Cloudways Black Friday Deal 2026: 80% Off + Free Managed Migrations

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How to Claim the Cloudways Black Friday Discount

It takes about five minutes.

1. Open the offer page through the Cloudways Black Friday offer so the deal is tied to your sign-up.
2. Create your account. Cloudways advertises a free trial with no credit card. On AWS and Google Cloud, the trial isn’t available, so you must upgrade your account first.
3. Pick a provider and server size from the price list below. The plan cards should say “80% OFF for 2 Months”.
4. Check the discount before you pay. The offer details list the code BFCM802, but they don’t say whether it applies automatically. So if the 80% isn’t visible on your sign-up or billing screen, enter BFCM802 manually in the promo field.
5. Don’t pay if the discount still isn’t showing. Ask Cloudways support first. That ten-minute check can save you a full-price invoice.
6. Request your free migration so the Cloudways team moves your existing WordPress or PHP site.

All prices are USD per month, billed hourly, and exclude taxes.

Add-on rates during the sale (per month):

Extra charges listed on the pricing page:

• Offsite backup storage: $0.033/GB per server
• AWS: $0.12 per extra GB of transfer, $0.1 per extra GB of disk (web application files and database)
• Google Cloud: $0.14 per extra GB of transfer, $0.17 per extra GB of disk (web application files and database)

What the 80% Off Covers (and What It Doesn’t)

Cloudways’ offer details describe the sale as covering all products, plans, and add-ons. This article sticks to what I could verify on the pricing page: the Flexible plans across five cloud providers, and the add-ons.

The percentage is the same everywhere. A Micro server on DigitalOcean gets the same 80% as an AWS or Google Cloud plan. But the starting prices differ a lot, because AWS and Google Cloud list higher regular rates.

Two limits worth knowing:

• It’s 2 months, not a lifetime discount. After that, the regular rate returns, which is five times what you paid during the sale.
• Migration is free and unlimited for WordPress and other PHP apps. If you’re moving something else, the page says the first one is on Cloudways.

Is This Better Than Previous Black Friday Offers?

From publicly reported past campaigns, Cloudways ran 40% off for 4 months in 2024 and 50% off for 3 months in 2025. This year it’s 80% off for 2 months.

The headline number looks huge, but the total saving is closer than it seems. Multiply the discount by the months, and you get roughly 1.6 free months this year, against 1.5 last year and 1.6 in 2024. Almost the same.

The real upgrade is migration. Earlier campaigns capped free migrations at a fixed number (reported as 40 and 50). This year it’s unlimited for WordPress and PHP apps. If you’re moving several client sites, that matters more than the extra percentage points.

Where this year genuinely wins: you pay very little upfront, and 2 months is enough to see how your real traffic behaves.

What You Actually Get on Every Plan

Beyond raw specs, every Flexible plan includes:

• 24/7 support from Cloudways engineers
• Unlimited websites and visits on one server, limited only by its resources
• One-click staging and cloning
• Free Object Cache Pro on 4GB servers and above, plus a free Redis cache
• Free SSL (Let’s Encrypt) and a dedicated server firewall (Imunify360)
• Automated and on-demand backups
• Free WordPress vulnerability scanner and vertical scaling
• Lightning Stack, which Cloudways tags as new on all plans

Cloudflare CDN is a paid add-on, not bundled. Most of the “extras” that cost money on other hosts are already included here, which is the main reason I’d pick it over a raw VPS.

A Developer’s Take on Performance

Hosting affects server response time (TTFB), which feeds into LCP. It can’t fix a bloated theme or ten render-blocking plugin scripts.

From what I observed while moving a WooCommerce client site to a managed cloud setup, the biggest difference was admin-side responsiveness once object caching was switched on. Front-end gains depended mostly on image and script cleanup.

I haven’t benchmarked the new Lightning Stack myself, so I won’t quote speed numbers. Elementor, Gutenberg and WooCommerce all sit comfortably on a stack with pre-configured PHP-FPM, multiple PHP versions and built-in WordPress caching. Just remember that Elementor-heavy pages and WooCommerce carts need RAM, so I wouldn’t go below 2GB for them.

Pro Observation: Object Cache Pro is free only on 4GB servers and above. Google Cloud’s Medium is 3.75GB, so check whether it qualifies before choosing it. For WooCommerce, the 4GB tier is the real sweet spot.

Where Cloudways Falls Short (and Who Should Skip)

• The price jump is real. After the 2 months, you pay regular rates. Set a reminder.
• AWS and Google Cloud bandwidth is tight. Included transfer is tiny, and extra usage is billed per GB, so a traffic spike can surprise you.
• No free trial on AWS or Google Cloud. You must upgrade your account first.
• Email isn’t bundled. Professional mailboxes are a separate Rackspace add-on.
• It’s not cPanel-style shared hosting. You choose and size your own servers.

Skip it if you run one tiny hobby blog and want the lowest long-term cost, or you need fixed-price billing with email included. A shared hosting plan may suit you better in that case, and I’ve covered the [Hostinger Black Friday deal] and the [Bluehost Black Friday deal] separately.

Best for WooCommerce stores, multi-site owners, and freelancers who want staging, backups, and scaling without managing a raw VPS.

Which Provider Should You Pick?

Here’s the 4GB Medium tier, the most popular size, across three providers:

Linode’s Medium matches DigitalOcean on RAM, vCPU and 4TB bandwidth, but uses SSD instead of NVMe. Google Cloud follows the same limited-storage, pay-as-you-go pattern as AWS.

The practical difference: DigitalOcean and Vultr give you big included bandwidth and predictable bills. AWS gives you the AWS ecosystem, but you pay for it in complexity and metered extras.

Winner: For most WordPress and WooCommerce sites, DigitalOcean Medium is the better pick because it pairs NVMe storage with 4TB of included bandwidth, while AWS Medium includes just 2GB. If you specifically need AWS infrastructure, AWS Medium makes sense. For a lean multi-site setup, go with Vultr. The one weakness across all of them: the sale rate is temporary.

What to Do After Buying

• Launch with the right size. Start with 2GB for a single blog, 4GB for WooCommerce.
• Request your free migration instead of moving files by hand.
• Enable Object Cache Pro (4GB and above), then test everything on staging first.
• Add the Cloudflare CDN add-on if your audience is spread across countries.
• Turn on automated backups, but remember offsite storage is billed per GB, so don’t hoard old copies.

Mistakes to avoid:

• Oversizing the server on day one. You can scale up later.
• Leaving test servers running, since billing is hourly.
• Forgetting the 2-month mark.