Hosting provider
Cloudways
Cloudways lists $14 a month with no separate renewal rate — the price is the same in the first term and afterwards. The three-year total below is simply thirty-six times that.
Our assessment
Managed cloud hosting at the same price in year three as month one. Costs three to five times what shared hosting charges, but runs on dedicated resources you scale yourself.
What is good
- +Price stays $14/month with no increase at renewal
- +Dedicated RAM and CPU, not shared resources
- +Scale vertically mid-month, billed hourly for usage
- +Choose infrastructure from five cloud providers
- +Staging environment and automatic backups included
What to know first
- −Costs $504 over three years versus $108 at Hostinger
- −Only 25GB storage on the base plan
- −No phone support at any tier
- −No priority support routing on cheapest plan
- −Requires more technical understanding than shared hosting
What it costs
What these words mean — every technical term used below, explained in a sentence.
Cloud hosting
More resources on the same billing structure.
| Plan | Introductory | Renews at | Intro runs for | 3 years, total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Micro 1 GB RAM, 1 vCPU, 25 GB NVMe, 1 TB transfer. Billed hourly, unlimited websites |
$14 | the same | no introductory term | Same price, always |
| Small 2 GB RAM, 1 vCPU, 50 GB NVMe, 2 TB transfer |
$28 | the same | no introductory term | Same price, always |
| Medium 4 GB RAM, 2 vCPU, 80 GB NVMe, 4 TB transfer |
$54 | the same | no introductory term | Same price, always |
| Large 8 GB RAM, 4 vCPU, 160 GB NVMe, 5 TB transfer |
$99 | the same | no introductory term | Same price, always |
Buy it for
Sites outgrowing shared hosting that need scalable cloud resources and a price that stays flat, without managing servers directly.Do not buy it for
New sites with light traffic where shared hosting costs a fifth as much, or anyone needing phone support and priority assistance on the base plan.The full read
Cloudways charges $14 a month for its smallest plan and does not raise the price. Most hosting here advertises a low first-term rate then doubles or triples it; this does not. That makes the three-year total misleading in the same way it would be misleading to present a grocery bill as thirty-six months of spending — you are paying a consistent monthly price, not discovering a hidden cost.
What you get for that $14 is a different product than shared hosting. A virtual server with 1GB of dedicated RAM, billed by the hour, running on DigitalOcean, Linode, Vultr, AWS, or Google Cloud infrastructure you choose. You are not sharing CPU cycles with a hundred other sites. The trade-off is that $14 a month is six times what Hostinger charges and still only buys you 25GB of storage where a $2 shared plan gives 50GB.
Cloudways is a management layer. It does not own servers; it provisions them from the five cloud providers and gives you a control panel, automatic backups, a staging environment, and managed updates. You pay Cloudways' fee plus the underlying cloud cost, though that cloud cost is included in the prices here. If you wanted to run DigitalOcean directly you would save money but also spend time on server administration.
Support is 24/7 via live chat and tickets. There is no phone line. The cheapest plan does not include priority routing; you wait in the same queue as everyone else. Cloudways does not publish a response-time commitment for the standard tier, so treat speed as unknown rather than fast. That is slower than managed WordPress hosts but faster than responding only by email.
You can scale vertically — more RAM, more CPU — without migrating. Shared hosting makes you change plans and move files. Here you adjust a slider and the server resizes, billed hourly for what you use. That matters if traffic spikes. It also means you can start at $14 and move to $28 mid-month without waiting for a billing cycle.
The case for Cloudways is that you want cloud infrastructure without wanting to manage it yourself, and you value a price that does not double after a year. The case against it is that for small static sites, shared hosting at $2 a month does the same job for less, and for high-traffic sites requiring this much resource, you may prefer a managed WordPress host with included CDN and more hands-on support.
Written 2026-09-01 by payless.host. The section above is our own assessment. The prices below are copied from the provider's pricing page and are not affected by it.
Prices read from the provider's own pricing page on Sep 1, 2026.
https://www.cloudways.com/en/pricing.php
Where the introductory term or the renewal rate is not published, the three-year column is left blank rather than estimated.
We earn a commission when someone buys through our links. It has no effect on the figures above, which are read from the provider's own page and published as they are.