How is it different – unlike normal website/cloud hosting options, Cloudways does not own the servers. Instead, it lets you pick from big cloud companies like DigitalOcean, AWS, or Google Cloud. That means you can actually choose where your website’s data lives, whether it’s in the US, Europe, Asia, or closer to your local audience. Cloudways then manages all the tricky parts like updates, security, and backups for you, so you get the power of cloud hosting without having to be a tech expert.
đź”” Remember a server or a host is simply the location where the data lives. So a web host is used to store the pictures, text and videos for a website. It is also the computer that powers the website.
If you’ve been searching for a detailed Cloudways review, you’re in the right place. I have been a Systems Engineer for over a decade using dozens of cloud providers, let’s just say I ain’t no rookie.
Cloudways has built a reputation as one of the most flexible and high-performance managed cloud hosting providers. Unlike traditional shared hosting companies such as SiteGround, Bluehost, or Hostinger, Cloudways gives you access to powerful cloud infrastructure (DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode, AWS, Google Cloud) while handling the complicated setup and management for you.
But is Cloudways still worth it in 2025, especially after its acquisition by DigitalOcean? In this review, we’ll take a deep look at Cloudways performance, pricing, features, support, pros and cons, and alternatives so you can decide if it’s the right hosting solution for your website.
âś… You can choose from major cloud infrastructures such as DigitalOcean, AWS, Vultr, Google Cloud, and Linode. This allows you to pick a provider and region that best suits your budget, performance, or latency needs
âś… Priced differently for different clouds. Outside of Cloudways, cloud infrastructures like Google Cloud and AWS are priced differently and this makes sense – No 2 cloud hosts are going to be identically priced. Similarly Cloudways prices their infrastructure differently for different cloud providers.
âś… Overall good support. The overall review from users online is their 24×7 support is genuine and you do in fact receive quality help.
âś… A good LiveChat. Being a systems engineer for a decade I rarely ask basic question, but even my questions are being answered remarkably well by their AI chat bot. I didn’t need to answer 200 questions to be allowed to talk to it, it was simple and gave accurate responses beyond what ChatGPT could tell me.
âś… Cloudways are a medium sized business. Behind the technology is an important consideration if you yourself are a small to medium sized business. Many cloud providers are small (under 10 employees) and be a problem if you choose to move infrastructure into their cloud just before they close down. Cloudways have been bought out by DigitalOcean which adds even more confidence in their longevity.
âś… Out of the box security options. Many vulnerabilities online are caused from a lack of understanding. Developers or website companies want their cloud setup quickly and opt for scary setups like web servers with a public IP address bolted onto it – it works, but you have a HUGE target painted on you for hackers to exploit. This is reduced significantly by Cloudways native security tools keeping even the most lazy developer more secure than they would otherwise be.
❌ You are limited to a small handful of cloud providers and they are missing some major names like Microsoft Azure.
❌ One of the key incentives to using a solution like Cloudways over using the cloud providers directly is simplicity. Although they handle the updates and security (very handy) that’s not the main complexity we need. We want is the reliability, speed and security of AWS, without the high blood pressure you get when logging into the AWS dashboard. This makes their AWS and Google Cloud offerings great, but ones like Vultr a bit pointless. Vultr is already very simple to use and would be cheaper to use them directly.
❌ No mention of Back-to-Back SLAs. Think of Cloudways as the middleman between you and a cloud provider like AWS or Google. If you need urgent help, Cloudways first takes time to respond, then has to escalate to the provider – meaning delays stack up. Some middlemen have special agreements so the total resolution time is still guaranteed. Cloudways doesn’t appear to have these deals, so big issues may take longer to resolve.
❌ Cloudways randomly dropped support for Vultr and Linode back in 2023 and then brought them back in 2024. Although they presumably realized this was a mistake, many readers have questioned whether their workloads are truly safe for future changes.
Cloudways servers run on a stack called ThunderStack – a combination of Nginx, Apache, Varnish, PHP FPM, and Redis. This setup is designed for speed. Many users report faster load times compared to shared hosting, especially for WordPress and WooCommerce sites.
Now before you techies rip my head off, I KNOW that it’s not the performance you would get from going direct to the cloud provider directly, I agree with you. However this is a Cloudways review and it’s still fair to say the performance is very good considering the simplicity of the platform and that it is not aimed at well rounded systems engineers who could build directly in the cloud provider like AWS.
Independent benchmarks show Cloudways handles traffic spikes much better than hosts like SiteGround or Bluehost. When combined with Cloudflare Enterprise and Object Cache Pro (both available as add-ons), you can achieve near enterprise-level speeds.
One common issue users face is high CPU usage. Cloudways is strict with CPU limits because it’s running real cloud infrastructure. If your WordPress plugins are poorly coded, or if you’re running WooCommerce with heavy traffic, your CPU usage can spike. This may lead to site slowdowns or even warnings from Cloudways.
The key here is optimization: lightweight themes, efficient caching, and avoiding “CPU-hungry” plugins is the usual easy fix. For high-traffic WooCommerce stores, some users find Rocket.net or Kinsta more forgiving.
One downside: Cloudways doesn’t offer LiteSpeed servers, which are known for excellent caching and high concurrency performance. Instead, it relies on its ThunderStack. While still powerful, LiteSpeed hosting (found on providers like Hostinger or NameHero) can sometimes outperform Cloudways for dynamic sites.
Cloudways feature set strikes a balance between simplicity and power.
Like I said at the start, this is Cloudways main differentiator. Instead of being locked into one company’s infrastructure, you can pick from:
This flexibility allows you to scale globally with the data center that makes sense for your audience. It would be nice to see Microsoft Azure added into the mix (especially because it is a seriously complex beast).
The Cloudways dashboard is cleaner than managing raw servers on DigitalOcean or AWS. You get a simple control panel for launching servers, deploying WordPress, managing backups, and scaling.
That said, it’s not as beginner-friendly as some other I have used like Vultr. It also pushes you towards using a corporate email address. Again, for many of us this doesn’t matter, but as a small business owner or a developer looking to get up and running quickly, you might only have @gmail or @outlook email addresses and that is not allowed during sign up with Cloudways.
If you’re a blogger or small business owner moving from Bluehost or SiteGround, expect a short adjustment period. Cloudways offers plenty of tutorials and a knowledge base to help, but there’s a slight learning curve.
It is arguably aimed at niche set of users. Anyone with a comprehensive technical experience would just go directly to the cloud provider like AWS.
Anyone with limited technical aptitude would be better off with simple website hosting companies like Hostinger (see the Hostinger Review) because it’s aimed at just websites not workloads. It is cheaper and simpler if all you want it a website.
In my option, Cloudways is aimed at developers looking to go live quickly or for small tech companies like managed service providers who want to provide a very simple cloud option for their customers data and applications.
In this Cloudways review, we discussed how the pricing depends on where you want to store your data, Cloudways are just the middleman between you and a cloud infrastructure provider like AWS.
The Cloudways pricing structure seems average. At the time of writing this it is $14 USD/month for a 1GB, 1 vCPU and 25GB SSD disk server in Vultr. That’s not going to break the bank, but it is also nearly 3 times the prices of just creating a Vultr account and doing it yourself. Vultr currently charge $5/month for the same specs if you go to them directly.
However, if you opt for the AWS cloud hosting that changes things. You could pay AWS 0.0084/hour which is $6/month, plus backup fees, plus network ingestion and egress fees, plus storage fees of the backups. Now yes you do pay additional fees per GB of data in Cloudways, but overall the management is simpler. AWS, Google Cloud or Azure are notorious for people accidentally spending hundreds of dollars in their first month after accidentally using the wrong server, disk type, networking or backups. Cloudways is a more straightforward way to use a provider like AWS without fear of draining your bank account overnight.
Cloudways Flexible is for people who want full control of their server setup: you pick the cloud provider (DigitalOcean, AWS, etc.), the server size, location, and resources. You still get managed-hosting perks (updates, SSL, staging, etc.), but you manage more of the infrastructure yourself.
Cloudways Autonomous is more hands-off: built for high-traffic WordPress sites or more realistically small-medium sized businesses trying to get their systems into a. very simple managed cloud. It includes autoscaling, more “ready out of the box” performance, load balancing, and you don’t need to think about server choices. The idea is you set it and let it grow/adjust automatically to traffic.
Pricing / Key Differences:
Yes – using what Cloudways calls SafeUpdates, they will automatically update your WordPress core and plugins in a safe method:
That being said, it is certainly unusual (in this Cloudways Reviewers opinion) to charge you a fee for this service. It is an additional fee to the monthly hosting which to me doesn’t make sense given the simplicity of the backups they are taking.
It wouldn’t be a Cloudways review if we didn’t mention the changes since 2022.
When DigitalOcean bought Cloudways in 2022, many customers expected improvements in speed, scale, and infrastructure. The acquisition cost was around $350 million, and the idea was for Cloudways to benefit from DigitalOcean’s resources while still offering its managed hosting services.
Many have jumped in with complaints of increased costs, stating that they Cloudways have increased their costs since the acquisition. This is false, the prices have NOT increased since the merger and we can see this from an online archive.
This is a side by side comparison of how the Cloudways website looked on January 1st 2022 and how it looks today in 2025. So although it has increased by $1 per month for the micro plan, you also got additional SSD space than you do today.
And in this Cloudways reviewer’s opinion, are we seriously going to call them out as horrible people because they increased prices by $1 in 3 years?
There’s been feedback about server sluggishness, especially on DigitalOcean-powered servers under Cloudways, compared to what some users were used to with Vultr or HF (high-frequency) providers. Support response times are also cited as having worsened; some users feel they now have to pay more (via premium support) just to get responses that used to be faster or included.
Cloudways reviews on Reddit contain comments like “I use them for multiple WordPress sites and highly recommend them” and “Cloudways CS can be hit or miss, but I’d say it’s fairly standard. For the price, you can’t ask for much more. Pretty great hosting overall”
A Cloudways review is tough to land, while they offer a comprehensive website and web app hosting suite, the value of their solution comes down to the size of the businesses using it.
My father Matt, wife Alicia and myself used to run a website company and trust me we have seem small business owners come to us spending over $200/month on domain management and DNS. Domain names get renewed once every 1-3 years and DNS is included almost always. I pay $4/month for my domain and website and it includes DNS – otherwise you wouldn’t be able to get to my website at all!
My point? I have a VERY small threshold for hosting companies when I think they are using smoke and mirrors to try and confuse companies into spending hundreds of dollars per month. Cloudways are right on the fence.
The reason this Cloudways reviewer believes they are walking the ethical tight rope, is when you compare other products on the market.
Here are the Vultr prices for WordPress hosting
$20 per month 2 vCPU 4 GB Memory 80GB Storage
Here are the Cloudways prices for web hosting using Vultr
$54 per month 2 vCPU 4 GB Memory 80GB Storage
Now there are minor differences, but if you simply plan to host WordPress in the cloud, you may be able to go directly to the provider, have a very simple experience (assuming we are talking about Vultr or Linode) and pay significantly less.
Nope. Not worth it. Hosting a small business website for $14/month to keep a website on the internet is not worth it. I pay $4 and there are plenty of vendors under the $5/month mark. Some will argue you get a server for that price, but lets be honest – you don’t. I can’t install Windows on it or my own services, it is just web hosting with the choice of big companies.
Yes worth it. I am referring to businesses in the 50 – 250 employees range. You have millions in revenue and should not risk hosting a highly critical website on cheap hosting. The support from Cloudways is not amazing, but it’s enough.
You also get the choice of locations such as USA which dramatically improves your security posture, meets data sovereignty requirements and may assist with compliance checks such as ISO 27001.
No, it is not suitable for enterprise grade systems. The flexibility is just not there like it is with professional web server/VPS hosting where you control the server and the networking.
You will struggle to get the support you need and in the event of an issue, while they claim to have someone ready at a moments notice, this doesn’t mean a systems engineer who can troubleshoot the issue quickly.
In-house engineers, developers and systems architects are there for a reason in a large business and are a safer option than relying on overseas support.
Well yes, overall they have never had a major security breach, but lets be honest even if they had you and I wouldn’t use that as a reason for or against (it is just too common these days).Cloudways offer a CDN’s and a Server-Level Firewall. While that might sound great, the least secure firewall is one that sits on the server it’s self, so it’s not much to brag about and likewise for the CDN, you can use CloudFlare free to get a similar result.
Cloudways does not include built-in email hosting as part of its standard server plans. However, you can get email services through add-ons. For example, they offer Rackspace Email as an add-on for using custom domain mailboxes; there are also transactional email options via SMTP or third-party providers.The current price is $1 per mailbox and while that’s not bad, this Cloudways reviewer would not suggest using it. They offer fixed 25GB sized mailboxes and this cannot be increased. Although that is a LOT of emails, the fact it’s fixed is enough for me to look for alternatives.
No, Cloudways does not use the traditional cPanel interface found in many shared hosting environments. Instead, it provides its own custom control panel/dashboard that handles server, application, and scaling operations. This dashboard is designed to give managed hosting functionality without the licensing fees and complexities of cPanel.
Cloudways doesn’t include a full file manager by default in the classic cPanel style, but it does offer ways to access and manage your files. You can use SFTP or SSH to upload, edit, or remove files. Using something like FileZilla can be tedious, but once it’s installed you will pick it up without much hassle. There are also third-party or plugin-based file managers that work with Cloudways for users who prefer a graphical interface.
No, Cloudways is not free except for a short trial period. They offer a 3 day free trial for certain plans to try out their hosting platform without commitment. After the trial, you pay monthly (or hourly in some models) for the hosting plan and any additional add-ons (such as email, backups, advanced support).
Howdy folks, my name is Ben, a veteran in the ICT space with over 15 years of comprehensive experience. I have worked in the health sector, many private companies, managed service providers and in Defense. I am now passing on my years of experience and education to my readers.
