Cloudways WordPress Performance Value Review

Cloudways is a managed WordPress hosting provider that allows you to deploy your WordPress site onto several different platforms. These platforms are:

Cloudways home page
Cloudways!

If you are just starting with Cloudways it can be tough to figure out where your money is best spent! The prices are different for each platform and how they are sized isn’t them same either. This review gathers data using Kernl’s WordPress Load Testing tool and then massages that data into someone easy to digest.

Load & performance test your own WordPress site with Kernl’s WordPress Load Testing service!

What Was Tested?

We tested the following Cloudways setups:

  • Google Cloud – A “small” instance out of their Northern Virginia data center. $39.36 / month.
  • Amazon Web Services – A “small” instance out of their Northern Virginia data center. $36.51 / month.
  • Vultr – “2GB” plan out of their New Jersey data center. $23 / month
  • Linode – “2GB” plan from their New Jersey data center. $24 / month
  • Digital Ocean – “2GB” plan from one of the New York City data centers. $22 / month.

And we had the following load testing setup:

  • Content was an export of this blog
  • 1000 concurrent users
  • 30 minute duration
  • 3 users per second ramp up
  • Load generating machines were in the San Francisco #2 Digital Ocean data center.

Overall Cloudways Performance and Value

Each provider performed extremely well in our tests. No errors were reported and they all reached over 700 requests / s sustained traffic. However not all hosts are created equal.

AWSGCPLinodeVultrDigital Ocean
Costs / Month (cents)36513936240023002200
Total Requests13409671274018144230114557221445759
$ / 1000 req (cents)2.723.091.661.581.52

Given that each load test was exactly the same, you can see that some hosts performed better than others.

Cost per 1000 requests (in cents)

AWS and GCP are a bit more costly than Linode, Vultr, and Digital Ocean and they also performed worse than the lower cost providers.

Cloudways Provider Response Times

While cost per requests is a good metric we also care about the quality of those requests. Quality can be measured in a number of ways, but response time is often a “good enough” measure of how well a particular host performs. For the providers that you can get through Cloudways, the variance in request quality is extremely interesting.

The chart below shows the 99th percentile response time performance for each provider. It means that 99% of all requests during the load test finished at or below this time.

99th percentile performance

You can see that lower cost providers once again out-perform the higher cost AWS and GCP in pretty significant ways. The really interesting result here is that Vultr responded to 99% of requests in 240ms or less! Way to go Vultr!

Conclusions

If you aren’t sure which provider is the best value on Cloudways, from a raw cents per requests perspective you can’t go wrong with Linode, Vultr, and Digital Ocean. It’s the same story when you consider the quality (re: response time) of service: Vultr, Linode, and Digital Ocean are the clear winners here.

Full WordPress Load Test Results:

Load & performance test your own WordPress site with Kernl’s WordPress Load Testing service!