Cloudways vs Vultr: same silicon, different job
Cloudways will run your site on Vultr hardware you could have rented direct, for a monthly premium. What that premium buys, what it leaves on your plate with raw Vultr, and which kind of operator should pick which.
Buy Vultr if you want a server and enjoy running it. Buy Cloudways, on Vultr hardware if you like, when the sites matter more than the systems work behind them.
By Sam Moreton
First-hand + researched
Which one for your use case
| Use case | Pick |
|---|---|
| Developers who want root and enjoy the operations work | Vultr |
| Agencies and freelancers maintaining client WordPress sites | Cloudways |
| Experiments and short-lived environments billed by the hour | Vultr |
| Business sites needing staging, backups and scaling as routine buttons | Cloudways |
| Buyers who want Vultr specifically without the sysadmin shift | Cloudways running on Vultr infrastructure |
Testing overlap: Cloudways observations drawn from ongoing production use of multiple servers; the Vultr side is researched from public product documentation, with no side-by-side benchmark run for this pair.
There is a wrinkle at the centre of this comparison that makes it more honest than most. Cloudways will sell you a Vultr server. Vultr is one of the infrastructure providers named on Cloudways' own pages, so for a monthly premium you can have the managed layer sitting on top of a machine you could have bought direct. That premium is the whole question, and it deserves a straight answer instead of a feature table.
My answer, after years of running production sites on Cloudways and years of running my own boxes before that: buy Vultr if you want a server, buy Cloudways if what you want is a set of working websites. If a 3am alert about a fallen database stirs professional curiosity in you, stay raw. If it stirs dread, pay the premium and sleep.
What Vultr is
Vultr sells raw compute, simply, in more locations than almost anyone. Spin up an instance, get root in about a minute, pay by the hour. The range runs from tiny virtual machines through high-frequency and optimised tiers to bare metal, with block storage, object storage and load balancers available alongside. Managed means the hardware and the hypervisor. Everything above that line belongs to you: the operating system, the patching, the web server, the database, and the alert at 3am.
None of that is a criticism. Vultr is one of the best products in its category, which is how it built a developer following and why Cloudways offers it as an underlying cloud. It is a component, and components assume an operator.
The work root buys you
The setup is a weekend. Install, harden, configure Nginx and PHP-FPM, tune the database, arrange TLS renewals, set up a firewall, put backups somewhere off the box, wire up monitoring. Then the standing tax begins: security patches that wait for nobody, PHP upgrades that break plugins, certificate renewals that fail quietly, a database that grows past its defaults, and backups that need testing before the night you need one. Staging, if you want it, is a system you design and maintain yourself.
I ran arrangements like this for years and was proud of some of them. The work is real, it is occasional more than constant, and it lands at inconvenient hours. Some people enjoy it, and for them the raw server is the better product. I stopped enjoying it, which is how I ended up with a Cloudways bill worth writing about.
What the Cloudways premium buys
On the same Vultr hardware, the Flexible plans give you the panel instead of the shell. Git deploys with one-click rollback. Staging and cloning on every plan. Vertical scaling that keeps your configuration when you resize. Backups sit offsite and restore with one click, metered at $0.033 per GB per server in October 2026 pricing, a meter that has never registered on my own bill. Their engineers move your first site in at no charge, whatever host it comes from, and the smallest server on the menu was $14 a month carrying as many sites as it fit. Cloudflare Enterprise joins as a per domain add-on at $4.99 monthly.
In practice the premium buys the disappearance of a chore list. Patching, firewalling, certificates and backup plumbing move behind the panel, and what is left is the work you actually get paid for: building and maintaining sites.
Where Vultr wins
Price, at every size, and by a wide enough margin that the difference is a line item. A raw instance with enough RAM for several WordPress sites costs materially less than the equivalent Cloudways server, because the management layer is the thing you are declining to buy.
Root, which Cloudways withholds by default. If your work needs kernel settings, custom daemons or a PHP extension the panel does not expose, the abstraction will eventually annoy you in ways the panel cannot fix.
Hourly billing and API-first provisioning make Vultr the natural home for experiments, CI runners and throwaway environments. A box spun up for an afternoon and destroyed the same evening is the product working as intended.
Product breadth, too. Bare metal, object storage, load balancers you configure yourself. If infrastructure is your trade, this is a proper toolbox.
The option people forget
Because Vultr is one of Cloudways' underlying providers, you can have both: the Cloudways panel running on Vultr hardware, in the regions Vultr covers. For the buyer who wants Vultr's network and speed without the sysadmin shift, this is the configuration that ends the argument. It is also my usual answer when someone asks which underlying cloud to pick on Cloudways and already has Vultr habits.
Who should pick which
A solo developer who enjoys operations and wants full control should buy Vultr direct and will be happy. An agency or freelancer maintaining client sites should be on Cloudways, where staging and cloning change the daily work. Anything experimental or ephemeral belongs on raw Vultr, billed by the hour and destroyed without ceremony. A business site that must stay up and has no sysadmin on staff belongs behind the managed layer, on infrastructure nobody there has to think about.
Before deciding, run your own numbers through the VPS versus managed TCO calculator. The answer flips at a specific value of your time, and that value is different for everyone. For the long version of what living in the Cloudways panel is like, the Cloudways review covers it, drawbacks included.
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