I admit it, I’m a SiteGround fanboy.
But as my traffic grew, I started getting CPU overages on SiteGround’s GoGeek plan. I upgraded to their $80/month cloud hosting but was still exceeding CPU, so I added more CPU/RAM and started paying them $180/month. Going from $11.95/month on GoGeek to $180/month was insane to me, to say the least. So I migrated to DigitalOcean on Cloudways where I was paying $80/month for roughly the same amount of CPU/RAM. After migrating, my load times dropped in half, I am nowhere near exceeding my CPU, and I’m saving $100/month.
Obviously, I’m quite happy.
Some of my tutorials have 10+ images and 400+ comments (5MB page size and 170 requests) and still load in <2s! Run this post through GTmetrix or click through my pages if you want – they all load instantly. This was the biggest difference I noticed when migrating to Cloudways.
Cloudways support isn’t as good as SiteGround (tickets are usually answered in an hour instead of 15 minutes) but with the improved performance, I can definitely live with that.
1. I Was Previously Using SiteGround’s Cloud Hosting
One problem I have with SiteGround is there’s no “middle” plan between GoGeek and cloud. You’re either paying $11.95/month or $80/month. And if you have to upgrade to cloud because you’re having CPU overages, chances are the entry level plan won’t be enough (it wasn’t for me). I had to pay them about $120/month to stop getting CPU overages, and $180/month for my server to be relaxed. 2 CPU + 4GB RAM usually won’t cut it for many.
I was paying them way too much:
2. The Money I Saved With Cloudways
Quick comparison check: 2 CPU + 4GB RAM costs $80/month on SiteGround when it’s only $42/month at Cloudways on DigitalOcean. Also, SiteGround’s cloud servers can’t handle CPU like Cloudways. In my case, instead of paying SiteGround
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This article was written by Tom Dupuis and originally published on Tom Dupuis.