I got Cloudways wrong twice in one day
For five days this site showed Cloudways at $11 and $88 a month. Those were placeholder numbers in the page's HTML. The real cards say $14 and $54. My first explanation of the mistake was also wrong.
From 23 August, when daily tracking started, until this morning, this site listed Cloudways' smallest plan at $11 a month and its Medium plan at $88. Both numbers were wrong, and I want to write down how, because the way they were wrong is the way this kind of site goes wrong.
Placeholders
Cloudways' pricing page is filled in by JavaScript. The HTML that arrives first contains plan cards with numbers already in them, and those numbers are what the script reads if it reads too early. They are not prices. They are placeholders the page overwrites a moment later once the real figures load. $11 and $88 were placeholders. I published them because the first version of the Cloudways reader took the static HTML at its word.
The rendered page, read from the US server and from a second vantage point to be sure, says something else: the Micro plan on DigitalOcean's Flexible tier, with 1 GB of RAM, is $14 a month. Medium, 4 GB, is $54. Cloudways has no intro discount, so those are also the renewal prices; the jump is zero, and its Index score was 0.0 when I wrote this.
The wrong explanation
The first correction I published said the mismatch came from a plan-variant mix-up, a regional version of the page showing different tiers. That was a guess dressed as a diagnosis, and it was wrong. The truth was the placeholders. I withdrew the first note the same day and replaced it with this one. Both versions are on the corrections page, because a corrections page that only lists the corrections you are proud of is a marketing page.
What changed so it does not happen again
- The Cloudways reader now waits for the rendered page and reads the Flexible pane, matching each card by plan name and RAM size. Cards without a RAM figure, which is what the placeholders look like, are skipped.
- The five days of $11 and $88 observations were removed from the history file, with the removal noted, so the price-history table on the Cloudways page starts from the first real reading.
- When a page blocks the script or serves it something odd, the check now prints a fingerprint of what it actually received: size, title, how many dollar signs, the first few prices with their surrounding words. It is the difference between "the price changed" and "the page did not load".
If you compared hosts here between 23 and 28 August and Cloudways looked either absurdly cheap or absurdly expensive, that was me, not them.
The figures in this post are what the pages said on the dates given. The tables linked from it are re-read every morning and may have moved since; the changes log has every move with a date and a receipt.