This post contains affiliate links. If you purchase through our links, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.
If you’re trying to migrate WordPress Bluehost to Cloudways, the part that actually worries people isn’t the file transfer — it’s the moment the domain repoints and you’re not sure whether visitors will hit a broken site, a blank page, or nothing at all. That fear is mostly unfounded if you plan the DNS cutover correctly, and mostly justified if you don’t. This guide covers both real migration paths Cloudways offers, the DNS mechanics that make “zero downtime” actually true rather than marketing language, and the Bluehost-specific cleanup steps that trip people up.
Why People Leave Bluehost for Cloudways
Bluehost runs shared hosting — dozens to hundreds of sites sitting on one server, splitting CPU and RAM. When that server gets busy, Bluehost throttles resources, and the result is slow pages or intermittent 5xx errors. Independent 2026 reviews put typical Bluehost WordPress load times around 4-5 seconds, well above the 2-3 second bar most modern sites need, and part of that gap traces back to Bluehost still running Apache instead of the LiteSpeed or Nginx stacks its competitors use.
Then there’s the renewal price. Bluehost’s intro rate of around $2.95/month is the number that gets people to sign up; the renewal rate near $10.99/month — a roughly 273% jump — is the number that gets people to leave. If you’re reading this because your renewal invoice just landed, you’re not alone, and that price shock is one of the most common triggers for this exact migration.
Third-party benchmark testing cited across multiple 2026 comparison sites puts Cloudways at roughly 119ms TTFB versus Bluehost’s roughly 478ms — about 4x faster before a single byte of page content even loads. The explanation is architectural: Cloudways provisions dedicated VPS resources per site through its underlying cloud providers, layered with a managed caching stack, instead of sharing one box across strangers’ sites.
our full Cloudways use-case breakdown
Two Ways to Actually Migrate: Plugin vs. Expert-Assisted
Cloudways gives you two legitimately free migration paths, and picking the right one matters more than most guides admit.
The Cloudways WordPress Migrator plugin (listed on WordPress.org as bv-cloudways-automated-migration) is the self-serve route. You install and activate it on your Bluehost site via Plugins → Add New, spin up a destination WordPress application on Cloudways first and grab its SFTP/database/site-URL credentials, then fill in the plugin’s migration form with your email, destination platform, and destination URL before clicking Migrate. Cloudways’ own documentation states this typically finishes in under an hour, though larger sites with big media libraries will take longer.
The free expert-assisted migration is the hands-off option — Cloudways markets it as “first move free” under its Application Migration add-on. You submit a support ticket with your Bluehost credentials, and a Cloudways engineer does the transfer for you. This route targets zero downtime by design but typically takes 1-2 business days depending on site complexity. It’s the better call for less technical users or for larger WooCommerce stores where a botched self-serve migration would be expensive to untangle.
These are two different services, not two speeds of the same thing — don’t expect hour-level turnaround if you go the expert-assisted route.
If neither plugin route fits — say the site has a plugin conflict or you want more granular control — UpdraftPlus lets you back up and selectively restore specific components (plugins, themes, uploads, database) on the new install. All-in-One WP Migration bundles the entire site into one importable file and rewrites URLs automatically, but its free version commonly caps exports around 512MB, so larger Bluehost sites need the paid Unlimited Extension. The full-manual fallback — downloading public_html over FTP and exporting the SQL database through cPanel’s MySQL Databases tool — still works for edge cases the plugins can’t handle, but it’s slower and leaves more room for error.
Before starting any migration method, take an independent manual backup. Some Bluehost users report failed scheduled backups, and you don’t want your only copy of the site sitting on the host you’re about to leave.
Zero-Downtime DNS Cutover: The Part Most Guides Skip
This is the piece that actually determines whether your migration is “zero downtime” or “surprise outage.” The core technique is TTL pre-staging.
DNS records — A, AAAA, CNAME, and critically MX — carry a Time To Live (TTL) value that tells resolvers around the world how long to cache them before checking for updates. If your current TTL is 86,400 seconds (24 hours), a change you make today won’t be fully honored everywhere for a full day. So the fix is to lower the TTL to something short, like 300 seconds (5 minutes), at least 24-48 hours before your planned cutover — giving the old, longer TTL time to fully expire everywhere first.
Once that short TTL is live globally, the actual domain repoint to your new Cloudways server IP will propagate to most resolvers within about 5 minutes, instead of the usual 24-48 hour window. Even with a short TTL live, make the actual switch during a verified low-traffic window on your own site — check your analytics rather than guessing.
Here’s the step most competitor content skips entirely: keep the old Bluehost account running and untouched for at least 48 hours after the DNS switch. Some visitors’ resolvers will still be serving cached records pointing at the old IP during that window, and if Bluehost is already deactivated, those visitors hit nothing.
If your domain is proxied through Cloudflare, switching the origin IP inside Cloudflare’s dashboard is close to instant for everyone passing through Cloudflare’s proxy — several migration guides flag this as the closest thing to a genuinely instant cutover, since you’re not waiting on resolver caches at all.
Bluehost Cleanup Before You Migrate
Bluehost preinstalls a handful of proprietary plugins — the Bluehost Plugin itself, JEENG on-site notifications, and other MOJO Marketplace bundled extras. None of them serve any purpose on Cloudways, and some can actively conflict with the new environment, so deactivate and remove them before or immediately after the transfer.
Don’t skip email. Cloudways does not host email — no mailboxes, no MX record hosting. If your Bluehost account also handled your inbox, migrating WordPress without a separate email plan means inbound mail silently breaks the moment DNS switches over. Before touching any DNS record, check your current MX records with a tool like MXToolbox and write down the existing values. Then either point MX to a third-party provider like Google Workspace or Zoho Mail before cutover, or confirm your email already lives outside Bluehost entirely.
Post-Migration Checklist: SSL, Staging, and Verification
Once DNS is pointing at Cloudways, install a free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate directly through the Cloudways platform panel — choose Let’s Encrypt, enter your email and domain, and click Install Certificate. Confirm the Auto Renewal toggle is switched on afterward; Let’s Encrypt certificates expire every 90 days, and a missed renewal reintroduces the exact downtime you just spent two days avoiding.
Before pointing your real domain at the new install at all, use Cloudways’ staging environments to verify the site actually works. Create one from the app’s Staging tab — it comes with its own free Let’s Encrypt SSL — and test the migrated site on the Cloudways-generated temporary URL, or via a local hosts-file edit, before you touch DNS. This is the step that catches broken permalinks, missing uploads, or plugin conflicts while the old Bluehost site is still live and serving real visitors.
Cloudways gives you a 3-day free trial with no credit card required, plus 30% off your first 3 months — enough runway to spin up the destination app, run the migration, and sit through the full staging/verification process before committing.
See our review of Cloudways staging for more on setting this up.
What Cloudways Costs After Bluehost
Cloudways sells two routes: “Flexible,” where you pick your own cloud provider and server size (DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode, AWS, or Google Cloud) and pay as you go, and “Autonomous,” which auto-scales and is built specifically around WordPress.
| Provider | Entry Price | Commonly Recommended Tier | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| DigitalOcean | ~$11/mo (1GB) | $14/mo (2GB) — handles up to ~50,000 monthly visitors | Most commonly recommended starting point |
| Vultr | ~$14/mo | — | Similar entry pricing to Linode |
| Linode | ~$14/mo | — | Similar entry pricing to Vultr |
| AWS | ~$20.56/mo | Up to $91.61/mo (Large config) | Higher ceiling for scaling needs |
| Google Cloud | ~$37.33/mo | — | Highest entry price of the five |
Prices last checked: 2026-07-08
Every plan includes unlimited applications per server, automated backups, a free SSL certificate, and 24/7 support. Cloudways currently runs a 3-day free trial with no card required, plus 30% off your first few months of billing (public pages differ on whether it’s 3 or 5 months — treat the 3-month figure as the tracked offer).
That said, Cloudways isn’t a raw cloud VPS — it’s a managed layer on top of one. Forum discussion on BlackHatWorld describes its control panel as a thin, sometimes limited layer over the underlying provider’s infrastructure, with no root access, and some users flag offshore support responsiveness as inconsistent (one thread includes an unverified, single-source allegation about client data handling that should be read as forum sentiment, not established fact). The trade-off is real: you’re paying a markup over “raw” VPS pricing specifically so you don’t have to manage installation, migration, and server upkeep yourself — which is exactly the trade a non-devops WordPress owner leaving Bluehost is usually looking to make.
our Cloudways vs Vultr comparison
Who Should Make This Move (and Who Shouldn’t)
If your Bluehost site is regularly slow under normal traffic, if you’ve hit a renewal price that no longer makes sense, or if you’re running WooCommerce and need dedicated resources instead of shared-tenancy throttling, migrating to Cloudways solves a real, measurable problem — not a marginal one.
It’s a worse fit if you’re running a single low-traffic blog with no plans to grow and genuinely don’t want to touch a control panel more sophisticated than Bluehost’s cPanel — Cloudways’ pricing only pays off once your traffic or performance requirements outgrow shared hosting. And if email hosting through your domain is something you’ve never had to think about before, budget time to sort out Google Workspace or Zoho before you touch a single DNS record, not after.
DNS Discipline Decides Whether You Get Zero Downtime
The technical migration — whether via the free plugin or the free expert-assisted service — is the easy part. What actually determines whether you migrate WordPress Bluehost to Cloudways with zero downtime is the DNS discipline: drop your TTL days in advance, verify on staging before cutover, and don’t touch the old Bluehost account for 48 hours after you flip DNS. Handle MX records as a separate task, not an afterthought.
If your site is outgrowing Bluehost’s shared resources or you’re staring down a renewal bill that tripled, start the destination Cloudways app now, using the free trial window to test the migration on staging before you commit to anything. Get the DNS TTL change queued today — it’s the one step with a built-in waiting period, so it should be first, not last.
