Cloudways vs ServerPilot Pricing and Real Monthly Cost for WordPress Agencies

Cloudways and ServerPilot both promise the same outcome to a WordPress freelancer or agency: servers you do not have to babysit. They bill for it in completely different ways. Cloudways rents you a managed server with the management included in one hourly price. ServerPilot is a control panel only, you rent the server from DigitalOcean or another provider yourself, and ServerPilot charges per server plus a fee for every app you put on it.

That per app fee is the part most comparisons skip, and it is the reason the answer depends on both the size of your servers and the number of sites on them. Every price below was read from the vendors' own pricing pages in October 2026, with DigitalOcean's Droplet prices as the server cost under ServerPilot.

Cloudways vs ServerPilot pricing at a glance

How much does ServerPilot cost per month?

ServerPilot costs $5 per server plus $0.50 per app on Economy, $10 plus $1 on Business and $20 plus $2 on First Class, billed hourly, and your cloud provider bills the server on top. One 2 GB DigitalOcean Droplet ($12) with ten WordPress sites on Economy therefore costs $12 + $5 + $5 = $22 a month.

Every plan includes free SSL certificates, a firewall, automated updates, one click WordPress installs and app isolation, so each site runs under its own system user. The tiers separate on visibility and support. Business adds a log viewer, server resource metrics and PHP process metrics, and First Class adds per app request and error metrics plus MySQL health. ServerPilot does not include a built in push to deploy; it points you to a GitHub Actions setup you build yourself.

How much does Cloudways cost per month?

Cloudways Flexible on DigitalOcean starts at $11 a month for a 2 GB server and costs $88 for an 8 GB, 4 vCPU server, with management, unlimited websites, free SSL, staging and cloning, a WordPress vulnerability scanner and 24/7 support included. There is no fee per site for hosting itself.

The extras are where an agency bill grows. Site Manager for update management starts at $3 per app, Malware Protection is $4 per app, Cloudflare Enterprise starts at $4.99 per domain, and offsite backup storage is $0.033 per GB per server. Our Cloudways pricing breakdown lists every add on and the Autonomous plans, which are a different product for traffic spikes.

Five agency fleets priced on both

Each row uses the same server sizes on both sides: Cloudways' own DigitalOcean price, against ServerPilot plus a DigitalOcean Droplet at $12 for 2 GB or $48 for 8 GB. No optional add ons on either side.

The pattern is clear. On 2 GB servers Cloudways wins at every site count, because $11 is less than a $12 Droplet before ServerPilot charges anything. On 8 GB servers the Droplet is $40 cheaper than Cloudways' price for the same size, and that gap pays for ServerPilot's fees with room to spare. The crossover is server size first and site count second.

Why the per app fee changes the answer

On ServerPilot, adding a site always adds money: 50 cents on Economy, a dollar on Business, two dollars on First Class. An agency with many small brochure sites on a few servers feels that more than one with a handful of big stores. On Business, 120 sites add $120 a month on their own, which is more than two extra 8 GB Droplets.

Cloudways looks flat until you buy the per app extras. Agencies that want managed plugin updates on every client site add Site Manager at $3 or more per app, so twelve sites add at least $36 to an $11 server. ServerPilot's automated updates are not the same thing as Site Manager's managed WordPress updates, so compare what you would actually switch on, not the plan names.

What you get for the money

Support is the clearest difference. Cloudways answers around the clock on every plan, which matters to a small agency without anyone on call. ServerPilot offers email support on Economy and faster queues on the higher tiers. If you resell hosting as a monthly care plan, remember that your clients call you, not your host; many agencies give them a dedicated support phone line so after hours calls reach whoever is on duty instead of a personal mobile.

Ownership is the second. ServerPilot manages servers in your own DigitalOcean, AWS or other account, so you keep root access, choose any region and size, and can leave the panel without moving a single site. Cloudways servers sit in Cloudways' account, which is simpler and includes free staging and cloning, but moving away means migrating every site.

Is ServerPilot or Cloudways better for an agency?

Cloudways is better for agencies with many small sites on 2 GB servers that want 24/7 support and no server responsibility. ServerPilot is better for agencies running larger servers in their own cloud account, where the cheaper Droplet price outweighs the per app fee, and for teams that want root access and app level isolation.

Two situations fit neither well. Agencies that also build custom PHP, Laravel or Node.js apps need git based deploys with releases they can roll back, and ServerPilot has no built in push to deploy. And agencies past twenty or thirty servers often want team seats and one audit log across every client server. That is where a general panel such as DeployManage fits, and it is not the cheap option: Starter is $59 a month for 3 servers and Growth, with atomic releases and rollback, is $129 for 10. Ten 8 GB Droplets on Growth cost $609 a month against $590 on ServerPilot Economy and $880 on Cloudways. Our ServerPilot alternative and Cloudways alternative pages compare the other panels, including RunCloud and SpinupWP, on the same fleets, and the WordPress VPS control panel page covers mixed WordPress and app fleets.

Moving between Cloudways and ServerPilot

Both directions are a normal WordPress migration: create the server, copy each site with a migration plugin or rsync plus a database dump, test on a temporary hostname and switch DNS with a short TTL. Both bill hourly, so you only pay double for the days the two stacks overlap. If you are moving a whole client list, do it server by server rather than site by site, and keep the old server for a week as a fallback. Our ServerPilot vs RunCloud pricing comparison is worth a look before you commit, because RunCloud's flat fee beats ServerPilot's per app pricing on large client lists.