SiteGround vs Kinsta vs Cloudways: What the Bill Actually Buys

Two readers open the same three pricing pages on the same afternoon and both end up paying about eleven dollars a month for WordPress. One gets a site that survives a front-page link from a large newsletter. The other gets an account suspended on the Tuesday after. The difference is not the provider, and it is not luck. It is which limit each plan actually enforces, and whether the number on the page is a promise or a guideline.

SiteGround, Kinsta and Cloudways get recommended in the same breath because they all sell WordPress hosting and all appear near the top of the same searches. They are not three points on one line. SiteGround is shared hosting: your site sits on a machine it shares with hundreds of others, and the provider promises unlimited traffic while keeping the right to act when your account consumes too much of that machine. Kinsta and Cloudways are managed cloud hosting: the provider runs a server, or a slice of one, that exists for your account alone, and you pay for that capacity whether the traffic arrives or not.

The entry price is a headline, and the renewal price is the bill

SiteGround's WordPress page currently advertises StartUp at $2.99 a month. The same block says it renews at $17.99 a month, that the $2.99 is prepaid for twelve months, and that the figure excludes VAT. So the first year is roughly $36 and the second is roughly $216. SiteGround is not hiding this. It prints the renewal on the same card, in smaller type, which is more than several of its competitors do. The price is still introductory, and you need to treat it as a discount rather than a rate.

Kinsta's Launch plan is $35 a month, or $350 billed annually, about $30 a month. The vendor's own discounts documentation notes that entry plans get the first month free for new customers, so the first invoice on a monthly plan is $0 and the next one is $35. There is no jump at renewal: $35 is a price, not a promotion.

Cloudways does not have an entry price in the usual sense. It rents compute by the hour through a cloud provider and adds its management layer on top. The cheapest DigitalOcean configuration on the pricing page is a 2 GB server with 1 vCPU, 50 GB of storage and 2 TB of transfer at $11 a month, billed as $0.0357 hourly. You pay for the hours the server runs, so a staging box that is switched off stops costing anything. The $11 is not intro pricing and it does not renew higher, but it also does not include a fixed visit allowance.

Put beside each other, the cheapest realistic first year runs about $36 on SiteGround, $350 on Kinsta and about $132 on Cloudways (plus tax in each case). Those are three different products.

What the entry tier includes, and what it quietly does not

SiteGround's StartUp tier is one website, 10 GB of storage, and a visit guide of about 10,000 visits a month on the vendor's own feature page. Standard features include free daily backups, a free CDN, free email accounts, wildcard SSL, and the multilevel cache that SiteGround builds into its platform. On-demand backups and staging appear under GoGeek, so a developer who wants a staging copy of the site is buying the top tier, not the entry one. One inconsistency worth knowing about: the pricing page lists StartUp with 10 GB of storage and the feature comparison page lists 15 GB for the same plan. I cannot tell you which is current, so ask support before you buy on storage alone.

Kinsta's Launch plan is one WordPress install, 15 GB of disk, 125 GB of CDN bandwidth, 75,000 estimated monthly visits, 14-day backup retention, unlimited free migrations, and staging environments. What it does not include is email. Kinsta's documentation covers pointing your MX records at Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 precisely because the platform does not hand you mailboxes. If your budget line for hosting has been carrying "and email", it does not carry it here.

Cloudways gives you control instead of allowances. The $11 server supports unlimited visits and unlimited websites, which is the honest way to describe a machine you are renting: the visits are unlimited until the machine runs out of memory. Included are free staging and cloning with one-click push and pull, automated backups, a server-level firewall, SSL, and multiple PHP versions. Not included: Object Cache Pro arrives free only on servers with 4 GB of RAM or more, Cloudflare Enterprise is a paid add-on, and email runs through Rackspace at about $1.50 per mailbox a month. Offsite backup storage is metered at $0.033 per gigabyte.

Three rows in that table decide most migrations. The visit row decides what happens in your best month. The staging row decides whether a developer can do the job properly on the plan you picked. The email row decides whether you are really comparing hosting or comparing hosting plus a mailbox service you have not priced.

Where each host stops being enough

SiteGround stops being enough when your traffic stops being average. The plan guide of 10,000 visits is not a hard cap, and that cuts both ways. Nothing shuts off at visit 10,001, so a small spike is absorbed. What the account cannot do is sustain a heavy workload, because shared hosting enforces limits at the account level, and "unlimited traffic" describes the transfer allowance, not unlimited CPU. On StartUp, a plugin-heavy WooCommerce catalogue or a post that reaches the front page of a large aggregator is the usual trigger, and the symptom is not a polite email: it is slow admin screens followed by a suspension notice. Budget for GrowBig, with a guide closer to 100,000 visits, before the spike, not after it.

Kinsta stops being enough at its visit cap, and it tells you so in dollars. The overage documentation states $0.50 per 1,000 visits beyond the plan allowance, charged on the renewal date unless the overage is extreme, which Kinsta defines as equal to or larger than the plan's monthly cost, or $500, whichever is less. On Launch that means a $35-per-month plan can carry an overage large enough to trigger early billing. Reaching 75,000 visits is not a failure; ignoring the alerts at 80 and 100 percent is. A site sitting at 60,000 visits should plan its upgrade, not wait for the invoice. On storage, Launch's 15 GB is modest, and the add-on is $20 a month per additional 20 GB, so an image-heavy site should price that in from the start rather than discover it in month three.

Cloudways stops being enough in a different direction, and it is the reason some people should not choose it at all. It does not sell a visit allowance, so it never sends an overage invoice for traffic. It sends one for resources instead, and the resource graph is your problem to read. A 2 GB server is enough for a well-cached brochure site and a handful of small stores. It is not enough for an unoptimised WooCommerce store with a large product table, because the bottleneck moves from bandwidth to PHP workers and database memory, and the fix is a bigger server at $88 a month rather than a support ticket. Cloudways suits the operator who will look at the server metrics and resize. It punishes anyone who chose it because the number was the lowest.

A blog with 3,000 visits a month, six posts, and no ecommerce is well served by SiteGround's GrowBig plan and should not be paying for a managed cloud server. A site that gets most of its traffic in bursts, from a newsletter or a seasonal sale, fits Kinsta better, because the cap is knowable and the overage is priced. A portfolio of small WordPress sites, or a site whose traffic pattern is genuinely unknown, fits Cloudways, where a larger server is one click and a higher hourly rate. None of the three is the best host. Each is the right host for a workload, and the workload is not "WordPress".

Leaving is cheap on paper and expensive in email

Migration is the part people get wrong in both directions. They overestimate the difficulty of moving files and underestimate the difficulty of moving everything attached to the site.

All three vendors make the file move straightforward. Kinsta includes unlimited free migrations on every plan and will do the transfer for you. SiteGround ships its own migrator plugin and advertises free site transfer on all plans. Cloudways lists free migration as a platform feature. A single-site WordPress move between any two of them is an afternoon, sometimes minutes, and the outcome is a working copy at the new host with the old one still serving until you change DNS. Budget for a staging copy and a test window, not a project.

Lock-in is where the picture turns. Kinsta cancels at the end of the paid period: cancel on the twelfth of a month that bills on the twenty-fifth and you keep the plan until the twenty-fifth, then it stops. That is fair and it means you should not expect a refund for unused days. Cloudways is closer to true pay-as-you-go because the compute is hourly, so leaving means destroying a server rather than negotiating a cancellation. SiteGround's entry pricing depends on prepaying twelve months, so leaving after four means abandoning eight months you already paid for. That is the real cost of the discount, and it is worth stating plainly: the cheapest year is cheap because you committed to it.

The expensive part of leaving is not the database. It is email. If your team has been using mailboxes bundled with a SiteGround plan, migrating the site does not migrate those addresses, and the export, the DNS records and the client conversations that reference the old address all become work. Cloudways answers this with mailboxes at about $1.50 each per month and Kinsta answers it by not offering them at all. If you expect to move hosts again, keep email with a provider you would keep anyway, and the next migration stops being a communications project.

The one thing none of this solves: your own workload. A site that outgrows a plan usually outgrew it because of an unoptimised query, an unchecked autoloaded option, or a plugin that runs a full table scan on every page view. Moving that site to a bigger server raises the ceiling and keeps the cause. Read the slow query log before you read another pricing page.

What to do on Monday

1. Open your host's renewal invoice, not its homepage, and write down what you will actually pay next term. If the number is the introductory one, you have found the article's first trap in your own account.
2. Compare your current monthly visits, or your peak month, against the visit guide or cap on the plan you are considering. Choose the plan that covers your peak, and price the overage on the one below it in case you are wrong.
3. Check whether staging and email are included or add-ons. On the three hosts here, those two rows account for more surprise cost than CPU ever has.
4. If you still intend to move, export the site and the mailboxes first, then change DNS. An unexported mailbox is the migration you will regret.
5. Run one slow query report and one PageSpeed test before you buy anything. If the site is slow on a plan that should carry it, hosting is not your problem.

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If your visit numbers and your renewal date now disagree with the plan you are on, the three pages worth re-reading are SiteGround's WordPress hosting plans, which show the renewal beside the introductory price, Kinsta's pricing page and its visit allowances, and Cloudways' server pricing, where the hourly rate sits next to the monthly estimate. Read the renewal column first. The Kinsta and Cloudways links are ordinary links: WPSifero has no affiliate relationship with either company, so nothing changes hands if you sign up with them. The comparison stands on the numbers either way.