hosting · comparison
Cloudways vs DigitalOcean: who does the ops, you or them?
verdict
Pick DigitalOcean if you're comfortable with SSH, want the cheapest possible bill, and enjoy owning your server. Pick Cloudways if you'd rather ship product than patch nginx — you pay roughly double for someone else to carry the pager.
This isn't really a hosting comparison — it's a question about how you want to spend your evenings. Cloudways runs managed servers on top of providers like DigitalOcean, AWS, and Google Cloud. So the hardware can literally be the same. What you're buying is the layer in between.
What you get with each
| DigitalOcean | Cloudways | |
|---|---|---|
| Entry price | ~$4–6/mo droplet | ~$11–14/mo (DO-backed plan) |
| Server updates | You, via SSH | Handled for you |
| Backups | Paid add-on or DIY | Built-in, scheduled |
| Stack setup | You install everything | PHP/WordPress/Laravel ready out of the box |
| New-user offer | Free credit for new accounts | Free trial, no card for trial |
The honest trade-off
I run raw servers because I like it and because at side-project scale, an hour of server maintenance a month is cheap. But I've watched plenty of solo founders lose whole weekends to a broken TLS renewal the night before a launch. If your product is a WordPress or PHP app and terminal time feels like a tax, Cloudways' markup buys real hours back.
If your app is a custom Node/Python/Go service, the calculus flips: Cloudways' managed stack is web-app shaped, and you'll fight it. Take the droplet.
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