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How Does Cloudways Payment System Work
How Does Cloudways Payment System Work

A step by step guide on how you can get the most out of the Cloudways payment system.

Emmad avatar
Written by Emmad
Updated over a week ago

Table of Contents

Payment System of Cloudways

First of all, please select your platform:

Cloudways Flexible

Pricing Model

Cloudways Flexible uses the Pay-as-You-Go model; you only pay for the resources you consume. You will be invoiced for the services used in any given month at the start of the following month. You may receive an invoice between the 1st and the 6th of every month for the total resources used in the previous month.

If you have funds available in your Cloudways account, the invoice will be paid using those funds. If there are not enough funds available to pay for the entire invoice, the remaining amount will be billed to your registered credit card. You can also pay your invoice using PayPal.

Pay-as-You-Go Explanation

To reiterate, Pay-as-You-Go means that you only pay for the resources you consume; therefore, any running servers and add-ons will incur charges.

If you have DigitalOcean, Linode, or Vultr servers that are stopped, the billing will still be active as resources remain allocated to your account regardless of being inactive. On the other hand, if you have AWS or GCE servers, an inactive server will incur minimal charges for disk space.

If you are looking to take a temporary break and want to stop Cloudways billing, you can read this article. If you want to cancel your Cloudways account permanently, you can read this guide.

Cloudways Autonomous

Pricing Model

Cloudways Autonomous uses an hourly pricing model, giving you a whole new level of flexibility and autonomy to activate, upgrade, downgrade the plan on the go and deactivate it when you no longer need it - no questions asked. You pay for the plan on an hourly basis as long as it is active, and you stop paying when you deactivate it.

For instance, if you subscribe to a $35 monthly plan, then we break down the total plan cost into per-hour cost for the whole 30 days. In other words, we divide $35 by the total number of hours in a month to calculate the hourly cost of the plan and bill you for as long as your plan is active. If you decide to use the plan only for an hour after subscribing and then deactivate it, you only pay for one hour.

You will receive monthly invoices for the plan you use in any given month at the start of the following month. You may receive an invoice between the 1st and the 6th of every month.

If you have funds available in your Cloudways account, the invoice will be paid using those funds. If there are not enough funds available to pay for the entire invoice, the remaining amount will be billed to your registered credit card. You can also pay your invoice using PayPal.

Upgrade/Downgrade Plan

This is also applicable when you upgrade or downgrade the plan, depending on your usage. Let's take a look at another example to understand this better if you subscribe to a $35 monthly plan and use that for 15 days (360 hours) and then upgrade to a $90 plan and use that for the remaining 15 days (360 hours) of a month; then your first 15 days will be billed according to the previous plan and the remaining 15 days will be billed according to the new plan.

Let's review a small calculation to understand this example:

First Plan

Plan cost: $35

Per hour cost: $35 (plan cost) / 720 (hours) = $0.0486
720 hours refer to 30 days

Second Plan

Plan cost: $90

Per hour cost: $90 (plan cost) / 720 (hours) = $0.125
720 hours refer to 30 days

Thus, your invoice should be:

First 15 days: ( $0.0486 * ( 15 (days) * 24 (hours) ) = $17.496 )

Last 15 days: ( $0.125 * ( 15 (days) * 24 (hours) ) = $45 )

Total: $17.496 + $45 = $62.496

Plan Overages

Your Cloudways plan has a fixed number of applications, monthly visits, disk space, and bandwidth. To increase your application allowance, you will need to upgrade your plan. However, if you exceed your monthly allowance for visits, disk space, and bandwidth, the overages will be billed in your next invoice. Please note that your applications will not suffer any downtime or failures due to excessive usage of resources.

Please note that your overages are automatically added to your next monthly invoice.

Monthly Visits

Monthly visit overages are charged at the rate of $1 per 1000 visits if you exceed your monthly visits quota. Here, monthly visits refer to the number of visits your site gets from unique IP addresses within 24 hours.

Let's understand monthly visit overages with an example. For instance, if your plan offers 30000 visits per month, but you exceed your monthly visits allowance by 2000 visits, then here's how you can calculate the overage fees:

( $1 (overage rate) * 2000 (monthly visits you exceeded) ) / 1000 (visits per $1) = $2

Important Note

Please take note that if you observe a discrepancy in the visit count between your Google Analytics console and the one mentioned in the plan section, it is likely due to the fact that a majority of ad blockers exclude www.google-analytics.com from their functionality.

This exclusion prevents the analytics JavaScript library from transmitting data to Google's servers, resulting in Google Analytics being unable to track visitors who use ad blockers. As we directly count visits on our server, this is why the visit count reported by Google Analytics is often lower than the count reported by us.

Understanding Website Visits: Inclusions and Exclusions

In this section, you will understand how website visits are counted and learn what is included and what is not. It's important to note that this information is pertinent to both production and staging sites.

  • Unique IP Addresses: Each unique IP address is logged as a single visit per day, and the visit count resets precisely at 00:00 UTC every day.

  • Direct Access to Static Assets: Visits related to static assets (e.g., images, CSS, JavaScript) are excluded from the visit count.

  • Bot Filtering: Traffic generated by recognized bots is automatically filtered out, ensuring only genuine human traffic is logged.

  • HTTP Status Codes: Requests resulting in HTTP status codes 403 (Forbidden) or 429 (Too Many Requests) are also excluded.

Let's take a look at some scenarios to understand it better.

  • Page Load: For instance, if a person visits your website, loads the first page, and stays there for a couple of seconds, it will be recorded as a unique visit, considering the visit via their IP address.

  • Link Click: If the same person clicks a link and views another website page, it will not be counted as a unique visit because of the same IP address.

  • Different Browser: If the same person now visits your site with a different browser, it will not be a unique visit because it is tied to the network IP address and not a browser.

  • Bookmarking and Return: If the same person bookmarks the site and returns after 11 days, it will be counted as a unique visit because of the daily reset of "unique IP addresses" at 00:00 UTC.

  • Bot Traffic: When a bot accesses your site, our servers process it like a genuine visitor, but bot traffic isn't included in billable visits.

Disk Space

Disk overages are charged at the rate of $2 per GB per month if you exceed your disk space allocation. It is also billed hourly pro-rata (same as your plan). Your disk accommodates all your application web files, core files, and databases.

Let's understand disk overages with an example. For instance, if your plan offers 25 GB of disk space, but you exceed your disk space allowance by 2 GB, then here's how you can calculate the per day overage fees:

( $2 (overage rate) / 30 (days) ) * 2 (Size in GBs you exceeded) = $0.13/day

Bandwidth

Bandwidth overages are charged at the rate of $1 per GB per month if you exceed your plan's bandwidth quota. Your overages will be billed to you in your next monthly invoice.

Let's understand bandwidth overages with an example. For instance, if your plan offers 200 GB of bandwidth, but you exceed your bandwidth allowance by 10 GB, then here's how you can calculate the overage:

$1 (overage rate) * 10 (Size in GBs you exceeded) = $10

If you don't wish to pay the overages moving forward, you can upgrade your plan to get more resources and allowance. Please note that when you upgrade your plan, it becomes effective immediately from that point onward. If you have incurred overages before upgrading, you will still be billed for those overage fees in your upcoming invoice.

Supported Payment Methods

The following payment methods are supported at Cloudways:

  • Credit card or Debit card (Visa, MasterCard, and American Express)

  • PayPal (only available to customers who have upgraded the account)

Please note that PayPal payments are not automated; thus, you need to manually pay your invoices using PayPal.

Real-time Billing Feature

Cloudways offers a Real-time Billing feature that estimates your upcoming invoice based on your current usage levels. While it provides a close approximation of your billing amount, please note that it may not be 100% accurate and serves as an estimation tool rather than a precise calculation. This feature aims to help you anticipate expenses and manage your budget effectively.

Authorization Charge on Credit Card

When you upgrade your Cloudways account, our payment processor, Adyen, charges a $1 authorization fee to verify your credit card. Please note that this transaction will be canceled and reverted upon completion of the verification process. The same procedure is applied when you update your credit card information, and the transaction is reverted once the payment processor verifies the new credit card.

What Happens if the Invoice Remains Unpaid?

  • If the invoice remains unpaid due to charge failure or lack of funds, we will notify the account owner immediately via email. A reminder will also be sent after 24 hours (and an SMS alert if we have your contact number) about rectifying this situation. You will also be informed that your applications and servers may get stopped if the invoice remains outstanding.

  • After two additional days (three days after the invoice charge failure), we will stop your applications and servers. You will be informed that your servers and applications may get deleted if the invoice remains unsettled.

  • After two more days (five days after invoice charge failure), your applications and servers will be deleted.

  • After two more days (seven days after invoice charge failure), we will send you a reminder notifying you that your server backups may get permanently deleted if the invoice is still unpaid.

If you would like to pay your invoice using a different credit card, you can update your billing information. Alternatively, you can also pay your invoice via PayPal. You can also add funds to pay your current invoice and add extra funds to pay for your future invoices as well.

Charges After the Account Cancellation

Cloudways charges in arrears for the services or plans you used in the previous month. If you cancel your account, you will still receive the last invoice if services were rendered before cancellation. For instance, if you delete all your servers/applications/add-ons and cancel your plan on January 5th, you will still receive a final invoice at the beginning of February for the five days of services used in January. Once you settle your final invoice, your account will be closed.

That’s it! We hope this article was helpful. If you need any help, then feel free to search your query on Cloudways Support Center or contact us via chat (Need a Hand > Send us a Message). Alternatively, you can also create a support ticket.


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