Cloudways is not worth the cost. Look at their top pricing tier for Digital Ocean. An 8GB 4 core VPS for $80 a month?! I pay that for a 16GB 6 core VPS directly with DO. All of these things they list as features:
- Free SSL - You can do this yourself with Let'sEncrypt/certbot, really simple CLI.
- CDN Add-on - Add-on? By the grey language I'm assuming they mean you pay for this separately? So you may as well buy a Litespeed license for $30 a month and have instant access to QUIC.cloud FREE CDN. But bonus round - you also get to integrate Wordpress Litespeed Cache plugin for free. Server level caching designed for Wordpress, at no extra cost.
- Free Migration - From where? To where? Not difficult, most panels have access to migration tools these days, if you're not managing your VPS with a panel, why not?
- Unlimited Application Installation - No limits on your own VPS, this is obvious.
- Team Management - ???? Add people to you panel? Easily done on Plesk/cPanel/Webmin, etc
- Dedicated Firewalls - ConfigServer, ufw, selinux, IPtables whatever you want to use, you aren't limited on your own VPS.
- 24/7 Real-time Monitoring - Easily integrated, there's some great open-source software out there that will let you do this. But most panels have this built in.
- Automated Backups - Again, using something like cPanel you can automate your own backups, Plesk auto backup to external storage, it's all good baby.
- Staging Environment - Install Softaculous for like $12 A YEAR, comes with staging environments for any of their supported software. Wordpress 100%
- Optimized With Advanced Caches - Not sure what this is supposed to mean, but we have already covered "advanced caches" but you can also install stuff like Redis and Memcached for free.
- Auto Healing - If you really need this, most people won't, then you can integrate it with something like https://autoscaler.cloud/ but natively Digital Ocean doesn't support this, so this must be a Cloudways feature. They're probably using autoscaler lol.
- Regular Security Patching - Easily achieved with KernelCare or something like Ubuntu Livepatch.
- HTTP/2 Enabled Servers - Fairly easy to set up on your own. Plus, LiteSpeed Web Server supports HTTP/2 out of the box. It also supports HTTP/3

- SSH and SFTP Access - Not sure how this is a feature, it's practically a necessity on a VPS.
Just put some effort into setting up your own VPS and you won't look back, plus you get to learn something new! I'm not sure
@Admin will allow this, but if it isn't allowed please remove the following link and
@SecNam PM me instead.
If you want to try Digital Ocean free for 60 days,
here's $100 credit.
EDIT: Also WOW, just looked at Cloudways AWS pricing and it's EXTORTIONATE in comparison to running stuff yourself. Unbelievable.