Cloudways Pricing and Real Cost vs Laravel Forge Pricing

How much does Cloudways cost per month?

Cloudways Flexible starts at $11 per month. That buys the Micro size: 2 GB of RAM, 1 vCPU, 50 GB of storage and 2 TB of transfer. As of the vendor's pricing page in September 2026 that same $11 Micro entry point is offered across DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode, AWS and Google Cloud Engine, and billing is hourly, so a server you destroy after nine days costs nine days.

Worth knowing before you read any other page on this subject: the numbers in circulation disagree. Several widely cited affiliate reviews describe the $11 plan as a 1 GB server, and break it down as a $4 droplet plus a $7 management fee. Others quote $14 for Vultr and Linode, $20.56 for AWS and $37.33 for Google Cloud. Those look like older tiers that were never updated. The figures on this page come from cloudways.com/en/pricing.php read in September 2026, and that page says 2 GB at $11. If your quote differs, trust your own console over any blog, including this one.

There is a second, much more expensive Cloudways product that gets confused with the first. Cloudways Autonomous is the fully managed, autoscaling WordPress offering, and it is priced in a completely different bracket: Growth at $99 per month, Scale at $199 and Plus at $399, each for a single website, with disk, bandwidth and autoscaling metered on top. If somebody tells you Cloudways costs a hundred dollars a month, they are talking about Autonomous, not Flexible.

Is Cloudways cheaper than DigitalOcean?

At the entry tier, yes, and this surprises people. DigitalOcean's own Basic droplet with 2 GiB of RAM, 1 vCPU, 50 GiB of SSD and 2 TB of transfer is $12.00 per month on DigitalOcean's public pricing page. The Cloudways Micro server with the same specification is $11, and the management console, patching and support are included in that price. Buying direct is a dollar more expensive for a strictly worse deal at that one size.

That is a real finding and it undercuts the usual pitch that managed hosting always carries an obvious markup. Cloudways buys capacity in bulk and prices the entry tier aggressively, which is exactly what you would expect from a plan designed to win the first purchase.

The comparison changes shape in three places. First, the ladder above Micro: DigitalOcean publishes a flat table where 2 GB with 2 vCPUs is $18, 4 GB is $24 and 8 GB is $48, while Cloudways prices larger servers through its calculator and per cloud. Second, server count, because DigitalOcean charges per droplet and so does Cloudways, but the panel fee sitting on top of your droplets does not multiply. Third, what you own: a droplet in your own DigitalOcean account has root, can be snapshotted, resized, moved and kept if you change panels. A Cloudways server cannot leave Cloudways.

If you want the long version of that trade off rather than the pricing arithmetic, we wrote it up in Cloudways VPS vs a self managed VPS.

Does Cloudways have hidden fees?

Not hidden, but easy to miss. There are no setup fees, no contracts and no renewal price jumps, which is genuinely better than most of the hosting market. What catches people out is the metered and per application layer sitting beside the server fee.

Two of those deserve a note. Cloudways bundles in a Cloudflare Enterprise tier and Object Cache Pro with Relay at no extra charge on the standard plans, which it values at $250 and $242 per month respectively. Those are vendor valuations rather than what you would actually pay elsewhere, but the inclusion is real and it is a genuine part of the value. And the off site backup rate is the one number we could not verify. Third party trackers quote roughly $0.033 per GB per month. Cloudways' own pricing page does not state it. Read it in your console rather than taking anyone's word for it, ours included.

Cloudways pricing vs Laravel Forge pricing and Ploi pricing

These are not the same kind of product, which is exactly why the comparison is useful. Cloudways rents you a managed server. Forge, Ploi and DeployManage sell you a control panel and let you rent the server yourself. So the question is not which subscription is cheaper, it is which total is cheaper at your server count.

Laravel Forge, checked in September 2026: Hobby $12 per month, Growth $19, Business $39. There is no free plan. All three tiers include unlimited sites, unlimited deployments and zero downtime deployments on one server per site; Envoyer is still sold separately for multi server deploys. Forge's zero downtime deploys cover a single server, whereas Envoyer deploys one project across several, so multi server Envoyer users still need their Envoyer subscription. Forge also now sells Laravel VPS, its own one click provisioning, with a 5 percent discount on Growth and 15 percent on Business. Hobby includes unlimited Laravel VPS servers but only one external server.

Ploi, checked the same day: Free for 1 server and 1 site, Basic 8 euro or about $10 for up to 5 servers, Pro 13 euro or about $16 for up to 10, Unlimited 30 euro or about $36. There is a 5 day Pro trial with no card, and the account drops to the free plan afterwards rather than being cut off.

RunCloud is missing from this page on purpose. Its pricing renders through JavaScript and the third party sources contradict each other, so any dollar figure we printed would be a guess dressed up as research. We would rather have a gap than a wrong number.

Now the arithmetic. Take three production servers at the 2 GB size. Cloudways is three base fees, so $33 per month, everything included. DigitalOcean direct is three droplets at $12, so $36, plus one panel fee: $19 for Forge Growth brings it to $55 (Hobby covers only one external server), Ploi Basic at about $10 brings it to $46, and DeployManage Starter at $59 brings it to $95. At that size and that count Cloudways is the cheapest, Forge and Ploi are close behind, and DeployManage is the most expensive of the four by a wide margin. The panel model only pulls ahead of Cloudways once the servers are bigger or more numerous, and Forge and Ploi get there first on price alone.

Change one variable and it moves. Push the servers to 4 GB and DigitalOcean charges $24 each while Cloudways prices through its calculator per cloud. Add per application add ons across a dozen client sites and Cloudways picks up $3 to $7 per site per month that the panel model simply does not have. Add cloud credits or a committed use discount and the raw cloud side drops while Cloudways does not move at all. The honest summary: Cloudways is priced to win small, and the flat fee panel model is priced to win at scale.

If you are weighing the panels against each other rather than against Cloudways, the Laravel Forge alternative and Ploi alternative pages go feature by feature, and Laravel Forge vs RunCloud covers that pairing.

If the comparison is the actual reason you are here, we now keep the full head to head on a dedicated page: Cloudways vs Laravel Forge works through real monthly bills at one, five and ten servers and identifies the exact point where the flat fee overtakes the managed price. The short version is that Cloudways stays cheaper on small 2 GB servers at almost any count, because its $11 covers a server DigitalOcean alone sells for $12, and Forge becomes cheaper from the first large server onward.

Where Cloudways is genuinely the better buy

A comparison page that never concedes anything is an advert. Here is where we would tell you to stay on Cloudways or go to it.

You run one or two WordPress or WooCommerce sites and you do not want to learn servers. The Micro tier is priced below the equivalent raw droplet, the WordPress tooling is mature, and the support desk is part of what you are buying. A panel gives you root, and root is a liability if nobody on the team wants it.

You want somebody to answer the phone at 2am. Managed hosting includes a support organisation whose job is your server. A control panel vendor supports the panel, not your application, and the difference matters during an incident.

You need autoscaling WordPress and can justify Autonomous. At $99 to $399 per month it is expensive, but building comparable autoscaling on your own servers is a project, not an afternoon.

You genuinely never want root. Some teams are better off without it. If your compliance posture is easier when no employee can log into a production box, a managed host is a legitimate control, not a limitation.

Where we would push back is the case people most often assume: that Cloudways is the cheap option for a growing team. Past a handful of servers, once add ons and larger sizes come in, the per server model is what you are paying for, and a flat fee against your own cloud account starts to win. That is the whole argument, and it is an arithmetic argument rather than a moral one.

What DeployManage costs and what it does with the server

DeployManage costs $59 a month on Starter (3 servers, 10 sites per server, 2 team members), $129 on Growth (10 servers, 50 sites per server, 10 team members) and $299 on Business (unlimited servers, sites and team members). Paid yearly, it is half price: $348, $768 or $1,788 a year. You pay your cloud provider directly for the servers, with no markup. Every account starts with a one-time demo of 1 server, 1 site and 1 deploy, no card required. See the pricing page for the full plan table.

The thing that separates it from a deployment tool is scope. Connect a cloud account and it provisions the server: nginx, PHP or Node, MySQL or PostgreSQL, Redis, firewall rules and a Let's Encrypt certificate. On Growth and Business it also runs zero downtime deployments with an atomic symlink flip and one click rollback (Starter does not include those). On every plan it keeps managing the parts that fill the rest of the year: certificate renewal, firewall, cron, queue workers and backups. Deployment is a few minutes a day. Everything else is the other 364 days.

You can point it at a server you already own, including one you are moving off managed hosting, or let it provision on DigitalOcean, Hetzner, Vultr, Linode, AWS or OVHcloud. Releases come straight from Git, so the workflow after migration looks the same as the one you have now.

To be plain about price: DeployManage is not the cheap way off Cloudways. Take five 8 GB servers. Cloudways Medium comes to $440 a month and Forge plus DigitalOcean to $259, while DeployManage Growth ($129, since five servers is past the Starter limit) plus the same five $48 droplets comes to $369. The difference over Forge buys team seats, one panel across any cloud, any app (Laravel, PHP, Node.js, WordPress), mailboxes and a fleet-wide audit trail. It fits teams and agencies running production client apps, where a failed deploy costs more than the panel. If you run one or two small sites, Cloudways, Forge or Ploi will cost you less.

Cloudways add on pricing

Cloudways re verified in September 2026. The Flexible tier prices are unchanged: Micro and Small both sit at $11 a month for 2 GB of RAM, 1 vCPU, 50 GB of storage and 2 TB of bandwidth on DigitalOcean, with Medium at $88 for 8 GB and 4 vCPUs, and the largest 8XL tier at $342 for 128 GB and 24 vCPUs.

The add ons are where the real monthly total drifts away from the sticker price, so here is the current published list.

Cloudways Autonomous is a separate product and still prices at $99 for Growth, $199 for Scale and $399 for Plus, each covering a single website, with a three day free trial. A ten site agency running Site Manager and mailboxes on a Micro server is therefore paying well above $11, which is the point of listing these here rather than burying them.

Note that Cloudways was advertising 40 percent off hosting plans through 15 September 2026 when this page was checked. Promotional rates expire, so treat the flat figures above as the durable ones.