I Migrated 22 Agency Client Sites Off SiteGround in Q1 2026. Here's What Actually Beats It.

Small WP dev shop, 22 client sites on SiteGround GrowBig and GoGeek across two reseller accounts. We moved every single one of them off in Q1. Here's what pushed us out and what we picked instead.

Why we left

Three things stacked up at the same time. Nobody does a portfolio migration like this for fun.

Renewal pricing got absurd. GoGeek went from about $25/mo to roughly $75/mo on renewal — basically tripled. Intro pricing as a business model, fine. The renewal gap was not.

Resource limits on GrowBig got stricter, too. One client site, maybe 4K daily visitors, plain WooCommerce, nothing exotic, got throttled for "CPU usage" three times in two months. SG support said upgrade to Cloud at $100/mo. We did not.

And the reseller dashboard kept getting worse. More upsells inside the client view. Clients saw the upsells, asked us about them, we got blamed for them. Hard to defend.

To be fair: support was genuinely good. Caching tier is solid. We just couldn't make the math work on an agency book.

Where the 22 sites actually went

We split by site type. "One host for everything" is a trap I've watched a lot of agencies fall into.

About 12 brochure and small agency sites went to Cloudways on DigitalOcean. $14/mo 1GB droplet, holding 5-8 of them per server. Low-traffic WP runs fine on this. The catch: no client-facing dashboard. So if you want clients logging into their own hosting, this is not it. We don't.

About 5 WooCommerce stores went to Rocket.net, $30/mo tier. The Cloudflare Enterprise integration is real. TTFB on two of the stores went from 480ms to about 95ms with no other changes. Support is good. The only negative is scaling cost if you cross the plan limits. We haven't yet.

About 3 high-traffic sites went to WP Engine on the agency plan, $290/mo for 10 sites. These are sites where downtime actually costs the client revenue. WPE is expensive. I have also never had a 2am crisis with them. At this point that's what I'm paying for.

The last 2 went to Kinsta. Similar tier to WPE, similar price. Those specific clients wanted Google Cloud infrastructure for compliance reasons.

Who we didn't pick

Bluehost, HostGator, the rest of the Newfold portfolio. Still avoiding. Performance has not caught up.

Hostinger is fine for personal projects. I wouldn't put a client revenue site on it. Support quality varies too much.

GoDaddy Managed WP has improved, but the reseller economics didn't work for us.

Pressable is reasonable, Automattic-owned, but didn't feel different enough from WPE to justify the migration friction.

Flywheel is now WPE. Same infrastructure under the hood after the merger.

What I'd actually tell someone picking right now

Low-traffic brochure stuff under 10K visits/mo: Cloudways on DigitalOcean. $14-$22/mo per server holding 5-10 sites. Passable margin if you bill clients $30-$50/mo for hosting.

Small WooCommerce under $50K/mo GMV: Rocket.net. The Cloudflare Enterprise layer is worth the premium.

Revenue-critical or high-traffic: WP Engine or Kinsta. Pay the money. You're paying for 2am peace.

The thing that actually saved us during migration

WP Migrate Lite. The free one. Paid version if you need multisite. Just worked better than the built-in importers from every managed host we tested.

What we charged

$180 per site as a one-time migration fee. Covered our time. Some clients complained. Most didn't.

Where we ended up

Hosting costs down 28% on average. Support ticket volume down too, mostly because the performance complaints stopped. We made margin on the migration fees.