The words “high-performance VPS” often come loaded with expectations—speed, power, and scalability. Cloudways has long marketed itself as a premium choice for developers and digital businesses, boasting an optimszed cloud VPS stack powered by top-tier providers like DigitalOcean, Vultr, and AWS.
But after a series of raw performance tests comparing Cloudways VPS setups to Hosting.com’s shared cPanel hosting servers, the results are not just surprising—they’re damning.
The Test Setup: Singapore-Based Servers
To ensure a fair and level playing field, we conducted benchmark testing using servers located in the same region: Singapore. On paper, Cloudways should’ve had the edge, offering managed cloud VPS solutions with dedicated resources, SSD storage, and scalable memory.
Meanwhile, Hosting.com’s Singapore shared hosting server—formerly run under A2Hosting before the recent merger—was expected to lag behind due to the nature of shared hosting environments.
The reality? Quite the opposite.
Uncached, Raw Performance Speeds
Let’s be clear—this wasn’t a comparison based on cache-boosted TTFB (Time to First Byte) or front-end optimisations.
These tests focused strictly on raw, uncached server performance: how fast can each environment process a request from scratch, without relying on caching plugins or content delivery networks.
Hosting.com blew Cloudways out of the water.
In multiple rounds of load testing, Hosting.com’s shared server consistently delivered faster response times and lower latency.
Page loads were visibly snappier, even under stress scenarios. Despite not having “dedicated” resources, the shared environment outperformed Cloudways across multiple locations.
Yes, we even spun up Cloudways instances in other locations— Sydney, even Frankfurt—just to be sure the underperformance wasn’t region-specific. But across the board, Cloudways failed to catch up to Hosting.com’s raw server response and “to the eye” page load speeds.
Pricing: Shared Hosting Wins Again
What makes this even more astonishing is the price disparity. A typical Hosting.com shared hosting plan comes in at a fraction of the monthly cost of a single Cloudways VPS instance.
For less than half the price, users on Hosting.com are getting faster load times, better throughput, and zero over-promise marketing jargon.
Cloudways’ billing model, while flexible, quickly becomes expensive if you scale your server size or add extras like security, and premium CDN.
For businesses on a budget or looking for pure cost-to-performance ratio, Cloudways simply doesn’t deliver. It might in resource allocation options, but not in raw performance.
Price Comparison
Cloudways VPS $54USD Month – Cloud Provider – Digital Ocean
- 4GB RAM
- 2 vCPU
- 80Gb NVMe
- Memcached
- No LightSpeed Server Cache
- No cPanel (In House Management System)
- No Softaculous Installer Scripts
- Pay Extra For Security Product – Imunify360
- I/O Speed – Unknown (Not Advertised)
- IOPS – Number of disk operations – Unknown (Not Advertised)
- Bandwidth Allowance – 4TB
- Dedicated IP – Free
- Data Port Speed Unknown (Not Advertised)
Hosting.com (Formally A2Hosting) – Shared Hosting Server – Turbo Max $8.99 for the first year then $29.99
- 6GB RAM
- 4 vCPU
- 100Gb NVMe
- Memcached
- LiteSpeed Server Cache 100% Free
- cPanel 100% Free
- Softaculous Installer Scripts 100% Free
- Imunify360 100% Free
- I/O Speed – Massive 250mb/sec < Other shared hosting services average just 5mb/sec
- IOPS – Number of disk operations Massive 8192
- Bandwidth Allowance – Unlimited
- Dedicated IP – Additional Cost (Not a perfomace factor on shared hosting)
- Data Port Speed 1Gbps/1000Mbps shared
Performance Verdict: The Numbers Don’t Lie
Hosting.com’s hardware, some of which was once operated under the A2Hosting banner before the merger, seems to have retained all the performance polish and optimisation that made A2 a top-tier player in shared hosting.
Whatever stack and configuration they’re running in Singapore—it’s working. And it’s running rings around the so-called “high-performance” cloud VPS solutions that Cloudways advertises.
By conventional wisdom, a Virtual Private Server (VPS) should easily outperform a shared hosting environment. Not in this case
More resources, fewer neighbors, better isolation—it’s a setup that’s meant to be faster and more powerful. But in a recent head-to-head comparison between Hosting.com’s shared hosting plans and Cloudways’ managed VPS servers, the results tell a very different story.
Real-World Speed Metrics: Cloudways Falls Behind
Testing was conducted using our own production website a full-featured news and media WordPress platform with dynamic content and real-world visitor traffic.
Here’s what we found:
| Platform | Location | Mobile Speed Score (Google PageSpeed) | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hosting.com | Singapore | 64 | Shared hosting, no cache. No CDN |
| Cloudways | Singapore | 43 | VPS, no cache. No CDN |
These are mobile speed scores, where performance bottlenecks are most exposed. Hosting.com outperformed Cloudways by a wide margin—21 points faster—on raw page load tests with zero caching or CDN enabled.
Nothing we did—tweaking server-level optimisations, database handling, cron jobs, heartbeat or switching cloud providers within Cloudways—could push its performance past Hosting.com’s shared environment.
Let’s Talk Cache — Why It Matters in Hosting Performance
When evaluating web hosting performance, it’s essential to focus on uncached performance—that is, how fast your website loads without the help of CDNs or preloaded caches. This is the true test of raw server capability.
However, once caching is in play, speed and load times can increase drastically. One key point often overlooked: the first load of any page after a cache purge is always slower.
This typically happens after a site update, plugin change, or when a new article is published—essentially, any action that triggers a full or partial cache flush. Meaning, that the very first visitor to a newly flushed page is the one who pays the price in load time
This is where Hosting.com has a significant advantage. Their servers support a feature called crawler cron—available through the LiteSpeed Cache plugin.
This server-side crawler, triggered by a cron job automatically visits each page on your website after a purge, ensuring those pages are preloaded into the server’s cache.
Even better, some cache (memcache) is stored directly in RAM (server memory), which is significantly faster than traditional SSD storage. That means subsequent visitors to your site will get fast load times because assets are already warm in memory.
Thanks to Hosting.com’s generous allocation of 6GB of VRAM per account, you can safely configure this crawler without risking timeouts or crashes due to resource overload.
It’s an out-of-the-box, easily configurable solution that gives your site a serious performance boost post cache purge by automatically crawling your site pages and warming the cache.
Now, contrast that with Cloudways. While Cloudways is a powerful and flexible hosting platform, it does not support LiteSpeed Cache for page caching. Instead, they rely on Varnish.
This obviously means if you’re using Cloudways and your site cache is cleared, you’ll have to wait for actual visitors to load each page before it gets cached again. That’s not ideal especially given the raw performance enounted in our tests.
Bottom Line: Don’t Be Fooled by the VPS Cloud Hosting Hype
This comparison isn’t about shaming Cloudways—it’s about reminding users that “VPS” doesn’t automatically mean “better.”
Hosting.com proves that with the right server configuration, location, and backend infrastructure, a well-optimised shared hosting server can outperform a more expensive VPS
