Microsoft Azure vs Cloudways

Microsoft Azure is strongest for enterprises. Cloudways is strongest for WordPress agencies. Here's how they stack up on price, uptime, and support.

Feature	Microsoft Azure	Cloudways
Starting price	$0.01/mo	$0.03/mo
Best for	Enterprises Windows/.NET workloads Hybrid cloud Regulated industries	WordPress agencies E-commerce (WooCommerce/Magento) Developers wanting managed infra without lock-in to one cloud
Stated uptime SLA	99.99%	99.99%
Storage	SSD	SSD
Regions	60	30
Managed Kubernetes	Yes	Yes
Support channels	Ticket, Phone (paid plans), Docs, Community forum	Ticket, Live chat, Docs, Advanced Support (paid, $100/mo, 75% lifetime discount promo to $25/mo)
Compliance	SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, FedRAMP, GDPR, PCI DSS	GDPR
Hidden costs to watch for	Windows Server VMs carry a license surcharge on top of the Linux compute rate Outbound bandwidth billed above 100 GB/month pooled free tier, tiered by volume Premium SSD/Ultra Disk IOPS and throughput billed separately from disk capacity Blob Storage Cool/Cold/Archive tiers bill a minimum 128 KiB per object and impose early-deletion penalties (90/180 day minimums) Archive tier retrieval fees are notably high ($6.50/10,000 read ops) AKS Standard tier control plane fee ($0.10/hr per cluster) on top of node VM costs	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	2026-07-18	2026-07-18