Comparison — from the record, read 2026-09-06
Cloudways vs DigitalOcean
Both ladders below were read from the vendors’ own pricing pages, in this market, on the dates shown. Nothing is converted: what you see is what each page showed a reader here.
What each one is
Cloudwayssite ↗pricing ↗
Managed cloud hosting that runs your site on infrastructure from providers like DigitalOcean or AWS without you administering the server. Paid plans start at $11/mo (Micro (Standard)); no free plan is published. The ladder we hold runs 8 paid tiers, topping out at $99/mo (Large (Premium)).
DigitalOceansite ↗pricing ↗
Cloud infrastructure aimed at developers and small teams, priced simply against the larger clouds. Paid plans start at $4/mo (Droplets); a free plan exists. The ladder we hold runs 7 paid tiers, topping out at $15/mo (Managed Databases).
The two ladders
Cloudwayssite ↗pricing ↗
read 2026-08-27 · USD
| Plan | Price | What the page says |
|---|---|---|
| Micro (Standard) | $11/mo | Unlimited websites. Suitable for personal websites and simple blogs. |
| Small (Standard) | $24/mo | Unlimited websites. Growing businesses and moderate traffic. |
| Medium (Standard) | $46/mo | Unlimited websites. Marked 'Most Popular' on the page. More demanding sites with higher traffic. |
| Large (Standard) | $88/mo | Unlimited websites. E-commerce and resource-intensive applications. |
| Micro (Premium) | $14/mo | Unlimited websites |
| Small (Premium) | $28/mo | Unlimited websites |
| Medium (Premium) | $54/mo | Unlimited websites |
| Large (Premium) | $99/mo | Unlimited websites |
DigitalOceansite ↗pricing ↗
read 2026-09-06 · USD
| Plan | Price | What the page says |
|---|---|---|
| Droplets | $4/mo | 'Starting at $4 /month'. Per-second billing with a 60-second minimum, 'or $0.01, whichever is higher'. |
| Kubernetes | $12/mo | 'Starting at $12 /month'. Managed Kubernetes. |
| App Platform | Free | 'Starting at $0 /month'. Fully-managed infrastructure. |
| Functions | Free | 'Starting at $0 /month'. Serverless computing. |
| Managed Databases | $15/mo | 'Starting at $15 /month'. |
| Cloudways Managed Hosting | $11/mo | 'Starting at $11 /month'. |
| Spaces (object storage) | $5/mo | 'Starting at $5 /month'. |
| Volumes (block storage) | $10/mo | 'Starting at $10 /month'. |
| Network File Storage | Custom | 'Starting at $0.15 /per GiB/month'. |
| Load Balancers | $12/mo | 'Starting at $12 /month'. |
| Container Registry | Free | 'Starting at $0 /month'. |
| Virtual Private Cloud | Free | 'Starting at $0 /month'. |
| Uptime monitoring | Free | 'Starting at $0 /month'. |
| Support Plans | Free | 'Starting at $0 /month'. Unlimited tickets on the free tier. |
| GPU Droplets | Custom | 'Starting at $1.91 /GPU/hour* — based on multi-month contractual commitment. On-demand pricing from $0.76 /GPU/hour.' |
| AI/ML Inference | Custom | 'Starting at $0.05 /M tokens'. |
Where they differ
- Cheapest way in: DigitalOcean at $4/mo, against Cloudways at $11/mo. That is the entry price in this market on the dates shown, not a judgement about which suits you.
- Free plans: only DigitalOcean publishes one — a plan priced at zero, not a trial.
- How far each ladder goes: Cloudways tops out at $99/mo, DigitalOcean at $15/mo. A deeper ladder is not a worse deal — it is a bill that keeps climbing if you keep growing.
How to choose in this category
- Match the tier to the sites and storage you actually use — the levels here divide on resources, not features.
- Introductory terms in this set run one to four years; a lower monthly figure often buys a longer lock-in.
- Every row links the host’s own pricing page. Open it and read the renewal line before you commit to a term.
Both ladders were read from the vendors’ own pricing pages as shown to a eurozone reader (read from Germany), on the dates beside each table. Nothing here is converted from another market and nothing is ordered by commission. Some links are affiliate links; they earn us a commission and change no number.
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