There are meaningful differences between Cloudways and regular hosting packages, and knowing those differences will help you decide which is worth the cost for your site. Both options can host a WordPress website, but the underlying infrastructure, the management experience, and the performance ceiling are quite different.
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. 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.
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.
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. Cloudways does not include email or domain registration
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, and a simple setup, traditional shared hosting does the job (our InMotion review covers one of the better-supported US options). If you want cloud infrastructure, instant scalability, automated backups, and server-level performance, Cloudways is worth the additional monthly cost. For a full breakdown of features, pricing, and who it suits, see our Cloudways review. If you’re also wondering does Cloudways have a VPS and how it compares to traditional VPS hosting, we cover that in a separate guide. For help choosing between DigitalOcean, Vultr, AWS, and the other providers, see our guide on what hosting supplier to choose on Cloudways. For step-by-step setup guides and a full feature overview, see our Cloudways hosting guide. For the complete Cloudways speed optimisation stack including Varnish, Redis, and Cloudflare, see our Cloudways performance and speed guide. For teams currently on SiteGround who are ready to make the move, our SiteGround to Cloudways migration guide covers the full process including SiteGround-specific plugins and zero-downtime DNS. For a detailed comparison of what a typical shared host offers, the Hostinger hosting guide covers plans, hPanel, and the real renewal pricing picture. Once you are on Cloudways, the next practical step is to make Cloudways faster for WordPress by enabling Varnish, Redis, and a CDN. When something breaks, our guide on how to view Cloudways application logs shows exactly which log to open. Before any significant change, see how to back up a Cloudways application to create a restore point first. If your migration involves moving multiple sites to Cloudways, see our guide on hosting multiple websites on one Cloudways server, which covers resource monitoring, isolated client environments, and agency-specific setup.
