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- Performance (RC) – Runcloud wins easily when you use the NGINX-only stack compared to the outdated Apache-NGINX hybrid stack which is available on both.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.
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
Putting redirects in htaccess is the best way to go about it. I much prefer that over php processing on every page request.
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
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.