Cloudways vs DigitalOcean vs Kinsta: price and speed for one small business site

The site in question is a small business's WordPress site. A home page, a few service pages, a contact form and a blog, built by a founder or a freelancer and edited once a week. Nobody on the team is a server administrator, and nobody wants to become one.

There are three common ways to host it that a lot of founders shortlist. DigitalOcean rents you a virtual server, called a Droplet, that you run yourself. Cloudways runs a server for you on DigitalOcean or another cloud, and looks after it. Kinsta sells managed WordPress hosting, priced per site, where the server isn't something you see at all.

Our guide to managed hosting or a VPS explains the work a self-run server takes. This comparison puts prices and limits side by side for the same site.

Cloudways, DigitalOcean and Kinsta at a glance

Prices are monthly, from each company's pricing page on the day we checked.^{⁠[1],[2],[3]}

What one site costs on each

DigitalOcean charges for the server and nothing else. A Basic Droplet with 1GB of memory costs $6 a month, and one with 2GB costs $12. Automatic backups are extra, at 20% of the Droplet's price for weekly copies or 30% for daily ones.^⁠[2] A 2GB Droplet with daily backups is $15.60 a month, or $187.20 a year.

Cloudways sells the same kind of server with a management layer on top. It's part of DigitalOcean, and DigitalOcean is one of five clouds it can run your server on.^⁠[1] On DigitalOcean's Standard servers, which use SSD storage, its smallest plan is $11 a month for 1GB of memory and a 2GB plan is $24. The same sizes on the faster NVMe servers cost $14 and $28, and those are the prices the page shows first.^⁠[1] Cloudways bills by the hour, so a server you delete halfway through a month costs about half. Offsite backup storage adds $0.033 per GB per server.^⁠[1] For a small site that's a few cents a month, so a 2GB Standard server comes to about $290 a year.

Kinsta prices by site and bandwidth rather than by server. Its Single 20GB plan costs $35 a month, or $30 a month billed yearly, which is $350 a year. It covers one WordPress install, 20GB of server bandwidth and 125GB of CDN bandwidth a month, 10GB of storage and 14 days of backups.^⁠[3] When we checked, Kinsta's page offered the first month free, and its WordPress hosting comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee.^⁠[3],[7]

Which size is the right one? Cloudways describes its 1GB server as suitable for personal websites and simple blogs, and its 2GB server as suitable for growing businesses with moderate traffic.^⁠[1] That's the size we've used to compare.

The limits that decide the bill

The three hosts meter different things, and that matters more than the headline price.

DigitalOcean and Cloudways meter the server. You pay for memory, processor and storage, and each size comes with a large transfer allowance, 2TB a month on a 2GB server. Neither one caps the number of visits or sites. Cloudways charges $0.02 per GB if you go past the transfer allowance on DigitalOcean.^⁠[1],[2] A small business site won't come close.

Kinsta meters the site. Server bandwidth on the Single 20GB plan is 20GB a month, and anything past that costs $0.50 per GB. CDN bandwidth beyond the 125GB allowance is $0.05 per GB, and storage beyond 10GB is $2 per GB a month. If server bandwidth overages pass 250GB and the plan hasn't been upgraded, Kinsta charges them at the end of that week rather than the end of the month.^⁠[4]

The CDN carries most of a site's images, scripts and stylesheets, so the 20GB covers the pages themselves and anything the CDN can't cache. For a brochure site that's usually plenty. For a site that serves large downloads, a busy store or a blog that goes viral, it's worth checking your current host's bandwidth figure before choosing a Kinsta plan.

What's left for you to do

On a DigitalOcean Droplet, nearly everything. The WordPress 1-Click image gets you started with Ubuntu 24.04, the Caddy web server, PHP 8.3, MySQL 8.0, fail2ban and WordPress already installed.^⁠[8] After that, DigitalOcean's shared responsibility model is clear that the operating system and everything above it is yours to patch and secure.^⁠[9] When WordPress breaks on a Droplet, fixing it is your job too.

On Cloudways, the server is looked after for you. Every plan includes free migration, a server firewall with IP blocking, free SSL certificates, automated backups, staging copies of your site and support around the clock.^⁠[1] You still choose the server size, decide when to resize it, and keep WordPress, its plugins and its theme up to date. Support for plugin and theme problems is a separate $100 a month add-on.^⁠[1]

On Kinsta, you look after the content and little else. Kinsta lists support in eight languages around the clock, unlimited free migrations, free malware removal, a managed firewall with DDoS protection, edge caching and a performance monitoring tool on every plan.^⁠[3] It backs up each site automatically every day. Backups every six hours cost $20 a site a month, and hourly backups $100.^⁠[5]

Speed

All three put a small site on fast enough hardware. The difference is in what sits in front of it.

Kinsta routes every site through Cloudflare by default, with a CDN that spans more than 300 cities, at no extra cost.^⁠[6] It runs from 30 data centers, so you can place the site near most of your customers.^⁠[7] Cloudways includes its own caching stack and Redis on every server, and sells Cloudflare Enterprise as an add-on from $4.99 a domain a month. Object Cache Pro is included only on servers with 4GB of memory or more.^⁠[1] A bare Droplet has whatever you set up, which on the 1-Click image means no CDN until you add one.

For a site whose visitors are mostly in one country, a server in the nearest data center and a well-built theme matter more than any of these labels. Heavy page builders, unoptimized images and a dozen plugins slow a site down on every host.

Support and getting help

Support is the reason most small businesses pay for managed hosting, and it's the biggest practical gap between the three.

On Kinsta, someone will look at a broken site with you at any hour, and malware removal is part of the plan.^⁠[3] On Cloudways, support covers the server and the stack around the clock, and the paid add-on extends it to plugins and themes.^⁠[1] On DigitalOcean, the person who fixes your site at 2 a.m. is you, or whoever you pay to be on call.

If you run more than one site

Plenty of small businesses end up with a second site, such as a separate store, a landing page for a new product or a site for a sister company. The three hosts price that very differently.

A Droplet or a Cloudways server can hold as many sites as its memory and storage allow, and Cloudways lists unlimited websites on every plan.^⁠[1] A second small site on the same 2GB server costs nothing extra.

Kinsta charges per WordPress install. Its WP 2 plan, for two sites, costs $70 a month, or $700 a year billed annually.^⁠[3] For two or three sites, that gap is the strongest argument for Cloudways.

Moving later

None of the three locks you in. WordPress sites move between hosts as files and a database. Cloudways and Kinsta both migrate sites in for free.^⁠[1],[3] Moving out of either is the same job in reverse, usually done with a migration plugin or a backup copied to the new host.

So the choice you make now isn't permanent. A site can start on Cloudways and move to Kinsta when the team wants to hand over more of the work, or start on a Droplet and move to Cloudways once running a server stops being fun.

Which one to pick

Choose Cloudways for most small business sites. You get a managed server, staging, backups and support for about $290 a year on a 2GB DigitalOcean server, with no visit limit. If you have several small sites, they can share one server, which makes the price better still.

Choose Kinsta if you want to spend no time at all on hosting, your traffic is modest and predictable, and $350 a year for one site is fine. Watch the bandwidth figure in your dashboard for the first couple of months.

Choose a DigitalOcean Droplet if someone on the team will patch the server, check the backups and answer the alerts. It's the cheapest way to run a site and it teaches you a lot, but the savings over Cloudways come to about $100 a year, which is a couple of hours of anyone's time.

If the site doesn't need WordPress at all, a builder may be simpler still. Our Framer vs Webflow comparison covers the two most founders consider, and the startup website checklist lists what any small business site needs before launch.