Cloudways vs SiteGround
SiteGround and Cloudways both sell managed hosting, and the marketing sits close together. Underneath, one puts your site on shared tiers graded by visits and bundles email and a domain, and the other rents you a sized cloud server behind a management panel. Which fits your sites, and what happens to the bill at renewal.
SiteGround is the better buy for one or two simple sites where you want email, a domain and daily backups in a cheap first-year package. Cloudways is the better home for several sites that need staging and cloning, and for anyone who wants the price they start on to be the price they keep paying.
By Sam Moreton
First-hand + researched
Which one for your use case
| Use case | Pick |
|---|---|
| One or two simple sites, owner wants email and domain included | SiteGround |
| Running several client or product sites that all need staging | Cloudways |
| Billing that stays predictable after the first year | Cloudways |
| Site outgrowing its tier, wants a resize instead of a migration | Cloudways |
| Handing a site to a non-technical client in their own panel | SiteGround |
Testing overlap: The Cloudways side draws on the ongoing production use described in the Cloudways review; the SiteGround side is researched from its published pages as of October 2026, and no side-by-side test period was run.
SiteGround and Cloudways both advertise managed hosting, and the marketing sits close enough that people treat them as substitutes. They are different products. SiteGround puts your site on shared tiers graded by approximate monthly visits, bundles email, a domain, a CDN and daily backups, and hides the server almost entirely. Cloudways rents you a cloud server sized in RAM and CPU and puts a management panel on top of it, with staging and cloning included from the bottom tier. If you run one straightforward site and want everything in one cheap first-year package, SiteGround is the easier buy. If you maintain several sites, or a renewal bill has ever surprised you, Cloudways is where I would put them. I run my own production sites there and wrote up what that actually costs.
What you are actually buying
SiteGround's shared tiers, as of October 2026, are graded by approximate monthly visits, storage and feature set, and the company publishes no RAM or CPU figures for them. That is the signature of shared hosting: you buy a slot with a soft traffic ceiling, and the host decides what the slot means in hardware. Their Site Tools panel is genuinely pleasant, and each site gets its own panel, which is a thoughtful touch when you hand one over to a client.
Cloudways grades by server size instead. The cheapest Flexible tier is a 1GB RAM, 1 vCPU box with 25GB NVMe and unlimited sites on it, and each step up the ladder is a bigger machine you can resize onto without moving anything. You choose the underlying cloud from names like DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode, AWS and Google Cloud. The panel is a server and application dashboard rather than a site builder, closer to the tools a developer reaches for weekly.
So the first question is whether you want to be insulated from the server or handed it. Both answers are legitimate. They lead to different hosts.
The renewal bill is the real price
SiteGround's pricing model is the complaint the brand cannot shake, and the shape is visible on its own pricing pages as of October 2026: a low price on the first invoice of a prepaid 12-month term, then the regular price at every renewal. On the UK site in October 2026, the entry tier opened around £1.99 for that first invoice and renews around £13.99 before VAT, and the ratio is similar on the tiers above. The first year is an acquisition cost they absorb; the second year is the product.
Cloudways bills per server at a flat monthly rate, and the rate you sign up at is the rate that keeps appearing. As of October 2026 the entry server is $14 a month, with offsite backup storage at $0.033 per GB per server and a Cloudflare Enterprise add-on from $4.99 per domain per month. Add-ons can grow the bill, as I have documented while complaining about mine, but the growth tracks what you choose to switch on rather than a calendar.
Neither approach is a trick. Introductory pricing is standard across shared hosting, and you can treat the first year as a discount and plan around it. The practical advice is a sum: price year two for both hosts before you buy year one, because that is the comparison that decides value.
Staging, backups and the daily work
This is where the products feel furthest apart in daily use. Cloudways includes staging and one-click cloning on every plan, at every tier, and the staging push is a button. SiteGround ties staging to its mid tier and adds Git integration only at the top tier, per the October 2026 plan pages. If your workflow is "change it, check it, ship it", having staging depend on which tier you bought is an odd tax.
Backups run the other way. SiteGround includes automated daily backups on every plan, with on-demand backups from the mid tier up, and states no retention period. Cloudways gives you automated and on-demand backups stored offsite with one-click restore, plus a per-GB storage charge, and also does not publish retention on its main pages. Ask both supports the retention question before you commit; it is the number both bury.
Migrations are painless on both sides, which is nice to be able to say about anything. SiteGround migrates sites free, by automatic migrator or by their staff. Cloudways moves your first site free with their engineers and throws in unlimited free WordPress migrations. Leaving either is realistic, and the underlying servers at Cloudways are standard enough that your data leaves with you.
Scaling and ceilings
A shared tier has one scaling move: go up a tier. SiteGround's tiers end where its shared product ends, and its separate cloud-hosting line sits outside this comparison, so I will not claim anything for it here. When your traffic doubles past a tier's approximate visits figure, the answer is a migration decision.
Cloudways scales vertically. A resize to more RAM and CPU preserves your configuration, takes minutes, and is the common case handled well. True horizontal autoscaling lives in their separate Autonomous product, aimed at high-traffic WordPress and WooCommerce, which bills per hour for servers beyond your baseline. If you already know you need autoscaling, that product, rather than the Flexible line, is the comparison to run against SiteGround's cloud tier.
Where SiteGround wins
Plenty of places, and it would be a poor comparison that pretended otherwise. The first year costs less for a single site than a Cloudways server does, full stop. Email at your domain is included rather than farmed out to a paid add-on, and for a lot of small businesses that alone settles it. The domain is free. The site builder exists and is fine. Support answers by phone, which Cloudways reserves for its top paid tier. And the per-site Site Tools panel is friendlier to a non-technical client than a server dashboard ever will be. For a freelancer shipping small brochure sites to people who will never open the panel twice, SiteGround is a defensible default.
Who should pick which
Pick SiteGround if your portfolio is one or two WordPress sites with predictable traffic, you want email handled, and the renewal jump after year one is a cost you have consciously accepted.
Pick Cloudways if you run several sites for clients or products, you want staging and cloning on all of them, you expect traffic growth that should be a resize rather than a migration, or you price hosting over more than one year. The managed WordPress guide covers the workflow in more depth.
If you are still torn, run the numbers for your site count over two years, including the TCO calculator for the do-it-yourself alternative. On a three-year view with more than one site, Cloudways usually wins on money and always wins on operational consistency. With one site and a tight first-year budget, SiteGround wins the purchase, and you should simply write the renewal date on a calendar.
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