Let’s set this WPX vs Cloudways comparison straight. WPX is a hosting provider focused on WordPress and WooCommerce. Cloudways is a middleman between you and third-party cloud hosting platforms, whose resources can be purchased via Cloudways.
If you’re on the verge of choosing one over the other, we implore you to stop. Take a deep breath and read this Cloudways vs WPX Hosting duel first. We’ll highlight their pros and cons, as well as review their features, performance, ease of use, support, prices, and other key aspects.
At the end, you’ll find out which provider is better for you and why we sided with WPX Hosting in the end. It’ll be an interesting battle full of surprises, so it’s best not to leave until the dust settles. Now, let’s take a deep plunge and see which hosting service is truly superior.
Cloudways vs. WPX Hosting: Key Features Compared
| Cloudways | WPX Hosting | |
| Types of Hosting | Cloud | WordPress and WooCommerce |
| Storage Size | Up to 3,840 GB | Up to 100 GB SSD |
| Bandwidth | Unlimited | 200 GB to unlimited |
| Hosted Websites | Unlimited | Up to 35 |
| Backups | Daily and on-demand | Daily and on-demand |
| Starting Price | $14 per month | $20.83 per month |
| Money-Back Guarantee | No (3-day trial) | 30 days |
| Ease of Use | Not for beginners | Easy |
| Site Migration | Free | Free |
| Free Domain | No | No |
| Security | Free SSL, server-level firewall with IP-blocking, and WordPress vulnerability scanner (malware protection is bought additionally) | Hybrid DDoS protection, brute-force protection, WAF, free SSL, daily malware scans, and WHOIS privacy |
| Email Accounts | No (bought additionally) | Unlimited |
WPX vs. Cloudways Plans and Pricing
Each provider offers a variety of plans structured differently.
WPX Hosting
WPX is a standard offering, with WordPress and WooCommerce plans sold separately. The WordPress Business plan starts at $20.83 per month, allowing you to host five websites on 15 GB of storage, with 5 GB of RAM and 200 GB of monthly bandwidth.
While all plans share the same features, which we’ll discuss later, they differ only in terms of computing resources. For example, the Professional plan allows you to host more websites, offers more bandwidth, and features more CPU cores. The same applies to the Elite plan.
In our WPX review, we mentioned that WooCommerce plans are pricier. They also offer a different set of features. The mid-tier Superstore plan removes the bandwidth cap. Meanwhile, the only WordPress plan without the cap is Elite. The principles are the same.
WooCommerce plans are identical, with the only variable being server resources.
Cloudways
Cloudways has an atypical pricing structure, but it’s safe to say it starts at $14 per month. Its pricing depends on the chosen cloud hosting provider. Cloudways lets you pick between DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode, AWS, and Google Cloud servers, all with different resources.
The most affordable option is DigitalOcean’s Micro plan, which includes unlimited sites and visits, 1 GB of RAM, one vCPU, 25 GB of NVMe storage, and 1 TB of bandwidth. Cloudways’s plans are compelling, and for a low price for cloud hosting, you can get very far.
That’s not to say there aren’t ludicrously priced plans. Google Cloud plans start at a whopping $37.33 per month, while its Compute Optimised variants go for as little as $255.37 per month. Cloudways is more flexible overall, as it even includes the Cloudways Autonomous plans.
These are managed WordPress hosting plans, starting at $35 per month, that can be further expanded by purchasing additional bandwidth, visits, and disk storage. While Cloudways can be significantly more expensive than WPX, it can also be substantially less expensive.
Since WPX starts at $20.83 per month and Cloudways can be obtained for $14 per month, the latter remains a cheaper option in 2026.
Money-Back Guarantee & Refund Policies
WPX Hosting relies on a standard 30-day money-back guarantee. Get it, see how you like it, and back out without consequences.
Cloudways offers a 3-day trial, allowing you to test the service before purchasing it. Because of this, Cloudways doesn’t have a money-back guarantee.
Its refund policy is on a per-case basis, which means it’ll issue a refund only if it doesn’t provide a properly functioning service. WPX, however, issues a refund regardless of the reason. We’re not sure which one we prefer, but now that we think about it, WPX’s refund policy sounds better.
Yes, you’ll spend money right away, but you have 30 days to test it.
Conversely, Cloudways and its 3-day trial aren’t very useful because you can’t get a complete picture of how the hosting service performs in 72 hours. Considering everything we’ve discussed, Cloudways is more cost-effective, while WPX offers a longer test period.
🏆 More Affordable Option: Cloudways
Hosting Management: Which Hosting is Easier to Use?
Cloudways and WPX don’t share many similarities in this aspect.
While Cloudways appears more professional and caters to experienced users, WPX’s vibrant colours and straightforward interface are more beginner-friendly. Take a look at Cloudways, and you’ll notice its sleek interface. On the other hand, it doesn’t hold your hand.
The custom control panel includes all options on the left, with the rest of the screen reserved for the selected option. You’ll have to install the apps you need on your own and even apply SSL encryption to your website manually. Installing WordPress is also manual labour here.
At least the company is kind enough to provide tutorials and explain everything, so you’ll no doubt navigate the unknown successfully. We appreciate the search bar, which allows you to quickly locate the tool you need without having to dig too much. Okay, so it’s time for WPX Hosting.
It looks a bit silly, but trust us — it’s very easy to use. Again, you’ll see the menu on the left, which houses everything you need. For example, when you click on Manage Websites, you’ll be able to activate SSL with a click or even create a website with WordPress in less than an hour.
WPX lacks the search bar from Cloudways’ snazzy interface, but it’s unnecessary given the low complexity of this interface. Everything is so easy to reach, from website management and databases to the file manager, FTP user settings, and even website backups.
As a beginner, you’ll appreciate WPX Hosting’s interface more. However, we must admit that looks are on Cloudways’ side, but as you know, looks aren’t everything in life (or in the web hosting world).
🏆 Easier-to-use Host: WPX Hosting
Cloudways vs. WPX Hosting Features
Cloudways and WPX have multiple award-winning features that bring light to the pitch darkness. The good news is that, apart from resources, their plans don’t change that much. This, in turn, means you’ll get virtually the same features no matter how much you spend.
We say ‘virtually because it’s not always like that. Here are the best WPX features in 2026:
- 15 to 100 GB of storage
- Free SSL and unlimited business email
- Free site speed optimisation
- 99.95% uptime guarantee
- Automated WordPress updates
- Custom CDN (XDN)
- 1-click WordPress installs
- Unlimited site migrations
- Website staging
- SSD storage
Security features will be addressed later, but as you see, there’s nothing you can point your finger at and say is missing. As managed WordPress hosting, WPX includes everything you need, even CDN, SSD storage, a WordPress installer, and other useful little features.
Cloudways lacks some security features, which will be discussed later. Its best features include:
- 1 to 384 GB of RAM
- 20 to 3,840 GB of storage
- Free SSL + migration
- Unlimited sites and apps
- Staging environment
- Object Cache Pro + Redis cache
- Automated and on-demand backups
- Free WordPress vulnerability scanner
You could argue that Cloudways offers more storage and RAM if you want to scale up. You will be right. It also hosts unlimited websites and includes advanced object caching to speed up load times. Unfortunately, you’ll have to spend extra to attain some more attractive tools.
For instance, Cloudways charges you $4.99 per month for its Cloudflare CDN. If you want email hosting from Rackspace Email, the cost is $1 per month per mailbox. Oh, do you need plugin updates and vulnerability fixes? That’s another $3 per month per application.
Rack up all of these, and you’ll quickly catch up to WPX Hosting price-wise. With WPX, there’s nothing to buy additionally. You’ll spend a hefty amount of money on a plan, but you’ll get everything the service has to offer. This ultimately makes WPX the winner of this round.
🏆 Hosting With More Features for Money: WPX Hosting
Speed & Uptime Tests: Which Web Hosting Performs Better?
This WPX vs. Cloudways duel would be incomplete without the speed tests. During our assessment, we relied on Pingdom, Loader, and GTmetrix to gauge their performance. We used WPX’s cheapest Business plan and compared it to the DigitalOcean Micro plan, which offers similar computing resources.
The only difference was that WPX used SSD storage, while Cloudways relied on NVMe storage instead. From here, we installed WordPress and made two identical websites, using the same theme, images, and pretty much everything else.
We chose the US server in WPX Hosting, as DigitalOcean also includes US hosting servers, to level the playing field. After the initial setup, it was time to boot up Pingdom and Loader to examine the results. Before we divulge them, see how Cloudways stacks up against SiteGround for a clearer picture of its performance.
Uptime & Response Time Results
Let’s start with uptime tests in Pingdom because they’re exceptional and identical. WPX promises 99.95% and delivers it swiftly. Cloud hosting’s reliability is undeniable, and after testing Cloudways for two months (the same as WPX), the result was exactly 99.90%.
WPX experienced a few brief downtime periods, but for some reason, Cloudways had an extended downtime period that lasted almost an hour. It also underwent scheduled maintenance, which took down its servers for approximately fifteen minutes. Not terrible, but not great.
Their response times were fantastic. We’d say some of the best in the business, as measured in Loader by our team of experts. Here are the results from WPX:
Here’s how Cloudways performed:
WPX is just a smidge better, with an average response time of 26 ms. Its minimum and maximum response times were 25 ms and 34 ms, respectively. Meanwhile, Cloudways achieved an average response time of 30 ms, with a minimum of 29 ms and a maximum of 62 ms. Excellent results!
What struck us the most was WPX, whose insanely low response times are atypical for shared hosting. To give you more context, everything under 600 ms is considered terrific. This is ultra-terrific, mainly because it’s better than cloud hosting provided by DigitalOcean.
Page Load Speed Comparison
WPX and Cloudways offer exceptional load times that’ll make your website feel premium and snappy. We noticed this the moment we made and optimised our websites, but we still went ahead and tested both through GTmetrix, using its famous Vancouver (Canada) server.
For this WPX Hosting vs. Cloudways comparison, we observed these few metrics:
- Time to First Byte (TTFB), which is ideally under 0.8 seconds.
- First Contentful Paint (FCP), which is ideally under 1.8 seconds.
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), which is ideally under 2.5 seconds.
- Fully Loaded Time (FLT), which is ideally under 3 seconds.
We first tested WPX and achieved the following results:
- TTFB: 116 ms
- FCP: 233 ms
- LCP: 302 ms
- FLT: 329 ms
When we tested our website hosted on Cloudways, we achieved these results:
- TTFB: 391 ms
- FCP: 532 ms
- LCP: 765 ms
- FLT: 1.0 s
Another surprise, huh? WPX’s shared hosting has beaten Cloudways’ cloud hosting by, might we add, a considerable margin! If we examine all four parameters, we’ll see that WPX is incredible, while Cloudways, while still way below the ideal values, is noticeably slower.
This may be due to the chosen plan, because we don’t doubt you’ll get better speeds with pricier plans. However, it would be unfair to compare WPX’s least expensive plan to Cloudways’ high-compute Google Cloud plan, which costs around $89 per month.
As things stand, WPX wiped the floor with Cloudways in all tests: uptime, response times, and load speed.
🏆 Faster Hosting: WPX Hosting
Security: Which Web Host Is the Safer Option?
WPX Hosting’s higher price means not sacrificing a single security feature. While cheap WordPress hosting options can be just as good, we think WPX Hosting has the most comprehensive toolkit of all.
It consists of:
- Free SSL encryption (Let’s Encrypt)
- Daily and on-demand backups
- Daily malware scans
- WHOIS privacy on all domains bought from WPX
- Managed Web Application Firewall
- Hybrid DDoS protection (enterprise-level)
- Two-factor authentication
- Brute Force protection
Do we need to clarify that WPX offers everything? If there’s something above everything, that’s WPX. Even WHOIS privacy is free if you buy a domain name from it. Additionally, there’s enterprise-level DDoS protection, along with daily malware scans and clean-ups, for enhanced security.
Best of all, this is included in all plans, with no additional cost required.
Cloudways security consists of:
- Free SSL (Let’s Encrypt)
- Firewall with IP blocking
- WordPress vulnerability scanner
- Automated backups
- Auto-healing servers
The list is way shorter, and you’ve likely noticed the lack of malware protection. It’s available, but you’ll need to spend $4 per month per app to access it. One feature we appreciate is auto-healing, which detects issues with your site or applications and automatically reverts them to a secure version, thereby removing vulnerabilities.
All things considered, WPX and Cloudways offer a comprehensive range of security features. It’s just a shame that you have to spend more on some of them in Cloudways, which ultimately renders WPX victorious.
🏆 More Secure Hosting: WPX Hosting
Customer Support
Whether you opt for WPX or Cloudways, you won’t be disappointed with the customer service.
Both companies offer 24/7 live chat support, facilitating fast and helpful responses at any time. It’s easy to access the chat widget, as well, which immediately allows you to represent yourself and type in a message. Their support response times are surprisingly short.
We haven’t had to wait for more than 5 minutes, and in most cases, we were “picked up” by the agent in roughly a minute. We’ll mention that Cloudways prompts you to leave your email address if the chat is abruptly ended, so that the company can follow up with you via email.
Cloudways and WPX offer knowledge bases to complement their chatty support teams. You’ll find tons of beautifully laid-out information and articles to help yourself out. You’d be crazy to complain about the customer support of either of these. They’re as professional as it gets!
As a result, we’re going to end this Cloudways vs. WPH Hosting duel with a tie.
🟰 Result: Tie
WPX vs. Cloudways: The Final Verdict
After an exhaustive comparison of these two popular web hosts, the logical conclusion is that WPX Hosting wins against Cloudways. Despite being a cloud hosting provider, Cloudways hasn’t surpassed WPX’s performance, and aspects such as ease of use, security, and features are also in WPX’s favour.
While Cloudways allows you to host unlimited websites and costs less monthly, its crucial add-ons, such as CDN, email accounts, and malware protection, can significantly increase the price. Not to mention, Cloudways had worse uptime in our tests, so it’s not as reliable as WPX Hosting.
Ultimately, the price difference between WPX and Cloudways appears justifiable. You’ll spend more on WPX, but simultaneously enjoy a better experience. If that sounds fair to you, then you should, by all means, opt for WPX and not look back — it’s phenomenal overall.
Are you, by any coincidence, considering VPS hosting as well? Perhaps these VPS hosting free trials might scratch that itch. If not, you now have a clear answer to today’s problem: WPX Hosting.
