About Cloudways

Cloudways, now part of DigitalOcean, sells managed hosting on top of other companies' cloud infrastructure, and a discount code is genuinely useful here because the pricing is monthly and ongoing rather than a one-off purchase.

What "managed cloud hosting" means

Ordinary shared hosting puts your site on a server with hundreds of others for a few pounds a month. Renting a raw cloud server gives you the whole machine and the whole job of running it. Cloudways sits between the two: you choose a cloud provider and a server size, and the platform handles provisioning, the web stack, caching, backups, staging sites, SSL certificates and security patching through a control panel. You can run WordPress, WooCommerce, Magento, Laravel or plain PHP applications, several to a server. There is also a more automated WordPress-only option that scales the server for you during traffic spikes.

Who it suits, and who it does not

This is aimed at agencies, developers and shops whose sites make money — where an hour of downtime costs more than a year of hosting. If you run one small brochure site that gets a few hundred visits a month, you are paying for headroom you will not use. If you have no interest in ever touching a server but need a site that survives a busy Friday, this is the trade being sold. Note what is not included: there is no email hosting on the platform, so mailboxes need a separate service, and domain registration happens elsewhere too.

Reading the price properly

The advertised figure is the server, billed monthly per hour of use. Add-ons are separate and stack up: premium support tiers, object storage and managed extras. The cheapest plan on one provider is not comparable to the same price on another, because the underlying machines differ. There is a free trial, which is the sensible way to test a real site under real traffic before committing, and migration of an existing site is usually offered free for a first site. Because billing is by the hour, an unused server left running still costs money — delete what you finish testing.

Signing up and using your code

Introductory codes are almost always for new accounts only, and they typically discount the first months rather than the ongoing rate, so look up the standard price you will pay afterwards before deciding. Apply the code during sign-up or in the platform's billing section, and confirm it appears on the invoice preview rather than assuming it registered. Take your own backups as well as the platform's, and put a reminder in the calendar for the day the promotional period ends.