How Cloudways Works: From Cloud Provider to Managed Application
Cloudways abstracts much of the server-management layer while still exposing choices that affect performance, capacity and cost. Understanding that architecture makes every later plan decision easier.
Flexible: infrastructure plus management
With Flexible, you select one of the supported cloud infrastructure providers, choose resources and a server location, then deploy one or more supported applications. Cloudways provides the management interface and hosting stack around that infrastructure.
Autonomous: a different operational model
Autonomous is a WordPress/WooCommerce product built around autoscaling and high availability. Instead of choosing and tending a specific server in the same way, the platform handles more of the infrastructure behavior for you.
What Cloudways manages
The platform provides application and server management features such as backups, staging, monitoring and security-related tooling. Exact capabilities depend on the product and current plan.
What you still own
You still own application-level decisions: WordPress configuration, plugins, code quality, database behavior, content, traffic acquisition and many performance choices. Managed hosting does not make poor applications automatically efficient.