Cloudways vs Rocket.net
Both are WordPress hosts aimed at agencies, freelancers and growing sites. They differ most on support, performance and multi-site management.
At a glance
| Cloudways | Rocket.net | |
|---|---|---|
| Overall score | 78/100 | 80/100 Higher |
| Free plan | No | No |
| Paid from | $14/mo monthly cap; $0.0208/hr | $30/mo monthly; $1 first month |
| Positioning | managed cloud | premium managed |
| Launched | 2011 | — |
| Best for | Anyone hosting several sites who is comfortable taking on a little more responsibility. | Site owners who want premium managed WordPress performance with pricing that does not jump at renewal. |
Where each one leads
| Dimension | Cloudways | Rocket.net | Leader |
|---|---|---|---|
| Staging environments | 4/5 | 3/5 | Cloudways |
| Multi-site management | 5/5 | 3/5 | Cloudways |
| Support | 3/5 | 4/5 | Rocket.net |
| Performance | 4/5 | 5/5 | Rocket.net |
| Value for money | 5/5 | 4/5 | Cloudways |
| Ease of use | 3/5 | 4/5 | Rocket.net |
| Scalability | 4/5 | 4/5 | Tie |
Scores are 1–5 per dimension. Cloudways leads on 3 dimensions, Rocket.net on 3. The overall figure weights these for WordPress hosting generally — see methodology.
Pricing
Plans are listed per tool rather than paired row by row — tiers rarely line up, and putting one vendor's second plan beside another's implies an equivalence that is not there.
| Tool | Plan | Per month | Terms |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cloudways | Micro (1GB) | $14 | monthly cap; $0.0208/hr |
| Small (2GB) | $28 | monthly cap; $0.0417/hr | |
| Medium (4GB) | $54 | monthly cap; $0.0804/hr | |
| Large (8GB) | $99 | monthly cap; $0.1473/hr | |
| Rocket.net | Starter | $30 | monthly; $1 first month |
| Pro | $60 | monthly; $1 first month | |
| Business | $100 | monthly; $1 first month | |
| Expert | $200 | monthly; $1 first month |
Pricing checked 23 September 2026 and 24 September 2026 against each vendor's own pricing page. Cloudways: Billed in USD by the hour against a monthly cap, excluding tax. Prices shown are DigitalOcean Basic servers. Rocket.net: Billed in USD. Yearly billing gives two months free; Rocket.net states it never raises prices at renewal.
Verdict
Cloudways
- +Unlimited sites and unlimited visits per server — far cheaper than per-site pricing once you run several sites.
- +Choice of cloud provider: DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode, AWS or Google Cloud.
- +Free staging, free migration, and Object Cache Pro included on 4GB servers and above.
- −You are choosing and sizing a server yourself, even if the panel hides most of the work.
- −Offsite backup storage is billed separately, per gigabyte.
Rocket.net
- +No renewal price increases, and the first month costs $1.
- +Every plan includes an enterprise CDN, a web application firewall, malware protection and daily backups kept for 30 days.
- +Unlimited free migrations and a 99.99% uptime guarantee on every plan.
- −Starter is $30 a month for one WordPress site with 10 GB of storage.
- −Bandwidth is capped on every plan: 50 GB on Starter and 100 GB on Pro.
Common questions
Is Cloudways cheaper than Rocket.net?
Cloudways starts at $14/mo (monthly cap; $0.0208/hr), and Rocket.net starts at $30/mo (monthly; $1 first month) — so Cloudways is the cheaper entry point. Compare what each includes at that tier, and what it renews at, rather than the headline figure alone.
Which is better, Cloudways or Rocket.net?
On our weighted scoring across the use cases in this category, Rocket.net comes out ahead overall. The honest answer is that it depends on the use case — the tables above break the score down by dimension so you can weight it to your own priorities.
Other comparisons
Sources & verification
- rocket.net — checked 24 September 2026No free plan; the first month costs $1.
- cloudways.com — checked 23 September 2026No free plan; a 3-day free trial without card details.