{
 "schema_version": "1.0",
 "id": "cloudways",
 "name": "Cloudways",
 "research_status": "researched",
 "vendor_domain": "cloudways.com",
 "category": "IT & Productivity",
 "task": "Hosting & websites",
 "summary": "Managed-hosting layer that rents you servers on DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode, AWS or Google Cloud through one dashboard, with the stack, caching, staging, cloning, backups and 24/7 platform support pre-built on top. You buy a server and put as many sites on it as it holds — no per-site plans and no visit metering — billed hourly and invoiced monthly in arrears with no contract. The trade is control: Cloudways' own documentation states there is no root access and no bring-your-own cloud account, so the server lives in Cloudways' name. Owned by DigitalOcean since September 2022.",
 "best_for": "agencies and PHP shops running many sites who want servers managed but not metered. One server holds as many sites as it can carry with no visit caps, billing is hourly and post-paid with no annual term, and Magento and Laravel are first-class alongside WordPress. It suits teams who genuinely do not want anyone patching kernels at 2am",
 "skip_if": "you are comfortable in a terminal, or you run a single small site. Going direct to the cloud provider with your own control panel keeps the server in your own account for materially less. And one low-traffic site is better served by shared hosting, or by a per-site managed host that bundles CDN and application support. Cloudways also has no email hosting of its own, reselling a Rackspace add-on instead",
 "honest_knock": "\"Fully managed\" here means the server, not your site — and that distinction is where the money is. Cloudways' own support page puts infrastructure and platform work in the included tier but treats application help as guidance only. Plugin and theme troubleshooting, database work and performance tuning sit behind Advanced Support at $100/month or 10% of your invoice, whichever is higher, on a six-month minimum. On a small server that add-on costs more than the server it supports. Content changes, custom code debugging and code audits stay out of scope on every tier, paid ones included. The deeper catch is ownership: Cloudways documents that you get no root access and cannot use your own cloud credentials, so the machine sits in Cloudways' account — you cannot fire the management layer and keep the server, you migrate. And read the billing terms before you rely on it: their help centre states that an unpaid invoice restricts server access and can lead to the server and its backups being deleted, with backups kept for only 14 days after deletion.",
 "pricing": {
  "status": "public",
  "entry_price": "$14",
  "entry_price_terms": "Micro (DigitalOcean, Premium NVMe) · per month, billed hourly at $0.0208 over a 672-hour month",
  "from_price_usd_month": 14.0,
  "plans": [
   {
    "name": "Micro (DigitalOcean, Premium NVMe)",
    "price": "$14/month, $0.0208/hour",
    "includes": "1GB RAM, 1 vCPU, 25GB NVMe, 1TB bandwidth"
   },
   {
    "name": "Small",
    "price": "$28/month, $0.0417/hour",
    "includes": "2GB RAM, 1 vCPU, 50GB NVMe, 2TB bandwidth; the Standard column prices the same box at $11 with an hourly rate that says $24"
   },
   {
    "name": "Medium",
    "price": "$54/month, $0.0804/hour",
    "includes": "4GB RAM, 2 vCPU, 80GB NVMe, 4TB bandwidth"
   },
   {
    "name": "Large",
    "price": "$99/month, $0.1473/hour",
    "includes": "8GB RAM, 4 vCPU, 160GB NVMe, 5TB bandwidth — the same droplet is $48 direct from DigitalOcean"
   },
   {
    "name": "Autonomous (Small / Medium / Large)",
    "price": "$35 / $240 / $995 per month",
    "includes": "autoscaling WordPress hosting metered on unique visits and bandwidth, 3-day free trial"
   }
  ],
  "plans_source": "hand-curated from the vendor's pricing page",
  "notes": "(read 2026-08-26 on cloudways.com/en/pricing.php, DigitalOcean tab) No free tier, but a 3-day free trial with no credit card required. Billing is hourly and post-paid, invoiced in the first week of the following month, with no annual contract — and the hourly figure is the one that decides the bill: every card divides its monthly price by 672 hours, so $0.0208 an hour is the $14 plan. The page now opens on DigitalOcean's Premium (NVMe) column, where Micro is 1GB RAM / 1 vCPU / 25GB NVMe / 1TB bandwidth at $14/month, Small 2GB / 1 vCPU / 50GB NVMe / 2TB at $28, Medium 4GB / 2 vCPU / 80GB / 4TB at $54 and Large 8GB / 4 vCPU / 160GB / 5TB at $99. Two of those have moved since July: the entry machine is now half the size for three dollars more (July's Micro was 2GB / 50GB at $11), and the 8GB plan went from $88 to $99. Switch the column to Standard and that same 2GB / 50GB box reads $11 a month — but the hourly figure printed underneath it, $0.0357, works out to $24 at the 672-hour month the other cards use, so the two numbers on that one card cannot both be right; read the live estimate before you commit. Bought direct from DigitalOcean on the same day, an 8GB / 4 vCPU / 160GB / 5TB droplet lists at $0.07143 an hour, $48 a month. Add-ons are monthly and separate: Cloudflare Enterprise CDN from $4.99 per domain, Site Manager from $3 per app, Malware Protection from $4 per app, Rackspace email $1 per mailbox, DNS Made Easy $0.50 per domain, offsite backup storage $0.033 per GB. Advance Support is $100/month or 10% of your invoice, whichever is higher, with a limited-time flat rate of $25/month advertised on the page today; the $500 Premium Support tier we recorded in July is no longer listed there. Cloudways Autonomous, the separate autoscaling product, now prices at $35, $240 and $995 a month where July's page showed $99, $199 and $399, and it meters unique visits and bandwidth rather than RAM (30k visits and 100GB on Small, 70k and 200GB on Medium) with a 3-day free trial. Markups on AWS and Google Cloud still cannot be calculated because Cloudways does not publish the underlying instance types. A site-wide banner advertises 40% off for four months until 15 September 2026 — promotions move, so read the live price. US list prices, excluding tax. Re-verified 12 October 2026 in a live browser on cloudways.com/en/pricing.php: Micro $14 ($0.0208 an hour), Small $28 ($0.0417), Medium $54 ($0.0804) and Large $99 ($0.1473) on the DigitalOcean Premium column, unchanged; the page adds $0.033/GB per server for offsite backup storage and says listed prices exclude taxes. The support page still lists Advanced at $100 a month or 10% of the invoice, whichever is higher, and Premium at $500 on the same rule, next to a banner offering Advanced at '$25/mo flat' as a 'Lifetime deal: 75% OFF'.",
  "verified_at": "2026-10-12",
  "source_url": "https://www.cloudways.com/en/pricing.php"
 },
 "free_plan": false,
 "free_plan_evidence": null,
 "cost_traps": [
  {
   "id": "addons_extra",
   "label": "Key features are paid add-ons",
   "evidence": "Add-ons are monthly and separate: Cloudflare Enterprise CDN from $4.99 per domain, Site Manager from $3 per app, Malware Protection from $4 per app, Rackspace email $1 per mailbox, DNS Made Easy $0.50 per domain, offsite backup storage $0.033 per GB.",
   "verified_at": "2026-10-12",
   "source_url": "https://www.cloudways.com/en/pricing.php"
  }
 ],
 "compare_with": {
  "name": "Going direct on DigitalOcean with your own control panel",
  "why": "DigitalOcean owns Cloudways and sells both sides, which makes this the honest comparison: the same 8GB machine is $48/month as a droplet and $99/month wrapped in Cloudways. Add DigitalOcean's own daily backups and a control-panel licence and a like-for-like self-managed box lands nearer $75-80, so the real premium is smaller than the sticker gap suggests. The decisive difference is not price but ownership: with your own droplet the account and root are yours and you can drop the panel and keep the server, whereas leaving Cloudways is a migration"
 },
 "links": {
  "record": "https://aibuildermarketplace.com/api/v1/products/cloudways.json",
  "review": "https://officesoftwaremarketplace.com/cloudways-review.html",
  "marketplace": "https://aibuildermarketplace.com/marketplace/cloudways/",
  "vendor_site": "https://cloudways.com"
 },
 "purchase": {
  "seller": "the vendor",
  "how": "AIBuilder Marketplace does not sell this software. Sign up, start a trial or buy on the vendor's site.",
  "handoff_url": "https://www.awin1.com/cread.php?awinmid=89935&awinaffid=2880219&ued=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.awin1.com%2Fcread.php%3Fs%3D4430136%26v%3D89935%26q%3D574000%26r%3D2880219",
  "affiliate": true,
  "disclosure": "Where purchase.affiliate is true, purchase.handoff_url is an affiliate link: AIBuilder Marketplace may earn a commission at no extra cost to the buyer. Commission never changes what a record says, and products are not ranked by commission. Where it is false the link is the vendor's plain site."
 },
 "provenance": {
  "research": "hand-researched dossier, read on the vendor's own pages",
  "researched_since": "2026-07",
  "method": "https://aibuildermarketplace.com/how-we-review/",
  "license": "CC BY 4.0. Credit 'AIBuilder Marketplace' with a link to https://aibuildermarketplace.com/atlas/.",
  "note": "A rebuild is not a new measurement: pricing.verified_at is the date that matters."
 },
 "cost": {
  "status": "not_yet",
  "engine": "https://aibuildermarketplace.com/agents/#cost",
  "rules": null,
  "growth": null
 },
 "unknowns": [
  "Contract terms (cancellation, data export, data location, minimum seats) are not researched as separate fields; pricing.notes mentions them only where the vendor's pricing page does.",
  "No computable price rules yet: cost at a given team size cannot be calculated for this product.",
  "Not tested hands-on by us: what the product does comes from the vendor's pages and our reading of them."
 ],
 "task_evidence": null,
 "open_questions": [
  {
   "question_id": "cloudways:cancellation_terms",
   "key": "cancellation_terms",
   "question": "Can a customer cancel at any time, and what happens to an annual plan that is cancelled mid-term?",
   "status": "open"
  },
  {
   "question_id": "cloudways:data_export",
   "key": "data_export",
   "question": "Which data can a customer export, in which formats, on which plans?",
   "status": "open"
  },
  {
   "question_id": "cloudways:data_location",
   "key": "data_location",
   "question": "Where is customer data stored, and can a customer choose the region?",
   "status": "open"
  },
  {
   "question_id": "cloudways:minimum_seats",
   "key": "minimum_seats",
   "question": "Is there a minimum number of seats or users on any plan?",
   "status": "open"
  }
 ],
 "vendor_answers": [],
 "agent_channels": {
  "vendor_mcp": null,
  "agent_checkout": {
   "status": "not_checked",
   "detail": "We could not read the vendor's pages as plain HTML.",
   "checked_at": "2026-10-07",
   "method": "homepage, /pricing and the pricing page we cite, read as plain HTML (no JavaScript) and searched for explicit support of purchases by AI agents: Agentic Commerce Protocol, Instant Checkout, Agent Payments Protocol, buy in ChatGPT, agentic checkout"
  }
 },
 "offers": [
  {
   "offer_id": "cloudways-reader-offer",
   "version": "139987f8d1",
   "offer_type": "price_discount",
   "benefit": "20% off your first three invoices",
   "verification_status": "vendor_confirmed",
   "expires_at": null,
   "record": "https://aibuildermarketplace.com/api/v1/offers.json#cloudways-reader-offer"
  }
 ]
}