Cloudways

Cloudways shows one list price per server size, with no separate renewal price. The cheapest DigitalOcean server in the plan tables is $11/mo for 1 GB, but a second table on the same page lists 1 GB at $14/mo, and the migration page says Flexible starts at $14. Servers are billed hourly with no minimum term, and a server that runs all month is charged its monthly price. Promo offers take 30% to 40% off for 3 to 4 months for new customers, and pages differ on which offer applies. Tax is added as a separate invoice line, based on your billing address.

The footer names Cloudways, LLC. The contact page says Cloudways operates as part of DigitalOcean LLC, and the support SLA defines "we" as DigitalOcean, LLC. The media kit says Cloudways has run since 2011. We didn't see a registered address or a company registration number on the pages we read.

A public status page tracks 15 components in three groups: the Cloudways platform, the five cloud providers, and add-on services. It lists the past two weeks day by day, with timestamped updates on each incident, such as a Vultr server issue on 14 Oct 2026, and links to an incident history page. All systems were operational when we looked. The homepage mentions a 99.99% uptime SLA for high-availability setups, and the Autonomous FAQ gives a 99.9% SLA.

Every plan includes 24/7 live chat and tickets. Standard support promises a first ticket reply within 12 hours, or 3 hours for high-priority issues. Advanced support ($25/mo on a limited-time offer, normally $100/mo or 10% of the invoice) cuts this to 6 hours and 30 minutes. Premium ($500/mo or 10% of the invoice) cuts it to 2 hours and 10 minutes, and adds a private Slack channel and phone support. We didn't see which languages support covers.

Billing is pay-as-you-go: usage is metered hourly and invoiced on the 1st of each month, with no long-term contract. To cancel you delete your servers, remove add-ons and click Cancel My Account, and all data is then deleted for good. Add-ons have a six-month minimum and are billed for the full month once turned on. We didn't see a money-back period or refund policy on the Cloudways pages we read. The terms page links its Terms of Service to a document on digitalocean.com, which this scan didn't read.

Servers take automatic backups daily by default and keep them for one week. You can set the frequency from every hour to every 7 days, and keep backups for 1 to 4 weeks. Offsite backup storage costs $0.033 per GB per server. You restore an app yourself in the panel, as a whole or just files or the database, and you can keep a local copy to download. We didn't see whether a restore costs extra, or how often Autonomous plans back up.

Free Let's Encrypt SSL is a one-click install, and Autonomous includes SSL through Cloudflare Enterprise. Account two-factor login works with an authenticator app or SMS, with 12 backup codes. Flexible servers get an Imunify360 firewall. Malware Protection is a paid add-on on Flexible, from $4 per app a month, while Autonomous and Velocity list malware protection as included.

The DigitalOcean hosting page names nine cities, including Amsterdam, Frankfurt and London. A February 2026 blog post says Cloudways offers 150+ locations in 50+ countries across its five cloud providers, and that you pick the provider and region when you add a server. The homepage says partner infrastructure is GDPR compliant. We didn't see a data processing agreement on the Cloudways pages we read, and the terms page links the privacy policy to digitalocean.com.

The plan tables list RAM, cores, storage and bandwidth for every server size. The DigitalOcean 1 GB server has 1 core, 25 GB storage and 1 TB bandwidth for $11/mo. Flexible plan cards say "Unlimited Websites" and "Unlimited Visits" without a stated limit beyond the server's own resources. Autonomous plans list disk, bandwidth, servers and 100 PHP workers per server, but we didn't see CPU or memory. Some cards on the pricing page paired a server size with another size's price, so we used the tables on the managed WordPress page.

A local backup holds your web files and database, and you download it over SFTP or SSH. Cloudways doesn't sell domain names, so there is no domain to transfer out. To leave, you delete your servers, remove add-ons and cancel from the account page, and we didn't see an exit fee. Backups of deleted servers are kept for 14 days, then removed.