Cloudways vs Directnic: guide for 2024

Cloudways vs Directnic: Final verdict

Looking over Cloudways vs. Directnic, Cloudways offers superior performance, features, and value, whereas Directnic remains a budget-friendly option with certain limitations.

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  Cloudways (Overall grade: 8.5)
  
  
  focuses on delivering high-performance hosting solutions with advanced technical and operational security measures. It offers SSD-based cloud hosting with multiple caching options, which significantly enhances website speed and reliability. Cloudways excels in scalability, allowing easy adjustments to server resources, ideal for high-traffic and eCommerce websites. The platform’s custom control panel provides intuitive management, and it supports team collaboration through detailed user roles and permissions. However, the lack of email hosting and some limitations on server vendor choices are noted drawbacks. Its strong uptime record, advanced security features, and responsive customer support make Cloudways a standout choice for users with demanding hosting needs.
  
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  Directnic (Overall grade: 6.8)
  
  
  provides practical, low-cost shared hosting plans with included email accounts, a free domain, and an easy-to-use cPanel interface, making it accessible for beginners and small businesses. The platform’s 99% uptime guarantee falls short of industry standards, posing potential issues for site accessibility. Despite these downsides, Directnic’s straightforward setup and cost-effective plans are appealing for those looking for a simple hosting solution. Its customer support, while available 24/7, lacks premium options and enterprise-level assistance. The service’s average feedback and relatively slow performance indicate it might not be the best fit for users with more advanced requirements or higher expectations for reliability.
  

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

SECTION 1:

🏆 Winner Cloudways: Superior uptime and advanced features for managed cloud hosting.

Cloudways demonstrates excellent reliability with an impressive uptime record over the years. From 2020 to 2021, it achieved a perfect 100% uptime, slightly dipping to 99.99% in 2022, which is still commendable. This performance places Cloudways at the forefront when compared to other providers like HostGator, GreenGeeks, GoDaddy, Hostinger, Bluehost, and iPage, which had lower uptime rates in 2022. Cloudways’ 99.99% uptime guarantee and detailed system status page further underline its commitment to reliability.

Directnic falls short with a 99% uptime guarantee, below the industry standard of 99.9%. This implies potential downtime issues which can affect site accessibility. Despite offering solid shared hosting plans and additional services like SSL certificates and SiteLock, Directnic’s lower uptime guarantee and lack of advanced hosting options are significant drawbacks. However, it remains a budget-friendly option with good customer support, ideal for individuals and small businesses with basic hosting needs.

🏆 Winner Cloudways: When it comes to general performance, Cloudways offers a clear advantage. It uses SSD drives, which are three times faster than HDDs, ensuring super-fast page load times. Its built-in advanced caches, including Memcached, Varnish, Nginx, and Redis, contribute to impressive load speeds. Cloudways also deploys an optimized stack with NGINX, Apache, MySQL/MariaDB, and PHP-FPM to manage high traffic efficiently. It has Cloudflare Enterprise, providing a robust Content Delivery Network (CDN) that stands against DDoS attacks. Although the number and locations of data centers are not specified, the performance metrics indicate a superior offering.

Cloudways excels in website speed, primarily due to its SSD hosting and multiple caching options like Memcached and Redis. The PHP 8 ready servers are another significant factor that boosts speed, along with auto-healing servers ensuring uninterrupted performance. With its integrated WordPress cache plugin, Breeze, that’s trusted by over 300,000 users, Cloudways stands out for website performance. In contrast, Directnic Hosting, with its 99% uptime and adaptive hosting plans, doesn’t offer as many built-in performance-enhancing features or advanced caching methods.

Website Speed

Cloudways excels in website speed, primarily due to its SSD hosting and multiple caching options like Memcached and Redis. The PHP 8 ready servers are another significant factor that boosts speed, along with auto-healing servers ensuring uninterrupted performance. With its integrated WordPress cache plugin, Breeze, that’s trusted by over 300,000 users, Cloudways stands out for website performance. In contrast, Directnic Hosting, with its 99% uptime and adaptive hosting plans, doesn’t offer as many built-in performance-enhancing features or advanced caching methods.

Scalability

Cloudways provides vertical scaling, allowing you to scale server resources like RAM, CPU, and storage easily and cost-effectively. This feature helps handle high-traffic situations without the need to overhaul your plan. Directnic Hosting offers scalability through its various tiered plans, but it doesn’t seem to offer the same granular control or automatic scaling features. The cost details for scaling resources on Directnic are not specified, and it appears you may need to manually upgrade plans as your requirements grow.

🏆 Winner
Cloudways: Offers an extensive range of security features and robust performance enhancements suitable for varied web hosting needs.

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

Technical security measures:

Cloudways delivers a variety of advanced technical security measures including free SSL certificates, server and platform-level firewalls, and automated protection like Fail2ban and bot protection, providing a well-rounded security environment. In contrast, Directnic offers various SSL certificates at different price points, a fully-managed Web Application Firewall (WAF), and multiple layers of DDoS protection. While both hosting services offer strong technical security measures, Cloudways excels with features like two-factor authentication and their auto-healing servers.

Operational security measures:

Cloudways deploys regular security patches and updates, automated protection systems such as vulnerability scanners, and application isolation to maintain operational security. Meanwhile, Directnic ensures 24/7/365 surveillance through their Cyber Security Operations Center (CSOC) and real-time intrusion prevention systems. Both providers employ continuous operational security practices but the automation and ease-of-use of Cloudways’ security protocols give it a slight edge.

Compliance and certifications:

Cloudways and Directnic follow different paths regarding compliance. Cloudways leverages PCI-DSS compliant hardware from its cloud infrastructure providers and likely aligns with GDPR requirements, although it is not explicitly mentioned. Directnic does not provide specific information about GDPR or PCI-DSS compliance. So, in this category, Cloudways has a more comprehensive compliance framework due to its PCI-DSS compliant infrastructure providers.

🏆 Winner
Cloudways: A high-performance hosting provider with advanced security and scalability features.

When evaluating the various features both Cloudways and Directnic offer, a few key differences stand out. Cloudways provides a more robust solution with a focus on performance, security, and ease of use. With SSD hosting, built-in caches, and an optimized stack, Cloudways significantly enhances website load times and reliability. Additionally, it offers Cloudflare integration and PHP 8 support, which are beneficial for users looking for a fast and efficient hosting service. Directnic, on the other hand, presents a simpler and more budget-friendly option. The inclusion of a free domain registration and cPanel hosting makes it accessible, especially for beginners or small businesses. The straightforward plans with clear-cut features like email accounts and easy script installs are appealing for those who want minimal hassle in setting up their websites.

When it comes to user-friendliness and customization, Cloudways continues to excel with its one-click actions for backups, restores, and server cloning. The support for SSH and SFTP access allows for greater control over server environments, which is ideal for developers. Team collaboration tools and real-time server monitoring further enhance its appeal for professional use. Directnic, despite its ease of setup, lacks several advanced features like Git integration and staging environments offered by Cloudways. Directnic does, however, stand out in its affordability and straightforward hosting plans, providing up to 200GB disk space and 2000GB data transfer on its deluxe plan, making it a viable option for those on a tight budget.

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 Directnic 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:

Email services at Cloudways offers email hosting through third-party services like Rackspace and Elastic Email. This setup is suitable for users looking to manage both transactional emails and campaigns but may require additional costs. Directnic includes email accounts with all its plans, providing POP3 email hosting capabilities, which can be beneficial for users wanting integrated email solutions without additional subscriptions. While both services cover essential email functionalities, Cloudways provides more specialized options, whereas Directnic offers a bundled, straightforward approach.

🏆 Winner Cloudways: Offers a comprehensive range of hosting solutions with extensive features.

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. Although some providers offer identical plans for WordPress and shared hosting, we have created separate tables for each to enhance clarity.

When comparing Cloudways and Directnic on pricing plans, Cloudways provides a wide array of cloud-based hosting plans suitable for various needs, ranging from basic WordPress hosting to extensive Amazon Web Services (AWS) hosting solutions. Directnic, on the other hand, delivers more conventional shared hosting plans at lower price points, but with limited storage and bandwidth capabilities. Cloudways clearly stands out when robust features and versatile offerings are imperative, especially for demanding applications and significant web traffic. Below are detailed comparisons of plans for WordPress hosting, shared hosting (web hosting), and cloud hosting.