Cloudways vs DigitalOcean: is the managed markup worth it?

A 2 GB DigitalOcean server costs $12 a month bought directly and $24 a month through Cloudways, and the extra $12 pays for someone else to install, patch, back up and support it. At the smallest size the gap is $5 ($11 against $6). At 16 GB it is $53 ($149 against $96). Whether that markup is worth it depends almost entirely on whether you would otherwise spend your own hours on server administration.

The two companies are not rivals in the usual sense: DigitalOcean bought Cloudways in 2022, and Cloudways' most popular servers run on DigitalOcean hardware. The choice is between renting the machine and administering it yourself, or renting the same machine with a management layer on top. This comparison goes through the points that decide it.

Cloudways vs DigitalOcean: the price at each size

These are DigitalOcean Basic Droplets with regular SSDs next to the equivalent Cloudways DigitalOcean Standard servers, at list prices in October 2026:

Backups narrow the gap a little. DigitalOcean charges 20% of the Droplet price for weekly backups and 30% for daily ones, so daily backups on a 4 GB Droplet add $7.20. Cloudways includes daily off-site backups and charges only for the storage, at $0.033 per GB, which for a typical small site is under a dollar. Both bill by usage: DigitalOcean moved Droplets to per-second billing in January 2026, while Cloudways bills by the hour, with a monthly cap on both.

What the Cloudways markup buys

On a raw Droplet, a WordPress site needs a web server, PHP-FPM, a database, an SSL certificate that renews itself, a firewall, a cache, a backup routine and someone to apply security updates. Cloudways sets all of that up when you click "Launch" and keeps it maintained. Specifically, you get:

• A tuned stack. Debian 12 with NGINX, PHP-FPM, MariaDB or MySQL, Redis, and a choice of the Hybrid stack with Apache and Varnish or the NGINX-only Lightning Stack.
• Operating system and security patching, plus an Imunify360 firewall with brute-force protection and a web application firewall, at no extra charge.
• Staging with push and pull of files and selected database tables, and one-click cloning of whole servers.
• Object Cache Pro on servers with 4 GB or more, a commercial WordPress caching plugin you would otherwise license yourself.
• 24/7 support that will log into the server to fix a stuck PHP process or a failed certificate, which DigitalOcean's support will not do on an unmanaged Droplet.

DigitalOcean's 1-Click WordPress Droplet gets you a working site in a few minutes, but after that it is yours to maintain. Updates, backups, staging and tuning are not part of the deal.

Root access and what you can run

This is where DigitalOcean wins outright. A Droplet gives you root on a Linux distribution you choose, so you can run Docker, Node.js, Python workers, a mail server, a game server or anything else that fits in the RAM. Cloudways gives you SSH as a non-root user and a menu of packages, and runs PHP applications: WordPress, WooCommerce, Magento, Laravel and custom PHP. It will not give you sudo and will not run its servers inside your own DigitalOcean account.

If even one part of your project needs something outside that list, such as a Node.js API next to a WordPress front end, you either run two kinds of hosting or go to the Droplet. Cloudways does now have a separate Node.js product called Velocity, but it is billed and managed apart from Flexible servers. Our root access guide lists what you can and cannot change on Cloudways.

The time you are buying back

The fair way to judge the markup is against your own time. Setting up a hardened LEMP server with automatic certificate renewal, off-site backups and a staging copy takes an experienced administrator a few hours, and keeping it patched takes a little time every month. If you have done it before and enjoy it, $12 a month is a poor price for something you can do. If you have not, the first time you restore a database at 2 am you will understand what the $12 was for.

There is a middle ground that DigitalOcean users should know about. Server panels such as RunCloud ($9 a month for one server) and SpinupWP ($12 a month) install and manage a WordPress stack on a Droplet you own, while leaving you with root. A $12 Droplet plus a $9 panel is $21, close to Cloudways' $24, with more control and less hand-holding. Our Cloudways vs RunCloud comparison goes through that trade-off.

Support: whose problem is it?

DigitalOcean supports its platform: if a Droplet will not boot or the network misbehaves, that is theirs. What runs inside the Droplet is yours, and a misconfigured NGINX file gets a link to a community tutorial. Cloudways Standard support covers the server itself around the clock, including PHP errors caused by server limits, SSL, backups and migrations. Neither will debug your WordPress plugins for free; on Cloudways that is the job of the paid Advanced Support tier.

Scaling and the constraints they share

Because Cloudways runs on DigitalOcean, it inherits DigitalOcean's resizing rules. On both, you can resize CPU and RAM up and back down, but increasing the disk is permanent. Cloudways adds one wrinkle: you can only scale back down to the size you originally launched, and anything smaller means cloning to a new server. On both platforms, block storage is the way to add disk without committing to a bigger machine. Our scaling guide covers the steps.

Which one to choose

What DigitalOcean genuinely does better is flexibility and price. What Cloudways genuinely does better is make the server someone else's 3 am problem. If you are not sure which camp you are in, the 3-day Cloudways trial runs on DigitalOcean hardware without a card, so you can try the managed version on the same infrastructure before deciding whether you would rather run it yourself.