Cloudways Backups

The Backup section is easily accessible in the left menu of your main dashboard. As you can see, the main options are to do with the frequency of the backups. It’s nice that you can schedule the timing yourself.

The local backup option lets you create one copy of your site. For some puzzling reason, Cloudways doesn’t let you download it directly from the dashboard – you’ll have to use SSH or SFTP to access it. And more importantly: it isn’t free. Cloudways charges $0.033 per GB of data that you backup offline.

Cloudways Vertical Scaling

One of the key benefits of having so many options is that you can scale your resources based on traffic spikes.

With Cloudways, this is done via what they call “vertical scaling”. You can increase your server size, but also CPU and memory, depending on the provider you have chosen.

It is a cost-effective solution, because you can keep all your data and web applications in one place, without having to migrate anything.

But there are a few things to note:

• Storage scaling is permanent: so you won’t be able to scale back down if you only want to increase disk size. The workaround is to clone your server and move it to a scaled down plan, then cancel the upgraded one.

• Scaling will take your server offline: make sure you do it during off-peak hours.

• Different providers have different options: AWS and Google Cloud let you scale your server CPU and RAM independently. DigitalOcean, Linue and Vultr only let you scale the entire size of your server, including CPU, RAM and disk space.

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Testing Cloudways’ hosting

As you can guess, measuring Cloudways’ performance is a bit tricky due to the number of server options. Still, this is what we found from our independent tests.

Uptime tests

We tested Cloudways’ (DigitalOcean server) uptime for the 12 months, we were very impressed with the results. As you can see in the chart below, those results of couldn’t be much better.

Compared to the last two years, there was a slight dip in performance this year, but 99.99% uptime is still very good:

To monitor uptime, I use StatusCake, a tool that checks each website every 5 minutes.

Note, however, that Cloudways doesn’t offer an uptime guarantee, unlike some of its competitors.

Is Cloudways fast?

Yes! Once again, note that we’ve only used the DigitalOcean data centers, but according to our series of independent tests, the average page loading speed was very good indeed.

With an average page load time of just 1.46 seconds, Cloudways was the one of the fastest web hosts we tested.

As you can see in the table below, Cloudways has got consistently faster, (both absolutely and compared to other web hosts), over the last three years:

Results in seconds

Although there are many things you can do to fix a slow website and make WordPress faster, your web host is the biggest contributor to the speed of your site.

So these numbers are a big deal!

Key takeaways: is Cloudways right for you?

Well, if you’ve been confused by any of the more technical terms in this review, such as CDN, staging, or server customization, you should probably look elsewhere. There are simpler alternatives that will host your site with good performance, and much fewer technical options. SiteGround or DreamHost come to mind.

If you’re after WordPress hosting, Cloudways is good, but there are alternatives like WP Engine or Kinsta, where you get support and infrastructure built especially for WordPress, and there are also cheaper WordPress hosts.

Now, Cloudways is probably one of the better options for managing and getting the most out of a hosting stack. That is, if you’re an agency with hundreds of sites in your portfolio, or a reseller, you’ll be able to move sites to the best data centers, hop on a different hosting plan when needed, and use the scaling options to meet the demands of huge traffic spikes.