Cloudways Review: Managed Cloud Hosting Worth the Price?

What Is Cloudways and Why Is It Different?

Cloudways isn't a traditional hosting provider. Instead of owning and operating its own data centers, Cloudways acts as a management layer on top of established cloud infrastructure providers like AWS, Google Cloud, DigitalOcean, Vultr, and Linode. You're essentially renting their software to provision, configure, and manage servers on these platforms — without needing your own accounts on each provider.

This approach is a meaningful departure from shared hosting. There's no multi-year contract, no inflated renewal pricing, and no mystery about what hardware your site runs on. You pick the cloud provider, choose the server specs, select a data center location, and Cloudways handles the rest through a clean graphical interface. If you've ever dreaded SSH-ing into a Linode box to configure Apache, Cloudways removes that friction entirely.

Setting Up a Server

Spinning up a new server on Cloudways is refreshingly straightforward. You start by choosing your application — WordPress, WooCommerce, Magento, or any custom PHP app — then name your application and server. Cloudways includes a project/folder system that's unique among hosting platforms, letting you organize servers by client or business unit. This is especially handy for agencies juggling multiple client properties.

Next, you pick your cloud provider. For the best value, DigitalOcean and Vultr tend to be the top choices. Vultr stands out with its high-frequency server option, which offers faster CPU clock speeds — a real advantage for CPU-intensive applications like online course platforms or WooCommerce stores with heavy checkout traffic.

You then select your server size, starting from 1GB of RAM, with storage, bandwidth, and CPU cores scaling up as you go. A key detail: with most providers on Cloudways, you can scale up but not back down. The only way to downsize is to clone the server at a smaller tier and migrate your sites over. So starting small and scaling as needed is the smart move. Finally, you choose a data center location closest to your primary audience, and the server launches in roughly seven to eight minutes.

Pricing: Pay-As-You-Go Cloud Hosting

Cloudways uses a pay-as-you-go pricing model billed by the hour. A basic 1GB Vultr high-frequency server runs about $13 per month (roughly two cents per hour). Scale up to 2GB and you're looking at around $26, while a 4GB server with dual-core CPU sits at roughly $50 per month.

Compared to the bait-and-switch pricing common with shared hosting — where you get a steep discount for year one and then pay three to four times more on renewal — Cloudways is predictable. You know exactly what your monthly hosting costs will be, and there's no sticker shock. For running an entire business on WordPress with WooCommerce and LearnDash, $25 to $50 a month is genuinely competitive.

The trade-off is the markup. That same Vultr server costs about $6 to $7 directly from Vultr. Cloudways adds their margin for the management interface, support, and tooling. For a handful of servers, that premium is easy to justify. If you're running dozens or hundreds of servers, the math starts to work against you and going direct to the cloud provider may make more sense.

The Cloudways Dashboard

The Cloudways dashboard splits cleanly between two views: servers and applications. Servers represent the physical (well, virtual) machines, while applications are the WordPress installs or PHP apps running on those machines. You can host multiple applications on a single server, though Cloudways recommends keeping transactional sites (e-commerce, course platforms) on their own dedicated server for performance reasons. Brochure-style sites with low traffic can share a server without issue.

Navigation is icon-driven, with quick indicators showing how many applications, projects, and team members are associated with each server. Once you get familiar with the iconography, moving between server-level and application-level settings is fast and intuitive. The ability to copy important details like IP addresses, usernames, and passwords with a single click is a small quality-of-life feature that saves real time during setup and troubleshooting.

Server Management: Credentials, Monitoring, and Services

Under server management, the Master Credentials tab gives you the server's IP address along with the username and password for SFTP and SSH access. You can add SSH keys for more secure authentication and even launch an SSH terminal directly in the browser — no need for Terminal on Mac or PuTTY on Windows.

The Monitoring tab provides a quick health check on RAM usage, CPU load, disk space, and bandwidth. A more detailed view shows time-series graphs for each metric, viewable in increments from one hour up to six months. For even deeper insight, Cloudways integrates with New Relic, a third-party monitoring service that can give you granular performance data beyond what the built-in dashboard offers.

The Manage Services panel shows every service running at the server level — Apache, Memcache, MySQL, Nginx, PHP-FPM, Varnish, and New Relic. You can start, stop, or restart any service with a click. If you're not a fan of Varnish's server-level caching (and many WordPress users aren't), you can simply disable it here.

Server Settings, Packages, and Security

The Settings & Packages area is where you fine-tune server behavior. At the basic level, you can adjust PHP memory limits, upload size caps, and the server timezone. The Advanced tab opens up configuration options for PHP, MySQL, Apache, and Nginx, including the WAF (Web Application Firewall) module that works with Cloudflare.

The Packages tab lets you manage pre-installed software versions. Need to upgrade from PHP 7.3 to a newer version? Select it, save, and the server reboots with the update applied. You can also swap MySQL versions, enable Elasticsearch, Redis caching, or Supervisor. A newer Optimizations tab handles automatic disk cleanup, which triggers when usage hits 80% — an important safeguard since a full disk can grind a server to a halt.

On the security front, Cloudways offers IP whitelisting at the server level. You can block all traffic except from approved IP addresses, which is useful for private internal servers or staging environments. The Vertical Scaling tab is where you bump your server up to a larger tier with a single click, typically completing in a minute or two.

Backups and SMTP Configuration

Cloudways provides server-level backup scheduling with solid flexibility. You can set backups to run as frequently as once per hour — ideal for high-traffic WooCommerce sites where you can't afford to lose recent transactions — and retain them for a configurable period. Off-site backups are enabled by default and can't be turned off, which is a good baseline. You can also enable local backups (same-server copies) and trigger on-demand backups before making major changes.

That said, relying solely on Cloudways backups isn't advisable. Best practice is maintaining at least two, preferably three, independent backup copies. WordPress plugins like WP Time Capsule or WP Vivid can provide that extra layer of protection.

The SMTP tab handles transactional email configuration at the server level — things like contact form notifications, password resets, and order confirmations. Cloudways offers Elastic Email at 1,000 emails for $0.10 per month, but there's a catch: Elastic Email appends your physical address to every email for CAN-SPAM compliance, which is problematic if you're managing client sites. For agencies, setting up your own SMTP through a provider like Mailgun is the better path.

Application Management: Domains, SSL, and Access

At the application level, the Access Details tab shows your site's URL, admin panel link, and login credentials. Every new application starts with a temporary Cloudways URL, which you can use to build out your site before pointing your real domain.

Domain Management is where you assign your actual domain name. After adding your primary domain in Cloudways, you'll need to create an A record at your DNS provider (Namecheap, Cloudflare, etc.) pointing to the server's IP address. Adding a CNAME record for the www subdomain ensures visitors who type the full www URL also reach your site. Tools like whatsmydns.net let you verify propagation across global DNS servers, which typically completes within a few minutes.

Once DNS is resolved, installing an SSL certificate is a one-click affair using Let's Encrypt. Cloudways handles automatic renewal, so once it's set up you never have to think about it again. After installation, you can enable HTTPS redirection to ensure all traffic uses the secure connection — essential for both user security and SEO.

Monitoring, Bot Protection, and Deployment

Application-level monitoring gives you insight into traffic patterns, PHP performance, and disk usage for individual sites — useful when you're running multiple applications on the same server and want to pinpoint which one is consuming resources. There's also a built-in cron manager for scheduling tasks, though WordPress typically handles its own cron needs out of the box.

Bot Protection is a standout feature that's dead simple to activate — just flip a toggle. It blocks malicious bots, prevents scraping, and provides statistics on blocked traffic requests, login attempts, and bad bot activity. You can whitelist legitimate bots (like Googlebot) and monitor the last five bots detected. For sites that face brute-force login attempts or resource-draining scrapers, this is a valuable layer of defense.

For developers, Cloudways supports deployment via Git. You connect your repository using an SSH key, and Cloudways pulls updates directly. The migration tooling is equally polished, using a white-labeled version of Starter Templates' Migration Guru plugin. Install it on your source site, connect to Cloudways, and the migration runs seamlessly. Cloudways also offers a managed migration service (24-72 hour turnaround) if you'd rather not handle it yourself.

CDN, Add-Ons, and Team Management

Cloudways includes an optional CDN powered by StackPath, priced at $1 per 25GB per application with additional consumption at four cents per gigabyte. For sites with a global audience or heavy media, this helps deliver assets from edge servers closer to your visitors.

The add-ons marketplace includes DNS Made Easy for premium DNS resolution, Rackspace Email at $1 per mailbox per month (functional but not as polished as Google Workspace), and tiered support plans. Standard support comes free with all accounts but response times can be sluggish. Advanced and Premium tiers unlock live chat and faster responses, which may be worth it depending on your team's technical capacity.

Team management is granular and well thought out. You can add team members with specific access levels — billing, support tickets, console access — and restrict them to particular servers, add-ons, or project folders. Members can be toggled active or inactive, so offboarding is clean. For agencies, the server transfer feature is particularly useful: build a client's site on your account, then transfer the entire server to their own Cloudways account when the engagement ends.

Final Verdict: 9.2 out of 10

Cloudways earns a strong 9.2 out of 10. The interface is genuinely beautiful and makes advanced server management accessible to anyone who's ever dreaded the command line. Pay-as-you-go pricing eliminates the shared hosting renewal trap, and the flexibility to choose from five major cloud providers means you're not locked into a single infrastructure.

The platform is best suited to small and mid-sized operations — freelancers, small agencies, and businesses running a handful of servers. The value proposition is clear: you trade a modest markup over direct cloud pricing for a dramatic reduction in management complexity and time. Features like one-click scaling, automated backups, bot protection, and Let's Encrypt SSL round out a hosting experience that's hard to fault.

Where Cloudways falls short is support. Standard-tier response times lag behind competitors like Kinsta, and if you're scaling to dozens or hundreds of servers, the per-server markup starts to add up significantly. But for the majority of users who need reliable, fast, and manageable WordPress hosting without a computer science degree, Cloudways is one of the best options available.

Watch the Full Video

Prefer watching to reading? Check out the full video on YouTube for a complete walkthrough with live demos and commentary.