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Cloudways Review (2026)

IT & ProductivityResearched assessment · by Daniel HaketUpdated 2026-09-02

"Fully managed" here means the server, not your site — and that distinction is where the money is.

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.

Who should skip it: 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.

→ Full review: Cloudways on officesoftwaremarketplace.com

Visit Cloudways → 🎟️ Code NETWORK26 — 20% off for 3 months Affiliate link — the rest of this page is the honest version, including who should skip it.

Pricing (2026)

✓ Pricing re-verified 26 Aug 2026

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.

Frequently asked questions

What should I weigh before buying IT & Productivity software?

Judge it on evidence rather than adjectives. Look for a published security page, single sign-on and role controls on the plan you would actually buy (they are often gated to higher tiers), a status page with real incident history, and a clear answer on where your data is stored. If the tool will hold anything sensitive, those four answers matter more than any feature comparison.

Is this a hands-on review of Cloudways?

This is a researched assessment, not a hands-on test — where we've used a tool ourselves, we say so explicitly. We name what each tool is genuinely good and bad at, and we earn a commission only if you sign up, at no cost to you.

What this page is based on

Buyer reviews on Trustpilot, G2 and hosting-review sites, read August 2026.
Read 2026-08-26 on cloudways.com/en/pricing.php, DigitalOcean tab.
A dated screenshot of that pricing page, kept on this site as the receipt.

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