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What Is Cloudways?

For WordPress hosting, the best solution is Cloudways, which offers a number of different servers for every type of business or brand solution.

Cloudways is the ideal host for companies using WordPress to build and run their online platforms, communities, and ecommerce divisions.

There’s many reasons for this, but the most important one has to do with speed. Cloudways is one of the fastest website hosting providers on the internet, without question.

We know this for a fact, because we personally tested Cloudways against a whole host (pun intended) of other platforms, and even against its own servers, to see what speeds we’d get.

As it turns out, Cloudways outperforms just about everybody, both in speed and in overall features and reliability. That’s why we believe in Cloudways for ourselves and our clients.

Quick Disclaimer About CTM and Cloudways

You might reasonably wonder whether our belief in Cloudways has anything to do with our personal relationship to the company itself.

You can rest assured that we are not being paid to advertise for Cloudways, nor do we receive any free or discounted hosting from them in any way.

That being said, we are an affiliate of Cloudways. This means that we may be eligible for a commission if anyone signs up for their services after clicking a link on our website.

Even so, we would make these claims regardless of our affiliate status.

You should know that we build every website we make on Cloudways for our clients, because we believe that they provide the best service out of all the hosts available (and there are a lot of them).

5 Cut Throat Reasons to Use Cloudways

With all of that in mind, let’s take a look at why we feel so strongly about Cloudways, and why we believe you’ll love them too.

Here are the five cut throat reasons you should use Cloudways for all of your WordPress website hosting needs, whether personal, professional, or a mix of both.

1. Cloudways is lightning-fast. Based on our in-house speed testing comparison, we found that Cloudways beat out all but one of the other hosts. For context, that other host (Flywheel) came in first by just .06 seconds.

2. Cloudways offers a whopping five separate data centers. As we’ll see below, this gives them a major advantage over other hosting platforms, for a number of reasons. (See speed test results section below for more details.)

3. Cloudways protects your website with automatic backups. While some other hosts offer backups, Cloudways takes it even further. They offer both automated and on-demand backups, which are stored on an offsite location. All backups can be restored with just a single click. You can even revert to a different version with 1-Click as well.

4. Cloudways gives you built-in bot protection. This is able to seamlessly block commonly used bots and website exploits to keep your WordPress site safe and secure at all hours of the day and night.

5. Cloudways has 24/7 website monitoring and customer support. They know that problems don’t only happen during regular business hours, so their customer service teams are ready and able whenever you need them via Live Chat. If you need even more detailed assistance, simply create a ticket, and they’ll get back to you as soon as humanly possible.

Cloudways Speed Tests Results

We wanted to truly see how fast Cloudways is firsthand. With that in mind, we devised a test of our own design.

Here at Cut Throat Marketing, we took a look under the hood to get a sense of how reliably quick the Cloudways servers really are, compared to other hosts, as well as to their own other servers.

Check out the chart below to see how each of the Cloudways servers stacked up against the rest.

Host

TTFB
6-19-20

TTFB
6-22-20

TTFB
6-23-20

TTFB
6-24-20

TTFB
6-25-20

Average Speed

Average
TTFB

Deviation

CW-GCP

3.2s

1.7s

3s

3.7s

3.6s

3.04s

215.5ms

2s

CW-AWS

2s

1.7s

1.6s

1.5s

2s

1.7s

239.8ms

.5s

CW-Vultr

1.5s

1.7s

2.6s

3.5s

1.4s

2.1s

210.7ms

1.9s

CW-Linode

2.9s

2.2s

3.2s

4.7s

3.6s

3.3s

337.1ms

2.5s

CW-Digital Ocean

1.4s

1.6s

2.3s

2.3s

1.8s

1.8s

228.8ms

.9s

Cloudways – GCE

If you’re a fan of the Google suite of services, you’ll be glad to know that Cloudways also offers Google Cloud hosting on their servers.

When we ran our test on the Google Cloud Engine via Cloudways, however, we discovered that it was one of the slowest out of the whole bunch. Only one other Cloudways server, Linode, produced slower page loading speeds.

That said, if you’re set on using Google Cloud, here’s some of the benefits you can expect:

  • 24/7 customer support from Cloudways expert team, so you can get the help you need, when you need it most
  • Optimized and robust performance on all your WordPress sites hosted with Cloudways GCP
  • Host an unlimited number of apps on the Google Cloud Engine servers when you use Cloudways
  • Easily deploy as many Magento, WordPress, and PHP apps as you need for your business or brand to operate smoothly

Cloudways – AWS

For the Cloudways partnership with Amazon Web Services, we found that it was the fastest of all the servers they offer. AWS averaged a load time of 1.76 seconds, while DigitalOcean came in second at 1.88 seconds on average.

That’s a difference of only .12 seconds.

The major downside of going with AWS over the others is the price tag. It costs twice as much as DigitalOcean — for the same server specifications.

Here are some highlights of AWS with Cloudways:

  • Amazon Web Server with Cloudways is fast and incredibly easy. You don’t need to be an engineer to get set up and running quickly.
  • We offer straightforward AWS cloud server management to make your team more productive and focused on what matters.
  • As Cloudways puts it, “Advanced cache technologies and optimized AWS web hosting servers for an unmatched experience.”

Cloudways – Vultr

The newest addition to the Cloudways suite of servers is called Vultr. In our speed tests, it was right in the middle of the pack, as far as Cloudways goes.

At over 2 seconds of average page load time, it certainly wasn’t the fastest. But, as the newest server in their fleet, it may be too early to tell for sure where this one stands.

Check out what Vultr has to offer from Cloudways:

  • Pricing starts at just $11/month, in order to provide high quality service at a low cost for businesses on a budget
  • Free SSL certificates for your sites and apps, which is becoming more standard across the industry, as tech companies place an emphasis on website security
  • 3 day free trial to see how you like the Vultr server experience from the folks at Cloudways

Cloudways – Linode

Another Cloudways offering is Linode, which came in dead last for page speed in our in-house testing environment. At over 3 seconds per page load, your customers are not likely to stick around and see what you have to offer.

While we can’t diagnose why Linode runs so much more slowly than the rest of Cloudways’ incredible servers, we can tell you that the other four options are a better bet overall.

Regardless, you can still expect great Cloudways features, such as the following:

  • Dedicated firewalls for all of your WordPress website and hosted apps with Cloudways
  • Support for all types of PHP apps
  • Built-in Content Delivery Network (CDN)
  • As many staging areas as you need for your Cloudways sites and apps hosted on the Linode servers

Cloudways – DigitalOcean

At last, we have the winner! Of all the Cloudways servers, we found that DigitalOcean performed the best overall, given the price. As mentioned above, AWS is technically the fastest, but it also costs twice as much for the exact same specs.

In other words, when compared to the others on average loading time, DigitalOcean technically came in second to AWS. But, when you take everything into consideration — including price, DigitalOcean takes the cake.

Of course, you also get these amazing Cloudways features with DigitalOcean as well:

  • Cloudways goes above and beyond in delivering speedy performance, impenetrable security, and a seamless scaling experience for all your web hosting needs
  • They assist all kinds and sizes of companies and brands to construct and run their web apps with easy and efficient collaboration
  • The cloud hosting platform on Cloudways gets rid of all the technical complexity, so that you can install your website and get up and running in a flash

Cloudways Server Hosting Conclusion

Ultimately, every website is different and comes with its own set of needs and requirements. That being said, all websites also need to load quickly, run smoothly, and operate around the clock for the sake of the bottom line.

If your WordPress site runs slowly, customers and clients will just go somewhere else, buy something else, and hire somebody else. It’s not a pretty picture.

Thankfully, Cloudways has multiple offerings that you can choose from to make sure that your website is lightning-fast, sturdy, and reliable at all times.

At the end of the day, we at Cut Throat Marketing believe that Cloudways is the best of the best. And, when we drilled down, we discovered that their DigitalOcean servers provide the most exceptional experience of them all.

For more help getting started with Cloudways and starting or transitioning your business to their DigitalOcean servers, just drop us a line. We’re here and ready to go, whenever you are.