Cloudways After DigitalOcean: What Changed and What Got Worse

What people feared (and what actually happened)

When the acquisition was announced, the WordPress community had three main concerns. Two turned out to be overblown. One turned out to be real.

Support: the real thing that changed

Pre-acquisition Cloudways was known for fast, direct human support. Post-acquisition, three changes are documented across multiple review sources:

1. AI chat as first contact. Support now routes through an AI chatbot before reaching a human agent. For simple questions this is fine. For urgent issues (site down, migration stuck, server unresponsive), the chatbot layer adds delay to situations where minutes matter.
2. Longer response times. Pre-acquisition reviews frequently cited fast support as a differentiator. Post-2023 reviews increasingly cite the opposite. The shift shows up in both Trustpilot trends (where negative reviews have moved from pricing complaints to support complaints) and independent review sites.
3. No DigitalOcean escalation path. DigitalOcean owns Cloudways, but the support teams are separate. A user who documented a major support failure on the DigitalOcean community forum in 2025 discovered this firsthand: their Cloudways ticket was ignored for five days, and DigitalOcean support couldn't intervene because the platforms operate independently. If Cloudways support stalls, there's nowhere to escalate.

To be fair, Cloudways still maintains a 4.6/5 on Trustpilot with 3,977 reviews and replies to 97% of negative reviews. The majority of users report positive experiences. The concern isn't that support is always bad. It's that when it fails, the safety net (escalation, compensation, urgency) is weaker than it used to be.

The backup restore problem

The most alarming post-acquisition complaint isn't slow chat responses. It's backup restores failing when they're needed most.

A detailed report from 2025, posted on the DigitalOcean community forum by a paying Cloudways customer, describes this sequence:

1. A WordPress plugin broke their site
2. They had both manual and hourly backups enabled
3. The restore process failed
4. They spent 12+ hours with Cloudways engineers who provided updates about a migration that "wasn't true. No migration was happening."
5. The fix came from the customer themselves: creating a new server and having engineers manually apply the backup, since "their restore system was so broken that was the only option"
6. The outage caused thousands of dollars in lost sales and doubled server costs from running two servers temporarily
7. Their compensation ticket was viewed by support, downgraded from high to normal priority, and not responded to for 5 days

This is one user's experience, not a systemic pattern I can prove. But backup restore is the one thing managed hosting must never get wrong. You're paying the management premium specifically so that when something breaks, the host can restore from backup quickly. If the restore system itself fails, the managed hosting value proposition collapses.

Billing: no grace period, permanent deletion

Cloudways' billing policy is aggressive by industry standards. From their own documentation and user reports:

• No long grace period. After a few days of nonpayment, servers are stopped and platform access is locked.
• Stopped servers still incur charges on DigitalOcean, Vultr, and Linode because hardware remains allocated. Stopping doesn't stop billing; only deleting does.
• Permanent deletion with no recovery. At least one documented case involves a user whose credit card was declined by their bank. By the time payment was resolved and they contacted support, the server and all associated backups had been permanently deleted.

This isn't unique to Cloudways (most cloud platforms have similar policies), but it's worth knowing because Cloudways markets itself to small business owners who may not be aware that a failed card payment can result in complete data loss within days. Keep your own external backups. Always.

What's still good

The acquisition hasn't touched the product fundamentals that made Cloudways the value pick for WordPress hosting:

• Redis included on all plans. While Kinsta charges $100/mo per site for Redis, Cloudways includes it at $14/mo. For WooCommerce operators, this alone can save $100-200/mo.
• Full-power staging included. No premium tier needed, unlike Kinsta's $20/mo staging add-on.
• Provider choice. The five-provider model survived the acquisition. You can still choose the infrastructure that fits your location and budget.
• Competitive pricing. Even after modest increases, Cloudways' DigitalOcean plans start at $14/mo for 1GB RAM, 25GB SSD, and 1TB bandwidth. The managed markup over bare metal (roughly $5-10/mo on entry plans) buys server management, one-click WordPress installs, and free SSL.
• Free first migration. Cloudways migrates your first site for free, done by their team.

For feature-per-dollar, Cloudways is still the managed WordPress leader. The question is how much the support trajectory concerns you.

Should you still use Cloudways?

Yes, with precautions.

The product is intact and the price is right. If your primary criteria are cost, Redis inclusion, and provider flexibility, Cloudways still wins. But the support degradation means you need to manage your own safety net rather than relying on Cloudways to save you in an emergency.

Three precautions:

1. Keep external backups. Don't rely solely on Cloudways' backup system. Use their external backup add-on ($2/mo) to push to your own S3 bucket, or run a WordPress backup plugin that stores copies offsite. If their restore fails, you need your own copy.
2. Keep your billing current. Set up payment alerts with your bank. Cloudways' deletion-on-nonpayment policy is real and fast. A declined card can cost you your data.
3. Have a migration plan. If support quality continues to decline, know where you'd move. Pressable ($20.83/mo, managed by Automattic) and Kinsta ($35/mo, fastest infrastructure) are the two managed alternatives with full migration assistance. Both are more expensive but have stronger support reputations.

If you need a host where support is the primary differentiator and you're willing to pay for it, Cloudways isn't the right choice anymore. It's a value play with a support risk. Price it accordingly.

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