Last updated 17 October 2026. Prices checked that day on cloudways.com and hostinger.com, in US dollars, excluding tax. Both change often.
We use both of these hosts, for different jobs: Cloudways for most client sites, and Hostinger’s VPS hosting for other projects. ExpertWebAdvisors is a Cloudways affiliate, so the Cloudways links below are marked “(Ad)”. The Hostinger links are plain links, and Cloudways doesn’t pay this site more if it comes out ahead.
The short answer: Hostinger for one small site on a tight budget; Cloudways when you’re running several sites and want staging and backups you control on all of them. The rest of this article shows why, including what each costs as you go from one site to twenty.
The quick verdict
- Pick Hostinger if you need one or two simple sites, you’re comfortable paying for several years upfront to get the low price, and you want a friendly control panel that handles most things for you.
- Pick Cloudways if you run several client sites, you want staging and adjustable backups on every one of them, and you’d rather pay monthly for a server than per site.
- Neither, on its own, if you need email included long-term. Hostinger’s mailboxes are free for the first year only, and Cloudways doesn’t include email at all.
Side by side
| Cloudways (Flexible) | Hostinger (managed WordPress) | |
|---|---|---|
| Best for | Freelancers and small agencies running several WordPress sites | Single small-business sites and tight budgets |
| How you pay | Per server, billed hourly, invoiced monthly. Unlimited sites per server, limited only by its resources | Per plan, paid upfront for the whole term. Sites per plan are capped (Premium: 3) or “unlimited” under a fair-usage policy |
| Starting price | $11/month (DigitalOcean 1GB Standard server) | $2.99/month on a 48-month term, renewing at $10.99/month (Premium) |
| Staging | Included free on every application, with push and pull | One-click staging on Business-tier plans and above. Not available for Multisite |
| Backups | Off-site, server-level. Daily by default, adjustable from hourly to weekly, kept 1–4 weeks. Storage billed at $0.033/GB | Weekly on Premium, daily on Unlimited and above. Restore files, database or both. Daily-backup add-on available |
| Support | 24/7 live chat and tickets. Paid Advance Support add-on | Priority 24/7 support listed on all three WordPress plans |
| Not included. Rackspace add-on at $1.50 per mailbox per month | Mailboxes free for the first year, then charged | |
| Control | Choose cloud provider, region, server size, PHP version, caching layers | Managed for you through hPanel |
| Our verdict | Our default for client work | Good value for one simple site, if you budget for renewal |
Price as you add sites: 1, 5 and 20
This is where the two models differ most, and where comparisons often mislead. Hostinger prices per plan, with a cap on sites or a fair-usage policy. Cloudways prices per server, and how many sites fit on a server depends on their traffic, plugins and caching, so there’s no honest “X sites per server” figure.
So here’s our method. It’s an illustration, not a quote:
- Cloudways: DigitalOcean Standard servers, sized for small, low-traffic brochure sites. Monthly price as published. Off-site backup storage and add-ons excluded, because they depend on site size.
- Hostinger: the cheapest WordPress plan that allows that many sites, at both the promotional rate (48-month term, paid upfront) and the renewal rate. VAT excluded.
| Sites | Cloudways (server, $/month) | Hostinger promo ($/month) | Hostinger renewal ($/month) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1GB server: $11 | Premium: $2.99 | $10.99 |
| 5 | 2GB server: $24 | Unlimited: $3.99 | $16.99 |
| 20 | 4GB server: $46 | Unlimited: $3.99 (fair usage applies), or Agency Startup: $29 on a 24-month term | $16.99, or $49 |
What this shows:
- At one site, Hostinger is clearly cheaper, even at renewal.
- At five sites, Hostinger is still cheaper on paper. But you’re comparing different things: Cloudways gives every site staging and daily, adjustable off-site backups, while Hostinger’s Unlimited plan puts all five sites on one shared plan.
- At twenty sites, the gap narrows. Hostinger’s agency plan (Agency Startup) is the fairer comparison here, with website isolation, staging, daily backups and per-site client access. It costs $29 a month on a two-year term and renews at $49. On Cloudways, twenty light sites on a 4GB server works out at about $2.30 a site before backup storage, but whether they’d all fit comfortably is something you’d have to watch.
And remember the upfront point: Hostinger’s promotional prices are for multi-year terms paid in one go. Cloudways bills you monthly for what you used.
Staging and backups in practice
For agency work, these two features matter more than anything else on the list.
Cloudways gives every application a staging copy that you can push to live and refresh from live, and it backs up the whole server off-site on a schedule you set. You can restore one application without touching the others. We cover the details in our Cloudways review.
Hostinger has a good staging tool and simple restores, but both depend on the plan. On Premium you get weekly backups and staging needs an upgrade. On Unlimited and above you get daily backups. For a small site that rarely changes, weekly may be acceptable; for anything that takes orders or enquiries, it isn’t. More in our Hostinger review.
Support
Both offer round-the-clock support. The useful test is a real question asked during Cloudways’ free trial or Hostinger’s money-back period.
Ease of use
Hostinger’s hPanel is the friendlier of the two for a non-technical owner. Cloudways assumes you’re happy thinking in terms of servers and applications, with settings split between the two levels. If a client will be logging in themselves, that alone may decide it.
Using both
You don’t have to choose just one. The two hosts suit different jobs, and running both side by side is a sensible set-up if you look after a mix of sites. We cover when each makes sense, and how to run both, in Hostinger or Cloudways? When each one makes sense. If a site’s needs change, it can move in either direction: Cloudways offers a free WordPress Migrator plugin and managed migrations by its own team, and Hostinger offers free migrations onto its Web, Cloud and Agency plans.
Whichever you choose, a CDN in front works with both. Start with how to add a CDN to any WordPress site.
Our pick
For one small site, Hostinger is the simpler and cheaper choice, as long as you budget for the renewal price and pick a plan with daily backups if the site matters. For an agency with several client sites, or anything that needs staging and server-level control, Cloudways is the better fit.
- Try Cloudways (Ad): three-day free trial, no card needed.
- See Hostinger’s plans (plain link): 30-day money-back guarantee.
Update, 17 October 2026: every table cell was re-checked against Cloudways’ and Hostinger’s own pages, and Hostinger’s agency plan was added to the 20-site comparison.
