Cloudways vs SiteGround: Server by the Hour or Bundled Plan

The short answer: for one WooCommerce store with three staff mailboxes, the two land within $24.24 of each other over two years, so the invoice will not choose for you. SiteGround GrowBig charges $4.99 a month across a prepaid first year, then steps to $29.99, with mail in the price; a 1GB Premium server on Cloudways is $14 a month with no step up, and mailboxes are an add-on at $1.5 each a month (USD before tax, checked on 26 October 2026 on SiteGround's WordPress hosting page and the Cloudways pricing page). What decides it is who on your side wants to size a machine. Choose Cloudways if your job is a store whose traffic jumps with campaigns, on a server you resize by the hour. Choose SiteGround if your job is keeping the store, its mailboxes and a staging copy on one plan that nobody has to size.

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Cloudways runs a server for you on one of five clouds, DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode, AWS or Google Cloud, and bills the hours once used. SiteGround sells a plan of fixed shape on Google Cloud, with email, a CDN and an AI agent folded in, per its web hosting page. One is capacity. The other is a package.

What decides it, in order:

1. Two years, with the mail counted. For example, SiteGround GrowBig is 12 x $4.99 + 12 x $29.99 = $419.76 for 24 months, mailboxes included. A Cloudways 1GB Premium server is 24 x $14 = $336, and three Rackspace mailboxes add 3 x $1.5 x 24 = $108, so $444 in all. Prices from the SiteGround and Cloudways pages; Cloudways adds $0.033 per GB for offsite backup storage.
2. What the store already depends on. Note where mail lives and how large the media library is. If your mailboxes already sit with Google or Microsoft, the $108 line disappears and Cloudways is the cheaper of the two by $83.76. GrowBig holds 50 GB; the 1GB server holds 25GB of NVMe storage and as many applications as it can carry, per the Cloudways pricing FAQ.
3. The one page that has to stay fast. Record checkout's load time in Google's PageSpeed Insights on the current host, and again on the new one before the trial or refund window closes. That pair of readings says whether the move worked.

Two years for one store, line by line

Read on 26 October 2026 on SiteGround's WordPress hosting and web hosting pages and the Cloudways pricing page. The Cloudways card opens on its Premium tier; the Standard tier's 1GB server is $11 a month on SSD storage.

Where they part

Who sizes the machine

Cloudways leaves the provider, the data centre and the RAM to you, and lets you resize when traffic moves; from the 4GB server upward, Object Cache Pro is included, which Cloudways values at $95 a month on its pricing page. On SiteGround you choose a plan, and caching comes as a fixed stack: NGINX direct delivery, full-page caching and Memcached, per the web hosting page. The first rewards someone who reads server graphs. The second suits a team that never wants to.

How the bill arrives

SiteGround takes twelve months up front and then renews at the card's higher rate. Cloudways bills in arrears, with an invoice early each month covering the previous one, so a server you scale up for a sale week is billed for that week and no more (pricing FAQ). A finance lead who wants one figure for the year prefers the first. A store that peaks twice a year pays for the peaks only on the second.

What sits outside the server price

Cloudways prices extras one by one: Cloudflare Enterprise from $4.99 per domain a month, malware protection from $4 per app, advanced support at $100 a month (pricing page). SiteGround folds a CDN, daily backups, email and an AI Studio plan with 20,000 tokens every month into hosting (AI agent page).

A speed audit by agent, before anything moves

SiteGround documents an AI Agent for WordPress that works on sites hosted anywhere, so you can point it at the store where it runs today.

1. Start AI Studio's 14-day trial, which comes with 20,000 tokens (AI agent page), install the AI Agent by SiteGround plugin on the store and paste in the connection key.
2. Ask it to audit the checkout page for Core Web Vitals issues, rank the top three bottlenecks by their effect on load time, name the setting that fixes each, and end the prompt with "don't change anything yet". SiteGround's performance tutorial explains why that closer matters: without it, a question about a setting can be taken as permission to switch it on.
3. The human check: whoever owns the store reads the list beside the PageSpeed readings and decides what changes. The tutorial also notes that NGINX direct delivery, dynamic cache and Memcached run on SiteGround's own servers, so on a Cloudways site the agent can adjust only the Speed Optimizer plugin's front-end settings. If the top bottlenecks are server caches, that argues for a move, to SiteGround or to a Cloudways server with its own object cache.

Free first, then one badge to read twice

Cloudways runs Flexible free for three days without a card and migrates your first site at no charge (pricing page); copy the store there and run the same PageSpeed test. The agent trial costs nothing, and SiteGround's 30-day money-back guarantee covers its hosting.

Then compare the two SiteGround pages a store owner is likely to land on. The WordPress hosting page puts its value badge on GrowBig; the WooCommerce hosting page moves the same badge to GoGeek, $7.99 a month for the first year and $44.99 after it. Entering through the store page steers a shop toward the plan whose renewal pays SiteGround $15 a month more than GrowBig's, so pick the tier from your storage and staging needs, not from the badge.

Choose Cloudways if the job is

• One or more WooCommerce stores whose traffic follows campaigns, sales and launches.
• Running client stores on servers you can resize, clone or hand over.
• Paying for the month just used, with mail kept at Google or Microsoft.

Choose SiteGround if the job is

• A store plus a brand site or two, with mailboxes on the same bill.
• Staging and on-demand backups without picking a server size.
• An agent that edits WordPress, posts and products by chat, included with hosting.

The Cloudways entry and SiteGround entry cover each product. How to use Cloudways resizes a server for a launch, how to use SiteGround runs the agent on meta descriptions, and Cloudways vs Hostinger sets the hourly server against prepaid plans.

FAQ

What does SiteGround charge after the first year?

The renewal on each card: $17.99 a month for StartUp, $29.99 for GrowBig and $44.99 for GoGeek, after twelve prepaid months at $2.99, $4.99 and $7.99 (WordPress hosting page, checked on 26 October 2026).

Can I keep my current email if the store moves to Cloudways?

Yes. A Cloudways server carries no mail, so your provider stays put as long as its MX, SPF and DKIM records move with the domain; Rackspace mailboxes cost $1.5 each a month if you want them from Cloudways (pricing page).

Which Cloudways size does a small store need?

Its pricing page pitches the 1GB server at personal sites and simple blogs and the 8GB server at ecommerce stores. Start where your checkout reading says and resize; a week on a larger server is billed as a week.