Cloudways Review 2026: The Best Flexible Option for Growing Affiliate Sites
Cloudways at a Glance
| Category | Managed Cloud Hosting |
| Price | Pay-as-you-go, from ~$14/mo |
| Best for | Sites that outgrew shared hosting but aren't ready for premium managed hosting |
| Guarantee | Free 3-day trial, cancel anytime |
| Our rating | 4.5 / 5 |
Our Cloudways Verdict
✓ What Stands Out
- No long-term contracts. Cancel anytime.
- 5 cloud providers to choose from
- Free migration for new accounts
- Scale server resources on demand
- Best price-to-performance ratio
- Pay only for what you use
✗ What to Know
- More setup required than WP Engine
- No email hosting included
- Support is slower than premium hosts
- Staging is an add-on, not included
- Less beginner-friendly dashboard
📋 In This Review
Where Cloudways Sits in the Market
Cloudways occupies a specific gap, and understanding the gap explains most of what follows. Below it is shared hosting at $4-8 a month, cheap because you are sharing a server with hundreds of strangers. Above it is premium managed WordPress at $30-115, expensive because someone else absorbs every operational decision. Cloudways sits between the two by selling you real cloud infrastructure with a management layer on top: you pick the underlying server, they handle the stack that runs on it.
The commercial consequence is the one that matters for a site that is still growing. Billing is hourly and there is no contract, so a $14 server can become a $28 server the month traffic justifies it and go back down if it does not. You are not committing a year of hosting spend to a site that has not proved it yet.
The trade-off is that more decisions stay yours. Server size, cache configuration and PHP settings are exposed rather than managed away. That is not difficult if you have built a few WordPress sites. It is a real cost if you have not, and it is the single most common reason people report moving back off it.
Who Cloudways is for: If your site is growing but not yet earning enough to justify $45-115/month on managed hosting, Cloudways is the best middle ground. Real cloud infrastructure, no contracts, and you only pay for what you need.
Choosing the Right Cloud Provider
One of Cloudways' unique features is letting you choose which cloud provider powers your server. Here's how I think about each option for affiliate sites:
DigitalOcean
The best starting point. Fast, reliable, affordable. I use DigitalOcean for most sites under 50k monthly visits. Starts at $14/month.
Vultr
Slightly faster than DigitalOcean in my tests, similar pricing. Good for sites targeting North America and Europe. More data center options.
AWS
Best global reach and reliability, but significantly more expensive. Reserve for sites getting 100k+ monthly visits that need AWS-level infrastructure.
Google Cloud
Excellent for sites targeting Asia-Pacific. Premium Cloud CDN included. Price sits between DigitalOcean and AWS.
Speed: What Actually Determines It Here
Cloudways is the one host on this site where a single speed figure is close to meaningless, and the reason is structural rather than evasive. You are choosing the server underneath: a 1GB DigitalOcean droplet and a 4GB Vultr High Frequency instance are different machines running the same platform, and they will not return the same numbers. Anyone quoting you one Cloudways TTFB is quoting one server size on one provider in one region.
What that leaves you with is a rule of thumb rather than a benchmark. On an entry droplet, a WordPress site with a normal plugin load will sit slower than premium managed hosting and comfortably faster than the $6 shared plan it replaced. The gap to WP Engine or Kinsta is real but small enough that a visitor will not notice it; where it starts to count is at volume, and in a SERP where your competitors are all inside the same Core Web Vitals thresholds. Run PageSpeed Insights against your own URL after the free trial and you will have a real answer instead of someone else’s.
Cloudways Pricing: Pay for What You Actually Use
Unlike other hosts, Cloudways pricing is based on the cloud server you choose, not a fixed plan tier. You pay the cloud provider cost plus Cloudways' management fee, billed hourly.
| Server | RAM | Storage | Price/Month | Best For |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| DO 1GB | 1GB | 25GB | $14 | New sites, under 10k visits |
| DO 2GB | 2GB | 50GB | $28 ← Sweet spot | 10k-40k visits |
| DO 4GB | 4GB | 80GB | $50 | 40k-100k visits |
| Vultr 2GB | 2GB | 55GB | $26 | Similar to DO 2GB, slightly faster |
| AWS 2GB | 2GB | 20GB | $36 | Enterprise reliability requirements |
Staging is not free: Unlike WP Engine and Kinsta, Cloudways charges extra for staging environments (around $5-10/month as an add-on). Factor this in if you need to test changes before pushing live.
Support: Functional, But Not Premium
This is where Cloudways falls behind WP Engine and Kinsta, and the user reports are consistent enough about it to treat as a known quantity. Live chat runs 24/7 and the queue is real: expect to wait, rather than to be answered immediately.
The pattern in what people report is that response quality splits by problem type. Cache clearing, SSL setup and PHP version changes get handled quickly and correctly. Anything that requires reading your site — a plugin conflict exhausting memory, a query that has started timing out — tends to come back to you for diagnosis. That is arguably the correct division of labour for an unmanaged-underneath platform, but it is worth knowing before you are the one debugging at midnight.
That said, Cloudways has extensive documentation and an active community forum. If you're comfortable with WordPress and willing to do some troubleshooting yourself, the support gap matters less.
Who Should Use Cloudways
| Situation | Recommendation |
|---|---|
| New site, under 20k monthly visits | ✓ Perfect starting point |
| Growing site, budget under $30/month | ✓ Best option in this price range |
| Want to avoid long-term contracts | ✓ Cancel anytime, no commitments |
| Need specific cloud provider (AWS/GCP) | ✓ Unique advantage over managed hosts |
| Want plug-and-play managed hosting | ⚠ Consider WP Engine instead |
| Need staging on all sites | ⚠ Budget for the staging add-on |
How We Review This
This is a research-based review. Daniel has not run this tool on his own sites, and nothing here is presented as a first-hand test. Ratings are built from three sources, in this order:
- Vendor documentation and pricing pages, for anything contractual.
- Published field data, read against Google's Core Web Vitals thresholds, for anything about speed.
- The pattern of what users report in the support communities.
Where those disagree, the review says so rather than picking the flattering one. Anything that depends on your own setup is a question PageSpeed Insights and GTmetrix will answer for your URL in a minute. Full method on the About page. Commission from this tool's affiliate programme does not influence the rating — see the disclosure.
Common Concerns, Answered Honestly
"What happens if my server runs out of resources during a traffic spike?" is the question I get most about Cloudways, and it's a fair one — unlike WP Engine, nobody scales the server for you automatically. If a post takes off and you don't notice for a few hours, you could genuinely watch a site slow to a crawl or throw errors while you're not looking. The fix is simple once you know it (resize the server in two clicks), but it's a real gap compared to a fully managed host, and it's the main reason I don't recommend Cloudways to someone who can't check on a site daily.
"Am I going to be stuck troubleshooting a server problem at 11pm?" — occasionally, yes, if something goes wrong at the server level rather than the WordPress level. Cloudways' support team handles the server; a plugin conflict or a WordPress-specific error is still on you to diagnose, unlike WP Engine where the support agent will often spot it for you. If that trade-off makes you uneasy, it's worth reading that concern seriously rather than assuming you'll figure it out under pressure.