Different WordPress groups on Facebook have the perfect symbiosis and coordination. This is teamwork. Some “experts” will try to convince you to switch to the “best” shared hosting plan with slow hardware, while others will try to convince you that there is nothing faster and more secure (sic!) than an unmanaged Vultr HF VPS on Cloudways. In both cases, affiliate fees are collected by misleading the unsuspecting public and convincing them to switch to the wrong service provider.
Many users are surprised to learn that there is a third option: Premium Shared Hosting providers with hardware as good or better than unmanaged VPSs. With cPanel, server-level malware protection, and LiteSpeed Enterprise, you get a much more secure experience and faster website loading speed from Premium Shared Hosting. For WooCommerce sites, the benefit is even greater. The best providers may not have an army of affiliate warriors behind them, but that does not mean their services are any less attractive.
Most Data Centers, like Google, are struggling to recycle a significant number of outdated servers. Serious marketing budgets are spent convincing everyone that cloud services are of great value. Ads have flooded Google, Instagram, and Facebook. It doesn’t help that the admins of most Facebook groups related to WordPress communities earn money through affiliate links to Cloudways. And it doesn’t matter if you get fewer CPU resources on cloud plans than you would from a much cheaper shared hosting provider. The privilege of being served by a household name like DigitalOcean or Vultr outweighs any technical considerations for the uneducated customer.
It is ironic to see that Kinsta, who done extensive marketing in 2019 to advertise their ultra-fast Google Cloud N1 servers, is now reporting about 2.5 times improvement in the PHP processing speed on the modern C2 hardware.
While Google and Vultr might be excited about AMD EPYC Zen 3, its performance isn’t much different from widely used AMD Ryzen Zen 2 and Intel Xeon E-2288G servers. Several shared hosting providers already use 35% faster hardware, such as Intel Xeon E-2388G and Ryzen 9 5950x.
As an example, consider a server with four CPU cores, two threads per Core, and 32 GB RAM. By setting up eight shared vCPUs per Core, your hosting provider can get 32 vCPUs served on eight threads of the processor. Now, they can set up 8 VPS accounts, each with 4 GB RAM and 4 shared vCPUs.
Alternatively, your provider can also set up eight vCPUs – with one vCPU per thread. These accounts are called dedicated vCPU accounts. Each dedicated VPS account can have 4 GB RAM and one dedicated virtual CPU.
Once a user account has created the processes, the hypervisor assigns vCPUs to the physical threads on the processor. Hypervisor limits the amount of time each vCPU can spend on a thread so that no process can occupy a processor thread for too long.
Consider an example where the server is less than 50% utilised. In this case, each shared CPU account can easily burst to four threads to serve its four vCPU processes simultaneously. In other words, you get 400% performance to serve the peak load. With dedicated vCPU accounts, you only get 100%.
Let us assume that the server is now running at 100% capacity. There is a limit to the amount of time each vCPU can spend on a thread. Hypervisor uses circular stacks to switch between all Virtual Machines and allocate freed threads to vCPUs. In other words, each of the eight busy accounts gets a thread on the CPU to fulfil its processes. Thread performance is no longer 100%. By reducing idle time, two threads sharing the same Core increase its efficiency to about 130%. About 65% (=130/2) of the original Core’s performance is available to each thread. Available CPU resources are now the same for both shared accounts with four vCPUs and dedicated accounts with one vCPU.
So, on a heavily loaded server, each account is guaranteed 65% of the Core performance. However, on an underutilised server, performance can go up to 400% for a shared vCPU account and 100% for a dedicated vCPU account. In other words, users should only expect up to 65% of the Core performance on both types of accounts. If their provider is keeping their server underutilised, they can receive a performance bonus of up to 400% on the shared vCPU plan and 100% on the dedicated one.
The fair continuous CPU load is no more than 60% of the CPU for both the shared and dedicated plans above. It allows you to give your processor some leeway. The 60% figure is equal to 15% of your RAM measured in GB. In the hosting industry, there is usually an eight-to-one ratio between the number of Cores and the size of the RAM in GB, so the 15% rule of thumb works well for VPS accounts with dedicated RAM. For shared hosting, the number is much lower depending on the plan; for more expensive semi-dedicated plans, it’s approaching 10%.
The vast majority of accounts on shared hosting with the LiteSpeed Web Server do not consume server resources. Server-side full-page caching means that brochure websites only use server resources when editing or updating plugins. A semi-dedicated shared hosting account can be used for accounts that constantly consume CPU resources to serve dynamic content. Such plans offer a lower account density with a higher average resource allocation.
Whether a hosting provider is good or bad depends on how rigorously they control the average load on their servers. You will get fantastic speeds for both your VPS and shared hosting plans if your hosting provider keeps the average server load at 50%. Your hosting provider will not be able to handle load spikes if the server processor thread utilisation reaches 100%. Even a low load user account will have a reduced CPU performance of 65% on a busy server. In both shared hosting and VPS hosting, performance on such overloaded servers is usually very volatile and slow.
The smaller shared hosting providers like MechanicWeb strive to offer the best user experience on underutilised servers. Linode, Vultr, and DO care much less about managing load on their shared vCPU servers, and you should expect them to be much more overcrowded.
Suppose the website is hosted on a dedicated shared server, under CloudLinux CageFS. Your hosting account has some pre-configured resource allocation in the form of a number of logical cores which can be utilised for your processes. Your processes have access to all threads of the CPUs dynamically allocated (as-needed) by Linux. You usually have 100% of this CPU core resource. Your hosting server provider assures this via monitoring that overall CPU utilisation on the server is below 60%. You need to change your shared hosting provider if they are not doing their utmost to keep server underutilised. An abusive account will be quickly identified by your provider, and they will resolve the problem by, for example, moving the account to a higher tier plan with lower customer density on the server.
Now, lets us understand how a similar scenario is implemented on Cloud services. Cloud services often give access to the shared vCPU, which represents a time share on a single thread of the physical core. The number of threads running on the physical CPU depends on the host node’s utilisation at any given time. When all threads are busy, the hypervisor will queue vCPUs before allocating them to freed threads. When neighbouring instances consume maximum resources for extended periods of time, it may interfere with your instance’s performance, but the hosting provider does aim to limit such abusive instances to ensure performance for all customers on the host node.
Implications are not good. If you work on the Cloud server, the overall CPU utilisation is kept above 60% by selling cheap vCPUs resources for non-time-critical execution, which can be terminated and restarted, balancing the overall CPU load. Your single thread (vCPU) will be executed on a relatively busy CPU core with a good chance of running concurrently with another thread. So occasionally, you will be lucky to have 100% of the logical core for your processes. But frequently, you will get from 50% to 65% share of the CPU core resources.
Cloudways users are unaware that Linode, DO, and Vultr originally offered shared vCPU plans for developers who needed to spin up a VPS instance for testing, compiling, and prototyping. They were never meant for production use. The majority of blog posts are intended to engage readers and generate referral fees. To obtain a better fee, numerous WordPress bloggers have misled their unaware readers by pretending that there is no fundamental difference between cloud-based shared vCPU accounts on Cloudways and dedicated VPSs. This is very far from reality. There’s a big distinction: with dedicated VPS, your account runs off of dedicated fixed resources such as RAM, CPU cores, hard disk space; whereas following your sign up for an account at Cloudways, they give you access to all these things through virtualisation. Many people think it doesn’t matter or even that cloud services are more reliable – but this couldn’t be farther from the truth!
Cloudways offers shared vCPU instance plans from major cloud hosting companies. The plans allocation is built via a number of provided vCPUs – a time share on a single hyper-thread of the physical CPU core. The cheap shared vCPU plans are designed by the providers for light web traffic and are explicitly advertised as such on the provider websites. The shared plans are not guaranteed to perform well. Most of the time, and on recently purchased and still undersold servers, you will have your single thread as the sole process on a physical CPU. However, you must understand the risks involved in using such plans before making any final decision. Your website visitors’ requests are latency-sensitive processes. You have a wide range of fluctuations in the internet traffic and might get some changes synchronously with other accounts on your cloud node – Black Friday is a good example of when sudden rushes can happen for most eCommerce websites.
The cloud hosting provider will never tell you the server’s specification as your account can be freely moved between different servers in the Data Center during maintenance or load distribution activities. This means you’ll never know how much time your website is served using what hardware – some fluctuations may come from chaotic moves between modern and outdated server hardware. Perfomance on Vultr HF varies by as much as 25% depending on specific hardware used for your plan. Good luck with your proactive planning for managing your CPU utilisation before that Big Day!
You risk crashing your website if you don’t have enough resources to execute all HTML requests properly. It is inevitable that when a Big Day comes, you are not ready for the traffic surge. You should be running your website at 20% of utilisation to be prepared, but this may be not enough. When traffic levels reach new levels on Black Fridays, you may notice your ability to burst vCPU allocation is void. You start receiving only 50% of your vCPU resources, and things are slower by 35% as well. Overall, you are limited to 30% of your previous burst performance. This can be seen as unavoidable, given that every account becomes overloaded simultaneously during this time period. The hypervisor will arrange a queueing system for vCPUs, waiting for another thread to be freed before allocating another vCPU to it. That’s why many online shops have to scale up their resource allocations by order of magnitude on Black Friday just to cover increased traffic and degraded cloud resources. Your hosting provider will try its best to inject more hardware, but you’re really only a second-grade user, so don’t expect a miracle.
If you ready to pay a 100% premium, companies like Linode, DO, VultrHF, and Google Cloud offer Dedicated or Compute-Optimised plans for their customers. The providers clearly recommend such dedicated vCPU plans for production websites or eCommerce websites. These higher-priced packages will allow a more consistent 100% CPU allocation due to lower host densities and stricter CPU allocations for virtual machines. Anyone who has purchased one of these two options can rest easy knowing they won’t have any problems with sporadic resource stealing by noisy neighbours or overloaded hosts servers. Your hosting provider will be obligated to provide peace of mind for Dedicated plan users and might neglect your struggle on shared vCPU plans. One problem that Cloudways customers have – they don’t get access to the Dedicated plans.
Shared instance plans on Cloudways are priced higher than fully managed VPS hosting on the modern dedicated servers with MechanicWeb. With Cloudways account, you share server resources with other customers, and that will cause your website’s performance to suffer when the local cloud nodes get too busy during periods of high traffic load. Dedicated vCPU plans offer something closer to the dedicated VPS plan on dedicated servers with a fixed memory and CPU resource limitation, so your website stays consistent even during high traffic loads.
Due to the flexibility and scalability of cloud hosting, the number of users has increased significantly. However, there’s a catch: you’re not the only one using the hardware – cloud hosting still means shared hosting. Cloud hosting providers give you a vCPU allocation that is shared among all customers of a physical server. This is very similar to how shared hosting works, and if you want to avoid throttling, you need to make sure that your CPU resource usage doesn’t exceed 15% of your limit on average on 1 vCPU/ 1 GB RAM plan. CPU usage should be under 30%, on average, for higher tier plans, like 1 vCPU/2 GB RAM.
Hosting hardware will typically have memory allocation (in GB) about eight times the number of physical CPU cores. Typical server configurations include 32 CPU cores and 256 GB of RAM, or 16 CPU cores and 128 GB of RAM. The continuous vCPU load of such configurations is about 15% of your dedicated RAM (in GB). For example, if you have 16GB RAM, your plan might include four dedicated vCPUs that can be used continuously at 60% (16*0.15=2.4). VPS plans with 8GB RAM might include two dedicated vCPUs that can be used continuously at 60% (8*0.15=1.2 CPU). Shared vCPU VPS accounts have more CPUs, but your average CPU usage should remain at 15% of your dedicated RAM (in GB). The junior plan with 1 GB RAM and 1 vCPU will allow only 15% of continuous CPU load. Vultr’s website states that their 4GB High FrequencyCompute plan comes with two virtual CPUs, so it is a shared vCPU plan with a 30% (4*0.15=0.6 CPUs) fair share of continuous CPU usage. The Vultr HF 16 GB plan comes with four vCPUs, which is very close to the dedicated CPU plan with 60% (16*0.15=2.4 CPUs) continuous CPU utilisation.
Usually, shared hosting providers monitor excessive system resource usage and always contact you to move to the next level if your CPU consumption is too high. Cloud hosting providers are not charities, and they too try to maximise their profits. Their terms and conditions state, “You may not use a shared system in a manner that consumes a disproportionate amount of the system’s resources.” Once your account is found to be using an excessive amount of resources, the cloud hosting provider will begin throttling your CPU allocation. Vultr technical support explains, “…we limit such abusive instances to ensure performance for all customers on the host node.” It is a major drawback of a hosting platform like Cloudways that you cannot communicate directly with your actual hosting provider.
Cloudways offers the free Breeze caching plugin that is inadequate. For satisfying Google Page Speed Metrics, an annual fee of $49/site is required to install the WP Rocket cache plugin. Three sites are $99/year. To save that money, you can also try using free versions of SwiftPerformance or PhastPress plugins. The performance should be better than using Breeze.
On Cloudways servers, Varnish integration is not the only caching layer. By default, they also provide OPcache, Nginx cache and Memcached, which is used to cache data and objects in RAM to speed up dynamic, database-driven websites. Memcached’s default expiration time is 3 hours. Varnish caches typically expire after 4 to 24 hours, which is a typical CDN cache expiration time. The default time in the Nginx cache is one month. In Cloudways, heavy caching strategies make additional WP cache plugin almost obsolete – the WP Rocket plugin prepares assets, while the actual caching is done elsewhere.
The “professional” bloggers’ benchmarks measure the performance of websites hosted on different fresh hosting installations. To make the comparison fair (!), they don’t configure the caching plugin settings on fresh WordPress installations. OPcache alone reduces the processing time for uncached requests by about ten times. As a result, Cloudways has an unfair advantage over all other hosting providers because their plans include full-fledged caching outside of your WP installation. Cloudways’ “professional” affiliates don’t appreciate that their testing methodology doesn’t include origin servers but instead measures the response time of a Varnish cache web application accelerator.
Apparently, Cloudways is not the only provider that automatically sets up caching layers for bending results of tests performed by “professional” bloggers. Similar activated OPcache caching layers are offered by Kinsta, A2Hosting, WPX, and Hostinger. Take a look at such “professionally” performed benchmarks, and you won’t be surprised to find these hosting providers at the top of the league.
Professional hosting providers rarely use OPcache as their default caching layer. Since no PHP code is executed when serving user requests from the server cache, OPcache has no relevance when serving fully cached static web pages. OPcache might allocate too much RAM to cache precompiled PHP code on a complex eCommerce website. To control the use of RAM, the website owner must be given the freedom to decide whether or not to use OPcache along with Redis or Memcached object caches. Hosting providers who turn on OPCache by default on their servers are aware of the “professional” tests performed by numerous naive and ignorant WordPress bloggers.
PHP 8 will level the playing field. PHP 8 adds a JIT compiler to its core, potentially speeding up performance. The impact on real-world web applications will be small, but most hosting providers will configure JIT properly. JIT will only work if OPcache is enabled. We therefore assume that all hosting accounts will come now with OPcache extensions preconfigured in PHP 8.
If your site uses a lot of blogs and long-form content, there’s a good chance it will attract international traffic. A significant number of visitors will come from outside your country. Google doesn’t know that you are a local business that is only interested in local customers. Websites with international traffic will not be penalised under the new Google Core Web Vitals. However, the data is collected from a global set of Chrome users and the metrics are calculated from that data. Google ignores 25% of the worst data that Chrome reports from your actual visitors, but you still have to provide fast-loading pages to the remaining 75%. Therefore, you should be careful if you are not using a CDN! Page Experience algorithms are not forgiving when remote locations, lack of CDNs, or high server loads slow down the delivery of page content to international visitors.
The QUIC.cloud CDN and LiteSpeed Cache are included as a part of the LiteSpeed Web Server and must be manually activated. Imagine that QUIC.cloud CDN and LiteSpeed Cache are enabled by default. Bloggers who use a “professional” benchmark methodology will achieve excellent results on any LiteSpeed servers. Rather than server hardware, they will test out QUIC.cloud’s CDN capabilities, which are perfect! However, since they have affiliate fees from Cloudways instead of LiteSpeed, they will immediately identify the flaw in the methodology and will turn off all the caching layers on LiteSpeed to provide a “fair” comparison.
According to our study, LiteSpeed servers are up to 90% faster than Cloudways on Vultr HF. LiteSpeed hosting providers offer from 3 to 10 times better value for money, depending on plan choice. Comparing Cloudways plans with the options shown in our benchmark will help you make an informed decision.
It would be best if you did not rely on Cloudways as a magic solution that offers more resources when your shared hosting plan has reached its maximum resource allocation. The opposite is true! For example, A2Hosting offers 4 GB RAM and 4 CPUs in its Turbo Max plan. Its single-core performance is about 25% slower than at Cloudways. If you switch to Cloudways with 4GB RAM and 2 vCPU, your ability to serve visitors might be reduced by up to 1.5 times. So, you should expect to handle the peak load of 1.5x more visitors on the A2Hosting plan. We don’t recommend A2Hosting due to its abysmal disk I/O speed of 4 MB/s, but we are sure that switching to a shared vCPU plan on Cloudways will not solve your problem!
Cloudways falsely advertise the Shared instance vCPUs as full CPU cores on DigitalOcean, Linode, and Vultr. Many users are shocked to recognise that they are served on the cloud shared hosting, sliced, wrapped, and sold under the VPS title.
For a company to claim to be the best while offering five to ten times less value than the competition is not uncommon. But does anyone know of another Western company that pays affiliate fees of $125 per new paid customer to people that spread misinformation in numerous Facebook groups? The company that pays affiliate fees to Facebook group admins, which motivates them to remove critical comments about the company or even ban the company’s constant critics from their Facebook groups?
We could not think of another example of such a post-truth world being pushed by Facebook, where fake statements are widely quoted to persuade users to purchase overpriced products and use them outside of the technical specifications of the vendors. Cloudways is crossing ethical and legal lines by using Facebook groups, part of the Facebook ecosystem, to manipulate customers. When we complained, Cloudways just shrugged, “We can’t stop affiliates from promoting Cloudways because they make money doing it, and we’re just three community managers…”
Adam Preiser, the administrator of the group and the gargantuan Cloudways affiliate scammer himself, fails to prevent the scavenging of the non-techies in his group. He regularly removes negative comments about Cloudways as they are not helpful to his affiliate income. Adam Preiser cowardly deleted users’ comments without notifying them, violating the last civil norms to protect free expression on Facebook.
We have contacted the 100 most active Cloudways affiliates from the “WordPress For Non-Techies by WPCrafter” group and asked them to comment on our research article. No one was brave enough to do it!
More and more members of another major Facebook group, “WordPress Hosting,” have become fed up with Cloudways scammers in recent months. Nonetheless, this group with 18,000 members has played a negative role in providing Cloudways scammers with a free platform to deceive its visitors. Andrew Killen, the group administrator, treats Cloudways scammers like decent contributors: “Honestly many people just like Cloudways, they seem to have funboys like Apple”. A second group admin, Rob Marlbrough, has also been an active contributor to Cloudways propaganda “1GB Cloudways plan could handle 20 low traffic sites easily. Disk space is the real concern if you want to add even more”.
WordPress Hosting Facebook group admins are aggressive about silencing or banning members who hold opinions different from their own. Web designers aren’t informed that the vast majority of affordable VPS plans come with shared CPUs, so they shouldn’t use them instead of shared hosting unless their developer needs root access. In addition to Cloudways, expensive $200 per month management panels like GridPane are heavily promoted for shared vCPU plans. GridPane with shared vCPUs from Vultr HF or DO is considered by the group members as the hallmark of a professional web design agency. It is true that many professional designers using GridPane are also experienced WordPress developers using Oxygen Builder. Some of them require root access and therefore benefit from using GridPane.
If you read the following two screenshots, you will appreciate that Cloudways intentionally misleads its users about the nature of shared hosting resources. When you subscribe to their services, you may find a message on the Server Management > Vertical Scaling tab stating that the 1 GB and 2 GB plans are for testing purposes only and are suitable for staging websites. Production sites must be served by 4 GB (or higher) plans. The Cloudways support team advises users to scale up to 4GB RAM Vultr HF if using Redis Cache in WordPress. This is a not-insignificant statement in the fine print that is completely missing from the company’s main website! Many Cloudways users did not plan to pay $50 a month for their hosting!
The question remains whether Cloudways or Kinsta offer the worst value for money in the current market. Bloggers are often bribed with affiliate fees to write enthusiastic reviews about Cloudways. Members of Facebook groups are actively instigating users with a large number of websites to move to Cloudways, despite knowing that such an offer is outside the technical specification of the vendors. You can find Cloudways own recommendations to host from ten to twenty websites on a 1GB / 1vCPU plan, to the dismay of more professional members of the Facebook groups. With about 0.5 GB of the RAM used by Linux, you are left with only 0.5 GB in the RAM to serve your websites. Having ten websites to share such limited RAM resources is a far cry from anything even the most dubious hosting companies would do!
Affiliate scammers even suggest you have multiple small Cloudways accounts so you do not put all your eggs in one basket – they know well that it’s easy to hack unprotected Cloudways accounts. If you are dying to get that adrenaline rush and scramble to find out if the latest ransomware attack has compromised your customers’ personal data, Cloudways is your best choice!
There’s a triple trap you fall into with Cloudways. Your WordPress installation is powered by outdated NGINX software, overpriced hosting resources, and compromised security.
We’ve done our best to show our readers the true nature of Cloudways and its affiliate community of Facebook scammers. We offer detailed arguments of why we think it’s a good idea to stay away from the company. We would hesitate to compare Cloudways to even the worst EIG hosts. Cloudways misinforms its users about the shared hardware resources offered in its plans. This looks dubious under European consumer law. Choosing the wrong hosting option, which may be unsuitable for your eCommerce website, can affect the user’s experience. As a result, not only will you lose some users due to the drop in conversion rate, but you also run the risk of losing your customers’ financial data due to the threat of an imminent hacking attack on your unprotected website.
At least two community managers from Cloudways, Saad Khan and Aleksandar Savkovic, have read our research article. We have offered to publish Cloudways’ written response to our arguments, and we have received their verbal commitment to do so in May 2021. This text implies that Cloudways has not yet issued an official statement. Most probably because they have nothing to say in their defence!
When websites attract heavy traffic, they overwhelm the provider’s hosting capacity. Adding a CDN service is an excellent way to get your website in front of more people and grow your audience. If you have a website with high traffic, then we recommend giving BunnyCDN a try. It will store a permanent cache of your website’s static files like CSS, JS, and images in its Geo-Replicated Perma-Cache servers. These servers will provide your files to the cache of 30 servers located around the world, shielding your origin from traffic. Your origin server will be left with the task of delivering HTML files to visitors, reducing the bandwidth load at your origin by a minimum of thirty times. BunnyCDN services cost you about $1 per month. It is a much better option than upgrading the level of your subscription with your original hosting provider.
Through our comprehensive solutions, we can help your business from logo designs to designing eCommerce stores. We provide a range of services, including technical SEO and relocation assistance to better web hosting. With our graphic design expertise, we are prepared to meet any other creative need that may arise.
