Cloud86 Review: How Good Is This Dutch Hosting Provider Really?
Cloud86 is an established Dutch hosting provider from Leeuwarden. Founded in 2019, Cloud86 has grown rapidly. The founders of Cloud86 have already proven themselves in the Dutch hosting industry before starting this new venture.
Cloud86 Review Overview
Speed
Lightning-fast LiteSpeed servers with every plan.
Uptime
Exceptional uptime performance with an uptime guarantee.
Support
Available by phone between 9 AM and 5 PM on weekdays.
Simplicity
Simple onboarding and using Plesk as their hosting panel.
Features
Free migration service, daily backups, free SSL certificates.
Costs
Super fast LiteSpeed hosting at rock-bottom prices.
Our score:
5 / 5
Benefits
Disadvantages
Cloud86 is one of the best hosting providers in Europe.
For quite some time now, it has also been the only Dutch hosting provider that shows up in international reviews.
They are known for providing fast hosting and excellent customer service to their (now over 30,000) customers.
The Cloud86 team is relatively small but effective. All too often with bigger hosting companies, you'll notice the service becomes somewhat diluted. You become just another number, and even with the best hosting providers, you're stuck in a rigid customer support system where you don't receive truly personalized attention.
At Cloud86, they are approachable and flexible.
My expectation is that, given the founders' decision to move away from the large hosting companies and start fresh, they will continue to pursue this direction in the future. This could be a significant advantage.
When is Cloud86 the right fit for you? For the majority of websites, Cloud86 will actually be an excellent choice. They particularly excel in WordPress hosting.
With this comprehensive Cloud86 review, I want to help you determine if Cloud86 is the right fit for you.
Cloud86 at a glance
| Uptime guarantee | ✕ |
| Customer Service | Ticket-based support, phone available on weekdays from 9 AM – 5 PM |
| Managed WordPress | ✓ |
| Types of Hosting | Shared, WordPress hosting, Managed VPS |
| Basic features | Dynamic caching, 5GB storage, free SSL, free CDN, HPE 3PAR SSD Enterprise storage pizza boxes |
| Most suitable for | Every type of website |
| Server Locations | Eemshaven (Groningen) |
| Price starting from | €1.95 per month |
Cloud86's speed, uptime, and customer service
The main pillars of good web hosting are speed, uptime, and customer service. Here you can read how Cloud86 performs in these areas.
Speed
A good hosting provider always focuses on performance. You simply don't want an unnecessarily slow website.
Slow websites are unpleasant for visitors and can be “conversion killers.” Google also evaluates your website's speed. Is yours slower than your competitors? Then ranking becomes more difficult.
Please note. A fast website starts with a fast web host, but this is only one piece of the puzzle.
When it comes to hosting speed, Cloud86 really excels. They've woven speed and performance as a common thread throughout their offerings. They utilize the lightning-fast HPE 3PAR SSD Enterprise storage combined with HPE Enterprise Proliant servers. Each core here runs at a minimum of 3 GHz.
They use LiteSpeed servers. This is superior to Apache and NGINX servers, which most providers use.
Combined, everything offers a 40 Gbit network and latency of less than 1 millisecond. That's extremely good.
I've personally tested Cloud86's speed by purchasing their Webhosting Medium plan and installing a test site on it with the following specifications:
- WordPress theme: Kadence (we also use this theme for WebsiteGecko)
- Plugins: Block Navigation, Kadence Blocks, Post Duplicator
- SSL Certificate (Let's Encrypt)
- No speed or caching optimizations
This site is not just an “empty” WordPress installation. It contains a multifunctional theme and multiple plugins. Additionally, the site includes images, text, and various graphic elements. This makes the site's speed representative of a small business website or blog.
To measure the speed of the test site, I used GTMetrix:
The test shows they achieve a good score on practically everything. The results indicate there's little room for improvement in terms of performance. The TTFB score is 199ms (without optimization, just to be clear). This score is important.
The TTFB score indicates how much time it takes for a visitor to receive the first information from the website. At 199ms, it's truly lightning-fast. With optimization, this score can even reach as low as 50ms.
A TTFB of up to 500ms is generally considered adequate. If you get below 100ms, you're among the absolute best performers.
This is typically only available from a highly advanced and expensive hosting provider.
Uptime
A fast loading time for your website is important. However, it's pointless if your website frequently crashes or goes down.
Cloud86 provides an uptime guarantee of 99.98%. This allows for a permissible total downtime of 1 hour and 45 minutes per year. In practice, our experience with the 5 websites we personally host with Cloud86 (distributed across 2 servers) shows that the actual uptime is significantly higher:
(Unfortunately, that less-than-perfect downtime was our own mistake.)
As a general rule, all hosting providers above 99% are perfectly fine, unless you're running mission-critical systems. With 99.98% uptime, Cloud86 exceeds this standard by more than a factor of 10.
Also reassuring: they provide more or less “uptime-by-design”.
If your website goes down, it immediately switches to another server, and the site is typically back online within 1 or 2 seconds.
In practice, you won't even experience that minimal downtime of approximately 2 hours per year.
Additionally, everything is monitored 24/7, and the team is available “on-site” day and night to resolve any issues should something still go wrong.
This is yet another advantage of a small web hosting provider. If you have 30 servers spread across the world, it remains to be seen whether they can actually deliver on their promises.
Customer service
We've had multiple contacts with Cloud86. Both during our process of choosing a hosting provider and later after we had made our decision. Everything went smoothly and quickly.
It's so valuable to talk with people who have strong subject matter expertise, and you can really tell that the communication lines are short.
When you contact support regularly, you get to know the customer support team personally. And they know you too. That's an incredible luxury in the world of web hosting.
At most large web hosting companies, you'll find that customer service is often staffed by poorly educated and inadequately trained people who have little technical knowledge or genuine understanding of hosting services.
When you contact them with a question, they halfheartedly search through their knowledge base to find an answer, document it poorly, and show no real motivation to help you.
In my experience, Cloud86 is different in this regard. You can tell they're quick to help you brainstorm solutions, you don't feel like just the eightieth customer query of the day, and they genuinely want to solve your problem.
Where there's potentially still room for improvement is in the knowledge base. It could be more comprehensive (articles could include more screenshots and video content). In itself, you don't really need this. Everything is self-explanatory and clear, and any question to the support team is quickly asked and answered.
Good, with a capable and approachable customer service team, you don't really need this anyway.
At Devise, my company, we've also eliminated our knowledge base for users, precisely for this reason.
Another limitation is that customer service is “only” available on weekdays from 9:00 AM to 9:00 PM. Working remotely from Bali? Well, you might face an 8-hour delay between asking a question and getting an answer.
The same applies to the night owls among us or people who want to work on weekends. In those cases, you'll have to wait a bit longer for your answer.
Is it reasonable to expect Cloud86 to provide 24/7 customer service?
No, that would be too expensive.
I can, however, imagine certain specific situations where customer service outside of regular business hours could be extremely important.
Other hosting providers might be a better choice in that case, such as Hostinger.
Other considerations for Cloud86
In addition to customer service, speed, and uptime, there are several other important factors to consider when choosing the best web hosting provider. You can read about these below.
Flexibility: Cloud86 is suitable for an extremely wide range of websites and online stores
You can host virtually any website on Cloud86. Whether you want to create a small website for your sports team, an online store with thousands of products, or a blog – it's all possible.
For all web hosting plans, you can install WordPress or WooCommerce with just a few clicks, and all the standard tools come included.
For more demanding products, you can use managed VPS plans.
The user interface: simplicity creates focus
Sometimes life can just be simple. Cloud86's interface is designed that way. From the home screen, you can easily see everything you need, making it straightforward to navigate to whatever topic you're looking for.
Cloud86 uses Plesk for hosting management. Plesk is a commercial competitor to the better-known cPanel. It essentially offers the same functionality, and you'll find all the possible options available here as well.
I must say that I had never worked with Plesk before my experience with Cloud86, but I'm pleasantly surprised.
It's all just a bit easier and more organized than cPanel. In my opinion, this is a huge improvement.
Free hosting extras
Generally speaking, there are two approaches in the hosting world: 1) web hosting is initially cheap, but everything you click on turns to gold. And 2) most features are included free in your plan.
Cloud86 falls into the second category. You won't face any surprises where your final hosting price doubles after all the additional costs.
The site includes a free SSL certificate and automatic daily backups are created and stored.
If you're using WordPress, you'll be happy with the WordPress toolkit that allows you to easily install and manage your WordPress site. This includes simple updates and similar tasks.
Cloud86 Pricing
Cloud86 offers highly competitive pricing for their services.
Monthly costs
When you select a plan from Cloud86, your costs will look like this:
- Web Hosting Starter. From €2.10 per month (renews at €3.70 per month, billed annually)
- Medium Web Hosting. Starting at €2.98 (€6.95 per month upon renewal)
- Web Hosting Power. Starting at €5.98 (renewal price €13.95 per month)
For medium and power web hosting plans, you can choose to pay monthly, annually, or on a three-year basis. The costs vary depending on which plan you select.
The quality you get for a price of just €1.95 is truly unique. Typically, with very cheap hosting, you end up with very mediocre quality.
For most users, the Medium Web Hosting plan will be the best choice.
In addition to web hosting, Cloud86 offers two other types of managed hosting:
Managed WordPress hosting, starting at €15.95 per month.
Cloud86 handles all WordPress updates and security for you
WooCommerce hosting, starting at €15.95 per month.
Cloud86 handles all WooCommerce updates and security for you
For advanced users, Cloud86 also offers VPS (Virtual Private Server) services as a final option:
Managed VPS, starting at €179.95 per month.
With this option, Cloud86 takes care of everything needed to keep your VPS running smoothly.
Featured web hosting plans from Cloud86
VPS hosting only becomes relevant once your site starts attracting tens of thousands of visitors per month. When you reach that point, you can always easily upgrade later.
With WebsiteGecko, we typically focus on “beginners.” That's why we're taking a closer look at Cloud86's web hosting solutions.
Shared hosting
Here you'll find an overview of Cloud86's shared hosting plans.
Cloud86 Starter Web Hosting
This plan is sufficient if you want to create a website on your own, for example for your club or a hobby blog.
You get 5 GB of storage on an SSD drive and 250 GB of data transfer per month. That's more than enough for the average simple website or for an “online business card.
Your site can handle approximately 5,000 visitors per month.
The plan includes basic support. This means you'll receive guidance on things like how to use Plesk or navigate the Cloud86 environment.
With the other plans, you receive comprehensive support where they provide more extensive assistance.
This includes, for example, helping you set up your email client and similar services.
You also don't get a migration service included, but honestly, at this price point, you really can't expect that anyway.
That being said, this plan is an excellent option if you're a beginner. You get a lot of value for your money.
Cloud86's Medium Web Hosting
With Medium webhosting, everything suddenly runs much smoother. You can handle up to 10,000 visitors per month and get 50GB of SSD disk space, plus unlimited data transfer. It's perfect for small websites with business importance.
You can now also take advantage of the comprehensive customer service and all other features.
Moving services are now completely covered by Cloud86.
Finally, you're no longer limited to a restricted amount of data traffic. From this plan onward, it's unlimited.
You can therefore stream videos and such with peace of mind.
Do you have a website but aren't satisfied with your current web hosting? Then I'd highly recommend trying this plan from Cloud86.
Webhosting Power
With Webhosting Power, you'll be equipped for heavier websites that attract up to 20,000 visitors per month.
You get 100GB of SSD disk space and can now create unlimited email addresses. This can be particularly useful for small to medium-sized businesses or startups.
Host your website with us and all your employees will get their email included for free. It'll cost you less than 6 euros per month (for the first year). Compare that to Google Workspace, which is significantly more expensive.
This plan is also ideal if you develop websites for clients. Do you run your own agency or sometimes get requests from acquaintances to build a website?
Then you can easily manage multiple websites through this.
Cloud86 even insists that when you do this, they will take a backseat and stay in the background.
WordPress Hosting with Cloud86
Earlier in this review, I mentioned that Cloud86 offers a special “managed WordPress” plan. In general, Cloud86 is very “WordPress-oriented”.
The 1-click WordPress installation, WordPress staging, and the specialized WordPress toolkit in Plesk are excellent examples of this.
This ensures that Cloud86 makes starting a WordPress website very easy for you – regardless of which plan you use.
Their managed WordPress plans offer several clear advantages compared to their standard web hosting. For instance, you share the server with far fewer other websites. This typically leads to better stability and uptime. Additionally, you receive premium support and your site is backed up twice daily instead of just once. You can also benefit from enhanced server specifications, such as 10 PHP workers instead of the standard 5.
My advice? If you have a website with business interests at stake and you have the budget for it, opt for managed WordPress hosting.
Conclusion
In summary, I'm very pleasantly surprised by Cloud86.
How can they seriously compete with the major Dutch web hosting companies, let alone the international leaders?
This Frisian hosting provider proves to me that it's possible.
Cloud86 is currently, in my opinion, the cheapest and best hosting provider in the Netherlands. The value for money is world-class, and their service is no-nonsense yet customer-focused. Additionally, Cloud86's hosting plans are compatible with virtually any website.
That's why we've included Cloud86 as one of the best hosting providers on the market, and for good reason.
One criticism to note in this otherwise positive review: their knowledge base could use improvement, as could the customer service hours.
If you're looking to build your website on WordPress, Cloud86 is an excellent choice. We have a WordPress guide.
With Cloud86's one-click installation, you can easily install WordPress and then simply follow the guide step by step.
