Cloudways hosting vs Nexcess Magento
Double the risk, double the delays, and double the price. Discover why Cloudways AWS hosting can’t match the cost-efficiency, performance, and expertise of Nexcess Magento hosting.

Why Magento users don’t stay with Cloudways hosting
Expensive support
DIY optimization
Harsh billing
Delayed response time
Limited privacy
Cloudways hosting vs Nexcess Magento
Expert support at a high price


Magento performance is DIY
Pay as you go, until you don’t pay


Expect delays from Cloudways
Magento security is more complicated

Why Cloudways customers are migrating away
Worst and slowest support
Worst and slowest support; which was something we were wishing for. Especially considering there isn't live chat available or phone. Only emails, which is probably running behind on support tickets. So don't expect results quickly..
Horrible experience as a 2 year customer
Due to my bank messing up my credit card info, my card didn't work for 3 days. Cloudways put my servers down, making all my sites offline because the payment did not get processed for 3 days!
Worst Hosting Speed!
I don't even want to give a one start. I've been focused on improving the speed of my Application! Every time I keep getting the error 'Reduce Initial Server Response' Whenever I get to customer support! They just say, we'll let senior developers note about the issue!
Cloudways hosting vs Nexcess Magento
Cloudways hosting is not owned by Amazon. Cloudways is owned by cloud infrastructure provider Digital Ocean, who acquired Cloudways for $350 million in 2022.
Cloudways has an official partnership with AWS, which allows them to resell AWS services at a premium. They are a broker between you and AWS infrastructure.
No, all Cloudways hosting is all outsourced to large, unmanaged cloud infrastructure providers.
Cloudways did not advertise Magento hosting until 2020. Nexcess has offered optimized, high-speed Magento hosting since Magento’s initial launch in 2008.
Nexcess and Cloudways hosting have similar base-level application stacks. The difference is that Nexcess has fine-tuned each instance to maximize performance potential for Magento customers. Another key difference is that Nexcess allows the user to bring their own stack and use any deployment method. Both providers include Nginx, Apache servers, PHP, Redis, MariaDB, HTTP/2, Elasticsearch, and compatibility with Git, Composer, and New Relic. However, Nexcess tunes these instances for higher-quality Magento performance and usability.
Cloudways includes RabbitMQ and Varnish within their core stack offering, but they require you set it up and configure it — that includes cookie and URL exclusions. Nexcess tunes Varnish and RabbitMQ out of the box and containerizes it, so you don’t have to manage usage and configuration yourself. Containerization also prevents unnecessary price increases. As containers, Varnish and RabbitMQ operate as isolated, external instances that do not take resources from your Magento solution. They cost a small monthly fee, but they are more scalable and less expensive than using your core cloud resources to deploy.
Cloudways AWS hosting is a managed service in which Cloudways procures AWS server resources on your behalf and manages some, but not all, digital server needs for you. Your Cloudways hosting is located in AWS data centers, but Cloudways does not physically monitor or manage your hardware. Unlike Nexcess, servers are not uniquely optimized for Magento needs — it is up to the user to optimize effectively.
Cloudways charges for DNS, additional migrations, email hosting, expert support, application upgrades, and CDN access. Additional resources like bandwidth and backups are charged on a usage basis.
AWS is a monolith of 200+ IT services that apply to hosting. While Cloudways does utilize AWS services, they do not disclose the EC2 instances that power their platform and customer websites.