Looking for a Cloudways alternative? What to compare before you switch
Cloudways prices went up, support got thinner, and there is still no email hosting. Here is an honest checklist for evaluating a Cloudways alternative — and where Simplewala fits.
If you are searching for a Cloudways alternative, you are probably not searching because the product stopped working. You are searching because something changed: the invoice grew, a support ticket sat unanswered for two days, or you hit a wall trying to do something basic on a server you supposedly own.
This is a checklist for evaluating any managed hosting platform, including ours — so you switch once, deliberately, instead of hopping between panels every year.
One disclosure first, because it changes how you should read the rest. Simplewala also charges a markup on infrastructure. We are Dashboard-as-a-Service for hosting management, and that markup is the dashboard fee — there is no subscription on top of it. So this is not a "we are cheaper, they are greedy" post. Every platform here is paid for somehow: a subscription, a bundled markup, or your own hours. The question is what you get for it.
Why people leave Cloudways
Cloudways is a genuinely capable platform — multi-provider, well-optimised stack, 150+ data centres. The complaints that push people to look elsewhere tend to cluster into four themes:
- Cost drift. The underlying droplet is one price; the managed version is meaningfully more. The gap itself is legitimate — it is the product, and we charge one too. What frustrates people is that it is not stated as a line item, so it is hard to tell what the management layer actually costs you.
- Support consistency. The most-cited complaint in reviews: response quality varies, and AI chat has been replacing first-line human support.
- No root or full SSH access. You are renting a managed environment, not operating a server. When you need to install something unusual, you find the ceiling fast.
- No email hosting. Nearly every small business needs mail on its own domain. Cloudways sends you to a third-party add-on for it.
None of these make Cloudways a bad product. They make it a specific product, with a specific shape. The question is whether that shape still fits you.
The five questions worth asking any alternative
1. Do I keep root access?
This is the one that bites later, not now. A platform that automates your server but hides it from you is fine until the day you need to debug something it did not anticipate. Ask whether you get SSH root access on your own machine, and whether using it voids anything.
On Simplewala you keep full root SSH access on every server. The dashboard automates the tedious parts — provisioning, SSL, firewall, backups — but nothing is hidden from you, and nothing breaks if you log in and look around.
2. Is it tied to one language ecosystem?
Cloudways, RunCloud, Forge, and Ploi all grew out of the PHP and Laravel world. That heritage shows: PHP is first-class, everything else is secondary. If your stack is PHP forever, that is an advantage. If you are running a Node.js API next to a WordPress site next to a Python cron job, it is a tax.
Simplewala is Docker-based and framework-agnostic. Node.js, Python, PHP, Go, Ruby, Java, and .NET are all containerised runtime apps that deploy the same way. See Node.js hosting or Docker hosting for how that works in practice.
3. Which features are behind a higher tier?
This is where comparison shopping gets difficult. Two platforms advertise similar entry prices, but one gates backups, monitoring, the API, and team seats behind a plan costing four times as much. Write down what you actually need, then price the plan that includes all of it.
Simplewala does not have feature tiers. You choose a server size and pay one flat monthly price — the provider's infrastructure cost plus our markup, which is the dashboard fee. Every feature is included at every size: backups, monitoring, the REST API, email, the container registry. Nothing unlocks later and nothing is billed separately. Our pricing page explains exactly how the number is built.
4. Can I host email on my own domain?
Most panels skip email entirely, because mail is genuinely hard: Postfix, Dovecot, DKIM, SPF, DMARC, reverse DNS, reputation. So you end up paying per mailbox to a third party for something your server is perfectly capable of doing.
Simplewala installs a full mail stack — Postfix, Dovecot, OpenDKIM, and Roundcube webmail — with the DNS records generated for you. There is a walkthrough in self-hosted email explained, and the feature page is at email hosting.
5. How do I get my data out?
Ask this before you migrate in, not after. A platform that makes leaving hard is telling you something about its confidence. Because your Simplewala server is a normal Ubuntu VM with root access, exporting is just files and database dumps — no proprietary format to escape.
What switching actually involves
The fear that keeps people on a platform they have outgrown is downtime. It is reasonable, and solvable:
- Build the new environment alongside the old one. Nothing is pointed at it yet.
- Copy files and import the database. Test on a temporary hostname.
- Lower your DNS TTL to 300 seconds a day in advance.
- Do a final sync, then switch the DNS record.
- Leave the old host running for a week. If anything is wrong, switch back.
Your old host stays live the entire time, so there is no moment where the site is only half-moved. We wrote the WordPress-specific version of this in how to migrate WordPress with zero downtime, and the general tooling is on the migration page.
An honest note on where Cloudways still wins
Cloudways has 150+ data centre locations across five providers, a mature agency partner programme, and years of operational history. If you need a specific edge location or their agency tooling, those are real advantages and we will not pretend otherwise.
Simplewala is the better fit if you want root access back, run more than one language, need email on your own domain, and would rather not think about which tier unlocks backups.
Try it against your real workload
Do not benchmark a hosting platform with a hello-world page. Deploy the messy app — the one with the cron jobs and the plugin nobody wants to touch. That is the test that tells you something. See how it works, or the getting started guide.
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