AWS Lightsail vs Cloudways

AWS Lightsail is strongest for AWS ecosystem users. Cloudways is strongest for WordPress agencies. Here's how they stack up on price, uptime, and support.

Feature	AWS Lightsail	Cloudways
Starting price	$0.8/mo	$0.03/mo
Best for	AWS ecosystem users Predictable bundled pricing Windows workloads	WordPress agencies E-commerce (WooCommerce/Magento) Developers wanting managed infra without lock-in to one cloud
Stated uptime SLA	99.9%	99.99%
Storage	SSD	SSD
Regions	16	30
Managed Kubernetes	No	Yes
Support channels	AWS Support plans (separate from Lightsail), Community forums, Docs	Ticket, Live chat, Docs, Advanced Support (paid, $100/mo, 75% lifetime discount promo to $25/mo)
Compliance	SOC 2, GDPR, HIPAA eligible	GDPR
Hidden costs to watch for	Data transfer overage varies significantly by AWS region ($0.09-$0.132/GB) Windows bundles cost 70-90% more than equivalent Linux bundles	Bandwidth overages billed per-GB and vary by underlying cloud: DigitalOcean $0.02/GB, AWS $0.12/GB, GCP $0.10-$0.17/GB Offsite backup storage billed at $0.033/GB per server Cloudways Autonomous disk overage $1/GB and bandwidth overage $0.04/GB beyond plan baseline Cloudways Autonomous autoscaling billed $0.07-$0.12/hour/server depending on tier Add-ons (Cloudflare Enterprise CDN, Site Manager, Malware Protection, Rackspace Email, DNS Made Easy, Advanced Support) are all separate recurring fees not included in base server price
Last reviewed	2026-07-17	2026-07-18