CloudWays Review (2018)

CloudWays participated for the fourth time in our WordPress Hosting Performance Benchmarks (2018). This review is based off the results of that test. This year CloudWays participated in the 25-50, 51-100 and 201-500 price tiers.

In years past it's been interesting to see CloudWays compete with the same stack on different platforms. This year is the furthest departure from that we've seen so far. It's also the first time CloudWays has earned Top Tier status for two out of three plans that competed this year. It's also important to note, the Digital Ocean plan was originally $70 when testing started but Digital Ocean reduced their pricing causing the cost of the plan to drop dramatically to $42 hence the competing in a different tier above (51-100).

The Products

	Plan Monthly Price	Plan Visitors Allowed	Plan Memory/RAM	Plan Disk Space	Plan Bandwidth	Plan Sites Allowed
Vultr 4GB New York	$44	Unlimited	4GB	60GB SSD	3 TB	Unlimited
DigitalOcean 4GB	$42	Unlimited	4GB	80gb	4TB	unlimited
AWS EC2 - 2XL - USA N.Virginia	$495.50	Unlimited	32GB	Starts from 4GB (variable)	2GB	Unlimited

Performance Review

Load Storm

	Total Requests	Total Errors	Peak RPS	Average RPS	Peak Response Time(ms)	Average Response Time (ms)	Total Data Transferred (GB)	Peak Throughput (MB/s)	Average Throughput (MB/s)
CloudWays AWS	770,304	822	607.12	427.95	15,083	324	52.27	42.27	29.04
CloudWays Vultr	328,015	0	249.5	182.23	7,372	360	22.27	18.55	12.37
CloudWays DO	442,424	243	331.95	245.79	15,097	1,131	30.11	21.79	16.73

Sources: AWS, Vultr, DO

The Load Storm test is designed to simulate real users coming to the site, logging in and browsing the site bursting some of the caching mechanisms typically found on managed WordPress hosts.

The Vultr plan had no issue, the AWS and DO had a few errors but around 0.1% which is negligible. The big issue was Digital Ocean's response time started to increase as the load increased which knocked it out of earning Top Tier status. AWS and Vultr did great overall. With the price change, I wonder if the smaller test would have been handled better though.

Load Impact

	Requests	Errors	Data Transferred (GB)	Peak Average Load Time (Seconds)	Peak Average Bandwidth (Mbps)	Peak Average Requests/Sec
CloudWays AWS	1049669	0	57	0.36	908	1990
CloudWays Vultr	335275	0	18.21	0.544	278	624
CloudWays DO	457906	30	24.89	1.92	312	702

Sources: AWS, Vultr, DO.

The Load Impact test makes sure static caching is effective so that if a page gets a lot of traffic the site will keep responding without issue.

AWS and Vultr handled it perfectly with zero errors. Digital Ocean had a miniscule 30 errors but an increased response time as the test went on. Great showing overall on the Load Impact test for AWS and Vultr.

Uptime

	UptimeRobot	StatusCake
CloudWays AWS	100	100
CloudWays Vultr	100	100
CloudWays DO	100	100

Perfect. Across the board, perfect uptime.

WebPageTest / WPPerformanceTester

	PHP Bench	WP Bench
CloudWays AWS	8.831	266.5955745
CloudWays Vultr	9.616	346.1405331
CloudWays DO	13.421	135.7036233

The WPPerformanceTester results are normal.

	CloudWays AWS	CloudWays Vultr	CloudWays DO
Dulles	0.312	0.33	0.328
Denver	1.137	1.305	1.101
LA	0.924	1.014	1.069
London	0.763	0.725	0.718
Frankfurt	0.816	0.785	0.819
Rose Hill, Mauritius	1.867	2.497	1.86
Singapore	2.281	2.163	2.25
Mumbai	1.65	2.287	1.646
Japan	1.578	1.613	1.573
Sydney	1.837	1.978	2.068
Brazil	1.1	1.195	1.172

The WPT tests look good. The Dulles test scores were some of the fastest, especially the CloudWays AWS server which was located in the same testing data center.

Conclusion

Hard work does pay off. CloudWays has been participating for years and continually has been improving. Two Top Tier awards for AWS and Vultr plans. The Digital Ocean plan unfortunately didn't share the same honor but it seems it was competing above its weight with a price drop that would have put it one cost tier below now.