Cloudways vs Leaseweb: guide for 2024

Cloudways vs Leaseweb: Final verdict

Looking over Cloudways vs. Leaseweb, it’s clear why both hosts are so popular. They have both hosted millions of
websites that run on WordPress for decades, building up a loyal customer base.

• 
  Cloudways (Overall grade: 8.5)
  
  
  excels with its optimized managed cloud hosting, offering superior uptime, including a perfect 100% in 2020 and 2021, and 99.99% in 2022. Its hosting stack is highly optimized for speed with SSD drives and advanced caching, ensuring quick load times. It shines with its comprehensive performance tools, secure environment, and user-friendly features like 1-click server scaling, built-in caches, and robust support options. However, its lack of domain registration and email hosting might be a downside for some, but its flexibility and performance make it ideal for users prioritizing ease of use and speed.
  
• 
  Leaseweb (Overall grade: 8.0)
  
  
  boasts a robust infrastructure with high-end CPUs and dedicated server options, making it ideal for high-traffic websites needing powerful compute resources. It promises a 99.999% uptime and offers globally integrated networks for low latency. Its comprehensive security features and compliance measures make it a secure and reliable choice for enterprise-level needs. The service may not be as intuitive for non-technical users due to its traditional management interface and lack of automated migration; however, its strong performance, scalable options, and varied support channels ensure that tech-savvy users and businesses with specific security or compliance requirements are well-catered for.
  

Hosting types offered

Both platforms provide a variety of hosting types, each designed to meet the different needs of users.

Although both offer a variety of hosting plans tailored to different needs, in
certain cases, one platform may prove to be more suitable.

Detailed comparison

🏆 Winner
Cloudways: Optimized managed cloud hosting with exceptional uptime and performance metrics.

Cloudways boasts excellent uptime records from 2020 to 2022, maintaining 100% in 2020 and 2021, and 99.99% in 2022. It provides a system status page for transparency about outages and maintenance. The hosting service also offers a user-friendly control panel and supports various cloud infrastructure providers. Though it doesn’t include domain registration or email hosting, Cloudways ensures excellent performance with an average server response time of 229ms.

Leaseweb promises an impressive core uptime guarantee of 99.999%, though its shared hosting uptime can vary. Their network capacity is substantial, with over 10 Tbps and a global reach through strategically located data centers. Leaseweb’s support options are varied, including telephone and live chat, with faster response times for high-end plans. Despite its strengths, Leaseweb’s fully loaded time for website performance was recorded at 3.3 seconds, which is longer compared to Cloudways’ 0.9 seconds.

🏆 Winner Cloudways: Fast and secure hosting with comprehensive performance and scaling features.

When comparing the general performance, Cloudways stands out with its use of SSD drives, which are three times faster than traditional HDDs. It boasts advanced caching methods like Memcached, Varnish, Nginx, and Redis, seamlessly integrated to enhance load times. Furthermore, Cloudways offers a content delivery network (CDN) through Cloudflare Enterprise, known for its multi-layered DDoS mitigation. With several server locations worldwide, Cloudways ensures globally optimized speed and reliability. On the other hand, Leaseweb delivers high compute power with CPUs up to 64 cores and configurable server specifications, targeting high-performance single-tenant needs. Leaseweb includes a strong, globally integrated network with 43 points of presence and a substantial bandwidth capacity, ensuring low latency. However, its CDN capabilities aren’t explicitly mentioned, implying they might not be as robust as Cloudways.

Website Speed

Cloudways provides a highly optimized stack with NGINX, Apache, MySQL/MariaDB, and PHP-FPM, ensuring fast page load times and better performance under high traffic. It’s ready for PHP 8.2 and offers auto-healing servers to maintain uptime. Leaseweb, with its powerful CPUs from Intel and AMD, ensures that compute-intensive tasks are handled efficiently, aiming for high IOPS and minimal latency. Both promise excellent website speeds, though Cloudways’ built-in caching and PHP optimization give it a slight edge in delivering faster load times consistently.

Scalability

Cloudways offers vertical scaling that allows users to easily increase resources like RAM, CPU, and storage without significant cost increments. Its elasticity enables quick adjustments to server capacity without changing plans. Cloudways also supports unlimited app installations and one-click actions for seamless scaling. Leaseweb’s flexibility comes from its configurable servers, but details on elasticity or cost-specific scaling aren’t provided. Cloudways wins here with its user-friendly vertical scaling options and clear transparency on how to increase server capacity efficiently.

🏆 Winner Leaseweb: Leaseweb boasts superior security features and compliance measures, making it a leading choice for hosting services.

Both Cloudways and Leaseweb, have notable differences in their approaches to technical and operational
security, as well as in their compliance with regulations.

Technical security measures:

Cloudways offers a range of high-quality SSL certificates, PHP 8 support, dedicated server-level firewalls, and automated protection like Fail2ban and bot protection powered by MalCare. Leaseweb, on the other hand, provides SIEM SOC services, DDoS IP protection with global scrubbing centers, and SSL certificates. Both have robust security measures, but Leaseweb’s penetration testing and hardware-based DDoS mitigation give it an edge in this category.

Operational security measures:

Cloudways features 24/7 server-level protection, regular security patches, and application isolation for WooCommerce stores, ensuring continuous security and uptime. Leaseweb offers 24/7 monitoring from a Security Operations Center (SOC), customizable security profiles and rules, and enterprise-grade backup solutions via Acronis. Leaseweb’s proactive monitoring and customizable security measures are slightly more comprehensive, offering better operational security.

Compliance and certifications:

Cloudways leverages PCI-DSS compliant hardware from underlying cloud providers like Google Compute Engine and Amazon AWS but is not PCI-DSS compliant itself. Leaseweb ensures full PCI compliance and follows GDPR regulations rigorously. While Cloudways aligns with GDPR, the lack of direct PCI compliance places it at a disadvantage compared to Leaseweb, which demonstrates stronger adherence to compliance standards.

🏆 Winner Cloudways: A versatile hosting provider excelling in performance, security, and ease of use.

Cloudways and Leaseweb both bring unique strengths to the table, catering to different user needs. Cloudways offers SSD hosting with built-in caches, which bolsters performance significantly. Its feature-rich setup includes the Breeze Plugin, NGINX, Apache, MySQL/MariaDB, PHP-FPM optimizations, and real-time server monitoring, ensuring a high-performance environment for WooCommerce and other applications. With additional security measures like dedicated firewalls, SSL certificates, 2FA, and IP whitelisting, it’s designed for users who prioritize security. Leaseweb also offers robust hosting through its Linux-based web hosting plans and VPS hosting, ensuring a 100% availability guarantee with an emphasis on strong DDoS and firewall protection. Its virtual private servers come with root/admin access, catering to more technically skilled users who need complete server control.

From a user-friendliness perspective, Cloudways shines with its 1-click actions for backup/restore and website/server cloning, alongside tools for team collaboration and staging URLs. It’s an ideal choice for users seeking ease of use and advanced features without long-term contracts. Leaseweb’s offerings include web hosting plans suitable for small to large needs, emphasizing mailboxes, domains, and fast delivery times. However, Leaseweb’s customization options via the Customer Portal and a variety of operating systems reflect flexibility though might be better suited to users comfortable with navigating control panels and requiring higher growth and scalability.

Both providers support a range of users from beginners to experts with user-friendly website builders and WordPress staging areas. However, in terms of developer tools, both Cloudways and Leaseweb offer robust options including SSH access, support for multiple programming languages, and Git for version control, thus appealing to developers looking for advanced capabilities.

Email services:

Cloudways leverages Rackspace and Elastic Email for robust email hosting solutions, suitable for campaigns and transactional emails. Leaseweb directly includes email hosting within its web hosting plans, providing users with generous mailboxes ranging from 10 to 250, depending on the plan. Both offer practical email solutions, but Cloudways’ integration with third-party services can offer additional flexibility for diverse email needs.

🏆 Winner
Cloudways: Cloudways scores slightly higher overall, mainly due to the robust features included in their plans and the transparency of what’s included.

Evaluating the pricing of plans among various hosting providers can be complex due to their differing pricing and renewal strategies. Additionally, certain plans require annual commitments, which adds to the difficulty of making comparisons. The prices listed are based on monthly commitments; plans requiring annual commitments are indicated. Additionally, although some providers offer identical plans for WordPress and shared hosting, we have created separate tables for each to enhance clarity.

The pricing of Cloudways and Leaseweb varies significantly across different hosting types. Cloudways offers a range of options in WordPress hosting starting at $11 per month, accommodating from 1 GB RAM to 192 GB RAM plans. Leaseweb, on the other hand, features affordable web hosting plans starting from €5.99 per month, focusing heavily on SSD storage and domain support. For cloud hosting, Cloudways has extensive offerings from various providers like AWS and Google Compute Engine, while Leaseweb focuses on flexibility in public, hybrid, and VMware clouds with prices starting from US$44.61 per month for dedicated servers.