. This means we created multiple pages, added a few dozen compressed images, and even added some videos to accompany them. We used the Astra theme on our WordPress site.

After publishing it, we went straight to GTmetrix and examined the following parameters:

TTFB or Time to First Byte
FCP or First Contentful Paint
LCP or Largest Contentful Paint
FLT or Fully Loaded Time
TTI or Time to Interactive

All five are fundamental metrics that describe your website’s performance. Here’s what we got:

TTFB	331 ms
FCP	487 ms
LCP	1.0 s
FLT	1.1 s
TTI	583 ms

We used DigitalOcean’s American server, and the tests were performed on GTmetrix’s Canadian server, so these are exceptional results.

The entire website loaded in about a second, and it became interactive in only half a second. Time to First Byte or TTFB was only 331 ms, indicating a short server response time, making the website feel snappy and responsive. How does it compare to its popular competitors?

Well, we can’t say it’s the fastest option ever.

WPX Hosting was faster in our tests, as was Hostinger’s cloud hosting. However, neither offers that flexible plans. If you pick a more powerful Google Cloud or AWS plan, Cloudways would likely perform even better and outperform nearly every “conventional” cloud hosting provider.

Uptime and Average Response Time

After speed tests, we tested Cloudways’ uptime and response time.

We used Pingdom and Loader to determine Cloudways’ reliability. It promises 99.9% uptime, and in our tests, it achieved 99.98%, which was exceptional. During a three-month period, Cloudways had two minor outages that lasted less than five minutes combined.

Meanwhile, its response times were great for cloud hosting. The average was 322 ms, which is slightly faster than WPX Hosting, for example. Even better, response times are stable, as the lowest was about 230 ms, and the highest was about 410 ms, both of which are considered solid results.

Is Cloudways Easy to Use? Our Experience

Cloud hosting is known to be more complex than regular, shared hosting, and Cloudways is no exception. You have to do many things manually, but ultimately, even as a beginner, you’ll find your way around its in-house hosting panel relatively effortlessly.

So, the first step is choosing the plan. After that, you follow the steps and are good to go. It’s nice that Cloudways lets you pre-install WordPress, as it’s not a fully managed WordPress service like Hostinger and SiteGround, although it can be if you spend more on it.

We selected the option to deploy WordPress right away, and when we clicked Launch, our server started working after a few minutes. This also opened up the control panel, which looked nothing like cPanel, hPanel, Site Tools, and other familiar hosting control panels.

Installing Apps

Cloudways allows you to easily install apps on your server. As explained previously in the review, you can install unlimited applications, which translates to hosting unlimited websites. However, Cloudways doesn’t support PHP applications natively, making the setup a bit more complex.

PHP apps can be installed, but you need to do this manually.

We noticed that Laravel and Magento setups are pretty simple, making Cloudways a decent option for developers and online shop owners. Cloudways also allows you to install WordPress or a combination of WordPress and WooCommerce, which further simplifies the setup.

You can then manage your apps by going to Servers, selecting Applications, and adding, modifying, or removing unnecessary apps.

Adding an SSL Certificate

While some providers automatically apply your SSL certificate, Cloudways leaves it to you.

You have a free Let’s Encrypt option, which you can access via the Application Management menu. The SSL Certificate menu shows all your domains. Simply select one, choose Let’s Encrypt, and press Install Certificate to finish everything up. Can you add an SSL certificate to other domains?

Yes! Your free SSL is unlimited, and you can apply it to unlimited websites on your Cloudways account.

Now that we mentioned SSL certificates, it’s worth noting that Cloudways doesn’t offer domain names. You’ll need one to publish a website, and you can purchase it through Hostinger, SiteGround, or GoDaddy.

When you do this, you must point the domain to the server, which Cloudways explains in detail on its website. The last step is creating an A record and waiting for DNS propagation, which can take up to 48 hours. In our case, DNS was propagated in about three to four hours.

Website Staging

WordPress hosting usually includes staging as part of all or some packages.

The same goes for Cloudways, which, this time, has comprehensive website staging in all plans. In our Cloudways test, we made a few website copies and experimented on them, being able to apply new changes to the already live version. Cloudways’ staging is one of the simplest to use.

You just go to Applications, select Your Application, and press Clone/Create Staging.

Remember that Cloudways lets you host unlimited websites (apps) on the server? This means you can set up dozens of staging copies and not cross the red line. Even better, you can apply changes to the live version of the site with a click. Conversely, you can “pull” data from the live to the staging copy.

Security

Cloudways offers enough security features to justify its price. We mentioned a few in our Cloudways review, but let’s do this again for clarification:

Free SSL (Let’s Encrypt)
Firewall with IP blocking
Daily and on-demand website backups
WordPress vulnerability scanner
Auto-healing servers
Optional security features

When we reviewed Hostinger, our overall #1 option, we noticed that it offers more features for the price. That provider includes DDoS and malware protection for a lower price. Meanwhile, Cloudways provides malware protection, albeit at $4 monthly per application.

If you want to protect a few websites, multiply this price by that number and add that to the initial subscription price. Now, the cost of managing the website and keeping it safe is much higher. Cloudways also offers the helpful SafeUpdates plugin for WordPress. It automatically updates your plugins and themes.

While it’s pretty good, the price of $3 monthly per app doesn’t seem so attractive.

All things considered, Cloudways is safe and secure. In our comprehensive review, we had zero security issues, and these essentials were more than sufficient. Still, excess security doesn’t hurt, or better said, doesn’t exist, and you can never be too safe. At this price, we’d like to see malware protection.

As things stand, security-wise, Hostinger and SiteGround are a bit better options.

Customer Support

Cloudways offers 24/7 live chat, knowledge base, and ticketing support, so again, the basics are all covered.

We contacted the company multiple times, and they were responsive and eager to help. However, some answers took longer than we expected. We even thought we were left for dead, but we realized that the support team agent was seeking answers to our inquiries.

As a precaution, the agent also needs your email address to contact you if the connection abruptly breaks. As for ticketing support, it’s okay if you’re not in a hurry and don’t need immediate help. We waited for up to two hours to get a response, which is still excellent.

Cloudways offers the Advanced Support Addon at $100 monthly. Sounds crazy, right?

At this price, the support team covers website performance, optimization, plugins, themes, and more. If you need help urgently, you can also contact them via phone.

So, is customer support good? We’d say yes! It blends response speed with knowledgeable customer support agents, leaving you in the trustworthy hands of Cloudways’ experts.

Cloudways Review Summary: The Best Cloud Hosting?

We clarified that Cloudways is a solid, if not great, option for cloud hosting in 2026.

However, is it the best cloud hosting at the price? Objectively, it’s not, but it’s up there with the top picks like Hostinger and SiteGround. Cloudways ticks pretty much all the boxes. It’s inexpensive, flexible, blazing-fast, and reliable even for resource-intensive websites and tasks.

As stated in our Cloudways review, we’d like to see more security features and better managed WordPress hosting features. While it’s not the most beginner-friendly option, Cloudways also isn’t the most convoluted, allowing beginners to slowly ease their way in.

If you want our confirmation to get it, you have it: Cloudways is great.

If you’d rather look elsewhere, consider SiteGround or even Hostinger, which are cheaper and equally, if not more powerful, cloud hosting options.

FAQs

Is Cloudways good?

Yes, it’s a good option for cloud hosting, with many security features, fast speeds, and a user-friendly interface. While there are superior alternatives, it’s hard to call Cloudways bad by any means.

Cloudways Flexible vs Autonomous, which is better?

The Flexible version is customizable managed hosting for PHP apps, WordPress, Laravel, and Magento. However, you have full control over server resources and cloud choice. The Autonomous version is fully managed, and you can’t choose your server provider, as it provides far less control.

The Autonomous version is more beginner-friendly, while the Flexible version is better for seasoned veterans.

Does Cloudways offer a free domain?

No, it doesn’t, and you also can’t purchase a domain name from it. You have to buy one separately or get a free domain from Hostinger, but it is included in its web hosting package.

Cloudways Review: How Good Is It in 2026?