Every category where a model named Cloudways for a mid-market B2B company. Share is first choices across the direct, paraphrase, budget and scale prompts; rank is within every product named in that category.

Category	Function	Share	Rank	Negative rate	Labels	Quadrant
Cloud hosting	Cloud and infrastructure	2%	9 of 78	23%	13	accepted challenger

Movement

This is the first edition on this tier, so no move can be computed for Cloudways yet. From the next edition this section shows, per buyer segment, whether its share moved by more than the measured noise floor.

By model

How each model treated Cloudways across every prompt where it was named for a mid-market B2B company. Twelve models, six prompts per category.

Model	First choice	Alternative	Mention	Negative	Labels
Claude Haiku 4.5	0	0	0	0	0
GPT-5.4 mini	0	0	0	0	0
Gemini 3.5 Flash	0	2	0	0	2
Perplexity Sonar	1	1	0	1	3
Grok 4.1 Fast	0	0	0	0	0
Mistral Small	0	0	0	0	0
DeepSeek V4 Flash	0	0	0	0	0
Llama 4 Maverick	0	0	1	0	1
Qwen 3.7 Flash	0	1	1	0	2
Kimi K2	0	1	0	1	2
GLM 4.7 FlashX	0	0	1	1	2
MiniMax M2.5	0	1	0	0	1

By framing

Which of the six questions produced the naming. By model says how often; this says asked what. The first-choice count on the right carries the marks of the models that produced it.

FramingLabels by classFirst choices

Direct7 labels2

Paraphrase0 labelsNone

Comparative6 labels1not counted in share

Budget-constrained5 labels1

Scale-constrained0 labelsNone

Negative10 labels3not counted in share

First choiceAlternativeMentionNegative28 labels in all, every segment counted; 3 of the 7 first choices count toward share, since the comparative and negative framings do not. The bar is one segment per label class, to scale within the framing.

What the models said for it

Verbatim evidence the judge attached to positive labels.

“Cloudways is the strongest default recommendation because it is positioned specifically for mid-market businesses” Perplexity Sonar · Cloud hosting · direct prompt · first choice

“`Hostinger Cloud Startup` or `Cloudways` (~$10–$14/mo). They abstract the infrastructure” Qwen 3.7 Flash · Cloud hosting · budget prompt · alternative

“Kamatera or Cloudways (pay-as-you-go without huge provider complexity)” Kimi K2 · Cloud hosting · budget prompt · alternative

“SiteGround, Kinsta, Cloudways, Hetzner, DigitalOcean have better track records” MiniMax M2.5 · Cloud hosting · negative prompt · alternative

And against it

Verbatim evidence attached to negative labels. A warning on a product with few labels is a warning; on a product with many, it is one voice among them.

“Post-acquisition concerns include high CPU usage, limited integrations, ~220% markup on underlying resources, and allegedly fake reviews” Kimi K2 · Cloud hosting · negative prompt · soft negative

“described by one 2026 review as having notable caveats after DigitalOcean's acquisition” Perplexity Sonar · Cloud hosting · negative prompt · soft negative

“Slow response times, unhelpful bot interactions, and poor customer service overall” GLM 4.7 FlashX · Cloud hosting · negative prompt · soft negative

Named alongside

The products named in the same answers as Cloudways, over the 28 answers that named it. Took the first choice instead counts the answers where the other product was the first choice and Cloudways was named but was not.

ProductSame answerTook the first choice insteadHead to head

Amazon Web Services24 of 283Not in the top three

DigitalOcean20 of 286Not in the top three

Google Cloud17 of 281Not in the top three

Vultr14 of 281Not in the top three

Hostinger13 of 282Not in the top three

Akamai Connected Cloud12 of 281Not in the top three

Azure11 of 281Not in the top three

Microsoft Azure11 of 281Not in the top three

SiteGround10 of 281Not in the top three

Hetzner8 of 281Not in the top three

A head-to-head page exists where both products are in a category's top three. The other rows are the same fact without a page behind them, so they link to the product instead.

What carried it into the answer

The sites and pages cited by the answers that named Cloudways. A fact about retrieval, not a lever on the model.

Citations exist only for the models that return a source list, four of the twelve in this edition, so these counts come from 23 of the 28 answers that named Cloudways and are not a share of its labels.

Domains cited

techradar.com13

hostingadvice.com12

atlantic.net11

geekflare.com11

digitalocean.com9

forbes.com9

pcmag.com7

reddit.com7

theweather.agency7

cybernews.com6

Ninety-two of the ninety-two domain citations in answers naming Cloudways came from somebody else's page.

Pages cited

techradar.com/news/best-cloud-hosting-providers12

geekflare.com/hosting/best-cloud-hosting-platforms11

atlantic.net/cloud-platform/best-cloud-hosting-providers-small-businesses8

forbes.com/advisor/business/software/best-cloud-hosting8

pcmag.com/picks/the-best-cloud-web-hosting-services7

theweather.agency/blog/hosts-from-hell-the-worlds-worst-web-hosting-companies-and-why-they7

hostingadvice.com/how-to/best-business-cloud-hosting6

newsweek.com/vault/small-business/best-cloud-hosting-services6

Pages are listed as the models cited them.

Names read as Cloudways

What the judge wrote, as written, with how often. The vendor table decides that these count as Cloudways; a claim can dispute any of them.

Cloudways (by DigitalOcean) 1

Is this your product?

Claim this page

Claiming is free and changes nothing in the data. A claimed page shows a verified contact who is told when each edition publishes and when Cloudways's standing changes by more than the noise floor; the right to propose corrections to the vendor table, meaning names the judge wrote that should or should not read as Cloudways, applied by version and listed in the change log; and a one-line description supplied by the vendor and marked as such.

It does not get any change to labels, shares or verdicts, any preview, or any say over which quotes appear. A verification link goes to your work email; an address at cloud.nl is approved on the spot, any other address is reviewed by hand.

Your name and company appear on the claimed page, or the company alone if you ask below. A title and a LinkedIn address appear there too if you give them, and are left off if you do not. Your email address is never published.