Are you looking for the best overall hosting provider? Well in this Cloudways review I'm
going to go through everything that you need to know about Cloudways so you can decide if
they're the right hosting provider for you. I'm not going to waste your time with fluff
content here but instead i'm going to provide value to you by showing you the most important
results from my live tests like the page load speed uptime and customer support quality
i will also show you a live demo so you essentially get to test out cloud cloudways
without having to actually purchase a plan for yourself and lastly i'll provide you with my
honest recommendations on if or who should buy cloudways i will have a special bonus offer for
you if you decide to pick up cloudways through my special discount link in the description below
i also have a free checklist on starting a successful blog which i'll give to everyone
so make sure to stick with me till the end and i'll show you how to get access to this bonus
but for now let's get right into the review after purchase setup and ease of use
so right away from their home page you can see it looks very easy to navigate with cloudway's custom
interface compared to the cpanel that a lot of other hosting providers use
the design is also very clean and simple just remember that there are two sections to everything
the server section which is more general and the application which is more related to your
wordpress website now let's see how easy it is to install and create our wordpress website you
want to pick what you want to install we want to choose the name of our app and our server the next
step is to choose which cloud server you want but like i said for this tutorial i'll choose vulture
and i'll select the high frequency one and i'll just start off with a one gigabyte that should
be enough for a brand new website and we come down to the bottom and for the locations we can choose
from so many different locations around the world so this depends on where most of your
traffic is coming from so for example if you live in australia and most of your visitors are from
australia then you probably pick sydney but if you have a global website where your customers are
worldwide then you probably want to pick somewhere in the usa and for this one i'll pick new york and
once we're happy with everything you can click on launch now now we need to give cloudways a
few minutes to spin up this server for us it says here it takes 13 minutes but usually it'll be less
than five minutes and will come back when it's ready and what about installing an ssl certificate
and to do that we once again click on applications click into our server click on ssl certificate
now we want to type in our email address and our domain name and click on install certificate give
it a second for cloudway to install this for you overall i would score cloudways a 9 out of 10
for setup and ease of use i think all users would like the clean and comprehensive user interface
and just how easy and responsive it is to navigate and do things to your site here
i did take one mark away from them for not having the option to purchase domain name
directly from cloudways they also don't have the option for you to host your email with them
but instead you'll have to pay extras for an upsell to get rackspace email instead not having
this option makes it harder to use overall for someone who is looking for a simpler solution
speed and uptime performance tests so after i have installed the basic wordpress site
i went ahead and tested out the speed of my bare bones website using gt metrics and the result is
one second flat this is a great start for cloud ways even though this is not the fastest in my
tests i must say they are very close so now i would take it a step further and add some design
elements to it to increase the page size and don't worry if you're overwhelmed looking at this
my course that i'll provide you for supporting the channel will guide you through this step
by step normally i would install wp fastest cache which is for speed optimization but cloudways has
their own server level caching and recommend me to install the redis object cache instead
so i will do that so what we do is to click on settings and package then click on packages
and then click on install redis the next plugin i will install is short pixel which is for image
optimization and lastly i will install cloudway's own cdn instead of my usual cloudflare cdn this
content delivery network will also increase my website performance this will overall make it
more comparable to what you would do in real life with these basic optimizations this is now what
the new website layout with all its new plugins look like and the speed is now 1.1 seconds which
definitely makes them one of the fastest hosting providers i've tested so far and they easily
pass google's recommended site load speed of 2-3 seconds now i have been monitoring the stability
performance of cloudways with uptime robot and can report that their uptime for the last 30 days
is a perfect 100 in fact they have not had here's a quick question for you do you think cloudway's
page load speed is faster or slower than what you expected let me know in the comments section below
support cloudways provides 24 7 customer support through email and live chat but not through phone
support so you can't contact them that way i will now test them out by asking them these
three different questions on live chat one i will tell them that i have been infected by
a virus on my website and ask for their help two i asked them a quick question about their domain
name and your cost and three i asked them if they could do me a favor and install an ssl certificate
and cloudflare for me as i am a complete newbie and have no idea how to do this and here are
the results for the first question they simply just refuse to help in any way even scanning and
providing me a malware report which many hosting providers would normally do for you for free
i even offered to pay for the upgraded support level but it's still a no from cloudways overall
i must say i was very disappointed seeing that i am paying a premium for manage wordpress hosting
but not getting the support i expected for the second question i had to contact them through
submitting a support ticket instead of live chat because they only have live chat for actual
customers potential customers don't have access to cloudway's live support team so overall i'm
happy enough with their resolution here and for the last question i had to ask them twice before
they would agree to help me with ssl installation here which was a little disappointing with regards
to the cloud flare installation this one was a no-go as well they were not willing to help with
this one at all and just gave me cloudflare's generic how-to web page to install it myself
overall i wasn't happy with this either i think cloudways can help a lot more especially with
these simple quick requests with regards to their response time i contacted them at three different
times of the day to make sure i get an overall average and not just a bias fast response time
during their off-peak hours so the three times were 7 seconds 15 seconds and 5 minutes
and the average of those 3 times turns out to be around 1 minute and 48 second weight
which is definitely one of the fastest response time from any hosting providers i've tested i
think the max wait time for any hosting companies should be kept under 5 minutes which cloud ways
pass with flying colours overall i have to score cloudways support a 4 out of ten i would say
their support is average at best i have to fail them here for not wanting to help with the ssl
certificate installation cloudflare installation and virus removal they were basically not willing
to go the extra mile for their customer at all also not having 24 7 live chat support for their
potential new customers is not good enough from cloudways as you have to pay a premium for manage
wordpress hosting solution so you want the premium support i also have to make a note
though that this do you like the level of detail i'm providing in my cloud ways review so far
if yes make sure to let me know by liking my video and don't forget to subscribe to my channel so
you don't miss out on more quality content that i'll release every single week pricing options
click on the link in the description or type this into your browser it will take you to my special
cloudways discount page where you get the best discount cloudways is currently offering they
also have a special custom coupon code that you can use to get an extra discount and i will show
you exactly how later on in this video so i'm sure you already know but cloudway is a managed cloud
hosting platform where you can choose different applications like wordpress magento and others to
host on servers from places like digitalocean or google cloud or vulture and a few others
and cloudways will manage this for you with their custom dashboard and their 24 7 customer support
team so that's what you're paying the extra money for so from the pricing page you can see here it
starts at ten dollars per month with digitalocean mind you it would be cheaper if you directly buy
your hosting plan from digitalocean themselves but you won't get the support and the custom dashboard
for you to create and manage your website easily so that's the extra value that cloudways offers
and we can see here from cloudways they have five different servers digitalocean lenode vulture
amazon aws and google cloud and they all vary in price but the first three is much cheaper compared
to the last two so let's take vulture for example you can choose between standard or high frequency
and you can see here that you're paying more for the resources that you need or want so for example
if you just start off with one gigabyte of ram then it's going to be 13 and it will increase the
more you pay and with the bandwidth the minimum is one terabyte which should give you around 800
000 page visits per month which is much more than other managed wordpress hosting companies
so you don't have to worry about that to begin with so what i recommend you do is to pick the
plan that you think you need right now because you can always expand later when you need to cloudways
is very flexible and you can upgrade month by month so that's a very handy thing to have from a
hosting provider you can see here it says you can pay as you go and there's no locked in contract
so you can cancel anytime and you can upgrade anytime and another good thing with cloudways is
that you're not limited by the number of websites you can have for each of these planned it is
based on a storage size so if you have many small websites that'll fit the 32 gigabytes of storage
then you can have many websites so that's also another advantage over other hosting providers
which count the number of websites you can have on each of their plans another great feature that
i should mention to you here is that cloudways offers free website migration where their support
team will personally migrate your website for you this is only for your first website though
so now i'll pick this plan for this tutorial to test them out and from their sign up page this
is where you can enter in the promo code that i have for you so you type in alan borch and you'll
see the tick here means that the promo code is valid and then you can use this to get started
the overall pricing score i would give cloudways is a nine out of ten they provide you with most
of the expected features of a managed wordpress hosting provider they have their own cdn and the
automatic daily backup is provided they also have a big range of servers to choose from and
have server-side caching which they say is faster than any caching plug-in installed on wordpress
but i will make sure to conduct the speed test later in this video to really see if this is
true or not i did take one mark off them as they only provide a three-day free trial i don't think
this is good enough as there are this is a quick note regarding my bonus offer to you
if you decide to pick up cloud ways through my link then just send me your receipt to bonus dot
com dollar dot com and i'll send you back access to my bonus course right away and if you want my
free checklist on starting a successful blog then just go to this link in the description and you
can get access to that from there recommendation overall i have given cloudways an average score
of 8.5 out of 10. they really are one of the best web hosting providers i've tested overall
they have amazing speeds and their price is really cheap for a managed wordpress solution so this is
my recommendation for you if you're looking for the best overall hosting provider on the market
i believe cloudways is a very worthy option that i think you should really consider however
if you're a beginner and you think you will require a lot more handholding
and expect top-notch customer support then i don't think cloudway now i think picking the
right hosting provider is such a crucial step for your business and you must get this right so if
after watching this review you think cloudways is not the right hosting provider for you then i
recommend you check out this hosting alternative but if you're happy with cloudways and you're
ready to go to the next step then go to this video and i'll see you over in the next tutorial
you