For us at Cloudways, 2025 is all about reinvention and growth. We have many exciting plans to improve the performance and flexibility of our platform (more on that towards the end).
With many customer requests demanding this capability, we’re pleased to announce the availability of DigitalOcean’s General Purpose & CPU Optimized servers on Cloudways Flexible. Along with this, we’re also changing how Vertical Scaling works for DigitalOcean servers, allowing us to offer you even more flexibility with the ability to downscale your servers. No DNS reconfiguration required!
Understanding Your Server Options
Existing DigitalOcean servers (Standard and Premium) will now be categorized as “Basic” servers and will continue to function as the go-to starting point for most businesses offering great performance at a cost-effective price.
Whereas the new General Purpose and CPU Optimized offer a great upgrade path for growing businesses that need the added reliability of dedicated resources. These not only increase the choice of options on the Cloudways platform but also provide value-oriented alternatives to existing AWS and Google Cloud servers which also offer dedicated resources.
This means that business owners like you can start your hosting journey with Basic servers on the Cloudways platform, which offers great price-performance for small businesses.
Once your business has scaled and needs more resources, you can switch to either General-Purpose or CPU-optimized servers (depending on your website type).
We plan on eventually bringing similar server options for Vultr and Linode as well. This means you will be able to host your websites on the Cloud of your choice, whether you’re just starting out or scaling your business.
General Purpose Servers: Ideal for most Websites
General-purpose servers have a 1:4 ratio of CPU cores to memory and are ideal for most website use cases. Whether you’re hosting a SaaS website or a busy forum, their combination of CPU and memory is designed for sufficient computation power and memory to handle both cached and uncached content.
Their balanced performance makes them an ideal choice for growing businesses that prioritize reliability and have moderate-high traffic needs.
Best use cases:
- Magento & Laravel based applications requiring a combination of CPU & Memory
- Growing business blogs with moderate traffic
- Small to medium woocommerce stores
- Real estate listings with moderate databases
- Local News & Media sites
- Small Agencies Hosting Multiple Client WordPress Websites
Pricing: General Purpose servers start out at $98/month for the standard version with 2 cores and 8 GB in memory and can be scaled all the way up to a 60-core version with 240 GB memory ($2369/month).
View the further pricing details.
Performance Benchmark: Single Page Load
In our Page Speed Benchmark (WordPress, no-cache, London), General Purpose Premium delivered significantly faster load times than Basic Premium, despite having fewer cores (4 vCPUs vs. Basic Premium’s 8 vCPUs). Specifically, our benchmark testing of General Purpose showed:
- 25% faster First Contentful Paint (454 ms vs. 607 ms)
- 22% faster Largest Contentful Paint (519 ms vs. 664 ms)
- 25% faster Time to First Byte (235 ms vs. 312 ms)
This highlights that General Purpose Premium’s balanced resource allocation provided superior performance for general web browsing and lighter, everyday website interactions.
However, under intense, CPU-heavy tasks with high concurrency (like user logins and dynamic content), General Purpose Premium was outperformed in our benchmark testing by Basic Premium due to its fewer cores, balanced resource approach and the bursting capability of basic servers (dependent on resource availability), which limits handling heavy uncached workloads.
In short, General Purpose Premium is an ideal choice for typical SMB website use, providing snappy load speeds, while more processing intensive applications with concurrent users would benefit from a CPU Optimized server configuration.
CPU Optimized Servers: Extra processing power for dynamic sites.
CPU Optimized servers have a 1:2 ratio of CPU cores to memory, along with faster CPUs clocked at +2.6 GHz. This means these servers have more cores to process uncached content in addition to having faster cores. Making them a great option for dynamic websites with lots of uncached content, such as some eCommerce stores and LMS sites.
Who it’s for: Larger digital agencies, e-commerce store owners, and LMS platform operators running high-traffic, dynamic websites with complex processing requirements.
Best use cases:
- High-traffic, dynamic e-commerce sites with extensive product catalogs
- Resource-intensive LMS (online courses) with many active learners
- Data-heavy sites generating real-time reports
- High-volume lead generation sites (constant form submissions)
- Large BuddyPress communities / social networks
- Big multisite networks with busy subsites
- Websites with significant uncached content
Pricing: CPU Optimized servers start out at $72/month for the standard version with 2 cores and 4 GB in memory and can be scaled all the way up to a 60-core version with 120 GB memory ($1739/month).
Performance Benchmark:
In our internal benchmarking (1,000 virtual users, 30 mins, no-cache), CPU Optimized Premium decisively beat Basic Premium, even though both had identical specs (8 vCPUs, 16 GB RAM). With dedicated, faster CPUs, our benchmark testing showed that CPU Optimized Premium handled 18% more total requests with 59% lower overall response times (Avg P95: 1,638 ms vs. 4,014 ms).
Specifically, CPU Optimized delivered:
- 60% faster page loads (954 ms vs. 2,378 ms)
- 67% faster user logins (651 ms vs. 2,000 ms)
This showcases the level of performance improvements that can be expected when switching from Basic to CPU Optimized instances for dynamic website workloads.
Vertical Scaling Improvements
Along with the new server types, we’re also significantly improving the vertical scaling experience to offer more flexibility for your use cases.
For some time now, our customers have been asking for the ability to downscale with DigitalOcean. We’re excited to announce that we’re finally bringing this enhancement to our platform.
Downscaling Capabilities
Previously, scaling meant increasing CPU, memory, and storage together. However, this meant that downscaling was not a possibility, and customers had to clone servers and undergo DNS reconfiguration for all their applications to be able to downscale.
With the new improvements, you can now;
- Scale Server Types: Transition between Basic, General Purpose, and CPU Optimized as your needs evolve.
- Scale CPU and Memory Independently: Scale only CPU and memory without scaling storage.
- Scale Everything: When you need more of everything, you can still scale CPU, memory, and storage together.
With the ability to scale CPU and memory without scaling storage, you can also downscale your servers with 1-click when using DigitalOcean servers.
The only limitation is that you can only downscale to the server configuration that matches your storage.
This means that if you start with a 2 GB DO server with 50 GB Storage and 2 vCPUs. And then, vertically scale your CPU and Memory up to 64 GB Memory & 16 vCPUs. You will be able to vertically scale down to any CPU/Memory configuration that normally has 50GB or more storage.
Similarly, if you want to then scale server types and scale this server from Basic to CPU Optimized, you can only scale to the configurations with 50 GB or more storage, i.e. 8 GB memory with 4 cores or higher.
However, if after scaling CPU and Memory up to 64 GB Memory with 16 vCPUs, you choose to add block storage, your downscaling limit will be reset to the level of the attached block storage, and you will not be able to scale down CPU and Memory to below your corresponding storage capacity.
This will be visible in the platform where the configurations you are barred from scaling down to will be greyed out.
Note: Scaling CPU and RAM separately is designed to give customers the flexibility to scale down. It does not impact the hourly billing, as the cost remains the same regardless of whether you scale CPU, memory, and storage or just CPU and memory.
What’s Next
This is just the first of many product improvements planned for 2025 designed to improve the performance and flexibility of our platform. Up next, we’ll be bringing similar server options for Vultr and Linode while also testing a more performant tech stack for Cloudways Flexible.
Sandhya Goswami
Sandhya is a contributing author at Cloudways, specializing in content promotion and performance analysis. With a strong analytical approach and a keen ability to leverage data-driven insights, Sandhya excels in measuring the success of organic marketing initiatives.
