SiteGround is a reputable name in the industry, mainly due to it being a WordPress-endorsed platform. Those who have used the service swear by it as it offers a bunch of hosting services and is known for its amazing customer support as well. Launched in 2004, the web hosting company seems to have a good repute and has a 99.7% happiness rate, which indicates how it is loved by its customers who are constantly growing in number.
In this review, we’ll dissect it in detail and conclude if it is worth a try. Without much ado, let’s have a look at our SiteGround review.
Headquartered in Bulgaria, it has data centers all around the world (USA, Europe, and Asia) and presence in six locations. Launched in 2004, it is slowly inching towards managing 1,900,000 domain names.
The company has a total of 400 employees, and it’s fast growing to hire more talented individuals to cater to the growing number of clients. It’s famous for its fantastic customer service, which is available round the clock and in multiple languages. This is one of the reasons why the platform is popular not just in the US but around the globe.
It is a “WordPress” recommended hosting company mainly due to its extremely incredible customer support. The hosting provider is very popular among WordPress users and even offers special discounts to WP Beginners.
The platform makes it a breeze to host WordPress sites. You can install WP with a single click, enjoy managed updates, WP staging, and git integration, and W-Cli.
It also uses the latest technologies like HTTP/2, PHP 7, SSD-drives, and NGINX-based caching to keep the site protected and ensure good loading times.
The website presently hosts about 738,149 websites and offers a total of 11 hosting plans. It offers a variety of TLDs including .com, .biz, .info, .org, and country-based TLDs including .us.
To write an unbiased and true review, we signed up for SiteGround’s hosting account and used different services to gauge the quality of the hosting offered by the company. We were quite impressed with the overall performance as the site itself loaded fast and offered incredible uptime and load time as well. We’d say it’s among best top 3 when it comes to uptime and speed.
To have a fast website, your web hosting company should also be fast. Keeping this fact in mind, we first tested the host’s speed. To do so, we made a test website using a default theme. We also added dummy content with images so that it acts like a real website. Finally, we used Pingdom for testing the site’s speed.
We used no speed optimization tricks or caching and were impressed with how quick the website was to load – 726ms. This is faster than 70% of the sites we have tested.
We created a live site and tested it regularly for downtimes and response times. The website did not go down once in the last 40 days and offered an uptime of 100% in the last 30 days. This is quite impressive. Plus, the response time is also good and stands at an average of 691.23mb, going up to 1 second only twice in the day. It is quite a reliable and stable host concerning uptime and response time.
Month | Uptime Stats | Load Time Stats |
---|---|---|
June 2019 | 99.99% | 608 ms |
May 2019 | 99.98% | 624 ms |
April 2019 | 100% | 682 ms |
We used Bitcatcha to judge the overall performance of the site. The servers performed extremely well in the US, while the speed was a little slower in other countries, it was still under one second with the response rate being the slowest in Sao Paulo, Brazil, at 5243 ms.
Overall, we’d say it’s impressive concerning the rate remained under a second. It can be a great option if you’re mainly targeting the US audience, but if your main audience lies in Asia or other continents, then it might not be the best choice.
SiteGround offers a variety of hosting plans broken into different types. They offer shared, dedicated, reseller, Cloud, and managed WordPress hosting.
Type of Hosting | #1 Package | #2 Package | #3 Package | #4 Package |
---|---|---|---|---|
Shared (Basic) | $3.95 / mo | $5.95 / mo | $11.95 / mo | ✖ |
WordPress | $3.95 / mo | $5.95 / mo | $11.95 / mo | ✖ |
Cloud | $80 / mo | $120 / mo | $160 / mo | $240 / mo |
Dedicated | $269 / mo | $349 / mo | $729 / mo | ✖ |
StartUp: For $3.95/month, you get to enjoy 10 GB of web space with 10,000 monthly visitors. It’s suitable for small sites, and you can host only a single website.
GrowBig: For $5.95/month, you get to enjoy 20 GB of web space with 25,000 monthly visitors. It’s suitable for mid-sized businesses, and you can host unlimited sites. Moreover, it comes with several premium features.
GoGeek: For $11.95/month, you get to enjoy 30 GB of web space with 100,000 monthly visitors. It’s suitable for big sites and allows you to host multiple websites, too.
Main Features | StartUp | GrowBig | GoGeek |
---|---|---|---|
Started Price | $3.95/mo | $5.95/mo | $11.95/mo |
Renewal Price | $11.95/mo | $19.95/mo | $34.95/mo |
Websites | 1 | Unlimited | Unlimited |
SSD Disk Space | 10 GB | 20 GB | 30 GB |
Bandwidth | Unmetered | Unmetered | Unmetered |
Email Accounts | Free | Free | Free |
Domain(s) Hosted | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
FREE Domains Included | ✖ | ✖ | ✖ |
FREE SSL Certificate | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
SiteGround’s WordPress hosting programs are quite popular and are the same as shared hosting plans, except for they include better WP support and performance with free transfers:
StartUp: Starts for as low as $3.95/month and lets you host 1 website. The package comes with 10GB web space and 10,000 monthly visits. You also get to enjoy a bunch of essential features including a web builder, 24/7 support, unlimited MySQL, free SSL and HTTPS, email accounts, and daily backups.
GrowBig: Starts for as low as $5.95/month and lets you host 1 website. The package comes with 20GB web space and 25,000-month visits. You also get to enjoy all essential features with a bunch of premium features including priority technical support, free site transfer, free backup restores, and improved speed.
GoGeek: Starts for as low as $11.95/month and lets you host 1 website. The package comes with 30GB web space and 100,000-month visits. You also get to enjoy all essential and premium features with a bunch of geeky features including fewer accounts on the server, WordPress staging, Joomla staging, PCI compliant servers, and one-click Git Repo creation.
It’s suitable for all sizes and starts as low as $3.95/month They all come with WooCommerce and Storefront installed.
StartUp: Starts for as low as $3.95/month and lets you host 1 website. The package comes with 10 GB web space and 10,000-month visits. You also get to enjoy a bunch of essential features including a web builder, 24/7 support, unlimited MySQL, free SSL and HTTPS, 4 server locations, auto-updater, email accounts, and daily backups.
GrowBig: Starts for as low as $5.95/month and lets you host 1 website. The package comes with 20GB web space and 25,000-month visits. You also get to enjoy all essential features with a bunch of premium features including priority technical support, WooCommerce SuperCacher, and free backup restores.
GoGeek: Starts for as low as $11.95/month and lets you host 1 website. The package comes with 30GB web space and 100,000-month visits. You also get to enjoy all essential and premium features with a bunch of geeky features including PCI compliant servers and one-click Git Repo creation.
It starts for as low as $80/month and is fully managed, fast, and scalable. All the resources are auto-scalable and offer daily backups with free CDN and multiple locations:
Entry: Starts for as low as $80/month and comes with 40 GB of SSD space and 5TB of data transfer. Moreover, you get to enjoy 1 CPU core.
Business: Starts for as low as $120/month and comes with 60 GB of SSD space and 5TB of data transfer. Moreover, you get to enjoy 2 CPU core.
Business Plus: Starts for as low as $160/month and comes with 80 GB of SSD space and 5TB of data transfer. Moreover, you get to enjoy a 3 CPU core.
Super Power: Starts for as low as $240/month and comes with 120 GB of SSD space and 5TB of data transfer. Moreover, you get to enjoy 4 CPU core.
This plan starts for as low as $42 and is suitable to host multiple websites. You even get to enjoy volume discount and get access to special domain names.
This is a good solution for big companies as all the resources are used for your website.
Entry Server: It starts for as low as $269/month and comes with 4 CPU cores. You get to enjoy 8MB CPU cache with 480 GB of disk space and 10 TB of bandwidth.
Power Server: It starts for as low as $349/month and comes with 4 CPU cores. You get to enjoy 8MB CPU cache with 960 GB of disk space and 10 TB of bandwidth.
Super Power Server: It starts for as low as $729/month and comes with 2×6 CPU cores. You get to enjoy 15MB CPU cache with 2×9460 GB of disk space and 10 TB of bandwidth.
Entry Server | Power Server | Super Power Server |
---|---|---|
$269/mo | $349/mo | $729/mo |
Intel Xeon E3-1230 SSD | Intel Xeon E3-1270 SSD | 2 x Intel Xeon E5-2630 SSD |
3.20Ghz CPU Clock Speed | 3.50Ghz CPU Clock Speed | 2.00Ghz CPU Clock Speed |
4 CPU Cores | 8 CPU Threads | 2 x 12 CPU Threads |
8 CPU Threads | 8 CPU Threads | 2 x 12 CPU Threads |
8MB CPU Cache | 8MB CPU Cache | 15MB CPU Cache |
16GB DDR3 RAM | 32GB DDR3 RAM | 64GB DDR3 RAM |
480GB SSD | 960GB SSD | 2x960GB SSD in RAID1 |
10TB Bandwidth | 10TB Bandwidth | 10TB Bandwidth |
SiteGround shared hosting plan, the StartUp, is optimized for hosting. It has all those features that 99.9% of hosting clients desire. For the same reason, they offer clients a direct path for signing up for this plan from the website.
Let’s look at the features included in the basic plan and the price you will have to pay. There are two upgrade options available as well for those who need them. They are the GrowBig and GoGeek plans.
StartUp (Basic Package): Starts for as low as $3.95/month and lets you host 1 website. The package comes with 10GB of web space and 10,000 month visits. You also get to enjoy a bunch of essential features including a web builder, 24/7 support, unlimited MySQL, free SSL, email accounts, and daily backups.
GrowBig: Starts for as low as $5.95/month and lets you host 1 website. The package comes with 20GB of web space and 25,000 month visits. You also get to enjoy all essential features with a bunch of premium features including priority technical support, free site transfer, free backup restores, and improved speed.
GoGeek: Starts for as low as $11.95/month and lets you host 1 website. The package comes with 30GB of web space and 100,000 month visits. You also get to enjoy all essential and premium features with a bunch of geeky features including fewer accounts on the server, WordPress staging, Joomla staging, PCI compliant servers, and one-click Git Repo creation.
Main Features | Basic | Plus | Choice Plus |
---|---|---|---|
Started Price | $2.75/mo | $5.45/mo | $5.45/mo |
Renewal Price | $7.99/mo | $10.99/mo | $14.99/mo |
Websites | 1 | Unlimited | Unlimited |
SSD Disk Space | 50 GB | Unlimited | Unlimited |
Bandwidth | Unmetered | Unmetered | Unmetered |
Email Accounts | 5 | Unlimited | Unlimited |
Domain(s) Hosted | 1 | Unlimited | Unlimited |
FREE Domains Included | 1 | Unlimited | Unlimited |
FREE SSL Certificate | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
FREE Site Builder | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
FREE Website Transfer | ✖ | ✔ | ✔ |
cPanel & Softaculous | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
Unlimited MySQL DB | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
Unlimited Sub and Parked Domains | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
Money Back Guarantee | 30 days | 30 days | 30 days |
Free CDN with Each Account | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
SuperCacher | Level 1 Only | All 3 Levels | All 3 Levels |
Anti-Hack Systems & Help | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
Automated Daily Backup | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
Advanced On-demand Backup | ✖ | ✔ | ✔ |
PCI Compliant Servers | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
Free SSH and SFTP Access | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
MySQL & PostgreSQL Databases | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
FTP Accounts | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
Pre-Installed Git | ✖ | ✖ | ✔ |
Staging | ✖ | ✔ | ✔ |
The company currently gives no discounts on long-term contracts but keep an eye for special offers that may come from time to time.
Payment Period / Plan (for new users only) |
StartUp | GrowBig | GoGeek |
---|---|---|---|
1 month | $3.95/mo + ($14.95 setup) |
$5.95/mo + ($24.95 setup) |
$11.95/mo + ($24.95 setup) |
12 month | $3.95/mo | $5.95/mo | $11.95/mo |
24 month | $3.95/mo | $5.95/mo | $11.95/mo |
24 month | $3.95/mo | $5.95/mo | $11.95/mo |
Payment Period / Plan (renewal prices) |
StartUp | GrowBig | GoGeek |
1 month | $11.95/mo | $19.95/mo | $34.95/mo |
12 month | $11.95/mo | $19.95/mo | $34.95/mo |
24 month | $11.95/mo | $19.95/mo | $34.95/mo |
36 month | $11.95/mo | $19.95/mo | $34.95/mo |
Let’s have a look at some of the main features SiteGround has to offer. These will help you determine how good or bad this option is for you.
No shared hosting plan currently comes with a free domain name. The company, however, keeps coming up with new updates and promotions so keep an eye on it. As for emails, there’s no worry since all packages come with unlimited email accounts.
You can choose to install WordPress with just a single click on any shared hosting plan. However, if you intend to have a WP site, then you may opt to go for WordPress hosting. You will get a bunch of WordPress features including free install, auto updates, free SSL, and migration. Going for a more expensive option will get you even more including on-demand backups.
It only takes 24 hours to transfer your existing account to SiteGround. The migration services are available for free on the more expensive packages, except for WP packages where all packages come with free migration. The good thing is that you will not have to worry about the job since the host’s team will handle it for you.
All the packages come with a website builder. It contains a mix of templates and is quite easy to use.
Other than this, SiteGround offers you a bunch of features including PCI compliant servers, WordPress staging, Joomla staging, and free site transfers. The features, however, differ from package to package and some may be available only with a more expensive hosting plan.
The company offers Domain Privacy Protection. It’s available in the User Area and protects your details from being open to the public. It’s essential if you do not want your name and address to go public. It comes for $12/year.
SiteGround is one of the few companies to offer free SSL certificates with all its hosting plans. You get HTTPS as well; hence you will not have an issue in keeping your site up and running.
The company offers exceptional security features to ensure your data remains safe. All the servers use PHP 7 for additional safety and Apache runs with suExec. Other than this, there’s a sophisticated IPS/IDS system to block attacks and bots.
Not all, but some packages come with a dedicated IP. You can order a dedicated IP address from your User Area. It takes about 2 days for the new IP to be activated and the setup only takes a few hours. If your package doesn’t offer a dedicated IP, you may choose to buy it. It’s available for $2.50 a month, billed annually.
All the packages offer free daily backup, but more expensive packages also come with free daily restores and on-demand backups. This way you will not have to worry about losing your data as you can always count on backups.
Other security tools include IP address blocklists, hotlink protection, leech Protect, SpamExperts, and SpamAssassin. You can also opt to buy an SG Site Scanner for $19.8 per year.
You can choose from five server locations including Chicago (USA), Amsterdam (NL), Singapore (SG), London (UK), and Iowa (USA). The location is important from the perspective of SEO and how your site loads. SiteGround appears to be doing well as its data centers are safe and secure.
SiteGround is quite beginner-friendly. One reason for this is because of its ease of use. Let’s see the features incorporated in these services that make them so user-friendly!
It is very easy to make an account. Choose the required plan and feed the details. You may register for a new domain or choose a domain that you already own.
The next step is to make an account and enter details including name, country, number, etc. You’ll be asked to enter payment details as well at this stage. The process is straightforward and takes only a few minutes to complete.
The website only accepts Visa, Discover, Master Card, and American Express cards right now. PayPal and other such options are not yet available.
Shared servers get activated right away. It may take about a minute for cloud servers to get activated and dedicated servers can take up to 12 hours. This is pretty good when compared to other hosting sites.
The platform makes use of cPanel for all its hosting packages. It is easy to use and makes it simple to perform takes such as create email accounts, manage databases and domains, etc. The website also offers a number of in-house and third-party tools to install with just a click.
The company has a team of 300 people to ensure customers are happy and satisfied. It’s one of the few companies to provide support in multiple languages (English, Italian, and Spanish). Other than this, it offers technical support as well for the more expensive packages.
Live chat is the preferred method of about 70% users as it’s said to be nine times faster than emails since the interaction is live and there is less holding period. Fortunately, the company offers live chat and processes over 2000 chat requests per day. It takes only a few seconds to get in touch with an agent. They’re all professional and quick in solving issues.
SiteGround processes over 1500 tickets per day and the team appear to be quite efficient at the job. You usually get a response within 24 hours and there are reminders as well.
SiteGround processes over 800 calls per day. The holding period is not long, and the agents are friendly and well informed.
There are well-detailed tutorials available on the site in the form of eBooks and how-to articles. They also contain images and make it a breeze to understand different aspects of hosting. In addition to this, there’s also an FAQ that covers almost everything.
The company offers a 30-day money back guarantee for shared hosting and a 15-day money back guarantee for cloud hosting. It’s available for all plans and can be requested from the User Area. However, renewal orders cannot be refunded and some other extra charges, such as domain name fee, may also not be refunded.
SiteGround is a good option for users who want a company with incredible customer support. It offers good uptime, and the speed is also quite impressive. However, it is a little more expensive than some other web hosts out there but is still quite popular due to some cool features such as free SSL certificates.
It is an excellent option for WP sites due to its WP hosting. It may also be suitable for e-commerce businesses due to the third-party apps that can make it a breeze to get your site started. Plus, the website developer also makes it easier to build your site in no time.
SiteGround is an excellent choice if you’re serious about having a professional site. It offers nearly 100% uptime and is easy to use as well. You may even shift from another host to SiteGround without any trouble as it provides free migration services and the agents will handle the job for you.
We hope this detailed review helps you come to an informed decision. What do you think about it? Do you have any experience with SiteGround? Let us know!
Hello,
I’ve heard good things about Siteground hosting, and your review confirmed it to me.
Thank you for the explicit informations. I see that you mentioned that they do offer HTTP/2. Is it offered on high end plans or on shared hosting low plans aswell ?
Thanks