Two things in that table do most of the work.
The first is the year-two number. SiteGround's headline price is a first-year promotional rate, and the renewal is roughly six times it. That is not a hidden fee, it is published, but a lot of people budget against the $2.99 and get a surprise twelve months later. SiteGround's promotional rates also vary by region, so a reader outside the US may see a different first-year figure, while the renewal rate stays the same. Budget against $17.99 a month and the comparison gets honest.
The second is the traffic allowance. Kinsta's entry plan carries 35,000 visits a month. SiteGround's StartUp is guided at around 10,000. Kinsta counts a visit as one unique IP address in a 24-hour window, which is a generous definition compared to pageviews. If your site is doing 30,000 visits a month, SiteGround's StartUp is not a real option regardless of price, and you are comparing Kinsta at $35 a month against SiteGround GrowBig at $29.99 on renewal. At that point the gap is five dollars and the decision changes completely.
What SiteGround gets right
Email. Kinsta does not do email hosting at all, and never has. If you host with Kinsta you are paying separately for Google Workspace or Microsoft 365, which is roughly $6 per user per month on top. SiteGround includes unlimited email accounts on every plan. For a small business running three or four addresses, that alone can close most of the price gap.
The promotional year is also just a good deal, and there is nothing wrong with taking it. Twelve months of Google Cloud hosting with free SSL, daily backups, and a CDN for $35.88 total is genuinely cheap. The catch is only a catch if you forget about it.
SiteGround also scales more forgivingly at the low end. GrowBig at $4.99 a month promotional (renewing at $29.99 a month) gives unlimited sites, 50 GB of storage, and roughly 100,000 monthly visits, plus staging. That is five times the storage on Kinsta's 10 GB Starter plan. On Kinsta, going from one site to two means moving from Starter at $35 a month to WP 2 at $70 a month. That's a doubling, and for a freelancer holding a couple of small client sites, SiteGround's economics are simply better.
What Kinsta gets right
Container isolation. Every Kinsta site runs in its own container on Google Cloud's premium tier network. SiteGround's shared plans put you on a server with other accounts, and their resource limits exist precisely because your neighbours can affect you. This is the actual product difference, and it is the one that shows up when traffic spikes.
Overage behaviour is the other one, and it is underrated. If you blow past your Kinsta visit allowance, the site stays up and you pay $0.50 per 1,000 extra visits. Kinsta publishes a worked example: 100,000 visits on a 35,000-visit plan produces a $32.50 overage. That is a bill, not an outage. SiteGround's shared plans have no equivalent overage charge, which sounds better, but the flip side is that exceeding your resource allocation gets you throttled rather than billed. On a day when a post lands on the front page of a subreddit, one of those outcomes costs you money and the other costs you the traffic.
Staging is included on every Kinsta plan, including the $35-a-month one. SiteGround locks it behind GrowBig. And Kinsta's overage rate is notably gentler than the rest of the premium tier: WP Engine charges $2.00 per 1,000 visits over the limit, four times Kinsta's rate. We run that matchup in full in our Kinsta vs WP Engine comparison.
The pricing traps in each
SiteGround's trap is renewal. It's disclosed, it's on their knowledge base, and it still catches people. StartUp goes from $2.99 to $17.99 a month. GrowBig goes from $4.99 to $29.99. GoGeek goes from $7.99 to $44.99. That last one matters: at $44.99 a month on renewal, GoGeek costs more than Kinsta's Starter plan at $35 a month, for shared hosting rather than an isolated container. If you are on GoGeek and about to renew, price Kinsta before you click.
Kinsta's trap is the second site. The jump from one install to two is $35 to $70 a month, with no intermediate step. Kinsta does sell an extra-site add-on at $30 a month, which is barely cheaper. Agencies feel this immediately, and it is the main reason Kinsta is a poor fit for anyone holding a portfolio of small, low-traffic client sites.
The other Kinsta cost that people miss is email. Budget for it. On a single-user setup with Google Workspace, that is $6 a month, which puts real Kinsta cost at $41 a month rather than $35. Our Kinsta review walks through the full plan ladder and where each tier fits.
Which one should you buy
Buy SiteGround if you are launching a first site, running under 10,000 visits a month, need email addresses on your domain, and want to keep the first year cheap. StartUp at $2.99 a month promotional is the right call and there is no cleverness required.
Buy SiteGround GrowBig if you have two or three small sites and want them on one bill. Unlimited installs at $29.99 a month on renewal has no equivalent at Kinsta.
Buy Kinsta if the site makes money. Specifically: if an hour of downtime or a throttled traffic spike costs you more than the roughly $20-a-month price difference against SiteGround's renewal rate, the isolated container and the pay-your-way-through-a-spike overage model are worth it. WooCommerce stores, membership sites, and anything where a slow checkout is a lost sale sit firmly on this side of the line.
Buy Kinsta if you are already on SiteGround GoGeek and renewing at $44.99 a month, because you are paying premium prices for shared hosting.
The honest summary: SiteGround's cheap year is real and worth taking, but price the second year before you commit. Kinsta is expensive and does not pretend otherwise, which is its own kind of clarity. For where these two sit in the wider market, see our best managed WordPress hosting guide and the rest of our web hosting reviews.