Cloudways vs Hetzner

Cloudways and Hetzner are aimed at different levels of the stack. Cloudways Flexible manages WordPress and PHP applications on supported cloud infrastructure, adding staging, backups, caching, monitoring and support. Hetzner sells the cloud servers themselves, including Intel, AMD, Arm64 and dedicated-vCPU families.

A ready-made web operations layer

Cloudways packages common application tasks into one control plane: staging and cloning, managed migration, automated backups, firewalling, monitoring and performance tooling. Flexible can deploy on AWS, Google Cloud, DigitalOcean, Linode or Vultr, so the customer chooses infrastructure while Cloudways standardizes the web workflow above it.

Less freedom below the web stack

Hetzner gives you a conventional VM and leaves the software architecture to you. That is the more natural model for containers, background services, custom networking and workloads that are not centered on supported PHP applications. Cloudways trades that low-level freedom for operational convenience.

Direct access to inexpensive cloud compute

Hetzner’s shared, Arm64 and dedicated-vCPU plans let teams choose both processor architecture and contention model. Hourly billing with a monthly cap works well for developers who automate server provisioning and already have their own deployment, monitoring and backup processes.

You assemble the hosting workflow yourself

Cloudways turns backups, staging, caching and application support into product features. Hetzner supplies the infrastructure foundation; the comparable application-management layer has to come from your own tooling and processes.