If you have been curious about what fully managed, autoscaling WordPress hosting actually feels like in practice, the Cloudways Autonomous free trial gives you a way to find out. Three days, no credit card required.
Autonomous is fully managed WordPress and WooCommerce hosting that scales your resources up and down automatically as your traffic changes. No server sizing, no plan upgrades during traffic spikes, no DevOps work on your side.
The trial lets you deploy a real WordPress or WooCommerce app on a Cloudways domain and put the platform through its paces before you commit to a paid plan.
- Who Should Try Cloudways Autonomous
- What’s Inside Your Autonomous Free Trial
- Making the Most of Your 3 Days on Autonomous
- What’s Not Available During the Trial
- What You Unlock After Upgrading to a Paid Plan
- Cloudways Autonomous Pricing After the Trial
- Real Cloudways Autonomous Customers on What Changed for Them
Who Should Try Cloudways Autonomous
The trial is designed for people who want to see how autoscaling behaves on a real workload before committing.
- WordPress and WooCommerce site owners who have outgrown fixed-plan hosting and are tired of guessing which plan size to buy.
- Developers who want to test how autoscaling responds to real traffic patterns and load spikes.
- Agencies evaluating hosting for client sites, especially those with unpredictable traffic or campaign-driven spikes.
What’s Inside Your Autonomous Free Trial
Here is exactly what you get during the 3 days.
Trial resources
- 3 days of access
- 20 GB disk space
- 150 GB bandwidth
- Unmetered visits
Region choice
- Frankfurt, Germany
- Northern Virginia, USA
You pick one during setup. Your trial app runs on a Cloudways domain (custom domains are not part of the trial).
Included features
- True Autoscaling
- Object Cache Pro with Relay as the default caching layer (you can switch to Redis if you prefer)
That is the same core infrastructure paying customers run on. The trial is a working version of it, not a demo.
Making the Most of Your 3 Days on Autonomous
Here are the things worth doing during your trial.
Launch an app in under 3 minutes. Pick WordPress or WooCommerce, select your trial plan, name your application, choose your region, and click launch to go live. No server configuration, no manual optimization.
Bring an existing site over. Use the free WordPress Migrator plugin to import your existing site’s content, plugins, and configurations into the trial app. The site runs on a Cloudways domain during the trial, but you get to test the platform against your real setup instead of a blank install. Anything you migrate stays intact if you upgrade.
Run load tests. This is the most useful thing you can do with the trial. Use load testing tools to simulate a traffic spike and watch how autoscaling responds. For WooCommerce sites, try simulating concurrent checkout sessions. For content sites, hit product or article pages hard and see how caching holds up.
Switch PHP versions. Trial apps launch on PHP 8.1 by default. You can upgrade to PHP 8.4 from the PHP Version setting in Application Settings if you want to test plugin and theme compatibility on the latest runtime.
Try both caching layers. Relay is the default, but you can switch to Redis from the Object Cache Pro settings in your dashboard. Test both if performance tuning matters to your workload.
Explore the dashboard. PHP settings, SSH keys, cron jobs, access and error logs are all available during the trial. Get a feel for how the platform is organized before you commit.
Resource usage in the dashboard updates every 15 minutes. If you get close to the trial limits, you will see notifications.
What’s Not Available During the Trial
Some features are held for paid plans. Knowing this upfront saves confusion during your 3 days.
- Your trial app runs on a Cloudways domain, with custom domain support unlocking on a paid plan
- Staging environments, application cloning, automated backups, and database management tools all come with a paid plan; on-demand backups are available during the trial
- Trial regions are limited to Frankfurt and Northern Virginia, while all 4 regions open up once you upgrade
- Keep an eye on your 20 GB disk and 150 GB bandwidth, since the trial ends as soon as either is used up, regardless of how much time you have left
What You Unlock After Upgrading to a Paid Plan
A few capabilities switch on the moment you move to a paid plan, beyond just removing the trial timer.
- All 4 Autonomous regions become available: Frankfurt, London, Northern Virginia, and Singapore
- Cloudflare Enterprise CDN and Malware Protection switch on
- Free Managed Migration is included on every paid Autonomous plan, within your plan’s website limits. This is an ongoing benefit, not a one-time perk.
- Custom domain, staging, cloning, automated backups, and database management tools all switch on
- Your trial app, its data, and its configurations carry forward with no rebuild required
- Your used bandwidth resets to zero so you start clean
Cloudways Autonomous Pricing After the Trial
Here is what the Autonomous plans look like when you are ready to move beyond the trial.
| Plan | Price | Baseline Autoscale Servers | Bandwidth | Disk | Visits |
| Growth | $99/month | 1 | 150 GB | 20 GB | Unmetered |
| Scale | $199/month | 2 | 250 GB | 50 GB | Unmetered |
| Plus | $399/month | 3 | 1000 GB | 100 GB | Unmetered |
| Enterprise | Custom | Custom | Custom | Custom | Unmetered |
All plans include True Autoscaling, Cloudflare Enterprise CDN, Object Cache Pro with Relay and Redis (optional), and Free Managed Migration.
If you had a payment method on file with Cloudways before starting your trial, your account will auto-upgrade to the Growth plan at $99/month when the trial ends. If you do not want that, cancel before the trial ends.
To cancel: delete your trial app from the dashboard. That is it.
Real Cloudways Autonomous Customers on What Changed for Them
You do not have to take our word for how Autonomous handles real traffic. Here is what customers are saying after switching.
Neon Rain, agency, Denver:
Managing 75 to 100 active client sites, Neon Rain moved its highest-traffic clients to Autonomous after years of hours-long downtime cloning instances on previous hosts just to scale up. When one client went viral on TikTok in March 2026 and pulled in 300,000 visitors in a single day, “there was no emergency call, no scramble, and no downtime.” The agency now regularly sees peaks of around 9,500 concurrent users. “We didn’t have to do anything for traffic spikes. Cloudways Autonomous just took care of itself,” says founder Arif Gangji. Read the full Neon Rain agency case study on Cloudways Autonomous.
The Feinheit, ecommerce, Dallas:
This luxury fashion brand offers 15,000+ curated items across 130+ designer brands. Before Autonomous, founder Jackie Fiach was “constantly concerned about resource limits, PHP workers, database performance, and caching layers holding up under load” ahead of every campaign. After switching, she says the real improvement “isn’t just performance metrics — it’s operational confidence.” You can dive into the complete Feinheit luxury fashion case study.
Local & Co, agency, Cape Town:
Local & Co took ecommerce client Hydraulics Stores from roughly 20% downtime to zero on Autonomous, with revenue up more than 100% during the sales period that followed. “Autonomous gives us the power to scale up, eliminating the fears of handling high-traffic websites. We feel assured that our websites perform well even during peak traffic,” says founder Weston Crewe. See how Local & Co took Hydraulics Stores from 20% downtime to zero in the full case study.
Mad with Power Fest, festival organizer:
When ticket sales opened, about 3,400 fans tried to buy at the exact same moment — and for the first time, the site stayed up. “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,” says founder Ty Christian.
Start Your Cloudways Autonomous Free Trial
Three days, no credit card, no risk. Bring an existing site or start fresh. Test what you would actually deploy in production.
For more details about the trial and platform capabilities, check out the frequently asked questions about Cloudways Autonomous.
Abdul Rehman
Abdul is a tech-savvy, coffee-fueled, and creatively driven marketer who loves keeping up with the latest software updates and tech gadgets. He's also a skilled technical writer who can explain complex concepts simply for a broad audience. Abdul enjoys sharing his knowledge of the Cloud industry through user manuals, documentation, and blog posts.
