SpinupWP vs Cloudways Pricing, Cloudways vs SpinupWP Cost for WordPress Agencies

SpinupWP and Cloudways sell to the same buyer, usually a WordPress freelancer or agency that has outgrown shared hosting, but they charge in opposite ways. Cloudways rents you a managed server and folds the management into one hourly price. SpinupWP is a control panel only: you rent the server from a cloud provider yourself and pay SpinupWP a separate fee to run it. That difference decides the bill, and it flips depending on how big your servers are.

Every figure below came from the vendors' own pages. Cloudways from its public pricing page and SpinupWP from the calculator on its pricing page, both read in September 2026, and DigitalOcean from its Droplet price list, which is where most SpinupWP customers put their servers.

How much does Cloudways cost?

Cloudways Flexible starts at $11 a month for a Micro server with 2 GB of RAM, 1 vCPU, 50 GB of storage and 2 TB of transfer, billed hourly in arrears, and an 8 GB, 4 vCPU server is $88 a month. The price covers the server and the management layer together. There is a 3 day trial with no card.

The per server price is only part of it. Cloudways sells several things per application or per domain, and an agency with many client sites feels those more than the server fee:

Cloudways also sells an Autonomous line for sites that need to scale on traffic: Growth at $99, Scale at $199 and Plus at $399 a month. That is a different product for a different problem, so the comparison below sticks to Flexible, which is what agencies moving off shared hosting actually buy.

How much does SpinupWP cost?

SpinupWP costs $12 a month on Essentials or $19 on Advanced, each including one server and unlimited sites, plus whatever your cloud provider charges for that server. Extra servers follow a graduated ladder: $8 or $10 each for servers two and three, then $5, $4, $3, $2 and $1 per server as the count passes 3, 6, 20, 40 and 60. The trial is 7 days with no card.

Advanced adds $2 a month for each user after the first and $1 a month per site monitor, and keeps more backups (up to four daily, four weekly and four monthly, against one daily snapshot per site on Essentials). Page caching, Redis object caching, a real system cron for WordPress and a dashboard for core, theme and plugin updates are included on both tiers. The servers themselves are billed by your provider. On DigitalOcean a 2 GB Droplet is $12, a 4 GB one $24 and an 8 GB one $48.

Is Cloudways cheaper than SpinupWP?

Cloudways is cheaper on small servers and SpinupWP is cheaper on large ones. A 2 GB Cloudways server is $11 all in, while the same server under SpinupWP is a $12 Droplet plus at least $12 of panel fee. At 8 GB it reverses: Cloudways charges $88, SpinupWP plus a $48 Droplet comes to $60 for one server and less per server as the fleet grows.

So the crossover is set by server size, not server count. Here are five fleets priced both ways. DeployManage is included because it is the third option an agency tends to consider, and the column is honest about where it lands.

Read it row by row. On small servers Cloudways wins outright until you start buying per app add ons, and then SpinupWP pulls ahead because its update dashboard costs nothing extra. On 8 GB servers SpinupWP saves $341 a month across ten of them. DeployManage is the most expensive option in the three rows without add ons. It lands between the two in the 25 site row, and on the ten 8 GB fleet it beats Cloudways by $271 while still costing $70 more than SpinupWP. We have not priced a 4 GB Cloudways server because its calculator does not publish that figure as plain text, and a guessed number would be worse than none.

SpinupWP vs Cloudways for WordPress agencies

For an agency that is 100 percent WordPress and comfortable with SSH, SpinupWP usually wins on cost and control, because the servers live in the agency's own cloud account with full root access, the update dashboard is included, and the per server fee drops as the fleet grows. Cloudways wins for agencies that want no server responsibility at all and host mostly small sites.

Control is the part pricing tables hide. On Cloudways the server is Cloudways managed and you work inside its console. On SpinupWP you own the Droplet, so moving a client, handing a server over at the end of a contract, or giving a developer sudo access is your decision. Agencies that resell hosting also like that the cloud invoice can sit on the client's own card while the agency pays only the panel fee. Whatever the setup, put the hosting terms (who pays the server bill, what uptime and response time you promise, what happens to the server when the contract ends) in a signed client contract before the first site moves.

The weak spot for both is deployment. SpinupWP's push to deploy pulls the repository into the live site and runs a script, with no release history to roll back to. Cloudways offers Git deployment from its console in the same in place style. That is fine for brochure sites edited in wp-admin. It is a real risk for agencies that ship custom themes, WooCommerce builds or Laravel and Node apps alongside WordPress, which is where a panel with atomic releases earns its higher price.

Which is better for WooCommerce stores?

Size decides it here too. A small store on a 2 GB server is cheapest on Cloudways at $11. A busy store needs 8 GB or more, and there SpinupWP plus your own server costs roughly two thirds of the Cloudways price for the same specification ($60 against $88 for one 8 GB server). Both configure Redis object caching, which WooCommerce needs for cart and checkout performance.

What changes with a store is the cost of a bad deploy. A theme or plugin update that half applies during checkout loses orders. If you deploy code rather than clicking updates, look for releases that are built in a separate directory and switched in one step, with the previous release kept on disk. Our WordPress VPS control panel does that on its Growth plan, and so does RunCloud on its $49 Business plan.

What about a panel that runs WordPress and Laravel?

SpinupWP is WordPress only by design. Cloudways runs several PHP applications, including Laravel and Magento, from the same console. Agencies with a mixed book, say 20 WordPress sites and three Laravel client apps, often end up with two vendors because SpinupWP cannot host the Laravel apps and Cloudways does not give them root access on the server.

DeployManage is built for that mixed fleet: WordPress, Laravel and Node.js sites on servers in your own DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode, Hetzner or AWS account, atomic releases with one click rollback on Growth and Business, 10 team seats on Growth and an audit log of who deployed what. It is not the cheap option. Starter is $59 a month and Growth $129, or half that billed yearly, against SpinupWP from $12. If you run only WordPress, SpinupWP or Cloudways will almost always cost less, and we would buy one of them in your position. If you run WordPress and custom apps for clients and need to know who shipped the release that broke a checkout, compare our SpinupWP alternative and Cloudways alternative pages, which price those fleets in detail.

Can I move sites from Cloudways to SpinupWP?

Yes. Most teams create the new server under SpinupWP, copy each site with a migration plugin or rsync plus a database dump, test on a temporary domain and then switch DNS. SpinupWP sells a migration service from $300 per site, which is more than most agencies want to pay for ten sites; with SSH comfort, one site takes an hour or two.

Lower the DNS TTL a day ahead, move the smallest site first, and keep the Cloudways server running for a week after the last cutover. Because Cloudways bills hourly, you stop paying for the old server the hour you delete it, so there is no reason to rush that step. Our Cloudways vs RunCloud comparison covers the same move to a different panel if SpinupWP's WordPress only scope is too narrow for you.

The short answer

Pick Cloudways if your sites are small, you want zero server work and you do not need per app add ons. Pick SpinupWP if you run WordPress on 4 GB or larger servers, want the servers in your own account and like an update dashboard included in the price. Pick a panel with atomic releases, such as DeployManage, only if you also ship custom code or non WordPress apps and the cost of a failed deploy is higher than the difference in the monthly fee.