Cloudways is powerful for developers and agencies, but complex for everyone else.
Cloudways is a strong choice for technical teams that want infrastructure flexibility. The most common reasons for leaving are complexity, variable billing from bandwidth overages, and the need to make cloud provider decisions that most businesses do not want to think about. These alternatives offer fully managed WordPress at flat, predictable rates without infrastructure decisions.
Cloudways attracts technical users and agencies because of its cloud flexibility and pay-as-you-go model. The reasons people leave are almost always about the operational overhead it creates. Selecting a cloud provider, choosing a server size, understanding bandwidth billing, and managing the platform's infrastructure layer all require a level of familiarity with cloud hosting that non-technical business owners typically do not have and do not want to develop. What starts as a flexible setup can become a maintenance task that takes time away from the business.
The billing model is the other friction point. Cloudways's base server price is straightforward, but bandwidth overages are billed separately and are harder to predict month-to-month. For a site with steady traffic, the total cost is predictable. For sites with variable traffic — seasonal businesses, content sites with occasional viral posts — a high-bandwidth month can produce a bill that is significantly higher than expected. Many users would trade the flexibility for a single flat monthly charge that covers everything.
If the infrastructure decision-making is the problem, look for providers that make the hosting fully managed with no cloud provider selection required. The trade-off is less customisation: you cannot choose between DigitalOcean and AWS, and you typically cannot scale server sizes on demand. For most businesses with a single or small number of WordPress sites, that flexibility was not being used anyway.
If the billing model is the problem, look for flat-rate pricing with no bandwidth overages and no variable components. Some alternatives use visitor limits rather than bandwidth caps, which creates a different kind of uncertainty. Providers with truly flat pricing — one price, everything included — solve both the billing predictability issue and the administrative overhead of monitoring resource consumption.
Google Cloud-backed managed hosting — simpler than Cloudways, but with intro pricing and visitor limits.
SiteGround runs on Google Cloud and makes hosting decisions for you — you pick a plan, not a cloud provider. The Site Tools dashboard is accessible for non-technical users and the support quality is one of the best in the industry. Daily backups are included on all plans. For Cloudways users who primarily used DigitalOcean or Google Cloud infrastructure and want something with less management overhead, SiteGround offers comparable infrastructure quality with a fully managed experience. The intro pricing of $2.99/month rises to around $17.99/month on renewal, and the StartUp plan has a 10,000 monthly visit limit.
Best for: Non-technical teams wanting managed Google Cloud infrastructure without any server decisions
Premium Google Cloud WordPress with flat pricing and no bandwidth billing — but expensive.
Kinsta offers premium managed WordPress on Google Cloud with truly flat pricing: no bandwidth overages, no infrastructure decisions, and no renewal hikes. The Starter plan at $35/month includes 25,000 monthly visits, daily backups, staging, and the well-regarded MyKinsta dashboard. For Cloudways users who want to stop managing infrastructure and are willing to pay more for a fully managed experience, Kinsta is one of the cleanest transitions. The visit limit is a meaningful downgrade from Cloudways's unlimited model, and the price is higher than most Cloudways configurations.
Best for: Technical teams wanting fully managed premium WordPress without any cloud infrastructure responsibility
Enterprise WordPress with Cloudflare CDN — flat pricing but with visitor caps and overage billing.
WP Engine uses flat monthly pricing with no bandwidth billing, which solves the Cloudways variable billing issue. Cloudflare Enterprise CDN, Git deployment, DevKit, and SSH are all included. The Growth plan at $20/month has a 25,000 monthly visit cap with overage charges — which reintroduces a variable billing element that Cloudways users may be trying to escape. For agencies and development teams that used Cloudways specifically for the developer tooling, WP Engine is a reasonable like-for-like at a flat price, with the caveat about visitor cap overages.
Best for: Development teams wanting enterprise WordPress tooling without infrastructure management
The cheapest entry point — shared hosting, not managed WordPress.
Hostinger is considerably simpler than Cloudways and considerably cheaper. There are no cloud provider decisions, no bandwidth to monitor, and the hPanel dashboard is straightforward. The trade-off is infrastructure quality: Hostinger is shared hosting, not dedicated cloud infrastructure. Your site shares resources with other accounts, which is a step back from Cloudways's dedicated server model. For businesses that used the lowest-tier Cloudways plan primarily for simplicity rather than performance, Hostinger can cover basic needs. For anyone who relied on Cloudways for consistent WordPress performance, Hostinger will be a noticeable downgrade.
Best for: Very basic sites that only need simplicity and the lowest possible cost
UK-based fully managed WordPress at £5.99/month — flat-rate, no bandwidth billing, no infrastructure decisions.
Arcadia solves both Cloudways pain points: there are no infrastructure decisions to make and no variable billing components. One price covers everything — no bandwidth overages, no visitor caps, no add-on charges. Each site runs in an isolated environment with dedicated vCPU and RAM, which gives performance comparable to a Cloudways DigitalOcean entry-tier server without the configuration overhead. The platform is UK-based and GDPR-focused. Plans start at £5.99/month with no long-term contracts. For Cloudways users who want isolated per-site resources and predictable billing without managing cloud infrastructure, Arcadia is the most direct simplification.
Best for: UK and EU businesses wanting isolated managed WordPress at a single flat monthly price with no complexity
Cloudways requires you to make infrastructure decisions that most hosted WordPress providers handle for you: which cloud provider, which server size, which region. For technical teams, this flexibility is the point. For non-technical users or businesses without dedicated DevOps, it is overhead. Bandwidth overages are also billed separately, which adds a variable component to the monthly cost that can be difficult to predict. Alternatives like Arcadia eliminate both issues with a fully managed, flat-rate approach.
Cloudways includes a bandwidth allowance based on the server plan. The DigitalOcean 1 GB entry plan includes 1 TB per month. Exceeding the allowance results in additional charges billed at the cloud provider's rate. For most sites with moderate traffic, the 1 TB allowance is more than sufficient. For sites with high media consumption or traffic spikes, the overage cost can be significant. Arcadia charges a single flat monthly price with no bandwidth billing.
Yes, for non-technical users. Arcadia is fully managed: you do not choose a cloud provider, configure a server size, or manage infrastructure. The Arcadia dashboard focuses on WordPress-specific tasks — staging, backups, SSL, and WordPress management. Cloudways is excellent for technical teams that want infrastructure control, but that flexibility adds complexity for users who do not need it. If you want WordPress to run reliably without server management, Arcadia is the simpler option.
For technical teams that want to move away from managing infrastructure without losing performance quality, Kinsta is a strong alternative. Fully managed Google Cloud infrastructure, no bandwidth billing, and a well-designed dashboard make it a cleaner experience than Cloudways. The trade-offs are cost — $35/month versus $14/month for Cloudways's entry tier — and visitor limits on the Starter plan. Kinsta is a good Cloudways alternative for teams willing to pay more for a truly hands-off experience.
It depends on which Cloudways plan you were on. A Cloudways DigitalOcean 1 GB server is a dedicated resource allocation. Arcadia provides similar isolated per-site resources at £5.99/month, with comparable performance for UK and EU audiences without the infrastructure management overhead. SiteGround and Kinsta run on Google Cloud, which can match or exceed DigitalOcean performance. Hostinger runs shared infrastructure and will generally underperform a Cloudways server for sites with consistent traffic.
No. Cloudways uses pay-as-you-go billing with no introductory rates or renewal increases. The server cost stays consistent from month to month unless you change the server size. The variable element is bandwidth overages, not a time-based pricing change. This makes Cloudways more transparent than SiteGround or Hostinger in one respect, while less predictable than flat-rate providers in another.
For agencies managing multiple client sites, Cloudways itself is often the best value because you can host many sites on a single server and reduce the per-site cost. If you are moving away from Cloudways specifically, WP Engine and Kinsta both have agency plans with team collaboration features and multi-site management. For smaller agencies running fewer than five sites, Arcadia's flat-rate per-site pricing is simpler and less expensive than agency-tier plans from the premium providers.
No visitor limits. No renewal price hikes. No contracts. UK-based.