Head-to-head
Cloudways vs DigitalOcean
Two hosts, side by side. Pricing, features, and the trade-offs that actually matter.
Cloudways from $11/mo
Managed cloud hosting on top of DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode, AWS and GCP — built for WordPress agencies.
HQ MT · founded 2009
DigitalOcean from $6/mo
The original developer-friendly VPS — now with a full PaaS layer on top.
HQ US · founded 2011
Quick verdict
Cheapest: DigitalOcean wins on entry price ($6/mo vs $11/mo).
More features: DigitalOcean ships more first-party platform features out of the box.
Region: Cloudways is HQ'd in MT; DigitalOcean in US.
Cheapest plans, side by side
| Cloudways | DigitalOcean | |
|---|---|---|
| Entry plan | DO 2 GB | Basic 1 GB |
| Price | $11/mo | $6/mo |
| CPU | 1 vCPU | 1 vCPU (shared) |
| RAM | 2 GB | 1 GB |
| Disk | 50 GB | 25 GB |
| Bandwidth | 2 TB | 1 TB |
Feature parity
| Cloudways | DigitalOcean | |
|---|---|---|
| Managed Postgres | × | ✓ |
| Managed Redis | × | ✓ |
| Object storage | × | ✓ |
| One-click apps | ✓ | ✓ |
| Private network | ✓ | ✓ |
| IPv6 | ✓ | ✓ |
| DDoS protection | ✓ | ✓ |
| Snapshots | ✓ | ✓ |
| Public API | ✓ | ✓ |
| Terraform | × | ✓ |
Cloudways pros
- +One dashboard across DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode, AWS and GCP — switch underlying clouds without rebuilding
- +Tuned LAMP/LEMP "Lightning Stack" (NGINX + PHP-FPM + Redis + Varnish) is genuinely fast for WordPress / Magento / Laravel
- +24/7 human support with ~90s first-response, plus free site migrations
Cloudways cons
- −Significant markup vs. running the same DO/Vultr droplet directly — you pay for the management layer
- −PHP-centric: no first-class Node, Python, Ruby, or Go runtimes
- −No managed Postgres or Redis as separate services — only what ships with the stack
DigitalOcean pros
- +Best documentation in the industry by a wide margin
- +Managed Postgres, MySQL, Redis, Mongo, Kafka — all first-party
- +App Platform (Heroku-style git push) on the same dashboard as droplets
DigitalOcean cons
- −Roughly 2× the price of Hetzner for equivalent compute
- −Bandwidth overage charges hit hard once you exceed the bundled allotment
- −Some regions (Sydney, Bangalore) have noticeably slower disk than NYC/AMS