If you’ve been curious about what truly hands-off WordPress hosting feels like, now’s your chance to find out. We’re opening up Cloudways Autonomous for a free 3-day trial – no credit card needed.
What to Expect From The Trial
When we decided to offer a trial of Cloudways Autonomous, we knew it had to be meaningful – a genuine opportunity to understand if our platform fits your needs. While you won’t get access to every feature (for example, the staging environment is only included with paid plans), you’ll experience the core of what makes Autonomous special: our Kubernetes-based infrastructure.
Think of this trial as your sandbox. For three days, you can deploy a WordPress or WooCommerce site and see how it performs under simulated conditions. You’ll get to work with the same autoscaling technology that our production customers use, backed by Cloudflare Enterprise and Object Cache Pro. The infrastructure automatically adjusts resources as your traffic fluctuates – a key feature you can actually test during the trial period using tools of your choice.
Your 3-Day Trial Resources
During your 3-day trial your trial application will run from the US data center on a Cloudways domain. And you’ll get up to 15GB disk space, 50GB bandwidth, and 10k visits – that let you properly evaluate the platform. Note that these resources are hard limits during trial and once you exhaust any of these resources your trial will end immediately regardless of the time left in your trial..Â
If you decide to upgrade to a paid plan, your trial app data & configurations will be restored and your used visits and bandwidth will be reset to 0.
If you’re an existing Cloudways user with a payment method on file with us, your account will be auto-upgraded to Plan 1 ($35/month) after the 3-day trial period for a seamless experience. If you don’t want to be auto-upgraded you can cancel anytime before then if you decide it’s not for you.
Try Cloudways Autonomous for free without a Credit Card
Join 1000+ users who trust Cloudways Autonomous to take care of their infrastructure & traffic management.
What Makes Autonomous Different
Before we get into how you can make the best use of your 3-day trial, we want to talk about WHY you’d want to try it out.
Unlike traditional managed WordPress hosts that offer fixed resources with manual vertical scaling options (through their support; cumbersome we know), Cloudways Autonomous leverages Kubernetes-based autoscaling infrastructure. Here’s why this matters:
- True Dynamic Scaling: Most “managed” hosts require you to manually upgrade plans when you hit resource limits. That too is vertical scaling meaning you’ll only be allocated a bigger server. Autonomous actually scales resources up and down automatically based on real-time traffic demands adding more servers or removing based on your workload.
- Enterprise-Grade Without the Complexity: Kubernetes infrastructure is typically reserved for large enterprises with dedicated DevOps teams. We’ve democratized this technology, making it accessible to SMBs and developers who want to focus on their core business.
- No DevOps Knowledge Required: If you’ve ever tried setting up auto-scaling on AWS, GCP, or Azure, you know the technical complexity involved. Autonomous handles all container orchestration, load balancing, and resource allocation behind the scenes.
- Cost-Efficiency Through Right-Sizing: Instead of over-provisioning resources “just in case,” Autonomous allocates what you need when you need it, optimizing your costs without sacrificing performance.
Our customers consistently tell us that eliminating infrastructure management has been transformative for their businesses. Whether you’re a developer who’d rather focus on code than server management, or a business owner who needs reliable performance without the technical overhead, Autonomous bridges that gap.
Setting Up Your Test Environment on Trial
Now let’s get to how you can actually use the free trial. The first thing you’ll notice is how straightforward deployment is. No wrestling with server configurations or optimization settings – just name your application, choose between WordPress or WooCommerce, and you’re live. Behind the scenes, we’re setting up your containerized environment with configurations we’ve refined through working with thousands of WordPress sites.
If you’re thinking about migrating an existing site, the trial is an excellent opportunity to test our migration process. You can use our free WordPress migration plugin to move your content over, and here’s the important part – anything you migrate during the trial stays intact when you upgrade. We designed it this way because we know how crucial it is to test with real-world data.
If you have a complex workload we’ll recommend a managed migration (option available once you upgrade), where our experts do the heavy lifting for you helping to ensure everything is migrated and working just how you want. Cherry on top, your first managed migration is free and on us!
Making the Most of Your Three Days
Let’s talk about what you should actually test. Based on our experience helping users evaluate Autonomous, here are some practical scenarios worth exploring:
If you’re in for simplicity and ease of use, launch a WordPress or Woo website on Autonomous and experience the breezy process. You’ll just name your app, choose a region, select between WordPress or WooCommerce and an autoscalable app is launched in under 3 minutes!
Beyond this you can explore our simple to understand dashboard and settings, features like PHP settings, SSH Keys, Cron Jobs Management, Database Management, Staging Managements, Access & Error logs etc.
If you’re in for autoscaling & want to test, here’s what we recommend:
For WooCommerce sites, try simulating a busy shopping day. Use load testing tools to generate traffic to your product pages and checkout process. Watch how the platform handles multiple concurrent cart sessions. Pay attention to how Object Cache Pro keeps your cart operations snappy even under load.
For content-focused sites, this is your chance to see how our caching stack performs. Try importing a batch of content and media files. Notice how Cloudflare Enterprise’s edge caching kicks in. Run some performance tests before and after caching is warmed up.
One thing to keep in mind – you’ll want to monitor your resource usage in the dashboard which updates after every 15 minutes. If you start approaching the trial limits, you’ll see notifications. This is actually a good thing to experience during testing – it helps you understand how the platform communicates potential issues.
A Note about Trial Limitations
We designed the trial to get you a glimpse of what’s possible with Autonomous and with that there are features that are fully accessible once you upgrade. Once you upgrade you get to:
- Utilize autoscaling with potentially no limits
- Connect your custom domain (you’ll use Cloudways domains for testing)
- Set up a staging environment
- Clone applications
- Access database management tools
- Use automated backups (though on-demand backups are available during the trial)
- Deploy to multiple regions (trial runs in the US region)
These features become available when you upgrade, and that’s also when you can properly set up your production environment with your custom domain and your full suite of needed tools.
Success Stories from the Autonomous Community
Since launching Autonomous, we’ve helped thousands of businesses transform their WordPress hosting experience. Here’s what our customers have to say:
For Agencies: Scale Client Sites with Confidence
“Autonomous is not just a hosting solution; it’s a strategic advantage. With it, we’ve confidently taken on high-traffic websites, delivering exceptional performance, scalability, and reliability to our clients.” — Weston Crewe, Founder: Local & Co
“With an average of 450+ orders and 1,500 tickets sold daily, the ability to autoscale has been a tremendous help in keeping my client’s holiday event ticket website running smoothly during peak periods, reducing customer service requests by 50%.” — Eric Kuznacic, President: Why The Fuss? Technical Solutions
For SMBs: Focus on Growth, Not Server Management
“The website no longer experiences crashes or freezes, providing a smooth user experience during peak traffic periods. With the time and extra admin saved, we hope to focus more on our strategic business goals.” — Zak Sampson, Director, Spitfire Competitions
“Long-time Cloudways user here! During early access, my site TechYorker received several traffic spikes, and with auto-scaling, I never had to worry about upgrading and downgrading servers. I couldn’t be more satisfied with the product.” — Ratnesh Kumar, Founder & CEO: Yorker Media
For Event Website Owners: Handle Traffic Spikes Without Downtime
“We had about 3,400 people trying to all buy tickets all at the same time and for the first time ever, the site stayed up. If you run this sort of business and want a service that’ll keep your site up while being frankly half or a quarter of the cost of what I was going to pay on Amazon Web Services, I would highly recommend Cloudways Autonomous.” — Ty Christian, Founder: Mad with Power Fest
When You’re Ready to Move Forward
If you decide Autonomous is right for you, upgrading is straightforward, get a detailed guide here. If you’re someone with a payment method added before the start of your Autonomous trial, note that you’ll be auto-upgraded for uninterrupted services at the end of your trial to Plan 1 ($35). If you wish to avoid auto-upgrading, cancel or delete your trial app before your trial time ends.
You can unsubscribe by clicking on the left side panel -> Plan Overview -> Manage Plan -> Unsubscribe.
If you do upgrade, your application, data, and configurations all carry forward. You’ll gain immediate access to the full feature set, and can then connect your own domain and set up your production environment properly. You can learn more about how the billing & pricing work here.
Getting Started
Head over to our signup page to begin your trial. Remember, this is a chance to test a production-grade platform – take advantage of it. If you run into questions or need guidance during your testing, our support team is available 24/7 to help you make the most of your trial period.
Try Cloudways Autonomous for free without a Credit Card
Join 1000+ users who trust Cloudways Autonomous to take care of their infrastructure & traffic management.
Saad Khan
Muhammad Saad Khan is the Director of Product Marketing at DigitalOcean, focusing on Cloudways, where he has over a decade of experience. He has a strong background in product marketing, particularly in creating effective positioning and messaging strategies. Saad is passionate about building products for customers with customers.
