Cloudways Specs (2026): Five Clouds, the $11 Print vs Hourly, No Root, and Cloudflare as an Add-on

Cloudways is a managed layer on five clouds, not a root VPS. The Flexible DigitalOcean Standard Micro widget prints $11 a month next to $0.0357 an hour, those two figures do not match 720-hour arithmetic, and Cloudflare Enterprise on Flexible is an add-on. This page sets out those published limits for September 2026. This site measures nothing.

✓ Figures from Cloudways' own pages
✓ Monthly and hourly shown together
✓ No measurements

Short answer

  • Micro print: Flexible DigitalOcean Standard Micro, $11/mo and $0.0357/hr on the same card (2026-09-28). $0.0357 x 720 = $25.704, labelled arithmetic.
  • Root: Cloudways' own KB says it cannot give root. SSH and SFTP are listed on the DigitalOcean hosting page.
  • Cloudflare on Flexible: add-on from $4.99/Month, $4.99 per domain per month for 1-5 domains, 30-day add-on trial.
  • Cloudflare on Autonomous: the homepage prints Free Cloudflare Enterprise. That sentence is not on the Flexible block next to it.
  • Trial: 3-day trial, no credit card, on the homepage. AWS and GCE trials are listed as not available.

Table of Contents

  1. 1. Flexible vs Autonomous
  2. 2. DigitalOcean Standard Micro: $11 and $0.0357 on the same card
  3. 3. Standard SSD vs Premium NVMe
  4. 4. The other four clouds, as the pricing page prints them
  5. 5. No root; SSH and SFTP
  6. 6. Bandwidth overage by underlying provider
  7. 7. Trial, AWS/GCE, backups
  8. 8. What Cloudways does not publish on these pages
  9. 9. Measuring the parts that are not published
  10. FAQ
  11. Sources

An earlier version of this URL compared Cloudways to raw Vultr with CPU, disk, network and TTFB figures, including 50,000 IOPS and 940 Mbps, framed as this site's own tests. None of those figures were measured here, and they have been removed. The old name on this URL was ThunderStack; the live Flexible page now prints Lightning Stack.

1. Flexible vs Autonomous

The pricing page sells two products. Flexible is "customizable managed hosting for WordPress, Magento, Laravel & PHP apps" with a cloud picker. Autonomous is "fully managed hosting for WordPress" with autoscaling. Lightning Stack is called out on Flexible. This is the turn: Cloudflare Enterprise is included only where the Autonomous page says so.

ProductCloudflare Enterprise as printed
Flexible add-on$4.99/Month on the Cloudflare page; $4.99 per domain per month for 1-5 domains, down to $1.99 at 25 or more
AutonomousHomepage and Autonomous feature lists print Cloudflare Enterprise as included

The Cloudflare add-on page for Flexible also prints a 30-day free trial, 100 GB of bandwidth per domain, overage at $0.02/GB, and conversion to paid if the add-on is not cancelled. Edge Page Caching on that page is supported only for WordPress and WooCommerce. Autonomous Growth prints $99/Month and lists Cloudflare Enterprise CDN, Object Cache Pro + Relay, and free managed migration among included features; Scale is $199, Plus $399. Autonomous overage on that same page is $0.04/GB bandwidth and $1/GB disk. Do not copy Flexible's $4.99 add-on onto Autonomous, or Autonomous's "included" line onto Flexible.

2. DigitalOcean Standard Micro: $11 and $0.0357 on the same card

The Flexible widget, left on DigitalOcean Standard, prints a Micro card at $11 USD per month with "You pay $0.0357 hourly," 2 GB RAM, 1 vCPU, 50 GB storage, 2 TB transfer, 4 free AI Copilot credits, Lightning Stack, unlimited visits and unlimited websites. $0.0357 times 720 hours is $25.704. That is arithmetic on the printed hourly rate, using 720 as 30 times 24 hours, not a billed month. The monthly print and the hourly print are both on the card; this page does not pick one and hide the other.

Card as printedvCPURAMStorageTransferMonthlyHourly
DigitalOcean Standard Micro12 GB50 GB2 TB$11/mo$0.0357/hr
Flexible 8 GB (Medium card)48 GB160 GB5 TB$88/mo$0.1310/hr
Flexible 8XL24128 GB2560 GB11 TB$342/mo$1.0848/hr

The 8 GB Medium card prints $88 a month and $0.1310 hourly; $0.1310 times 720 is $94.32, again labelled arithmetic. The 8XL card prints $342 a month and $1.0848 hourly. A markdown fetch of the widget also repeated a small "$11" chip on those larger cards while the large price was $88 or $342. Do not treat $11 as the 8 GB or 8XL price. The inner HTML table on the managed DigitalOcean hosting page still lists mixed families, including DO1GB at $14 and DO2GB at $28. That table is a different ladder. This page does not merge it with the Flexible widget.

Object Cache Pro is described on the pricing page as free on a 4 GB server or above, "which usually costs $95 a month." Offsite backup storage is "$0.033/GB per server" on both the pricing page and the DigitalOcean hosting page.

3. Standard SSD vs Premium NVMe

On the same pricing widget, DigitalOcean Standard Droplets are "powered by 2nd generation or earlier Intel CPUs and standard SSD" with "networking speeds up to 2 Gbps." Premium Droplets are "powered by 2nd or 3rd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors and faster NVME storage" with "network throughput up to 10 Gbps." Those are vendor "up to" speeds, not measurements from this site. The DigitalOcean blurb also says SSD standard and NVMe premium across 9 locations, with Basic, General Purpose and CPU Optimized lineups.

4. The other four clouds, as the pricing page prints them

Flexible's cloud picker on 2026-09-28 named five: DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode, AWS and GoogleCloud. Vultr: 30 locations, standard servers with SSD, high frequency servers with NVMe. Linode: 25 datacenters. AWS: EC2, 28 datacenters, Standard and Compute Optimized. GCE: 28 datacenters, Standard, Compute Optimized and High Compute. Those are the blurbs. This page does not rank the five by performance.

DigitalOcean locations printed on the pricing page and the DigitalOcean hosting page: New York, Amsterdam, Bangalore, Frankfurt, London, San Francisco, Singapore, Sydney, Toronto. New York and San Francisco are the US names on that list. Cloudways is "a subsidiary of DigitalOcean, but the services of the companies are separate," per the DigitalOcean hosting FAQ, which also says Cloudways does not manage existing DigitalOcean droplets and that one free migration is included in every account.

5. No root; SSH and SFTP

Buyers who treat Cloudways as a VPS they can root will miss the platform's own answer. The help article "Why Can't I Have Root Access to My Server?" (live fetch bot-walled on 2026-09-28; wording from the public KB excerpt) states: "We can not give root access to your servers, as there is no way we can be sure that you will not break any of the tools and services that are core to our platform." The DigitalOcean hosting feature list still includes "SSH and SFTP Access," and the FAQ says you can manage files through SFTP or SSH with clients such as Filezilla or PuTTY, and that you do not need cPanel because Cloudways has its own frontend. SSH without root is the published access model.

The same FAQ says Cloudways "does not currently support applications based on .NET, Java, Python, or Ruby." The homepage also advertises a Node.js product. This page quotes the FAQ list and does not flatten the homepage into it.

6. Bandwidth overage by underlying provider

The bandwidth help article (same bot wall on the live URL; rates from the public KB excerpt dated with this page) says overage follows the underlying cloud. DigitalOcean: $0.02 per additional GB. Vultr: $0.01 per GB in North America and Western Europe, $0.025 in Singapore and Tokyo, $0.05 in Sydney. AWS: pay as you go, with a $0.12/GB example (100 GB x $0.12 = $12). GCE: $0.11 to $0.17 per GB, varies by region. Linode's overage rate was not in the excerpt read for this page, so it is not printed here. Autonomous's own overage, on the pricing page, is a different meter: $0.04/GB bandwidth and $1/GB disk.

7. Trial, AWS/GCE, backups

The homepage prints "3-day trial, no credit card needed." The DigitalOcean hosting page adds that the free trial is not available for Amazon Web Services or Google Compute Engine; you need to upgrade the account to launch those. AWS and GCE disk sizes are configurable and bandwidth is pay as you go on that same additional-information block. Backups, again, are $0.033/GB per server for offsite storage. PHP versions listed on the Autonomous feature block run 7.4 through 8.2.

8. What Cloudways does not publish on these pages

  • A 720-hour equivalent for $11. The hourly print is $0.0357. The arithmetic product is $25.704. Cloudways does not print that product on the card.
  • A promotional-duration sentence on the 2026-09-28 markdown fetch of pricing.php. This page does not invent one.
  • Root, a hypervisor name, or plan-disk IOPS.
  • A Linode overage dollar figure in the bandwidth excerpt read for this page.
  • A full merged ladder of every Flexible size. The widget cards above are the rows copied; the inner DO table is a different mix.

9. Measuring the parts that are not published

CPU model, disk IOPS and achievable throughput are measurable on a server you control. On Cloudways you do not get root, so those commands run only as far as the platform's SSH user allows. This site publishes none of those measurements. The benchmarks hub has the commands used on providers that sell a root VPS. The 3-day trial page is the published way to open a Flexible server without a card. The Cloudways review and Cloudways vs Vultr are separate URLs; this page does not take prices, markup claims or scores from them. WordPress application limits are also on the WordPress on VPS guide.

Before treating $11 as the bill, add the Cloudflare add-on if the site needs it on Flexible, and read the overage line for the cloud you pick. The 3-day trial is the cheap way to see the panel. Cloudways links on this page are plain official URLs, not affiliate links.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much is the cheapest Flexible plan?

The Flexible DigitalOcean Standard Micro card on the pricing page in September 2026 prints $11 USD per month, 2 GB RAM, 1 vCPU, 50 GB storage and 2 TB transfer.

What is the difference between the $11 monthly print and the hourly print?

They sit on the same Micro card and they do not reconcile under 720-hour arithmetic. The card prints "$11" as the monthly figure and "You pay $0.0357 hourly." $0.0357 times 720 hours (30 times 24) is $25.704. That product is arithmetic on the printed hourly rate, not a billed month and not a claim that Cloudways invoices $25.70. The 8 GB Medium card repeats the pattern: $88 a month next to $0.1310 hourly, and $0.1310 times 720 is $94.32. Read both numbers before treating $11 as the bill. This page does not invent a promotional-duration sentence that the 2026-09-28 fetch did not print.

Does Cloudways give root access?

The official help article is titled "Why Can't I Have Root Access to My Server?" The search-cached wording of that article, used because a live fetch of support.cloudways.com was bot-walled on 2026-09-28, is: "We can not give root access to your servers, as there is no way we can be sure that you will not break any of the tools and services that are core to our platform." The DigitalOcean hosting page still lists SSH and SFTP access. Root and SSH are not the same thing on this platform.

Is Cloudflare Enterprise included?

On Flexible, the Cloudflare page sells it as an add-on: $4.99/Month, 30-day free trial, then $4.99 per domain per month for 1-5 domains. Autonomous's homepage line is "Free Cloudflare Enterprise." Those are two product pages, not one included feature.

Is there a free trial?

The homepage in September 2026 prints "3-day trial, no credit card needed." The DigitalOcean hosting page says the free trial is not available for Amazon Web Services or Google Compute Engine; those clouds need an upgraded account.

Sources

Prices, specifications and quoted phrases are from Cloudways' own pages, read on 2026-09-28. The 720-hour products are arithmetic on the printed hourly rates and are labelled as such. Support-center quotes are from public KB excerpts because live fetches of support.cloudways.com were bot-walled the same day. This site publishes no measurements. Cloudways links on this page are plain links, not affiliate links.