Cloudways

Cloudways

Company Profile & Results

Focus on your business and avoid all the web hosting hassles. Our managed hosting guarantees performance, reliability and choice with 24/7 support that acts as your extended team, making Cloudways an ultimate choice for growing agencies and ecommerce businesses.
Disclaimer: Descriptions are provided by the company.

Historical Performance Summary

Year<$25$25-50$51-100$101-200$201-500Enterprise ($500+)Woo Commerce
2022
2021
2020
- Top Tier - Honorable Mention - No award

2022 WordPress Results

$51-100/Month Summary

Cloudways handled the Static test with ease. Cloudways ran into the same issue across every server this year where Hetrix Tools showed a short downtime but Uptime Robot did not. Unfortunately, the Load Storm test proved too much for the server.

$101-200/Month Summary

Cloudways had the 4th fastest average response time on the static test. Cloudways had the fastest WPT test in two locations and were a mere 2ms behind 3rd place for fastest average. Cloudways also had the second fastest PHP bench. The uptime issue where Hetrix Tools couldn't connect to any Cloudways servers persisted across every plan while the Uptime Robot monitor showed them all online. Cloudways earned itself an Honorable Mention because the Load Storm test was extremely borderline. It showed some load spikes and they were averaging over 1000ms, but this was incredibly close. Overall, a great job, one of the closest to Top Tier performances I've had to evaluate.

<$25/Month Summary

Cloudways handled the Static test with ease. Cloudways had the same uptime monitoring issue with Hetrix Tools on every plan this year but Uptime Robot showed a perfect uptime. Unfortunately, Cloudways struggled with the Load Storm test which caused the server response times to go very high.

$25-50/Month Summary

Cloudways had perfect uptime on one monitor while Hetrix Tools showed a much lower number across every plan for some reason. Cloudways had the second fastest PHP Bench. Cloudways also handled the Load Storm and Static tests without issue. Given the overall good performance, the only possible detraction is the uptime monitors which showed very different numbers, my third monitoring system broke so I don't have a tie breaker, I will err on the side of good faith. Cloudways put together a Top Tier performance that handled all the tests well.

$201-500/Month Summary

Cloudways handled the static test without issue. Cloudways had great uptime on one monitor and lower than expected on the other. This seemed like it maybe was a bug and showed on every Cloudways monitor on the Hetrix Tools platform. Unfortunately, the Load Storm caused the server to error out and fail the test. I'm not sure what happened but I hope they figure it out and we see a comeback next year.

Enterprise ($500+/Month) Summary

The one thing Cloudways did well this year was the static test. It handled it without issue. We could add in uptime if we assume it was a glitch on the monitoring end which affected all Cloudways servers being monitored by Hetrix Tools. But Cloudways struggled with the Load Storm test with the login erroring completely. There is some definite room for improvement.

LoadStorm

Load Storm is designed to simulate real users visiting the site, logging in and browsing. It tests uncached performance.

K6

K6 is designed to test cached performance by repeatedly requesting the homepage.

WebPageTest

WebPageTest fully loads the homepage and records how long it takes from 12 different locations around the world.

Uptime

Uptime is monitored by two companies: HetrixTools and Uptime Robot. A self hosted monitor was also run in case there was a major discrepancy between the two third party monitors.

WPPerformanceTester

WPPerformanceTester performs two benchmarks. One is a WordPress (WP Bench) and the other a PHP benchmark. WP Bench measures how many WP queries per second and higher tends to be better (varies considerably by architecture). PHP Bench performs a lot of computational and some database operations which are measured in seconds to complete. Lower PHP Bench is better. WP Bench is red in the chart, PHP Bench is blue.

SSL

The tool is available at https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/

CompanyQualsys SSL Grade
Cloudways 2022 100A
Cloudways 2022 200A
Cloudways 2022 25A
Cloudways 2022 50A
Cloudways 2022 500A
Cloudways 2022 entA

2022 WooCommerce Results

WooCommerce Summary

Cloudways had a pretty good static test, a few bumps but nothing much to complain about there. Cloudways unfortunately struggled tremendously on the WooCommerce (Load Storm) test. I can't help but wonder if the low WP Bench score correlates with difficulty on the WooCommerce test. Would a faster CPU/DB help?

LoadStorm

Load Storm is designed to simulate real users visiting the site, logging in and browsing. It tests uncached performance.

Load Storm Average Response Time by Profile

This takes deeper look at the results and analyzes the performance of loading HTML mime types, to ignore a lot of static assets which are cached and bring down average response times. This tests how fast the initial pages are delivered, which is what a user would experience before loading all the other assets like css, javascript and images.

K6

K6 is designed to test cached performance by repeatedly requesting the homepage.

WebPageTest

WebPageTest fully loads the homepage and records how long it takes from 12 different locations around the world.

Uptime

Uptime is monitored by two companies: HetrixTools and Uptime Robot. A self hosted monitor was also run in case there was a major discrepancy between the two third party monitors.

WPPerformanceTester

WPPerformanceTester performs two benchmarks. One is a WordPress (WP Bench) and the other a PHP benchmark. WP Bench measures how many WP queries per second and higher tends to be better (varies considerably by architecture). PHP Bench performs a lot of computational and some database operations which are measured in seconds to complete. Lower PHP Bench is better. WP Bench is red in the chart, PHP Bench is blue.

SSL

The tool is available at https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/

CompanyQualsys SSL Grade
Cloudways 2022 WooCommerceA

2021 WordPress Results

$101-200/Month Summary

Cloudways had a pretty good run this year. 99.999% uptime. Cloudways had the second fastest average response time on the WPT results. The K6 test was smooth. The problem was Load Storm results held it back this year, while having no errors, the performance slowed down considerably with wp-login response times of 1226ms and average response time going over 1000ms for a while during the test. A little bit better on the Load Storm test and there would be awards being handed out.

$201-500/Month Summary

Cloudways earned itself Top Tier recognition. Perfect uptime. Error free load testing on both Load Storm and K6 which had response times so flat you would want to ride on a boat on it. It wasn't the fastest product, but it handled these tests without blinking and error. A Top Tier performance for sure.

LoadStorm

Load Storm is designed to simulate real users visiting the site, logging in and browsing. It tests uncached performance.

K6

K6 is designed to test cached performance by repeatedly requesting the homepage.

WebPageTest

WebPageTest fully loads the homepage and records how long it takes from 12 different locations around the world.

Uptime

Uptime is monitored by two companies: HetrixTools and Uptime Robot. A self hosted monitor was also run in case there was a major discrepancy between the two third party monitors.

WPPerformanceTester

WPPerformanceTester performs two benchmarks. One is a WordPress (WP Bench) and the other a PHP benchmark. WP Bench measures how many WP queries per second and higher tends to be better (varies considerably by architecture). PHP Bench performs a lot of computational and some database operations which are measured in seconds to complete. Lower PHP Bench is better. WP Bench is red in the chart, PHP Bench is blue.

SSL

The tool is available at https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/

CompanyQualsys SSL Grade
Cloudways 2021 200B
Cloudways 2021 500B

Internet.nl

The tool is available at https://internet.nl/test-site/.

Mozilla Observatory

The tool is available at https://observatory.mozilla.org/.

CompanyMozilla Observatory
Cloudways 2021 200F
Cloudways 2021 500F

2020 WordPress Results

$51-100/Month Summary

Zero errors on both load tests and no impact on response times, one of only two companies in this price tier that managed to pull off the perfect load tests. Congrats on earning Top Tier status.

$101-200/Month Summary

Perfect uptime. Zero errors on load tests was nice. But the response times just increased too much to win any recognition.

<$25/Month Summary

Cloudways had perfect uptime at 100% on both monitors. The good news during the load tests were that they didn't have a single error. The bad news during the load tests was the response times increased substantially and the server slowed down under stress.

$25-50/Month Summary

Cloudways had perfect uptime on both monitors which was good. The problem was the load tests caused the server to slow down and have high response times.

$201-500/Month Summary

Overall a very good performance from Cloudways. Perfect uptime. Improved speeds from last years WPPerformanceTester results. Just a minor slow down during Load Impact kept them from earning Top Tier honors.

LoadStorm

Load Storm is designed to simulate real users visiting the site, logging in and browsing. It tests uncached performance.

K6

K6 is designed to test cached performance by repeatedly requesting the homepage.

WebPageTest

WebPageTest fully loads the homepage and records how long it takes from 12 different locations around the world.

Uptime

Uptime is monitored by two companies: HetrixTools and Uptime Robot. A self hosted monitor was also run in case there was a major discrepancy between the two third party monitors.

WPPerformanceTester

WPPerformanceTester performs two benchmarks. One is a WordPress (WP Bench) and the other a PHP benchmark. WP Bench measures how many WP queries per second and higher tends to be better (varies considerably by architecture). PHP Bench performs a lot of computational and some database operations which are measured in seconds to complete. Lower PHP Bench is better. WP Bench is red in the chart, PHP Bench is blue.

SSL

The tool is available at https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/

CompanyQualsys SSL Grade
Cloudways 2020 100B
Cloudways 2020 200B
Cloudways 2020 25B
Cloudways 2020 50B
Cloudways 2020 500B

About the Author

Kevin Ohashi

Kevin Ohashi is the geek-in-charge at Review Signal. He is passionate about making data meaningful for consumers. Kevin is based in Washington, DC.

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