Most people who move a high-ticket store onto Cloudways do it in the wrong order. They launch a server, point the domain at it, and then start fixing caching and SSL and backups while real traffic is already hitting the box. Do it that way and your first outage is a Tuesday afternoon with a quote request half-submitted.
This is the order I would do it in instead: launch, migrate, test on the temporary application URL, harden, then switch DNS last. Every step below comes from Cloudways’ own documentation and pricing page, read on 29 September 2026, plus WooCommerce’s published server recommendations. Where something is my recommendation rather than a Cloudways rule, I say so.
I run Ecommerce Paradise and I have moved a lot of stores between hosts. The hosting decision matters less than people think and the migration order matters more. If the business model is new to you, start with what high-ticket dropshipping actually is before you worry about servers.
Test the Whole Move Before You Pay Anything
Cloudways advertises a 3-day free trial with no credit card required, which is long enough to launch a server and run a full test migration.
First, Know Which Cloudways You Are Buying
Cloudways sells two different things under one brand, and picking the wrong one is the most expensive mistake available here.
Cloudways Flexible is the per-server product, and the one I would point a new store at. You rent a server from a cloud provider through Cloudways and Cloudways manages it. You choose the provider, the size and the location yourself. The pricing page lists Flexible plans as including “Unlimited Visits” and “Unlimited Websites” on what Cloudways calls its “Lightning Stack”.
Cloudways Autonomous is managed WordPress with autoscaling, priced per plan rather than per server. The published tiers are Growth at $99 a month for 1 website with 20GB disk, unmetered visits and 150GB bandwidth; Scale at $199 with 2 baseline servers, 50GB disk and 250GB bandwidth; Plus at $399 with 3 baseline servers, 100GB disk and 1000GB bandwidth; and a custom Enterprise tier. Autonomous add-on charges are listed at $1 per GB of disk space and $0.04 per GB of bandwidth, with autoscaling from $0.07 to $0.12 per hour per server.
For a store doing its first few hundred quote requests a month, Flexible is the one I would start on. Autonomous is built for traffic you do not have yet, and $99 a month is a lot of ad budget.
One warning about the Flexible pricing page: the plan table is a slider, not a fixed list. Entry pricing is shown from $11 a month, and you drag to pick RAM. Read the live figure on the page for the size you actually want before you click launch, because the slider price is the only figure the page actually commits to. Step 10 of the launch flow asks you to review costs before confirming, so that is the moment to check it.
Step 1: Check What WooCommerce Actually Needs First
Before you touch a launch screen, know the floor you have to clear. WooCommerce’s published server recommendations ask for PHP 8.3 or greater, tested up to PHP 8.4. They ask for MySQL 8.0 or greater, or MariaDB 10.6 or greater. They ask for WordPress 6.9 or greater, a WordPress memory limit of 256MB or greater, and HTTPS support. Apache or Nginx is recommended as the web server.
WooCommerce notes it also still functions on PHP 7.4 and MySQL 5.6 or MariaDB 10.4, but describes those versions as End of Life. That is not a floor to aim for on a store taking card payments.
This matters at the launch screen because of one specific field, which I will come back to in a moment.
Step 2: Launch the Server and the Application
Cloudways’ documentation for launching a server and application walks this screen through. In the platform, open Servers from the top menu bar and click Launch Now. You then fill in a single screen, in this order:
- Select Application. WordPress for a WooCommerce store. Cloudways also offers one-click installs for WooCommerce, Magento, OpenCart and custom PHP applications.
- Enter Application and Server Name. My habit is to name them so you can tell them apart in six months: the app after the store, the server after its role.
- Select Your Project. Pick an existing project or create a new one.
- Select Your Server. The cloud provider choices are DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode, AWS or Google Cloud.
- Application Stack. Review the stack options.
- Database Type. MariaDB 10.11 or MySQL 8.4.
- Server Type. Basic, General Purpose or CPU Optimized.
- Select Server Size. A slider, in 1GB, 2GB, 4GB and larger steps.
- Location. Pick the one nearest your customers.
- Launch. Review the costs shown, then click Launch Now.
Step 6 is the one to slow down on. Cloudways’ documentation states that the database type selection is permanent. Both options clear WooCommerce’s floor, since MariaDB 10.11 is comfortably past 10.6 and MySQL 8.4 is past 8.0, so this is not a trap for a WooCommerce store. It is a trap if you later need something one engine supports and the other does not, and you cannot change your mind.
On location, the rule I use is that the server goes where the buyers are, not where you are. I run US stores from Bali and every one of those servers lives in the United States.
When the server finishes building, click the www button on it to open the deployed application. If you are adding a store to a server you already own, the path is different: Servers, select the server, click the grid icon at the bottom right, choose Add App, pick the application, type the app name, choose the project, and click Add Application.
Step 3: Migrate With the Plugin, Not by Hand
Cloudways publishes a free Automated WordPress Migrator plugin, and it is the path I would take for a WooCommerce store. The plugin installs on the source site, not the destination, which catches people out.
The sequence is: launch the WordPress application on Cloudways first, open the destination application’s admin panel through the Cloudways platform, then install the Cloudways WordPress Migrator plugin on your existing site under Plugins and Add New.
Then you fill the migration form. Each field has a specific home in the Cloudways dashboard:
| Field | Where the value comes from |
|---|---|
| Destination Site URL | Application Details section |
| SFTP Host / Server Address | SSH/SFTP section, the IP address |
| Database Name | Database section |
| SFTP Username | Master Username |
| SFTP Password | Master User Password |
| Email Address | You enter it |
There are four extra toggles: HTTP Auth Enabled, whether to migrate root directories, whether to include additional database tables, and whether the source site is password protected. Set the last one honestly or the migrator cannot read your site.
Two documented warnings worth knowing before you start. WordPress Multisite is supported only on Cloudways Flexible, and it needs multisite mode enabled and the primary domain configured beforehand. Separately, the Lightning Stack does not support .htaccess files, which some configurations rely on. If your store has accumulated redirect rules in .htaccess over the years, that is a thing to audit before you move, not after.
If you would rather not do it yourself, Cloudways offers white-glove migration and states that your first five website migrations are free. On a store with live orders, letting their team do it is the cheaper choice even though it feels like the lazy one.
After the migration finishes, test the site and verify it in the dashboard. If the site displays wrong, purge the Varnish cache before you start debugging anything else. That one step resolves a surprising share of “the migration broke my theme” panics.
Skip the Migration Weekend Entirely
My done-for-you builds cover the store, the suppliers and the hosting stack behind it, so you are not learning SFTP fields on a site that already takes orders.
Step 4: Build Staging Before You Touch Anything Else
Cloudways states that creating staging environments is completely free, and on a store this is the single most valuable button in the dashboard. Set it up now, while nothing is urgent.
On Flexible the path is Servers, select the server, click the globe button, select the application, then under Application Management click Staging Management and Launch Staging Application. On Autonomous it is Applications, select the app, Workflow/Tools, Staging Management, then the same launch button.
You can build the staging environment on the same server or a different one, and you tick Create as Staging before proceeding. Cost-wise: on Flexible there is no additional charge if you use an existing server, and a new server incurs the normal fees. On Autonomous, staging counts against your plan’s bandwidth, visits and disk.
Staging sites are password protected by default using your live admin login, and the staging URL and credentials sit in Staging Management under Access Details.
Understand Push and Pull Before You Use Them
This is where people destroy live data, so read the option names carefully. Push sends staging to live. Pull brings live down to staging. Both offer the same choices.
For web application files, Overwrite will completely overwrite your live application’s web files. Incremental applies only changed files, and Cloudways is explicit that files deleted in the staging application will not be deleted on live.
For the database, Full DB will completely overwrite your live application’s database. Selected Tables targets specific tables only.
On a live store, Full DB push is the one that eats orders. Any order placed on the live site after you cloned to staging is not in the staging database, so a full push replaces your real order table with a stale one. My rule is that database changes flow live to staging only, and code and theme changes flow staging to live using Incremental. There is also a Backup option that creates a restore point before pushing, and I would tick it every single time.
Step 5: Turn On SSL and Caching
Cloudways provides free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates installable from the dashboard in a few clicks. WooCommerce lists HTTPS support as a requirement, so this is not optional on a store.
For performance, Cloudways lets you enable Varnish caching and Redis caching directly from the platform. For a WooCommerce store their guidance is to install the Breeze cache plugin and integrate Cloudflare CDN.
The CDN part is where the numbers get interesting. The pricing page lists “Free Cloudflare Enterprise (Worth $250/Month)” and “Free Object Cache Pro + Relay (Worth $242/Month)” as included, while also advertising Cloudflare Enterprise CDN “starts at just $4.99/month” per domain as an add-on. Those two statements sit on the same page, so check which applies to the plan you are actually on before you budget for it or assume you already have it.
A caching warning specific to stores, and this one is my own operating practice rather than a Cloudways setting I can point you to in their docs. Full-page caching in front of a cart is how you end up serving one customer another customer’s basket. What Cloudways does document is that you should purge Varnish when pages display wrong after a migration. My habit on top of that is to load the cart, checkout and account pages on staging after every plugin update and confirm they are still rendering per-visitor.
Step 6: Configure Backups Deliberately
Backups are configurable at server level, and the three controls there are worth setting deliberately rather than leaving alone. In server-level backup settings you get three of them.
Backup Frequency ranges from one hour to every seven days. Backup Retention runs from 1 week to 4 weeks, and Cloudways states this determines how long backups are stored and available to use. Schedule Time lets you pick when it runs, and is available when the frequency is daily or longer.
There is also a Take Backup Now button for on-demand backups, which is what you press before every plugin update. On off-site storage, Cloudways states that off-site backups, once created on the server, are exported to a resilient and secure storage solution. You can additionally enable local backups to keep the most recent copy on the server itself, though Cloudways notes you cannot create local backups for a single application.
My settings on a store taking orders, and these are my choices rather than Cloudways defaults: frequency at the shortest interval you will actually use, retention at the 4-week maximum, and a manual backup before every update. Cloudways’ backup article does not state a charge for backup storage either way, so check your own plan rather than assuming a shorter interval is free or costly. The reason retention matters more than frequency is that the failures you actually need to recover from are the ones you notice three weeks late, like a plugin quietly breaking tax calculation.
Step 7: Switch DNS Last
Everything above happens on the temporary Cloudways application URL. Only when the store loads correctly there, with a test order placed end to end, do you point the domain.
The DNS change itself happens wherever your domain’s records live, at your registrar or DNS host, not inside the Cloudways dashboard. The sequence I use: confirm the migrated site on the temporary application URL, install SSL for the real domain, place a real test order through checkout, confirm the order confirmation email arrives, then change DNS, then watch for an hour.
That last part is not paranoia, and it is general DNS behaviour rather than anything specific to Cloudways. While records propagate, some visitors reach the old host and some reach the new one, and on a store that means orders can land in either database. The shorter you keep that window, the less reconciling you do later.
Email Is a Separate Decision
Hosting a store and sending its email are two different problems, and Cloudways treats them that way. They offer an Elastic Email add-on for transactional email, and separately a Rackspace Email add-on for professional mailboxes. The Rackspace add-on is listed at $1.5 per mailbox per month. Cloudways does not publish an Elastic Email price on the pricing page I read, so check it in the dashboard.
Transactional email is the one that matters most on a quote-driven store, because an order confirmation that lands in spam reads as a store that took the money and vanished. Whichever route you choose, send yourself a test order and check where the confirmation actually lands.
If you are running quote requests rather than instant checkout, the follow-up sequence matters as much as the confirmation. That is a CRM problem more than a hosting one, and I have written up how I set up a free CRM for a quote funnel separately.
What the First Year Actually Costs
Here is what to budget, using only the figures Cloudways publishes.
| Line item | Published price |
|---|---|
| Free trial | 3 days, no credit card required |
| Flexible entry pricing | From $11 a month, size chosen on a slider |
| Autonomous Growth | $99 a month, 1 website |
| Autonomous Scale | $199 a month |
| Autonomous Plus | $399 a month |
| Staging | No additional charge on an existing Flexible server |
| SSL | Free Let’s Encrypt from the dashboard |
| Cloudflare Enterprise CDN add-on | Starts at $4.99 a month per domain |
| Malware Protection add-on | Starts at $4 per app per month |
| Site Manager add-on | Starts at $3 per app per month |
| DNS Made Easy add-on | $0.50 per month per domain |
| Rackspace Email add-on | $1.5 per mailbox per month |
| Advanced Support add-on | $100 a month, with a promotional $25 a month flat rate advertised |
Note the billing model, because it surprises people: Cloudways states it uses a post-billing method and charges in arrears, with invoices issued in the first week of every month. You are paying for what you used, after you used it, which is fine but means your first invoice arrives later than you expect.
The add-ons are where an $11 server quietly stops being an $11 server. Stack the published prices for Cloudflare Enterprise CDN at $4.99, Malware Protection at $4, Site Manager at $3, DNS Made Easy at $0.50 and one Rackspace mailbox at $1.50, and you have added about $14 a month before you have done anything unusual. Decide which you actually need on day one and skip the rest until something forces the issue. I have broken the plan-by-plan picture down further in my Cloudways pricing guide.
What I Would Skip on Day One
Cloudways has a long feature list and most of it is not for a store in its first quarter.
Advanced Support at $100 a month is a real cost for a problem you probably do not have yet. The 24/7 chat, email and ticketing support listed as included has been enough in my experience for the kind of question a new store owner has.
Autoscaling on Autonomous is for traffic spikes you can measure. At $0.07 to $0.12 per hour per server it is not expensive, but it solves a problem that only exists once something you did went right.
Multiple servers is the other one. Flexible plans list unlimited websites, so a second store can live on the same server until its traffic justifies its own. Splitting early just doubles the number of things you patch.
Where Hosting Sits in the Bigger Picture
Hosting is a solved problem and it is not where stores are won or lost. In my experience the order that actually matters is: pick a niche where buyers are willing and able to spend, get authorized dealer agreements with real suppliers, then worry about infrastructure.
If you are still choosing what to sell, my high-ticket niches list is the place to start, and it will tell you more about your eventual revenue than any server size will. Once you have a niche, the supplier side is the bottleneck, which is why I wrote a full guide to finding high-ticket suppliers.
The other thing to have in place before you have real orders is the legal wrapper, because suppliers ask for it and payment processors ask for it. That side is covered in business formation for high-ticket dropshipping.
The First Week, in Order
| When | What you do |
|---|---|
| Day one | Start the free trial, launch the server and WordPress app, pick the database engine carefully |
| Day one | Install the Migrator plugin on the old site and run the migration |
| Day two | Test the migrated store on the application URL, purge Varnish if anything looks wrong |
| Day two | Launch the staging environment and confirm push and pull behaviour before you need it |
| Day three | Enable Varnish and Redis, install Breeze, then load cart and checkout yourself to confirm they still render per-visitor |
| Day three | Set backup frequency and retention, then take a manual backup |
| Day four | Install SSL for the real domain, then place a full test order end to end |
| Day five | Switch DNS, then watch orders and error logs for an hour |
The reason I spread this across a week rather than doing it in one sitting is that the test order on day four tends to find something the migration missed, and you want slack in the schedule when it does.
Run the Whole Migration on the Trial
Three days with no credit card is enough to launch a server, run the migration and see the store load. Cloudways also states your first five website migrations are absolutely free.
Six Mistakes to Avoid
Switching DNS before you have placed a test order. Every other mistake on this list is recoverable. This one loses real orders while you debug.
Choosing the database engine without thinking. Cloudways says the selection is permanent. Both options clear WooCommerce’s stated floor, so read that floor once and decide deliberately.
Pushing Full DB from staging to live. It completely overwrites your live database, including orders placed since you cloned. Push code, pull data, never the reverse.
Not re-testing the cart after a cache change. This one is my own rule rather than a documented Cloudways requirement: load cart, checkout and account pages yourself after enabling caching and after every plugin update.
Leaving backup retention at the minimum. Retention runs up to 4 weeks. The problems you need to roll back are usually the ones you notice late.
Assuming .htaccess rules will survive. Cloudways documents that the Lightning Stack does not support .htaccess. Audit your redirect rules before the move.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is there a free trial?
Cloudways advertises a 3-day free trial with no credit card required, on both Flexible and Autonomous.
How much does Cloudways cost?
Flexible entry pricing is shown from $11 a month and the plan size is chosen on a slider, so read the live figure for the size you want. Autonomous is published at $99, $199 and $399 a month for Growth, Scale and Plus.
Which cloud providers can I choose?
DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode, AWS or Google Cloud.
Can I change the database engine later?
Cloudways’ launch documentation describes the database type selection as permanent, so treat it as a one-time decision.
Does staging cost extra?
Cloudways states staging is completely free. On Flexible there is no additional charge if you build it on an existing server, and a new server incurs normal fees. On Autonomous it counts against your plan’s bandwidth, visits and disk.
How often does it back up?
You set the frequency anywhere from one hour to every seven days, with retention from 1 week to 4 weeks, plus a Take Backup Now button for on-demand backups.
Will Cloudways migrate my store for me?
Yes. They offer white-glove migration and state that your first five website migrations are free. There is also a free Automated WordPress Migrator plugin if you would rather do it yourself.
Do I get a CDN included?
The pricing page lists free Cloudflare Enterprise as included on Flexible while also advertising a Cloudflare Enterprise CDN add-on from $4.99 a month per domain. Check which applies to your plan before budgeting.
Is Cloudways the right host for a high-ticket store?
For a WooCommerce store it does the job, and the free staging plus off-site backups are the features I would actually use. If you want it measured against the obvious rivals, I have compared them separately.
Related Articles
- Cloudways Review
- Cloudways Pricing
- Cloudways Alternatives
- Cloudways vs Kinsta
- Cloudways vs WP Engine
- Cloudways vs SiteGround
- Cloudways vs DigitalOcean
Trevor Fenner is an ecommerce entrepreneur and the founder of Ecommerce Paradise, a platform focused on helping entrepreneurs build and scale profitable high-ticket ecommerce and dropshipping businesses. With over a decade of hands-on experience, Trevor specializes in high-ticket dropshipping strategy, niche and product selection, supplier recruiting and onboarding, Google & Bing Shopping ads, ecommerce SEO, and systems-driven automation and scaling. Through Ecommerce Paradise, he provides free education via in-depth guides like How to Start High-Ticket Dropshipping, advanced training through the High-Ticket Dropshipping Masterclass, and fully done-for-you turnkey ecommerce services for entrepreneurs who want a faster, more hands-off path to growth. Trevor is known for emphasizing sustainable, real-world ecommerce models over hype-driven tactics, helping store owners build scalable, sellable, and location-independent brands.
Still deciding what to sell?
Grab the free list of 1,000+ niches that work for high-ticket dropshipping, sorted by category.
Free. Unsubscribe any time.
