Cloudways pricing 2026: what you will actually pay

Cloudways Flexible costs from $11 a month for a 1 GB DigitalOcean server up to $149 for a 16 GB one, and most live websites end up on the $24 or $46 size. Cloudways Autonomous, the autoscaling WordPress product, is priced per site at $99, $199 or $399 a month. On top of either you pay for backup storage, and optionally for email, a CDN and better support.

There are no contracts and no first-year discount that disappears at renewal. You can try any Flexible server size on DigitalOcean, Vultr or Linode free for three days without a card. This guide lists the prices we checked in October 2026, explains how the hourly billing actually works, and prices three realistic setups so the headline figure means something.

Cloudways Flexible prices by cloud provider

On Cloudways Flexible you pick a provider first, then a server size, and the price follows from both. These are the monthly prices for the smaller sizes, which is where almost every new account starts:

Google Cloud uses different sizes: about $37 for a 1.7 GB shared-CPU machine, $84 for 3.75 GB and $152 for 7.5 GB. Above 8 GB, DigitalOcean Standard runs $149 for 16 GB and $240 for 32 GB, and dedicated-CPU General Purpose and CPU-Optimized machines start at $98 and $72 respectively.

Two things the table does not show. First, Cloudways itself says 1 GB servers are mainly for testing and staging, and recommends 2 GB or more for live sites, so the $11 figure is a floor rather than a recommendation. Second, AWS and Google Cloud are not available on the free trial, have no monthly cap, and bill bandwidth and extra disk by the gigabyte on top of the server price. They earn their premium when you need a specific region or a company policy requires them. For everyone else, our provider comparison explains why DigitalOcean or Vultr is usually the better buy.

How Cloudways billing works

Servers are billed by the hour and invoiced in arrears: usage in May is charged at the start of June. On DigitalOcean, Vultr and Linode, each size has a monthly cap. A server that runs the whole month costs exactly the cap; one that runs for part of the month costs its hourly rate times the hours. The 2 GB DigitalOcean server, for example, is $0.0357 an hour, so a two-day test costs about $1.70.

When you scale a server mid-month, the hours are split between the two sizes at their own hourly rates, and the cap only applies if one size ran for the full month. AWS and Google Cloud have no cap at all and are always billed by the hour.

The rule that catches people: a stopped server is still a billed server on DigitalOcean, Vultr and Linode, because the CPU, RAM, disk and IP address stay reserved for you. Only deleting it stops the charge. Third-party add-ons such as DNS Made Easy work the other way, charging the full month on the day you switch them on even if you remove them the next day. Sales tax or VAT is added on top of the listed prices where it applies. Our guide to cancelling Cloudways covers the clean way to stop every charge.

Cloudways Autonomous pricing

Cloudways Autonomous runs a single WordPress or WooCommerce site on a Kubernetes cluster that adds capacity when traffic rises. You do not choose a server size. You choose a plan, and the plan sets how much baseline capacity, disk and bandwidth is included:

Every plan includes one website, unmetered visits, Cloudflare Enterprise, Object Cache Pro with Relay, malware protection and unlimited off-site backups. Extra disk is $1 per GB and extra bandwidth $0.04 per GB. If a site exceeds its allowance it stays online and the overage is billed. A staging copy counts against the same disk and bandwidth quota as the live site.

That $99 entry price is the main thing to weigh. A 4 GB Flexible server at $46 carries Object Cache Pro and several sites; Autonomous buys you autoscaling and high availability for one. It makes sense for a store with a predictable flash sale or a publisher whose traffic jumps on a news day, and very little sense for a steady brochure site. Our Flexible vs Autonomous comparison goes through the break-even.

Add-on prices

Everything below is optional except backup storage, which applies as soon as backups exist, and they are on by default.

Each of these replaces something you could source elsewhere, often for free. Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 handle email, the free Cloudflare plan covers basic CDN and DNS, and a WordPress security plugin can stand in for the malware add-on on a small site. The Cloudflare Enterprise review covers when the paid edge is worth it.

Three realistic monthly bills

These use DigitalOcean Standard servers and list prices from October 2026, before tax and before any new-customer discount.

A freelancer with four small client sites

• DigitalOcean 2 GB server: $24.00
• About 12 GB of off-site backups: $0.40
• Email on the clients' own Google Workspace accounts: $0
• Total: about $24.40 a month, or $6.10 per site.

A small business with one WooCommerce shop

• DigitalOcean 4 GB server, so Object Cache Pro is included (our WooCommerce guide explains why stores start at 4 GB): $46.00
• About 25 GB of off-site backups: $0.83
• Five Rackspace mailboxes: $7.50
• Cloudflare Enterprise on one domain, after its free month: $4.99
• Total: about $59.30 a month.

An agency hosting twelve sites

• DigitalOcean 8 GB server: $88.00
• About 120 GB of off-site backups: $3.96
• Cloudflare Enterprise on six client domains at $3.99 each: $23.94
• Site Manager Pro on all twelve sites: $36.00
• Advanced Support at the $25 offer price: $25.00
• Total: about $176.90 a month, or $14.74 per site.

The agency bill shows where the money really goes once a portfolio grows: the server is half of it, and the rest is tooling that is priced per site or per domain. That is still well below managed WordPress hosts that charge per install, which is the case our Cloudways for agencies piece makes in more detail.

Discounts and the catches around them

Cloudways usually runs a new-customer discount. In October 2026 the pricing page offered 30% off for three months and the promo page 40% off for four months. The discount is applied automatically when a new account upgrades from the trial, cannot be combined with another code, does not apply to existing customers, and ends after the promotional period. Our guide to Cloudways promo codes explains why coupon sites listing "secret" codes are mostly noise.

Other small print worth knowing: there are no refunds for unused hours; on DigitalOcean, scaling the disk up is permanent; extra DigitalOcean bandwidth beyond the plan is $0.02 per GB; and a paid add-on keeps billing until you deactivate it, even after the site it served is gone.

Is Cloudways good value?

For one site, Cloudways is not the cheapest managed option. Introductory shared-hosting plans cost less for the first term, though they typically renew at several times the starting rate. For three or more sites, the arithmetic turns quickly in Cloudways' favour because the server price is shared. Kinsta charges $30 a month for each extra site, while another site on a Cloudways server costs nothing until you need a bigger server.

The fair way to compare is total monthly cost for your actual portfolio, including email and backups, over two years. If that number is close, the deciding factors are root access (Cloudways has none), email (Cloudways has none) and how much you value staging pushes that can leave your order tables alone.