Cloudways is a managed hosting platform, with support for various cloud hosting providers, including DigitalOcean. Cloudways supports different applications, including WordPress, Magento, Drupal and others.
Sail is a great alternative to Cloudways. While it does not support applications other than WordPress, it does offer more freedom and transparency, with plenty of unique features as well.
Unlike Cloudways, which is a closed proprietary platform, Sail is completely open source and transparent, giving you the flexibility and freedom to host WordPress on your own terms. Visit Sail on GitHub to learn more.
|
Cloudways |
Sail CLI |
+ Premium |
|
|---|---|---|---|
| Easy-to-use dashboard | |||
| Unlimited installs/domains | |||
| Unlimited visits/pageviews | |||
| Your own DigitalOcean account | |||
| Full root access to server | |||
| Custom configs for PHP, Nginx, MariaDB | |||
| Custom PHP modules support | |||
| Built-in performance profiling | |||
| Health & uptime monitoring | Limited | ||
| Image compression, WebP | |||
| Managed backups | Paid addon |
Cloudways pricing includes DigitalOcean charges. Most features are available on all plans. Backup storage is priced additionally at 3.3 cents per GB. Cloudways CDN starts at $1 per 25GB.
Sail is free, so the comparison table below includes charges you will incurr with your DigitalOcean account when using Sail. The optional premium offering is priced at $9 per server (unlimited sites) per month.
|
Cloudways |
DigitalOcean |
Sail Premium |
|
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 core, 1GB RAM, 25GB storage, 1TB bandwidth | $10 | $5 | + $9 |
| 1 core, 2GB RAM, 50GB storage, 2TB bandwidth | $22 | $10 | + $9 |
| 2 core, 4GB RAM, 80GB storage, 4TB bandwidth | $42 | $20 | + $9 |
| 4 core, 8GB RAM, 160GB storage, 5TB bandwidth | $80 | $40 | + $9 |
| Additional storage, per GB | $0.10 | $0.10 | - |
DigitalOcean allows bandwidth pooling, which means if you provisioned two servers with 1TB of bandwidth each, your total allowed monthly bandwidth is 2TB, regardless of which server is actually consuming it. Excess data transfer is billed at $0.01 per GB.
With Cloudways you may incurr additional bandwidth charges of $0.02 per GB for excess data transfer of individual servers.
Cloudways provides a free 3-day trial period.
Sail Premium offers a 60-day money back guarantee. DigitalOcean provides a 60-day trial with up to $100 in credits. This is the equivalent of running a 4-core premium AMD/Intel CPUs with 8GB of RAM, 160 GB NVMe SSD and 5 TB of bandwidth for two months.
Cloudways provides live chat support for all customers. Paid support options are also available for an additional $100/mo, and $500/mo for phone support.
Sail provides product support via our Slack community. Paid WordPress support options are available through vetted Sail partners starting from $49/mo.
Getting Started with Sail