Every number on this page was read off each vendor's own pricing page on 11 August 2026, not copied from a directory. Cloudways bills per server and bundles the management. A panel charges one flat fee and you pay the cloud directly. Which is cheaper depends entirely on how many servers you run and how big they are.
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Cloudways Flexible starts at $11 per month for a Micro server with 2 GB RAM, 1 vCPU, 50 GB storage and 2 TB of transfer, billed hourly with no contract. That single price covers both the server and the management layer, which is why the entry tier undercuts buying the same specification straight from DigitalOcean at $12 per month. The cost case against Cloudways is not the sticker price on one small server. It is that Cloudways charges per server while a flat fee panel like Laravel Forge ($12 to $39 per month) or Ploi (free to about $36) covers many servers at once, so the more servers you add, the further the two models diverge.
Last updated August 2026
Cloudways Flexible bills each server separately, starting at $11 per month for the Micro size on any of its clouds. Two applications on one server cost one server fee. Two applications that need isolation, a separate staging box or a dedicated database host each add another full server fee. This is the single biggest line on most invoices and the one people forget to model before they migrate.
Price rises with RAM, vCPU and disk. Cloudways publishes the ladder through its own pricing calculator rather than as a flat table, and the figures differ between DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode, AWS and Google Cloud. We are not going to guess those numbers here. Pull them from the calculator for the exact size you need before you commit, because the gap against raw cloud pricing widens as the box gets bigger.
Each plan includes a transfer allowance, 2 TB on Micro. Past that you pay per GB and the rate depends on which cloud the server sits on. Cloudways lists roughly $0.02 per GB on DigitalOcean, $0.12 on AWS and $0.10 to $0.17 on Google Cloud. Media heavy sites and anything serving large downloads should model this line, not assume it is noise.
Extra disk space is billed at $1 per GB per month. Fifty GB goes quickly once you keep database dumps, user uploads and a few release directories on the same volume, so check your current disk usage before you pick a size rather than after the first overage.
These stack quietly. Site Manager runs $3 per application per month, Malware Protection $4 per application per month, and the Cloudflare Enterprise CDN $4.99 per domain per month. Advanced Support is listed at $100 per month with a heavily discounted rate advertised at $25. On a fifteen site agency account the add ons can outgrow the servers.
Backups to off site storage are metered rather than bundled. Cloudways does not publish the per GB rate on its main pricing page, and third party trackers quote around $0.033 per GB per month, so treat that figure as unconfirmed and read the real number in your own console before you rely on it.
Cloudways charges per server. Write down how many separate servers you genuinely need: production, staging, anything that has to stay isolated for a client or for compliance. That count is what multiplies.
Look up the identical RAM, vCPU, disk and transfer at DigitalOcean, Hetzner or Vultr. That is your floor. Anything above it is what you are paying for management, support and the console.
A panel is one subscription no matter how many servers sit behind it. Laravel Forge is $12, $19 or $39 per month. Ploi is free for one server and about $10 to $36. DeployManage is free to start. Add that single figure to your raw cloud total.
At one small server the numbers are close and Cloudways often wins. The crossover moves in favour of raw cloud plus a panel as servers get more numerous, get larger, or start collecting per application add ons.
Every price below came from the vendor's own pricing page on 11 August 2026. Where a vendor does not publish a number, this table says so instead of guessing. RunCloud is deliberately absent: its pricing page renders through JavaScript and the third party figures for it contradict each other, so quoting a RunCloud dollar amount here would be inventing one. Cloudways and Ploi publish in more than one currency, and Cloudways bills hourly, so the monthly figures are the published monthly equivalents.
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| Cloudways Flexible | DeployManage plus your own cloud | Laravel Forge | Ploi | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Billing model | Per server, hourly, pay as you go | Flat panel fee, cloud billed to you directly by the provider | Flat subscription, unlimited sites | Flat subscription, banded by server count |
| Entry price | $11 per month, Micro | Free to start, plus whatever your cloud charges | $12 per month, Hobby | Free for 1 server and 1 site |
| What the fee covers | Server rental and the management layer together | Management only, you rent the server | Management only, you rent the server | Management only, you rent the server |
| Entry specification | 2 GB RAM, 1 vCPU, 50 GB disk, 2 TB transfer | Whatever you buy, DigitalOcean charges $12 for that exact specification | Whatever you buy, or Forge's own Laravel VPS | Whatever you buy |
| Higher tiers | Priced through the Cloudways calculator, varies by cloud | Raw provider ladder, DigitalOcean runs $18, $24 and $48 for 2, 4 and 8 GB | $19 Growth, $39 Business | About $10, $16 and $36 for 5, 10 and unlimited servers |
| Servers included in the fee | One. Each extra server is another full fee | Unlimited | Unlimited on all plans | 1, 5, 10, then unlimited by tier |
| Root access to the box | No, the server is Cloudways managed | Yes, it is your account and your server | Yes | Yes |
| Provisions the server for you | Yes | Yes | Yes, including its own Laravel VPS option | Yes |
| Zero downtime deployments | Not the core model, it is a hosting console | Yes, atomic releases with rollback | Yes, included on all plans, single server | Yes |
| Per application add on fees | Site Manager $3, Malware Protection $4, CDN $4.99 per domain | None | None | None |
| Free trial | 3 days, no card required | Free to start | No free plan | 5 day Pro trial, no card, then drops to free |
| Best fit | One or two WordPress or WooCommerce sites, nobody who wants to touch a server | Teams running several servers who want root and one flat fee | Laravel teams who want the first party tool | Small teams and freelancers who want a cheap flat panel |
| Wrong choice when | You need root, many servers, or you already have cloud credits | Nobody on the team will ever log into a server | You want a free tier | You need heavy managed support |
Honestly, Cloudways is hard to beat here. Eleven dollars covers a 2 GB server and the management, which is a dollar less than the equivalent DigitalOcean droplet on its own. If you run one site, never want to see a terminal and do not need root, the arithmetic favours Cloudways and this page is not going to pretend otherwise.
This is where the per server model bites. Ten client servers is ten base fees, and if each site picks up Site Manager and Malware Protection that is another $70 per month before bandwidth. Ten servers behind one flat panel fee is one subscription plus ten raw cloud bills, and the raw cloud bills are usually smaller than the managed equivalents.
Startup programs, AWS or Google Cloud credits and negotiated committed use discounts are worth nothing on Cloudways, because Cloudways rents you the server. Running the panel against your own cloud account means the credits apply to the actual infrastructure bill.
Custom PHP extensions, a specific Node version, a background daemon, an unusual queue driver, tuned kernel parameters or an agent your security team requires. A managed host will not give you root on its box. If any of that is on your list, the price comparison is moot and you need a server you own.
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 on 11 August 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 on 11 August 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.
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.
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.
| Charge | Rate | When it hits you |
|---|---|---|
| Extra disk space | $1 per GB per month | Past the 50 GB included on Micro |
| Bandwidth, DigitalOcean | about $0.02 per GB | Past the 2 TB included |
| Bandwidth, AWS | about $0.12 per GB | Past the included transfer |
| Bandwidth, Google Cloud | about $0.10 to $0.17 per GB | Past the included transfer |
| Autonomous bandwidth | $0.04 per GB | Autonomous plans only |
| Autonomous autoscaling | $0.07 to $0.12 per server hour | Above the plan baseline |
| Site Manager | $3 per application per month | Optional, per app |
| Malware Protection | $4 per application per month | Optional, per app |
| Cloudflare Enterprise CDN | $4.99 per domain per month | Optional, per domain |
| Advanced Support | $100 per month, advertised at $25 discounted | Optional |
| Off site backup storage | not published on the pricing page | Verify in your console |
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.
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 on 11 August 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, which used to require a separate Envoyer subscription. Forge's zero downtime deploys cover a single server, whereas Envoyer could deploy one project across several, so multi server Envoyer users still need their old 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: $12 for Forge Hobby brings it to $48, Ploi Basic at about $10 brings it to $46, and DeployManage is free to start so it stays at $36. At that size and that count, Cloudways is competitive on raw price and only loses to the free panel option.
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.
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.
DeployManage is free to start, and you pay your cloud provider directly for the servers. We are not going to publish a fake tier ladder here to look bigger than we are.
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. Then it runs zero downtime deployments on top with an atomic symlink flip and one click rollback, and 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.
Cloudways Flexible starts at $11 per month for a Micro server with 2 GB RAM, 1 vCPU, 50 GB storage and 2 TB transfer, verified on the vendor pricing page on 11 August 2026. Billing is hourly with no contract, so you pay only for the hours a server exists. Larger sizes are priced through the Cloudways calculator and vary by cloud provider.
At the entry size, yes. DigitalOcean charges $12.00 per month for a Basic droplet with 2 GiB RAM, 1 vCPU, 50 GiB SSD and 2 TB transfer. The equivalent Cloudways Micro server is $11 and includes management and support. The advantage narrows on larger servers and disappears once you run several servers behind one flat fee panel.
The Micro server on Cloudways Flexible at $11 per month is the cheapest entry point, available across DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode, AWS and Google Cloud. Cloudways Autonomous, the autoscaling WordPress product, is a separate and far more expensive line that starts at $99 per month for a single website.
There are no setup fees, contracts or renewal increases. There are metered and optional charges: $1 per GB for extra disk, per GB bandwidth past the included transfer, Site Manager at $3 per application, Malware Protection at $4 per application, the Cloudflare Enterprise CDN at $4.99 per domain and Advanced Support at $100 per month.
Yes. Cloudways offers a 3 day free trial with no credit card required. Cloudways Autonomous also lists a 3 day trial covering one website, 15 GB of disk, 30,000 visits and 100 GB of bandwidth. Three days is short for a real migration test, so plan what you want to prove before you start the clock.
Cloudways Autonomous is priced at $99 per month for Growth, $199 for Scale and $399 for Plus, each covering one website with unmetered visits and 150 GB, 250 GB and 1 TB of bandwidth respectively. Disk runs $1 per GB, bandwidth $0.04 per GB and autoscaling $0.07 to $0.12 per server hour beyond the baseline.
Yes. Cloudways Flexible bills hourly rather than on a fixed monthly contract, so you are charged for the hours a server actually exists and can scale up or down or destroy a server at any time. The published monthly figures are the equivalent of a full month at that hourly rate.
For one small server, usually yes, because $11 on Cloudways covers the server and the management while Forge Hobby is $12 for the panel alone plus whatever the server costs. For several servers Forge wins, because its $12 to $39 subscription covers unlimited servers while Cloudways charges a base fee for every single one.
It is worth it if you run one or two sites, want managed support and never intend to log into a server. It stops being the cheap option once you run several servers, need larger sizes, want root access, or have cloud credits and committed use discounts that a managed host cannot apply to your bill.
Each plan includes a transfer allowance, 2 TB on the Micro tier, and traffic beyond it is billed per GB at a rate that depends on the underlying cloud. Cloudways lists roughly $0.02 per GB on DigitalOcean, $0.12 on AWS and $0.10 to $0.17 on Google Cloud, with Autonomous plans billed at $0.04 per GB.
Cloudways buys cloud capacity in volume and prices its smallest tier aggressively to win the first purchase, which is how a $11 managed server can undercut a $12 unmanaged droplet with the same specification. The margin is recovered on larger servers, on per application add ons and on accounts that grow to many servers.
Yes, though you cannot take the Cloudways server itself, because it belongs to Cloudways rather than to you. You provision a fresh server in your own cloud account, install the stack, move the application files and database, verify on a temporary hostname, then cut DNS over. A panel that provisions the replacement server handles the rebuild step for you.
We are not quoting a RunCloud figure. Its pricing page renders through JavaScript and the third party sources we checked contradict each other, so any number here would be a guess. Check runcloud.io directly and treat directory listings for it with caution, since those are frequently out of date.
Provision on the cloud you already pay for, keep root, and run zero downtime releases from the same panel that manages the certificates, firewall, cron and queue workers. Free to start.
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