Cloudways vs. Pressable

Multi-Site Management

Pressable

Pressable plans are built for multi-site management. Agencies can host hundreds of WordPress sites on a single account with team collaboration tools and a dashboard designed for managing large WordPress site portfolios.  WordPress-specific features like bulk plugin management, centralized performance monitoring, automated updates, and one-click staging are built in. Pressable fully supports WordPress Multisite, and unlimited white-glove migrations make onboarding new clients straightforward.

Cloudways

Cloudways Autonomous plans are better for single high-traffic sites than multi-site portfolios. Cloudways does offer Flexible, a service that supports multiple applications and consolidated billing. However, Flexible is a general-purpose cloud management platform for hosting WordPress, Magento, Laravel, and other PHP applications across multiple infrastructure providers. It lacks WordPress-specific tooling, and agencies must select cloud providers, choose server sizes, and allocate applications across their infrastructure.

High Availability

Pressable

Pressable’s 100% uptime guarantee is backed by geo-redundant infrastructure. Site data is synchronised in real time across geographically separate data centres. If one region experiences an outage, traffic is automatically routed to another. Multi-region architecture protects against regional infrastructure and network failures.

Cloudways

Cloudways Autonomous’s high availability depends on its Kubernetes infrastructure, with pod redundancy that supports automatic recovery if servers fail. However, high availability operates within your chosen region rather than across regions, so it doesn’t provide Pressable-level protection against broader regional outages.

Scalability

Pressable

Pressable uses a vertical scaling model because that works best with WordPress. When traffic increases, WP Cloud allocates more CPU and memory, up to roughly 110 CPU cores, and increases PHP workers on that instance. 

Scaling happens in real time on the existing site, so you avoid reprovisioning delays or cache flushes. Because the application continues to run on the same infrastructure, your site doesn’t experience the cross-node consistency and synchronization issues that often come with horizontal scaling. WP Cloud’s design is a natural fit for WordPress because the platform was purpose-built for WordPress workloads rather than a general cloud stack.

Cloudways

Cloudways Autonomous uses horizontal autoscaling on Kubernetes. As traffic grows, the platform adds more Kubernetes pods that run WordPress behind a load balancer. It’s a cloud architecture pattern often used for microservices and distributed apps, but it is not the best architecture for WordPress.

New pods have to start, warm their caches, and attach to shared storage, and the platform has to coordinate sessions and data across pods. If autoscaling only reacts once a spike is underway or caches are not tuned, the extra complexity can show up as added latency during scale-out events. 

Architecturally, Cloudways is applying a generic cloud-native pattern that it also uses for Magento, Laravel, and other PHP apps, then adapting it to WordPress, rather than designing the platform around the specific needs of the WordPress application.

Automation

Pressable

The Pressable API provides endpoints for many of the features in the MyPressable control panel. That includes site creation, cloning, backups, staging-to-production sync, plugin and theme management, PHP version changes, and collaborator permissions. 

In addition to the REST API, Pressable supports over 50 webhooks, covering events such as site creation, cache purges, and backup completion, giving you real-time integration with external tools. WP-CLI and Bash command support are also available through the API.

Cloudways

Cloudways has a REST API that covers cloud infrastructure and generic app management. You can provision servers, manage backups, scale resources, and configure SSL. However, because the API operates at the infrastructure layer,  it does not provide endpoints for WordPress-specific operations such as plugin or theme management. 

Agencies and WordPress professionals managing large site portfolios are likely to find it less convenient than a WordPress-focused API that provides full control over site management operations.