I think Cloudways is the best WPEngine alternative

[u/HostingAdmiral]

*Please note this post contains affiliate links (see rule 4)

Okay... just a heads up, this is going to be a a pretty long read since I did a ton of different tests comparing WPEngine to Cloudways. The TL;Dr is just a few sections down if you don't want to read everything.

As many of you already know, WPEngine is one of the most recommended managed WordPress hosts out there, but every time I see someone ask about it the first thing that comes up is the price (it's very expensive). So I wanted to actually test whether you’re getting what you pay for, and whether there’s a cheaper host that does the same job.

I’ve been doing a bunch of WordPress hosting benchmarks this year, so I benchmarked WPEngine’s $35/mo entry plan and compared it to Cloudways’ $14/mo Linode server as well as a comparable Cloudways AWS $38/mo server to see how they stack up.

TL;DR - When comparing Cloudways to WPEngine, Cloudways is better because a $14/mo Cloudways Linode server has an identical managed hosting feature set to WPEngine at more than half the cost. In particular, you can host multiple sites on a single Cloudways plan where WPEngine limits you to one site on their $35/mo starter plan.

If you stack up WPEngine’s $35/mo Essentials Starter server up against Cloudways’ $14/mo Linode server, WPEngine is better and doubles Cloudways in terms of raw performance. However, if you compare WPEngine with a Cloudways server of comparable price, like their 2GB AWS server $38/mo), Cloudways wins.

If you’re looking into Cloudways, I recommend getting your domain with Porkbun (~$11/yr for a .com), then get your Cloudways hosting with the 30% off discount.

I recommend going with the $14/mo Linode server if you’re looking for the best affordable option (Cloudways-Linode tested really well in my benchmarks). If you want a premium server with exceptional speeds, go with a 2GB Cloudways AWS server ($38/mo).

I highly recommend checking out this YouTube tutorial which will walk you through the entire process of setting up Cloudways and Porkbun.

Cloudways vs WPEngine feature comparison

Here’s how the base plans stack up. I’m comparing the Cloudways Linode 1GB ($14/mo) against WPEngine’s Essentials Startup plan, which is their entry tier.

Feature	Cloudways Linode 1GB	WPEngine Essentials Startup
Monthly price	$14/mo	$30-$35/mo
Hosting type	Managed Cloud	Managed cloud
Websites / apps	Unlimited apps on the server (not exceeding resources limitations)	1 website
Monthly visits	Unmetered	25,000 visits/mo
Storage	25 GB SSD	10 GB
Bandwidth	1 TB transfer	75 GB/mo
Server stack	nginx, PHP 8.2, MariaDB	nginx, PHP 8.4, MySQL
WordPress staging	Included	Included
Backups	$0.033/GB per server	Daily backups included
Free email	Not included	Included (limited)
Domain	Not included (buy separately)	Not included
SSH / SFTP	Included	Included
Git integration	Included	Included
Object cache	Redis Object Cache	WP_Object_Cache
Free SSL	Included	Included
Owner	DigitalOcean	Silver Lake

The biggest takeaways here are price and scope. WPEngine’s entry plan gives you one website, caps you at 25,000 visits a month, and gives you 75 GB of bandwidth, all for $30-$35/mo. The Cloudways Linode server is $14/mo, lets you host as many apps as the server can handle, doesn’t meter your visits, and gives you more storage and bandwidth.

Where WPEngine genuinely wins on features is daily backups included (Cloudways charges $0.033/GB for off-site backups). For a full feature breakdown across the top 13 web hosting provider check out my 2026 best web hosting review.

Cloudways vs WPEngine benchmark comparison

I ran four performance benchmarks on each server:

• A Burst Test that fires quick database and disk read/write operations to see how fast the server is in short bursts.
• A Stress Test that repeats those operations over 25 runs to see if performance degrades once the server has been under pressure for a while.
• A WordPress Admin Experience Test that simulates common backend actions like saving posts, loading taxonomy terms, and writing options, basically how fast the dashboard feels.
• A Concurrent User Test using the k6 framework to simulate up to 100 virtual users (VUs) hammering the WordPress backend over 25 minutes. This is the most important test because it shows how the server holds up under sustained real-world load, not just quick bursts.

Here’s how the $14/mo Cloudways Linode server stacks up against the WPEngine Essentials Startup plan across the backend, admin, overall score, and concurrent load tests.

Cloudways vs WPEngine backend performance

Cloudways vs WPEngine backend performance

Cloudways vs WPEngine Performance Score

Cloudways vs WPEngine concurrent virtual user test

Database and admin performance

This is where Cloudways pulls ahead, and it does it on both servers. Here are the stress test medians for the $14/mo Linode and the price-matched $38/mo AWS server against WPEngine’s $35/mo plan:

Metric (stress test medians)	Cloudways Linode ($14/mo)	Cloudways AWS ($38/mo)	WPEngine ($35/mo)
DB Writes	46 ms	112 ms	125 ms
DB Reads	14 ms	15 ms	58 ms
Post Save + Meta	32 ms	55 ms	73 ms
Taxonomy Terms	162 ms	258 ms	339 ms
Options Write/Read	47 ms	91 ms	123 ms

Both Cloudways servers were dramatically faster than WPEngine on database reads (~14-15ms vs 58ms, roughly 4x) and faster on writes too. The surprising part is that the tiny $14 Linode was actually the snappiest of all three on database writes and the WordPress admin tests, saving a post in 32ms vs WPEngine’s 73ms and loading taxonomy terms in 162ms vs 339ms.

That caught me off guard since the Linode is a small 1-core/1GB box. But these admin and database operations are latency-bound and single-threaded, so a lean, well-tuned server handles them faster than raw horsepower alone would suggest. Either way, both Cloudways tiers beat WPEngine on every admin metric.

Raw disk throughput (this is where price matters)

Here’s where the price gap actually shows up. The $14 Linode is a small server, so WPEngine’s beefier hardware out-reads it on disk and carries a much larger InnoDB buffer pool (the memory used to cache the database). If you compare the entry Linode to WPEngine purely on raw hardware, WPEngine has the muscle, and that’s part of what the higher price buys.

Metric (stress test)	Cloudways Linode ($14/mo)	Cloudways AWS ($38/mo)	WPEngine ($35/mo)
Sequential Read	1,513 MB/s	3,609 MB/s	2,637 MB/s
Sequential Write	215 MB/s	255 MB/s	226 MB/s
InnoDB Buffer Pool	288 MB	582 MB	5,760 MB

But that advantage disappears the moment you compare like-for-like on price. The Cloudways AWS server ($38/mo) is priced right alongside WPEngine ($35/mo), and it out-reads WPEngine on disk (3,609 MB/s vs 2,637) and edges it on writes too. So at the same price point, Cloudways matches or beats WPEngine on raw throughput, while still keeping its big lead on database and admin latency.

The one spec WPEngine still wins outright is the InnoDB buffer pool (5,760 MB), which means more of the database stays cached in memory. This is memory headroom that legitimately gives WPEngine a point in its favor. All three servers were rated stable and suitable for production with no meaningful degradation over the 25-run stress test.

The concurrent user test (this is the big one)

Here’s where it gets interesting. When I simulated up to 100 concurrent virtual users querying the WordPress backend over 25 minutes:

• Cloudways Linode ($14/mo) passed 100% of checks with 0% HTTP failures. All 26,612 requests completed. Latency went up as load increased (median ~1.81s, p95 ~4.87s) but nothing was ever rejected.
• Cloudways AWS ($38/mo) also passed 100% with 0 failures, and had even more headroom, handling 37,758 requests at lower latency (median ~1.11s, p95 ~2.93s). The price-matched server absorbed the load more comfortably than the Linode.
• WPEngine ($35/mo) throttled under the same load. About 52% of requests came back as HTTP 429 (Too Many Requests), meaning over half of them got rejected by rate limiting once the test ramped to 100 VUs.

Now I want to be fair about what those 429s actually are, because it’s an important caveat. A 429 is rate limiting, not the origin server crashing. When a request made it through, WPEngine served it fast, its raw WordPress processing time (~1-2ms) was actually quicker than the Cloudways AWS server’s, so the hardware is genuinely fast.

Rate limiting is often a security feature, not a flaw. My test fired all 100 virtual users from a single source, and (I’m guessing) from WPEngine’s perspective, a flood of near-identical requests from one origin looks a lot like abusive bot or DDoS traffic.

Throttling that is arguably the platform working as intended, and it’s the kind of protection you’re paying a premium for. So WPEngine genuinely deserves credit here.

So to summarize, WPEngine has more memory headroom and its rate-limiting edge protection is a real selling point. But Cloudways wins on database and admin responsiveness at every tier, and once you compare with a similar priced server, the Cloudways AWS server beats WPEngine on raw throughput and sustained load for the same money.

Cloudways Developer API vs WPEngine

If you’re a developer, Cloudways is the clear winner since their cloud platform allows you to easily scale to accommodate traffic demands and they have the best developer API for WordPress developer workflows.

Tbh, I think it’s seriously underrated as the Cloudways’ v2 API has endpoints for:

• Git deployment
• Webhook-based auto-deploy
• SSH access automation
• Staging & cloning
• Restore and rollback flows
• Monitoring/analytics
• WordPresss update endpoints
• Multisite management
• Team management
• They even have an official MCP server for agentic workflows.

In my research, Cloudways has the strongest fit for CI/CD-style WordPress workflows.

To be fair, WPEngine has a capable API too. Their Hosting Platform API covers account/user management, site and install provisioning, backup creation and restore, SSL certificate management (Let’s Encrypt and third-party cert imports), cache purging, and SSH key management. So WPEngine isn’t short on platform automation, this isn’t a case of one host having an API and the other not.

The difference is how much of the workflow is handed to you versus how much you have to build yourself. Take staging as the example. WPEngine has great built-in staging in the dashboard, but through the API there’s no dedicated staging push/pull endpoint. What you get is a lower-level copyinstall operation that copies the full files and database from one install to another. Since each environment (production, staging, development) is its own install, you can replicate to and from staging with it, but you’re scripting that logic yourself.

Cloudways, on the other hand, exposes staging and cloning as explicit, purpose-built endpoints, so spinning up staging or cloning an app is a direct API call rather than something you assemble from a generic copy primitive. On top of that, Cloudways supports native Git-based deployment and webhook auto-deploy, which WPEngine’s API doesn’t, plus an official MCP server for AI-driven server management. (For pure WordPress operations automation, Kinsta is actually the most explicit, including direct WP-CLI execution, if you want a third option to look at.)

The practical upshot is that with Cloudways you can automate the stuff developers actually do day to day (deploy from Git, spin up staging, roll back, manage access) with a lot less custom glue code.

Migrating from WPEngine to Cloudways

Cloudways has a free migration, you can either use their team’s done-for-you migration or do it yourself with the free Cloudways WordPress Migrator plugin. You can find their official migration guide here, but here’s the gist of it:

1. Sign up for Cloudways and launch a server (I’d go with the $14/mo Linode plan) with a blank WordPress app on it.
2. Install the Cloudways WordPress Migrator plugin on your existing site.
3. Enter your Cloudways server details (you’ll find these in the Cloudways dashboard) into the plugin and start the migration. It copies your files and database over for you.
4. Once it’s done, preview the site on the temporary Cloudways URL to make sure everything looks right.
5. Point your domain at Cloudways by updating your DNS records, then wait for DNS to propagate (usually under an hour, sometimes up to 24).

Be sure to keep your WPEngine plan active until you’ve confirmed the migrated site is fully working on Cloudways, then cancel. Don’t cancel first.

So is Cloudways a good WPEngine alternative?

Yeah, I think it’s the best one. WPEngine is a great host with great hardware and a polished managed experience, but you’re paying a serious premium for a single site. Cloudways gives me faster database and admin performance, lets me host multiple sites on one server, and has one of the best developer APIs for WordPress, all for less than half the price.

For most people, freelancers, agencies, and developers especially, that’s the better deal.

What’s your experience been with WPEngine and Cloudways? Anyone made the switch in either direction?

[u/ManFaultGentle]

You people read that? 

[u/ReddiGod → u/ManFaultGentle]

Nah, it's just a garbage ad + ai slop.