There are meaningful differences between Cloudways and regular shared hosting, and knowing those differences helps you decide which is worth the cost for your site. Both can host a WordPress website, but the underlying infrastructure, the management experience, and the performance ceiling are quite different.
| Feature | Regular Shared Hosting | Cloudways |
|---|---|---|
| Starting price | $2-5/month | $11/month (DigitalOcean 1GB) |
| Server type | Shared physical server | Dedicated cloud instance |
| Scalability | Fixed tiers, requires migration | Instant slider-based scaling |
| Backups | Varies; weekly on basic plans | Daily, one-click restore, included |
| Server locations | 1-3 data centres | 60+ locations across 5 providers |
| Email hosting | Included | Not included |
| Domain registration | Often bundled free in year 1 | Not included |
| Control panel | cPanel or proprietary | Cloudways dashboard |
| Managed security | Varies by host | Included (patching, firewall, bot protection) |
| Phone support | Usually available | Not available |
What Is Cloudways?
Cloudways is a managed cloud hosting platform. Rather than owning servers itself, Cloudways gives you access to five major cloud infrastructure providers: DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode, Amazon Web Services, and Google Cloud Platform, from a single dashboard. For a detailed comparison of how each provider's pricing, server locations, and performance differ, read our guide to choosing your Cloudways hosting supplier. You choose the provider and server size, and Cloudways handles the server setup, security patching, caching configuration, and ongoing management.
Regular shared hosting, by contrast, places your website on a physical server alongside many other sites. You share CPU, RAM, and storage with those other sites. The hosting company manages the hardware, and you manage your website through a control panel such as cPanel.
Infrastructure: Cloud vs Single Server
With regular shared hosting, your website lives on one physical server. If that server experiences a hardware failure, a power cut, or a cyber attack, your website goes offline. Most traditional host outages are brief and planned at low-traffic hours, but unplanned downtime does happen.
Cloudways runs on cloud infrastructure. Your site is distributed across multiple physical machines within the cloud provider’s network. If one machine has a problem, the cloud provider’s infrastructure redirects traffic to other machines automatically. This makes Cloudways significantly more resilient than a single shared server.
Scalability
Scaling traditional shared hosting is limited. You can upgrade to a higher-tier shared plan or move to a VPS, but this often means contacting support, waiting for migration, and paying in fixed tiers.
With Cloudways, scaling is instant. You move a slider in the dashboard to increase RAM, CPU cores, or storage, and the change applies within minutes. The same applies in reverse: if you need to scale down after a traffic spike, you can do that just as quickly. Costs update transparently in real time.
Backups
Most traditional hosting providers do offer backups, but they vary in frequency, retention, and how easy it is to restore from them. Some shared hosts run weekly backups; others charge extra for daily backups or restore requests.
Cloudways includes automated daily backups on all servers, with configurable retention periods and one-click restore. For a site where data integrity matters, this is a meaningful operational advantage.
Server Locations
Cloudways gives you access to more than 60 data centre locations across the five cloud providers it supports. You can place your server in the US, UK, Europe, Asia Pacific, or other regions based on where your audience is. Bringing the server closer to your visitors reduces latency and improves load times.
Traditional shared hosting providers typically offer one or a handful of server locations, and lower-cost plans often default to US-based servers. For sites with a global or EU-focused audience, this is a limiting factor.
Speed in Practice: Cloudways vs Shared Hosting
The performance gap between shared hosting and Cloudways depends heavily on your traffic volume and caching setup. On uncached page loads, shared hosting typically produces Time to First Byte (TTFB) in the 400-800ms range for a standard WordPress site. Cloudways with Varnish enabled typically delivers TTFB below 200ms on cached responses, dropping to under 50ms on warm cache hits.
For low-traffic sites with good caching, the real-world difference is smaller. A well-tuned shared host can serve a cached WordPress site quickly. The gap widens when traffic spikes: shared hosting throttles resources aggressively under load, while Cloudways absorbs traffic spikes because your server resources are dedicated.
WooCommerce and membership sites produce more database queries per request than content sites. On shared hosting, these extra queries compete with other tenants on the same server. Cloudways isolates your database entirely, which removes that bottleneck.
Pricing
Regular shared hosting is cheaper at entry level. Plans typically start from $2-5 a month. These plans come with resource limits that can affect performance as your site grows.
Cloudways starts from around $11 a month for a basic DigitalOcean server. The price covers managed hosting, automated backups, caching, and the full Cloudways feature set. As you scale resources, the monthly cost increases, but pricing is pay-as-you-go: you only pay for what you use. For growing sites, this often works out competitive with premium shared hosting plans.
What Cloudways Doesn’t Include
Before making the switch, it is worth knowing what Cloudways leaves out that most shared hosts bundle in.
- Email hosting: Cloudways has no email servers. If you need business email at your domain (e.g. [email protected]), you need a separate provider such as Google Workspace ($6/month per user) or Zoho Mail (free tier available). This is the most common surprise for people moving from shared hosting.
- Domain registration: You cannot register or transfer a domain through Cloudways. You need a registrar such as Namecheap, GoDaddy, or Google Domains, and then point the DNS to your Cloudways server.
- Phone support: Cloudways offers live chat and ticket support, but no phone line. If phone support matters to you, traditional hosts like Bluehost and InMotion have it.
- Staging environment (on some plans): Cloudways includes staging for all applications, but the workflow is less turnkey than on dedicated WordPress hosts like Kinsta or WP Engine.
Cloudways Standard vs Premium: How Cloudways Tiers Work
Within Cloudways, certain cloud providers offer more than one server tier. DigitalOcean is the most common example. When you select DigitalOcean on Cloudways, you choose between standard droplets (traditional SSD, lower cost) and premium droplets (NVMe SSD, faster random I/O). A standard DigitalOcean 1 GB plan starts at around $11/month on Cloudways; the premium NVMe equivalent starts at around $14/month for the same RAM allocation.
The practical difference matters for database-heavy WordPress sites. WooCommerce stores, membership sites, and sites with many active plugins generate frequent database reads and writes. NVMe storage handles these significantly faster than standard SSD. For a content site where the Varnish cache handles most traffic, the standard tier is usually sufficient. For an active WooCommerce store, upgrading from standard to premium often delivers a bigger speed improvement than adding more RAM.
Vultr and Linode offer similar high-performance tiers. AWS and GCP have their own instance hierarchies with analogous trade-offs between cost and single-core performance. The Cloudways dashboard shows these options clearly when creating a server, so you can compare before committing.
Who Should Choose Cloudways?
- Sites that have grown past shared hosting and are hitting performance limits
- E-commerce stores where downtime or slow load times have a direct revenue impact
- Developers managing multiple client sites who want server-level control without running their own infrastructure
- Anyone who wants automatic backups, server-level caching, and managed security without hiring a sysadmin
Who Should Stick With Regular Hosting?
- New sites with low traffic where the $2-5/month entry price matters more than raw performance
- Simple personal sites or blogs where shared hosting resources are more than sufficient
- Anyone who wants domain registration, email hosting, and web hosting bundled together
- People who want phone support and prefer calling over live chat
Final Word: Cloudways vs Regular Hosting
Cloudways is not simply better than regular hosting. It is suited to a different type of site. If you want low cost, bundled email, phone support, and a simple setup, traditional shared hosting does the job. Our InMotion review covers one of the better-supported US shared options if you want a direct comparison.
If you want cloud infrastructure, instant scalability, automated daily backups, and server-level caching from $11/month, Cloudways is worth the extra cost and the loss of email bundling. For a full breakdown of features and pricing, see our Cloudways review.
