How to Migrate Your WordPress Site to Cloudways | Cloudways 101
Published by CloudwaysWatch on YouTube
Cloudways
Managed cloud without a sysadmin
- Cloudways (DigitalOcean) · Malta
- Since 2012
Key takeaways
from our research
Choose your own cloud provider and resize with a click as traffic grows
Hourly pay-as-you-go with no contracts and no renewal price games
Best measured performance of the general-purpose hosts we tested
No email hosting included and no cPanel — expect a learning curve
Our verdict
Updated Aug 25, 2026Fact-checked Jul 23, 2026
Cloudways occupies the gap between shared hosting and running your own server, and it fills it better than anything else here. You choose the underlying cloud — DigitalOcean, Linode, AWS or Google Cloud — and a server size, and Cloudways handles provisioning, patching, caching, backups and monitoring. When traffic grows you resize with a click rather than migrating.
The commercial model is refreshingly clean. Hourly billing, no contracts, no introductory-then-renewal games — the price you see is the price you keep paying, which after the rest of this category feels almost radical. Performance was the best of the non-specialist hosts in our testing, unsurprisingly since you are on real cloud instances with dedicated resources rather than a shared box.
It asks more of you than shared hosting. There is no cPanel, email hosting is not included (you buy it separately, which surprises people), and concepts like server-versus-application and vertical scaling need understanding. Support is good on the higher plans and merely adequate on the base tier, where advanced help costs extra.
Our guidance: the right step up when a site has outgrown shared hosting but does not need WP Engine's managed WordPress premium. Ideal for agencies and developers; more than a non-technical owner needs.
Written by Maya Krishnan · Edited by Daniel Ross
Ratings
Loved by 67% of reviewers
First-party reviews, individually moderated before publication.
Pros & cons
Where Cloudways shines — and where it doesn't
What users love
- Scaling without migration42
- Transparent pricing37
Where it falls short
- No email hosting34
- Learning curve26
Themes generated from 3 verified reviews, updated monthly
Head to head
Cloudways vs WP Engine at a glance
CloudwaysRating
4.3(3)
4.3(3)
Starting price
$14/mo
$20/mo
Free trial
Yes
Yes
Free plan
No
No
Alternatives
Top Cloudways alternatives
The closest fits based on category, feature overlap, and reviewer demand.
Category LeaderSiteGround
4.5(3)Best support quality for business sites that cannot afford downtime
From $3.99/mo
Videos
Watch Cloudways in action
Product walkthroughs published on Cloudways's own YouTube channel — so you see the real interface, not a reenactment.
How to Launch a WordPress Site on Cloudways | A Beginner's Guide 🎤
Published by CloudwaysWatch on YouTube
Capabilities
Key features
What Cloudways does — and doesn't — cover, checked against the category feature vocabulary.
Platform
- Not included:Agency & white-label toolsClient billing, transferable sites and branded reporting for agencies.
Performance
- Included:Built-in CDNGlobal content delivery included rather than bought separately.
- Included:Free SSL certificatesAutomatic HTTPS certificates issued and renewed at no cost.
- Included:HTTP/3 and modern PHPCurrent protocol and runtime versions rather than legacy defaults.
- Included:NVMe SSD storageFast NVMe drives rather than older SATA SSDs or spinning disks.
- Included:Server-level cachingCaching at the server rather than relying on a plugin.
Management
- Included:Automated daily backupsAutomatic daily backups with self-service restore.
- Included:Choice of cloud providerPick the underlying infrastructure — AWS, Google Cloud, DigitalOcean and others.
- Included:Free site migrationThe host moves your existing site across at no charge.
- Included:Git deployment & SSHDeploy from a repository and access the server over SSH.
- Included:Staging environmentsOne-click copy of the live site for safe testing, with a push to production.
Support & Reliability
- Included:24/7 human supportRound-the-clock access to a person rather than a documentation search.
- Included:Managed security & WAFFirewall, malware scanning and patching handled by the host.
- Included:Uptime SLAA contractual uptime guarantee with credits when it is missed.
Pricing
Cloudways pricing
Cloudways's paid plans start at $14/month — above the $3.99 median of the 5 Web Hosting tools we track. You can test it on a 3-day free trial.
Value for money 4.3/5DigitalOcean 1GB
$14/mo
per month, billed hourly
- 1GB RAM, 1 core, 25GB storage
- Managed server and patching
- Free SSL and staging
- Automated backups
- Unlimited applications on the server
Most popularVisit website
DigitalOcean 2GB
$28/mo
per month, billed hourly
- 2GB RAM, 1 core, 50GB storage
- Everything in the 1GB plan
- Suitable for a busy WordPress site
- Object cache Pro available
- Vertical scaling on demand
Vultr High Frequency 2GB
$41/mo
per month, billed hourly
- High-frequency CPU
- 2GB RAM, 64GB NVMe
- Better single-thread performance
- Same managed layer
- Global data centre choice
AWS / Google Cloud
$54/mo
from, per month
- Enterprise cloud infrastructure
- Premium global network
- Higher baseline performance
- Advanced monitoring
- Suited to high-traffic commerce
Pricing fact-checked August 25, 2026 · source: vendor pricing page · see the full breakdown
Ecosystem
Integrates with 6+ tools
- WordPress
- WooCommerce
- Magento
- Laravel
- Cloudflare
- Git
Fit check
Will Cloudways fit your team?
Support
- Email support
- Live chat
- Knowledge base
Training
- Documentation
- Video tutorials
- Webinars
Deployment
- Web
Typical users
- Small businesses
- Mid-size companies
- Enterprises
Reviews
What real users say
First-party, moderated reviews — never scraped, never paid for.
David K.Validated Reviewer
CTO · SaaS · 11–50 employees
5.0
July 23, 2026
“Scaled through a traffic spike with a slider”
Used weekly for 1–2 years
We got covered by a large publication and traffic went up forty times in an hour. Resized the server from 2GB to 8GB from my phone, took ninety seconds, no migration and no downtime. On shared hosting that would have been a dead site.
Ryan O.
Head of Delivery · Marketing agency · 11–50 employees
4.5
June 6, 2026
“Our default for client sites above a certain size”
Used daily for 2+ years
Shared hosting for brochure sites, Cloudways for anything with traffic or a shop. Cloning a server to build a staging copy takes minutes and the team features mean junior staff can deploy without root access.
Ben C.
Freelance Consultant · Consulting · Self-employed
3.5
April 26, 2026
“More than I needed”
Used monthly for 6–12 months
Moved from shared hosting expecting a speed boost and got one, along with concepts I did not want to learn — servers versus applications, choosing a provider, sizing. Fine for a developer. I went back to managed shared hosting.
Sources & methodology
Product information sourced from Cloudways (DigitalOcean)'s public content (Malta); pricing verified August 25, 2026. Reviews are first-party and moderated. How we test and rate tools
- Founded 2012
- 1 language supported
- cloudways.com
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