Cloudways vs HostGator

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

Feature	Cloudways	HostGator
Starting price	$0.03/mo	$3.75/mo
Best for	WordPress agencies E-commerce (WooCommerce/Magento) Developers wanting managed infra without lock-in to one cloud	Beginners Small business sites Budget-conscious buyers on long-term contracts
Stated uptime SLA	99.99%	99.9%
Storage	SSD	SSD
Regions	30	1
Managed Kubernetes	Yes	No
Support channels	Ticket, Live chat, Docs, Advanced Support (paid, $100/mo, 75% lifetime discount promo to $25/mo)	24/7 Live chat, Phone, Ticket, Knowledge base
Compliance	GDPR	PCI DSS (via SSL/hosting infra)
Hidden costs to watch for	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	Renewal prices are 2-3x the advertised introductory rate on every product line (e.g. Shared Hatchling $3.75/mo intro vs $10.99/mo renewal) Longest (36-month) term required to get the lowest advertised intro price; shorter terms cost meaningfully more per month Domain name is free only for year one; standard registrar pricing applies afterward Site/Domain Backup, SSL certificate upgrades, and dedicated IP are upsells on lower shared tiers VPS/Dedicated bandwidth is "unmetered" but subject to a fair-use policy capping sustained resource usage at 25% of system capacity for 90+ seconds
Last reviewed	2026-07-18	2026-07-18