Cloudways for WooCommerce: sizing, caching and safe updates

For a WooCommerce store, Cloudways is a good fit because it includes the one thing stores need most: Redis object caching, with the commercial Object Cache Pro plugin included free on servers with 4 GB of RAM or more. Plan on a 4 GB DigitalOcean server at $46 a month as the starting point for a store with real orders, give the shop its own server, and use staging pushes that leave the order tables alone. The 3-day trial is enough to load-test a copy of your store before you move.

A WooCommerce store is harder to host than a blog for a specific reason, and the rest of this guide follows from it: which Cloudways features address it, how to size a server, how to change a live shop without losing orders, and what to do before a big sale.

Why stores are harder to host than blogs

A blog post looks the same to every visitor, so a page cache can serve it from memory without running WordPress at all. Carts, checkout, the account area and anything showing a customer's own data are different for every visitor, so they must be built fresh on each request. On a busy store, those uncacheable pages are where the server spends its time, and they are the pages where slowness costs money.

The fix is not more page caching. It is making each uncached request cheaper. That means object caching, which keeps the results of repeated database queries in memory, enough PHP workers to handle concurrent shoppers, and a database that is not fighting other sites for RAM.

What Cloudways includes for WooCommerce

Cloudways installs Redis on every server, and on servers with 4 GB or more it includes Object Cache Pro, a commercial plugin built to use Redis efficiently with WooCommerce. Cloudways values it at $95 a month; Kinsta, by comparison, charges $100 a month per site for its Redis add-on. This is the main reason to start at 4 GB rather than 2 GB.

On the Hybrid stack, Varnish provides a page cache for catalogue pages and, by Cloudways' default rules, skips cart, checkout and account pages. On the newer Lightning Stack, which drops Apache and Varnish for NGINX alone, Cloudways cites a benchmark by the testing firm Koddr.io in which Lightning completed 58% more WooCommerce checkouts than the Hybrid stack under load. Treat vendor figures with care, but for stores without custom .htaccess rules, Lightning is worth testing. Our Lightning Stack explainer covers the switch.

For large catalogues, Elasticsearch or OpenSearch can be installed from the server's Packages page and used through a plugin such as ElasticPress, which takes product search off the database. There is also a WooCommerce option when you create a new application, which installs the plugin with WordPress.

Which server size to buy

• New or small store (under about 50 orders a day): DigitalOcean 4 GB at $46. This is the smallest size that includes Object Cache Pro.
• Established store with steady traffic: Vultr High Frequency 4 GB at $60 or DigitalOcean Premium 8 GB at $99, both with NVMe storage and faster CPUs for the uncached work.
• Large catalogue or heavy plugins: 8 GB or more, or a dedicated-CPU General Purpose server from $98, where the CPU is not shared with other customers.

Cloudways recommends one store per server, and it is good advice: a shop should not share memory with a client's blog. Watch the server's Monitoring graphs for the first month. If memory sits near the top or the CPU spikes at checkout times, scale up. Our provider comparison explains the CPU differences.

Changing a live store without losing orders

This is the WooCommerce-specific skill on Cloudways. Staging makes a full copy of the store. You change it, test it, and push it back. The danger is that the copy's database is frozen at the moment you made it, while the live shop keeps taking orders. A "Full DB" push would replace those new orders with the stale copy.

The push dialog lets you choose "Selected Tables" instead. For a theme or design change, push the web application files and only the tables your change touched, such as wp_options for settings, and leave everything order-related alone. On stores using WooCommerce's order tables (HPOS), orders live in tables named wp_wc_orders, wp_wc_order_addresses, wp_wc_order_operational_data and wp_wc_orders_meta. On older stores they live in wp_posts and wp_postmeta along with your pages, which makes those two tables unsafe to push once the shop has taken orders. Always tick the box to back up the live site before pushing. Our staging walkthrough goes through the dialog option by option.

Keeping the store running

Cron, emails and background jobs

WooCommerce relies on scheduled tasks for things like follow-up emails, stock holds and subscription renewals. By default, WordPress only runs these when someone visits the site, which is unreliable on quiet nights and wasteful on busy days. On Cloudways, disable the built-in trigger by adding define('DISABLE_WP_CRON', true); to wp-config.php, then create a server cron job in the application's Cron Job Management that calls wp-cron.php every five minutes.

Order confirmations need a proper sending service. Cloudways does not deliver mail itself, and mail sent directly from cloud servers is often filtered. Connect the Elastic Email add-on or the free SMTP add-on with SendGrid, Mailgun or similar before launch. Our email guide covers the DNS records.

Before a sale or a launch

1. Scale up a few days early. On DigitalOcean, scaling CPU and RAM without the disk is reversible, so you can go up for the sale and back down afterwards. Scaling takes the site offline briefly, so do it at a quiet hour.
2. Turn on hourly backups for the sale week, then return to daily.
3. Put Cloudflare Enterprise in front if you have not already. It absorbs static traffic at the edge, and each domain gets a 30-day free trial before the $4.99 monthly charge.
4. Load-test a staging copy with a tool such as k6 or Loader.io, running through add to cart and checkout, not just the home page.

If your sales are big and unpredictable, such as limited drops that sell out in minutes, look at Cloudways Autonomous. It runs one WooCommerce store on an autoscaling cluster from $99 a month and keeps at least two copies running, so there is no single point of failure. Our Flexible vs Autonomous comparison shows where the break-even sits.

Where Cloudways falls short for stores

A Flexible server is one virtual machine. If it fails, the store is down until Cloudways restores it, and there is no automatic failover. Stores where an hour offline is very expensive should weigh Autonomous or a host with redundant infrastructure. Support is the other limit: Standard support will fix server-side problems at any hour, but a slow query from a reviews plugin or a checkout conflict between two extensions is application-level work, covered by the Advanced Support add-on at $100 a month or the $25 offer price Cloudways was running in October 2026.

Within those limits, Cloudways gives a WooCommerce store the right tools at a fair price. Start with a 4 GB server, keep the store on its own, master the selected-tables push, and test a copy of your real shop on the free trial before you move.