Cloudways review
Managed cloud without the sysadmin work · Founded 2011 · Malta
Our verdict
The sweet spot between shared hosting and running your own server. You pay per hour on real cloud VMs and Cloudways handles the stack. No renewal trap, because the price never was a discount.
$396 over three years one term at the intro rate, then two renewals
- Refund window Trial only, no refund
- Uptime SLA 99.99%
- Readers rate it No reviews yet
What we liked
- No intro-price bait: the price you see is the price forever
- Pick your own cloud provider and region
- Free staging and one-click backups
- Excellent for Laravel and WooCommerce
What we did not
- No email hosting included
- No domain registration
- 3-day trial rather than a money-back guarantee
- Steeper learning curve than cPanel
What it actually costs
checked 27 Jul 2026No introductory discount here, so the price you see is the price you keep paying.
Cloudways does not discount the first term, so there is no second-year rise to plan for. Year one, year three and year five are the same number — $132 a year, $396 across three.
The upper bar is hypothetical — it is $11 a month renewing at the average multiplier across the 16 providers we track, which would cost $668 more over three years. 14 of those 16 raise the price after year one; Cloudways is one of the 2 that do not.
Check today's price →For comparison, the cheapest renewal we track is MilesWeb at $2.28/mo — about $105 a year less than Cloudways. Whether that matters depends on what you get for the difference; read both.
Arithmetic on the published monthly rates above. Real bills vary with term length, currency, region, taxes and whatever promotion is live when you check out.
Specifications
Plans and real pricing
Renewal rates shown where the provider publishes them. Confirm at checkout.
DigitalOcean 1GB
- Websites1+
- Storage25 GB
- Bandwidth1 TB
Hourly billing, no contract
Get DigitalOcean 1GB →DigitalOcean 2GB
- Websites2+
- Storage50 GB
- Bandwidth2 TB
Sweet spot for WooCommerce
Get DigitalOcean 2GB →Full review
Who it is for
A site that has outgrown shared hosting but does not have a sysadmin. You choose the cloud provider and region; Cloudways manages the stack.
Why the pricing is unusual
Billing is hourly with no introductory discount, so there is no renewal jump — the $11 entry price is the ongoing price. The trade-off is that the 3-day trial is not a refund window, so budget for a paid month if you need longer to evaluate.
What is missing
No email hosting and no domain registration. Plan for a separate mail provider.
Reader reviews
Nobody has reviewed Cloudways here yet
We do not write customer reviews ourselves, so this stays empty until real customers fill it. If you have hosted with Cloudways, yours would be the most useful thing on this page.
- Which plan, and how long
- Resource limits matter more than brand name
- One thing that went right
- Be specific — "support was good" helps nobody
- One thing that went wrong
- The most valuable line in any review
- What you paid at renewal
- The figure we cannot verify without you
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