11 Reasons Why WordPress Users Keep Picking Cloudways Over Other Hosting Providers

WordPress-powered apps and websites have a reputation for user-friendliness, responsive design, and SEO-readiness. To get the smoothest performance out of them, however, the right WordPress hosting provider is crucial. That’s where Cloudways comes in.

Over the last 10 years, Cloudways has grown by leaps and bounds within the WordPress community, taking painstaking care to meet the evolving needs of customers through innovation and constant back-and-forth feedback. WordPress users specifically preferred Cloudways because of its customer-centric features that cater to pain points that no other hosting provider offers.

In this piece, I’ll list the major reasons WordPress developers have grown so attached to Cloudways, and let you read what the community has to say about it.

What Is It That Sets Cloudways Apart?

Here are some of the features that make Cloudways a tempting prospect for WordPress users.

1. No Traffic Limit on Any Plans
2. More Than 60 Data Centers
3. 5 Different Cloud Providers
4. Vertical Scaling
5. Pay as You Go
6. Pre-Installed Object Cache Pro
7. Unlimited Free WordPress Migrations

1. No Traffic Limit on Any Plans

Karl Taylor
Founder of Karl Taylor Education

“Now that we’re with Cloudways, an environment can be scaled by simply dragging a slider within the hosting platform. We’ve also been able to get far better value for money. We are able to ensure that we are always only using a small percentage of our server’s resources, which means we can avoid any potential issues that come with spikes in traffic. This would often be a problem with our previous host as our live shows often result in many users visiting the site during a live broadcast.”

Cloudways plans come with no traffic limit which means that customers are not limited by the number of visitors that land on their website. A number of hosting providers and their alternatives like Bluehost alternative, use this limitation as a means to charge more from their customers when they reach the limit which is off-putting.

This feature is especially useful for WordPress users with high traffic websites such as a WooCommerce store, or a brochure website for freelance services.

And for God's sake don't buy shared hosting from @GoDaddy. Need reliable, inexpensive, hosting? @linode and @digitalocean are both great. Get their services through @Cloudways if you want managed hosting. You'll get much better performance and be able to handle more traffic.

— @[email protected] whomst is up? (@gordoooo_z) December 2, 2021

@Cloudways is fantastic. I use it for several sites, including a high traffic e-commerce site and never have an issue. Very easy to work with. Switched to them from another host and have been very pleased

— Parker Braamse (@JPBraamse) September 17, 2021

2. More Than 60 Data Centers

Brett Kelly
Marketing & Technology Consultant

“Cloudways gave us the option to easily manage resources and configurations on a per-site basis. With very little effort, we could move a busy site to its own server, which we’d place geographically close to the site’s audience. We can collect small sites on a single server and add new servers as needed.”

Cloudways offers 63 data centers that are spread out throughout the world making it
easier for all customers to choose a server at their preferred location. These data centers allow customers from Asia, Africa, America, and Australia to host their WordPress websites without compromising on speed and performance.

A number of WordPress agencies at Cloudways find this feature extremely useful since they have clients from all over the world. Having the option to select a datacenter from the US, Europe, Australia and Asia makes it easier for them to host clients and deliver optimized performance.

Cloudways is good if you want to run different apps on different data centers. Scalable and affordable too.

— Chris Dyson (@ChrisLDyson) July 10, 2019

This is how @Cloudways helps my site pic.twitter.com/SADb62GMcj

— Mario (@99marketingtool) March 4, 2022

3. Five Different Cloud Providers

Karl Taylor
Founder of Karl Taylor Education

“Cloudways’ promise of major speed improvements, by moving from our previous VM hosting to the cloud, was a big deciding factor. The fact that Cloudways offered a choice of infrastructure providers such as Digital Ocean, AWS or Google (and the ability to switch between them) was another added benefit. This flexibility was something the other companies we had shortlisted didn’t offer.”

WordPress users can host their websites on any of the 5 cloud platforms that Cloudways offers, ie, DigitalOcean, Linode, Vultr, AWS and Google Cloud. All 5 cloud providers offer great data center location along with some unique features such as DigitalOcean has a premium variant and Vultr comes with Vultr High Frequence, both better in terms of performance as compared to their standard counterparts.

Having the option to choose from 5 different cloud providers also offers a price range where WordPress users, whether they are small time bloggers or running large agencies, can choose a pricing plan that suits their needs and budget. Kinsta disallows granular control over your server and limits resources like PHP workers. For more control, you might need to find the right Kinsta alternative.

1# TTFB matters.

My hosting wasn't delivering results for me anymore.

So, I moved to @Cloudways with a @Vultr setup.

Most of my traffic is from the USA, I moved server location from London to Seattle, USA.

Quick server response = good
Low server response = bad pic.twitter.com/6YRrGAwVfn

— Pete Callaghan (@petecallaghans) November 20, 2021

4. Excellent Flexibility

Erik Lindeman
Founder of jacht.digital

“I’ve tried them all: WPEngine, GoDaddy, Flywheel, Kinsta Also see wpengine alternative.

None of them could compete with Cloudways. Why?

Cloudways is extremely flexible. It already starts with the choice of a server location. Then, the extensive options include backups, creating multiple staging environments, integration with Git, scalable servers.

All working parts are where they should be, and missing from the competition. The pricing model is also extremely flexible. You pay per hour, which is useful for performing tests without having to pay $ 30 per month.”

5. Prioritized Security

Chadwick Savage
Web Developer at East West Digital Marketing

“I have a client that is an IT security firm working with Dell, Microsoft, DUO, etc, and another client that is tangentially tied to NASA. Both are hammered consistently by bots from other countries trying to access their backend. Cloudways Bot Protection not only tells us where those attacks are coming from but mitigates them brilliantly.

The IT security firm once ran a penetration test on their own site without telling me, within 10 minutes they’re marketing team was calling me telling me the site was down and they couldn’t access it. Turns out Cloudways had blocked their own internal IP because of the penetration test. Once marketing got on the phone with IT, they said we passed.”

Cloudways takes the security of your websites and applications extremely seriously, and bot protection is just one of its stringent security features. The Platform is fully encrypted from end to end, and is further protected by two-factor authentication, firewalls, free SSL certification, and more. Cloudways also recently added the Cloudflare Enterprise CDN to its security repertoire, which offers advanced protection against hackers, and mitigates DDOS attacks in under 3 seconds.

6. Performance and Speed Boosted by Custom Stack and Pre-Installations

George Kounas
Lead Web Developer at Network Dynamics

“Even if you write the best and most optimized PHP code ever, you can only be as performant as the underlying infrastructure allows you to be since much of the work is done on a web service level. This is a huge problem in general since most of the hosting solutions are not configured for performance by default, and some cheap shared hosting cannot be configured at all.

Unless of course, you are using Cloudways with the whole stack optimized for performance by default. I have worked with many different hosting solutions over the years and Cloudways is the first one I have encountered so far that has preconfigured PHP-FPM as the default PHP handler. Well, the second actually, the first one was a small web server a friend of mine was managing but that does not really count. Also, the one-click CDN installation is a nice touch since you can offload a ton of workload from your server in a few seconds without any extra configuration.

I really like Cloudways approach on speed optimization because it is really simple in contrast with most speed optimization plugins, Cloudways Breeze may not offer a ton of customizability and depth but it is lightweight and can optimize the website in just a few clicks. For me personally, it is a great timesaver to have a more than decent speed boost on a website without having to spend hours tweaking properties and settings until you reach a working solution.”

Cloudways boost performance through its own custom, pre-configured and pre-installed stack, as well as through tools such as Object Cache Pro, a premium Redis cache backend for WordPress. At Cloudways, WordPress customers get this tool, which costs $95/mo, pre-installed on their installations free of charge. The tool comes with great features such as cache analytics, data compression, cache priming and more.

7. Vertical Scaling

Matt Swanson
Founder at MS Digital Solutions

“Scalability and performance were really the deciding factors for Cloudways. We need environments that could easily scale up as more coaching clients came on board. We also needed an environment that wouldn’t bog down as the course materials grew.”

Scalability is one of the reasons why WordPress users prefer cloud hosting over other hosting types. Though it can be difficult to scale a cloud server, Cloudways scalable WordPress Hosting makes the process simple by allowing users to increase their server specifications within just a few clicks of a button.

At Cloudways, we have a number of WordPress users who are running websites on affiliate models which means every now and then, they run various marketing campaigns that drive huge traffic to their websites. The vertical scaling feature helps them to scale up their websites to accommodate that spike in the traffic while ensuring that the website is running smoothly.

Cloudways is a favorite among designers and developers using WordPress, Magento and other apps. Cloudways allows the flexibility in expanding your server as needed due to traffic, performance an even speed. Check it out to learn more. https://t.co/mJgsY00ppu (aff link)

— Chanel Reneé your digital footprint curator (@webpres) August 30, 2021

fcdn8. Pay-as-You-Go

Roger Wehbe
Founder at RJW Digital

“The real-time billing feature is a godsend and was exactly what I was looking for, only charging me for the resources used, rather than an arbitrary amount per month! Also, as mentioned earlier, the fact that I could get a new server or application up and running in a few clicks meant that I could get started on building and designing the websites quicker and easier.”

Cloudways offers an innovative payment option where customers only pay for the resources they use. In simple terms, it’s real time billing which allows customers to keep track of their billing while they are using the server.

Let's talk about some of @Cloudways features!

[A Thread]

— Tyler Potts (@Tyler_Potts_) September 29, 2021

Furthermore, Cloudways is one of the most affordable cloud solutions in the industry with a starting price of just $10/month which gives you 1GB RAM, 1 core processor, 25GB storage and 1tb of bandwidth.

9. Free Unlimited Migrations

Diego Zanella
Founder of Aelia.co

“I was able to migrate the Aelia website to Cloudways, with all its media (images, files, etc) in less than 3 hours. That time includes the learning phase, my unnecessary tinkering 😅, the time to fix my mistakes, and finally, performing the migration.

Since Cloudways offers a site migration service, you don’t have to worry about any of the above. I highly recommend taking advantage of that service to save time. In my case, I did the migration myself because I wanted to get familiar with the manual process, in case I would have to help our customers with it.”

Cloudways offers free and unlimited WordPress migrations through its migrator plugin. Once you sign up on Cloudways, you can download the free migrator plugin and migrate unlimited WordPress websites to Cloudways. The process takes about 2 to 3 hours depending on the size of your WordPress website. Along with that, the process is super safe and completely automated so you don’t have to worry about anything.

A number of customers on Cloudways have multiple websites that they are hosting on Cloudways. Some of them are agencies, some are freelance developers providing reseller hosting service and some are affiliate marketers. Regardless of their personas, these users use the migrator plugin to bulk migrate their websites to Cloudways safely.

10. Optimized WordPress Environment

Martin Coates
Technical Director at Impact Media

“Cloudways have enabled us to spin up optimized WordPress environments in both staging and production quickly and efficiently. Performance-wise for servers has been fantastic and with our other optimisation techniques we have clients with their own WooCommerce servers obtaining fantastic speed and performance results.”

11. Superior Customer Support

Jim Galiano
President at Gulf Coast Internet Publishing

“Cloudways support has never let me down as well. I seldom need to contact support, but when I do, most challenges are standard WordPress issues that happen with plugin conflicts or upgrade issues.

With those kinds of problems, it’s usually just a matter of deactivating and activating the plugins one at a time until the issue is identified. From there you either contact the plugin vendor and/or reinstall the previous version until they fix the issue.

However, when it comes to needing assistance, Cloudways and their team members (apart from their support) are ever-ready to help you out. They are really active on social media and there are Facebook groups where other Cloudways users create tutorials and video walkthroughs.

Cloudways’ website has a large knowledge-base as well along with video tutorials to answer most of my questions.

All in all, I’ve never felt alone or stuck when I run into a problem.”

A Short Summary of What Cloudways Has to Offer!

Cloudways user Tyler Potts offered a brief summary of some of Cloudways’ most exceptional features in this Twitter thread:

Let's talk about some of @Cloudways features!

[A Thread]

— Tyler Potts (@Tyler_Potts_) September 29, 2021

To Conclude

12 years after its inception, Cloudways continues to grow as a customer-centric brand that promises to deliver an exceptional managed hosting experience. With a focus on premium support and best in class features, Cloudways acts as your extended team member, letting you focus on growing your business while the platform takes care of your hosting needs.