What Is Cloudways? Managed Servers on the Cloud You Choose
By Joris van Huët · Cloudways's own site
The short answer: if a WordPress or WooCommerce site needs a server of its own and nobody on the team wants to run Linux, Cloudways Flexible starts at $11 a month for a 1GB DigitalOcean Standard server, or $14 on the Premium tier the pricing page opens with, billed by the hour in arrears (pricing page, checked on 26 October 2026). Cloudways, part of DigitalOcean, runs and patches the server stack on DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode, AWS or Google Cloud, for teams that would rather pick a server size than buy a shared-hosting tier.
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What sets the invoice:
- Server size times hours. For example, a 2GB Premium server plus the Cloudflare Enterprise add-on is $28 + $4.99 = $32.99 a month before tax, both figures from the pricing page.
- The sites you already run. A server takes as many applications as it can carry, with no per-site charge, so three small brand sites can share one server.
- The readings that say the size is right. Cloudways Copilot watches the web stack, disk and backups and flags 5xx errors from plugins or themes, per its product page.
What Cloudways runs
Four products share one dashboard, per the homepage. Flexible hosts WordPress, Magento, Laravel and other PHP apps on the cloud you choose, at the size you set. Autonomous is managed WordPress on Kubernetes that adds capacity by itself when traffic jumps. Velocity deploys Node.js apps, and Managed AI Agents hosts agent frameworks.
Flexible servers include 24/7 support, free SSL, a server firewall, staging and Redis. Agents can run the account too: the Cloudways MCP server gives clients such as Claude and Cursor more than 300 tools, behind access tokens scoped Read-Only, Limited or Full.
A good fit, and a poor one
A good fit: a marketing team or agency with several WordPress or WooCommerce sites, traffic that moves with campaigns, and one person willing to choose a server size. A poorer fit: anyone expecting mail in the hosting bill, since mailboxes are a Rackspace add-on at $1.5 each a month on the pricing page, or a finance team that wants one fixed annual figure.
Prices on 26 October 2026
Flexible on DigitalOcean, in USD a month excluding tax, from the Cloudways pricing page:
| Server | Standard tier | Premium tier | Transfer included |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1GB RAM, 1 vCPU | $11 | $14 | 1TB |
| 2GB RAM, 1 vCPU | $24 | $28 | 2TB |
| 4GB RAM, 2 vCPU | $46 | $54 | 4TB |
| 8GB RAM, 4 vCPU | $88 | $99 | 5TB |
Autonomous costs $99 a month on Growth, $199 on Scale and $399 on Plus, with capacity above the baseline charged per server-hour, on the same pricing page. Extra bandwidth on DigitalOcean is $0.02 per GB. No card shows an introductory rate or a renewal step.
Next to Hostinger, SiteGround and Cloudflare
- Hostinger sells shared plans paid in advance: Premium is $119.52 for 48 months, then $10.99 a month, on its pricing page. Four years committed, or a server paid by the hour.
- SiteGround puts email, staging and an AI agent into GrowBig at $4.99 a month for a prepaid first year, renewing at $29.99, per its WordPress hosting page. It wins on one bill with mailboxes included.
- Cloudflare is the network in front of a site, not the server behind it, with a Free plan and Pro at $20 a month billed annually on its plans page. Cloudways resells its Enterprise tier as an add-on, so the question is whether you need a server or only the edge.
Where to start
Start free: Flexible has a three-day trial with no card, and Cloudways moves your first site from any host at no charge, per the pricing page. How to use Cloudways then sizes a server for a campaign launch. Read the plan card as the price of the server alone: offsite backups, bandwidth past the allowance and every add-on reach you later on the same post-paid invoice, so the low figure you compared hosts on is not the figure Cloudways bills.
FAQ
Does Cloudways include email?
No. Mailboxes come from the Rackspace add-on, or you keep the mail provider you already have.
How does Cloudways bill?
By the hour, in arrears: invoices go out in the first week of each month for the month before, and tax is added by billing address, per the pricing page FAQ.
Can an AI agent manage a Cloudways server?
Yes, through the MCP server. Since MCP 2.0 it takes access tokens rather than API keys, which stopped working on 15 October 2026, and Cloudways advises starting with a Read-Only token.