SiteGround Alternative: Hosting Without CPU-Second Limits
If you are looking for a SiteGround alternative, two things are worth checking before you move anything. The first is the fair use policy, because SiteGround advertises unlimited traffic and then meters the account in CPU seconds. The second is the renewal price, because the first year is cheap in a way the second year is not.
Three Reasons People Leave SiteGround
No CPU-second budget
Your plan is bandwidth and NVMe storage. There is no daily CPU allowance to burn through, no cap on how many files you keep, and no ceiling on how big the database is allowed to get.
Year two costs what year one did
SiteGround StartUp is £1.99 a month for the first year and £13.99 after it. FastCow does not run an introductory rate, so there is nothing waiting for you at renewal.
Hardware we own, in places we name
Dallas and the UK, on our own machines rather than a container sharing a host with several hundred other accounts. The person who replies to you can get into it.
FastCow And SiteGround, Line By Line
Structure and published limits, not benchmarks. Two of these rows go to them.
How this was put together. The FastCow column is what we sell and will be held to. The SiteGround column comes from their published fair use policy and hosting pages, and is theirs to change. Sources: SiteGround fair use policy and their WordPress hosting page. Last reviewed August 2026. Think a figure has moved? Send it to us and we will check it the same day. Our other host comparisons are written the same way.
Why The Same Traffic Costs Less Here
SiteGround meters you on CPU seconds, so the question that decides whether you stay inside your plan is how much work the server does to serve a page. That is a question about the software stack, and it is where most of the real difference between these two platforms sits.
LiteSpeed, not Apache or nginx
The web server is LiteSpeed with its own caching layer, so a cached WordPress page is served without waking PHP at all. No PHP process means no CPU seconds burned, which is exactly the meter SiteGround charges you against.
Redis object caching, on every plan
Free with every plan rather than a tier. Repeated database queries are answered from memory instead of from MySQL. SiteGround puts its own Memcached layer behind GrowBig, so StartUp does not get the full SuperCacher stack at all.
LiteSpeed Cache set up for you
The plugin configured and tuned against the server it is actually talking to. Page cache, object cache, image optimisation and critical CSS, without you reading a single tutorial or guessing at a setting.
The updates are ours to run and ours to fix
Core, plugins and themes, kept current by us. If an update takes the site down, the people who ran it are the people who put it right. On a shared plan that is your job, at whatever time of night it happens.
Every one of those is on every plan, including the entry one, so there is no tier to climb to get the caching. The full stack is on our managed WordPress hosting page, and the plans are on pricing.
Three Times We Would Tell You To Stay Put
SiteGround is a good host with a long record. Here is where it beats us.
You want a data centre near you
Eleven data centres on four continents against our two regions, and you can move between them whenever you like. If your audience sits in Sydney or Singapore, that is a real advantage and we are not going to argue with it.
The first year matters more than the fifth
If the site is a short project, a launch or a test, £1.99 a month for twelve months is cheaper than anything we sell. There is nothing wrong with taking it.
You would rather migrate it yourself
Their free WordPress Migrator plugin is genuinely good. Some people would rather run the move themselves at a time of their choosing than hand over a login.
Leaving SiteGround Takes You Ten Minutes
Ten minutes of your time, none of it technical. Our engineers do the rest and nothing changes for your visitors until you say so.
Hand Over The Site Tools Login
One message with your SiteGround credentials and you are done. We audit what is there, flag anything odd, and tell you before we touch it.
Look At It On A Test Address
You get a private URL running the real thing. Click around, check the forms, run PageSpeed against it. Your live site has not moved.
Say Go, And We Switch It
You change two DNS records. SSL reissues itself, the cache warms, and the old account keeps serving until the last visitor has moved across.
Privately Owned, And That Shows Up In The Price
An introductory rate that triples at renewal is not an accident or an oversight. It is what happens when a business has a growth number to hit and a quarter to hit it in. FastCow has neither, which is the entire reason year two costs what year one did.
No investors, no board
Privately owned and self-funded. There is no VC board setting a target and no outside shareholder who needs revenue per customer to climb before December.
We grow on revenue, not funding rounds
Things ship when they are ready rather than when a quarter needs to look busy. It is a slower way to build a hosting company and a considerably steadier one to sit on.
Profits go back into the platform
Faster hardware, better tooling and more engineers, spent on the people already here rather than on winning the next batch with a discount.
Not for sale
We are building FastCow to keep, not to flip. Your host will not quietly become somebody else’s next acquisition, and your renewal will not be repriced to pay for one.
All of that applies to the cheapest plan we sell, not a tier you have to reach. FastCow Hosting Limited, 39 C/O FastCow Hosting, Jefferson Close, London, England, IG2 6RZ. Ring the number in the footer and a person picks up. Who we are, and why we built it this way.
Find Out What Your Renewal Would Actually Cost
Send us your renewal quote and a month of traffic. We will tell you which plan fits, what it costs, and what it costs the year after. If staying put is cheaper, we will say so.
SiteGround Alternatives, Answered Properly
Still weighing it up? Ask us the awkward one and we will answer it straight.
Talk to us →For the first year, no. SiteGround introductory rates are lower than anything we sell. From the second year on it usually flips, because StartUp renews at £13.99 a month against an introductory £1.99, and FastCow renews at the rate you signed up on. Send us your renewal quote and we will do the maths honestly.
SiteGround fair use policy sets a CPU-second budget per plan: 10,000 a day on StartUp, 20,000 on GrowBig and 40,000 on GoGeek, alongside file count caps and a 1,000MB maximum database size. Traffic is advertised as unlimited, but the processing behind that traffic is not. FastCow sizes plans on bandwidth and NVMe storage instead, so there is no equivalent budget to exhaust.
Their policy states that the system relies on a series of early warnings where those are possible, and that in cases of extreme or repetitive over-usage they may limit access to your website until you take action. In practice that can mean the site starts refusing requests until usage drops or you upgrade.
No. Our engineers copy the site across and hand you a temporary URL to check it on. Your live site keeps serving from SiteGround the whole time, and you only change DNS once you have signed off on the copy, so the switch is a nameserver change rather than an outage.
For cached pages, yes, and by a wide margin. LiteSpeed answers a cached request at the web server without starting a PHP process at all, and a PHP process is what consumes the CPU seconds SiteGround measures. Caching plugins that run inside WordPress cannot do that, because WordPress has to boot before the plugin can decide to serve a cached page.
On geographic choice, yes. Eleven data centres across four continents is more than our two regions and you can switch between them. On support the two are comparable and we would not claim otherwise. The case for moving is about how the plan is metered and what year two costs, not about SiteGround being a poor host.