Cloudways review
Cloud servers with the operations handled: the usual step for a site that has outgrown shared hosting, priced per server with no term, and requiring the customer to choose a size and a cloud.
Sites that have outgrown shared hosting and do not want to take on server administration.
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Pricing, as published on 3 October 2026
Pay as you go, billed monthly in arrears, in US dollars. The smallest DigitalOcean server (1 vCPU, 2 GB memory, 50 GB storage) is $11 a month, or $0.0357 an hour; AWS and Google Cloud servers cost more and vary by region. There is no minimum term.
What Cloudways sells
Cloudways is a managed layer over cloud infrastructure that the customer selects, with DigitalOcean, AWS or Google Cloud underneath. The platform provisions the server, installs and tunes the web stack, applies patches, takes backups, provides staging environments and a control panel, and presents the result as an application host rather than a machine. The customer never opens a terminal. What distinguishes it from the shared tier is that the server is the customer's own, with reserved resources and a size that can be changed; what distinguishes it from an unmanaged cloud server is that the administration is included in the price.
What it costs
The entry price is in the pricing block above. Billing is pay as you go: the bill arrives monthly in arrears for the hours a server existed, without a term or an introductory rate, and the price scales with the server size and the cloud chosen. DigitalOcean servers are the least expensive; AWS and Google Cloud carry a premium and vary by region. In practice the first month costs what the pricing page states, and a site that needs a larger server pays for the larger server from the day it is resized, without a migration.
Where it fits
- The move off shared hosting: a WordPress site whose traffic has started to matter and for which pooled resources are no longer acceptable.
- Agencies and multi-site owners: several applications on one resizable server, each with its own staging environment, under one panel.
- Custom PHP applications: teams that want their own server without taking on its administration.
The decisions it asks for
Cloudways presents decisions that beginner hosts conceal: which cloud provider, what server size, when to scale and whether to enable the paid add-ons for backups off the server or for a content delivery network. Each has a sensible default, and the concepts behind them are explained in the hosting guides. The platform's own caching layer, server-level rather than plugin-based, is the component most customers notice first, because a WordPress site that was slow on shared hosting is usually fast on arrival without further work.
The DigitalOcean relationship
Cloudways manages the same infrastructure that DigitalOcean rents unmanaged. The smallest managed server with 2 GB of memory at Cloudways costs slightly less than the equivalent unmanaged Droplet at DigitalOcean; the difference in what is included, rather than the difference in price, is the basis for choosing between them.
Compared with its neighbours
| Aspect | Bluehost | Cloudways | Liquid Web |
|---|---|---|---|
| Server | Shared with other customers | The customer's own cloud server | The customer's own VPS or dedicated machine |
| Administration | Included, invisible | Included, through a panel | Included, with engineers on call |
| Pricing model | Introductory rate on a multi-year term | Pay as you go, monthly, no term | Monthly, no term |
| Suits | A first site | A growing site or an agency | A site whose downtime has a cost |
The tier above is Liquid Web, where the management includes a support team that administers servers for a living and the price reflects it. The tier below is Bluehost. A site that is a business, with WooCommerce or a database under load, moves up; a site that has not yet justified its own server stays down.
Where Cloudways is the wrong choice
- A first site with no traffic: the entry price is several times a shared plan's, and the capacity goes unused.
- An owner who wants no decisions at all: the platform asks which cloud, which server size and when to scale, and the defaults are reasonable but not invisible.
- A business that needs a named engineer accountable for the server: the support is platform support, and a site whose downtime has a cost per hour belongs with Liquid Web.
- A developer who wants root access and a custom stack: the managed layer is the product, and the raw machine is available for less from DigitalOcean directly.
Cloudways: quick answers
What changes when a site moves from shared hosting to Cloudways?
The site stops sharing a pool of resources. It runs on a cloud server sized for it, with reserved memory and CPU, server-level caching and a staging environment. The control panel is somewhat more technical than a shared host's, and the bill is monthly with no term.
Which cloud provider should be selected?
DigitalOcean for most sites: it is the entry point of the range and performs adequately for typical workloads. AWS or Google Cloud is justified by a specific requirement, such as existing infrastructure on that cloud or a data-residency rule, and costs more.
Is Linux knowledge required?
No. The managed layer exists so that no customer needs to open a shell session. Server concepts such as size, scaling and caching appear as vocabulary in the panel; the operations behind them are performed by the platform.
Not convinced?
The other rungs of the ladder, one click away:
- Bluehost · Your first WordPress site or a small business site that needs to exist, not scale.
- Liquid Web · Business-critical sites and WooCommerce stores where downtime costs money and support has to answer.
- DigitalOcean · Developers and the developer-curious: custom stacks, side projects, and learning how servers work.
- Shopify · Selling online without assembling hosting, software, payments and security by hand.
The concepts behind this pick
Managed Hosting
Managed hosting is any plan where the provider runs the server on your behalf, covering updates, hardening, monitoring, backups and tuning, so the thing being sold is administration time with a machine attached rather than the machine itself.
Cloud Hosting
Cloud hosting is the model in which servers, storage and databases are created on demand through an API from a provider's pooled hardware and billed for the time they exist, rather than rented as a fixed box by the month.
Last reviewed 3 October 2026 · Getting Digital