SiteGround is respected for its beginner-friendly tech support and WordPress expertise. But how great is SiteGround? While several users have shared how incredible this hosting service is further down the site, how true is this?
Probably, these amazing customer satisfaction reviews and ratings are nothing but statistical flukes. Or perhaps they don’t mean that SiteGround is the perfect choice for your hosting requirements.
Therefore, is SiteGround the right choice your needs?
Don’t stop reading! I’ll provide you with detail and comprehensive explanation to what SiteGround offers, including its Pros and Cons.
SiteGround Overview
SiteGround is a privately-owned hosting provider founded in 2004. This company is based and has two offices in Bulgari. They also are located in Madrid, Spain.
This website promotes a number of different hosting plans – WordPress, shared, dedicated, and cloud – among other specialized plans. Customers can also take advantage of the free SSL certificates and Cloudflare CDN. Also, their shared plans pack a bunch of features.
In addition to that, you should expect a rock sold server from SiteGround because that’s what they offer. Plus, the uptime is quite impressive.
But these features are not the top reason why most people are pleased with SiteGround. According to the hundreds of reviews online, most customers are always happy with their support.
Now, let’s dig a bit deeper!
SiteGround Hosting Plans
As said earlier, SiteGround offers cloud hosting, WordPress hosting, shared hosting, and dedicated hosting plans. If you’re new, then you should probably try out the shared hosting plans it might be just what you need. However, you need to make sure that this hosting company offers other packages you may want to upgrade to when your site eventually grows.
So, let’s check out the features of SiteGround hosting plans.
Shared Hosting
For beginners or new websites, it is always recommended to start with the shared hosting plan. This plan is great for low traffic websites, as only large sites require dedicated or VPS/cloud hosting. In the shared hosting market, SiteGround performs exceptionally great and distinguishes itself from others.
WordPress hosting
The hosting company offers WordPress users an optimized form of their shared hosting plan. There’s no huge difference. While it comes with the same disk space, visits, features, the only difference is installing WordPress is absolutely free. In addition, its in-house WordPress optimizations designed to help improve your website’s performance.
Cloud Hosting
The cloud hosting plan is a great choice for a website with lots of traffic and demands. It permits users to apply multiple servers’ resources on cloud architecture. It’s recommended for popular blogs, growing sites, or businesses.
SiteGround cloud hosting plan comes in 4 different packages – Super Power, Business Plus, Business, and Entry.
All of these clouding hosting packages offer a monthly data transfer of 5 TB. Even the least, Entry plan, comes 2 CPU cores,40GB disk and RAM of 4GB, which is extremely powerful, as well.
Dedicated servers
This hosting plan provides you with an entire server for website needing more stability and power. While dedicated servers offer users additional power, it comes with a hefty price tag. However, this plan seems to be marred with a downside, which is users are responsible for managing the server.
Similarly, it comes with three plans – Super Power, Power, and Entry. These plans are available with a monthly bandwidth of 10 TB and built on Intel Xeon processors. Note, they differ as to disk space, RAM, and CPU cores.
Enterprise hosting
The Enterprise hosting plan is meant for high traffic and large businesses sites having troubles with server requirements. SiteGround help build and manage a custom server built for your specific sites’ server requirements.
Further Break Down of Shared Hosting Plans
Just like other hosting plans offered by SiteGround, the shared hosting plan comes in three levels to fit into everyone’s budget.
- Startup – this plan only allows one website to be hosted. It features a disk space about 10 GB, which is enough for a site with about 10,000 monthly visits. Plus, users get all the necessary features such as free setup, daily backups, website transfer,1-click WordPress install, and many more.
- GrowBig – Unlike startup hosting plan, this allows users to host an endless number of websites. It includes a 20GB disk space, and it’s an excellent choice for site receiving about 25,000 visitors per months. Also, you enjoy all the benefits offered on the premium plans. Plus, you enjoy other premium features such as a year free wildcard SSL, Super Cacher, and lots more.
- GoGeek – the GoGeel plan is mainly used by small eCommerce sites. It handles sites with about 10,000 visitors per months. In addition to all benefits featured on the GrowBig’s, you also have access to other advanced features such as Joomla and WordPress staging,1-click git repo creation, and many more.
Pros and Cons of SiteGround Hosting
Pros
The main categories review in this section for SiteGround’s performance includes support, speed, and uptime. Moreover, these three categories play an integral part in the success of your site.
Also, there are other couples of areas web host can take advantage to be different from the competition, such as extra plan features. This contributes to the positive reviews and overall ratings, and I’ve found that SiteGrounds features a few, which we will discuss below:
High Uptime – 99.99%
SiteGround provides excellent stability even when there are unexpected spikes in traffic since the platform is running on Linux container. Also, they are pioneers of account isolation technology to ensure additional securities.
That’s not all. SiteGround has its proactive server monitoring system programmed not only to monitor the servers every half second but also to fix any issues without any human aid.
The result of our test site on SiteGround showed an average uptime of 99.9 percent, which is about 0.05 better than the industry threshold value of 99.94 percent.
Last year, 2022, SiteGround only had about 20 outages, unlike other web hosting providers with over 2000 outages.
Above Average Load Time
For ten months, the test site on SiteGround has a 714 ms average page load time, which is more 100ms faster than the typical 890 ms average load times noticed with most web hosts.
This means SiteGround is one of the quickest webhosting we’ve ever seem. On top of that, it’s very consistent with no slow loading times or spike whatsoever.
Highly Responsive & Knowledge Support
This is one area SiteGround put lots of focus and attention. Considering the numbers of tickets, chat, and phone calls they have to attend to every day, this shows that web hosting provider places customers satisfaction before anything else.
Free Security Add-Ons
SiteGround offers extra security plus those available with the WordPress manage to host for sites with all sizes and shapes. Available security add-ons include IP address blocklist, hotlink protection, Leech Protect, Spam Assassin and spam experts.
Simple eCommerce Installs
Magneto and several other web’s top sites are powered by eCommerce application, which is simple and less challenging if you are technically inclined.
Here’s a piece of good news, this web host offers a hassle-free, one-click installation of such eCommerce application of your choice from a wide range of applications.
Con
Limited Storage Space
Unlike other web hosts, this provider offers a storage space that is a tad on the small size. Thus, if a larger storage space is a priority for you, then this web host may not be for you.
Should I Use SiteGround – Our Opinion
All in all, SiteGround is recommended for people who love good customer support, while not sacrificing impressive uptime and fast page speeds either.
Besides, they come with a pack of extra features, which may be just what you need, such as additional security add-ons, etc. Lastly, they offer a pricing package that should match anyone’s budget.
