Cloudways vs SiteGround 2026: Which is Better for WordPress Agencies?

Cloudways and SiteGround serve different parts of the WordPress hosting market. SiteGround is a traditional managed WordPress host with fixed plans, shared infrastructure, and strong marketing toward small business owners. Cloudways is a cloud hosting platform layered on major infrastructure providers, aimed at developers and agencies managing multiple sites.

They're often compared because both sit between budget shared hosting and premium hosts like Kinsta — but they're built differently and optimised for different users.

Quick summary

Short answer: Cloudways for developers and agencies managing multiple sites with technical requirements. SiteGround for small business owners or clients who need a hands-off managed experience with phone support.

Infrastructure and architecture

Cloudways

Cloudways provides managed hosting on top of major cloud infrastructure. You choose the provider:

• DigitalOcean — reliable, affordable
• Linode (Akamai) — solid alternative
• Vultr High Frequency — NVMe SSD, best performance option
• AWS — for enterprise clients requiring Amazon infrastructure
• Google Cloud Platform — for GCP requirements

You rent a server (VPS), and Cloudways manages the setup: Nginx, Varnish, PHP-FPM, MariaDB, Let's Encrypt. Multiple WordPress sites run on a single server as separate applications. You control server sizing and scaling.

SiteGround

SiteGround uses their own managed infrastructure built on Google Cloud. Plans are fixed: StartUp (1 site), GrowBig (unlimited sites), GoGeek (unlimited sites + priority support). Sites are on shared servers — the resources available to your site depend on what other sites on the same server are using.

SiteGround's SG Optimizer plugin provides server-level caching integration, image optimisation, and performance configuration from within WordPress.

Performance

From the WordPress Hosting Speed Test 2026:

These are the plans and figures from that benchmark run — SiteGround's top shared tier against Cloudways' smallest Vultr HF server, which is the more generous framing for SiteGround, not the less.

Cloudways is faster on both. The cached gap (32ms vs 87ms) is the difference between a page that feels instant and one with a perceptible beat before it paints. The uncached gap is the more consequential one: 198ms against 382ms is what decides logged-in pages, cart and checkout, none of which can be served from a page cache.

Uncached response scales with server size on Cloudways, so a 2GB or 4GB server widens the gap further. SiteGround has no equivalent lever — GoGeek is already the top shared tier.

Pricing

Cloudways

Cloudways is priced by server size, not by site count. Multiple WordPress sites on one server have no per-site cost within that server tier.

Vultr High Frequency (recommended):

Redis add-on: €14/month per server (not per site).

SiteGround

Warning on SiteGround pricing: The introductory rates shown in their marketing (€3.99, €6.69, €10.69) are for the first 12 months only. Renewal rates are significantly higher (€14.99, €24.99, €39.99 per month). This is standard in the budget managed hosting market but catches people who don't read the renewal terms.

For 10 client sites:

• Cloudways Vultr HF 2GB: €25/month (no site limit, 5–10 sites comfortable)
• SiteGround GrowBig at renewal: €24.99/month (10-site practical limit before performance degrades)

At renewal pricing, they're similar in cost for 10 sites. Cloudways outperforms SiteGround significantly at that price point.

Features comparison

Caching

Cloudways: Nginx + Varnish Cache on every server. Varnish is a proven full-page cache — configured correctly, it serves cached pages in 30–40ms. Requires correct WooCommerce exclusion configuration (documented, not automatic). Redis available as €14/month add-on.

SiteGround: SG Optimizer plugin provides server-side caching integration. Simpler to configure than Cloudways' Varnish setup. Less flexible but more beginner-accessible. No Redis option.

Staging

Cloudways: One-click staging per application. Available on all plans. Staging is a full WordPress clone with separate database. Push to production via the Cloudways dashboard.

SiteGround: Staging included on GrowBig and GoGeek. Not included on StartUp. Staging is functional but less mature than Cloudways' implementation.

Team access

Cloudways: Team member access with role-based permissions. Add developers to specific applications without giving them server access. Essential for agencies with multiple developers.

SiteGround: Collaborator access available, but limited role customisation. Better suited to single-owner accounts than multi-developer agencies.

Developer tools

Cloudways: SSH/SFTP, WP-CLI, PHP version switching per app, Git deployment support, application-level PHP configuration, server-level access for technical users.

SiteGround: SSH, SFTP, WP-CLI, PHP version selection. Less server-level access than Cloudways — you work within SiteGround's managed constraints.

Automatic updates

SiteGround offers automatic WordPress core and plugin updates via their platform. Cloudways does not — you manage updates yourself or via a third-party tool like WP Umbrella.

This is a meaningful difference for agencies running maintenance retainers. If you're managing updates manually at scale, add this to the workflow comparison.

Support

Cloudways: 24/7 live chat and ticketing. Response typically 5–15 minutes. Support quality is good for managed hosting questions, weaker for deep WordPress troubleshooting.

SiteGround: 24/7 live chat, phone support on GoGeek, and email ticketing. SiteGround's phone support is a differentiator — Cloudways doesn't offer it. Response times are comparable for chat.

For clients who want to call their host when something breaks, SiteGround's phone support matters. Cloudways is chat-first.

Backups, security and recovery

The comparison most people skip, and the one that matters when something breaks.

Backups. Cloudways runs automated backups per application, with frequency from hourly to weekly and on-demand snapshots before risky changes. Restore is per-application, so recovering one site does not roll back the others sharing that server. Backup storage is billed separately per GB. SiteGround includes daily backups on all plans with 30-day retention on GrowBig and above, and restore is a one-click affair from the panel — genuinely simpler, with no separate storage line item.

Advantage: SiteGround for simplicity, Cloudways for control. If you want backups you never think about, SiteGround wins. If you want an on-demand snapshot before every plugin update and per-app restore granularity, Cloudways wins.

Security. Both give you free Let's Encrypt SSL, server-level firewalls and OS patching. Cloudways adds two-factor authentication on the platform account, IP whitelisting for SSH/SFTP, and Cloudways Bot for flagging plugins with known CVEs. SiteGround adds a custom web application firewall and an AI anti-bot system, and their security plugin handles WordPress-layer hardening that Cloudways leaves entirely to you.

Neither includes a hack-fix guarantee of the kind Kinsta offers, so budget for cleanup yourself — our hacked site process covers what that involves.

Email. SiteGround includes email hosting; Cloudways does not. For a client migrating off cPanel who expects mailboxes to come with hosting, that is a real cost difference and an awkward conversation if you discover it during the migration rather than in the quote.

Migrating between them

Onto Cloudways: their free migration plugin handles standard sites. Multisite networks, very large media libraries and custom server configuration need more involvement, and Cloudways offers team assistance for those. Configure Varnish exclusions before sending traffic, not after — the default rules will cache WooCommerce pages they should not.

Onto SiteGround: their Migrator plugin covers most WordPress sites, and they include one free professional migration on GrowBig and above.

Off SiteGround onto Cloudways is the more common direction for agencies, and it usually happens at renewal, when the intro pricing expires and the real rate lands. If that is you, do it before the renewal date rather than after — you avoid paying a month at the higher rate while you deliberate.

Either direction, the sequencing in our migration guide applies: drop DNS TTL to 300 seconds a day ahead, verify on a temporary URL, and use maintenance mode to hold writes during the cutover.

For SiteGround on its own terms — what it does well, and the renewal pricing that decides most of it — see our SiteGround review 2026.

WooCommerce: the deciding case

If the site is a store, the comparison narrows to one number.

Cart, checkout and account pages cannot be page-cached, so store speed is decided by uncached response time. Cloudways Vultr HF returned 198ms uncached on the smallest server tested; SiteGround GoGeek returned 382ms. That is not a marginal difference on the pages where customers spend money — it is more than double.

Redis makes the gap wider. WooCommerce leans on object caching for sessions and cart state under load, and Cloudways offers Redis at €14/month per server. SiteGround does not offer Redis at all, which is the single strongest argument against it for a serious store.

The honest counterpoint: a low-volume store selling a handful of orders a week will not notice. SiteGround's simpler management and included email may be worth more to that client than the 184ms gap on checkout. Our WooCommerce hosting roundup covers the full field if neither fits.

When to choose Cloudways

You're an agency or developer managing multiple client sites. Cloudways' team access, per-app staging, and server economics make it the stronger platform for agencies. Running 10 sites on a Vultr HF 2GB server at €25/month outperforms 10 SiteGround accounts.

You need technical control. PHP-level configuration, Varnish tuning, server scaling, and SSH access to the underlying system. Cloudways gives you this; SiteGround keeps you within their managed constraints.

WooCommerce with Redis. Cloudways offers Redis (€14/month add-on). SiteGround doesn't. For WooCommerce stores with significant concurrent sessions, Redis object cache matters.

Performance is a priority. Cloudways' 32ms cached TTFB on Vultr HF vs SiteGround's 87ms is a meaningful performance difference. If site speed is part of your agency's value proposition to clients, Cloudways is the better argument.

When to choose SiteGround

You're handing hosting off to the client. SiteGround's interface is more client-accessible than Cloudways. A non-technical client can navigate SiteGround; Cloudways is more confusing for non-developers.

The client wants phone support. Cloudways doesn't offer phone support. SiteGround does (GoGeek plan). For business owners who will call their host when something goes wrong, SiteGround's support model fits.

Budget is the primary driver on a single site. SiteGround's introductory pricing is lower than Cloudways for a single site. At renewal, Cloudways is competitive — but the initial cost is lower.

You need a beginner-accessible interface. SiteGround's WordPress-specific onboarding and SG Optimizer plugin are more approachable than Cloudways for users without server management experience.

Verdict

For WordPress agencies and developers, Cloudways is the better platform. The performance advantage is real, the team access and staging are more mature, and the server economics at scale are better than SiteGround's renewal pricing.

SiteGround is a solid choice for small businesses, single-site owners, and clients you're handing hosting off to who need a simple, phone-supported managed experience.

Don't let SiteGround's introductory pricing mislead you. Compare at renewal rates — at that level, Cloudways' performance and feature advantage is clear.

The one-line version: if you manage sites for a living, Cloudways. If you own one site and would rather not think about servers, SiteGround. The middle case — a small agency with a handful of low-traffic clients who want email included and updates handled automatically — is the only place the decision is genuinely close, and there SiteGround's simplicity can outweigh the performance gap.

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