In this article, we will share Siteground hosting review and we will see what kind of webmasters are advised to use as their hosting company. There are tons of web hosting companies on the market. That’s why it is not easy to decide which one is best for your website. SiteGround is one of the hosting companies with the highest growth in recent years and also best valued by both users and critics.
What is the secret behind Siteground success? Is everything really as good as it seems? That is what we are going to clarify below. Read our complete SiteGround review to find out if SiteGround is the right host for you.
In this detailed SiteGround review, we will test all the promises of Siteground. Below are the facts we will test in detail:
- Performance: Speed is the main factor in the success of every website. So we will check how fast your website will load with Siteground hosting?
- Reliability: Sitegound promises an uptime of 99.99%. So we will test the stability of servers. Will your website be available 24/7/365 without facing any downtime?
- Customer Support: Can you count on their customer support?
- Features: Do they offer all the features and tools you will need to build your website?
- Pricing: How much it would cost you? Are there any SiteGround deals that can save you money?
Bottom line: Don’t want to read all the details? Let us summarize it for you. We found SiteGround to be noticeably faster and extremely reliable. Their hosting plans are flexible, and their customer support is one of the best in the industry.
Now let’s dive into our detailed SiteGround review, so that you can see how we reached that conclusion and decide for yourself.
- What is SiteGround?
- Siteground Review – Advantages
- Siteground Review – Disadvantages
- Siteground Review – Plans and Prices
- Siteground Review – Conclusion
What is SiteGround?
SiteGround is a hosting company founded in 2004 and has more than 2 million domains under its management. The company’s headquarters are located in Bulgaria and other offices are located in the United States (Alexandria, Virginia), Spain (Madrid) and the United Kingdom (London). SiteGround has a philosophy of doing things by hand and this is reflected from the choice of hosting resources, such as free CDN and SSL, up to the level of instant support that the company promises to deliver. Widely used by WordPress users, SiteGround is one of the hosting sites recommended by WordPress.org.
Siteground Review – Advantages
We will analyze the performance of Siteground hosting through its main characteristics, among which are: Uptime, speed and support. These 3 categories of the chosen web hosting are vital for the success of your project.
There are also other areas where hosting can distance itself from its competition and that contribute to improving its evaluation. Siteground has a few of them that we will review later.
1. Uptime (99.99%)
All of this data is based on 1-year periods to make statistics more reliable.
Rather than using pre-made software solutions, you prefer to do it more manually to ensure a high-quality hosting experience for your customers.
Its platform is built on the basis of Linux containers that provide great stability in times of unexpected traffic spikes.
Siteground has been one of the first companies to introduce account isolation technology to provide greater customer security. Another excellent web hosting provider that has applied this account caging method with great success is WPX Hosting.
Siteground has its own proactive server monitoring that monitors your servers every 0.5 seconds and fixes any type of problem that occurs automatically and without the need for human intervention, thus ensuring an exceptional Uptime close to 100%.
As a final result in the Siteground review, Uptime is approximately 0.20% higher than the average of its competitors, making it a benchmark in terms of server uptime.
2. Fast Website Load Time (~ 500ms)
Siteground load times are also very fast and stay well below those of other hosting companies. Sitegroung is undoubtedly one of the fastest web hosting providers today.
The measurements are also very consistent, with no spikes or slowdown periods. So the loading time is another plus in the Siteground review.
3. Customer Support and Help
Customer support service is one of the areas where Siteground stands out the most in our opinion. Despite having a very large clientele throughout the world and also in the US, Siteground has put special interest in adequately serving its users with a large group of experts who resolve all doubts and incidents quickly in several languages: Spanish, English and Italian.
Siteground not only provides support on hosting related topics but also helps with questions about major CMS like WordPress.
Siteground’s customer satisfaction is spectacularly high and in recent years it has resulted in more than 96% of satisfied users. So the outstanding customer support added one more star to the Siteground Review.
4. High performance WordPress hosting
One of the special features that Siteground plans include and that most of its competitors don’t have is Managed WordPress hosting on all of their accounts.
This means that someone manages the service for you in terms of speed, security, support, updates and provides improvement tools to make your life easier.
The Siteground platform is built on SSDs (more stable, secure and reliable high speed solid disks) and has its own caching tool called SuperCacher, essential for your website to load lightning fast.
Siteground also takes security very seriously and constantly monitors WordPress-related vulnerabilities in addition to pro-actively protecting its users. They take care of plugin updates and WordPress, they make daily and free backups in case something happens (something more common than many people think, either because of the user or due to external reasons of many kinds).
As a Siteground client you will also have access to their ‘Let’s Encrypt SSL’ and free CDN with more than 100 server locations, to ensure that heavy multi-media files are delivered fast and your page load time does not suffer.
Users of the higher plans (GrowBig and GoGeek) also have many added advantages such as free SSL, e-commerce options, priority support, etc.
5. Free SSL Security
In addition to the security options available with Siteground hosting, the company also provides added security for all types of websites. Available tools include SpamAssassin and SpamExperts, IP address blocklists, Leech Protect, and hotlink protection.
All their plans come with ‘Let’s Encrypt SSL’ for more security and you can add HackAlert Monitoring (a service that checks your website daily and notifies you if it is hacked or with problems) for very little money. Free SSL service is one of the most attractive features of the Siteground hosting Review.
6. Easy eCommerce installation
The eCommerce applications that transform or allow your website to have an online store, such as Magento, can be problematic if you do not have the appropriate technical knowledge.
Luckily, Siteground takes the iron out of the matter making you can choose between 18 applications for online store and install your favorite with 1 click.
They also provide multiple server locations, free CDNs, PCI compliance, advanced caching solutions to maximize performance, and a great customer service experience.
For security, user accounts are isolated, which means that if any of them were infected by a virus, the others would not be affected.
7. Free migration of hosting for existing websites
If you have your website in another hosting, the Siteground team transfers your site to their servers for free and in no time. You won’t have to lift a finger or wait for days. In a few hours, your site will be on the new servers ready for action.
There are several ways to migrate your website. The easiest is to request it when you contract your plan with Siteground from the configuration panel. Another option is to request it through the Support section within your account. In any case you will not have any problem.
It is important to note that in the event that your previous hosting provider did not work with cPanel, Siteground will only be able to migrate files and databases, but not email accounts and other account settings.
It is also possible to migrate your website to Siteground manually, but it is advisable to take advantage of the free migration option that comes with the plan.
8. Economical price
Siteground offers quality web hosting with lots of extra features. Despite this, the prices are very cheap and although they are not the cheapest on the market, it stands out from the competition.
9. 30-day satisfaction guarantee
This is not something new among hosting companies but it certainly gives enough security when hiring. For 30 days you can try Siteground services and if you are not 100% satisfied with them you can easily request a refund of money through the user area.
Obviously this is only for initial hires and is not for hosting renewals. Payments for domain names and their privacy protection are not refundable either.
Cloud hosting and dedicated hosting services, paid support, and third-party services are also not covered by the 30-day money-back guarantee.
Siteground Review – Disadvantages
We have already seen how Siteground offers excellent Uptime, well above average load times and truly brilliant support service. They even make a number of “extras” available to their customers that can go a long way toward making a decision for you. However, there are some not so positive points that we could mention:
1. Monthly payment
Many hosting companies try to catch their customers by offering a very low monthly price. The trick is that to get that price you have to sign up for 2 or 3 years.
The good news is that Siteground doesn’t fit into that game.
Siteground simply does not give you the option of monthly payment for shared hosting plans, but the minimum contract period is 1 year.
It does allow this payment method for dedicated and cloud hostings instead.
In short, if you want to pay less, it is always more on account to pay for a longer period of time.
2. Limited storage space
Compared to other hostings, the disk space that Siteground offers is in our opinion somewhat fair, so it should be taken into account if your project is large. Anyway they offer an indicative note regarding how many monthly visitors each plan can support safely and without experiencing any kind of problem. However, if you are just starting a normal website, the “StartUp” plan will be more than enough for you. When your website grows you can easily expand your plan to a higher one. With the StartUp plan you get 10GB of disk space and it’s more than enough for web traffic of around 10,000 visitors per month.
If you need more space, you can simply expand your account to the GrowBig plan and get 20GB, more than enough space for a traffic of about 25,000 visitors per month. This is the plan recommended by Siteground for its clients because it also has other very interesting advantages that the most basic plan lacks, such as access to the “SuperCacher” cache plugin so that your website loads like lightning, the possibility of hosting unlimited websites or have 30 backups with a 1-click recovery tool.
The most elite plan is the GoGeek with 30GB of space. This plan is designed for a website that receives around 100,000 visits per month and has added advantages such as optimization for eCommerce.
Siteground Review – Plans and Prices
Here you have a brief compilation with the most outstanding prices and characteristics of each Siteground plan :
WordPress Hosting Plan
It comes with 3 plans:
Startup Plan: It costs $6.99/month and is valid for a single website. It is an appropriate plan for beginners who are starting with their website. It supports up to 10,000 unique visits per month and has a 24/7 support service, free CDN and Let’s Encrypt SSL, unlimited emails, free migration. daily backups etc.
GrowBig Plan: This plan costs $9.99/month and allows you to host multiple websites. It supports up to 25,000 visits/month, 30 free backups and restorations, free SSL, a SuperCacher cache plugin (to make your website load very fast) and Premium support (although Siteground already has excellent customer service, higher plans have even more incredible priority special support.)
GoGeek Plan: This Siteground plan costs $14.99/month and allows hosting multiple domains, offers more space and supports web traffic of around 100,000 visitors/month. In short, this plan has all the excellent characteristics of its predecessors and other very interesting ones added, such as fewer clients per server, 1-click WP installation, optimization for eCommerce, etc.
Other features of Siteground plans are:
All Siteground shared hosting plans come with free email account, free CDN and unlimited bandwidth. Free SSL and unlimited bandwidth are some cool feature which adds more stars to this Siteground Review.
Siteground also sells domains at an affordable price of around $15.95/yr.
The registration process in Siteground is very simple and fast and is done on one page. You can pay with a credit card and account activation is very fast.
It has a cPanel control panel for a very pleasant and simple user experience.
The installation of the main CMS on the market like WordPress or Joomla is very easy and fast.
Siteground Review – Conclusion
Despite not being one of the cheapest hostings (although sometimes it has excellent promotions), its value for money makes it stand out from the rest and places it at the height of the best competitors on the market in the field of web hosting such as Bluehost.
Siteground’s shared hosting plans, and especially its two top plans (GrowBig and GoGeek), are great for those who are serious about their project and are looking for an affordable yet secure hosting option with a good support team to take care of them.
The most basic plan can work perfectly for beginners who don’t need to consume too much server resources yet but want good service.
Its almost 100% UpTime and excellent loading speed speak for themselves.
Also Siteground offers a whole set of additional functions that will come in handy, especially if you are a WordPress user and for eCommerce themes.
In short, in our opinion, Siteground is a web hosting provider that you should seriously consider for your online project.