Exploring Cloudways: The Ultimate Web Hosting Experience of 2025

Every successful WordPress blog depends heavily on reliable web hosting. A quick search on Google shows hundreds of hosting providers, many of which seem appealing because of their low prices. Still, it’s important to be cautious—most of these are shared hosting plans, which may not be ideal for all bloggers.

“The key to great hosting lies in the 3 S’s: speed, support, and security,” says Adam Berry, digital director at Wingard Creative. It’s clear he knows his stuff. As someone experienced with WordPress blogging, I decided to test one of the top managed hosting services—Cloudways—to see if it truly meets these crucial criteria. My goal was to determine if it ticks the boxes for speed, support, and security—what makes a hosting provider excellent.

Note: This article includes affiliate links, meaning I earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. These links are to tools I highly recommend, especially for SEO purposes. You can review the full affiliate disclosure in my privacy policy footer.

Let’s dive into the review.

About Cloudways

Cloudways is a managed hosting platform that offers choices among five cloud infrastructure providers: DigitalOcean, AWS EC2, Linode, VULTR, and Google Cloud Platform. It allows you to deploy any PHP-based application—such as multiple versions of WordPress, including vanilla, WooCommerce, and WordPress with Breeze—to suit various needs within the community.

Having understood what Cloudways is, let’s explore the features that make it a popular choice for hosting WordPress sites.

Cloudways Review

To evaluate how well Cloudways performs, I followed these steps:

Server – Launch – Select Application (WordPress):

Next, name your managed app and select your preferred cloud infrastructure:

Then, pick the server size and location that best serves your target audience, optimizing for speed and reliability:

Migrating Your Website to Cloudways

If you already own a WordPress blog, shifting it to the Cloudways platform is straightforward. Simply install and activate the Cloudways Migrator Plugin from the WordPress plugin directory. Once activated, clicking on the Migrate button will start the transfer process. Depending on your website’s size—files and database—the migration can take a few hours to complete smoothly. During this period, your website remains operational, and the transfer proceeds without issues.

Site Performance Enhancement

Free WordPress Cache Plugin – Breeze

Breeze is a custom-developed caching plugin designed specifically for WordPress sites. It helps improve website speed by optimizing caching processes and eliminating the need to experiment with multiple cache plugins. Breeze automatically enables Varnish cache and combines features like File Exclusion, Minification—reducing the size of HTML and CSS files—and gzip compression, all aimed at faster page loading times.

CloudwaysCDN

A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a network of servers distributed globally to deliver content faster by reducing latency. With just a single click, you can activate CDN on your WordPress site, which improves load times and enhances your website’s ability to handle traffic spikes efficiently. Implementing a CDN provides a smoother experience for visitors and can significantly contribute to your blog’s success.

Global Data Centers

Selecting the right server location is crucial before launching your website. Cloudways offers over 50 data center locations worldwide, allowing you to choose a server close to your target audience. This proximity ensures lower latency, faster websites, and a better user experience, ultimately increasing your site’s conversion potential. Connecting to nearby data centers results in quicker load speeds for your visitors.

Built-in Caching Technology

Website speed is vital for a successful online presence. Cloudways provides access to advanced caching technologies such as Memcached, Varnish, NGINX, and Redis, all integrated into your hosting platform. You can easily enable or disable these caches with a single click, ensuring your WordPress blog remains fast and responsive without manual configuration struggles.

Staging URLs

Testing new plugins and themes directly on your live site can be risky, often leading to website crashes. To mitigate this, Cloudways offers staging environments where you can safely experiment with updates. Once you’re satisfied that everything works correctly and no conflicts exist, you can push the staging version to the live site seamlessly—ensuring stability and minimizing downtime.

Security Measures

Two-Step Verification Process

To keep user accounts safe, Cloudways includes Two-Factor Authentication on all accounts. This security feature creates an extra safeguard by requiring a secondary form of verification, such as a password, PIN, or a security question, beyond the standard login credentials. Even if someone acquires one piece of your login information, this additional step prevents unauthorized access. It not only enhances protection against identity theft but also makes account access more user-friendly. Importantly, enabling this feature costs nothing extra with Cloudways.

Firewall Protection for Servers

Given that WordPress websites are often targeted by online threats, security is a top priority for hosting providers. Cloudways installs dedicated firewalls at the platform level that constantly monitor all incoming traffic to your sites. These firewalls actively identify and block malicious data packets, raising alarms if suspicious activity is detected, helping to safeguard your website from potential attacks.

Complimentary SSL Certification from Let’s Encrypt

Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) is vital for encrypting data exchanges between your website and visitors, creating a secure browsing environment. Without an SSL certificate, your site may be vulnerable to intrusions. To improve your website’s security, Cloudways offers a free SSL certificate powered by Let’s Encrypt, which can be easily installed with just one click, ensuring encrypted connections that protect your data and visitors.

Managing Your Team

Collaborating with a team is more efficient when workload distribution is streamlined, leading to faster results. Within Cloudways, you can add team members, assign specific roles, or remove users directly through the platform. This flexible management system lets you control who has access to different functions and resources, tailoring permissions according to each team member’s responsibilities.

Backup Options

Cloudways enables users to create comprehensive backups of their servers directly from the control panel. You can set up automatic backups to run every 1 to 7 hours, or at custom times that suit your needs. Restoring previous versions of your website is straightforward, providing peace of mind in case of accidental data loss or updates gone wrong. This feature ensures your website remains resilient and recoverable at all times.

Managing backups is straightforward. To access the backup options, navigate to your server, then click on Server Management and select the Backups tab. All backups are securely stored on Amazon S3 servers, separate from your live website servers. If needed, you also have the option to create local backups for added convenience.

Customer Support

Support Available 24/7

Providing exceptional support around the clock, Cloudways adheres to the 3S’s of superior hosting: Speed, Security, and Support. Their support system includes a comprehensive knowledge base, the CloudwaysBot virtual assistant, live chat, ticketing, email support, and phone assistance to ensure help is always accessible.

Find Solutions Quickly

Locating answers to common issues is simple with Cloudways. Just enter your problem into the search feature, and it automatically provides organized, easy-to-understand solutions based on answered questions, making troubleshooting efficient.

CloudwaysBot: Your Virtual Assistant

The CloudwaysBot acts as your personal helper, offering suggestions for server improvements and alerting you to important updates and performance metrics. It helps keep your setup optimized without manual effort.

Tickets and Email Support

If you face any issues, you can submit a support ticket for quick assistance. In my experience, response times were consistently prompt, which I found impressive for a support team. For further questions or feature explanations, you can reach out via email, and they are always ready to guide you through complex situations to ensure a smooth experience on their platform.

Final Thoughts

My review of Cloudways highlights its focus on the three pillars of a top web host: speed, security, and support. I found Cloudways excels in all three areas. While some of its advanced features might be more suited for experienced users rather than casual bloggers, their support team and extensive knowledge base made it easier to maximize the platform’s potential during testing.

Cloudways is suitable for all types of websites, not just blogs. In my testing, its performance and security measures met, and sometimes exceeded, expectations. Do the features Cloudways offers help boost your blog’s success? For me, the answer is yes.

Get started with Cloudways today and experience the difference.