Cloudways vs DigitalOcean

Cloudways and DigitalOcean can sit on the same infrastructure chain, but they sell different levels of responsibility. Cloudways adds a managed application layer over providers including DigitalOcean, while buying DigitalOcean directly gives you the underlying cloud services and the operational work that comes with them.

Provider choice without running the whole server stack

Cloudways Flexible currently exposes five infrastructure providers — AWS, Google Cloud, DigitalOcean, Linode and Vultr — behind one managed interface. That is useful when the priority is deploying web applications with platform assistance rather than building every server-management workflow yourself.

You accept an extra platform layer

Direct DigitalOcean access gives you its full product catalog and native controls. Cloudways narrows that surface into its managed hosting model, so teams that need lower-level networking, custom infrastructure automation or services outside the supported application workflow may prefer to work with DigitalOcean directly.

Native cloud services and a published infrastructure SLA

DigitalOcean combines Droplets with managed Kubernetes, managed databases, object storage and networking across 20 data centers in 12 regions. Its global infrastructure page publishes a 99.99% uptime SLA for Droplets and Volumes block storage.

Application operations are less bundled

Cloudways wraps hosting tasks such as server management and application-oriented tooling into the service. With DigitalOcean directly, you gain a broader infrastructure surface but your team chooses and maintains more of the deployment, security and monitoring stack.