Cloudways DigitalOcean vs Vultr vs AWS: which to choose

On Cloudways, DigitalOcean is the best default: its Standard servers are the cheapest at $24 a month for 2 GB, and its Premium servers add NVMe storage and faster CPUs for $28. Vultr High Frequency, at $30 for 2 GB, suits CPU-heavy sites and offers the most regions. Linode prices sit between the two. AWS and Google Cloud cost two to three times as much for the same memory and are worth it only when a specific region or company policy requires them.

Cloudways installs the same stack and gives you the same dashboard whichever provider you choose, so the decision comes down to price, hardware, location, and a few rules about scaling and billing that differ between providers. This guide covers each.

Price by provider and size

These are Cloudways monthly prices from its pricing page in October 2026. AWS prices vary by region; the figures are the ones Cloudways lists by default.

Google Cloud uses different sizes on Cloudways: about $37 for a 1.7 GB shared-CPU machine, $84 for 3.75 GB and $152 for 7.5 GB. Above these sizes, every provider offers larger machines, and DigitalOcean, Vultr and Linode also offer dedicated-CPU lines (General Purpose and CPU-Optimized) where the cores are not shared with other customers.

DigitalOcean: the sensible default

DigitalOcean owns Cloudways, and its servers are the platform's cheapest and most common. Standard servers use SSD storage and older Intel CPUs; Premium servers use NVMe storage and newer CPUs with faster networking. For a typical WordPress site, Standard is fine. For a store or a site with heavy database work, the $4 step to Premium at 2 GB is the cheapest performance upgrade on the platform.

DigitalOcean also has two practical advantages on Cloudways. Its CPU and RAM can be scaled up and back down without touching the disk, and it is the only provider where you can attach Block Storage to add disk space without moving to a bigger server. Its weakness is geography: Cloudways lists nine DigitalOcean locations, in New York, San Francisco, Toronto, London, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Bangalore, Singapore and Sydney.

Vultr and Linode

Vultr: more regions and fast CPUs

Vultr offers around 30 locations on Cloudways, the widest choice among the cheaper providers, which helps if your audience is in South America, Africa or parts of Asia that DigitalOcean does not reach. Its High Frequency servers use CPUs clocked at 3 GHz or more and NVMe storage, which suits WooCommerce and other workloads that do a lot of uncached PHP work.

Two catches. Vultr upgrades are permanent, so scaling down means cloning to a new, smaller server. And you cannot scale a Vultr Standard server into a High Frequency one; that also needs a clone. Pick the right family at launch. Vultr also blocks outgoing mail on port 25, so use an SMTP service on port 587, which you should do anyway.

Linode: a middle option

Linode, now part of Akamai, has around 25 locations on Cloudways and prices close to Vultr Standard, slightly higher at 4 GB and 8 GB. Like Vultr, its upgrades are permanent. Its General Purpose servers start at $69 for 4 GB, against $72 for DigitalOcean's smallest CPU-Optimized server, which can make it the cheaper pick for a busy site that needs more consistent CPU.

AWS and Google Cloud: when you need them

AWS and Google Cloud each have about 28 locations on Cloudways and the strongest enterprise credentials. They also behave differently from the other three in ways that affect the bill:

• No monthly cap. They are billed purely by the hour, so a full month costs the hourly rate times every hour.
• Bandwidth and disk billed separately. Bandwidth is charged per gigabyte, roughly $0.10 to $0.17 depending on provider and region, and extra disk is charged per gigabyte too.
• No free trial. You need an upgraded account to launch them.
• Two-way scaling. You can scale down as well as up, and resize the data volume on its own.

Choose them if your organisation requires AWS or Google Cloud, if you need a region only they offer, or if your other systems already live there. Otherwise you are paying two to three times as much for the same memory.

Choosing for your site

Pick the region first

Distance adds delay to every uncached request, so the region matters more than most hardware differences. Put the server on the continent where most of your visitors are, and within that, close to the biggest group: Frankfurt or Amsterdam for continental Europe, London for the UK, New York or Toronto for eastern North America, San Francisco for the west coast, Singapore for South-East Asia, Sydney for Australia, Bangalore for India. If your audience is spread worldwide, a CDN does more than any choice of region, because it serves cached pages from near each visitor. Our Cloudflare Enterprise review covers that option.

Check the provider list for your exact region before choosing a provider, not after. If DigitalOcean has no location near your audience, Vultr's wider spread or AWS's regional coverage may decide it for you.

Then the provider

Changing provider later

You are not locked in. Servers on different providers can sit in the same Cloudways account, and moving a site means launching a server at the new provider, cloning each application to it, testing on the temporary address and changing your DNS. The same process works within a provider to move to a smaller Vultr or Linode server. Our scaling guide covers when cloning is needed, and the pricing guide lists the larger sizes.

Cloudways' scaling screen also links to its own benchmark results for each server type, which is a reasonable starting point. The better test is your own site: the 3-day trial works on DigitalOcean, Vultr and Linode, so you can launch on the provider you are leaning towards and see how your slowest page performs.