Cloudways Free Plan: What You Actually Get Before Paying

Cloudways has no free plan, only a short trial: 5 days on Flexible and 3 days on Autonomous, with no credit card. Here is what you get before paying.

By Galactic News Editorial · Published 2026-11-10T19:35:18+00:00 · Updated 2026-11-10T19:35:18+00:00

Cloudways Free Plan: What You Actually Get Before Paying

Cloudways has no free plan. That is the short answer. Its own support pages say so plainly. What it offers instead is a short free trial. Flexible gives a 5-day trial. Autonomous gives a 3-day trial. Neither needs a credit card. This guide explains what the trial includes, what happens when it ends, and what you pay after. All prices come from Cloudways' own pricing page.

Cloudways free plan: the trial is all there is

Cloudways support states it plainly: it does not provide a free hosting service. It offers a 5-day free trial on Cloudways Flexible and a 3-day free trial on Autonomous. All plans are pay-as-you-go once the account is upgraded from trial to full. The trial starts when you create a trial server. During the trial you can try DigitalOcean, Vultr, or Linode. AWS and Google Cloud are not included in the trial. You can upgrade later if you want either of those. When the trial ends, your server is deleted. If you upgrade by adding a payment method, your server is restored with your apps, setup, and data. One warning: Cloudways' own pricing page shows conflicting trial lengths for Flexible. Its FAQ says 5 days in one place and 3 days in another. The support knowledge base says 5 days for Flexible. Treat 5 days as the stated length and confirm it when you sign up. The trial window is short either way. Plan your test before you start it.

Cloudways Flexible prices after the trial

Flexible is the classic Cloudways product. You pick a cloud provider and a server size. Then you install as many WordPress, WooCommerce, Laravel, or PHP apps as the server can hold. Billing is pay-as-you-go, charged by the hour. The DigitalOcean Premium entry points on the pricing page are Micro at $14 a month, Small at $28, Medium at $54, and Large at $99. Micro gives 1 GB of RAM, 1 vCPU, 25 GB of NVMe storage, and 1 TB of transfer bandwidth. Small gives 2 GB of RAM, 1 vCPU, 50 GB of storage, and 2 TB of bandwidth. Medium gives 4 GB of RAM, 2 vCPU, 80 GB of storage, and 4 TB of bandwidth. Large gives 8 GB of RAM, 4 vCPU, 160 GB of storage, and 5 TB of bandwidth. Visits and websites are unlimited on every Flexible server. Your bill rises when you scale the server, not when traffic spikes. Extra costs apply. Offsite backup storage costs $0.033 per GB. CDN bandwidth beyond your plan costs $0.02 per GB. Extra disk costs $1 per 10 GB.

Cloudways Autonomous and Velocity prices

Autonomous is fully managed WordPress hosting on Kubernetes. It autoscales across servers during traffic spikes. Its trial lasts 3 days with no credit card. The Growth plan costs about $99 a month. It includes 1 website, 1 baseline autoscale server, 150 GB of bandwidth, and 20 GB of disk space. Visits are unmetered. The Scale plan costs about $199 a month, and Plus costs about $399 a month. Extra disk costs $1 per GB. Extra bandwidth costs $0.04 per GB. Extra autoscale servers cost about $0.07 to $0.12 per server-hour, depending on the plan. Velocity is managed Node.js hosting with flat monthly plans. Starter costs $20 a month for 2 GB of RAM, 2 vCPU, and 5 apps. Professional costs $30 a month for 4 GB of RAM, 2 vCPU, and 8 apps. Growth costs $50 a month for 8 GB of RAM, 4 vCPU, and 14 apps. Higher Velocity plans run to $400 a month. Cloudways also lists a separate line of managed agent hosting from $9.99 a month. That is a different product from web hosting.

What the Cloudways free trial includes

The trial gives full access to the platform. You can deploy a real WordPress site and test it on your real workload. Free SSL certificates from Let's Encrypt are built in. Staging environments are free. You can create a staging copy, test changes, and push them live with one click. Automated backups run on demand or on a schedule. Object Cache Pro is free on servers with 4 GB of RAM or more. Cloudways says that plugin usually costs $95 a month on its own. Your first website migration is free. Cloudways engineers move it from any host for you. The Cloudflare Enterprise add-on costs extra. Rackspace email costs $1.50 per mailbox per month. Advanced support is a paid add-on too. None of these extras are part of the free trial.

How to use the Cloudways free trial well

Follow these steps to get real value from a 3 to 5 day window. First, prepare before you start the clock. Have your site files, database export, and domain details ready. Second, pick DigitalOcean for the trial server. It is the cheapest provider and it is included in the trial. Third, migrate or install your real site on day one. A blank test install tells you nothing about speed. Fourth, test what matters. Load your heaviest pages. Run a backup and a restore. Try the staging workflow. Check support response time with a real question. Fifth, decide before the trial ends. Add a payment method to keep the server, or let it be deleted. Note the Autonomous warning. If you already added a payment method, an Autonomous account can upgrade to a paid plan when the trial ends. Cancel the trial first if you do not want that.

Bottom line

There is no Cloudways free plan. There is a 5-day trial on Flexible and a 3-day trial on Autonomous, both with no credit card. After that, Flexible starts at $14 a month on DigitalOcean, and Autonomous starts at about $99 a month. The trial is genuine and full-featured. But 3 to 5 days is short. Prepare your site first, test it on real traffic, and decide before the clock runs out. If you need a permanent free tier, Cloudways is the wrong host. Look at free static hosting or a free WordPress.com plan instead.