Cloud provider choice: Teams with a specific preference or requirement around AWS, Google Cloud, or DigitalOcean get to choose directly, rather than accepting a fixed infrastructure decision made by the host.

Pay-as-you-go cost control: Usage-based pricing can be more cost-effective for SaaS products with highly variable or low-baseline traffic, since costs scale directly with actual resource consumption.

Direct server-level access: Technically skilled teams that want to fine-tune caching, PHP settings, or other server configurations have more direct control than a fully managed alternative provides.

The practical decision usually comes down to whether anyone on the team wants to own server configuration as an ongoing responsibility. Cloudways’ flexibility is a genuine asset for a team with the technical interest and time to use it well — but for a SaaS team where every hour is better spent on the product, Kinsta’s pre-configured approach removes a recurring task from the team’s plate entirely.

It’s worth being honest about how this responsibility tends to play out in practice. Server configuration often falls to whichever engineer happens to be technically comfortable with it, regardless of whether that’s the best use of their time. Over months, small recurring configuration tasks add up to a meaningful chunk of engineering hours that could otherwise go toward the product itself.