Oh boy, Cloudways. Let’s talk about the absolutely snail-paced performance of their uncached pages. I don’t care how many marketing dollars they throw into saying they’re “optimized,” or how many cloud platforms they let you pick from—if your uncached pages are slower than a dial-up connection in 1998, what’s the point?
Let’s get into it.
Uncached Page Load Times: A Masterclass in Frustration
Trying to load an uncached page on Cloudways is like watching paint dry in slow motion. You click a link, and then… nothing. Just that little spinner twirling like it’s training for a figure skating competition.
And you’re left wondering: Did the server crash? Did my internet go out? Am I being punished for something?
Then, finally, after what feels like a full geological era, the page appears. But by then, your users are long gone. Your bounce rate? Through the roof. Your patience? Nonexistent. Your faith in Cloudways? Hanging on by a thread.
“But It’s Managed Hosting!”
Yeah, sure, it’s managed. That word means nothing if the backend is crawling. Oh wow, they give you a sleek UI and some nice integrations, but if the raw speed isn’t there for dynamic content, then what’s the point? Seriously—what good is scaling if you’re scaling slow performance?
Try working with a dynamic WordPress site. No aggressive caching. Just pure PHP + MySQL requests. You’ll learn very quickly that “managed” means you’re managing your own expectations into the gutter.
Supposed “Cloud Infrastructure”
They give you a menu of cloud providers—DigitalOcean, Vultr, AWS, Google Cloud—but none of that matters if the stack they put on top is bloated, misconfigured, or simply underperforms. Their stack might be optimized for cached performance, but once caching is off, the whole thing collapses like a cheap folding chair.
You’d think with all this cloud flexibility, there’d be some real power behind the scenes. Nope. It’s like driving a Ferrari with a lawnmower engine under the hood.
Support Will Blame Everything But Themselves
And if you dare bring this up to support? Get ready for a masterclass in deflection. They’ll tell you to optimize your database. Disable some plugins. Look into Redis. Adjust your PHP workers. “Have you tried our Breeze caching plugin?” THEY DON’T GET IT.
The problem isn’t caching—it’s the abysmal raw load speed when no cache is involved. That’s the real test of a good host.
Caching is a band-aid, not a cure. If a server can’t handle a single uncached request without tripping over itself, that’s not a hosting solution—that’s a liability.
In short: Cloudways might work for heavily cached brochure sites or for developers who love tweaking settings endlessly. But if you have real users, real traffic, and actual business requirements, uncached performance matters, especially when you are updating WordPress posts—and Cloudways drops the ball hard.
