Cloudways Pricing (2026): Plans, Add-Ons and Real Monthly Costs

Cloudways Pricing at a Glance

Cloudways Flexible plans start from $14 a month as shown by default on Cloudways' pricing page; prices vary by cloud provider and server type. You pay per server, not per website, and each server can host unlimited websites with unlimited visits. Billing is hourly, invoiced monthly, with no contract. Cloudways Autonomous, the autoscaling WordPress product, starts at $99 a month for one website.

The short version: Cloudways is inexpensive for what you get on the server itself, and the final bill depends on which optional add-ons you need. This guide walks through every line item so you can estimate your real monthly cost.

How Cloudways Billing Works

Cloudways uses pay-as-you-go pricing. Each plan shows both a monthly price and an hourly rate, and you are billed for the hours your servers run, with a single monthly invoice. There is no long-term commitment, so you can resize, add or delete servers at any time. Listed prices exclude applicable taxes.

The price of a server depends on three choices you make when launching it:

• Cloud provider: DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode, AWS or Google Cloud.
• Server type: Basic, General Purpose, CPU Optimized, Standard or Premium, depending on the provider.
• Server size: RAM, vCPU, storage and transfer.

Because of this, the figures below are the defaults Cloudways shows on its pricing page, not the only prices available. Cloudways' pricing page lets you switch provider and server type to see the matching rate before you launch anything.

Cloudways Flexible Plans

Default prices shown on Cloudways' pricing page in October 2026. Prices exclude taxes and vary by provider and server type.

Cloudways describes Micro as suitable for personal websites and simple blogs, Small for growing businesses with moderate traffic, Medium for more demanding sites with higher traffic and Large for ecommerce stores and resource-intensive applications. All four include Lightning Stack, unlimited visits and unlimited websites.

View Cloudways Plans

What Is Included Free

A large part of Cloudways' value is what comes with every Flexible server at no extra charge:

As listed on Cloudways' pricing and home pages in October 2026.

WordPress users get the most from these inclusions. Cloudways lists the WordPress-specific tools on its WordPress hosting page.

Cloudways Add-On Prices

These optional services are where your bill can grow, so it pays to know them before you sign up:

As listed on Cloudways' pricing page in October 2026.

Two common costs are not on that list at all: Cloudways does not include a free domain name, and email is not included by default.

Offsite Backup Storage Costs

Cloudways charges $0.033 per GB per server for offsite backup storage. The cost scales with how much backup data you keep. For example, if your backups take up 50 GB, that works out to about $1.65 a month; 100 GB is about $3.30. For most single sites this is a small line item, but agencies with many large sites should factor it in.

Cloudways Autonomous Pricing

Autonomous is billed differently. Instead of choosing a server size, you pick a plan with a baseline environment that autoscales.

As listed by Cloudways in October 2026. The Scale plan costs $199/mo for sites with consistent traffic growth.

Overages are easy to estimate. Using 200 GB of bandwidth on Growth means 50 GB over the allowance, or $2. Needing 30 GB of disk adds 10 GB at $1 each, or $10. Autonomous also has a 3-day free trial.

Flexible vs Autonomous: Which Costs Less?

For a single WordPress site with steady traffic, Flexible is usually the cheaper route. A Large Flexible server costs the same $99 a month as Autonomous Growth but can host unlimited sites, while a Micro or Small server covers most blogs and business sites for $14 to $28 a month.

Autonomous earns its price when traffic is unpredictable. It bundles Cloudflare Enterprise CDN, Object Cache Pro with Relay and a managed migration, and it scales out automatically during a sale or course launch instead of making you resize a server. If your site regularly sees sudden spikes in concurrent visitors, the convenience can outweigh the higher base price. A practical path is to start on Flexible and consider Autonomous if spikes become routine.

Example Monthly Cost Scenarios

These examples use the default Flexible prices above and list prices for add-ons. They exclude taxes, offsite backup storage and email, and your actual price will change with provider and server type.

Calculated from Cloudways' listed prices in October 2026. Assumes one domain on Cloudflare Enterprise and one app on Malware Protection for the store.

Cloudways Cost vs Kinsta and ScalaHosting

Comparing prices only makes sense alongside what each plan includes, because each host bundles services differently.

As listed by each provider in October 2026.

Cloudways usually costs less per site when you host many sites on one server, as the $84 agency example shows next to Kinsta's WP 10 plan. Kinsta's higher price covers services Cloudways sells separately, including malware removal, a Cloudflare-powered CDN and unlimited expert migrations; see our Kinsta pricing guide for the full breakdown. ScalaHosting's first-term price on Build #1 is lower than Cloudways Medium with the same 4 GB of RAM, while its renewal price is close to Medium's monthly price; our ScalaHosting pricing guide covers its terms.

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How to Pay Less on Cloudways

• Start small and scale up. Vertical scaling lets you begin on Micro or Small and resize when traffic grows.
• Consolidate sites. You pay per server, so grouping several small sites on one server lowers the cost per site.
• Compare providers and server types. The same RAM and CPU can cost different amounts depending on the cloud and server type you choose.
• Only add what you need. Cloudflare Enterprise, Site Manager and Malware Protection are priced per domain or per app, so apply them where they matter most.
• Watch backup storage. Trim old offsite backups you no longer need.
• Use the free trial. The 3-day trial lets you size a server before paying.

For current offers across hosts, see our web hosting deals page.

Is Cloudways Worth the Price?

For developers, agencies, stores and anyone running several sites, Cloudways offers strong value: dedicated cloud resources, a tuned stack, free Redis, staging and a server-level firewall, all billed hourly with no contract. The base price stays low because extras such as malware removal, Cloudflare Enterprise and email are optional. If you would rather pay one all-inclusive price for WordPress, Kinsta is our #1 overall pick in the best WordPress hosting guide. For the full feature picture, read our Cloudways review, or compare options in our Cloudways alternatives guide.

Cloudways Pricing FAQs

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