When it comes to Cloudways vs. SiteGround, I have used both.
I’ve been using SiteGround for 4+ years. But I outgrew their GoGeek plan (my traffic grew) and was getting CPU overages. My only option on SiteGround was to upgrade to cloud hosting for $80/month, which I did, but was still exceeding CPU even though I wrote a tutorial on it. So I added more CPU + RAM until I found myself paying $180/month. That’s when I decided to migrate to Cloudways which not only saved me $100/month, but also cut loads times in half.
I switched to their DigitalOcan plan and my site loads insanely fast – click through my pages or run them through GTmetrix if you want. Even this post loads in <2s and it has tons of images with an 4.70MB page size and 127 requests.
A lot of people in Facebook Groups have the same problem – they sign up for SiteGround and are happy until renewal prices kick in or they get CPU overages. They ask for help, and people point them to Cloudways. This is a common cycle in the WordPress Hosting Facebook Group. SiteGround is great for low traffic sites not running high CPU plugins, otherwise… Cloudways. My only gripe with Cloudways is support isn’t great, but it’s a tradeoff for better performance.
1. My Story With SiteGround
I went from SiteGround GrowBig → GoGeek → Cloud. I loved their shared hosting while my traffic was low and was able to get 100% GTmetrix reports on my homepage. My site loaded quickly, support and security were awesome, and I virtually had no downtimes. They also had great features like free Let’s Encrypt SSL, easy backups, Cloudflare, and staging. Life was good.
But when my traffic grew and I got CPU overages on GoGeek, I was basically forced to their $80/month cloud hosting, which quickly turned into $180/month to keep my load times fast.
My conclusion: SiteGround is great for shared hosting on low traffic sites with the 3 years promotional price (that’s why I suggest 3 years of GrowBig or GoGeek). But once it’s time to renew, you reach CPU limits, or you need a more powerful server, it’s time to use Cloudways.
2. Why I Upgraded To Cloudways
The Main Reasons
- I didn’t want to deal with CPU limits
- SiteGround’s cloud hosting is expensive and not the fastest
- I saw tons of positive reviews of Cloudways in Facebook Groups
- The Cloudways community manager helped me with the sign up process
This article was written by Tom Dupuis and originally published on Tom Dupuis.