Cloud Ways Review 2026. Is cloudways.com good web hosting in Malta?

📄 Editorial Review

(3*) 🔧 Services: Web Hosting
🔃 This company is a reseller of Digital Ocean
Cloudways operates as a managed cloud hosting platform rather than a traditional shared hosting provider. Instead of renting space on their own servers, they sit on top of major cloud infrastructures – DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode / Akamai.com, AWS and Google Cloud – and provide a simplified control panel, performance stack and managed services around them. This makes Cloudways an option for agencies, ecommerce businesses, developers and serious bloggers who want the power of cloud servers without running Linux boxes themselves.

The company started in 2012, co-founded by Aaqib Gadit and Pere Hospital, and later became part of DigitalOcean in 2022. It originally grew out of Malta and now runs under its US-based parent with a distributed team across more than twenty countries. The platform today powers a large number of websites and sits firmly in the managed cloud and premium WordPress hosting segment rather than the low-cost shared-hosting market.

Product portfolio and positioning

Cloudways groups its hosting into two main product lines:

• Cloudways Flexible – customizable managed hosting for WordPress, WooCommerce, Magento, Laravel, custom PHP apps and multi-site setups. Customers choose the underlying cloud provider and instance size (RAM, vCPU, SSD, bandwidth etc.), and Cloudways adds its management layer, monitoring, backups, security and performance stack (the newer Lightning Stack, built around NGINX, PHP-FPM, caching and Imunify360 firewall). In practice this behaves much more like managed VPS or managed cloud servers than classic shared hosting.
• Cloudways Autonomous – fully managed, Kubernetes-based, high-availability WordPress hosting built on Google Kubernetes Engine with integrated Cloudflare Enterprise, autoscaling and load balancing. This line is aimed at high-traffic WooCommerce stores, LMS platforms and media or event sites with big, spiky traffic where autoscaling and resilience matter more than manual control over server sizes.

On top of these core hosting lines there are several add-on and companion services:

• Cloudflare Enterprise CDN add-on for global caching, WAF and DDoS mitigation.
• SafeUpdates for automated WordPress core, plugin and theme updates with testing.
• Malware Protection Add-on for proactive scanning and cleanup.
• DNS Made Easy integration to accelerate DNS resolution.
• Client Billing & Reporting for agencies that resell hosting and need automated invoicing and white-label reports.
• Cloudways AI Copilot, an AI-assisted troubleshooting and monitoring layer that helps detect issues in the stack and suggests remediations.

In everyday use, Cloudways functions as a middle ground between doing everything on raw cloud infrastructure and paying for very high-end boutique WordPress hosting. It removes most sysadmin work – OS patching, basic security hardening, performance stack configuration, server monitoring, backups – while still letting users decide how much RAM/CPU/storage they need and which cloud region to use.

Typical use cases include:

• Agencies who manage dozens of client sites and want centralized management, staging and client billing.
• Online stores (especially WooCommerce) that need strong caching, integrated CDN, autoscaling options and good support.
• Developers who want an opinionated stack (SSH, Git, staging, multiple PHP versions) without building it from scratch.
• Growing SMB sites that have outgrown cheap shared hosting but do not want an in-house DevOps team.

It is less suitable for users who simply want a very cheap shared plan with bundled domain, email and cPanel, or for workloads that fall outside the PHP/WordPress/Laravel/Magento ecosystem.

💰 Price & Cost

Cloudways uses pay-as-you-go, post-paid billing with hourly metering and monthly invoices. Customers are billed in USD for the actual hours their servers or Autonomous apps run, and invoices are generated in arrears at the start of each month.

Cloudways Flexible pricing

On the Flexible side, pricing depends on the chosen cloud provider, server family and size. For a typical DigitalOcean-based setup (Standard or Premium Droplets), the range roughly looks like this:

• Entry level (Micro / Small) – around $11/month for a server with about 2 GB RAM, 1 vCPU, 50 GB SSD and 2 TB bandwidth, suitable for small WordPress sites and basic business sites.
• Mid-range (Medium and similar tiers) – around $88/month for configurations such as 8 GB RAM, 4 vCPUs, 160 GB SSD and 5 TB bandwidth, used for busier sites, agencies hosting multiple client projects, or more demanding stores.
• High-end (8XL and larger) – roughly $300–350/month for large servers with up to 128 GB RAM, 24 vCPUs, multi-terabyte SSD storage and double-digit TB bandwidth, geared toward resource-intensive applications and big ecommerce platforms.

The exact figures vary by provider (Vultr HF/NVMe, Linode, AWS EC2, Google Compute Engine) and region; AWS and GCE generally start at higher price points than DigitalOcean, Vultr or Linode. Off-site backups incur a small extra fee per GB, and bandwidth overages follow the rules of each underlying cloud provider.

Every Flexible plan includes the core platform features: the Lightning Stack, basic security, automated or on-demand backups, free Let’s Encrypt SSL, staging environments, application and server monitoring, and 24/7 chat/ticket support. Upsells include Cloudflare Enterprise, SafeUpdates, Malware Protection and the Advanced/Premium support tiers.

Cloudways Autonomous pricing

Cloudways Autonomous has its own WordPress-specific pricing grid with fixed monthly bundles:

• Free Trial / Small – a limited plan used as a trial or for very small sites (1 WordPress app, around 15 GB disk, 30k visits and 100 GB bandwidth).
• Growth – around $100/month for 1 high-availability WordPress site with 20 GB disk, 150 GB bandwidth, unmetered visits and 100 PHP workers per server.
• Scale – about $200/month with more baseline autoscale servers and higher bandwidth and disk allocations.
• Plus – around $400/month, tuned for large LMS platforms or big WooCommerce stores, with multiple autoscaling servers and up to 100 GB disk and 1 TB bandwidth in the base bundle.
• Enterprise – fully custom, negotiated with sales for clusters beyond the standard plans.

All Autonomous plans include true autoscaling, integrated Cloudflare Enterprise CDN, Redis, Object Cache Pro + Relay, built-in firewall and DDoS protection, staging and cloning, and 24/7 chat/ticket support. Additional disk, bandwidth and extra autoscaling hours are billed separately at clear per-GB and per-hour rates.

Trial, refunds and money-back

Instead of a classic 30-day money-back guarantee, Cloudways relies on:

• A 3-day free trial on Flexible (no credit card required) to test the platform and deploy real servers.
• Occasional promotional trial periods for Autonomous tied to specific offers.
• Post-billing with hourly metering, so customers pay for what they actually used in the previous month.

There is no traditional blanket money-back guarantee for past usage; the safety net is the free trial and gradual scaling rather than refunds.

Payment methods

Cloudways bills in US dollars and supports:

• Major credit and debit cards: Visa, MasterCard, American Express.
• PayPal, available once the account is upgraded from trial; PayPal payments are typically manual top-ups rather than fully automated recurring charges.
• The option to add funds to a prepaid wallet and let invoices auto-deduct from that balance, with the card as fallback.

Region-specific indirect taxes (VAT/GST) are added for certain countries such as Singapore, Australia, Canada, India and the USA, depending on local regulations.

🏢 Data Center

Cloudways does not operate its own physical data centers. Instead, it provides access to a large global footprint by partnering with cloud providers and exposing their regions through its platform.

For example, using DigitalOcean via Cloudways offers nine data center locations:
New York / Amsterdam / Bangalore / Frankfurt / London / San Francisco / Singapore / Sydney / Toronto

When Vultr, Linode, AWS or Google Cloud are selected, additional regions across North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific become available. The pricing and feature pages mention that Vultr covers around 30 locations, Linode around 25, and both AWS and Google Cloud offer dozens of regions each, giving broad geographic flexibility for latency-sensitive projects.

Cloudways layers its own stack on top of these providers: SSD or NVMe storage, an optimized web stack (Lightning Stack), Imunify360-based firewalls, Cloudflare Enterprise CDN (as an add-on or included with Autonomous), and automated backups. Combined with the underlying providers’ reliability, Cloudways sets an uptime expectation around 99.99%, especially for ecommerce and Autonomous workloads where high availability and load balancing are built in.

In practice, uptime and performance depend on the chosen provider, plan size, application design and add-on choices, but the platform clearly targets performance-critical and always-on WordPress and PHP applications rather than casual hobby sites.

✍️ Customer Support

Support is a key pillar of the service. All plans include 24/7/365 technical support, delivered primarily through:

• Live chat from inside the control panel for immediate assistance.
• A ticketing system for more complex issues.
• A comprehensive knowledge base and documentation library.

On top of the standard support included in every plan, there are Advanced and Premium support add-ons. These paid tiers add faster response times, more proactive monitoring and escalations, and higher-touch assistance, for example around performance tuning, complex migrations or critical incident handling. For businesses running mission-critical ecommerce or high-traffic sites, one of these higher support tiers can be worth budgeting for, especially when the cost of downtime is significant.

Cloudways also runs a partner program for agencies, webinars, a public roadmap and changelog, and maintains an active blog and resource section around WordPress, performance and ecommerce topics. For everyday users, this mix of support channels and educational content helps reduce the learning curve when moving from shared hosting to managed cloud.

🔨 Control Panel

A key differentiator is the proprietary Cloudways control panel. The platform does not use cPanel or Plesk; instead, it offers its own interface focused on managed cloud tasks:

• 1-click server and application launches for WordPress, WooCommerce, Magento, Laravel and generic PHP apps.
• Application-level controls (domain mapping, SSL, cron jobs, cache management, PHP version changes) separate from server-level controls (vertical scaling, service restarts, firewall options).
• Staging environments, with 1-click push/pull between staging and production.
• Automated and on-demand backups, restore options and off-site backup retention controls.
• Server and application monitoring, with metrics such as CPU, RAM, disk, response times and real-time indicators.
• Access via SSH/SFTP, Git deployment and integration with popular developer workflows.

For users coming from cPanel, there is a short adjustment period, because routine tasks (DNS, email, email forwarders) are not handled in the same way. DNS can be managed through Cloudways DNS or third-party DNS providers, and email is usually external (for example transactional email services or hosted email suites rather than classic "mailboxes on the web server"). On the other hand, users who mainly care about application performance, staging, backups and server operations often find the interface leaner and more focused than a generic shared-hosting panel.

🎯 Conclusion

Cloudways fills a very specific niche: it is not the cheapest way to put a basic site online, but it is a strong option for people and teams who have outgrown low-end shared hosting and want real cloud resources without hiring a full-time DevOps engineer.
Key strengths include:

• Managed cloud on top of multiple providers, with a wide choice of regions and server sizes.
• A modern stack (Lightning Stack, caching, SSL, Imunify360 firewall, optional Cloudflare Enterprise, Object Cache Pro, Redis) tuned for WordPress and PHP performance.
• The Autonomous line for autoscaling, high-availability, Cloudflare-integrated WordPress hosting, ideal for big WooCommerce or LMS projects.
• 24/7/365 support, plus higher-tier support options for businesses that need faster SLAs and more hand-holding.
• Transparent pay-as-you-go pricing, hourly metering and a free trial model that lets users test before committing.
• A control panel designed around developer and agency workflows (staging, multiple apps per server, Git, monitoring).

Potential drawbacks or trade-offs:

• No traditional 30-day money-back guarantee; the safety net is the free trial and pay-as-you-go billing rather than refunds.
• No classic shared hosting frills like bundled domain registration, simple built-in email hosting or cPanel; some users need to combine Cloudways with external DNS/email providers.
• No domain registration!
• Extra costs for add-ons (Cloudflare Enterprise, SafeUpdates, Malware Protection) and advanced support can push the total bill higher than the bare plan price.
• The platform assumes at least a basic understanding of how server sizes, regions and application performance relate; it is easier than raw cloud, but still more technical than a one-click shared host.

Cloudways operates as a subsidiary of DigitalOcean with origins in Malta and a distributed team across multiple countries. A conventional street-level mailing address is not published for customers, and the business is largely run as a remote-first organization.

Overall, Cloudways works well for agencies, developers and serious site owners who want reliable, high-performance hosting on top of big-name clouds, combined with practical tooling and support. It is less suited to absolute beginners wanting a very cheap shared plan, but for growing businesses in the WordPress and ecommerce ecosystem, it offers a realistic balance of control, convenience and scalability.

🌏 Server locations:

London San Francisco New York Amsterdam Frankfurt am Main Toronto Seattle Los Angeles Chicago Miami Paris Tokyo Sydney Seoul Mumbai Sao Paulo Iowa City Montreal Newark Fremont Dallas Atlanta Oregon Bangalore

📢 Special pages

• Contact us
• About us
• Terms of Service
• Knowledge base