Companies Using Cloudways

We detect Cloudways on 65,170 domains, including Norman Smile Center, Kerry Group, Foodpanda. A detection means the technology is present on that domain, which for large organisations is often a single storefront or subdomain rather than a company-wide deployment. Among domains we matched to a company with a resolved industry, the most common is Construction (5.52%).

We detect 65,170 domains running Cloudways across our monthly crawl of live business domains. Company data could be matched for 43,424 of them (66.6%), and every company-size, industry and country breakdown on this page describes that matched subset rather than the full detected base. A further 26,054 domains carried a Cloudways detection previously and no longer do.

Cloudways holds 2.78% of the PaaS category, ranking #8. This is a share of the domains we detect running a platform in this category — not a share of all websites, and not a share of spending — so it is not directly comparable to figures published on other denominators.

The top alternatives to Cloudways include Amazon Web Services (39.98% market share), Vercel (16.64% market share), WordPress.com (8.24% market share), Azure (7.5% market share) — measured as a share of the domains we detect running a platform in this category.

United States leads with 16,738 matched Cloudways domains, followed by United Kingdom (6,111), Canada (2,899), Australia (2,728), Netherlands (1,655). These are counts within the 43,424 domains we could match to a company record, not the full detected base.

The most common company size is 1-10 employees, representing 61.31% of the Cloudways domains we could match to a company record and size — a subset of 43,424 matched companies, not of all 65,170 detected domains. This is followed by 11-50 employees (25.46%) and 51-200 employees (8.87%).

Among the Cloudways domains we could match to a company with a known founding date, the largest group was founded in the 2010s (36.77%), followed by the 2000s (19.19%). That matched subset is drawn from 43,424 companies and is not representative of all 65,170 detected domains. This suggests Cloudways is most popular among relatively young companies.

The ideal Cloudways customer is: Company Size: 1-10 employees, Location: US, UK, Canada, or Australia, Industry: Construction, advertising agencies, real estate, or health care, Founded: 2010s, with a long tail before 1980, Stack: WordPress on Nginx behind Cloudflare — based on our analysis of 43,424 enriched companies at TechnologyChecker.io.

Because the previous figure was a cumulative one. This page used to report 88,770; the August 2026 reading is 65,170 domains still answering. Across the current crawl window, June to August 2026, 88,563 domains carried a Cloudways detection at some point, which is within 250 of the old number. Separately, 26,054 domains dropped a detection since we began tracking in March 2026. We publish the count of domains answering now, so 65,170 is the figure the rest of this page is built on.

Cloudways is matched by a single response header, cache-provider: CLOUDWAYS-CACHE-DE. That is the whole rule, so 65,170 is a floor rather than a census: any Cloudways site whose cache layer is off, configured differently, or fronted by something that strips the header is invisible to us. What one exact-match header does buy is precision in the other direction, since no other platform sends that value, so a domain in this count is very unlikely to be a false positive. It also means we cannot tell which underlying provider, region or plan sits behind a given detection.

No, and it is a fair thing to check. The header value ends in DE, which looks like it could pin the count to a German data centre. The geography rules it out: 16,738 matched domains are in the United States and 6,111 in the United Kingdom, then Canada (2,899), Australia (2,728) and the Netherlands (1,655). Germany is ninth on 657 domains, roughly 25 times smaller than the United States. Whatever that suffix denotes inside Cloudways' cache tier, it is not selecting German customers.

Look at the response headers. A Cloudways site served through the platform's cache returns a cache-provider header whose value names Cloudways, which is exactly the signal this page counts. You can read it in any browser's network inspector or with a command-line HTTP client. A site can be on Cloudways without returning it, so a missing header is not proof of absence, but the header being present is a reliable positive.

In practice, yes, whatever the category label says. WordPress runs on 99.63% of the Cloudways domains we sample, the next CMS on the list is GoDaddy Website Builder at 0.28%, and the analytics layer is full of WordPress plugins: Site Kit (9.37%), MonsterInsights (4.09%), WordPress.com Stats (3.85%) and PixelYourSite (2.92%). Cloudways also supports other PHP applications, but there is no measurable non-WordPress population in our data.

Because Cloudways provisions and manages servers on someone else's infrastructure rather than reselling space on its own, which is the structural definition of a platform layer. The classification is defensible and still misleading for buyers: the category's largest members are Amazon Web Services (936,363 domains), Vercel (389,653), WordPress.com (193,092), Azure (175,651) and Firebase (160,932), most of which are sold to engineering teams. Cloudways is sold to small businesses and agencies running WordPress. Read its 2.78% as a position inside a bucket, not as a competitive standing.

The managed WordPress hosts, not the cloud platforms it shares a category with. WP Engine and Kinsta sit above it on price and hand-holding, Hostinger and the shared hosts sit below it on price, and a self-managed VPS sits beside it for anyone willing to run the server themselves. That is the shortlist a small business or its agency actually draws up, and it maps to the base we measure: 61.31% of matched companies have 1 to 10 employees.

Not in any way our data supports, which is why this page publishes no Cloudways to AWS migration figure. Cloudways runs customer sites on underlying cloud providers and AWS is one of them, so the two are nested rather than rival. Of the domains that ever ran both, 67.8% still run both. A count of domains apparently moving between them would be describing our own view of the layer underneath Cloudways, not a customer changing supplier.

Some do, in small numbers. Since March 2026 we observe 388 domains moving from Cloudways to Vercel and 9 moving back, with 120 of the 388 in the last 30 days. Against 65,170 detected domains that is a fraction of a percent. The direction is the interesting part: Vercel is a deployment target for framework-built sites, so this corridor mostly reads as WordPress sites being rebuilt rather than WordPress sites changing host. It is the only corridor on this profile large enough to publish.

Very nearly. Of the 40,970 Cloudways domains we could match to a company and an employee band, 25,120 (61.31%) have 1 to 10 employees and 86.77% have fewer than 50. Larger organisations do appear, but almost always on a single subdomain rather than across an estate: Kerry Group on supplements.kerry.com, Santos on ourstory.santos.com, David Lloyd Group on investor-relations.davidlloyd.co.uk. Read those as one site each, not as company-wide hosting decisions.

Established ones, by a clear margin. Only 16.85% of matched Cloudways companies were founded in the 2020s, against 36.77% in the 2010s and 19.19% in the 2000s, and 10.88% were founded before 1980. Nearly half the base, 46.38%, predates 2010. Detected users include Hs Fresenius (1848), Gilbane Building Company (1870), Seur (1942), Vistage International (1957) and Lincoln Property Company (1965). This is a hosting purchase made by businesses that already have a website, not a runtime chosen by a new company.

Construction leads on 2,098 domains (5.52% of industry-resolved matches), followed by Advertising Services (1,303), Real Estate (1,128), Medical Practices (1,094), Business Consulting and Services (1,029) and Hospitals and Health Care (1,022). IT Services and IT Consulting is seventh on 1,008. No industry clears 6%, so the base is horizontal, but it is notably not technical: by comparison, Render, another platform in the same category, has Software Development as its top industry at 17.58%.

Agencies are one of its core segments and the data shows it. Advertising Services is the second-largest industry at 1,303 domains, and the agency model concentrates domains: one account can carry many client sites, so a single agency may account for several of the domains we count. Cloudways supports that pattern directly with team access, separate application environments per server, staging and client billing. The trade-off is concentration risk on both sides, since one agency leaving takes its whole portfolio with it.

They solve different problems. Shared hosting puts many sites on one server and sells on price; Cloudways provisions a cloud server per customer and sells on managed performance, staging and isolation, which costs more. Our switching data shows no corridor between Cloudways and the budget hosts large enough to publish, so this is not a decision the market is visibly making in one direction. If a site is small and static, a shared host is usually enough; if downtime or slow pages cost money, the managed layer is what you are paying for.

Yes. Cloudways documents Magento support with an optimised stack including Varnish, Redis and Elasticsearch, and lets you pick the underlying server size for it. Just be aware of what the deployed base actually looks like: WordPress runs on 99.63% of the Cloudways domains we sample and no other CMS clears 0.3%, so Magento is a supported use case rather than a measurable part of the platform's population.

No. Cloudways provides neither email hosting nor domain registration, and this is the most common complaint in its G2 reviews. You add a third-party service such as Google Workspace, Zoho Mail or an SMTP add-on and point your DNS at it. The omission is deliberate rather than an oversight: Cloudways sells the hosting layer and leaves the surrounding services to specialists.

Five: DigitalOcean, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Vultr and Linode. You choose the provider and server size at launch, and Cloudways manages the stack on top of it. This is also why we do not treat AWS as a Cloudways competitor: the two sit in a stack rather than opposite each other, and 67.8% of the domains that ever ran both still run both.

Yes. DigitalOcean completed its acquisition of Cloudways in September 2022, in a deal valued at $350 million per the official announcement. The two had been partners well before that, and Cloudways continues to operate under its own brand and to offer servers on competing clouds, including AWS and Google Cloud.

Cloudways was founded in 2012 and headquartered in Malta, with a large part of its engineering and support organisation in Pakistan, which is where the association comes from. Since the 2022 acquisition it operates within DigitalOcean, a US company, while keeping its own brand and product team.

Cloudways prices per server rather than per site, on pay-as-you-go billing with no long-term contract, so the bill scales with the server you pick and how many applications you put on it. The entry DigitalOcean server is listed at $11 per month on cloudways.com; AWS and Google Cloud servers cost several times that. Check the vendor page before quoting a figure, since our data measures where sites are deployed, not what anyone pays.

Yes, a short free trial with no card required, which is enough to launch a server, deploy a site and see the control panel. There is no permanent free tier: after the trial the server bills at its normal rate. Check cloudways.com for the current trial length before relying on it.