Overview of SiteGround Hosting: pros and cons, user reviews
High-quality web hosting with extensive plans
High-quality web hosting with comprehensive plans SiteGround is one of the most preferred web hosting providers serving the owners of over 2 million domains worldwide. You can host almost all popular CMSs, but they mainly specialize in WordPress, WooCommerce, Magento, and Joomla.
Another innovation that was introduced in 2021 and affected both representatives of the IT sector and football fans. Yes, these two spheres can be connected. And all this became possible thanks to partnership. The company started its work as an official hosting partner of the capital’s English football club Westham. “Just like exceptional hosting, Premier League football is all about speed, performance and reliability. That’s why we’re teaming up,” SiteGround tweeted.
Managed WordPress and Woocommerce hosting
SiteGround is one of the most popular and highest-rated hosting providers in the WordPress community. They are known for their friendly and knowledgeable 24/7 support and are an official WordPress, and WooCommerce recommended hosting provider. With SiteGround, you get more value for just a few euros more. They offer the most affordable bundle of Managed WordPress services with unique internal speed and security solutions, great support, and plenty of features like WordPress performance optimization tools, CDN, free SSL, daily backups, email hosting, and more.
Superfast servers
SiteGround service is run on Google Cloud, a robust infrastructure known for its network speed and high performance. In addition, all SiteGround servers are equipped with SSD drives; they run custom in-house developed software to ensure your site is super fast. SiteGround operates data centers in London and the other US, Europe, Asia, and Australia.
User-friendly platform for an easy start
SiteGround makes it easy to start a website with their WordPress Starter tool that walks you through a selection of free themes and plugins to choose from, so you can have your website up and running in minutes.
Why choose Siteground’s hosting
SiteGround is an international hosting provider and has been operating in the hosting market since 2004. The quality of their hosting is high, and the rates are relatively low for what you get. They specialize mainly in shared, dedicated, and VPS hosting packages and have a data center in London. A big plus is that they offer free SSL certificates through Let’s encrypt, and also Cloudflare CDN is included for free on the packages.
The reason why SiteGround is an above-average hosting provider is the power and speed of the servers and the attention to customer satisfaction. They have a 24/7 helpdesk that will kindly assist you via chat or email.
Siteground’s hosting packages
SiteGround has three hosting packages with different options. The difference is mainly in the size of the server.
- The StartUp package is delicate for a minimal website.
- The GrowBig package is recommended for a standard website because you can also use the SuperCasher, making your website a lot faster.
- The GoGeek package.
The holy trinity of good web hosting
The most important pillars of good web hosting are customer support, uptime and speed. How does SiteGround score on these areas?
Customer support
I have never had a problem with SiteGround because of a technical error *knock on wood*. However, I have had a specific technical issue a few times that could not be solved with a Google search. In these cases, it didn’t take more than a few minutes for SiteGround’s support team to get back to me via live chat (you can also call for free). This is the case 24/7.
When you have to move heaven and earth to reach the customer service of specific companies, this is a relief.
In addition, SiteGround knows WordPress through and through. This is not surprising, as SiteGround is one of three hosting services that officially recommend WordPress. So when you have a specific WordPress issue, SiteGround’s staff is happy to lend a helping hand.
Of course, there are limits to the help they can offer. If you are dealing with a complicated problem that you caused yourself, they are not going to spend hours solving it for you.
But if hosting and WordPress are new to you, it’s nice to know you’re not alone. And when you get stuck, all you need is someone to give you a push in the right direction to get the ball rolling again.
SiteGround scores 4.8/5 on the TrustPilot site after more than 6000 reviews. Their excellent customer service is extensively cited.
Please note: SiteGround only offers customer support in English.
Speed
Nobody likes a slow website. Slow web pages get lower rankings in Google, and visitors will also click away quickly when a site loads slowly.
You can influence the speed of your website through things like image size and the platform you use. But in the end, everything depends on your hosting. Slow hosting = slow website.
Looking at a SiteGround test website, we see that the speed fluctuated between 609 and 758 milliseconds in 2020. This is phenomenally fast. It’s hard to find a hosting service that is consistently faster than this.
Uptime
Your Webhosting can be as supportive and fast as you want it to be, but if your website is offline, it won’t help you.
Fortunately, SiteGround consistently ranks in the top 5 web hosting services with the highest uptime. With an average uptime of 99.988%, the chance that you’ll find your website offline with SiteGround is nil. How does SiteGround achieve this high uptime?
SiteGround’s monitoring system checks the server status every half second. Not only does it detect and automatically resolve many existing issues, but it can also anticipate and prevent potential problems. Their team also monitors and fends off emerging threats and software vulnerabilities with a firewall that has become more intelligent. An AI bot that blocks malicious website traffic before it can reach your site.
The result is hosting that is a few thousandths of a percentage point away from always on.
Further considerations
Besides customer service, speed, and uptime, several other factors are essential for choosing the best web hosting. I will discuss these below.
Flexibility
You can host practically any website on SiteGround.
Is this your first time hosting a website? No problem at all. You don’t need any technical knowledge to get started with SiteGround. Once you have your SiteGround package, you can have, for instance, WordPress installed automatically within a few clicks.
But even if you are an experienced web developer SiteGround is an excellent choice. If you want to configure the server to your liking, this hosting has suitable packages for that too.
Besides shared hosting (a server you share with other users), there is also cloud hosting.
Their packages cater to a wide variety of traffic. You can always scale up your package according to the growth of your website.
Backend
You don’t want to spend time understanding your hosting backend. Fortunately, SiteGround’s backend is very user-friendly. This is not the case with every Webhosting company.
Even if it’s your first time using web hosting, you’ll get to know the ins and outs of SiteGround in no time.
Free hosting extras
Many web hosting services will charge you extra when you want to use additional services. SiteGround, however, offers a lot of different features for free.
If you have a site with visitors from all over the world, you can install Cloudflare CDN for free. Cloudflare caches your content over an international network of servers and loads your website from the server that is closest to your visitor. This ensures a website that loads super fast anywhere in the world.
SiteGround also offers a free SSL certificate that you can install with just one click. This is something every website needs. When a site has an SSL certificate, you will see a green padlock in the address bar. This indicates that the site runs through a secure connection. A secure connection ensures that third parties cannot steal sensitive personal information from your visitors.
Furthermore, your SiteGround account offers one free website transfer. If you use the GrowBig or GoGeek package, a SiteGround employee will take care of the move for you.
SiteGround costs
SiteGround is not the cheapest web hosting on the market. This is not surprising considering the quality of their services. As they say… what you pay for is what you get.
Monthly costs
SiteGround has attractive monthly costs at first sight. However, these are entry-level rates.
When you renew your package, your costs will look like this:
- Startup. From 6.99$ to 14.99$
- GrowBig. From $11.99 to 24.99$
- GoGeek. From 15.99$ to 37.99$
Across the board, costs practically triple. That’s why it’s wise to sign up for the most extended possible contract, which is 36 months. That way, you pay the best price for the longest possible time.
Money-back guarantee
As befits a good web hosting service, SiteGround offers a 30-day money-back guarantee for their shared hosting. This gives you more than enough time to find out if SiteGround is indeed the best hosting service for you.
For their cloud hosting, there is a two-week money-back guarantee. A little less, but still enough to find out if you want to continue with SiteGround.
Furthermore, SiteGround guarantees an annual uptime of 99.9%. If they slip below this, you get one month of free hosting.
This explains the excellent uptime figures we discussed earlier.
SiteGround hosting packages
As usual among web hosting services, SiteGround offers a range of different packages. If you are starting or have a website that attracts less than 100,000 visitors per month, shared hosting is what you need.
Once you start exceeding this limit, it’s worth looking into cloud hosting.
Shared hosting
Here is an overview of SiteGround’s shared hosting packages.
Startup
This package works well if you are not running more than one website, and this site is under 10,000 visitors per month. Your site can cover up to 10 GB. This is more than enough for the vast majority of websites.
StartUp lacks several features GrowBig and GoGeek do offer. Although they do provide daily backups of your site, you cannot make backups on demand.
StartUp also lacks staging. With SiteGround, the staging feature makes a copy of your website that visitors cannot see if you are using WordPress. This is useful for testing new designs and functionality.
That said, this package is an excellent option for beginners.
GrowBig
The GrowBig plan lets you add as many sites as you want to your account. It also allows about 25,000 visitors per month, which is quite a number. You have 20 GB of web space to spend on your site(s).
In addition, you have extensive backup options and the staging above. This package also has speed-boosting caching, which ensures that your web pages load a lot faster.
If you want to collaborate with others on your site, you can also add them to your SiteGround account.
If you are reading this article, then this package is probably the best option for you.
GoGeek
With GoGeek, we enter a more severe web hosting level. With 40 GB webspace and 100,000 visitors, you can run an entire site or site on this package.
This package is also ideal if you develop websites for clients. SiteGround’s “white label” functionality allows you to add users to your SiteGround account easily. Subsequently, these users can start working with the Site Tools of their website.
In addition, with GoGeek, you get access to the highest class of SiteGround server resources. In practice, this means that your site(s) will run just that little better than on the other packages with this package.
You’ll also get access to the best and most experienced customer support staff the company has to offer.
WordPress hosting with SiteGround
Earlier in this piece, I mentioned that WordPress officially recommends SiteGround. There are hundreds of thousands of hosting services worldwide, and most of them are capable of running WordPress.
So why would WordPress give SiteGround this honor?
One of the reasons is that SiteGround makes managing WordPress sites incredibly easy. The 1-click WordPress installation, WordPress staging, git integration, easy updates, and the tools SiteGround has developed specifically to create WordPress sites run better make running WordPress sites an almost worry-free process. SiteGround has done everything possible to make its hosting service work perfectly with WordPress sites.
If you have an existing WordPress site, you can transfer it to SiteGround for free using the SiteGround Migrator Plugin.
Cloud hosting
Cloud hosting is a flexible upgrade from shared hosting. When you have outgrown shared hosting packages, this is the logical next step. With cloud hosting, SiteGround guarantees that your site will have enough server resources allocated to it. Your server’s RAM and CPU are not shared with others.
You can upgrade your RAM, CPU, and memory at any time. No approval is required, and your site will not go offline once you do so.
Conclusion
I highly recommend SiteGround. Since we use them for Start24, this conclusion will probably not surprise you.
SiteGround offers something for almost everyone. They have the best customer service out there, excellent uptime and speed, and are officially recommended by WordPress. They are easily one of the best hosting providers on the market.
SiteGround is not a British company. But because they have a data center in the United Kingdom, this does not hinder the speed of your website at all.
Much attention to speed
Siteground pays much attention to the speed of your website. This can be seen from:
- Fast NGINX servers in the UK, vital if you have visitors from the UK.
- All shared website hosting servers have SSD disks, which will make your website considerably faster (many providers have this nowadays, but Siteground already offered it in 2015, which indicates that they are at the forefront of new technologies)
- HTTP/2 on all shared and cloud servers, which allows the different files of your website to be loaded at the same time instead of one after the other, which again makes for a faster website (again, they had had this since 2015, when it was not standard)
- A self-developed SG Optimizer caching plugin to speed up WordPress websites. With its caching capabilities and front-end and image optimization functions, it optimizes the performance of WordPress sites so much that, according to Siteground, you can see speed benefits between 20% and 500%.
- Free Cloudflare CDN integration loads some files from the fast Cloudflare servers and makes your site faster
- According to a May 2020 blog, 40% faster processors: “We will update all processors used to host our clients on the Google Cloud infrastructure. The new N2 CPUs perform roughly 40% faster than the ones we used previously.”
- The latest PHP7 version for even faster websites
Strong focus on security
Siteground also pays a lot of attention to the security of your website:
- technology to prevent hacked sites on the same server from infecting your site
- automatic WordPress & plugin updates (can be turned off if you don’t want to)
- active monitoring of and pro-active response to potential security vulnerabilities
- Free Let’s Encrypt Wildcard SSL certificates that you install yourself in just a few clicks: many providers have this too nowadays, but Siteground was one of the first, which shows that they are in the lead.
Free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates.
Siteground offers free Let’s Encrypt Wildcard SSL certificates that you install yourself in just a few clicks. Many providers have this too nowadays, but Siteground was one of the first, which shows that they are ahead of the game.
Support day and night
No matter what time of day it is, Siteground is available 24/7 for your questions and will answer them quickly. You can do this via chat (immediate), e-mail (usually within 15 minutes), and telephone (I have not yet used it myself).
Good price-quality ratio
In my opinion, Siteground offers excellent value for money.
You can host your website much cheaper, but then you have many websites on one server. OK, for a private website, but for a business website, I would go for something better.
There are also high-end hosting providers like WP Engine, but you pay $35 – $310 per month.
At Siteground, you pay $14.99 – $37.99 per month. And you get a significant discount on your first invoice, so you only pay $6.99 – $15.99 per month for the first time (all prices are excl. VAT).
Additional GrowBig & GoGeek features
For the two more expensive accounts, you also get:
- multiple domains on the same account
- Siteground SuperCacher plugin for a faster website
- WordPress & Joomla staging makes a copy of your site to test new plugins and updates before applying them to your live site.
Siteground review: the disadvantages
I have recently discovered one real disadvantage of Siteground.
The packages state how many GB and visitors you get. This is usually more than sufficient. The more expensive packages also say “Unlimited Websites.” However, I have come across another limit there. There is also an inode limit. There is a limit to the number of files you can have on your account. So even though you are well below your GB limit, you might still run into your inode limit. That has happened to me a few times. But then again, I have about 15-20 sites on a GoGeek account.
Another disadvantage could be that the support is only in English. Not a problem for me, but if your English is not that good, you should look for another hosting provider.
Which Siteground package do you need?
Siteground has 3 packages:
- StartUp
- GrowBig
- GoGeek
The difference is the number of websites, disk space, and extra features.
If you have a straightforward business website, the StartUp package is sufficient.
The GrowBig account makes sense if you want to host multiple websites or have a website that needs to stay up and run. You can then use a staging site (copy of your website) to test new plugins or significant updates to WordPress, plugins, or your theme, for example.
The GoGeek account makes sense if, like me, you want to host 10-20 websites, need an even faster server, or want speedier support.
| Tariff | StartUp | GrowBig | GoGeek |
|---|---|---|---|
| Costs | €12.99 | €22.99 | €34.99 |
| Disk space | 10 GB | 20 GB | 40 GB |
| Number of sites | 1 | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Tariff | Entry | Business | Business Plus | Super Power |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Price per month | €64.00 | €96.00 | €128.00 | €192.00 |
| Traffic | 5 ТB | 5 ТB | 5 ТB | 5 ТB |
| Memory | 6 GB | 8 GB | 10 GB | 12 GB |
| Storage space | 40 GB | 60 GB | 80 GB | 120 GB |
Alexandria, Virginia (USA)
SG Hosting Inc.
901 N. Pitt St, Suite 325
Alexandria, 22314 VA
+1 800 828 9231
(Пока оценок нет)
Loading...
I work with SitGround almost 2 years and I really like this service. I’m not an expert but with their support I’m feel so confident and safe without stress to contact them and always they are very nice and helpful 🙂
Fantastic service – knowledgable and fast, great hosting (fast, available). And a great price! really cannot be beaten.
I am new to their service, but they are very quick, friendly and know there stuff. Great technical and business help so far. Keep up the great service!
Have been with Site Ground for a year now. Only complaint: I didn’t find them sooner! Amazing customer service. Super quick and friendly and helpful.
Siteground has hosted my website for the last 5 years and I’ve always been impressed by their telephone technical support and customer service. I just renewed for another 3 years.
With a technical service – reliability and great customer support are the two differentiators that make all the difference. And Siteground provides both. I am a customer with 3 servers on their system for 5 years now. They have never failed to take care of any issue.
Siteground is the best hosting and domain service I’ve ever used. I have switched all my businesses over to them for everything and encourage anyone I work with to do the same. Their support is amazing. I’ve never encountered such positive, helpful and patient people in any industry. They are just the best.
I had a great experience with customer service. Even though what I was asking them to help with was removing my account, they didn’t give me any grief at all and were really helpful. The service was great, but just not a good fit for my company at this time. Excellent experience!
The siteground team are always so helpful. I don’t understand a lot about the technical side of websites and hosting but they always inform me in terms I understand. The support is incredibly quick as well
The guys there are fantastic. Most competent in technical terms and highly willing to provide immediate support. Not to mention their infrastructure that provides scale-ability and value for money. Recently migrated from another provider and feel very happy about that.
Great customer service. In less than 10 minutes they resolved my issues. Great hosting company. So far, the best!
almost a customer for 10 years, and I must depart due to “new” pricing. Please be aware that their plans renew automatically at regular cost, for instance a $160 a year plan will renew at over $400. I started with siteground back in 2009 great company, great services but no longer a competitive one, just do the math I have 5 websites, 10 registered domains and 2 accounts and my bill (if paid quarterly) amounts to over 1K a year. 1K for hosting 🙁 sadly no longer a business that we can afford.
The support team were patient and truly superb in resolving the issue with my new site. Highly recommended! Its great to have that peace of mind when you are not technically minded and have exhausted all the options!
This is the number one service in the world! They really fix all your problems. They spend a lot of time to keep customers happy. Like everybody else you will love this company!
Best web hosting service. Period. Great high speed servers, excellent service. Not only technically speaking but also customer service/tech support wise. Their tech support staff was patient with my questions and very knowledgeable, they offered swift effective solutions to any problems I contacted them with. Well worth the money. Ten out of ten would recommend to anyone.
I’m not as technical as I used to be and after having some terrible service from my previous host found SiteGround and its by far the best move I have made. They talked me through every step with clear instructions and patience. If the rest of their service is as good as this then I will be very happy indeed!
Stunning support. The man immediately recognised the situation and resolved it professionally and promptly. By the time we had finished an email had come through confirming everything. So good. I am only a small (tiny user) but I felt as if I were being treated like royalty. Top man. Thanks.
These guys deliver a great service! They went over and beyond to help me out with my hosting and domain that i needed to restore for an old website i had saved with them. These guys truly deliver the best service I have seen with a hosting company and performance is some of the best value you get for the money out there! 5 stars no doubt!
Very Swift and best support provided. I have accidentally kept Auto Renewal ON, due to which one of my Service was Renewed and charged my Credit Card directly. As I am very new here, and I wanted to Cancel that service. The Support executive, provided the Proper guidance how to disable Auto Renew option. And also I can able to Cancel the Renewal.
Really very helpful people. Thanks for the great support.
I’ve just moved my website to SiteGround. I initially had some issues with the migration tool, but after contacting support the issue was resolved pronto. Best thing about it is that as they promise, the speed of my website loading has improved out of sight. Very happy with both the product and service.
Siteground has hosted my website for the last 5 years and I’ve always been impressed by their telephone technical support and customer service. I just renewed for another 3 years.
My experiences are always first class. The support team are always friendly, super knowledgable and very patient. Thanks for all that you do for your clients! By far the best hosting and web support out there – good work!
I’ve had an ongoing hosting issue with my Siteground hosting account that has become a nightmare. During the last four days the average response time is 3 to 4 hours sometimes half a day. I recently was hung up on by a tech-support technician informing him of an issue he was unable to diagnose. Yesterday I had a technician shutdown all 5 sittes on my account through resctricted access to my htaccess file. Not even sure that is legal. They literally held me hostage for a full day while one client had a campaign circultaing with over 40k behind it. A toatl loss. Loss of a client and I may be entangled in a lawsuit now. Which obviously is going to account for another lawsuit on my behalf versus SG. I highly recommend not using them. They use to be good. They are obviously cutting staff. And no longer a provider I would even begin to recommend!
Very Swift and best support provided. I have accidentally kept Auto Renewal ON, due to which one of my Service was Renewed and charged my Credit Card directly. As I am very new here, and I wanted to Cancel that service. The Support executive, provided the Proper guidance how to disable Auto Renew option. And also I can able to Cancel the Renewal. Really very helpful people. Thanks for the great support.
I’ve been using Siteground for about three years and have received excellent support and speed. Their tutorials and help have helped me resolve most issues myself, but in one or two issues each year there has always been someone there to help 7X24. The wait is never more than a few minutes. I will recommend them to my consulting students.
Stunning support. The man immediately recognised the situation and resolved it professionally and promptly. By the time we had finished an email had come through confirming everything. So good. I am only a small (tiny user) but I felt as if I were being treated like royalty. Top man. Thanks.
I’ve been having constant problems with my Siteground hosting account, which has become a nightmare. For the last four days, the average response time is between 3 and 4 hours, sometimes half a day.
Excellent company, their currently going through growing pains but the company truly does care about its customers.
If you speak to the right people they really do invest and listen to customers.
Great company I hope you guys become #1 speed wise one day (make your own CDN that’s lightening fast)!
I have been using Siteground for many years, and generally I was quite happy with the hosting quality and the customer support.
However, over the past year, the quality of hosting and support has gone down significantly, and my most recent experience has forced me to change hosting providers.
First, the speed of my site became very, very slow (slow server response time). Siteground support claimed that this was due to the site architecture and coding, and not due to the hosting environment. I tried to work with the support team, but the claim was always the same – ‘it is not the fault of the hosting, it is your site that is slow’. I decided to test this claim by moving my site to a different hosting provider, and voila! The site works perfectly fine, with quick response times, no speed issues.
Recently, I received an email from Siteground that said the my site was limited (blocked) due to overuse of CPU resources. This happened completely WITHOUT ANY WARNING. They just blocked the site completely, without even trying to reach out to explain the problem and gave no chance to address possible issues. This is completely unacceptable. You cannot just block a site without first at least trying to reach out to resolve the issue.
I have had a ticket open for over a month now, trying to get access to the blocked site (at least from the backend). I have tried to connect it with a temporary domain (from siteground), but there seem to be some technical issues preventing it from working properly. I have tried to get help from their support. I have been patient, but for some reason they are incapable of understanding the problem and suggesting a solution to fix it. If they put some minimum effort into it, I am sure the ticket could be resolved within a day. Instead, I get replies that indicate they do not even take the time to look into the issue. Just random pieces of advice like ‘your cloudflare service is not configured properly’ (I am not using cloudflare), or ‘your domain is not pointed properly’ (I am using a siteground domain and there is no option to ‘point it’).
I am now switching to a different hosting provider. After the change, my site is performing normally, and the cost of the service is lower.
I wish Siteground support could put some effort into their work and treat their paying customers with more respect. This would save them both time and money. Again – you need to provide some warning or notice before blocking a live site. Doing so without any contact is completely unacceptable.
I would recommend choosing smaller, cheaper hosting providers. The quality can be much better (faster servers) and the customer support more reliable.
Great, quick and friendly, support, simple account management especially since they introduced Site Tools, fair above average pricing that reflects the overall quality – I’d definitely recommend them to a friend that needs a simple and reliable hosting service.
I don’t know what happened to their technical support because it’s BAD! Worst technical assistance ever! Tried to get help with an SSL issue and these people were VERY unhelpful! I was passed around ALL day and no one actually solved it. My website DOWN because of them and they have help get it back up!!
I’ve been with the for 5+ years, I have a cloud hosting account with over 30 websites. The least they could do is help me get my website live!!
Moving over to a new cloud host.
Very efficient, prompt support! Much better than my previous experiences with hosting services.