Cloudways

Cloudways sits in a specific gap: you want cloud server performance without actually managing a cloud server. It’s a managed layer on top of DigitalOcean, Vultr, AWS, Google Cloud, and Linode that handles security patches, stack optimization, and backups while giving you enough control to not feel boxed in. If you’re a developer or agency owner who’s outgrown shared hosting but doesn’t want to babysit Ubuntu servers, this is probably your shortlist. If you want cPanel, email hosting, or a $5/month plan, look elsewhere.

I’ve run production WordPress sites, WooCommerce stores, and Laravel apps on Cloudways across all five providers since 2018. After the DigitalOcean acquisition in 2022 and subsequent pricing changes, the platform has evolved in ways that are mostly positive — but with some real tradeoffs worth discussing.

What Cloudways Does Well

The multi-provider model is genuinely useful. You’re not locked into one infrastructure. I’ve tested identical WordPress installs across DigitalOcean, Vultr High Frequency, and AWS in the same week. Vultr HF consistently delivers 15-25% faster TTFB than base DigitalOcean at only $2/month more. AWS gives you access to specific regions and compliance requirements. The ability to spin up a test server on one provider, benchmark it, and tear it down (paying only for the hours used) is something no traditional managed host offers.

The stack is well-tuned out of the box. Each server comes with Apache + Nginx (reverse proxy), PHP-FPM, MariaDB or MySQL (your choice), Redis, Memcached, and Varnish. For WordPress specifically, they bundle Object Cache Pro for free — that’s a $95/year plugin that dramatically reduces database queries. On a WooCommerce store I manage with ~3,000 products, enabling Object Cache Pro dropped average page generation time from 420ms to 180ms. That’s not marketing fluff; that’s from my own New Relic monitoring.

Staging works the way it should. Every application gets a staging URL. You push to staging, test, then push to production. The smart part: you can choose which files and database tables to push. Updating a theme on staging doesn’t force you to overwrite the production database. I’ve used this dozens of times for WooCommerce sites where the live orders database can’t be touched. Most competing platforms (Kinsta, WP Engine) offer staging too, but Cloudways’ selective push is more granular than either.

Scaling is genuinely painless. Need more resources? You click “Vertical Scaling” in the server dashboard, pick a bigger plan, and the server resizes in 2-3 minutes. No migration, no ticket, no downtime window. I’ve done this mid-traffic-spike on a Black Friday WooCommerce site — bumped from 4GB to 8GB RAM on Vultr while the site was serving 800+ concurrent users. It worked. Going back down after the spike saves you money since billing is hourly.

Where It Falls Short

The pricing increases have been steady and annoying. When I started using Cloudways in 2018, the DigitalOcean 1GB plan was $10/month. It’s now $14/month. The Vultr HF 1GB went from $13 to $16. The DigitalOcean acquisition accelerated this — they eliminated some lower tiers entirely and repositioned the product upmarket. If you’re comparing raw price to spinning up your own DigitalOcean droplet ($6/month for 1GB), you’re paying more than double for the managed layer. Whether that’s worth it depends on how you value your time, but let’s call it what it is: a significant markup.

No email hosting is a real gap. Cloudways doesn’t handle email. Period. Every client I onboard needs a separate email solution — Google Workspace ($7.20/user/month), Zoho Mail (free for up to 5 users), or something else. For developers this is fine. For small business owners migrating from cPanel shared hosting where email “just worked,” it’s a frustrating conversation. You’ll spend time explaining why their new $28/month hosting doesn’t include something their old $8/month GoDaddy plan had.

Multisite and edge cases require support tickets. WordPress Multisite works on Cloudways, but it’s not a checkbox. You need to contact support to adjust the Nginx configuration. Same goes for custom Varnish rules, specific PHP module installation, or anything that touches server-level configs you can’t access through the dashboard. Support is responsive (I’ve averaged 2-3 minute chat response times), but the dependency on support for server-level changes can be a bottleneck when you’re trying to deploy at midnight.

The Cloudways CDN add-on is mediocre for the price. At $4.99/month per application, the built-in CDN (powered by Cloudflare Enterprise) sounds good on paper. In practice, you get better performance and more control by setting up your own Cloudflare free or pro plan directly. The Cloudways CDN doesn’t give you access to Cloudflare’s full feature set — no Workers, no custom page rules, limited caching controls. I stopped recommending it to clients after comparing it to a direct Cloudflare Pro setup ($20/month) that does significantly more.

Pricing Breakdown

Cloudways bills hourly with a monthly cap. You never pay more than the monthly price, but you can pay less if you spin up a server for testing and delete it the same day. No contracts, no setup fees. That’s genuinely refreshing.

Here’s what the tiers actually look like as of early 2026:

DigitalOcean plans range from $14/month (1GB RAM, 1 core, 25GB SSD) to $1,035/month (32GB RAM, 16 cores, 640GB SSD). The sweet spot for most WordPress sites is the $28/month 2GB plan. It handles a single site doing 50-100K monthly visitors without breaking a sweat. If you’re running 3-5 sites on one server, start at 4GB ($54/month).

Vultr High Frequency plans start at $16/month (1GB) and scale to $~ 1,200/month for top-tier configs. Vultr HF uses NVMe storage and higher clock-speed CPUs. I consistently measure 20-30ms faster TTFB compared to equivalent DigitalOcean plans. For $2/month extra at the entry level, it’s an easy recommendation. See our DigitalOcean vs Vultr comparison for detailed benchmarks.

AWS plans start at $38.56/month for 2GB RAM. You’re paying roughly 2.5x what an equivalent DigitalOcean plan costs. The performance difference for a standard WordPress/WooCommerce site? Negligible. AWS on Cloudways makes sense only if you need specific AWS regions (São Paulo, Mumbai, Seoul) or have compliance requirements that mandate AWS infrastructure. Otherwise, you’re overpaying for a logo.

Google Cloud plans start at $37.45/month for 1.7GB RAM. Similar to AWS — the Google Cloud network is excellent, but for the kind of workloads most Cloudways users run, the performance delta over Vultr HF doesn’t justify paying 2x more. I’ve tested identical WordPress installs on Vultr HF ($16/month) and GCP ($37.45/month) with virtually identical TTFB (220ms vs 205ms average from the same region). That 15ms isn’t worth $21/month.

Linode plans were deprecated for new signups in late 2024 after Akamai’s acquisition of Linode changed the partnership dynamics. Existing Linode servers continue to work, but new deployments are limited to DigitalOcean, Vultr, AWS, and GCP.

The Autonomous plan (formerly Cloudways Enterprise) is custom-quoted. It includes dedicated account management, SLA guarantees, advanced autoscaling across multiple servers, and priority support. I’ve seen quotes ranging from $500-$3,000/month depending on infrastructure needs. It’s aimed at agencies managing 100+ sites or businesses with genuine high-availability requirements.

Add-on costs to watch: Email add-on via Rackspace ($1/mailbox/month — honestly terrible, use Google Workspace instead), Cloudways CDN ($4.99/app/month), DNS Made Easy integration ($0-$5/month), and offsite backups ($0.033/GB/month stored on AWS S3). The backup add-on is actually worth it — local backups exist on the same server, which defeats the purpose if that server has a disk failure.

Key Features Deep Dive

Server Provisioning and Provider Selection

When you create a new server, you choose your cloud provider, data center location, server size, and initial application. The whole process takes under 7 minutes. I’ve timed it repeatedly — DigitalOcean servers provision in 4-5 minutes, Vultr in 5-6, AWS in 6-7, and GCP in 5-7.

What matters here is the data center selection. DigitalOcean gives you 15 locations, Vultr gives you 32 (including more Asian and South American options), AWS gives you 25+ regions, and GCP gives you 35+. If your audience is in Brazil, Vultr’s São Paulo data center or AWS’s sa-east-1 will serve them better than DigitalOcean’s nearest option in New York. Match your data center to your audience — this single decision affects performance more than any caching plugin.

Breeze Cache + Varnish + Redis Stack

Cloudways ships its own caching plugin called Breeze for WordPress. It handles page caching, minification, and database optimization. But the real power is in the server-level stack: Varnish as a full-page cache sitting in front of Apache/Nginx, and Redis for object caching (with Object Cache Pro handling the WordPress integration).

In practice, here’s what a request flow looks like: visitor hits your site → Cloudflare CDN (if configured) → Varnish checks for cached page → if miss, Nginx passes to Apache → PHP-FPM processes the request → Redis serves cached database queries → response generated.

For a tuned WordPress site, ~95% of requests should be served from Varnish and never touch PHP. On a client’s blog doing 200K monthly pageviews, server CPU utilization sits at 3-5% on a 2GB DigitalOcean plan because Varnish handles almost everything. The gotcha: WooCommerce cart/checkout pages bypass Varnish by design (they have to — they’re dynamic), so e-commerce sites need more server resources than pure content sites.

Staging and Cloning

Every application on Cloudways gets a staging environment. Click “Staging Management,” and you get an exact copy of your site on a subdomain. Make changes, test them, then push to production.

The cloning feature is different — it copies an entire application to a new or existing server. I use this constantly when migrating clients. Clone the production site to a new Vultr HF server, update DNS, done. Total downtime: whatever your DNS TTL is (set it to 300 seconds before migrating).

One limitation worth knowing: staging environments share the same server resources as production. If your production server is already at 85% RAM usage, your staging site will compete for those same resources. For agencies running staging on busy production servers, this can cause temporary slowdowns. The workaround is cloning to a cheap $14/month test server instead.

SafeUpdates for WordPress

Introduced in 2023 and significantly improved since, SafeUpdates automates WordPress core, plugin, and theme updates with visual regression testing. It takes a screenshot of your site before updating, applies the update, takes another screenshot, and compares them. If something looks broken, it rolls back automatically.

Does it work? Mostly. I’ve tested it across 30+ sites over the past year. It caught a broken plugin update on a WooCommerce site that changed the checkout layout. It rolled back correctly. However, it missed a subtle CSS issue on a blog where a sidebar widget shifted by ~20 pixels — the visual comparison wasn’t granular enough to flag it. It’s a solid safety net, not a replacement for human QA. Use it for bulk-updating lower-priority sites, but manually test updates on sites that generate revenue.

Team and Client Management

Cloudways lets you add team members with role-based access. You can restrict access to specific servers or specific applications. For agencies, this means you can give a client access to only their application — they can see analytics, manage staging, and view backups without accessing other clients’ sites or server settings.

The access levels are: Owner, Super Admin, Admin, Developer, Billing, and Support. In practice, I set up most clients as Application-level viewers and give junior developers Application-level access to their assigned projects. It works well enough, though I wish the permissions were more granular — there’s no way to give someone staging access without also giving them production deployment access, for example.

Server and Application Monitoring

The built-in monitoring shows CPU, RAM, disk, and bandwidth usage in real-time with historical graphs. You can set threshold alerts — I configure alerts at 80% CPU and 90% RAM on all production servers. When triggered, you get an email notification.

The monitoring is adequate for identifying resource bottlenecks but lacks application-level detail. You won’t see slow database queries, individual PHP process times, or request-level tracing. For that, you’ll need New Relic (installable on Cloudways but requires your own license at ~$99/month per server) or a solution like Query Monitor for WordPress. The built-in monitoring tells you that something is slow; external APM tools tell you why.

Who Should Use Cloudways

WordPress developers and agencies managing multiple client sites. The ability to spin up servers on different providers, clone sites between them, and manage everything from one dashboard is a genuine time-saver. If you’re currently managing 10+ sites on shared hosting or juggling multiple VPS logins, Cloudways consolidates that workflow. Budget expectation: $50-200/month for a typical agency setup.

WooCommerce store owners who’ve outgrown shared hosting. If your store has more than ~500 products or handles more than ~1,000 orders/month, shared hosting will start choking. Cloudways on a 2-4GB Vultr HF plan ($28-54/month) with Redis and Object Cache Pro handles this workload comfortably. One WooCommerce client I manage does 15,000 orders/month on an 8GB Vultr HF plan ($100/month) without issues.

Laravel and PHP developers who want managed deployment without Kubernetes complexity. Cloudways supports Laravel, Symfony, CakePHP, and plain PHP out of the box. Git deployment works (connect your repo, push to deploy), though it’s not as sophisticated as Laravel Forge or Deployer. If your deployment needs are simple — push to main, pull on server — Cloudways handles it fine.

Technical business owners who understand enough to make infrastructure decisions but don’t want to maintain servers. You should be comfortable with concepts like SSH, DNS records, and PHP versions, even if you don’t configure them daily. If the term “PHP-FPM” makes you nervous, consider Kinsta or WP Engine instead — they abstract away more of the infrastructure decisions.

Who Should Look Elsewhere

Budget-constrained beginners launching their first site. At $14/month minimum with no email hosting included, Cloudways costs more than shared hosting alternatives that bundle everything. If you’re launching a blog or small business site with minimal traffic, a $5-10/month shared hosting plan from SiteGround or A2 Hosting gives you more for less, including email. You can always migrate to Cloudways later when you outgrow it.

Teams that need email with their hosting. If your business relies on professional email and you want it managed alongside your hosting, Cloudways will frustrate you. Every other managed host bundles email or integrates it tightly. Cloudways’ Rackspace email add-on ($1/mailbox) is bare-bones and unreliable — I’ve had deliverability issues with it. You’ll end up paying for Google Workspace anyway. Consider SiteGround or traditional cPanel hosting if email integration matters.

Enterprise teams needing autoscaling and high availability. Cloudways’ standard plans are single-server. If that server goes down, your site goes down. They don’t offer load balancing, automatic failover, or horizontal scaling on standard plans — you need the Autonomous tier for that, at custom pricing. If you need true HA architecture, look at AWS directly with Elastic Beanstalk, Google Cloud Run, or managed Kubernetes solutions. Cloudways sits firmly in the “managed VPS” category, not the “enterprise infrastructure” category.

Developers who want full root access. Cloudways gives you SSH access but not root. You can’t install arbitrary packages, modify Nginx/Apache configs directly, or run custom daemons. If you need that level of control, you want an unmanaged VPS from DigitalOcean or Vultr directly (and accept the maintenance burden), or a tool like RunCloud or GridPane that provides a management panel on your own server with root access preserved.

DigitalOcean vs Vultr vs AWS vs GCP on Cloudways — Which Provider to Pick

This is the question I get asked most. Here’s my framework after testing all four extensively:

Pick Vultr High Frequency if you want the best price-to-performance ratio. NVMe storage and higher clock speeds deliver measurably faster page loads than base DigitalOcean. The $2/month premium at the 1GB tier is a no-brainer. This is my default recommendation for 80% of use cases.

Pick DigitalOcean if you want the cheapest entry point and are running a low-traffic site. The $14/month 1GB plan is adequate for a personal blog or development staging server. DigitalOcean also benefits from being Cloudways’ parent company now — integration is tightest here.

Pick AWS only if you have a specific reason. Need the Mumbai data center? AWS compliance requirements for a government contract? Specific AWS service integrations? Then yes. Otherwise, you’re paying 2.5x for similar performance.

Pick GCP for the same reasons as AWS — specific region requirements or existing GCP ecosystem integration. Google’s network is genuinely excellent, but you’re paying a premium that doesn’t show up in WordPress TTFB benchmarks for most sites.

For a detailed breakdown with benchmark numbers across all providers, see our Cloudways provider comparison guide.

The Bottom Line

Cloudways is the best managed cloud hosting platform for developers and agencies who want cloud performance without cloud complexity. It’s not the cheapest option, it’s not the most powerful option, and it doesn’t try to be either. It sits in a productive middle ground that saves you real hours every month on server management. Start with Vultr High Frequency, skip the built-in CDN in favor of direct Cloudflare, and budget for a separate email service — that’s the setup I run for clients and it consistently delivers.

---

Disclosure: Some links on this page are affiliate links. We may earn a commission if you make a purchase, at no extra cost to you. This helps us keep the site running and produce quality content.