Cloudways review: what managed cloud hosting really costs a small store

Cloudways is not a web host in the usual sense. It rents you a cloud server from DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode, AWS, or Google Cloud, then manages the software on it for a markup.

That model changes how you should judge it. The question is not "is $11 a month cheap?" but "what does the server plus every add-on cost, and is the management worth the markup?"

I have not run a paid site on Cloudways. This review is built from Cloudways' own pricing, support SLA, and migration pages, plus independent test data from Gizmodo, Themeisle, and HostingStep, named where used. I run my other sites on Hostinger, and I compare the two where that helps.

The short answer

Cloudways is a good next step for a store that has outgrown shared hosting. The price is flat, the servers test fast, and you can leave any month.

It is a poor first host. You pay extra for email, malware scanning, and backup storage, and support is slower than the marketing suggests unless you pay for a higher tier.

If you are still choosing your first host, our small business hosting comparison is a better starting point.

How Cloudways pricing works

Cloudways now sells two products. Flexible is the classic pay-as-you-go server, billed by the hour. Autonomous is a newer autoscaling product with flat monthly plans.

Flexible is what most small businesses should look at. You pick a provider, a server size, and a region, and Cloudways bills you in arrears in the first week of each month.

There is no long-term prepayment and no intro rate. A month on Cloudways costs the same in year three as in month one, unless Cloudways changes its list prices.

Plan limits

These figures come from Cloudways' own pricing page in October 2026. Trackers disagree on the entry spec: Toolradar and Subger list a 1 GB server at $14, while Cloudways' page lists 2 GB at $11. I used Cloudways' own figure.

Plan	RAM / vCPU	Storage	Transfer	Sites	Email	Backups	Price
Flexible, DigitalOcean entry	2 GB / 1	50 GB	2 TB	Unlimited	None	You set frequency	$11/mo
Flexible, DigitalOcean 4 GB	4 GB / not listed	80 GB	4 TB	Unlimited	None	You set frequency	About $46/mo
Flexible, DigitalOcean 8 GB	8 GB / 4	160 GB	5 TB	Unlimited	None	You set frequency	$88/mo
Autonomous Growth	Autoscaling	20 GB	150 GB	1	None	Unlimited offsite	$99/mo
Autonomous Scale	Autoscaling	Not listed	Not listed	Not listed	None	Unlimited offsite	$199/mo

The 4 GB price comes from a single tracker, Toolradar, because Cloudways' own page did not show that size when I checked. Confirm it in the Cloudways calculator before you budget.

AWS and Google Cloud servers cost far more through Cloudways. One comparison site lists the entry AWS server at about $38.56 a month (2 GB RAM, 20 GB) and Google Cloud at about $37.45 (1.7 GB RAM, 20 GB).

For a small store, DigitalOcean or Vultr gives you the most server for the money. AWS and Google Cloud make sense only if you need a specific region or already run other services there.

What Flexible includes, and what costs extra

The included list is strong for the price. Every Flexible server gets free Let's Encrypt SSL, the Imunify360 firewall, Redis, Object Cache Pro, staging and cloning, vertical scaling, and a WordPress vulnerability scanner.

Object Cache Pro matters for stores. It caches database queries on cart and checkout pages, which ordinary page caching skips. Cloudways values it at $95 a month on its own pricing page.

The add-on list is where the bill grows. These are Cloudways' listed prices:

Add-on	Price
Rackspace email	$1.50 per mailbox per month
Malware protection	From $4 per app per month
Offsite backup storage	$0.033 per GB, rounded up to $0.50 steps
Cloudflare Enterprise CDN	From $4.99 per domain per month
SafeUpdates (tested plugin updates)	From $3 per month
DNS Made Easy	$0.50 per domain per month
Advanced support	$100/mo list, $25/mo promo

None of these are hidden. They are all on the pricing page, but the headline $11 does not include any of them.

What it really costs over 3 years

Renewal pricing is why shared hosting gets expensive, and Cloudways has none. But add-ons do the same job from the other direction.

Here is a small store with one WooCommerce site, two mailboxes, malware protection, and about 15 GB of backups, on the entry DigitalOcean server.

Cost item	Monthly	3-year total
Entry server	$11.00	$396.00
2 Rackspace mailboxes	$3.00	$108.00
Malware protection, 1 app	$4.00	$144.00
Backup storage, about 15 GB	$0.50	$18.00
Cloudways total	$18.50	$666.00

The backup line is an estimate. Your real figure depends on how much your files change, since Cloudways stores incremental copies.

For comparison, Hostinger's Business shared plan costs about $143.64 for 3 years on a 48-month term, with mailboxes included for the first year. Hostinger's Cloud Startup costs about $287.64 for the same period at $7.99 a month.

So Cloudways costs roughly 2 to 4 times as much as Hostinger over 3 years. What you buy with that is a server that is yours alone, hourly-to-weekly backups you control, and the freedom to leave any month without forfeiting a prepayment.

Skip the email and malware add-ons, and the 3-year cost drops to about $414. Many small stores already pay for Google Workspace, so the email line may not be new money.

Choosing a provider and region

The provider you pick sets your region options and your overage costs. Cloudways lists these data center counts and bandwidth overage rates:

Provider	Data centers	Bandwidth overage
DigitalOcean	9	$0.02 per GB
Vultr	30	Not listed
Linode	25	Not listed
AWS	28	$0.12 per GB
Google Cloud	28	$0.10 to $0.17 per GB

A small store rarely uses the 2 TB of transfer on the entry DigitalOcean server. On AWS, an image-heavy catalog that goes over its allowance costs six times more per extra GB.

DigitalOcean also comes in two grades. Cloudways describes Standard as up to 2 Gbps networking and Premium as up to 10 Gbps with faster NVMe storage, at a higher price.

Speed and uptime

I did not run my own tests. These come from published reviews, and they mostly agree.

Gizmodo monitored a Cloudways site with Pingdom for three months. It recorded 99.98% uptime, with two short outages totaling under five minutes, and a 322 ms average response time, ranging from about 230 to 410 ms.

HostingStep ran the longest test I found: 304 days from October 2025 to July 2026. Cloudways' standard DigitalOcean server measured 99.99% uptime, 7 minutes of total downtime across 7 outages, and a 442 ms average response.

Themeisle logged 100% uptime for each month of its tracking window. Its load times ranged from about 0.16 seconds in London to 1.20 seconds in Mumbai, which shows how much server region matters.

Not every test favors Cloudways. Gizmodo found Hostinger's cloud hosting and WPX Hosting faster in its own runs.

Cloudways' uptime promise is 99.9%. DigitalOcean, the most common choice underneath, publishes a 99.99% monthly uptime SLA for its servers.

Pick a data center close to your customers. A US store on a London server gives away a few hundred milliseconds on every page.

Security and backups

Every Flexible server runs behind a server-level firewall powered by Imunify360. Cloudways lists bot protection, a honeypot for malicious bots, Fail2Ban for brute-force logins, and DoS protection on SSH and HTTP.

Free SSL comes from Let's Encrypt and installs from the dashboard. Cloudways says all Flexible apps are scanned regularly with Imunify360, but active malware cleanup is the paid $4 add-on.

Backups are where Cloudways beats most shared hosts. A Cloudways team post says you can set the backup interval anywhere from 1 hour to 168 hours (1 week). One third-party guide lists retention from 1 to 4 weeks, with 1 week as the default.

Restores are one click from the dashboard, and you can take an on-demand backup before a risky update. For a store taking orders all day, an hourly schedule means you lose at most an hour of orders in a bad restore.

That flexibility has a cost. More frequent backups and longer retention use more storage, billed at $0.033 per GB.

SafeUpdates, from $3 a month, takes a backup, tests plugin and theme updates on a temporary staging copy, then applies them. It is worth it if nobody on your team handles WordPress updates.

Moving an existing site to Cloudways

Cloudways gives you a few ways in. The free WordPress Migrator plugin handles unlimited self-service migrations: you install it on your old site, paste in your new server details, and it copies files and database.

Cloudways also includes one free migration done by its own team. After that, expert migrations cost $25 per WordPress or WooCommerce app, $99 for Joomla or OpenCart, and $125 for LMS platforms, per its migration add-on page.

Plan the move in three steps. Copy the site to a temporary Cloudways URL, test checkout and forms there, then point your domain's website records at the new server.

Change only the A or CNAME records for the website. Leave your MX, SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records alone, or email for the domain can stop working.

Our ecommerce hosting guide covers what to test on a store before you switch DNS.

Support

Every account gets 24/7 live chat and tickets at the Standard tier. Cloudways' own SLA page sets these response targets, which measure time to acknowledge a ticket, not time to fix it:

Tier	Price	Outage tickets	Normal tickets	Chat limit	Phone
Standard	Included	3 hours	12 hours	15 minutes	No
Advanced	$100/mo list, $25 promo, or 10% of invoice	30 minutes	6 hours	30 minutes	No
Premium	$500/mo or 10% of invoice	10 minutes	2 hours	No limit, via private Slack	Yes

Cloudways' marketing quotes a 90-second average chat response. That is not in the SLA, and Themeisle lists slow support as a con despite quoting the same figure.

Standard support covers the server stack. Deep plugin or theme debugging falls outside its scope, which is the main reason stores pay for Advanced.

Public sentiment is still good. Cloudways holds a 4.5 out of 5 TrustScore on Trustpilot from about 4,000 reviews, and replies to most negative ones.

The dashboard and the learning curve

Cloudways uses its own panel, not cPanel. You manage servers, apps, domains, SSL, and backups from separate screens.

Some tasks that are one click on shared hosting need a few steps here. Pointing a domain means adding it to the app, setting DNS at your registrar, then issuing SSL.

Cloudways does not sell domains, so you register one elsewhere. Our best domain registrar guide compares the options.

Cloudways vs Hostinger, from where I sit

I run my own sites on Hostinger shared hosting, so that is my reference point. Hostinger's hPanel bundles email, a domain, and backups in one cheap prepaid plan.

Cloudways bundles none of that, but it gives each store its own server with no neighbors. The trade is simplicity and a low 3-year price against performance headroom and monthly freedom.

Our Hostinger review covers the shared side in detail. For a two-host shared comparison, see Hostinger vs Bluehost.

Who Cloudways is for

Pick Cloudways if your store already slows down during sales on shared hosting. A dedicated 4 GB server with Object Cache Pro is the usual fix.

It also fits if you run several client or brand sites and want them all on one server, since Flexible has no site cap.

And it fits if you dislike prepaying 3 or 4 years upfront. Cloudways lets you start, test for a month, and leave without losing money.

Who should look elsewhere

Look elsewhere if this is your first website. Shared hosting at $3 to $4 a month, with email and a domain included, is a better place to learn.

Look elsewhere if you want phone support without paying $500 a month. GoDaddy offers phone support on regular plans, and Bluehost does above its entry tier.

And look elsewhere if nobody on your team will handle WordPress updates. A builder like Shopify or Squarespace costs more, but removes that job. Our builder vs shared vs cloud comparison lays out that choice.

My verdict

Cloudways earns a 4.2 out of 5. The servers are fast and stable in every independent test I found, and flat monthly billing is fairer than the intro-then-renewal pricing most shared hosts use.

It loses points on the add-ons and on Standard support's 12-hour normal-ticket target. Budget about $18 to $25 a month on the entry server once email and malware protection are in, not $11.

Use the 3-day free trial to migrate a copy of your store and time the checkout page. If it is not clearly faster than what you have now, you do not need Cloudways yet.