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Which WordPress hosting provider would you prefer for your business site? Would you choose Cloudways or WPX Hosting? A response will appear in a matter of seconds.
Among the most renowned and well-respected hosting companies are Cloudways and WPX Hosting. You may be familiar with these names if you know anything about web hosting.
It isn’t easy to choose between Cloudways and WPX hosting. Both hosting services are nearly equal in terms of popularity and brand recognition in the market. Do they both offer the same level of service? Today’s post will examine this issue in more detail.
As a result, we’ll take a closer look at Cloudways hosting vs. WPX Hosting in this article. Let’s dive in.
Cloudways vs WPX hosting
Brand | Cloudways | WPX Hosting |
Website: | ||
Year Founded: | 2012 | 2013 |
Headquarters: | Mosta, Malta | Sofia, Bulgaria |
Service Types: | Managed Cloud Hosting for WordPress, Magento web apps, etc | Managed WordPress Hosting |
Base Plan: | $12/month | $24.99/month for monthly subscriptions and 2 free months of hosting if you buy an annual subscription |
Customer Support: | Ticketing and chat (Excellent Service) | Ticketing and chat (Excellent Service) |
Data Centers: | A vast number of servers from 3 Cloud Providers | 3 prominent Data centres include the USA, the UK, and Australia. |
Uptime: | 99.95% | 3 prominent Data centers include the USA, the UK, and Australia. |
Reliability: | Bot protection, GeoIP blocking, Daily backups, Auto-Healing Servers | Automatic backups, DDoS protection, and malware removal |
Refund Policies: | 3-day trial without credit card | 30-day money-back guarantee |
CDN Type: | Cloudflare | Their Own CDN (XDN) |
Email Boxes: | Additional $1 per box | Unlimited |
Table of Contents
An Overview of Cloudways and WPX Hosting
Founded in 2013, WPX hosting has been making a name for itself in the WordPress community primarily thanks to its lightning-fast website speeds and top-notch customer service.
It has been a pleasure to use this hosting provider so far, with excellent security, performance, and stability. They can handle everything from website migration to WordPress installation.
Those who would rather concentrate on their website work than on technical aspects will benefit from this. WPX hosting handles all of the technical aspects also.
Founded in 2012, instead of positioning itself as a WordPress-only host, Cloudways positions itself as a developer’s best friend for hosting PHP programs, such as WordPress.
As well as being speed-focused (including their caching plugin), they offer a fully managed experience that varies based on the demands of your servers. If your app becomes too popular, they will notify you and ask for more resources, such as CPU and RAM, making it possible for you to continue.
Cloudways vs. WPX Hosting
Let’s examine the differences between Cloudways and WPX hosting in more detail.
Security
The cyber-world is full of threats, and no website is safe from malicious attacks, hackers, or data breaches. Alternatively, Cloudways blocks everything from getting through, providing security on all ends. With the help of the five major cloud providers with whom they work, Cloudways has developed its security procedures as a backup.
Right away, you’ll get a free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate, guaranteeing that your visitors’ data is always secure. As well as dedicated firewalls, they apply security patches regularly.
If an attacker attempts to access your system through your account, Cloudways’ two-factor authentication process gives you an advantage of protection over them.
As a final note, Cloudways is there for you in case of disaster. You can easily restore your site whenever needed because of the off-site backups of Cloudways.
On the other hand, WPX Hosting offers a security suite that includes DDoS protection, virus scanning every day, and free SSL certificates. Even though these metrics are adequate, they pale compared to the ones provided by Cloudways.
Speed and Performance
You need to pay attention to the speed of your website because it affects both its user experience and its search engine ranking. As a result, Cloudways puts a high value on speed, and its system is designed to keep loading times down.
Rather than using mechanical disks for storage, Cloudways’ cloud partners use SSD disks. This has resulted in a three-fold reduction in loading times. In addition, they offer CloudwaysCDN as their CDN, which allows your visitors to access a nearby CDN node rather than waiting for a connection from a remote server.
Practical Speed Test
In order to accurately test the speed of both hosting providers, I have set up two identical sites. WPX base plan price is $24.99/mo and for this experiment, I choose a $26/mo Vultr High-frequency server from Cloudways.
Update: Nearly a year after the acquisition of Cloudways by DigitalOcean, Cloudways stopped offering Vultr and Linode for its new customers; this is definitely a downgrade, however, from DigitalOcean’s point of view they probably don’t want to provide clients to their direct competitors.
So now you’re left with only 3 cloud providers; DigitalOcean, AWS, and Google Cloud.
Let’s start the speed test
I have disabled WPX hosting’s in-built CDN to make the testing fair and accurately measure the server response.
GTmetrix
KeyCDN Performance test
Test performed on FastOrSlow.com (Global Website Speed Profiler)
Site Hosted on WPX Hosting:
Site Hosted on Cloudways:
As you can see, both of these hosting providers’ performance is identical. Although WPX’s performance is slightly lesser than Cloudways, it would be unfair to call it bad.
Additional Features
You can use Cloudways and WPX Hosting to migrate your site to a new hosting provider if you have an existing site. They both offer a feature of their one-click WordPress installation function, which allows you to create a new WordPress site within minutes.
On the other hand, Cloudways wins the award once again for productive and collaborative solutions. In addition, they offer tools for adding new team members, developing assignments, testing new themes, generating SFTP credentials for each team member, plugins, and apps without destroying your site, cloning your servers, and creating copies.
One of the advantages of VPS is the ability to control your server with a command line but learning these skills for a non-developer can be treacherous. However, the Cloudways interface makes it easy for everyone.
You can take advantage of these features if you’re working with a larger group. Furthermore, Cloudways supports CSM platforms other than WordPress, such as Drupal and Joomla.
After using WPX for nearly three years, I migrated this site to Cloudways. Reason? Well, WPX was not bad at all, in fact, they were excellent. However, I wanted the little extra performance of VPS.
Even though I have directly hosted some of my sites on VPS cloud platforms like Linode and Vulr; I needed some peace of mind with the support, automated daily backup, and security so that I could concentrate on the content. Cloudways is a perfect solution to reap the benefits of VPS with its managed system.
Cloudways allows you to choose their cloud partner’s server from dozens of locations, whereas you don’t have much flexibility with WPX as they only have data centers in three places.
Pricing
Cloudways offers superior plans and pricing to WPX Hosting, offering unlimited sites and greater resources at a lower price. For example, Cloudways’ $10 per month plan includes unlimited sites and 1TB bandwidth, whereas WPX Hosting’s lowest-tier plan is $24.99 and only includes five sites and 10GB bandwidth. Cloudways is undoubtedly the winner based on costs.
One of the advantages of Cloudways is that they charge hourly, so you only have to pay for the running time; you can test their servers and delete them without having to spend much.
Cloudways is also designed with a cloud architecture, which makes scaling a straightforward task. In contrast, WPX Hosting is similar to shared hosting because it doesn’t allow you to scale, and once you reach the bandwidth limit, you need to upgrade your plan.
You can avail of 20% OFF on your Cloudways purchases for the first 3 months using our exclusive Cloudways promo code below:
Support
The support of both WPX Hosting and Cloudways is excellent via live chat and tickets; however, you will find WPX Hosting to be superior since it connects in seconds and the executives are highly educated.
Cloudways customers must communicate with a bot before speaking with an actual person.
Final Verdict
That’s all from our detailed comparison of WPX Hosting and Cloudways. Selecting Cloudways over WPX Hosting is unquestionably the better option for flexibility, affordability, and unlimited website features. By any means, WPX Hosting is not a bad hosting company, but it appears more suited to new WordPress users with less control over the server.
Update (March 2022): I migrated this blog to Rocket.net (read my first-year experience with them) because they offer the world’s fastest Cloudflare Enterprise CDN which has 250+ Edge locations across the World. If you ask me, they seem to be the fastest-managed WordPress hosting provider.
Update (April 2022): Cloudways launches the Cloudflare Enterprise add-on starting at just $4.99/mo for a single domain. It will definitely increase the speed and performance of Cloudways users.
I haven’t tested it out yet, but here is the comment from the Rocket.net founder about it.
I also like the more managed features that Rocket.net offers, so not going back to Cloudways. But if you’re just starting out, Cloudways can be a good economic deal.
