Cloudways vs Linode (Akamai)

Cloudways is strongest for WordPress agencies. Linode (Akamai) is strongest for developers. Here's how they stack up on price, uptime, and support.

Feature	Cloudways	Linode (Akamai)
Starting price	$0.03/mo	$1/mo
Best for	WordPress agencies E-commerce (WooCommerce/Magento) Developers wanting managed infra without lock-in to one cloud	Developers Startups GPU/AI workloads Small-to-mid production apps Kubernetes
Stated uptime SLA	99.99%	99.99%
Storage	SSD	SSD
Regions	30	20
Managed Kubernetes	Yes	Yes
Support channels	Ticket, Live chat, Docs, Advanced Support (paid, $100/mo, 75% lifetime discount promo to $25/mo)	Ticket, Community forum, Docs, Phone (higher support tiers)
Compliance	GDPR	SOC 2, PCI DSS (for compatible services), GDPR, HIPAA (with BAA on eligible services)
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	Outbound bandwidth billed at $0.005/GB (compute/storage) or $0.015/GB (NodeBalancer) once pooled network transfer allowance is exceeded Backups service is a separate add-on priced per instance (roughly 20-25% of the instance monthly price) HA control plane for LKE Kubernetes is a flat $60/mo add-on per cluster; LKE Enterprise clusters are $300/mo per cluster Managed Database HA (3-node) clusters cost roughly 2-3x the single-node price
Last reviewed	2026-07-18	2026-07-18