A developer cloud bought the managed layer that sat on top of it. Three years on, what the acquisition did to pricing, product and the case for using it.
Cloudways built a good business by solving one problem: people wanted VPS performance without VPS administration. You picked a server from DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode, AWS or Google, and Cloudways ran the stack on it — nginx, PHP, MySQL, Redis, Varnish, SSL, backups, staging — with a control panel and no SSH required.
In 2022 DigitalOcean bought it, for a reported sum around $350 million. One of the underlying providers acquired the layer selling access to all of them.
Why DigitalOcean wanted it
DigitalOcean sells raw infrastructure to developers, a market with thin margins and hyperscaler competition. Cloudways sells a managed experience to agencies and site owners at a considerable premium over the same hardware. Buying it moved DigitalOcean up the value chain and brought a customer base that was already, in effect, reselling its servers.
What actually changed
The multi-cloud story got quieter. Cloudways still offers other providers, but DigitalOcean and Vultr are the promoted defaults and the pricing structure favours them. It would be surprising if a competitor's infrastructure were pushed hard by its owner.
Pricing tiers were reworked. Entry pricing rose and the plan structure was reorganised more than once. Long-standing customers noticed; new customers see a competitive but no longer startling price.
The product got more features and a slightly more corporate shape. Autonomous WordPress hosting, better staging, more monitoring — real improvements. Alongside them, the small-company responsiveness that early customers liked has diminished, which is the standard cost of acquisition.
What did not change: the core proposition. Managed stack, real monthly billing with no lock-in, staging and cloning, one-click SSL, server-level caching, no SSH required. That still works and still has no obvious equal.
Where Cloudways sits now
| Raw VPS | Cloudways | Managed WordPress | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Typical monthly | £4–10 | £9–40 | £20–100 |
| You manage | Everything | Application only | Content only |
| Support scope | Infrastructure | Platform, not your code | WordPress itself |
| Email included | No | No | Usually no |
| Billing | Hourly | Monthly, no contract | Monthly or annual |
It remains the honest middle. Cheaper than Kinsta or WP Engine, far less work than Hetzner, with London available through the DigitalOcean LON1 region. For agencies running client sites that need more than shared hosting, it is frequently the right economics.
The caveats worth stating
- No email hosting. Same as the premium managed hosts — budget separately.
- Support is scoped to the platform. They will fix the server; they will not debug your plugin conflict. That is the difference between this and Kinsta, and it is most of the price gap.
- You are paying twice, structurally. The server cost plus the management fee. That is the deal, and it is fair — just be clear it is not the same as buying a Droplet.
- Single-owner risk. A managed layer owned by one of the clouds it manages is a strategic position that could change again.
Three years on, the acquisition looks like most acquisitions in this industry: the product is better, the prices are higher, the company is less personal, and it is still the right answer for the specific problem it solves. Which is a fairly good outcome by hosting standards.
Published 2 April 2026. Prices and ownership change — check the comparison table for current figures, and the provider's own site before buying. No affiliate links anywhere on this site.