Cloudways vs Grafana Cloud
Managed cloud hosting across DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode, AWS, Google Cloud
vs. Fully-managed observability — Prometheus + Loki + Tempo + Grafana
Pricing tiers
Cloudways
Autonomous — Free Trial
3-day free trial. 1 server, 20 GB disk, 150 GB bandwidth.
Free
Flexible — DO Micro
DigitalOcean-backed. 1 vCPU, 2 GB RAM, 50 GB storage, 2 TB bandwidth. Starting tier.
$11/mo
Flexible — DO Medium
4 vCPU, 8 GB RAM, 160 GB, 5 TB bandwidth.
$88/mo
Autonomous — Growth
WordPress-optimized autoscaling. 1 baseline server, 20 GB disk, 150 GB bandwidth.
$100/mo
Autonomous — Scale
2 baseline servers, 50 GB disk, 250 GB bandwidth.
$200/mo
Flexible — DO 8XL
24 vCPU, 128 GB RAM, 2.56 TB storage, 11 TB bandwidth.
$342/mo
Autonomous — Plus
3 baseline servers, 100 GB disk, 1 TB bandwidth.
$400/mo
Enterprise
Custom autoscale, volume pricing.
Custom
Grafana Cloud
Free
Always free. 10k metrics series + 50 GB logs/traces/profiles + 3 users + 14-day retention.
Free
Self-Hosted (OSS)
Apache 2.0 / AGPL. Run Grafana + Mimir + Loki + Tempo yourself.
$0 base (usage-based)
Pro
$19/mo platform fee + usage-based overages. 10k metrics series + 50 GB included. 13-month metrics retention.
$19/mo
Enterprise
$25,000/year minimum. Custom retention, premium support, BYOC (Bring Your Own Cloud) option.
$25000/mo
Free-tier quotas head-to-head
Comparing auto-free-trial on Cloudways vs free on Grafana Cloud.
| Metric | Cloudways | Grafana Cloud |
|---|---|---|
| No overlapping quota metrics for these tiers. | ||
Features
Cloudways · 17 features
- Autonomous (WordPress) — Fully managed WordPress with autoscaling.
- Backups — Automated daily + on-demand. Retention configurable.
- Bot Protection — Cloudflare Enterprise bot filtering add-on.
- Bot Scaler — Autonomous: auto-scale based on traffic patterns.
- Breeze (WP cache plugin) — In-house WordPress caching plugin.
- CloudwaysCDN — Built-in CDN add-on (StackPath-backed).
- Flexible Plans — BYO-sized servers on any of 5 providers. Full control over stack.
- Free Let's Encrypt SSL — 1-click cert install + auto-renewal.
- Free Migration — 1 free app migration per plan. Cloudways team moves your site.
- Horizontal Scaling — Auto-scale app servers (Autonomous plans).
- Malware Protection — Add-on ($4/app/month). Scan + clean.
- Object Cache Pro — Included on certain plans. Redis-backed object cache for WP.
- SafeUpdates — Automated WordPress plugin/theme updates with rollback.
- Staging Environments — 1-click staging clones with push-to-live.
- Team Collaboration — Invite team members with granular role permissions.
- Thunderstack (Optimized) — Apache + Nginx + Varnish + Redis + Memcached preconfigured for speed.
- Vertical Scaling — Resize server specs without migration.
Grafana Cloud · 16 features
- Alloy (OTel agent) — Distribution of OpenTelemetry Collector with Grafana additions.
- Application Platform — Infrastructure + k8s + frontend + cloud provider integrations.
- Beyla (eBPF auto-instrumentation) — Zero-code auto-instrumentation via eBPF for any language.
- Faro (RUM) — Frontend observability — traces, logs, Core Web Vitals.
- Grafana in Azure Marketplace — "Azure Managed Grafana" — Azure-native deployment.
- Grafana Incident — Incident management with Slack-native flows.
- Grafana OnCall — On-call scheduling + incident response (powered by Amixr).
- Grafana SLO — Service level objective tracking + error budget visualization.
- Grafana (visualization) — Dashboards, variables, alerting, annotations over any datasource.
- k6 (synthetic + load testing) — Load testing + synthetic monitoring. JavaScript-based scripts.
- Loki (logs) — Prometheus-inspired log aggregation with LogQL.
- Mimir (metrics) — Horizontally-scalable Prometheus-compatible TSDB.
- Pyroscope (profiling) — Continuous profiling (CPU, memory, etc.).
- Self-Host Option — Full OSS stack deployable in your infra.
- Tempo (traces) — High-scale distributed tracing with TraceQL.
- Unified Alerting — Grafana-native alerting across metrics, logs, traces.
Developer interfaces
| Kind | Cloudways | Grafana Cloud |
|---|---|---|
| CLI | — | Grafana Alloy (agent), grafana-cli |
| SDK | — | Faro Web SDK (RUM) |
| REST | Cloudways API | Grafana HTTP API, Loki Push API |
| OTHER | Cloudways Platform (web UI), Server SSH Access, SFTP | Prometheus Remote Write, Tempo OTLP |
Staxly is an independent catalog of developer platforms. Outbound links to Cloudways and Grafana Cloud are plain references to their official websites. Pricing is verified against vendor pages at publication time — reconfirm before buying.
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