Cloudways occupies an interesting middle ground in hosting: it gives you the raw performance of cloud infrastructure — DigitalOcean, Linode, Vultr, or AWS — without requiring you to manage a server directly. For a blog that’s outgrown shared hosting but isn’t ready for the price of a fully managed host like WP Engine, that middle ground can be exactly right.

What Makes Cloudways Different

Unlike traditional shared hosting, where your site competes for resources with hundreds of others on the same server, Cloudways gives you dedicated resources on cloud infrastructure of your choosing. You pick the cloud provider, the server size, and the region — then Cloudways handles the technical layer of actually running WordPress on it.

Speed: Genuinely Fast

In our testing, Cloudways sites loaded consistently fast — comparable to SiteGround’s performance, and noticeably better than standard shared hosting under any real traffic load. Because you’re not sharing resources with other sites, performance stays consistent even during traffic spikes, which is one of the most common hidden causes of shared hosting slowdowns.

Setup: More Technical Than Shared Hosting

This is the honest tradeoff. Installing WordPress is still one click, but configuring email, setting up a CDN, and fine-tuning caching requires more hands-on comfort than Bluehost or Hostinger’s more guided experiences. Cloudways is best suited to bloggers who’ve run a site for at least six months and have some baseline familiarity with hosting concepts.

Pricing: Pay for What You Use

Cloudways bills monthly with no annual lock-in, starting around $14/mo for a basic DigitalOcean server. Unlike most shared hosts, there’s no jarring renewal price increase after year one — what you pay month one is roughly what you’ll keep paying, scaled to whatever server size you choose.

Frequently Asked Questions