Cloudways

What they say they tested: Describes a live chat test with support. No speed or uptime measurements shown for Cloudways on the page.

• + Liked: Choice of cloud providers with the platform managed for you
• + Liked: Very easy WordPress set-up, staging and migration
• + Liked: Team accounts with different access levels
• + Liked: Quick live chat replies

• – Disliked: No email or domain registration
• – Disliked: Backups are charged by storage used
• – Disliked: No money-back guarantee, only a three-day trial
• – Disliked: Advanced support is a paid add-on

Summarised in our own words.

What they say they tested: Says it tries hosts hands-on but no longer runs its own performance lab; its Cloudways speed claim is credited to Cybernews.

• + Liked: Five cloud providers with pay-as-you-go billing
• + Liked: No contracts or renewal jump
• + Liked: Object Cache Pro included on larger plans
• + Liked: Autoscaling option for traffic spikes

• – Disliked: No free domain or included email
• – Disliked: Dearer than shared hosting and prices went up after the DigitalOcean takeover
• – Disliked: No money-back guarantee
• – Disliked: Reports that support quality dipped after the acquisition

Summarised in our own words.

What they say they tested: Mentions a 60-minute hands-on test of setting up WordPress on a Cloudways server; points to the full review for metrics.

• + Liked: Fully managed VPS servers
• + Liked: Tuned for WordPress
• + Liked: Scales easily on cloud infrastructure
• + Liked: Includes an AI management tool

• – Disliked: Best results need the higher-priced plans
• – Disliked: Not suited to budgets under about $50 a month, in the reviewer’s view

Summarised in our own words.

What they say they tested: Ranking uses its own monitoring data from 1 Nov 2025 to 31 Aug 2026 (60% performance, 20% features, 20% value).

• + Liked: Strong uptime and response times, in the top five of the hosts it tracks for response time
• + Liked: No renewal increase

• – Disliked: Reports load handling got worse over the three months before the update
• – Disliked: Value score held back by the higher starting price

Summarised in our own words.

• + Liked: All of its cloud providers offer UK data centre options
• + Liked: Three-day free trial with no card needed
• + Liked: Pay only for resources used

• – Disliked: Not easy for beginners
• – Disliked: No domain registration
• – Disliked: No email in any package

Summarised in our own words.

What they say they tested: Bought and monitored five Cloudways entry configurations (DigitalOcean Standard and Premium, Vultr, Vultr High Frequency, Linode), some since 2020. Publishes time-to-first-byte and uptime history from Pingdom, Loader.io load tests, a 40-city global response test and a hardware benchmark.

• + Liked: Uptime around 99.99% or better on all five plans in its window
• + Liked: Good response times for US and European visitors
• + Liked: No renewal price rise
• + Liked: Server-level control and support for several PHP apps, not just WordPress
• + Liked: Daily backups

• – Disliked: CDN and email cost extra
• – Disliked: Custom panel with no cPanel or traditional file manager
• – Disliked: Lower hardware benchmark scores on entry plans than some shared hosts
• – Disliked: Some configurations dropped a small share of requests under peak load

Summarised in our own words.

What they say they tested: Says it used GTmetrix to check uptime and response time. The caption says this was measured on Cloudways’ own main website rather than a test site on a Cloudways server. No figures are given in the text.

• + Liked: Choice of several underlying cloud providers
• + Liked: Reviewer found the servers fast
• + Liked: Control panel is easy to find your way around
• + Liked: Round-the-clock live chat support
• + Liked: Free SSL, one-click WordPress staging and a free caching plugin

• – Disliked: No email hosting included
• – Disliked: Cannot register domains through Cloudways
• – Disliked: Identity checks required at sign-up
• – Disliked: No file manager
• – Disliked: Costs climb quickly as you add server capacity

Summarised in our own words.

What they say they tested: Signed up for the free trial, created a server (took about seven minutes) and installed WordPress. No speed or uptime measurements shown.

• + Liked: Quick to set up
• + Liked: Free trial without a payment card
• + Liked: Choice of cloud platforms

• – Disliked: No domain sales
• – Disliked: Email costs extra
• – Disliked: Own control panel takes getting used to if you know cPanel or Plesk

Summarised in our own words.