Hosting

Cloudways Review 2026: Real Costs, Pros and Who It Suits

BY JASON — 04.10.2026

Cloudways suits growing sites and stores that need a cloud server without managing it themselves. Hourly billing avoids a renewal jump, but email and some other services cost extra. For one small blog, ordinary shared hosting is usually simpler and cheaper.

How Cloudways works

Cloudways sits between you and a big cloud company:

  1. You choose a cloud provider: DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode (now part of Akamai), AWS, or Google Cloud.
  2. You choose a server size (RAM, CPU, storage) and a data center. Cloudways lists 9 DigitalOcean locations, 30 for Vultr, 25 for Linode, and 28 each for AWS and Google Cloud.
  3. Cloudways builds the server, installs its web stack, and manages it: updates, firewall, monitoring, backups, and support.

One Cloudways bill covers the server and the management. The server is a private virtual server for your account, not a slice of a shared hosting box, and you can run as many WordPress sites on it as it can handle.

Cloudways now sells two products:

  • Flexible is the classic product described above, and what most readers want.
  • Autonomous is a fully managed WordPress plan on Kubernetes (a system that spreads a site across many servers) that adds servers automatically during traffic spikes. You do not choose a provider or a size.

Cloudways pricing in 2026

All prices below come from the Cloudways pricing page in October 2026, in US dollars, before tax. Each plan shows a monthly price and the hourly rate it is built from.

Flexible prices by cloud provider

For DigitalOcean Standard, the 1 GB, 2 GB, 4 GB and 8 GB servers cost $11, $24, $46 and $88 a month. Premium costs $14, $28, $54 and $99 at the same memory sizes. The first two sizes have one vCPU, the 4 GB size two, and the 8 GB size four. The entry Standard plan has 25 GB SSD storage; Premium has 25 GB NVMe.

Vultr Standard costs $14, $28, $54 and $99 for those sizes, with 25 GB SSD storage on the entry plan. High Frequency costs $16, $30, $60 and $118, with 32 GB NVMe on the entry plan; its 8 GB option has three vCPUs rather than four. Linode costs $14, $28, $59 and $105, with 25 GB SSD on its smallest server.

DigitalOcean Premium uses newer Intel CPUs and faster NVMe storage than Standard, which is why it costs $3 more at the bottom. It is the plan Cloudways shows by default. All DigitalOcean, Vultr and Linode plans include at least 1 TB of bandwidth.

AWS and Google Cloud cost much more for the same RAM:

AWS starts at $20.56 for 1 GB RAM and two vCPUs, rising to $38.56 for 2 GB, $91.84 for 4 GB and $183.22 for 8 GB, each with two vCPUs.

Google Cloud starts at $37.33 for 1.7 GB with shared CPU. The larger examples cost $84 for 3.75 GB and one vCPU, $152.02 for 7.5 GB and two vCPUs, or $241.50 for 15 GB and four vCPUs.

The AWS and Google Cloud cards list only 20 GB of storage and a small amount of bandwidth (2 GB on AWS, 1 GB on Google Cloud). Extra storage and bandwidth are billed on top. Pick them only if you need that provider.

Bigger servers exist too: DigitalOcean General Purpose starts at $106 a month (8 GB, 2 dedicated vCPUs) and CPU Optimized at $164.

How hourly billing works

Cloudways bills by the hour and sends one invoice on the 1st of each month for the month before. According to its billing guide:

  • DigitalOcean, Vultr and Linode have a monthly cap. The $14 server costs $0.0208 an hour, and you never pay more than $14 for a full month.
  • AWS and Google Cloud have no cap. You pay every hour the server runs.
  • If you scale a server mid-month, each size is charged for the hours it ran.
  • Add-ons are different. They are charged for the full month as soon as you turn them on, even if you remove them a day later.

So there is no prepay and no renewal shock, and you can delete a server any time. The trade-off is that your bill moves with usage.

Cloudways Autonomous pricing

Autonomous still exists, and it was repriced for sign-ups from November 11, 2025. Cloudways dropped visit limits and now charges for actual resource use.

Each Autonomous plan covers one website. Growth costs $99 a month with one baseline server, 150 GB bandwidth and 20 GB disk; extra scaling time costs $0.07 per server-hour. Scale costs $199 with two baseline servers, 250 GB bandwidth and 50 GB disk, with extra time at $0.10 an hour.

Plus costs $399 a month with three baseline servers, 1,000 GB bandwidth and 100 GB disk. Additional server time costs $0.12 an hour, so the base plan price is not necessarily the final bill during traffic spikes.

Extra disk costs $1/GB and extra bandwidth $0.04/GB on every plan. Cloudflare Enterprise, Object Cache Pro with Relay, malware protection, staging and unlimited offsite backups are included. There is a separate 3-day free trial, and Cloudways says Autonomous has a 99.9% uptime SLA.

What is included, and what costs extra

Every Flexible server includes free WordPress migrations, one-click staging, free Let’s Encrypt SSL, the Imunify360 server firewall with bot and brute-force protection, Redis, the Breeze caching plugin, server monitoring, SSH and SFTP, Git deployment, and unlimited apps.

Object Cache Pro, a paid Redis plugin that speeds up database-heavy sites like WooCommerce, comes free. The pricing page says this applies on servers with 4 GB of RAM or more.

Backups run automatically every 24 hours and are kept for a week by default. You can change the schedule to anything from every hour to every 7 days, and keep them for 1 to 4 weeks. The backup itself is free, but offsite storage is billed at $0.033 per GB per server.

Here is what costs extra, as of October 2026:

Rackspace mailboxes cost $1.50 each per month. Transactional mail can use the Elastic Email add-on or the free SMTP and Gmail SMTP connectors with your own provider. Domains must be bought from a registrar; Cloudways does not sell them.

Cloudflare Enterprise costs $4.99 per domain monthly for one to five domains, $2.99 for ten to 24 or $1.99 for 25 or more. Each domain includes 100 GB bandwidth, then $0.02 per GB, with a 30-day trial. DNS Made Easy costs another $0.50 per domain monthly.

Site Manager has a free tier; Pro, which replaced SafeUpdates, costs $3 per site monthly for up to five sites or $2 from six sites. Malware Protection starts at $4 per app monthly with volume discounts. A non-WordPress migration costs $99.

Advanced Support lists at $100 a month or 10% of the invoice, whichever is higher, with a $25-a-month flat lifetime promotion at our check. Premium lists at $500 a month or 10% of the invoice.

What a small business site really costs

Here is an example for one business site on the default plan:

  • DigitalOcean Premium 1 GB server: $14.00
  • Two Rackspace mailboxes: $3.00
  • Offsite backups for a 10 GB site: about $0.33
  • Cloudflare Enterprise for one domain (optional): $4.99

That is about $22 a month, plus a domain from a registrar. Compare that with Hostinger’s renewal price of $10.99 a month on its Premium plan. Cloudways costs more, but you get your own cloud server and no long prepay.

WordPress tools

Staging. You can create a password-protected staging copy of a site, then push changes to live or pull live content back. Every push and pull is logged. Cloudways says staging is free on both Flexible and Autonomous. If your current host lacks this, our guide to WordPress staging plugins covers plugin options.

Site Manager (formerly SafeUpdates). SafeUpdates tested plugin and theme updates on a temporary copy before applying them. Site Manager, generally available since April 2026, is replacing it entirely. Site Manager adds scheduled updates, visual regression testing (it compares screenshots before and after an update), automatic rollback, and one-click login to each site’s admin. The Pro tier costs the same $3 or $2 per site as SafeUpdates did.

Lightning Stack. By default, Cloudways runs sites on its Hybrid stack (NGINX in front of Apache, with Varnish caching). In November 2025 it released the Lightning Stack, built on NGINX and PHP-FPM only. Cloudways says it is up to 65% faster for dynamic sites like stores and membership sites. You can switch per app. Sites that rely on .htaccess rules should stay on Hybrid.

Free migration. The add-ons page lists WordPress and WooCommerce migrations as free, and the migration page promises unlimited free WordPress migrations handled by Cloudways engineers. If you would rather move a site yourself, a plugin like All-in-One WP Migration works on Cloudways too; see our guide to transferring a WordPress site to another host.

Copilot. Cloudways Copilot is an AI assistant that watches your servers and suggests fixes. Each server includes 4 free Copilot credits; bigger credit plans are paid.

The Cloudways control panel

Cloudways does not use cPanel. Its own panel has two levels. At the server level you scale, back up, clone, and manage services like Redis and Varnish. At the application level you handle domains, SSL, staging, cron jobs, Git, and caching settings, as in the knowledge-base image above.

It is cleaner than cPanel but more technical: “Varnish settings” and “PHP-FPM settings” sit right next to “SSL certificate”. Expect a short learning curve if you come from shared hosting.

What Breeze adds

Breeze is Cloudways’ free caching plugin, with no account requirement or paid edition. We tested it on a separate WordPress server, not a Cloudways plan. The hosting review is based on Cloudways’ published pricing, features and terms rather than an account trial.

Page caching worked immediately and refreshed the homepage after a new post. Its Standard preset reduced HTML slightly and deferred most featured images until scrolling. Browser-caching rules worked too. These local measurements show the plugin working; they do not establish Cloudways hosting speed.

Varnish, Redis and Cloudflare purge controls need the corresponding server services. They could not work on our ordinary test server. Command-line activation also failed with a PHP error, while activation through the WordPress dashboard worked cleanly. On Cloudways, Breeze is the natural choice; elsewhere, use a cache suited to your host.

Performance

We did not test a Cloudways server, since that needs an account. We did run Lighthouse (mobile settings, three runs each, median shown) against Cloudways’ own website from one test location on the US West Coast in October 2026:

The Cloudways marketing homepage scored 61, with a 66 ms server response, a 15.0-second largest-content time and roughly 2.9 MB transferred. Its pricing page scored 60, responded in 134 ms, showed its largest content at 14.5 seconds and transferred about 3.9 MB. These are measurements of the vendor’s public marketing pages, not a benchmark of a customer’s hosted WordPress site.

The server answered fast, but the pages are heavy, so they load slowly on a simulated phone connection. That says more about Cloudways’ marketing site than about its hosting. Cloudflare in front of the site blocked plain curl requests with a bot check, so we have no curl timings, and Cloudways does not publish a demo WordPress site to test.

What decides your speed on Cloudways is the server you pick and how your site is built. A 1 GB server is fine for a small brochure site. A WooCommerce store wants 2 to 4 GB, and the free Object Cache Pro only kicks in at 4 GB.

Support

Standard support is free and runs 24/7 through live chat and tickets. Cloudways’ published service levels say chats that are not solved within 15 minutes become tickets, and tickets get a first reply within 12 hours (3 hours for high priority). Cloudways claims a 90-second average chat response time.

The catch is scope. Standard support covers the server and platform: launching servers, backups, SSL, domains, migrations, and setting up Breeze. Help with plugin and theme conflicts, slow database queries, and server error investigation is part of the paid Advanced add-on. Advanced lists $100 a month or 10% of your invoice, whichever is higher, with first ticket replies within 6 hours (30 minutes for high priority). As of October 2026 Cloudways is offering it at $25 a month flat for life. Premium support, at $500 a month or 10% of your invoice, adds a private Slack channel and phone support.

Free trial and refunds

Cloudways offers a 3-day free trial with no credit card. To keep going, you add a card. Cloudways places a $1 hold that it reverses, or takes $5 through PayPal as credit toward your first invoice.

We found no money-back guarantee on Cloudways’ pages. Because you are billed in arrears for hours used, there is less to refund, but once a server has run, those hours are charged. To stop billing, you delete your servers and add-ons, then cancel the account in the panel. Cloudways says cancellation is permanent, deletes all data, and that a final invoice may arrive the following month.

Ownership and recent changes

DigitalOcean announced it would buy Cloudways in August 2022 and completed the $350 million deal on September 8, 2022. The two had been partners since 2014, and DigitalOcean said about half of Cloudways customers already ran on its servers. Cloudways says it now has more than 100,000 customers.

The changes since then that matter most:

  • April 2023: the first price rise since 2017. The DigitalOcean 1 GB Standard server went from $10 to $11 and Premium from $12 to $14. Local taxes were added in some countries.
  • November 2025: the Lightning Stack became generally available, and Autonomous moved to usage-based pricing with no visit limits.
  • April 2026: Site Manager became generally available and started replacing SafeUpdates.
  • Recently: Cloudways has added the Copilot AI assistant and products beyond PHP sites, such as Velocity for Node.js apps and managed AI agents.

Some long-time users say support and upsells changed after the acquisition. We could not verify that, so treat it as a reason to use the free trial.

Cloudways vs other hosts

Cloudways provides a managed cloud server with hourly billing and a monthly invoice. Hostinger and SiteGround offer shared and cloud plans on prepaid terms, including terms up to 48 months at Hostinger, and both have substantial renewal increases. Kinsta is managed WordPress hosting with monthly or annual billing and no renewal jump.

Email is another cost difference: Cloudways and Kinsta do not include it. SiteGround does, while Hostinger includes it for the first year in the plans compared here.

If you are torn between Cloudways and SiteGround specifically, our Cloudways vs SiteGround comparison goes into more detail. For a wider view, see our guide to managed WordPress hosting or browse all our WordPress hosting reviews.