Table of Contents
What is Cloudways?
Cloudways is a hosting service for developers to quickly deploy sites to cloud providers like DigitalOcean, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform and Vultr etc.
Cloudways supports various CMSs such as WordPress Drupal, Magneto and Joomla. Cloudways server setup is easy with all the main functions you need combined into a single panel.
Cloudways offer reliable and affordable cloud hosting services for small and medium sized businesses.
Cloudways offers an integrated approach so you never have to interact directly with the cloud hosting provider. You’ll have one Cloudways account and pay Cloudways directly for every aspect of your hosting.
However, this approach results in one drawback: you don’t get root access to the server and your costs grow exponentially.
Supported cloud hosts:
Cloudways support limited number of vendors. Cloudways only offer cloud hosting via following providers:
- DigitalOcean
- Linode
- Vultr
- AWS
- Google Cloud
Advantages:
- Free trial
- Automatic site backups
- Pay for what you consumed
- User-friendly control panel
- Ability to install unlimited applications.
Disadvantages
- The pricing depends on the provider you choose and you are locked with certain number of providers
- Cloudways back-end is kind of slow and takes almost 5 seconds to load most of the things.
- Doesn’t Include Email Hosting
- No file manager
- Only one free website migration
- Cloudways is cheaper if you just need a single, low-resource server.
What is CloudPages?
CloudPages is a software-as-a-service platform used for cloud server management using a simple yet powerful panel. You can deploy your web applications on DigitalOcean, Vultr, AWS, Goolge Cloud and virtually any cloud provider using CloudPages.
Simple enough for someone with minimal technical knowledge to use. With CloudPages’ management panel, you can easily deploy and manage your web applications.
CloudPages gives you the fastest loading speeds for your website because it is the only platform that allows you to deploy WordPress sites on either OpenLiteSpeed or LiteSpeed Enterprise.
LiteSpeed servers are known for their high performance and resource-saving features without sacrificing security, performance, or compatibility.
Supported Cloud Providers:
Beauty of CloudPages is that its not at all cloud provider dependent. Which means, you can connect CloudPages with any cloud hosting provider that you want. This unique feature has a huge impact on final pricing too. This feature makes sure that hosting is not at all hard on your pocket. CloudPages support unlimited number of vendors.
You can deploy CloudPages on any cloud provider or even bare metal servers.
Features of CloudPages:
- CloudPages do not lock you with any provider
- One-click server deployment
- Auto SSL
- Temporary Domains
- File manager
- WordPress manager
- Firewall
- One-click backup and restore
- OpenLiteSpeed and LiteSpeed Enterprise support
Advantages of CloudPages:
- Support LiteSpeed Servers
- Comprehensive but clean UI design
- WordPress manager (feature)
- File manager (feature)
LiteSpeed Server:
CloudPages offers LiteSpeed, which is fast and compatible with LiteSpeed Cache Plugin. It is a popular plugin for WordPress users all over the world.
Many cloud managing panels (almost 98%) do not offer LiteSpeed yet. They only offer NGINX and Apache-NGINX based hybrid stack.
Comprehensive but clean UI design:
UI is really nicely organized. You can clearly understand where servers, billing and teams are. Server section has only server-related stuff. Site section has only site-related stuff. This segregation is so simple and basic but this makes it so greatly understandable for new comer and beginners.
UI design looks and feels simple yet has everything that you would need. Advance users and new beginners can find their required areas easily. Any advance user is not at all annoyed by all the basic features meant for newbies or the new beginners being overwhelmed by advance settings that they might not understand.
WordPress manager feature:
CloudPages WordPress manager makes all the tasks faster, easier and more fun. You can install, delete, activate, and disable plugins straight from the WordPress manager. You can even manage WordPress core/theme/plugin updates.
File manager:
It is so simple but when you are a newbie, you would love file manger because it is so much more convenient than logging into FTP. Also, when you’re an advanced user and you are managing hundreds of sites across different servers, it is still is much more convenient than logging into FTP.
Pricing difference:
The pricing model of both CloudPages and Cloudways is totally different from each other.
In Cloudways they offer you their services and also bound you to get a server from them. This model cause an increase in the pricing. Like if you buy a service from them, you also have to buy any server from them to set up. But it is not that much and it is a great benefit when we compare it with shared and traditional hosting. As if you see in the start of business or individual it seems great.
CloudPages on the other hand helps you to reduce this. CloudPages allows you to get any plan from CloudPages and you can connect unlimited servers. You can reduce your cost by buying one account here and adding servers from any cloud provider. For example with our Freelancer plan you can add as many DigitalOcean or Vultr servers.
Let’s do a pricing comparison between CloudPages and Cloudways to check the difference between both Platforms.
Cloudways:
For this comparison, we will take the Most Popular Plan of Cloudways with DigitalOcean.
If you buy the most popular plan of Cloudways with Digital Ocean having 2 CPU cores, 4GB RAM, 80 GB storage, and 4 TB bandwidth you will get that in $50/month.
Cloudways charges a percentage markup based on the cloud hosting service. If the underlying cloud hosting costs $6, Cloudways will roughly double it to $13, implying that you’re effectively paying a 100% markup based on your underlying hardware.
Every time you want a new server, this price will increase exponentially such as:
1 server -> $50
2 servers -> $100
3 servers -> $150 an so on.
CloudPages:
On the other hand If you get these 2 CPU cores, 4GB RAM, 80 GB storage, and a 4 TB bandwidth plan you will get it in $24/month directly from DigitalOcean. And if you buy the Freelancer plan of the CloudPages that price is $16/month. So the total cost will be $40/month.
Now, if you have One server with CloudPages you will save $10 but If you add one more server you just have to pay the DigitalOcean fee and that’s all nothing more. Which means you save more and more as you continue to deploy new servers.
Save $10 when having one server with CloudPages
On adding the next server save $26/month.
On every new server you will save $26 per month and so on.
Real Time Average Response Comparison:
So now let us see how CloudPages and Cloudways perform in real time. We will conduct the test using loader.io. To be as fair as possible, we have created two sites, one in CloudPages and the other in Cloudways. Both sites are deployed on identical servers and have identical theme (OceanWP) with both having identical plugins.
Site deployed on Cloudways
Site deployed on CloudPages
As we can see, average response time for Cloudways is 384 ms and average response time for CloudPages is 224 ms which is a huge difference between the two.
Conclusion
Well the difference is clear, CloudPages is a new cloud-server manager in the market and its taking the market by storm. Its unique features, affordability and fast response is making it a beast in the market. CloudPages team’s goals are set to include every unique feature that is out there to give a unique WordPress experience to it’s users.
