Cloudways vs SiteGround – Bought, Tested and Compared

Back in 2020, we started testing both Cloudways and SiteGround by buying a hosting account on each, deploying a test site, and rigorously testing to find the real performance data.

Now, we have over six years of Cloudways and SiteGround performance data, such as TTFB, Uptime, load handling, and global TTFB tests.

To give you the most updated comparison review of SiteGround and Cloudways, we are using the last 10 months of data, from October 1, 2025 to July 31, 2026, covering 437,760 uptime and response-time tests per host.

Along with our performance data, we consider the features, pricing, and support to determine which is the best of the two.

Cloudways vs SiteGround: Introduction

Cloudways is the most popular Managed Cloud Hosting service, known for its affordable pricing and exceptional hosting services. Cloudways runs your site on rented cloud infrastructure, and we monitor five Cloudways plans across Cloudways DigitalOcean, Cloudways Vultr and Cloudways Linode. Cloudways itself has been owned by DigitalOcean since 2022. Cloudways plans start at $11/month for the Cloudways DigitalOcean 1GB server and run to $16/month for Cloudways Vultr HF. None of them carry a renewal increase.

Founded in 2004, SiteGround is a popular web hosting provider worldwide. In recent years, they have made significant changes to their hosting infrastructure, including introducing their own control panel, using Google Cloud for data centers, and offering caching plugins and security features. Their StartUp plan starts at $3.99/month on a 12-month prepayment and renews at $17.99/month.

SiteGround reduced its business to only a handful of countries. Make sure SiteGround allows sign-up from your country.

Cloudways vs SiteGround: Pricing

SiteGround is $84 cheaper than Cloudways DigitalOcean Standard in year one and $84 more expensive by month 36. Against Cloudways Vultr HF, the plan that matches it on renewal price, SiteGround saves you $144 across three years and gives you a host that ran 323ms slower on everyday response time.

Cloudways vs. SiteGround: Performance

1. TTFB

TTFB performance was measured by pinging the test site from 22 North American regions once every 60 seconds, which is 1,440 tests a day and 437,760 tests per host across the window. The test was done using the Pingdom synthetic monitoring tool.

Across the 10-month window, Cloudways DigitalOcean Standard averaged 442ms and Cloudways Vultr HF averaged 428ms. SiteGround’s test site averaged 751ms. Cloudways wins TTFB outright, and the gap widened in eight of the ten months.

Cloudways held a flat line all year, 410ms at its best and 478ms at its worst. SiteGround started the window at 661ms and peaked at 913ms in May, a 38% slowdown inside eight months. July’s 683ms is the first sign of recovery in half a year.

2. Uptime

The Uptime data is collected using the same Pingdom tool. Cloudways DigitalOcean Standard recorded 99.99% uptime against SiteGround’s 99.97%, but the percentage hides the real gap. SiteGround was down for 1 hour 59 minutes across 35 separate outages. Cloudways lost 7 minutes across 7 outages, and Cloudways Vultr HF lost 6 minutes across 4.

Cloudways is the real winner in the Uptime test.

3. Load Testing

Load Testing is done to measure how SiteGround or Cloudways reacts when the sites receive 100 constant visitors at a time. SiteGround handled the run at 170ms with zero dropped requests. No Cloudways plan matched it. Cloudways DigitalOcean Standard averaged 443ms and Premium 360ms, both completing every request at a 0% error rate. Cloudways Linode was fastest per completed request at 269ms, with Cloudways Vultr at 279ms and Cloudways Vultr HF at 288ms, but those three dropped 1.5% to 2.2% of requests as the test approached 100 users.

SiteGround handled our load test more cleanly than any Cloudways plan. This is the clearest win SiteGround takes in this comparison.

That result is worth putting in context, because 170ms is a SiteGround win over Cloudways and still a long way off the field.

There are two separate things in that table. The first is raw speed under load, where SiteGround beats every Cloudways plan. The second is whether a host drops visitors at the ceiling, and there the two Cloudways DigitalOcean plans match SiteGround at 0% while Cloudways Vultr, Cloudways Vultr HF and Cloudways Linode shed 1.5% to 2.2% of requests as the test reaches 100 users. If a hundred people hit your site at once, roughly two of them get nothing on those three plans.

So SiteGround takes this section, and it takes it fairly. What it does not do is make SiteGround the right buy on load handling alone. Hostinger Business served every request at 31ms and renews at $7.99, less than half SiteGround’s $17.99. Kinsta managed 40ms and WP Engine 27ms, both at 0%. If a traffic burst is the thing you are actually worried about, neither host on this page is where we would send you, and our best WordPress hosting tests rank the full field.

4. Global TTFB

Global TTFB is measured by pinging the test site from 40 global locations. This test is useful for sites intended to receive global traffic.

Cloudways DigitalOcean Standard recorded a warm-cache global TTFB of 386ms across 40 locations, tested without the Cloudflare Enterprise add-on. SiteGround recorded 1,200ms, the slowest global TTFB of any host we monitor. Paris returned 5,400ms, Delhi 3,900ms and Milan 3,200ms on the same test. We have no recorded global TTFB test for Cloudways Vultr HF, so it is left out of this section rather than estimated.

5. Server Hardware (WPBench)

WPBench measures the CPU, memory and disk I/O a host actually allocates to your site. SiteGround scores 8.4, Cloudways Vultr HF 7.6 and Cloudways DigitalOcean Standard 4.7. SiteGround wins this outright, for a straightforward reason: a 1GB Cloudways DigitalOcean server on SSD is a small machine, and SiteGround allocates more raw resources on its shared plan than that server has to give.

The spread inside Cloudways itself explains what the score is really tracking. Cloudways Vultr HF at $16 scores 7.6 on 32GB NVMe storage and higher-clock CPUs; Cloudways Vultr at $14 scores 4.3 on 25GB SSD. Same platform, same 1GB of RAM, different underlying hardware. WPBench measures allocation only, so it has nothing to do with which web server software a host runs, and it does not predict page delivery. SiteGround has the better hardware score of the two brands here and the slowest response time of any host we monitor.

Where it does matter is admin work: bulk imports, WooCommerce order processing, anything that hammers the database. If that describes your site, Cloudways Vultr HF at 7.6 closes most of the gap to SiteGround’s 8.4.

Cloudways vs SiteGround: Features

1. Control Panel

Both Cloudways and SiteGround offer their own custom control panels. I personally like both user interfaces. They are less cluttered and user-friendly, which makes me productive all the time.

Cloudways control panel is mostly split between server and application settings. The most common features, like PHP selection, are available in the server settings. WordPress-related options, such as SSL and CDN management, are available in the application settings.

Since SiteGround is a shared hosting, their control panel looks like a modern version of cPanel. It has all the options neatly placed. All the upsells can be managed within this dashboard.

2. Data Center Locations

Cloudways has no competition from SiteGround or any other hosting provider. Due to its partnership with multiple cloud providers, you can choose from over 60 data center options located worldwide.

SiteGround uses Google Cloud, and within that, it allows you to host your site from 11 data center locations in the United States, Europe, and Australia. On both hosts this is a one-time signup choice, not replication. Your files sit on a single server and every other location is measured as network distance. That is what the global TTFB figures above are showing.

3. CDN

Cloudways offers Cloudflare Enterprise CDN as an add-on for $4.99/domain. It comes with access to 300+ global CDN locations, 100GB Enterprise CDN, and all Cloudflare enterprise features like Edge page caching, argo smart routing, etc.

SiteGround now offers its own CDN with 17 global locations. It further deploys Google internal network for edge caching from 176 edge locations.

4. Email Hosting

This is the one feature gap that changes real decisions. SiteGround includes unlimited email accounts on your domain at no extra cost, set up inside Site Tools. Cloudways includes no email at all, so you either add a paid mailbox add-on through Cloudways or run your domain email through a separate provider. If you need five mailboxes and you do not want to manage a second service, SiteGround is genuinely simpler, and no amount of response time changes that.

Six Years of Cloudways and SiteGround Data

A 10-month window tells you where two hosts are. It does not tell you which direction they are heading. We have monitored both continuously since 2020, so here is every full calendar year side by side.

Both hosts have got slower. Cloudways DigitalOcean Standard drifted from 306ms to 442ms across five years, a 44% rise and a real one worth naming. SiteGround improved sharply in 2022, held that for two years, then went from 403ms to 751ms: an 86% rise concentrated in the last twenty months.

The outage column is the one that does not appear in any uptime percentage. Both hosts report 99.9-something every single year. Cloudways has never exceeded 8 outages in a calendar year. SiteGround recorded 52 in 2022 and 44 in 2025.

Cloudways vs SiteGround: The Verdict

SiteGround launched in 2004 and Cloudways in 2009. Both have rebuilt their stacks since, and both now compete for the same WordPress customer.

On performance, Cloudways wins TTFB, uptime and global TTFB outright. SiteGround wins the load test against all five Cloudways plans and scores higher on WPBench hardware allocation. We have not bought or monitored SiteGround’s higher plans or its paid CDN, so we cannot say what either would change.

Cloudways is built differently, as there is no promotional price to fall off. Every Cloudways plan costs the same in month 36 as it does in month one, so the plan you pick is a resourcing decision rather than a bet on what renewal will cost.

SiteGround offers a real starting point at $3.99/month, with strong hardware allocation, cleaner load handling and an all-inclusive control panel that includes email. The issue arrives at renewal, when StartUp moves to $17.99/month, more than Cloudways Vultr HF, which was 323ms faster on everyday response time over the same 304 days.

Overall, Cloudways has a clear edge over SiteGround on response time, uptime, global delivery and long-term price. SiteGround takes hardware allocation, load handling and included email.

Cloudways vs SiteGround FAQ