Cloudways review
Managed cloud hosting layered over DigitalOcean, Vultr, AWS and GCP
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Quick verdict
A strong middle ground if you want cloud performance and control without administering the server yourself.
Sits between raw cloud servers and managed hosting: you choose an underlying cloud provider and Cloudways handles provisioning, stack management and updates. Now part of DigitalOcean.
Who it suits
- · Performance-sensitive sites
- · Developers who want SSH and Git
- · Online shops
- · Sites expecting to grow
Who should look elsewhere
- · Email hosting is a paid add-on, not included
- · Billing is usage-based, so costs are less predictable
- · More moving parts than a straightforward shared host
Hostoholic Score
How this rating is built
Weighted from six dimensions. Affiliate commission is not an input — there is no field for it in the calculation.
What you pay across the full term — including the renewal, not just the headline.
Channels offered, hours covered, and whether the answers are any good.
Staging, email, SSH, Git, database and security tooling included as standard.
Control panel, onboarding, migration and how much you need to already know.
Not yet assessed: Performance, Reliability. These are excluded and the remaining weights renormalised, rather than counted as zero.
What is good
- Choose the underlying cloud and region, including London
- Vertical scaling without rebuilding the server
- Full SSH and staging on every plan
- Suits WooCommerce workloads that outgrow shared hosting
What is not
- Email hosting is a paid add-on, not included
- Billing is usage-based, so costs are less predictable
- More moving parts than a straightforward shared host
The detail
Features and specifications
Anything marked unknown has not been verified by an editor yet. We would rather show a gap than a guess.
Hosting and platform
- Control panel
- Cloudways Platform (custom)
- UK data centre
- Yes
- Data centre regions
- London, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, United States, Singapore, Sydney, Bangalore
- Free SSL
- Yes
- Email hosting included
- No
- Free migration
- Yes
- Money-back period
- Unknown
Performance and tooling
- Staging environment
- Yes
- CDN included
- Yes
- Object caching
- Unknown
- Redis
- Unknown
- Automatic backups
- Unknown
- Backup retention
- Unknown
Developer access
- SSH access
- Yes
- Git
- Yes
- WP-CLI
- Yes
- Cron jobs
- Unknown
- PHP versions
- Unknown
- Node.js support
- Unknown
Ecommerce and security
- WooCommerce support
- Yes
- Malware protection
- Unknown
- Web application firewall
- Unknown
- DDoS protection
- Unknown
- Support channels
- live chat, ticket, knowledge base
Pricing
What it costs
We publish a price only once an editor has checked it against the provider's own pricing page and recorded the date.
| Plan | Type | Sites | Latest checked price |
|---|---|---|---|
| DigitalOcean 2GB | cloud | — | USD 11 |
Alternatives
Compare Cloudways with
Sources
Where this information came from
- Cloudways hosting overview· Capabilities and plan structure · checked 17/08/2026
- Cloudways pricing page· Entry pricing · checked 17/08/2026
Spotted something wrong?
Facts drift. If something here is out of date, tell us and we will check it.