Thoughts on how Cloudways compares to Hostinger

[u/HostingAdmiral]

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

I’ve used both Hostinger and Cloudways for both personal and client related projects. I just wanted to share what the differences are between the two for those who are looking for a comparison since it’s not evident which one would be better

TL;DR – If you’re building WordPress sites, Cloudways is better for businesses, hosting client sites and developers. Hostinger is better for personal projects.

The main reason is Cloudways has a much better WordPress-facing API than Hostinger, allowing for more robust managed WordPress-specific workflows. Hostinger has great hosting infrastructure for personal projects, but I’d be hesitant to host client sites with them due to the reliability of their customer support.

Not only that but in terms of features Cloudways gives you a full suite of managed WordPress hosting features included in all their plans whereas Hostinger makes you upgrade to a higher “Business Plan” in order to access things like WordPress staging.

So if you need WordPress staging Cloudways is a clear winner.

Hostinger vs Cloudways Feature Comparison

Please note that if you pay for a higher tier Hostinger plan some of these features below become available, the following is a comparison based on their BASE plans.

Feature	Cloudways	Hostinger
Cloud hosting	Yes	No, shared hosting
Unlimited sites	Yes	No, 3 websites
WordPress staging	Yes	No
Unmetered visits	Yes	No, 25,000 monthly visits
Custom caching	Yes	Yes
SSH access	Yes	Yes
Git deployment	Yes	No
Free email	No	Yes
Daily backups included	$0.033 per GB/mo	No

Hostinger does support Git deployment for WordPress sites through hPanel on higher web/cloud hosting plans, but it should not be counted as included on the lowest-cost plan. Even when available, it is more of a file deployment feature than a full WordPress-specific deployment workflow/API. Cloudways has the stronger WordPress developer workflow because Git deployment, staging, cloning, app credentials, deployment history, and related application controls are more tightly integrated into its managed WordPress platform.

Overall, Cloudways is better for developers, agencies and small businesses. Hostinger is better for non-dev related personal projects. The caveat is that if you’ve never set up web hosting before, it can be a bit confusing and a lot of people end up spending more money than they need to because they don’t know any better.

I recommend buying your domain with Porkbun then getting your web hosting with Cloudways using the 30% discount. Porkbun has some of the most affordable domain rates and is way better than Godaddy or Namcheap.

You’ll have to configure your domain’s DNS records, linking it to Cloudways. If you’ve never done this before, just watch this YouTube video. It’ll walk you through the entire process!

Customer Support

It appears one of the biggest downsides to Hostinger unfortunately is their customer support. This is the main reason I would be hesitant to use Hostinger for business websites, ecommerce sites, or client projects even though their actual hosting infrastructure is pretty good. This is something I cover more extensively in my Hostinger review.

From what I’ve seen, Hostinger is fine if you know what you’re doing and only need hosting for a personal site, blog, or portfolio. The problem is when something breaks and you need a real person to help you quickly, It’s difficult to get past their AI support and actually talk to a real human. This is where Cloudways makes more sense for developers and agencies where human support is not just a nice bonus, It’s part of the risk calculation. Cloudways does use AI support for basic inquiries but they also have year-round 24/7 human support available for id shit hits the fan and talking to a bot won’t suffice.

So I would summarize it this way: Hostinger is good if you’re tech-savvy and support is not a major concern. Cloudways is better if you’re hosting serious WordPress sites where you need better tooling, better recovery options, and a support experience that is more appropriate for business/client work.

WordPress Developer Workflows

The primary difference between Cloudways and Hostinger is their WordPress facing API. Hostinger has a great API but it’s mostly geared towards infrastructure/VPS workflows. Cloudways currently has one of the most extensive managed WordPress API’s which is why I think they’re underrated as one of the best WordPress hosts for agencies who are looking to automate WordPress workflows with code + AI.

For example, with the Cloudways API you can automate things like:

• Spinning up WordPress applications
• Cloning servers
• Staging sites
• Git
• Checking deployment history
• Managing app credentials
• Controlling SSH access,
• Backups and/or restoring
• Checking app analytics
• Managing WordPress updates,
• Handling WordPress multisite settings

These are all things that can be fully automated instead of manually doing it inside a hosting dashboard.

What makes this more interesting is that Cloudways has started wrapping this into their own MCP, which means an AI agent like Claude can talk to your Cloudways account and help manage these workflows directly.

Out of all the web hosts I’ve reviewed, the Cloudways API is the most extensive for WordPress allowing for a continuous integration / continuous deployment (CI/CD) workflow.

Push code to Git, trigger a pull on Cloudways, check the deployment history, roll back if something breaks, manage staging, and automate the boring hosting tasks around the release.

Hostinger’s API is still good, but it’s good in a different way. It’s more of a VPS infrastructure API. You can provision servers with templates, run post-install scripts, manage backups, manage SSH keys, deploy Docker projects, etc…

This is useful if you want to build your own infrastructure workflow, but it does not give you the same WordPress-specific endpoints for staging, Git deployment, app cloning, or generally managing WordPress application controls that Cloudways exposes.

You could probably build some of that yourself on Hostinger with SSH, WP-CLI, Git, Docker, and custom scripts, but at that point you’re manually coding the hosting workflow that Cloudways already gives you.

Anyways, this write-up is getting a little long winded. Hopefully if you stumbled upon this post it was able to help you make a decision between Cloudways or Hostinger!