Review
Cloudways review
The only host on this site whose price does not change after the first term, because there is no term. You pay more per month than shared hosting from day one and nothing extra from month 49 onward. Worth it for a site that has outgrown shared hosting and wants predictable cost and no lock-in; overkill for a first blog.
Cloudways is different from every other host on this site, so this review is structured differently. It is managed cloud hosting: Cloudways rents you a server from DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode, AWS or Google Cloud, layers its own control panel, caching stack and support on top, and bills you by the hour. There is no shared-hosting tier, no free domain, no promotional term and — the reason it belongs on a site about renewal prices — no renewal price.
Plans and what they really cost
Prices below are the ongoing monthly rate for the smallest servers on each cloud. The “4-year cost” column is 48 months at that rate — no intro discount, no jump.
| Host & plan | Monthly price | Renews at | Hourly rate | 4-year cost | Resources |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CloudwaysDigitalOcean 1 GB | $11.00/mo | same — no promo term | $0.0164/hr | $528 | 1 GB · 1 vCPU25 GB SSD · 1 TB transfer |
| CloudwaysDigitalOcean 2 GB | $24.00/mo | same — no promo term | $0.0357/hr | $1,152 | 2 GB · 1 vCPU50 GB SSD · 2 TB transfer |
| CloudwaysDigitalOcean 4 GB | $46.00/mo | same — no promo term | $0.0685/hr | $2,208 | 4 GB · 2 vCPU80 GB SSD · 4 TB transfer |
| CloudwaysDO Premium 1 GB | $14.00/mo | same — no promo term | $0.0208/hr | $672 | 1 GB · 1 vCPU25 GB NVMe · 1 TB transfer |
| CloudwaysVultr / Linode 1 GB | $14.00/mo | same — no promo term | $0.0194/hr | $672 | 1 GB · 1 vCPU25 GB · 1 TB transfer |
| CloudwaysAWS Micro | $20.56/mo | same — no promo term | $0.0286/hr | $987 | 1 GB · 2 vCPU20 GB · metered transfer |
Cloudways bills by the hour and invoices monthly in arrears. There is no promotional term and no separate renewal price: the four-year figure is simply 48 × the monthly rate. Promotions (for example 40% off for a limited period) are temporary discounts on this rate, not a lock-in. Verified September 2026. See the screenshots these figures were read from.
The number to anchor on is $11/mo for the DigitalOcean 1 GB server, which works out to $528 over four years. For comparison, the cheapest shared plan we track, Hostinger Premium, costs $144 over the same period, and SiteGround GrowBig costs $1,140. Cloudways sits in the middle on total cost while delivering a different product: a server you control rather than a slice of one you share.
Two things the table cannot show. First, Cloudways runs periodic promotions (a limited-time percentage off, for example) which are discounts on the hourly rate for a fixed number of months; they end and the list rate resumes, but the list rate is public and does not increase. Second, the cheapest plan is small: 1 GB of RAM and one virtual CPU. That is enough for one or two well-cached WordPress sites, and Cloudways’ own documentation suggests the 2 GB server for four or five small sites or around 110,000 page views a month.
Check current Cloudways pricing
Why there is no renewal price
Shared hosts make their money on the gap between the intro rate you see and the renewal rate you pay from month 13, 37 or 49 onward. Cloudways cannot do that because it does not sell terms. Billing works like a utility meter: every server accrues an hourly charge, the hours are totalled on the first of the next month, and you pay for what you used. Delete the server and the meter stops the same day. There is nothing to renew, so there is nothing to mark up.
What replaces the renewal trap is a different kind of cost creep, and it is worth naming. The base server price is honest, but several things most people eventually want are add-ons: off-site backup storage ($0.033 per GB per month), email hosting (from about $1.50 per mailbox), Cloudflare Enterprise ($4.99 per domain per month), automated plugin updates (from $3/mo) and advanced support (list $100/mo). None of these is compulsory, and a small site can run for years on the base price alone, but a “$11 server” that also needs email and off-site backups is closer to $14–$15.
Cloudways vs Hostinger Cloud on four-year cost
The most useful comparison is Hostinger’s Cloud Startup plan, because it is the cheapest “cloud” tier from a mainstream host and it follows the intro-then-renewal model this site exists to expose.
| Plan | Months 1–48 | Month 49 onward | 4-year cost | 6-year cost | Specs |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| HostingerCloud Startup | $7.99/mo | $25.99/mo | $384 | $1,007 | 4 GB · 4 cores100 GB NVMe · 100 sites |
| CloudwaysDigitalOcean 1 GB | $11.00/mo | $11.00/mo | $528 | $792 | 1 GB · 1 vCPU25 GB SSD · unlimited apps |
| CloudwaysDigitalOcean 4 GB | $46.00/mo | $46.00/mo | $2,208 | $3,312 | 4 GB · 2 vCPU80 GB SSD · unlimited apps |
Hostinger figures assume the 48-month term paid upfront at the intro rate, then the published renewal rate. Cloudways figures are the list rate throughout. Verified September 2026.
Read honestly, this cuts both ways. Over the first four years Hostinger is cheaper — $384 against $528 — and it gives you four times the RAM and four times the cores for that money. From month 49, Hostinger costs $25.99 a month and Cloudways still costs $11.00; the cumulative lines cross at month 58, and by year six Cloudways is $215 ahead. Match the specs instead of the price (Cloudways 4 GB at $46/mo) and Hostinger wins on cost at every horizon.
So the case for Cloudways is not “cheaper”. It is: a price you can see, a bill you can stop tomorrow, a server you can move between clouds, and no 48-month prepayment. The case for Hostinger Cloud is raw resources per dollar, if you are comfortable prepaying four years and remembering what month 49 costs. The full head-to-head is here.
Verdict
- No promotional term and no renewal price — the monthly rate is the ongoing rate
- Hourly billing: delete the server and billing stops the same day
- Choice of five clouds and 150+ regions, per server
- Unlimited applications per server, staff-performed WordPress migrations, free Object Cache Pro
- 3-day free trial with no card required
- No money-back guarantee — the trial is the only risk-free window
- Entry-level server (1 GB RAM, 1 vCPU) is far weaker than Hostinger’s 4 GB Cloud Startup for the money
- Email hosting, off-site backups, Cloudflare Enterprise and advanced support are all paid add-ons
- No domain registration and no cPanel
- Costs more than shared hosting over the first four years, even against renewal prices
The fine print
This is the part that decides whether you are happy in year two.
| Owner | Owned by DigitalOcean (NYSE: DOCN), which bought Cloudways for $350M in September 2022. DigitalOcean is also the default infrastructure provider on the platform. |
| Control panel | Cloudways Platform (proprietary). No cPanel. Server-level and application-level views; SSH and SFTP access on every plan. |
| Support | 24/7 live chat and tickets free. Advanced support is a paid add-on (list $100/mo, discounted at the time of writing) and Premium support starts at $500/mo or 10% of your invoice. |
| Backups | Server-level backups configurable from hourly to weekly, retained 1–4 weeks, plus on-demand backups. Off-site backup storage is a paid add-on at $0.033 per GB per month — a 5 GB site costs about 17¢ a month. No restore fee is documented. |
| Migration | WordPress and WooCommerce migrations are free and staff-performed. Non-WordPress applications: one free, then $99 per application. Unlimited self-service moves via the Cloudways WordPress Migrator plugin. |
| Refund window | No money-back guarantee. You pay hourly in arrears, so cancelling stops the meter; nothing is refunded because nothing is prepaid. The 3-day free trial (no card required) is the try-before-you-buy. |
| Free domain | No free domain. Cloudways does not sell domains; register elsewhere and point DNS. Free SSL via Let’s Encrypt. |
| Datacenters | 150+ locations across five cloud providers: DigitalOcean (9 regions), Vultr (30), Linode (25), AWS (28) and Google Cloud (28). Chosen per server. |
Cloudways has no money-back guarantee, and it is the one host here where that is not a red flag. You never prepay, so there is nothing to claw back; the 3-day trial (no card required) is where you decide. The practical consequence: do your testing inside the trial, because once you add a card the meter is running.
What the AI features actually include
Nothing, on the DigitalOcean plans priced above — and Cloudways is the only host here that does not advertise AI on the plans we cover.
Its AI product, Cloudways Copilot, is sold separately and metered by credit: $3.99/mo for 4 credits, $9.99 for 12, and $19.99 and up for 25 to 100. One Insight report costs one credit; one SmartFix costs one credit. Run out and “basic monitoring will continue, but you will not be able to generate Insights or apply SmartFix”.
Two caveats before reading anything into that. Copilot is “Included in all Cloudways Flexible hosting plans” — a different product line from the standard servers on this page — and it is still in public preview, so both the pricing and the feature set should be treated as provisional.
This is consistent with how Cloudways prices everything else: fewer inclusions, no promotional sweeteners, and the cost stated as a rate rather than bundled into a headline. Whether that is honest or merely austere depends on whether you wanted the AI features in the first place.
Providers advertise these inclusions without publishing the limits. Specifically: whether Hostinger’s 5 and 15 hosting-plan credits are monthly or one-time; how many free AI tokens each SiteGround plan includes; and what Bluehost’s “AI Site Creation Tools” contains or caps. We have left these unconfirmed rather than guessing. AI terms change faster than prices — this section was checked against provider documentation on 20 September 2026.
Who should buy it
Buy Cloudways if your site has outgrown shared hosting — you are hitting resource limits, you want staging environments, you care about which datacenter you are in, or you simply refuse to prepay four years to get a decent rate. It is also the sensible choice for anyone who has been burned once by a renewal invoice and wants a price that cannot move without a public announcement.
Do not buy it for a first blog or a brochure site. The entry server is weaker than a $3/mo shared plan on paper, you will manage more yourself, and Hostinger Premium at $144 over four years — renewal included — is still less than half the cost.
Start the Cloudways free trial Check Hostinger Cloud pricing
Compare it directly
Hostinger Cloud vs Cloudways
Four-year cost, the month the lines cross, and what each gives you for the money.
Read the comparison →Best WordPress hosting
When managed hosting is worth paying for, and when it plainly is not.
Read the guide →Related questions
- Is 10 GB of hosting storage enough for a WordPress site?
- How do I avoid the hosting renewal price increase?
- Is Cloudways worth it for a small website?
All hosting questions, answered →
Sources
Every factual claim on this page is checkable on the provider’s own site. Prices and policies were verified September 2026 and change without notice.