Cloudways
You need monthly billing, Laravel or Magento, client sites, or room past 4 GB.
Hostinger
You run a handful of WordPress sites, want email included and can prepay for years.
Cloud Startup $7.99/mo on 48 months, renews $25.99
Rounds won
| Round | Cloudways | Hostinger |
|---|---|---|
| Price for 4 GB | $46/mo | $7.99/mo prepaid for 48 monthsWins |
| Commitment | Monthly, delete any timeWins | A long term paid upfront |
| Email and domain | Neither included | Mailboxes and a domain free for the first yearWins |
| Provider and region | Five clouds to choose fromWins | Hostinger's own locations |
| Room to grow | Up to 192 GBWins | Larger plans, then a VPS |
| Laravel and Magento | Supported, with queue workersWins | Built around WordPress |
| Safety net | 3-day trial, no card | 30-day money-back guaranteeWins |
Hostinger is far cheaper for comparable memory, includes email and a free domain, and is the better buy for a small business or blogger who wants one bill and can prepay. Cloudways costs more and asks you to choose a server, but gives you monthly billing with no long prepayment, a choice of cloud provider and region, server-level control, room to grow well past 4 GB, and support for Laravel and Magento. Pick Hostinger for value, Cloudways for control and growth.
Cloudways vs Hostinger: cheap cloud plans vs real servers
Cloudways vs Hostinger: $7.99 cloud plans prepaid for four years against a $46 server billed monthly. Price, email, control and who should pick which.
How we pay for this
We buy the hardware and pay for the subscriptions we write about. Claim a deal through our link and we may earn a commission — our readers sometimes get a discount or a freebie out of it too, but it never pushes the price up, and it never changes what the review says.
Hostinger's Cloud Startup plan gives you 4 GB of RAM and unlimited websites for $7.99 a month if you prepay 48 months, renewing at $25.99; a 4 GB Cloudways server on DigitalOcean costs $46 a month, billed monthly. On price, Hostinger wins by a wide margin, and it includes email and a free domain. What Cloudways sells instead is control: your choice of cloud provider and region, server-level settings, monthly billing with no long commitment, and room to grow far beyond 4 GB.
These two get compared because both call themselves cloud hosting. They mean different things by it. This piece explains the difference and goes through price, email, control and support so you can pick the one that fits how you work.
Cloudways vs Hostinger at a glance
| Deciding factor | Cloudways (DigitalOcean 4 GB) | Hostinger Cloud Startup |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $46/mo, billed monthly | $7.99/mo on a 48-month term ($383.52 upfront) |
| Renewal | Unchanged | $25.99/mo |
| Resources | 4 GB RAM, 2 vCPU, 80 GB SSD | 4 GB RAM, 4 CPU cores, 100 GB NVMe, 100 PHP workers |
| Not included; $1.50 per mailbox add-on | Unlimited mailboxes per site, free for the first year | |
| Domain | Bought elsewhere | Free for the first year |
| Provider and region | DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode, AWS or Google Cloud | Hostinger's own list of data centre locations |
| Room to grow | Scale to 192 GB or larger | Larger Hostinger cloud plans, then a VPS |
| Trial or refund | 3-day free trial, no card | 30-day money-back guarantee |
Price over four years
The numbers favour Hostinger clearly. Prepaying 48 months of Cloud Startup costs $383.52. Four years of a 4 GB Cloudways server costs $2,208, before email. Even at Hostinger's renewal price of $25.99 a month, its plan costs less than half of Cloudways' $46 for the same amount of RAM.
The prepayment is the catch. Hostinger's advertised rates depend on long terms paid upfront; shorter terms cost more per month. That is a reasonable deal if you are sure you will stay, and the 30-day money-back guarantee covers the first month. Cloudways' model is the opposite: no upfront payment, hourly billing with a monthly cap, and the freedom to delete the server next week and pay only for the hours used. Our Cloudways pricing guide covers how that billing works.
What "cloud hosting" means at each
Hostinger's cloud plans are a managed hosting account with allocated resources, managed through its own hPanel dashboard. You add websites, mailboxes and domains; Hostinger runs the servers underneath, built on LiteSpeed with its own caching. You do not choose the hardware provider, the server, or how its software is configured.
A Cloudways server is a virtual machine at the provider you pick, in the region you pick, configured by Cloudways and controlled through its dashboard. You can SSH in as the master user, install packages such as Redis, Elasticsearch or Supervisor, change PHP-FPM settings, choose between two web stacks and scale the machine up as far as 192 GB. That control is what you pay extra for. If you would never use it, it is not worth $38 a month.
Email and the one-bill question
Hostinger includes mailboxes on your domain, free for the first year on its cloud plans, and a domain registration for the first year. For a small business, that covers the website and info@ address in one place. Cloudways hosts no email: you add Rackspace mailboxes at $1.50 each, or use Google Workspace or Microsoft 365. Our email guide explains the set-up, but it is still a second service to manage.
Where Cloudways is the better host
- Agencies and developers. Per-application credentials, team permissions per server, Git deployment and SSH access suit people who manage sites for others. Our agency guide covers the set-up.
- Laravel and Magento. Cloudways hosts both with Supervisor queue workers, Elasticsearch or OpenSearch and Varnish. Hostinger's cloud plans are built around WordPress and simple web apps.
- Growing WooCommerce stores. Object Cache Pro is included from 4 GB, staging pushes can skip order tables, and a busy store can move to 8, 16 or 32 GB servers or dedicated CPUs without changing host.
- Region-sensitive sites. With five providers, Cloudways can put a server in more locations, which matters for audiences far from Hostinger's locations.
Where Hostinger is the better host
- Price for small and medium sites, by a wide margin, as long as you prepay.
- Email and domain included, which saves both money and set-up time for small businesses.
- Ease of use. hPanel and Hostinger's AI tools are aimed at people who have never managed hosting.
- A longer safety net. 30 days to ask for a refund, against Cloudways' 3-day trial.
Both now offer AI tools for site management. Hostinger has an AI agent for WordPress and a connector for coding assistants such as Claude Code and Cursor. Cloudways offers Copilot for server diagnosis and an MCP server that lets AI tools run dashboard actions. Our Cloudways MCP guide covers what that can do.
A worked example: five client sites over two years
Take a freelancer moving five small business sites. On Hostinger Cloud Startup, the 48-month term is $383.52 paid upfront and covers four years of hosting for all five sites, with mailboxes free for the first year and charged after that. On a 4 GB Cloudways server, two years cost $1,104 billed monthly, plus about $1 a month in backup storage, and email for the clients would be extra on top, either Rackspace at $1.50 per mailbox or their own Google Workspace accounts.
On paper Hostinger wins by around $700 over two years. What the Cloudways money buys in this scenario is per-site SFTP credentials for each client's developer, team permissions, staging that can push selected database tables, and the freedom to stop paying in any month. Whether that is worth $700 depends on how often those features would be used. For five brochure sites that rarely change, it often is not.
Support and migration
Both offer 24/7 support. Hostinger's cloud plans include priority support and an AI assistant aimed at beginners; Cloudways' standard support focuses on the server and leaves plugin debugging to a paid tier. Both migrate WordPress sites for free. Moving from Hostinger to Cloudways, the Cloudways WordPress Migrator plugin copies each site across, and our migration guide covers the DNS cut-over. If your mailboxes are at Hostinger, move them to a new provider before changing DNS, since Cloudways does not host email.
Which one to choose
Choose Hostinger if you run a handful of WordPress sites, want email included, are happy to prepay for years, and do not want to make server decisions. It is the better value for most small businesses and bloggers. Choose Cloudways if you need monthly billing without a long commitment, run Laravel or Magento, manage client sites, or expect to outgrow 4 GB. Our Cloudways vs SiteGround comparison covers the other popular budget host, and the alternatives guide puts all of them side by side.
More in Hosting & cloud
See the whole sector
Namecheap Private Email review: worth $14.88?
Custom-domain email for a fifth of what Google Workspace costs. What the rebuilt 2026 platform gained, what it quietly dropped, and the sending cap.
WordPress on Kamatera: fast, but you are the sysadmin
A $4 Kamatera server will serve WordPress faster than most shared hosting. It will also hand you updates, backups, security and email to run yourself.
Claire Whitman
Senior Software Editor · The Comparer
Edits most of what runs on this site and writes the pieces nobody else wants to take on. Keeps a running list of every subscription she's cancelled.
Readers also opened
Bento user reviews: Trustpilot vs Reddit
What Bento users say on Trustpilot (4.6 stars) versus Reddit, and why the two disagree. Our own verdict is in the full Bento review.
AWeber review 2026: is it still worth using?
AWeber has been sending automated emails since before Gmail existed. We spent weeks in the dashboard to see how it holds up against its 2026 competition.
Jotform review 2026: when it earns its keep
Forms, e-signatures, approval chains, even AI agents: where Jotform pulls its weight, where the usage caps start to bite, and whether the paid tiers are worth it.
Cloudways review 2026: what $11 to $99 a month gets you
Cloudways review: managed cloud hosting from $11/mo on DigitalOcean. What you get, real costs, no root access, and who should pick something else.
Kamatera review 2026: flexible cloud VPS with caveats
Kamatera starts at $4/mo with 30 days free, but it is unmanaged infrastructure. What the money buys, what it does not, and the billing rules that catch people.
Rewrite Bento's AI pitch so it sounds like you
Why the out-of-the-box AI pitch gets ignored, and a simple four-part structure for rewriting it so it actually sounds like you wrote it.
How to build an automated welcome sequence in AWeber
A walkthrough for setting up sign-up tags, a five-email nurture sequence, and automatic PDF delivery so new subscribers hear from you right away.
Jotform vs Google Forms: why pay $39 a month?
A practical look at exactly where free Google Forms stops being enough, and where paying for dedicated workflow software starts making sense.
How to find the right person to pitch at a brand
A walkthrough of Bento's search filters — niche, region, and the specific job titles worth targeting, from Influencer Marketing Manager to Head of Growth.
Jotform AI Agents tested: do they beat a form?
We built agents for customer service, lead qualification, and payment intake to see where the format actually holds up and where it doesn't.
ActiveCampaign vs Mailchimp: which should you pick?
Mailchimp is easier and has a free tier. ActiveCampaign automates far more and starts at $15. The honest split is whether you send campaigns or run journeys.
Cloudways vs DigitalOcean: is the managed markup worth it?
Cloudways vs DigitalOcean: the same 2 GB Droplet costs $12 direct and $24 on Cloudways. What the extra $12 buys, and when running it yourself wins.