Cloudways vs IONOS
Cloudways and IONOS compared on measured uptime, response time, pricing and features from our own tests. Cloudways scores higher overall.
By Jennifer T. · Updated
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Verdict
CloudwaysWins overall
DigitalOcean's managed cloud layer: servers from $11 a month on five clouds, billed hourly, staging and caching included
The former 1&1: unlimited sites and traffic from $8 a month at renewal, with a free domain and wildcard SSL
Cloudways wins 4 of the six sub-scores and comes out ahead overall (7.8 vs 7.1).
How do the scores compare?
Cloudways leads on 4 sub-scores, IONOS on 1. Higher is better.
Which one is faster and more reliable?
Which one costs less?
On renewal, Cloudways is cheaper ($14.00/mo vs $14.00/mo). Intro prices need the listed term.
| Cloudways | IONOS | |
|---|---|---|
| Cheapest plan | DigitalOcean Premium Micro | Plus |
| Intro price | $14.00/mo | $1.00/mo (better) |
| Renewal price | $14.00/mo | $14.00/mo |
| Required term | 1 months (better) | 12 months |
| Websites | unlimited | unlimited |
| Storage | 25 GB | 350 GB |
| Money back | 0 days | 30 days (better) |
What does each include?
| Cloudways | IONOS | |
|---|---|---|
| Free domain | No | One domain free for the first year on every plan: .us, .ca, .com, .net, .org, .info, .me, .biz or .online |
| Free SSL | Let's Encrypt certificates on every application | One DV wildcard certificate on Essential, Starter and Plus; unlimited wildcard certificates on Ultimate |
| Backups | On-demand and scheduled server backups with one-click restore; offsite storage billed at $0.033 per GB per server | Daily backup of storage and databases with data recovery, every plan |
| Free migration | Free migration of existing sites | No |
| Free CDN | No | Starter, Plus and Ultimate; not on Essential |
| Caching | Lightning Stack (NGINX), Object Cache Pro and Redis included on every plan | Server compression and HTTP/2 listed; no caching layer named on the plan page |
| Staging | Advanced staging and cloning on every plan | No |
| No | 1, 2, 4 or 5 accounts of 2 GB by plan, with forwarding, webmail and anti-spam | |
| Resource limits | A whole server per customer: 1 to 8 GB RAM and 1 to 4 vCPU on the listed sizes, larger sizes and other providers available | CPU priority 1x, 3x, 5x and 10x by plan; 262,144 inodes on every plan; cron jobs 10, 25, 50 and 100 |
| Data center choice | The provider's regions, chosen per server: DigitalOcean 9, Vultr 30, Linode 25, AWS 28, Google Cloud 28 | No |
| Uptime guarantee | No | 99.99% in the general terms, with a credit for the month proportional to the downtime, on request and at IONOS's discretion |
| Security | Built-in firewall with IP blocking, WordPress vulnerability scanner, bot protection and dedicated firewalls per the pricing page | Daily malware scanning (basic, or advanced with automatic removal on Ultimate), DDoS protection, geo-redundancy |
| Free trial | 3 days without a credit card | Not stated |
| Phone support | No | 24/7, with a personal consultant |
| Windows hosting | No | No |
| SSH, SFTP, WP-CLI and Git | Not stated | Every plan, with 200 SFTP accounts, Perl and Python |
| PHP versions | Not stated | 8.4, 8.3 and 8.2, with paid extended support for 5.6 and later |
| Websites and traffic | Not stated | Unlimited websites and unlimited traffic on every plan; 5,000 subdomains |