In today’s competitive online business, the web hosting plays a significant role in the success of your website. Therefore, it becomes really important to invest your hard-earned money in the right web hosting for your website or blog. Today, we are reviewing SiteGround Web hosting – One of the web hosting services recommended by WordPress itself. Let’s find out, is SiteGround Hosting really a reliable & fast web hosting through this in-depth SiteGround Review?
But before digging deep into SiteGround Review, we must understand the benchmarks on which we need to make our purchase decision of any web hosting.
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How to Choose a Great Web Hosting?
The criteria of a great web hosting might vary for the webmasters and website owners, depending on their requirements and planning (budget etc). But there are few major pillars (benchmarks) which every webmaster and website owner must look for while selecting the best hosting for their projects. The major pillars of a great web hosting service are:
- Faster Performance
- Modern and Innovative Features
- Secure Servers
- Reliable Service
- Easy to be heard/ Readily available support
- Affordable Pricing and Plans
Like many other things in the world, these touchstones are also relative. As something affordable to someone might not be low-priced for others. That’s why you should choose the best web hosting for your website or blog as per your requirements and budget.
However, this SiteGround review will certainly help you understand whether SiteGround fulfills all of your requirements or not.
Stay with me, it’s gonna we long and detailed.
Are all web-hosting companies equally good?
Of-course, they don’t. That’s why, it’s a good idea to read reviews of web-hosting service, like the one you’re reading at the moment, before making a purchase decision.
There are several web hosting companies available in the market and most of them claim to be the best web hosting company around the world. However, most of these companies are lying with the straight face. Therefore, it is immensely important for you to choose a trusted web hosting company that provides commendable features, uptime and customer support at a reasonable price.
We understand that it might be really puzzling for you to choose a trusted web hosting service from the numerous web hosting options available out there. Therefore, today we are going to share our in-depth review of SiteGround Web Hosting Service. SiteGround web hosting is one of our recommended hosting services, and as of now, our website is also hosted on the same. We hope that this review will assist you to get to know the key features, pros & cons and important aspects like customer support, plans & pricing etc. of SiteGround web hosting service.
SiteGround Review – A Web Hosting Worth Your Money? Or It’s just Another Hype.
- About the Company – SiteGround Hosting Service
- Key Features
Technologies – SuperCacher, PHP 7, Nginx, HTTP/2, SSD Drive etc.
Free & Easy SSL Setup
Fast & Free Content Delivery Network (CDN)
Free Website Migration
Multi-Location Data Centers
Five-minute WordPress Installation
Optimized for WordPress
- Performance & Uptime
- Pricing & Plans
- Customer Support
- Pros & Cons
- Is SiteGround Suitable for you?
- Final Verdict
About the Company – SiteGround
SiteGround was established in the year 2004 by a few college friends and gradually it has risen to fame due to its excellent features and customer support. The company has six offices, including one each in Bulgaria, Italy, Spain, UK and USA.
SiteGround Hosting offers different types of hosting including WordPress Hosting, Shared Hosting, Cloud Hosting, Dedicated Servers, Reseller Hosting and Enterprise Hosting Solutions. It is among one of the fastest growing web hosting companies around the globe. The company host more than 500,000 domains and still counting.
Key Features of SiteGround
First of all, let’s talk about the key features of SiteGround web hosting.
Technologies – SiteGround utilizes technologies like SuperCacher, PHP 7, HTTP/2, Nginx, and SSDs etc.
- SuperCacher: SiteGround offers the advantage of SuperCacher. The major function of SuperCacher is to purge dynamic cache whenever the content is updated. Hence, there is smooth loading of updated content on webpages.
- Solid State Drive (SSD): They use SSD driver in all of their plans. SSDs are claimed to be significantly faster than traditional storage disks.
- HTTP/2 Network Protocol: It’s the newest network protocol which helps to speed the up the website. But HTTP/2 requires encrypted connections. To empower its clients with the speed advantage of HTTP/2, SiteGround offers free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate.
- PHP7: It utilizes PHP7 support for better performance and security of the websites and webapps.
- Nginx: SiteGround Hosting uses Nginx server with all share and cloud hosting plans. Event driven architecture of Nginx enables it to process and handle thousands of HTTP connections simultaneously. And concurrent connections handling mean better performance.
Free Let’s Encrypt SSL Certificate – SiteGround provides free setup of Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate to its clients. You would not require paying an extra single penny to attain SSL certificate for your websites hosted with SiteGround. And their easy SSL setup process would not take more than five minutes to get the SSL certificate working with your site.
Fast & Free CDN – Apart from the choice of data centers in three continents for better regional data rendering at user-end, it offers free CloudFlare Content Delivery Network (CDN) that comes with all hosting packages that help to render the webpages at great speed with high performance. You might like to know other free CDN providers for WordPress.
Free Website Migration – Unlike some-other web hosting companies that charge a huge amount for website migration, SiteGround offers free website migration to its hosting clients. The company doesn’t charge any fee to migrate your website from existing hosting company to SiteGround. When you will first login to your account, you will see an option to migrate your website for free of cost. The migration process would not take a long time and it would take few couple of minutes (depending on the size of website data) to transfer the website from one hosting company to SiteGround.
Multi-Location Data Centers – SiteGround Hosting has 5 data centers located around the world – Chicago, Singapore, Amsterdam, Milan, and London. Having five data centers located in the different parts of the world is important for overall speed & performance of the website.
The distance between the server where website is hosted and the user (who is browsing the website) plays a major role determining the speed and performance of the website. Therefore, SiteGround Hosting offers to choose server location among their data center locations as per the regional traffic to the website. For example, webmaster whose website gets more visitors from European countries can host his website on one of European data center for fast speed and better performance.
Five-Minute WordPress Installation – SiteGround offers famous five-minute WordPress installation. There are two options to install the WordPress – either you can install WordPress with SiteGround Hosting wizard or you can install WordPress with Softaculous for easy and fast WordPress setup. SightGround has partnered with Softaculous for auto-installation of other platforms as well.
Optimized for WordPress – It is considered to be one of the best optimized hosting environments for WordPress. SiteGround Hosting has been designed, keeping in mind the WordPress; therefore, they actually know what WordPress needs. The company provides an excellent caching mechanism that adds extra layers of caching, which will help your blog or website to load faster than normal speed.
Performance & Uptime
We have already mentioned the technologies SiteGround use for speed optimization and security. They use the best in class technologies like Nginx, SSDs, HTTP/2, SuperCacher etc. for blazing fast speed of websites. Whether the use of Solid State Drives (SSDs) in all their plans or adaption of newest network protocol HTTP/2, SiteGround Hosting never disappointed its customers by providing the desired results.
They use Linux Containers (LXC) technology on their machines. Because LXC is highly resource efficient and adaptive thus it ensures better stability. They also use their own backup system for faster restore of data.
SiteGround uses unique Anti-bot Artificial Intelligence system to the brute-force attacks. They claim to stop up to 2 million brute-force attacks per hours.
In the shared hosting servers, they use Secure Account Isolation so that one account is not at all affected by others.
With the use of all these innovative technologies, they claim 99.99% uptime.
Pricing & Plans of SiteGround
We know that one price will not fit in the pocket for all users. Therefore, SiteGround offers variety of hosting plans to select from under Shared Hosting, WordPress Hosting, Cloud Hosting, and Dedicated Servers etc.
Shared Hosting – It offers 3 different hosting plans under shared hosting category. Starting with StartUp @ $3.95/month then GrowBig @ $5.95/month and GoGeek @ $11.95/month.
WordPress Hosting – SiteGround’s WordPress Hosting plans are very much similar to their Share Hosting plans. The major change with WordPress Hosting is that SiteGround offers Managed Services on all WordPress Hosting plans.
Cloud Hosting – Their Cloud Hosting plans start with $80/month and upto $240/month. SiteGround hosting is suitable for small & medium size business which require robust and reliable hosting solutions.
Apart from these SiteGround offers Dedicated Servers and Custom solutions for enterprises as well. You may visit their website for more details.
Customer Support/Service
SiteGround provides 24×7 live support to its customers. There are three ways to ask for support from them; Phone, Live Chat and Ticketing System. Out of these three modes Phone & Live Chat are instant support systems, however, Support through Ticketing System took around 10 minutes of response time.
Also, they have got Application Specific Support so that you need not hustle a lot telling your issue to a common tech support person. Their tech representatives are real humans and even you can see their profile, background and experience as well.
In addition to tech assistance, SiteGround also maintains well drafted Knowledge Base of Tutorials & Webinars for common procedures and fixes etc.
Pros & Cons of SiteGround Web Hosting
Pros:
We already talked a lot about their innovating and pioneer features. And SiteGround’s several features especially speed optimization, free SSL, security practices and excellent support can be considered their USP. These features (& over-all customer satisfaction) not only help them to stand out in the crowd but they also managed to get a place on the list of WordPress recommended hosting providers.
- Recommended by WordPress – WordPress has listed SiteGround in the recommended web hosting providers, which are BlueHost, DreamHost and SiteGround obviously.
- Loved by Customers – They have earned a good reputation among industry’s influencers as well. See what opinion Syed Balkhi of WPbeginner has for SiteGround.
Cons:
We have talked about quite a time about the pros of SiteGround hosting so far. So let’s what can be the deal breaker for you while choosing SiteGround web hosting.
- Restricted Storage – Whether it’s Share Hosting or WordPress or even Cloud Hosting all the plans comes with storage ceiling i.e. unlimited storage is not there. If you are starting a new project (in most cases) you do not need much of storage. So you have to see whether restricted storage is deal a breaker for your new website.
- Script Execution – This practical issue we faced on our own projects as well. Let me tell you, what is it? The hosting comes with a ceiling of script(s) execution. The script execution ceiling varies for an hour, a day and a month. For instance, you own a website which has n number of scripts. Each time any script executes, 1 will be deducted from the quota. The quota of script execution varies from plan to plan. It’s not an issue if you can optimize script executions on your website. Moreover, lesser scripts help you unlock more speed for your website.
- Expensive, really? – Some of you may find SiteGround web hosting little expensive as compared to other web hosting companies in the market. But the price is justified for their advanced features and excellent customer support.
Is SiteGround Suitable for you?
It’s a tough one to answer in yes or no; because I am not aware of your website requirements and budget as well. Let me tell you this way..
I tried to be fair with the review and cited all the major features, pros & cons as well. The information I shared above will certainly help you to know more about SiteGround as a whole. For ease of plan selection, they have mentioned suitability of plan according to the traffic to the website, you can compare those stats to make a purchase decision.
However, if you are just starting a blog or small project, you may give a shot to one of the SiteGround’s Share Hosting plans.
Their Share Hosting plans even can be good-to-go for small and medium businesses as well (depending on the complexity of website and traffic to the website).
Considering their features and support, SiteGround hosting maybe listed among one of the best choices for WordPress. Softaculous Autoinstaller setup makes SiteGround suitable for other CMS and platforms (like Joomla, Drupal, Magneto etc.) as well.
Final Thoughts
I hope this article (SiteGround Review) will help you make a purchase decision. We already have seen that SiteGround fulfills on all the major pillars (fast, secure, reliable, feature-rich, affordable and easy to be heard) of a good hosting service. For these reasons they are not being trusted by many of satisfied customers including the industry influencers, but they also manage to get listed among WordPress recommended web hosting providers.
If you are looking for a high-quality web hosting service and can afford one of SiteGround hosting plans then it is worth buying. Because they offer a fast and secure web hosting service and are always ready to hear your concerns and queries via their excellent customer assistance. What else do you need?
Share your views and experiences about SiteGround web hosting via comments below.
Thanks for the detailed review. I think after reading this I stand a chance of trying SiteGround WordPress hosting.
Thanks for sharing the amazing article. Especially the criteria for choosing a good hosting is really helpful for people looking for benchmarks for correct web hosting.
Hey Casey,
Glad that you found it useful.
Thanks for stoppin’ by!
I have been using it and I have to say they got a great support and the site run really fast and smooth..
Hey Aviv,
Good to know your experience with SG.
Thanks for feedback and stopping by.
Thanks for this indepth review. I think they’re really good at what they. I may use their service next time.