What Is Cloudways: How Managed Cloud Hosting Works and Its Pricing Structure
What is Cloudways? DigitalOcean, Vultr, AWS and other cloud providers supply the servers, and Cloudways is the managed cloud hosting that adds server management and application installation on top. On October 19, 2026, I checked the dashboard and the official pricing page again and compared them with the billing history of the Cloudways test server to sum up how it works and how its pricing is structured.
1️⃣ What is Cloudways: how it works and its five cloud providers
A Cloudways server is created in a data center of the cloud provider you choose. The Add Server screen offers five cloud providers: DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode, AWS and Google Cloud.
Cloudways installs a web server stack and a database on that server and gathers management features such as backups, a firewall and SSL in one dashboard. For the stack, you choose between the Lightning stack, an Nginx setup, and the Hybrid stack, which supports [.htaccess]. The database is either MariaDB 10.11 or MySQL 8.4 and cannot be changed after the server is created.
You don't create a separate account with the cloud provider, and Cloudways bills the server fees too, all in one bill. The Cloudways test server is a Vultr Seoul 1GB server, and the payment method is registered only in the Cloudways account.
2️⃣ Server and application structure
On Cloudways, one site is one application, and you put several applications on one server. The official pricing page states that there is no limit on the number of applications as long as the server can handle them.
The Cloudways test account also shows 1 server and 2 applications on the Flexible card of the home screen.
Besides WordPress, you can put PHP, Laravel and Magento sites on the same server, choosing them from the application list on the Add Server screen.
The menus are also split in two, server and application. The server screen holds server-wide settings such as changing the server size, the backup frequency and the firewall, while the application screen holds per-site settings such as domains, SSL and backup restore.
3️⃣ Built-in features
Every Flexible plan includes 24/7 support, staging, free SSL, a server firewall and automatic backups (according to the official pricing page).
Object Cache Pro is free on servers with 4GB or more, and Cloudways engineers migrate your first site from another host for free.
| Features | Flexible plan | Conditions · price |
|---|---|---|
| 24/7 support | Included | — |
| Number of applications | Included | No limit, up to the server's resources |
| Staging | Included | — |
| Free SSL | Included | Let's Encrypt |
| Server firewall | Included | Imunify360 |
| Automatic backups | Included | — |
| Object Cache Pro | Included | Servers with 4GB or more |
| First site migration | Included | Done by engineers |
| Cloudflare Enterprise CDN | Add-on | From $4.99 per domain per month |
| Site Manager | Add-on | From $3 per application per month |
| Malware Protection | Add-on | From $4 per application per month |
| Rackspace Email | Add-on | $1.5 per mailbox per month |
| DNS Made Easy | Add-on | $0.50 per domain per month |
| Advance Support | Add-on | $100 per month |
The values in the table are based on the official Flexible pricing page on October 19, 2026. Add-on fees are added according to the number of applications, domains and mailboxes you use.
4️⃣ Cloudways pricing structure
Cloudways pricing is set by the cloud provider and server size you choose, and it is calculated for the time the server was running. According to the official pricing page, among 1GB servers DigitalOcean Standard is the cheapest at $11 a month and AWS the most expensive at $20.56 a month. On Google Cloud, the smallest plan is 1.7GB at $37.33 a month.
| Cloud provider | Plan | Monthly fee | Per hour | RAM · CPU · storage · bandwidth |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| DigitalOcean Standard | Micro | $11 | $0.0164 | 1GB · 1 vCPU · SSD 25GB · 1TB |
| DigitalOcean Premium | Micro | $14 | $0.0208 | 1GB · 1 vCPU · NVMe 25GB · 1TB |
| Vultr | Micro | $14 | $0.0208 | 1GB · 1 vCPU · SSD 25GB · 1TB |
| Linode | Micro | $14 | $0.0208 | 1GB · 1 vCPU · SSD 25GB · 1TB |
| AWS | Micro | $20.56 | $0.0286 | 1GB · 2 vCPU · 20GB · 2GB |
| Google Cloud | Small | $37.33 | $0.0518 | 1.7GB · shared CPU · 20GB · 1GB |
Billing is postpaid: you are charged the following month for what you used, and the official pricing page says that the invoice for the previous month's usage is issued in the first week of each month. The prices in the table exclude tax, so depending on your billing address, tax is added as a separate line. AWS and Google Cloud prices differ by region.
Running the Cloudways test server (Vultr Seoul 1GB) for 184 hours, from October 9 to 00:00 on the 17th, cost $3.83 in server fees. Offsite backup storage added $0.50, and the estimated October bill including tax was $4.76.
Autonomous is an autoscaling product you sign up for at a flat monthly rate instead of choosing a server. The plans are Growth at $99 a month, Scale at $199 a month and Plus at $399 a month, and servers that are automatically added beyond the base server count are charged an hourly fee per server.
5️⃣ Sites Cloudways suits
Flexible suits sites that want to choose the cloud provider and server size themselves without an engineer to run the server. If you need company mailboxes, the Rackspace Email add-on fee is added separately.
For online stores or online course sites where visitors suddenly surge, the autoscaling Autonomous is the right product, and for Node.js applications, Velocity.
For a single small-business website, you can start with the smallest 1GB server. On a Cloudways test server of the same size, the time to first byte with the Breeze caching plugin turned on was 45.4 ms.
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