Moving a site because a homepage says "fast" is how teams buy the wrong server. Measure the site you have, then ask the new host about the parts the sticker price leaves out. This note is from public pricing pages and from questions you can ask a provider. We have not migrated a production site for this article.
Write the stack on one page
- CMS and the exact PHP version
- MySQL or MariaDB version
- Object cache, CDN, SSL, and cron jobs
- Where email for the domain is hosted, which may not be the web host
Moving the website does not, by itself, take email down. Mail changes only in some setups. Ask whether the host you are leaving stores the mailboxes, whether the migration will change MX records or other mail DNS, and whether anyone will copy the mail to the new service. If mail is at a separate provider and those records stay pointed there, the site can move and the inbox can keep working. If the web host does run the mail, or if someone edits the MX records without copying the mailboxes first, messages can fail or go to the wrong server. That is a planning question, not an inevitable outage.
Traffic is a peak, not a monthly average
Ask for peak concurrent users in the last 30 days, and for the heaviest page. A host that prices by visits, by RAM, or by transfer will quote different products from the same number. Bring the number. Do not let the quote invent it.
The restore you have actually done
Write the date of the last successful restore, not the date of the last backup. Then ask the new host who runs a restore, how you request it, and how long they say it takes. If they will not put that in writing, you do not yet know the backup product.
Why the monthly price is not the bill
On 6 November 2026 we read two public price lists as an illustration, not as a recommendation for your site.
| What we read | Figure | What it does not include |
|---|---|---|
| DigitalOcean Basic, 1 GiB | $6 a month | Backups. Weekly backups were listed at 20% of the Droplet price. |
| Cloudways Flexible card labeled DigitalOcean, 1 GB | $14 a month | Offsite backup storage, listed at $0.033 per GB |
| DigitalOcean Basic, 4 GiB | $24 a month | A matched Cloudways card. We did not pair another Cloudways price to 4 GB. |
Sources, 6 November 2026: digitalocean.com/pricing/droplets and cloudways.com/en/pricing.php. The Cloudways button on this site is an affiliate link. The DigitalOcean button is not. Confirm both pages before you treat the dollars as current.
Your worksheet for 12 months should have a row each for list price, backups, CDN, seats, overage, and any migration fee. Leave a cell blank when the vendor has not written the number. Do not copy an uptime promise from a marketing page into the sheet unless the contract states it.
Cutover and the day after
- What outage length you will accept
- Whether the plan includes a staging copy that is not the live site
- Who applies PHP and OS updates after you move
- Whether the old host stays paid for one full billing cycle so you can roll back
The printable version is the migration and cost checklist. The price comparison behind the table is DigitalOcean vs Cloudways. For a managed WordPress shortlist, see managed hosting and how we research.
See Cloudways plans →Affiliate link
How this page was made: from each provider's official product and pricing pages and its public documentation, read on the date named in the page. We have not run a hands-on test, lab benchmark, or paid user study for this page. A step-by-step section describes the vendor's published flow. It is not a test we performed.