You host WordPress or PHP sites, maybe for clients, and you want servers that work without someone patching them at 2am. You also see the same hardware sold for half the price one click away. If you are comparing these two, you are probably an agency or a developer deciding whether management is worth paying for. DigitalOcean owns Cloudways, so this is really a choice about how much server work you want to do.
Both tools are affiliate partners of ours: we may earn a commission if you sign up through a button on this page, at no extra cost to you. That is why we also say when to pick neither. Disclosure: we earn commissions when you shop through the links below.
| Cloudways | DigitalOcean | |
|---|---|---|
| Price we read | Droplets from $4 a month; App Platform free for three static sites, containers from $5; managed databases from $15; GPUs from $0.76 per GPU-hour (read 3 Oct 2026) | |
| Entry price | Micro $14/mo ($0.0208/hr): 1GB RAM, 1 vCPU, 25GB NVMe (read 12 Oct 2026) | Basic Droplet $4/mo: 512 MiB, 1 vCPU, 10 GiB SSD (read 3 Oct 2026) |
| How you pay | Hourly, post-paid, invoiced the following month; no annual contract | Per second, charged monthly in arrears; no term |
| Free plan or trial | No free tier; 3-day free trial with no card needed | App Platform free for 3 static sites; $5 signup credit valid 90 days |
| Best for | Agencies and PHP shops running many sites on managed servers | Developers who run their own server and want each piece priced separately |
| Main catch | No root access; plugin and theme help needs Advanced Support, $100/mo or 10% of invoice | Unmanaged; backups, databases and load balancers are extra lines; no refunds |
You run one small, low-traffic site. Cloudways adds a managed-server markup you will not use, and DigitalOcean expects you to run the server yourself.
Look at ChemiCloud instead. Our Cloudways dossier says one low-traffic site is better served by shared hosting or a per-site managed host, and names ChemiCloud for that reader. Read our ChemiCloud review.
One 8GB server, 4 vCPU, 160GB. Cloudways Large on DigitalOcean: $99 a month (read 12 Oct 2026). The same Droplet direct: $48 a month (read 26 Aug 2026), plus daily backups at 30%: $48 + $14.40 = $62.40 a month. That leaves out a control-panel licence, which our dossiers do not price; our Cloudways dossier puts a like-for-like self-managed box nearer $75 to $80. If you also want plugin and theme help on Cloudways, Advanced Support is $100 a month or 10% of the invoice, whichever is higher: $99 + $100 = $199 a month at list price.
DigitalOcean Premium Medium: 4GB RAM, 2 vCPU, 80GB NVMe for $54 a month ($0.0804 an hour), read 12 Oct 2026. Start with the 3-day free trial.
Start with Cloudways →A Basic Droplet: $12 a month for 2 GiB, plus daily backups at 30% ($3.60), read 3 Oct 2026.
Start with DigitalOcean →On both, no. Cloudways' help centre (read 12 Oct 2026) says billing on DigitalOcean servers continues whatever the server status. DigitalOcean's docs say a powered-off Droplet is billed until you destroy it.
No. The included tier covers the server and platform. Plugin and theme troubleshooting starts at Advanced Support, listed at $100 a month or 10% of your invoice, whichever is higher; a banner offered it at $25 a month flat on 12 Oct 2026. Content changes and custom code debugging are out of scope on every tier.
No. Cloudways documents that you get no root access and cannot use your own cloud credentials, so the server sits in Cloudways' account. Leaving is a migration.
Cloudways' help centre says an unpaid invoice restricts server access and can lead to the server and its backups being deleted, with backups kept 14 days after deletion. DigitalOcean moves an account to past due, then suspended, then possible deletion, and publishes no fixed timelines.
Cloudways: cloudways.com/en/pricing.php and support.php, read 26 Aug and 12 Oct 2026, its help-centre billing articles (12 Oct 2026) and our own trial on 25 Oct 2026. DigitalOcean: its pricing pages, read 3 Oct 2026, and its Droplet and billing documentation, read 25 and 27 Oct 2026. Prices change: each one carries the date we read it, and our reviews are re-checked against the vendor pages. How we review.
Built for a specific kind of business? Software for agencies