Amazon CloudFront vs SiteGround Comparison

A

Why choose Amazon CloudFront

• Has a free plan (SiteGround does not)
• Higher Integration score (9/10 vs 4/10)
• Higher Scalability score (10/10 vs 5/10)
• Better fit for developers (9/10 vs 5/10)

Why choose SiteGround

• Higher Ease of Use score (8/10 vs 5/10)
• Higher Support score (8/10 vs 6/10)
• Better fit for small business (9/10 vs 5/10)
• Includes Managed WordPress, which Amazon CloudFront lacks
• Includes Shared Hosting, which Amazon CloudFront lacks

A

Amazon CloudFront

Pros

• The network is very large, with more than 750 PoPs plus over 1,140 PoPs embedded inside ISP networks.
• Data transfer from AWS origins such as S3 and EC2 to CloudFront costs nothing, which lowers costs for workloads hosted on AWS.
• Flat-rate plans start at $15 a month with no overage charges, which makes bills predictable.
• It has strong compliance coverage, including PCI-DSS Level 1, HIPAA, SOC, ISO and FedRAMP Moderate.
• Two tiers of edge compute are available: CloudFront Functions at $0.10 per million invocations and Lambda@Edge for heavier code.

Cons

• G2 and Capterra reviewers report complex configuration and a steep learning curve for people new to AWS.
• Capterra-network reviewers rate customer support poorly, around 3.4 out of 5.
• Flat-rate plans lack some features, such as real-time logs, dedicated IP SSL and continuous deployment, and going over the allowance reduces performance.
• Dedicated IP SSL at $600 a month and Anycast Static IPs at $3,000 a month are expensive extras.
• Users on AWS re:Post and GitHub report cache invalidations that occasionally hang for hours or time out during deploys.

SiteGround

Pros

• Every shared plan includes a custom WAF, AI anti-bot protection, malware scanning and daily off-site backups kept for 30 days.
• It runs on Google Cloud, with data centers in the US, Europe, Singapore and Sydney.
• GoGeek and the cloud plans include white-label client access and staging with Git, which helps agencies manage client sites.
• Reviewers on G2 and review sites regularly praise its support and uptime.
• Free site migrations and managed WordPress updates are included on all plans.

Cons

• Promotional first-year prices renew at roughly six to eight times the intro rate.
• The intro shared-hosting prices require paying 12 months upfront.
• The entry StartUp plan allows one site and 10 GB of storage, which a growing site can quickly outgrow.
• There is no documented public infrastructure API for developer teams.
• Some G2 users find the dashboard structure confusing.