Cloudways

Cloudways, part of DigitalOcean, runs servers for you on a cloud provider of your choice — DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode, AWS or Google Cloud — without you administering the machine. It is built mainly for PHP applications: WordPress, WooCommerce, Magento, Laravel and other PHP frameworks.

The model is one managed server per plan, not a pool of containers. On the Flexible plans you choose a provider, a server size and a data center, and Cloudways deploys a fixed stack on Debian: Nginx in front of Apache, Varnish, MySQL or MariaDB, PHP, Memcached and Redis, with optional Elasticsearch, Supervisor and RabbitMQ. You can launch as many applications as fit on the server, reach them over SSH and SFTP, and deploy from GitHub, GitLab or Bitbucket. A separate plan, Cloudways Velocity, runs Node.js apps (Next.js, Express, Astro and others) on persistent servers at a flat monthly price, deployed via Git, with PostgreSQL available from the dashboard.

What a small team gets: OS security patches, automated off-server backups, free Let's Encrypt SSL, a firewall, staging environments and 24/7 support by chat and ticket, billed hourly with a monthly invoice. Data centers come from the five providers, which Cloudways counts as more than 150 locations.

Limits to know: there is no root access, so software outside the stack and its settings panel goes through support; the stack is built around PHP; and bandwidth beyond the plan, a CDN and some security features cost extra. A server stays in its data center, and moving means cloning it to another provider or location.