Cloudways is a web hosting provider founded in 2011 and was acquired by DigitalOcean in 2022. It provides exclusive cloud hosting services and is backed by cloud servers like Google, Vultr, DigitalOcean, Linode, and AWS.
Cloudways has 80,000+ customers worldwide and hosts 570K+ websites for agencies, SMBs, and Individuals. Cloudways won the High-Performance accreditation from G2 in 2022.
Liquid Web is a hosting company that focuses on web and cloud professionals, catering to growing businesses, designers, developers, and agencies. The company was founded in 1997 and serves 45,000+ customers from 150 Countries.
Liquid Web is known for their excellent customer support, with a team of over 250 professionals providing 24/7/365 support.
Their web hosting services include dedicated servers, VPS, cloud dedicated servers, VMware private cloud, and managed WordPress and WooCommerce services, among others.
Cloudways offers only cloud hosting with 3 different providers—AWS, DigitalOcean, and Google Cloud. You get unlimited application installation options, free daily backups, SSL certificates, and site migration on all plans.
Plus their servers are NvMe-based and with a dedicated environment. The host also provides 1-click installs for over 10+ applications.
With Cloudways, you can clone fully configured servers, migrate, and add all your sites to one place at no additional costs.
Furthermore, you can change your data center location, cloud provider, expand your storage, or even collaborate with other team members in real time. Although they don’t provide a website builder, Cloudways is an excellent option for everyone who wants the flexibility and scalability of a cloud server.
Liquid Web provides different types of hosting including VPS, Cloud, Managed WordPress, and Dedicated.
They offer automatic SSL installation on every plan, free and convenient website migration, high-performance SSD/NvMe hybrid storage, free WordPress installation, and automatic daily backups – accessible in just one click.
They also provide the Beaver website builder with their managed WordPress hosting.
Cloudways exclusively provides managed cloud hosting to their customers, while Liquid Web also offers VPS and dedicated hosting.
Liquid Web also offers specialized hosting solutions like HIPAA compliant hosting, starting at $229 per month, and enterprise-level solutions like VMware Private Cloud, starting at $510 per month
You can use the cloud hosting solutions of Cloudways to manage your WordPress Hosting.
Range from $11/month for 1GB RAM, 1 Core Processor, and 25GB storage, to $99/month for 8GB RAM, 4 Core Processor, and 160GB storage.
AWS and Google Cloud plans are generally more expensive, starting at around $38.56 and $37.45 per month, respectively. All Cloudways plans include features like free migration, 24/7 support, automated backups, free SSL certificates, and more.
Begin with the ‘Spark’ plan at $21 per month, which includes 15 GB storage and 2TB bandwidth, and can handle up to 1 site. The pricing scales up based on the resources and number of sites you require.
There are higher-tier plans like ‘Maker’, ‘Designer’, ‘Builder’, ‘Producer’, and ‘Enterprise’, with the latter costing $492.75 per month for 800GB storage, 10TB bandwidth, and up to 250 sites.
Each of these plans includes various features such as plugin performance monitoring, WooCommerce automated testing, and Solid Security Pro.
Liquid Web’s Managed VPS Hosting offers a good balance between cost, performance, and flexibility, making it a suitable choice for growing businesses, e-commerce sites, and web professionals who need more power and resources than traditional shared hosting but don’t require a dedicated server.
The plans start at $20 per month for the Essential plan, which includes 2 vCPU, 2 GB RAM, 40 GB SSD Storage, and 10 TB Traffic.
The pricing increases with the resources offered, with the Elite plan priced at $50 per month, providing 12 vCPU, 12 GB RAM, 200 GB SSD Storage, and 10 TB Traffic.
These plans include features like DDoS Attack Protection, local site backups, enhanced security, CloudFlare CDN, and more.
Cloudways does not provide Managed VPS Hosting.
Liquid Web’s Cloud Dedicated Hosting starts at $159 per month. This hosting solution combines the dedicated resources of a traditional server with cloud features.
It’s particularly suited for enterprises with high-traffic websites, resource-intensive applications, or those requiring a high degree of customization and control.
The pricing increases with the resources offered, with the Intel Xeon E-2336 plan priced at $249 per month, providing 6 cores, 64 GB RAM, 1.92 TB SSD Storage, and 10 TB Traffic.
Liquid Web’s Managed Dedicated Hosting starts at $199 per month for the INTEL E-2356G plan, with higher-tier options like the INTEL XEON GOLD 6226R available at $299 per month.
These dedicated servers are customizable and include features such as DDoS protection, CloudFlare CDN, backup drives, and advanced security.
32% of your customers will bounce if your website takes more than 3 seconds to load; so it’s important your host’s servers load quickly.
It’s also important to consider your host’s uptime. In Layman’s terms, uptime means the percentage of the time your host servers are online.
To test Cloudways and Liquid Web, I ran both hosts’ domains through GTmetrix and PageSpeed Insights and these were the results:
Cloudways had an overall score of 87% on GTMetrix and a TTFB of 354 ms which is quite decent.
Cloudways performed quite poorly on Google Page Speed Insights with a TTFB of 1.2s with a 64% overall performance.
Liquid Web performed far better than Cloudways on GTMetrix with an overall 95% performance and an excellent 225 ms TTFB.
PageSpeed Insights shows a performance of 98% on Desktop with a TTFB of 0.8s, which is remarkable.
Cloudways provides 24/7 support through multiple channels – phone, live chat, slack community, youtube video guides, knowledge base, and a blog section.
The phone and live chat support are especially great if you need to solve urgent problems.
The host also offers advanced and premium support add-ons like a Slack community, dedicated account manager, and more.
The knowledgebase is quite helpful and will help you figure out answers around topics like subscription, billing, account management, website and troubleshooting, etc. and is awesome if you are a DIY learner.
You can find a live chat option on the home page or the support menu.
There’s a Facebook group for support on Cloudways, which is quite great.
For inquiries before purchase, you can reach out to them via their contact us page. 
They have regular updates on their blog and YouTube, which you can use to gain more knowledge throughout your website building and management journey.
You can also see how frequently their content gets updated on YouTube:
As an alternative to Cloudways, Liquid Web also has a strong customer support system – especially, human support. As you can see, they have a live chat option right on their front page.
You will also find a ticket support option on their contact page. When I clicked on the “create a ticket” option, it redirected me to the signup page.
Liquid Web has phone support 24/7, and I contacted the phone numbers for inquiries that were unavailable from my location. 
Like Cloudways, Liquid Web has an in-built search engine in its knowledge base and different categories to check your queries. I searched “DDoS Protection” on the search bar to see the system’s efficiency, and quickly got a list of helpful guides.
In the content hub, I found numerous webinar videos from Cloudways experts. When you click “Watch now,” it will show you to fill in your information to watch the videos. Once you do that, however, they are free to watch. The same videos are available on their youtube channel.
Further, they have an active blog with hundreds of articles to provide knowledge on different product categories.
I decided to try out the live chat. I clicked on the “chat with a human” button, and was redirected to sign up.
After signing up, a live agent joined and I was impressed with how quickly he responded. No long waiting time. You can see the conversation.
Cloudways has a clean website interface and as they provide only cloud hosting, everything is straight to the point.
Once you sign up as a customer, you get access to the host’s customized cPanel. It’s clean and easy to perform all your backend tweaks.
Furthermore, they have a help page with guides on using the control dashboard.
Cloudways has great support but their contact information is a little hard to find plus integrated email hosting.
Liquid Web provides versatile products and services and its UI groups it all nicely. The home page is minimal and clutter-free, with easy navigation to the different relevant pages.
Liquid Web has the old-school cPanel – and if you are big on tradition, you’d feel right at home.
Liquid Web’s Account Management Dashboard also has a clean look:
Plus, if you don’t have a website yet, the Beaver website builder included will help you create one with its easy to use drag-and-drop themes.
The extensive security features of Cloudways include a free SSL, Two-Factor Authentication (2FA), security patching, 24/7 real-time monitoring, bot prevention with the Malcare plugin, daily backups, WAF, and more with their premium add-ons.
Further, your website will get a boost with their advanced Cloudflare CDN.
Like Cloudways, Liquid Web also provides great security features on all its plans. Some of their no-cost security solutions include DDoS protection, free SSL encryption, Cloudflare CDN, and daily backups and restore.
If you want more, the paid add-ons include firewalls and VPNs, data protection, server protection, routine malware scans and removal, and an anti-virus.
You want to go for a host with a wide server footprint, especially if you are targeting a global audience. The closer your host’s servers are to the user, the faster your website will load.
Cloudways has widely spread servers in England, Netherlands, India, Germany, USA, Singapore, Australia, South Africa, and more.
Liquid Web has its own data centers in three primary locations: Lansing, MI; Phoenix, AZ; and Amsterdam, NL.
Cloudways is a great cloud web hosting company that offers cloud servers at an affordable price. Thus, I’d suggest you take Cloudways if:
Liquid Web is a robust competitor of Cloudways with multiple hosting plans and extensive add-ons. In a nutshell, you should choose Liquid Web if :
| Provider | Overview | Expert & User Reviews | |
|---|---|---|---|
 | Offer cloud web hosting, WordPress hosting, and managed cloud servers. Verpex is known for great customer support, site migration assistance, and performance optimization. | Verpex Hosting Review | Visit Verpex Hosting |
 | Known for its cloud and VPS hosting plans, which offer excellent performance and a variety of features. It is an appealing choice for users seeking reliable and scalable hosting solutions. | ScalaHosting Review | Visit ScalaHosting |
 | Known for their slightly higher-priced plans but compensate with speedy support and a generous 45-day money-back guarantee. | ChemiCloud Review | Visit ChemiCloud |
In the 7-round matchup, Liquid Web trumps Cloudways as the better host.
They offer versatile products, quick support, high performance, impressive server speed, and a 30-days money-back guarantee on all plans.
However, Cloudways is still a great alternative to Liquid Web in terms of budget, security, ease of use, and has a wider server footprint.
Liquid Web is Known for their excellent customer support and high uptime standards, Liquid Web’s hosting solutions are characterized by robust security features and strong performance, making them a reliable choice for users who need dependable and efficient hosting services.
Cloudways is best for small and medium-sized businesses with global customers who have a tight budget but want a fast, flexible, and scalable cloud hosting service with multiple cloud options.
Some top-notch Liquid Web and Cloudways alternatives are Kinsta, Rocket.net, WP Engine, SiteGound, GoDaddy, etc.
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