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Cloudways vs RunCloud – Managed WordPress Hosting Comparison (UPDATED 2020)

WordPress hosting Aug 6, 2018 by Johnny 5 Comments

I’ll give a quick rundown on these 2 managed panel hosting services and how they compare for developer-grade clients.

Speed, features, pricing, ease-of-use. What I like and dislike about both. We’ll go over all that.

Cloudways vs Runcloud – hosting comparison

  • Ease-of-use for noobs (CW) – they have support and easy to set up without touching the CLI.
  • Ease-of-use for devs (RC) – clean UI where you don’t get lost between server vs application settings. I think the one thing that kills their ease-of-use here is having to connect the server to RC. Non-techies will get lost in the CLI and not know how to generate SSH keys and use Putty and all that.
  • Performance (RC) – Runcloud wins easily when you use the NGINX-only stack compared to the outdated Apache-NGINX hybrid stack which is available on both. (Cloudways only offers hybrid Apache-NGINX stack.)
  • Price (RC) – no brainer here. RC’s price includes as many servers as you want and with no overhead on their pricing. Cloudways has that support cost built-in and becomes extremely pricey when you go above their $12/month plans.

My verdict? Cloudways or Runcloud?

Pick Cloudways if:

  • You’re a non-techie just moving up from cheap shared hosting with cPanel.
  • Expect to have tech support.
  • Like having htaccess.
  • Not able to work from the command line.

Pick Runcloud if:

  • You’ve comfortable with servers and VPS and can manage the CLI or know how to hire someone to do it for you.
  • Don’t need tech support.
  • Manage multiple servers.
  • Manage really high-traffic sites.
  • Prefer pure NGINX for max performance.
  • Cost is a big factor.

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About Johnny

Right on the edge of WordPress development! 10+ years of WordPress design, development, hosting, speed optimization, product advisor, marketing, monetization. I do all that.

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Reader Interactions

5 Comments

  1. Fernando

    August 31, 2018 at 6:41 am

    Hello Johnny!

    I have a question, I’m using RunCloud with Apache-NGINX because I don’t know if I’m going to have a plugin incompatibilities with NGINX, some of my plugins put a code in to httaccess file like Swift, Thirsty Affiliates (redirections), and other I don’t remember the name.
    Do you know if there a problem with this? I’m trying to have feasters sites

    Reply
    • Johnny

      September 5, 2018 at 1:22 am

      Putting redirects in htaccess is the best way to go about it. I much prefer that over php processing on every page request.

      Reply
  2. geo

    March 10, 2019 at 12:38 pm

    Been testing RC, but not sure if you had a chance to test clustercs (similar to RC) and would appreciate if you could share your thoughts on it.

    Thanks

    Reply
    • Johnny

      March 10, 2019 at 2:03 pm

      I’ve not tried them yet but they seem like a cool bunch. I’m not a fan of Apache-NGINX hybrid stacks but will stay open minded. If I ever get a chance, I’ll check out their free version. Thanks for the share.

      Reply

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