Cloudways alternative: own your server, pay your provider directly
4 min read
Looking for a Cloudways alternative? With Zefily you pay your provider directly for the server and the panel separately, starting free, with malware scanning and backups to your own storage.
Cloudways is managed cloud hosting: it bills the server for you, by the hour, starting at $11 a month for a 2 GB DigitalOcean server, with a 3-day trial. Zefily is a different model: you rent the server at the provider of your choice and Zefily manages it, so the server bill is yours, at the provider's own price.
In short
- You own the server account at your provider and pay it directly, at the provider's own price.
- Zefily is free for 1 server, $8 a month for 3 servers with unlimited sites.
- Updates, certificates, backups, restarts and security are still done for you.
- Malware scanning, vulnerability notices, AI bot blocking and signed jobs are built in.
At a glance
| Cloudways | Zefily | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | From $11/month (DigitalOcean, 2 GB), billed hourly by Cloudways | Free for 1 server and 2 sites, no time limit; from $8/month for 3 servers |
| Server bill | Included in the Cloudways bill | You pay your provider directly for the server |
| Try it | 3-day free trial | Free plan instead of a trial |
| Server maintenance | Managed for you | Done for you: updates, certificates, backups, restarts |
Competitor details are taken from their own pages in October 2026 and may change. Zefily prices are in US dollars, excluding VAT.
What you get with Zefily
All your servers in one place
One panel for every server at any provider: Hetzner, DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode and AWS can even be connected so Zefily creates, snapshots and power-cycles servers for you, and a site can be moved to another server in two steps.
Servers that look after themselves
Failed services (web server, PHP, databases, Valkey, CrowdSec, cron) are restarted automatically, a full disk is cleaned safely, planned maintenance windows silence alerts, and a weekly digest sums up what needs you.
Malware scanning with quarantine
ClamAV scans every site's files on demand, daily or weekly, and can move what it finds to a root-only quarantine. Upload scanning checks every file the moment it is written (SFTP, deploys, plugin installs, upload forms) and quarantines infected files at once. Scans need a server with 2 GB of memory, upload scanning 4 GB. More on our security tools.
Block AI crawlers and countries
One switch per site refuses GPTBot, ClaudeBot, CCBot, PerplexityBot, Bytespider and other AI crawlers while search engines keep indexing; you can also block or allow countries (nginx), block addresses, and turn on the web application firewall (ModSecurity with the OWASP Core Rule Set).
Backups you own
Encrypted restic backups to your own S3, Google Drive, SFTP or FTP storage, with your own repository password, restorable without Zefily. Why that matters.
A web stack we build and patch
Zefily ships its own nginx build with HTTP/3 and Brotli, and its own signed PHP packages so PHP 7.3–8.5 run even on Ubuntu 26.04 (amd64 and arm64). Security fixes for PHP, nginx, OpenLiteSpeed and PostgreSQL install automatically, and you can switch a running server between nginx and OpenLiteSpeed in place.
More than PHP
WordPress, Laravel and PHP sites run next to Node.js and Python apps, Go, Java, .NET, Ruby, Bun and Deno, rootless containers and Compose files, each as its own Linux user. One-click apps such as Ghost, Nextcloud, Uptime Kuma and Supabase are upgraded one major version at a time, with a backup taken first.
When Cloudways may still be the right fit
If you never want a provider account of your own and prefer one bill for server and management, managed hosting like Cloudways fits that.
Moving from Cloudways to Zefily
- Connect a server to Zefily: a fresh Ubuntu or Debian server at any provider works best, since Zefily does not take over software it did not install.
- Create the site with the PHP version (or runtime) it uses today.
- Copy the files over SFTP and import the database in the site's database section.
- Test on the site's free
zefily.appaddress before you touch DNS. - Switch DNS; the certificate is issued automatically.
Frequently asked questions
How does Zefily pricing compare with Cloudways?
With Cloudways the server and the management are one hourly bill. With Zefily you pay your provider's own price for the server, and Zefily is free for 1 server or $8 a month for 3 with unlimited sites. Compare both totals for the server size you need.
Do I own my server with Zefily?
Yes. The server and its provider account are yours; Zefily manages it through a small agent, and if you leave, the server keeps running as a normal Linux server.
Can Zefily create servers for me?
Yes. Connect Hetzner, DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode or AWS and Zefily creates, snapshots and power-cycles servers there for you.
Does Zefily include backups?
Yes. Nightly encrypted restic backups to your own storage, kept 7 daily, 4 weekly and 6 monthly by default.
How do I move from Cloudways to Zefily?
Create a server at your provider, connect it to Zefily, create each site, copy files and the database, test on the free zefily.app address and switch DNS.
Start free with one server: no time limit, and your first site can be live on a free zefily.app address in minutes.