Cloudways

Cloudways is server management software rather than a hosting service in its own right: it provisions virtual machines on five infrastructure providers — DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode, AWS and Google Cloud — and puts its own control panel over them. Billing is pay-as-you-go by the hour and invoiced in arrears, with a short trial ahead of it.

Because the servers sit on other providers’ hardware, the locations on offer are whatever those providers operate, so the geography of a Cloudways account is decided upstream. It was acquired by DigitalOcean in 2022. WordPress hosting is a separately marketed product line.

Worth knowing

The machine and the management layer arrive on one invoice. That is unusual for this category — most panels are billed separately from the server they run on — and it means the cost of the panel itself is not separable from the cost of the compute underneath it.