Cloudways gives you dedicated cloud servers with no prepayment, Redis included, staging and an official MCP server with scoped tokens, but it publishes no contractual uptime SLA, charges separately for backup storage and email, and good support is a paid add-on. Aderlo Cloud is fully managed shared hosting with a 99.9% SLA, mailboxes and backups included, a hosted MCP server with OAuth and free migration of every site.
Side-by-side comparison
| Cloudways | Aderlo Cloud | |
|---|---|---|
| Plan compared | Flexible (DigitalOcean), 2 GB server | Starter Store / Growth Store |
| Price: year 1 → renewal | $28 a month, billed monthly or hourly, no prepayment; VAT added by billing address | €120 / €290 a year excl. VAT — the same at renewal |
| Web server and cache | NGINX + PHP-FPM (Lightning Stack) | LiteSpeed Enterprise + LSCache, configured for you |
| Redis / object cache | Redis included; Object Cache Pro on servers of 4 GB and up | yes, a separate instance per account, included |
| PHP versions | 7.4–8.4, per application | 7.4–8.4, per domain, with the result verified |
| Processes, CPU, RAM | dedicated vCPU and RAM of the chosen server; unlimited sites | 5 / 10 dedicated PHP workers, up to 1.5 / 3 vCPU, 2 / 4 GB RAM |
| Backups | hourly to weekly, 1–4 weeks, off-site storage $0.033 per GB | daily, on separate hardware, 7 / 14 days |
| Data centre | choice of 5 cloud providers; DigitalOcean EU: Amsterdam, Frankfurt, London | Falkenstein, Germany (EU) |
| SSH, WP-CLI, Git | SSH, WP-CLI, deploy from Git, free staging | SSH, WP-CLI and Git deploy on every plan |
| Migration | first site migrated free by engineers | free, done by the Aderlo Cloud team, email included |
| AI agents (MCP) and API | official remote MCP server (250+ actions, scoped tokens), public API, Copilot | remote MCP server with OAuth and 5 scopes; API with scoped keys |
| Uptime SLA | no contractual uptime SLA found (support SLA only) | 99.9% |
When Cloudways is the better choice
- You want dedicated cloud servers and hourly billing without prepayment.
- You need staging and a choice of five cloud providers.
- You want an MCP server with very broad API coverage (250+ actions).
- You plan to scale vertically by resizing servers.
When Aderlo Cloud is the better choice
- You want a contractual 99.9% uptime SLA.
- Email hosting and backups are included — at Cloudways, mailboxes ($1.50 each) and off-site backup storage are extra.
- You want every site migrated free, not just the first one.
- You prefer fully managed hosting to managing cloud servers and paid support tiers.
What to watch for
- Cloudways standard support caps chats at 15 minutes; advanced support is a paid add-on.
- Cloudflare Enterprise and malware protection are paid add-ons at Cloudways.
- Cloudways pages describe the stack inconsistently (Lightning Stack vs. Apache/Varnish).
Frequently asked questions
- Which is cheaper, Aderlo Cloud or Cloudways?
- Compare the total over three years at similar resources, not the first-year price. Aderlo Cloud renews at the list price — €120 / €290 a year (excl. VAT) for Starter Store / Growth Store.
- Is moving from Cloudways to Aderlo Cloud free?
- Yes. Aderlo Cloud moves the store, including email, free of charge on every plan, and switches the address only once the copy works — the store keeps selling throughout.