Cloudways vs Servebolt
A managed cloud panel against a performance specialist. The gap in price is the whole story, and it decides this one quickly.
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Cloudways
Managed cloud hosting with no limit on sites.
Servebolt
Performance hosting for sites where speed is the business case.
Prices last checked on
| Feature | Cloudways | Servebolt |
|---|---|---|
| Our score | 4.2 / 5 | 4.2 / 5 |
| Price | From $11/mo | From $114.74/mo |
| Free plan | No | No |
| Best for | Multiple sites | WooCommerce under real load |
| Category | Managed WordPress | Managed WordPress |
| Provider | Cloudways (DigitalOcean) | Servebolt AS |
| Visit Cloudways | Visit Servebolt |
Our verdict
These two get compared a lot and should not be. Cloudways DO Starter costs $11 a month, $132 a year, and never jumps. Servebolt Pro starts at $114.74 a month, $1376.88 a year, around 10 times as much. What you buy is different too.
Cloudways manages a DigitalOcean server for you and leaves the sizing, the stack choices and the application count to you. Servebolt sells measured capacity on its own tuned Linux platform: 500,000 dynamic requests a month and five live sites on the entry plan, with no RAM ceiling and unmetered transfer.
On speed the honest answer is that Servebolt wins, and not narrowly. It is built for WooCommerce under load and it shows up at the top of independent benchmarks. Cloudways is quick enough for almost everything else, and quicker still if you know what you are doing with its caching.
So the decision is arithmetic rather than taste. Work out what a faster page is worth to you per month. If that number beats the $103.74 a month difference, Servebolt is cheap.
If you cannot make that sum work, and most sites cannot, Cloudways is the right answer and the $1244.88 a year you keep is better spent elsewhere.
“Host unlimited sites and pay per server size. With multiple sites this is far cheaper than the competition. Slightly more technical, but the strongest price-to-performance you will find in managed hosting.”Editorial team, on Cloudways
“The fastest hosting we have measured for WooCommerce, and priced like it. Servebolt sells raw performance to sites where a second of load time costs real money, and makes no attempt to be cheap.”Editorial team, on Servebolt
Frequently asked questions
What does Cloudways cost against Servebolt?
Cloudways DO Starter is $11 a month, $132 a year, with no promo and no renewal jump. Servebolt Pro starts at $114.74 a month, $1376.88 a year, listed as EUR 99 on their own pricing page. That is roughly 10 times the money, so the two are not really competing for the same buyer.
Is Servebolt worth ten times the price?
Only if speed shows up in your revenue. Servebolt sells guaranteed capacity on a stack it tunes itself and wins independent WooCommerce benchmarks by margins that are hard to argue with. For a shop where a slow checkout costs orders, or a publisher whose ad income tracks page speed, the sum can work. For a brochure site, a blog, or a handful of client sites, it cannot, and Cloudways does the job for a fraction of it.
What do you actually get on each entry plan?
Cloudways DO Starter gives you a managed DigitalOcean server: one machine, as many applications as it can carry, and you decide how to divide it. Servebolt Pro gives you five live sites, 10 GB of storage and 500,000 dynamic requests a month, which is capacity you can count rather than a server you have to size. The Cloudways model rewards people who like tuning; the Servebolt model removes the question.
Which one should an agency pick?
Both, for different clients, is the honest answer. Cloudways at $11 a month per server is the sane default for the long tail of client sites. Servebolt earns its place for the two or three clients whose sites make real money and fall over at peak. Paying $114.74 a month for a portfolio of small sites is money set on fire; paying $11 for a store doing serious volume is a false economy.