SiteGround Review

Disclosure: This content is reader-supported, which means if you click on some of our links that we may earn a commission.

SiteGround is one of the most popular web hosting providers out there. Over two million website users trust SiteGround for their hosting needs. 

They offer a wide range of hosting options, plans at different price points, and phenomenal customer support. Whether you’re a small blog, medium-sized business, or large online store, SiteGround has an option for you. 

In a nutshell, SiteGround is a host that your business can grow with, which is pretty darn important. 

SiteGround Compared to The Best WordPress Web Hosts

SiteGround fares exceptionally well against other products in its category. It’s without a doubt a key contender for top web hosting for WordPress services. 

But what I love most about it is that they’re both extremely scalable and dedicated to supporting your WordPress website. 

Whether you’ve got 10,000, 25,000, or 100,000 visitors, there is a plan for you. There is also room for exponential growth for websites starting out without committing to the highest available plan. 

SiteGround also supports your WordPress website with their specifically designed features (which we’ll discuss below) and their 24/7 WordPress wizard customer support team. 

But I appreciate that you may have different needs or wish to explore your hosting options a bit further before committing to one host. 

That’s why we’ve taken the time to research and test some of the top web hosts for WordPress for you. Be sure to see all of my top picks before making your decision. 

Who is SiteGround Best For?

If I were extremely broad, I would say SiteGround is excellent for just about anyone who wants to host their website on WordPress. 

But to get specific, I’d say SiteGround is best for a small website owner who has little to no experience running a website and expects their website to grow over time. With flexible plans and excellent customer support, SiteGround is great for beginners and scaling over time.

SiteGround: The Pros and Cons

The Pros

Top-Notch Customer Support: Ever had seemingly unresolvable issues with technology and tried everything under the sun to fix it to no avail? Yeah, me too. 

Building a website doesn’t have to be scary or traumatic when you have SiteGround support on your side—your wish is their command. The customer support team is phenomenal. They receive almost a 100% satisfaction rating every year. 

Their 24/7 support comes via a live chat channel, phone support, and a helpdesk ticketing system. Even the most complex issues are resolved in an average time of 15 minutes, meaning you can get back to business asap. 

These things are super important for a beginning website owner to combat the inevitable challenges they face.

WordPress Recommended: SiteGround hosts over 80% of the two million domains on WordPress. With this in mind, it’s no surprise that they are experts at managing WordPress. 

Many of the support team are highly trained in WordPress and will happily assist you with WordPress related troubleshooting, compared to other hosts, who will simply tell you it’s not their issue (which truthfully, it isn’t). 

This is also why SiteGround has developed and implemented WordPress-specific features, such as the SG Optimizer, WP Auto Update, and Supercacher, in their plans. I’ve not come across another host that can boast such features, so SiteGround stands out in this area.

Low Introductory Price & Money-Back Guarantee: With a monthly hosting solution starting as low as $6.99 per month, SiteGround is a perfect option for even the most beginner website creators. 

Furthermore, the lead-in hosting plan includes all of the key features a new website owner would want in a plan, rather than having the absolute bare-bones to get the user to commit to a higher plan immediately. 

If something goes wrong, or your website doesn’t function the way you expect it to, you can get a full refund of your hosting fees within 30 days of signup.

Excellent Uptime & Site Speed: Uptime and site speed go hand-in-hand. Uptime refers to the amount of time the server stays up and running, while site speed refers to how quickly your website loads. 

You can see below that SiteGround’s average uptime over 12 months is 99.98%, with only 73 minutes of total downtime over the whole year. Reliable uptime means your website is virtually guaranteed to be running around the clock, keeping visitors happy.

Have you ever heard the notion that if your page doesn’t load within three seconds tops, you’ll lose the visitor’s interest? 

You won’t have to worry about that with SiteGround. They claim that they load your website four times faster than other hosts, so you won’t have to worry about visitors losing interest while waiting for your graphics to load. 

And, as you’ll see here, their slowest load time between 2019 to 2020 was 693 ms. 

Free Website Transfer: Many people are worried about making the switch to a new host. After all, it’s a scary process. What if you lose your entire website or cause irreparable damage? 

With SiteGround, you don’t need to worry. They’ll do it for you.

Most hosts will just move the files over. But SiteGround will also make the necessary tweaks to ensure everything is working smoothly for you after the transition. 

No blood, sweat, tears, or big bucks required in switching to a new host. SiteGround includes the WordPress migrator plugin in their plans, though if you prefer a professional to do it, it will cost you only $30 per website. 

Free Daily Back-Up: Most hosts will only back your website up every other day or even once a week. So, if anything happens to your website that you can’t fix, you might be forced to go back an entire week, meaning you’ll lose everything you’ve done in the meantime. 

But, with SiteGround, the worst-case scenario is that you’ll only lose the changes you’d made in the 24 hours since the last back-up. If that’s not peace of mind for someone making constant changes to their website, I don’t know what is! 

Great for Scalability: When you’re just starting out in business, there is no way but up, right? With SiteGround’s flexible range of plans, you don’t have to worry about outgrowing your host. Simply upgrade your plan as your business grows.  

The Cons

Renewal Price: As dreamy as the promotional rates of SiteGround’s hosting plans are, once the honeymoon is over, it’s truly over. 

When you renew, your rates will jump up quite high. The cost of your plan will essentially triple across the board once your promotional period is over. Ouch.

The best way to combat this is to sign up for the longest term available on the promotional period, which is either 24 or 36 months before you face the higher renewal rates.

No Monthly Billing Cycle: The higher renewal rates might be easier to cop if you could pay month-to-month. But unfortunately, monthly billing is not something that SiteGround offers. 

Personally, this is not a deal-breaker for me, but I can certainly appreciate how it may be restrictive and frustrating for some.

Storage Limitations: The low amount of storage space available on the shared hosting plans is unlikely to bother most of you reading this post. However, if your site does grow beyond 40 GB, you’ll have no choice but to switch to the more expensive cloud hosting plans. 

The StartUp plan includes just 10,000 site visitors, so if your website traffic grows exponentially too quickly off the bat, you may find yourself needing to upgrade your plan sooner than you think. 

SiteGround Pricing

SiteGround offers three tiers for their hosting options:

  • StartUp
  • GrowBig
  • GoGeek

These tiers’ pricing remains the same across the board for web hosting, WordPress hosting, and WooCommerce hosting. Cloud hosting has its own levels and pricing, which we’ll discuss. 

StartUp 

As the name suggests, this plan is perfect for those new to business or looking for smaller websites. The StartUp plan allows you one website, 10 GB of space, and up to 10,000 monthly visitors. Pricing starts at $6.99 per month on the introductory offer. 

Some other features included in this plan are:

  • Free WordPress Installation
  • Free SSL
  • Daily Backup
  • Free Cloudflare CDN
  • Free Email 

Overall, it’s a great plan for those who are just getting started. The only thing to be wary of is outgrowing your monthly visitors limit. If you think you’re going to scale quickly, it would be worth starting straight off with the GrowBig plan.

GrowBig  

The GrowBig plan is perfect for medium-sized businesses or those who know they will be managing more than one website. You’ll have access to unlimited websites, 20 GB of web space, and up to 25,000 monthly visitors. Pricing starts at $9.99 per month on the introductory offer. 

Aside from the features included in the StartUp plan, this plan also includes:

  • On-demand Backup copies
  • Speed-boosting Caching 
  • Staging environment 
  • Add collaborators to your site

It’s easy to understand why GrowBig is SiteGround’s best-selling plan. It includes a range of great features that are easy to use and will fit the brief most in need of a website out there that expects a steady traffic flow. 

GoGeek

The GoGeek is the most extensive shared hosting plan SiteGround has to offer. As the name suggests, it’s designed for ‘technology geeks’ who want lots of control over their website. 

The GoGeek plan will give you unlimited websites, 40 GB of web space, and up to 100,000 monthly visits. Needless to say, it’s truly designed for large businesses with a high volume of traffic. Pricing starts at $14.99 per month on the introductory offer. 

The GoGeek plan includes all the features mentioned above, as well as: 

  • Register your clients with white-label access to Site Tools
  • Use more server resources for higher process execution time
  • Ultrafast PHP for faster page loads
  • Priority support from SiteGround’s most experienced customer support agents

In a nutshell, this plan is for those of you who know what you’re doing with websites. If you don’t understand some of the plan’s technological features, it may not be the best plan for you. Unless, of course, you have a specialist on your team to manage your website and need access to high volume traffic capabilities. 

Cloud Hosting

We’ll touch on the cloud hosting product offerings shortly, but in terms of pricing, there are four plans for SiteGround’s cloud hosting: Entry, Business, Business Plus, and Super Power. 

As you can see in the screenshot below, the pricing ranges from $110 to $410 per month. The major difference in the plans is CPU cores, memory, and SSD space. 

Due to the easy scalability of the cloud hosting options (which you’ll learn about shortly), you can confidently start with the Entry plan if it’s your first time using cloud hosting. 

SiteGround Offerings

SiteGround Web Hosting

SiteGround offers fast and secure web hosting for websites of any kind. Their general web hosting product is optimized for a range of Content Management Systems (CMS) such as WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and more. 

You’ll be able to build and launch your website quickly and easily with their full website solution, including your choice of site builder: WordPress or Weebly. If you’re an online store, you’ll be able to install the shopping cart of your choice for free. 

Domain registration is easy and affordable with SiteGround, so you’ll be able to enjoy the convenience of managing both your domain and your site in one place. 

You’ll also have access to an unlimited number of email accounts when you create your domain, which is perfect for managing different areas of your business. 

SiteGround WordPress Hosting

SiteGround is one of the few web hosting companies that offer hosting options specifically for WordPress. As mentioned previously, they are even highly recommended directly by WordPress. 

With SiteGround, you won’t need to download and install WordPress manually. Instead, you’ll be able to automate the process with a simple click of a button using the WordPress Launch feature. 

Upon login to your new website, you’ll be prompted to set your site up simply and easily with SiteGround’s WordPress Starter kit. The whole process takes minutes from start to finish, even for a beginner!

One of the most popular features of SiteGround’s WordPress hosting is the free SiteGround Migrator plugin. This feature is perfect for users who may hold their website with another host and wish to transfer over to SiteGround. 

Better yet, if you’re not confident in your abilities to navigate the migrator plugin, you can have a WordPress whiz from SiteGround do it for you for an additional fee. 

SiteGround WooCommerce Hosting

SiteGround also offers hosting options for users looking to build a powerful online shop using WooCommerce. This plan comes with WooCommerce pre-installed, saving you time and hassle, allowing you to straightaway focus on uploading products to your online store. 

With WooCommerce, you can sell any type of product or service online. SiteGround will support your ecommerce growth by keeping your website safe with a unique AI anti-bot system, free pre-installed SSL, and custom Web Application Firewall (WAF).

If you choose the WooCommerce GrowBig or GoGeek plan, SiteGround will also include a convenient staging tool. You’ll be able to develop your store safely, testing changes and updates made on the staging copy before going live. 

SiteGround Cloud Hosting

Cloud hosting is a relatively new way to host websites. It’s an ideal solution for businesses and websites of medium to larger sizes, who have the capacity to grow very quickly. If you are starting to outgrow your shared hosting plan, cloud hosting is the next step. 

SiteGround’s cloud hosting will provide you with guaranteed resources with your very own RAM and CPU. You can also upgrade the RAM, CPU, and disk space of your cloud plan at any time. Better yet, there is no downtime with this process—the resources are added immediately. 

If you want to automate the scaling process, you can do that, too! SiteGround’s unique auto-scale option will adjust your CPU and RAM to meet the needs of unexpected traffic surges, preventing any slowness or downtime. 

The best part is that the scalable amount is pre-determined by you, so you’ll still have control over the scale’s parameters. 

Finally, cloud hosting with SiteGround will also include a free dedicated IP. This feature will give you peace of mind that your website is safe from IP blacklist due to other webmasters’ actions.

The Best WordPress Web Hosting Service

Not sold that SiteGround is the perfect match for you? Or maybe you simply want to know what else is out there, so you can ensure you’ve chosen the best of the best. I get it. 

That’s why we’ve written a whole post about the Best WordPress Web Hosting Services out there. Here are the contenders I’ve reviewed:

1. Bluehost — Best WordPress Hosting For New Websites
2. DreamHost — Most Versatile WordPress Hosting Plans
3. Nexcess — The Best For Customized Managed Hosting Solutions
4. SiteGround — The Best For Scalable Traffic
5. WP Engine — Best Managed WordPress Hosting
6. A2 Hosting — The Best For Site Migrations
7. IONOS by 1&1 — The Best For Pro Users

The bottom line: Would I recommend SiteGround for your web hosting needs? Absolutely.

They have a range of plans to suit any business and budget, and they compete well with their competitors in terms of features. They excel in site speed time and offer phenomenal customer service. With all this in mind, they are a sound choice. 

The post SiteGround Review appeared first on Neil Patel.