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One sells you a machine. The other sells you the absence of one.

A cloud VPS and a managed hosting plan are not two tiers of the same thing. They are different products for different buyers, bought in different ways, and the fastest way to choose is to work out which sentence you would rather say on a Friday afternoon.

Configure a cloud VPS See managed hosting

Side by side

Nine rows, and none of them is a feature tick.

The interesting differences are about what you are buying and how you buy it, not about which one has more of something.

Cloud VPS compared with managed hosting across what is bought, how it is bought, what is included, published figures, workloads, location, support, growth and billing
Attribute	Cloud VPS	Managed hosting
What you are buying	Capacity and control. A virtual machine, root on it, and the freedom to do anything lawful with it	An outcome. A website that stays up, patched, backed up and watched, with the server included in the price
How you buy it	Configure it and check out. Running in about a minute	A conversation first. We look at what you run, where it lives now and when it can move, then scope a tier
What the price includes	The machine. Backups are an optional add-on at 20% of the plan price; everything operational is yours	The machine, the operational work, the backups, the monitoring and the migrations stated in the tier
Published figures	vCPU, RAM, NVMe, transfer allowance, region — every specification is on the plan page	Websites, storage, migrations and response times. No vCPU or RAM, because sizing is our job on this product
What can run on it	Anything you can install on Linux. 6 images, containers, your own stack, your own kernel modules	Websites and the software behind them, scoped with you. Not a general-purpose compute product
Where it runs	48 regions, chosen by you at deploy time	Decided with you when the work is scoped. Say up front if you have a residency requirement
When something breaks	Yours. We answer questions about the platform — network, hypervisor, images, billing — 24 hours a day	Ours. First reply within 4 business hours on Essential, down to 30 minutes, 24/7 on Scale
Growing	Resize up in place from the panel, keeping the IP address. You decide when	We move you to the next tier in place, usually before you have noticed. The difference appears on the next invoice
Billing	Hourly or monthly, 10% off for twelve months up front. Destroy it and billing stops	Monthly, server included. The published price is also the renewal price

Exclusives

Things only one of them can do.

Read these before the price. If something in either column is a requirement, the decision is already made and the money is not the argument.

Only the cloud VPS

Run any Linux workload — containers, queues, game servers, build agents, anything you can install.
Choose from 48 regions across four parts of the world, including the UAE.
Pay by the hour and destroy the thing when the experiment is over.
Take a snapshot before a risky change, and roll back to it yourself.
Pin cores that no other tenant can touch, on the Dedicated CPU line.
Hold root from the first minute, with nothing of ours running on the machine.

Only managed hosting

A written first-reply time you can hold us to, 24/7 from the Business tier.
Backups that somebody else takes, retains and rehearses restoring.
Updates applied, checked, and rolled back by us when they break something.
Your existing site migrated in by us, rehearsed privately before the cutover.
A staging copy of each site, on the Business tier and above.
A named engineer who knows how your stack is put together, on Scale.

The one-question version. When the site breaks at an inconvenient hour, who do you want to be the person fixing it? If the honest answer is you — because you are quick, because you like it, or because you want nobody else touching the machine — buy the cloud VPS. If the honest answer is anyone else, no amount of specification comparison is going to change that, so buy the managed plan and get your evenings back.

Entry points

What each one starts at.

Two different things being priced, so this is a starting point rather than a like-for-like comparison. The like-for-like sum, with backups included on both sides, is on the managed-versus-self-managed page.

Cloud VPS

$7.90/month

U1-1: 1 vCPU, 1 GB RAM, 15 GB NVMe. No setup fee, hourly available, and the operational work is yours.

Managed hosting

$29.00/month

Essential: 1 website, 20 GB NVMe, 1 migration, done by us, first reply within 4 business hours. Server included, and no cart button — it is scoped with you first.

Questions

Where the two products get confused.

Is managed hosting the same as shared hosting?

No. Shared hosting puts your site in a directory on a machine full of other people's sites. Our managed tiers include a server, and the work of running it, in one price. The similarity is that in both cases you never think about the operating system; the difference is that here there is an actual server underneath and engineers who are accountable for it.

Can I run something that is not a website on a managed plan?

Ask first. The tiers are counted in websites, and one website means one domain and the software behind it, plus its staging copy where the tier includes one. A background worker, a queue or an API can often be part of that scope, but it is scoped rather than assumed — and if your workload is genuinely not a website, the cloud VPS is almost certainly the right product.

Can I have both?

Yes, and it is a common shape: the marketing site on a managed plan where downtime is somebody else's pager, and the application on a cloud VPS where you want root and your own deploy pipeline. They are billed on one account, and neither depends on the other.

Which one is cheaper?

The cloud VPS, on the sticker — it starts at $7.90 a month against $29.00 for the entry managed tier. Whether it is cheaper in total depends entirely on what your own time is worth and how much of it the server takes. We are not going to put an hours-per-month figure on that, because it depends on what you run and how much of it you already know.

Do I get root on managed hosting?

On request, yes, and we carry on managing the server. The only condition is that you tell us before changing things, so our updates and your changes do not collide. On the cloud VPS you have root from the first minute and nothing of ours runs on the machine at all.

What happens if I want to leave?

From the cloud VPS: destroy the server, and billing stops — the data was always yours and you were the only one with the keys. From managed: billing is monthly, you can stop at any renewal, and you get a full copy of the site files and database plus help pointing the domain wherever you are going. Exit is a normal request on both, not an argument.

The products

Read whichever one you leaned towards.

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