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As of October 2026, Cloudways is a managed cloud host, part of DigitalOcean, that runs a server for you on DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode, AWS or Google Cloud, from $11 a month for 1GB on DigitalOcean, billed hourly, with unlimited sites per server. The documented trade-offs: paid add-ons for email, Cloudflare Enterprise and faster support, no root access, no published money-back guarantee, and an SLA that covers support response times instead of server uptime.
This review is based on Cloudways’ published plans, documentation and terms, checked in October 2026; it does not include our own speed tests.
Our Web Hosting Price Index lists 22 hosting plans, Cloudways included, with intro and renewal prices side by side.
In this guide
Cloudways at a glance
| Item | As of October 2026 |
|---|---|
| Owner | DigitalOcean |
| Products | Flexible (pick a cloud and server) and Autonomous (autoscaling WordPress) |
| Clouds on Flexible | DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode, AWS, Google Cloud |
| Cheapest server | $11 a month ($0.0164 an hour), DigitalOcean 1GB |
| Recommended for live sites | 2GB or more: $24 a month on DigitalOcean |
| Sites per server | Unlimited on Flexible |
| Free trial | 3 days, no card; not on AWS or Google Cloud |
| Money-back guarantee | None published |
| Backups | Daily by default, kept 1 week; up to hourly and 4 weeks |
| Support | 24/7 chat and tickets free; Advanced $100 a month (offered at $25), Premium $500 |
| SLA | Support response times; uptime falls under each cloud provider’s SLA |
| Not hosted; Rackspace mailboxes $1.50 each a month |
How Cloudways works
Cloudways sells two products. Flexible, the main one, lets you pick a cloud provider and server size, then installs and manages the stack for WordPress, Magento, Laravel and other PHP apps. Its pricing page lists five providers and claims more than 50 data centers. Autonomous is a separate Kubernetes-based product that adds capacity as traffic rises; its plans list regions, not providers, and its FAQ says it runs only WordPress and WooCommerce, without Multisite.
On Flexible, Cloudways’ getting started FAQ says it handles OS patches, security updates and firewall rules. It uses its own panel instead of cPanel, and files are reached over SFTP or SSH. Cloudways doesn’t give root access or deploy into your own cloud account, saying customers could break or bypass the tools that run its platform. Its AI assistant is covered in our Cloudways Copilot guide.
What Cloudways costs
Cloudways charges per server, not per site. The entry server costs $11 a month on DigitalOcean Standard (1GB, SSD), $14 on DigitalOcean Premium, Vultr or Linode, $20.56 on AWS and $37.33 on Google Cloud (1.7GB). Prices are in US dollars before tax.
Treat $11 as a test-server price. Cloudways’ FAQ calls 1GB servers “primarily intended for testing and staging” and advises 2GB or more for live sites: $24 a month on DigitalOcean Standard, $28 on Premium. It says a 2GB server can handle 4 to 5 small sites with up to 110,000 combined page views a month, and suggests one store per server. Autonomous costs $99, $199 or $399 a month. Our Cloudways pricing guide lists every provider, size and add-on.
What every server includes
- Unlimited applications, free Let’s Encrypt SSL and free staging with one-click push to live.
- An Imunify360 server firewall, IP and country blocking, and a free WordPress vulnerability scanner.
- Free Redis, plus Object Cache Pro on servers with 4GB of RAM or more.
- A free managed migration of your first site (later ones are paid) and a free WordPress migrator plugin.
- Vertical scaling, and 24/7 support by live chat and tickets.
Backups
Per Cloudways’ backup guide, new servers back up daily and keep backups for a week. You can set frequency from hourly to weekly and retention from 1 to 4 weeks, run on-demand or single-app backups, and keep a local copy to download. Backups of a deleted server are kept 14 days.
Support and the SLA
Under Cloudways’ support SLA, free Standard support gives tickets a first response within 12 hours, or 3 hours when your service is unusable, and chats over 15 minutes become tickets. The support page prices Advanced at $100 a month or 10% of your invoice, whichever is higher, and also advertises a lifetime offer of $25 a month; it cuts targets to 6 hours and 30 minutes and adds plugin and theme troubleshooting. Premium is $500 a month or 10%, with 2-hour and 10-minute targets, Slack and phone support. Both cover the whole account, need six months’ commitment and aren’t available on the trial.
The SLA covers the support platform only: it credits 5% of that month’s fee per hour Cloudways misses its support standards. It says its availability promise doesn’t apply to the cloud providers, links to their SLAs instead, and sets no server uptime percentage. Support excludes debugging custom code, application-level security issues and SEO.
What costs extra
- Offsite backup storage: required on every server, at $0.033 per GB, rounded up in 50-cent steps (backup charges). Autonomous includes it.
- Extra bandwidth: $0.02 per GB on DigitalOcean, $0.12 on AWS, $0.10 to $0.17 on Google Cloud.
- Cloudflare Enterprise: $4.99 per domain a month at the lowest volume, down to $1.99 at 25 or more domains, with 100GB per domain, then $0.02 per GB, and a 30-day free trial per domain (add-on page). Autonomous includes it.
- Email: Cloudways doesn’t host email on its own servers. Rackspace mailboxes cost $1.50 each a month; app mail can go through an SMTP or Elastic Email add-on.
- Malware Protection: Imunify360 scanning and cleanup from $4 per app a month, less per app at volume (add-on page).
- DNS Made Easy: $0.50 per domain a month.
Third-party add-ons such as DNS Made Easy bill a full month on activation, even if removed days later.
Billing, trial and refunds
Cloudways’ billing guide says DigitalOcean, Linode and Vultr servers active all month pay a capped monthly price, and partial months are billed hourly. AWS and Google Cloud are always hourly, with no cap. Billable hours include time a server is “running or stopped”, so stopping one doesn’t stop charges. Invoices are issued at the start of each month for the previous month, in US dollars.
The payments guide says an unpaid invoice restricts the account on day 7, stops servers on day 10 and permanently deletes data on day 28.
The Flexible free trial lasts 3 days without a card, excludes AWS and Google Cloud, and upgrading may add a temporary $1 to $10 card verification charge. Autonomous has its own 3-day trial with capped resources.
The pricing page doesn’t mention a money-back guarantee. The payments guide allows refund requests for eligible unused prepaid funds within three months of payment. Cloudways’ terms page links to DigitalOcean’s terms of service, which let DigitalOcean change prices by updating its pricing policies and make fees non-refundable when an account is terminated.
Cloudways pros and cons
| Documented strengths | Documented limits |
|---|---|
| Priced per server, with unlimited sites on Flexible | 1GB servers are meant mainly for testing; the recommended 2GB starts at $24 |
| Five cloud providers to choose from | No root access, no cPanel, no deploying into your own cloud account |
| Hourly billing, capped monthly on DigitalOcean, Linode and Vultr | Stopped servers still bill; third-party add-ons bill a full month |
| Free staging, SSL, firewall and backups; Object Cache Pro from 4GB | Offsite backup storage, Cloudflare Enterprise and malware cleanup cost extra |
| 3-day free trial, no credit card | No published money-back guarantee |
| 24/7 chat and tickets on every account | Standard ticket target is 12 hours; the SLA covers support, not uptime |
| Autonomous adds autoscaling for one busy WordPress site | No email hosting; mailboxes are $1.50 each a month |
Who Cloudways fits, and who it doesn’t
Cloudways fits agencies, freelancers and developers running several WordPress or PHP sites who are comfortable sizing a server, working over SSH or SFTP, and adding only the extras they need. On Cloudways’ own guide of 4 to 5 small sites per 2GB server, $24 a month works out to $4.80 a site before add-ons, against $35 for one site on Kinsta’s entry plan. For one busy WooCommerce store, Autonomous starts at $99 and lists 100 PHP workers per server; our PHP workers guide explains why that matters.
Look elsewhere if you want one bundled plan with a domain, email and hosting, a refund window, root access, or servers in your own cloud account. Moving up from shared hosting? Our Hostinger vs Cloudways guide covers when to switch.
Cloudways vs Kinsta, Hostinger and Liquid Web
| Plan | Price | Sites | Traffic | Refund | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cloudways Flexible, DigitalOcean 1GB | $11/mo, hourly | Unlimited | Unlimited visits, 1TB transfer | $1.50 per mailbox | None published |
| Cloudways Flexible, DigitalOcean 2GB | $24/mo, hourly | Unlimited | Unlimited visits, 2TB transfer | $1.50 per mailbox | None published |
| Kinsta Single 35k | $35/mo or $350/yr | 1 | 35,000 visits | Not offered | 30 days |
| Hostinger Premium | $2.99/mo on a 48-month prepay, renews at $10.99 | 3 | Not stated | 2 per site, free for 1 year | 30 days |
| Liquid Web Pro | $19/mo, or $17.10/mo billed annually | 1 | 50,000 visits | Not listed | Terms say non-refundable |
Cloudways vs Kinsta. Kinsta charges per site with a visit or bandwidth allowance, and its pricing page adds a free first month on select plans and a 30-day money-back guarantee. Its docs say it doesn’t provide email either. See our Kinsta review and Kinsta pricing guide.
Cloudways vs Hostinger. Hostinger’s Premium plan bundles 3 sites, a free first-year domain, mailboxes and a 30-day money-back guarantee, but $2.99 needs $143.52 up front for 48 months. Cloudways has no prepay and no renewal jump. Our Hostinger review covers its limits.
Cloudways vs Liquid Web. Liquid Web’s managed WordPress starts at $19 a month for one site, with 15GB of shared storage, 14-day daily backups, and a Cloudflare edge CDN and WAF on every plan. See our Liquid Web pricing guide.
Bottom line
On paper, Cloudways is a practical way to run several sites on one managed cloud server, from $24 a month at the 2GB size it recommends for live sites. Budget for offsite backup storage, Cloudflare Enterprise and email, and accept no root access and no published money-back guarantee. If you would rather not size servers, a per-site host such as Kinsta decides for you. Otherwise, use the 3-day trial to see your region’s price and see Cloudways’ current plans.
Frequently asked questions
Is Cloudways good for beginners?
Partly. Cloudways patches the server, offers a no-card trial, free staging and 24/7 chat, and manages SSL and backups from its panel. But you choose the server size, it uses its own panel instead of cPanel, files are reached over SFTP or SSH, email is separate, and standard tickets have a 12-hour response target. A beginner with one small site may find a bundled plan with a domain and email simpler.
Is Cloudways good for WordPress?
WordPress is a core use case. Flexible servers include free staging, Redis, Object Cache Pro from 4GB of RAM and a free migrator plugin. Autonomous runs only WordPress and WooCommerce, with autoscaling and Cloudflare Enterprise included, from $99 a month for one site.
Does Cloudways include email?
No. Cloudways doesn’t host email on its own servers. You can add Rackspace mailboxes at $1.50 each a month, or keep email with another provider.
Does Cloudways offer a refund?
The pricing page doesn’t mention a money-back guarantee, so the 3-day trial is the way to test it. Cloudways’ payments guide allows refund requests for eligible unused prepaid funds within three months, subject to verification.
Last checked: October 2026. Prices and plans change; check the vendor’s page before you buy.