If there’s one hosting plan that’s a total ripoff, it’s SiteGround’s cloud hosting.
A couple years back, I migrated from GoGeek to SiteGround’s cloud hosting. But like most people who reported in Facebook Groups, I was still getting CPU limit issues. Want to know how much I had to pay them to stop getting CPU issues and make my site load decently fast?
$180/month.
Going from $14.99/month to $180/month? No thank you. If you want to know the spoiler, I ended up at Cloudways DigitalOcean. Load times were about 2x faster, no CPU issues, and I was paying 1/2 of what I was at SiteGround. There’s no reason to use SiteGround cloud hosting.
An Honest Review Of SiteGround's Cloud Hosting
1. My Experience With SiteGround’s Cloud Hosting
As my traffic grew, I expected to move away from GoGeek and pay more for hosting.
$80/month was quite the jump, but if it meant it could handle my (slow but steady) increase in traffic and made my site load faster, I was on board. I had a few issues with CPU limits on their cheaper plans, but I like SiteGround’s support, cPanel, and speed were pretty solid for shared.
SiteGround’s cloud hosting was a huge disappointment with consistent CPU overages. And now that their support has gone downhill with no more cPanel, I have very little reason to use them.
2. It Won’t Fix Your CPU Limits
Even after jacking up their prices (twice) and migrating to Google Cloud servers, SiteGround’s inode limit is the exact same as it always has been, and they don’t plan on increasing it (read the comments on their blog). This means they’ve done nothing to fix their infamous CPU limit issue.
Keep in mind I write WordPress speed tutorials for a living.
My website loaded instantly, used WP Rocket, Cloudflare, heartbeat was disabled, no high CPU plugins, and I even had a perfect 100% GTmetrix report at the time. For someone who writes about reducing CPU and optimizing site speed, I was amazed I was still getting CPU overages.
With other hosting companies, they might slow down your website if you exceed CPU limits. On SiteGround, they will send you an email warning, swiftly take down your site, and send you a follow up email telling you to upgrade your plan (add more CPU + RAM or a dedicated server).
What’s amazing is that after migrating hosts, CPU usage was nowhere near as high.
Many people have the same problem:
3. It’s Too Expensive
The same entry level cloud hosting plan on SiteGround (2 CPU + 4GB RAM) can be purchased at DigitalOcean on Cloudways for $42/month. Many customers want to stay on SiteGround because their support used to be good, but that’s no longer the case. Why would you pay more?
4. It’s Not Even That Fast
The entry level 2 CPU + 4GB RAM on SiteGround’s cloud hosting is not fast.
Even if you add more CPU + RAM and end up paying $180/month like me, it’s still not as fast as other cloud hosting providers. This is what happened when I migrated from SiteGround to DigitalOcean. Load times were about 2x faster at 1/2 the price. You don’t get what you pay for.
Load times were still “decent” on SiteGround, but I had done every optimization in the book.
5. Support Won’t Get Any Better
SiteGround support has gone downhill.
And I wouldn’t expect getting any better support if you upgrade to their cloud hosting. It’s sad because SiteGround used to have one of the best support teams in the industry. Now, they’re only interested in making profit (you can tell because their support isn’t interested in fixing CPU issues, tells you to upgrade, and they even moved priority support from GrowBig to GoGeek). All these changes are very suspicious in what their true motives are – it’s not making you happy.
6. Features (If You Still Want To Use It)
SiteGround’s cloud hosting comes with 2 CPU + 4GB RAM by default, but this is usually not enough and you will at least need to upgrade your memory.
CPU – (central processing units) handle and execute programs. When multiple requests are made on your website, they are queued in a line. Multiple CPUs process these faster, thus making your website faster. Think of it like an Intel Core i7 for your computer, only for your site.
RAM – temporarily stores data and command instructions, then passes it along for computation. Just like you would add an extra slot of RAM to your laptop, adding RAM to your cloud hosting plan is one of the best things you can do to make your website load faster.
Storage – check how much storage you’re using on your current hosting plan (this should be found in Site Tools). Then add the necessary amount to your cloud hosting plan.
Upgrade Anytime – you can monitor your memory in SiteGround’s Site Tool to see if your server is stressed (it’s always on the edge of your limits). If this happens, you will need to add more RAM or CPU. You never want to be close to the peak, otherwise you will experience CPU overages (they’ll shut down your site) or get 503 errors which means the server is overloaded.
Autoscale Resources To Compensate For Traffic Spikes – if you have peak seasons or want to compensate for traffic spikes, you have the option set your cloud hosting account to autoscale (increase CPU + RAM) if you get a large amount of traffic. However, since you already have low CPU limits on SiteGround, you may end up autoscaling and paying more than what you thought.
Isolated Resources Mean Better Uptimes And Security – since you’re not sharing servers with other websites (like on shared hosting), your website(s) shouldn’t be affected if something goes wrong on other sites. Cloud hosting in general, should have better security than shared hosting.
Additional Features
- Backups
- Priority support
- Automatic updates
- Free hosting migration
- Back & restoration service
- Unlimited hosted websites
- WordPress-related support
- High amount of email storage
- Securspam prevention
- 4 data centers to choose from
- SiteGround’s speed technology
- SiteGround’s uptime technology
- SSD (solid state drives) for speed
- CDN (content delivery network) for speed
- NGINX servers, HTTP/2, PHP7, and HHVM for speed
- Free domain name, SSL, WordPress autoupdates, email storage
7. There Are Better Cloud Hosting Options Available
Do your research is all I’m saying. Some Facebook Groups I recommend are:
And yes, I 100% recommend Cloudways over SiteGround’s cloud hosting.
8. Conclusion: Don’t Use SiteGround’s Cloud Hosting
I can only tell you my own experience (and shared some Facebook posts) about SiteGround’s cloud hosting.
But I can tell you there are tons of complaints about not only their cloud hosting, but how their lower plans have even gone downhill. I actually used to be super affiliate of SiteGround (back when they were good) and referred thousands of people to them. But I no longer recommend them and am switching all my hosting recommendations to Cloudways (it’s a blog about speed, so I have to recommend the fastest)! And SiteGround is definitely not that. I’d look elsewhere.
I hope this helped,
Tom
