Cloudways vs SiteGround
Both are WordPress hosts aimed at agencies, freelancers and growing sites. They differ most on support, staging environments and value for money.
At a glance
| Cloudways | SiteGround | |
|---|---|---|
| Overall score | 78/100 Higher | 75/100 |
| Free plan | No | No |
| Paid from | $14/mo (about £10.46) monthly cap; $0.0208/hr | £1.99/mo (about $2.66) first-year rate, prepaid for 12 months; renews at £13.99/mo |
| Positioning | managed cloud | managed shared |
| Launched | 2011 | — |
| Best for | Anyone hosting several sites who is comfortable taking on a little more responsibility. | Small sites and freelancers who want managed WordPress hosting at a low first-year price, and will budget for renewal. |
Where each one leads
| Dimension | Cloudways | SiteGround | Leader |
|---|---|---|---|
| Staging environments | 4/5 | 3/5 | Cloudways |
| Multi-site management | 5/5 | 4/5 | Cloudways |
| Support | 3/5 | 4/5 | SiteGround |
| Performance | 4/5 | 4/5 | Tie |
| Value for money | 5/5 | 4/5 | Cloudways |
| Ease of use | 3/5 | 4/5 | SiteGround |
| Scalability | 4/5 | 3/5 | Cloudways |
Scores are 1–5 per dimension. Cloudways leads on 4 dimensions, SiteGround on 2. The overall figure weights these for WordPress hosting generally — see methodology.
Pricing
Plans are listed per tool rather than paired row by row — tiers rarely line up, and putting one vendor's second plan beside another's implies an equivalence that is not there.
| Tool | Plan | Per month | Terms |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cloudways | Micro (1GB) | $14 | monthly cap; $0.0208/hr |
| Small (2GB) | $28 | monthly cap; $0.0417/hr | |
| Medium (4GB) | $54 | monthly cap; $0.0804/hr | |
| Large (8GB) | $99 | monthly cap; $0.1473/hr | |
| SiteGround | StartUp | £1.99 | first-year rate, prepaid for 12 months; renews at £13.99/mo |
| GrowBig | £3.99 | first-year rate, prepaid for 12 months; renews at £23.99/mo | |
| GoGeek | £5.99 | first-year rate, prepaid for 12 months; renews at £34.99/mo |
Pricing checked 23 September 2026 and 24 September 2026 against each vendor's own pricing page. Cloudways: Billed in USD by the hour against a monthly cap, excluding tax. Prices shown are DigitalOcean Basic servers. SiteGround: Shown to UK visitors in GBP, excluding VAT. Headline prices are first-year rates prepaid for 12 months; renewal prices are shown with each plan. Where the two bill in different currencies, conversions use the European Central Bank reference rate.
Verdict
Cloudways
- +Unlimited sites and unlimited visits per server — far cheaper than per-site pricing once you run several sites.
- +Choice of cloud provider: DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode, AWS or Google Cloud.
- +Free staging, free migration, and Object Cache Pro included on 4GB servers and above.
- −You are choosing and sizing a server yourself, even if the panel hides most of the work.
- −Offsite backup storage is billed separately, per gigabyte.
SiteGround
- +Introductory prices from £1.99 a month on StartUp, prepaid for 12 months (ex VAT).
- +Free SSL, a free CDN and free daily backups kept for 30 days on every plan.
- +GrowBig adds unlimited websites, 50 GB of storage, staging and on-demand backups.
- −Renewal prices are much higher: StartUp renews at £13.99 a month, GrowBig at £23.99 and GoGeek at £34.99 (ex VAT).
- −StartUp hosts one website with 10 GB of storage and no staging.
Common questions
Is Cloudways cheaper than SiteGround?
Cloudways starts at $14/mo (about £10.46; monthly cap; $0.0208/hr), and SiteGround starts at £1.99/mo (about $2.66; first-year rate, prepaid for 12 months; renews at £13.99/mo) — so SiteGround is the cheaper entry point. Converted at the European Central Bank reference rate. Compare what each includes at that tier, and what it renews at, rather than the headline figure alone.
Which is better, Cloudways or SiteGround?
On our weighted scoring across the use cases in this category, Cloudways comes out ahead overall. The honest answer is that it depends on the use case — the tables above break the score down by dimension so you can weight it to your own priorities.
Other comparisons
Sources & verification
- api.frankfurter.app — checked 6 November 2026European Central Bank reference rate, published via Frankfurter.
- cloudways.com — checked 23 September 2026No free plan; a 3-day free trial without card details.
- siteground.co.uk — checked 24 September 2026No free plan.