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Cloudways lets you choose the infrastructure underneath your managed server, and Vultr and Linode joined DigitalOcean, AWS and Google Cloud as options. That choice is presented as a small dropdown during setup, but it is one of the few decisions that is genuinely annoying to reverse later — so it is worth understanding what actually differs.
What the choice does and does not change
The management layer is identical whichever provider you pick. The same control panel, the same stack, the same backups and staging and SSL handling. What changes is:
- 1. Where the machine physically sits — and therefore your baseline latency.
- 2. What you pay for a given amount of CPU and RAM.
- 3. How the resource tiers are cut, which decides how cleanly you can scale up later.
Everything else is the same. If a comparison article tells you one of these providers is dramatically faster than another at the same specification, be sceptical: they are all running comparable modern hardware, and the differences that matter in practice come from location and from your own caching configuration.
The providers
Vultr — founded in 2014, and notable mainly for the breadth of its location list. If your audience is concentrated somewhere that DigitalOcean does not serve well, this is usually the reason to pick it.
Linode — founded in 2003, making it the oldest of the three, and now part of Akamai. Straightforward pricing and a long operational track record.
DigitalOcean — the common default. Its real advantage is ecosystem: when something breaks, someone has already written the answer.
AWS and Google Cloud — meaningfully more expensive through this platform. Choose them when you specifically need to sit inside those ecosystems, not for general web hosting, where you are paying enterprise prices for a WordPress site.
How to actually choose
Work through these in order and stop at the first one that decides it for you:
- 1. Where are your readers? Open your analytics and find the country with the most sessions. Pick the provider with a data centre nearest to it. This single factor outweighs everything below.
- 2. Do you need a specific region for compliance? Data residency rules decide this for you.
- 3. Are you cost-sensitive at the margin? Compare the specific tier you need, not headline pricing. The tiers are cut differently, so one provider may give you noticeably more RAM at the same price point.
- 4. Do you already have infrastructure somewhere? Keeping services close to each other reduces both latency and egress cost.
- 5. Still undecided? Take DigitalOcean. The documentation advantage is real and costs nothing.
Why latency deserves the top spot
It is the one thing you cannot fix later with configuration. Caching, a CDN and image optimisation all reduce how much you transfer and how often — but the round-trip time for an uncacheable request is set by physical distance and the speed of light. A dynamic request from Sydney to a server in New York carries a floor of roughly 200ms before your application does any work at all.
This is also why "which provider is fastest" is usually the wrong question. The right question is "which provider is closest to my readers".
About the launch promotion
This article originally promoted a launch offer — 30% off the first three invoices with the code VL30. That promotion has expired. Cloudways runs seasonal offers from time to time; check their pricing page for anything current rather than relying on a code from an archived post.
Cloudways signup *(affiliate link)*
Summary
More provider options is a genuine improvement, because it decouples the management layer from the infrastructure underneath it. But do not overthink the decision: pick the data centre closest to your readers, size the server for your actual traffic, and spend the time you save on caching — which will do far more for your load times than the logo on the underlying provider.
About the Author: gs_admin
A senior technical contributor specializing in architectural designs, software optimization, database structures, and developer education. Passionate about writing clean code and sharing engineering knowledge.