Cloudways, founded in Malta in 2011 and acquired by DigitalOcean in 2022, is a managed cloud hosting platform that sits on top of DigitalOcean, AWS, Google Cloud, Vultr and Linode. Instead of configuring a raw VPS yourself, you launch a fully-tuned WordPress, Magento, Laravel or PHP stack in a few clicks — with caching (Varnish + Redis), free SSL and automated backups included.
It is especially popular with freelancers and digital agencies because of its team collaboration features, per-server billing (rather than per-site) and one of the cleanest control panels in the managed-cloud category. Support is 24/7 via chat and there is no long-term contract — you pay by the hour.