Question

DigitalOcean + Cloudways slower than Shared Godaddy Hosting for Wordpress?

Posted December 25, 2014 23.7k views

Surely it can’t be right, can it? A 2GB RAM DO’s performance is terrible in this article. And why are there so many errors?

http://reviewsignal.com/blog/2014/11/03/wordpress-hosting-performance-benchmarks-november-2014/

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5 answers
Peter December 25, 2014

I use DigitalOcean via Cloudways for Joomla and Wordpress sites.
My tests showed that it outperform any shared and managed hostings around, that is why I chose Cloudways.
Sure it probably depends on many things, such as what kind of cache, plugins u use, how many visitors you have and what they do on site …
I did many kind of testing and Cloudways always win.
I have no any problem to use 512 the starting droplet for 2 sites with 1000 unique visitors per day.
I tell you truth, all my website via Cloudways just fly without any problems.
I did same test on Digital Ocean ubuntu + wordpress droplet, which had really bad results during testing, bc. it is not optimized.
One thing is use great hardware and infrastructure, another also important to optimize software, update it and all managing around that.

Btw. shared hosting can sometimes show good results for test like this, but you are not able to do it long time, like is mentioned in that test, its up to 25 000 visits per month, so 500 current visitors are just teorethical, they will not allow you so high traffic on that plan.

Don’t care about any shared hosting, all are really far behind well optimized and managed cloud hostings …

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  • m0n0cle December 25, 2014

    Thanks for clearing up my doubts. Yeah if you have a constant high load GD will probably block you.
    I just started with ServerPilot but I’ve been looking to move to Cloudways. Do you happen to have any experience with ServerPilot? I’m really interested in knowing how these two fare against each other.
    As for Cloudways, did you tinker with the default stack or just adjusted the parameters of WP cache plugins?

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  • Peter December 25, 2014

    Actually I turned varnish off and don’t use any cache plugin for my WP sites, bc. I experienced some trouble on safari and did not feel to spend whole my life to setting cache. While I don’t have millions of visitors and server is really fast, for now I don’t need cache much.
    I keep one eye on ServerPilot as option, but still Cloudways looks for me as better option.
    1 click clone site or server, staging site, this is so great for developing/testing.
    Also huge advantage of Cloudways is their support, its one of the best what I meet. They are helpful even for things who belongs to Wordpress, not to the hosting, so they don’t need, but they always help me.
    Also in Cloudways I can easily with one click set up some server setting like on/off varnish, max upload, memory limit, execution limit.
    Also daily back up are there included, good stats of server …
    I don’t want to spend my time learning and do things with ssh line, so that kind of managed service is huge benefit for me.

    What I see as advantage of Server Pilot is, that is something like half managed … so they install just main software there so you have lightweight staff on server, so it eat less memory … but from my test and experience its not real advantage … bc. I prefer performance and stability over to see “wow I have so big free memory” If I pay for for source I want that it is used, so if system and cache use my memory its good.

    I think the best what you can do is go there and try their trial free … or even if you will pay, its billed by hours, so the time you destroy server, you are not billed.
    You can always do own tests with blitz, pingdoom and others tools.
    How you can see form my comments, I m really satisfied with Cloudways and I can higly recommend it, bc. it just fit to all my requirements.

    You can check also this one test
    http://www.perehospital.cat/blog/cloud-server-from-73-to-26127-hits-with-a-properly-configured-caching-layer

    Keep in mind that it was tested by founder of Cloudways, but anyways results are truthful.

    I was close to try ServerPilot but always when I m ready for that, I check it and don’t see much advantage of it. Its good service for somebody, but with my knowledge I can not install staff on server in good time with ServerPilot - I mean staff like something for manage mysql …

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  • m0n0cle December 25, 2014

    I’ve also been considering Cloudways because they are fully managed. I have just created an account but probably I’ll stick with ServerPilot for the first few months because I have money on DO and I’ll just be hosting a WP site.

    As for the link your provided I saw it today and I’ve been wondering why there are so many errors and how does that affect the user.

    This article is very interesting too. http://reviewsignal.com/blog/2014/06/25/40-million-hits-a-day-on-wordpress-using-a-10-vps/ but requires modifying files which I rather not have to do.

    Would be great if there was an app specific optimisation setting add-on to the base stack provided.

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Leckoren December 25, 2014

Read this > “CloudWays doesn’t do just WordPress, so it’s easy to understand why their performance might not quite be as good as some of their competitors who solely focus on WordPress.”

DO not as bad as that review makes it look. Other companies put a lot of work into making wordpress run fast and good. If you did the same on a DO VPS, you could get the same fast speeds and stuff, but you will have to put the work into it. Something like cloudways will give you better then out of the box install of WP, but you will still need to tweak it. Also what plugins you have installed and using on a WP install will greatly affect how well the site works. So keep that in mind.

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  • m0n0cle December 25, 2014

    Yeah I understand, it’s just that Godaddy has always had a bad reputation for web hosting, specially for dynamic sites so it is surprising that it is performing on par with a Cloudways 2GB DO. Cloudways may not be Wordpress centric but they sure market the hell out of their highly optimised stack.

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  • Peter December 25, 2014

    they offers free trial, go test them, do the same in any shared hosting, you will see the different, huge different

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m0n0cle December 25, 2014
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Peter December 25, 2014
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paulcheetham85 March 8, 2015

I’m currently hosting a DO server on cloudways, the support seem fair enough, but I’m running a small application no more intensive than wordpress. in fact it’s idle the majority of time. The problem is that it seems to work perfectly fine, but the problem is that they have very frequent slow responsiveness, so slow that it actually causes it fails when other online apps. ie twilio make a get request to the url.

Overall I’m not impressed, cloudways throw loads of bloat on the server, they themselves don’t recommend the 512mb droplet for hosting live sites, overall I’m not impressed

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Fettel June 8, 2015

I really have to jump in here. I moved a simple WP site to Cloudways and I’m very unhappy. Site is offline frequently, bad support and I had to move up my plan (paying $30 per month now for a simple site now!). Please guys, just don’t go there.

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  • m0n0cle June 10, 2015

    I only have one wordpress installed which doesn’t have any visits, and another photo web app installed with very few visits because it’s a new site and I get frequent downtimes like yours. Cloudways support told me the problem is that I’m on a 512mb plan so it’ s a memory problem, therefore if I wanted to have any real live use I would need to upgrade.

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macamex September 6, 2019

I know its an old post… but i have to jump in here also. Cloudways has an optimized stack for the masses. If you have an application and want to get that running in an optimal way Cloudways is the wrong provider. We will leave cloudways also with several servers. Also support knows only one answer “Increase your server you need more ram or cpu”. An optimized managed server is cheaper than cloudways and you get a lot more performance..

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