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.
Not yet rated
We have loaded Cloudways's capability data but have not completed our own assessment. Rather than publish a number we have not earned, this stays blank until it is done. How we rate.
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.