SiteGround Cloud Hosting

SiteGround Managed Cloud Hosting is an interesting offering by a reseller web hosting service: SG packages GCP's (Google Cloud Platform) virtual machines and adds support found in its Shared Hosting offerings. Unlike the usual VPS services offered by other shared hosting services, SiteGround allows you to configure your virtual machine, with the possibility to scale at any time.

The advantage of this is similar to the case with Shared Hosting: it is easier to configure, especially for someone without all the necessary technical knowledge. SiteGround also makes it trivial to use SSL encryption with Let's Encrpyt's free certificate and CloudFlare's free "CDN". SG also provides automated daily backups, with 7 copies kept.

On the flipside, these added services can all be configured easily on GCP with some technical know-how. It is also worth noting that CloudFlare is a caching proxy that is not a real CDN: users cannot upload, invalidate, or manage files cached on CloudFlare.

Compared to GCP's predefined VMs, SiteGround's plans tend to offer slightly less memory, which may be suitable for simple PHP-based websites that are limited by processing power. Thankfully, more memory can be configured easily.

Overall, for anyone with sufficient knowledge of cloud computing, directly using Google GCP, Amazon AWS, or Microsoft Azure, etc. would provide more flexibility as well as potential savings. SiteGround, however, is a good choice, thanks to the ease it providese and the possibility to scale easily.