Home / Partner Picks / Cloudways
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Best for: Cloud-Based Hosting
Last updated: July 23, 2026
Cloudways sits between raw cloud infrastructure and fully managed hosting: you pick your provider — DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode, AWS or Google Cloud — and Cloudways handles provisioning, patching, caching, backups, staging and scaling so you never touch a terminal. The standout is the billing model. Pay-as-you-go, no contracts, and — unusually for hosting — no renewal price hikes. Where budget hosts triple your rate in year two, the price you start at is the price you keep. The trade-off: no free domain, no bundled email, no cPanel.
STARTS AT
$11 – 99/mo
Cost depends on provider and server size — Cloudways bundles raw infrastructure plus its management fee into one monthly price. Entry DigitalOcean servers run roughly $11–14/mo (1GB RAM, 1 core, 25GB storage). Vultr and Linode sit similarly; AWS and Google Cloud start considerably higher, around 3× DigitalOcean for comparable specs. Annual billing offers a meaningful discount. Check the live page — entry rates have moved recently.
No — Cloudways' single biggest advantage over conventional shared hosting. Most budget hosts advertise a low first-term rate then renew at three or four times that. Cloudways is straightforward pay-as-you-go with no contracts and no renewal hikes: the price you start at is the price you keep. Over two or three years that often makes it cheaper in total than a host whose headline rate looked far lower on day one.
DigitalOcean for most people — best balance of price and performance, and the most popular option. Vultr and Linode are broadly comparable with different data centre networks, so choose them if the locations suit your audience; Vultr's high-frequency NVMe servers are worth it for speed-sensitive sites. AWS and Google Cloud cost ~3× as much for similar specs — pick them only if you specifically need their enterprise infrastructure, compliance or regional coverage.
Two things people miss: no free domain and no bundled email — Cloudways focuses on application hosting, so business email needs Google Workspace, Microsoft 365 or a paid add-on. There's also no cPanel; you use Cloudways' own dashboard. Not dealbreakers, but the true cost of moving includes an email plan, and the workflow feels unfamiliar coming from traditional shared hosting.
Less than you'd think, more than shared hosting. Cloudways handles provisioning, patching, Nginx config, caching, backups, staging and scaling — you never touch a command line. It does expect basic comfort with server concepts: choosing RAM and CPU, understanding applications vs servers, managing staging. Want one-click cPanel and a free domain? A traditional shared host is friendlier. Outgrown shared hosting? This is the natural next step.
Agencies managing multiple client sites, WooCommerce stores that buckle on shared hosting during traffic spikes, and growing WordPress or PHP sites where Core Web Vitals matter. Unlimited applications per server plus a multi-site dashboard makes the agency case especially strong, and one-click scaling handles seasonal spikes well. Not the pick for a first small blog wanting a free domain, bundled email and cPanel in one place.
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