Cloudways vs WP Engine

Cloudways is strongest for WordPress agencies. WP Engine is strongest for WordPress-only sites. Here's how they stack up on price, uptime, and support.

Feature	Cloudways	WP Engine
Starting price	$0.03/mo	$30/mo
Best for	WordPress agencies E-commerce (WooCommerce/Magento) Developers wanting managed infra without lock-in to one cloud	WordPress-only sites Agencies managing multiple WP sites Enterprise WordPress High-traffic WordPress blogs/publishers
Stated uptime SLA	99.99%	99.99%
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)	Chat, Phone (Professional plan and above), Docs, Dedicated support team (Enterprise)
Compliance	GDPR	GDPR
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	Visit overages billed at $2 per 1,000 visits beyond plan allowance Extra sites beyond plan limit billed around $20/mo per additional site on Startup Annual-billed prices shown on the marketing site often include a first-year-only promotional discount; renewal/steady-state annual rate can be higher than the advertised starting price Month-to-month billing (no annual commitment) costs roughly 17-20% more per month than annual billing Email hosting is NOT included; third-party estimates put it around $6-7 per mailbox per month Smart Plugin Manager and NitroPack optimization add-ons priced/bundled separately on Essential plans (included standard on Core) Numeric 99.99% uptime SLA is marketed prominently for Core/Enterprise tiers; not clearly guaranteed with a published SLA credit policy on Essential (Startup/Professional/Growth/Scale) plans
Last reviewed	2026-07-18	2026-07-18