SiteGround assessment
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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 prices, and phenomenal customer support. Whether you are a small blog, a medium-sized business, or a large online store, SiteGround has an option for you.
In short, SiteGround is a host that your business can grow with, which is darn important.
SiteGround compared to the best WordPress web hosts
SiteGround scores exceptionally well when compared to other products in its category. It is without a doubt a major competitor for top web hosting for WordPress services.
What I like most, however, is that they are both extremely scalable and they support your WordPress website.
Whether you have 10,000, 25,000 or 100,000 visitors, there is a plan for you. There is also room for exponential growth for websites that start without committing to the highest plan available.
SiteGround also supports your WordPress website with their specially designed features (which we will explain below) and the WordPress wizard's 24 hour customer service team.
However, I do appreciate that you may have other needs or want to study your hosting options a little more before settling on a host.
That's why we've taken the time to research and test some of the best web hosts for WordPress for you. Make sure you check out all of my top tips before making your decision.
Who is SiteGround best for?
If I were extremely broad I would say that SiteGround would work for almost anyone who wants to host their website on WordPress.
To be specific, I'd say SiteGround is best for a small website owner who has little to no experience running a website and who expects their website to grow over time. With flexible plans and excellent customer support, SiteGround is great for beginners and scalers over time.
SiteGround: the pros and cons
The professionals
First class customer support: Have you ever had seemingly unsolvable problems with the technology and tried everything under the sun to fix them to no avail? Yes me too.
Building a website doesn't have to be scary or traumatic when you have SiteGround support by your side – your wish is their command. The customer service team is phenomenal. You will receive a satisfaction rating of almost 100% every year.
24/7 support is provided through a live chat channel, telephone support and a help desk ticketing system. Even the most complex problems are resolved in an average of 15 minutes, so you can get back to business as quickly as possible.
These things are very important for a beginning website owner to face the inevitable challenges they will face.
WordPress Recommended: SiteGround hosts over 80% of the two million domains in WordPress. With that in mind, it's not surprising that they are experts at managing WordPress.
Many of the support team are highly skilled in WordPress and are happy to assist you with troubleshooting any WordPress related issues compared to other hosts who simply tell you that this is not their problem (which frankly it is not).
Because of this, SiteGround has also developed and implemented WordPress-specific features such as SG Optimizer, WP Auto Update and Supercacher in its plans. I haven't come across any other host that has features like this, so SiteGround stands out in this area.
Low introductory price and money-back guarantee: With a monthly hosting solution starting at $ 6.99 per month, SiteGround is the perfect option for even the novice website builder.
In addition, the lead-in hosting plan includes all of the major features a new website owner would want on a plan, rather than the absolute must to get the user to commit to a higher plan right away.
If something goes wrong or your website does not work as you expect, you can get a full refund of your hosting fees within 30 days of signing up.
Excellent uptime and speed on site: Website uptime and speed go hand in hand. Uptime refers to the time the server stays up, while website speed refers to how fast your website loads.
Below you can see that SiteGround's average uptime over 12 months is 99.98% and there is only 73 minutes of downtime for the whole year. Reliable availability means that your website runs practically around the clock and keeps visitors happy.
Have you ever heard the idea that if your page doesn't load up within three seconds, you will lose visitor interest?
With SiteGround, you don't have to worry about that. They claim that they will load your website four times faster than other hosts so you don't have to worry about visitors losing interest while you wait for your graphics to load.
And as you'll see here, the slowest load time between 2019 and 2020 was 693 ms.
Free website broadcast: Many people are concerned about moving to a new host. After all, it's a scary process. What if you lose or cause irreparable damage to your entire website?
With SiteGround, you don't need to worry. They will do it for you.
Most hosts simply move the files. However, SiteGround is also making the necessary adjustments to make sure everything works fine for you after the transition.
No blood, sweat, tears, or big bucks required to switch to a new host. SiteGround is adding the WordPress migrator plugin to its plans. However, if you prefer a professional, it only costs $ 30 per site.
Free daily backup: Most hosts only back up your website every other day or even once a week. So if something happens to your website that you can't fix, you might have to go back a whole week, which means you will lose everything you have done in the meantime.
With SiteGround, however, the worst-case scenario is that you only lose the changes you made in the 24 hours since the last backup. If this isn't a security for someone who is constantly making changes to their website, I don't know what it is!
Ideal for scalability: If you're just starting out there is no other way but going up, is there? With SiteGround's flexible plans, you no longer have to worry about your host stop growing. Just update your plan as your business grows.
The disadvantages
Price for an extension: As dreamy as the special pricing on SiteGround's hosting plans are, once the honeymoon is over, it really is over.
If you renew, your prices will go up pretty high. The cost of your plan will triple across the board at the end of your advertising period. Ouch.
The best way to combat this is to sign up for the longest available term of the promotional period, i.e. either 24 or 36 months, before facing the higher renewal rates.
No monthly billing cycle: The higher renewal rates may be easier to deal with when you can pay month to month. Unfortunately, SiteGround doesn't offer monthly billing.
Personally, this isn't a deal breaker for me, but I can safely understand how restrictive and frustrating it can be for some.
Storage Limitations: It is unlikely that most of you reading this post will be bothered by the limited space available on the shared hosting plans. However, if your website grows past 40GB, you have no choice but to switch to the more expensive cloud hosting plans.
The StartUp plan only includes 10,000 website visitors. So if your website traffic is growing exponentially too fast right off the bat, you may need to update your plan sooner than you think.
SiteGround pricing
SiteGround offers three levels of hosting options:
The prices of these tiers remain the same for web hosting, WordPress hosting and WooCommerce hosting at all levels. Cloud hosting has its own levels and prices that we will discuss.
Start up
As the name suggests, this plan is perfect for those new to the business or looking for smaller websites. The StartUp plan allows you a website, 10 GB of storage space and up to 10,000 monthly visitors. Pricing for the introductory offer starts at $ 6.99 per month.
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 starting out. The only thing to watch out for is that you are going over your monthly visitor limit. If you think you're going to scale up quickly, it's worth getting started on the GrowBig plan right away.
GrowBig
The GrowBig plan is perfect for midsize businesses or those who know they will be managing more than one website. You have access to unlimited websites, 20 GB of web space and up to 25,000 monthly visitors. Pricing for the introductory offer starts at $ 9.99 per month.
In addition to the functions included in the StartUp plan, this plan also includes:
- On-demand backup copies
- Speed-increasing caching
- Staging environment
- Add employees to your site
It's easy to see why GrowBig is SiteGround's best-selling plan. It packs in a number of great features that are easy to use and precisely tailored to the tasks a website needs that expects a steady flow of traffic.
GoGeek
The GoGeek is the most comprehensive shared hosting program SiteGround has to offer. As the name suggests, it is intended for "technology freaks" who want a lot of control over their website.
The GoGeek plan gives you unlimited websites, 40 GB of web space, and up to 100,000 monthly visits. It is of course designed for large companies with high traffic. Pricing for the introductory offer starts at $ 14.99 per month.
The GoGeek plan includes all of the above, plus:
- Register your customers with white label access to Site Tools
- Use more server resources for longer process execution time
- Ultra-fast PHP for faster page loading
- Priority support from SiteGround's most experienced account managers
In short, this plan is for those of you who know what you do with websites. If you don't understand some of the technological features of the plan, it may not be the best plan for you. Unless, of course, you have a specialist on your team who manages your website and needs access to high-traffic features.
Cloud hosting
We'll cover the cloud hosting product offerings shortly. In terms of pricing, there are four plans for SiteGround cloud hosting: Entry, Business, Business Plus, and Super Power.
As you can see in the screenshot below, prices range from $ 110 to $ 410 per month. The main difference in the plans is in CPU cores, storage, and SSD storage space.
The easy scalability of the cloud hosting options (which you are about to get to know about) is a safe way to start with the get started plan the first time you use cloud hosting.
SiteGround offers
SiteGround Web Hosting
SiteGround offers fast and secure web hosting for all types of websites. The general web hosting product is optimized for a number of content management systems (CMS) such as WordPress, Drupal, Joomla and more.
The complete website solution makes building and launching your website quick and easy, including the site builder of your choice: WordPress or Weebly. If you are an online shop, you can install the shopping cart of your choice for free.
Domain registration is easy and affordable with SiteGround, making it easy for you to manage your domain and site in one place.
You also have access to an unlimited number of email accounts when you create your domain. This is great for managing different areas of your business.
SiteGround WordPress hosting
SiteGround is one of the few web hosting companies that offers hosting options specifically for WordPress. As mentioned before, they are even highly recommended directly by WordPress.
With SiteGround, you don't have to manually download and install WordPress. Instead, you can automate the process with a simple click of a button using the WordPress launcher feature.
When you sign up on your new website, you'll be prompted to set up your website easily and hassle-free using SiteGround's WordPress Starter Kit. The entire process takes minutes from start to finish, even for beginners!
One of the most popular features of SiteGround's WordPress hosting is the free SiteGround Migrator plugin. This feature is ideal for users who may be keeping their website with another host and transferring it to SiteGround.
Better still, if you're not sure if you can navigate the Migrator plugin, you can have a WordPress expert at SiteGround do it for you for an additional fee.
SiteGround WooCommerce hosting
SiteGround also has hosting options for users looking to build a powerful online store with WooCommerce. WooCommerce is pre-installed in this plan, which saves you time and hassle and allows you to immediately focus on uploading products to your online store.
WooCommerce allows you to sell any type of product or service online. SiteGround supports your ecommerce growth by protecting your website with a unique AI anti-bot system, free pre-installed SSL and a custom web application firewall (WAF).
If you go for the WooCommerce GrowBig or GoGeek plan, SiteGround also includes a handy staging tool. You can safely develop your business and test changes and updates to the staging copy before going live.
SiteGround cloud hosting
Cloud hosting is a relatively new method of hosting websites. It is an ideal solution for medium to large sized businesses and websites that can grow very quickly. When you start to outgrow your shared hosting plan, cloud hosting is the next step.
SiteGround's cloud hosting gives you guaranteed resources with your own RAM and CPU. You can also upgrade your cloud plan's RAM, CPU, and space at any time. Better still, there is no downtime in this process – resources are added instantly.
If you want to automate the scaling process, you can too! SiteGround's unique auto-scaling option adjusts your CPU and RAM to meet the demands of unexpected traffic jams, preventing slowness or downtime.
The best part is that the scalable amount is predetermined by you, so you still have control over the parameters of the scale.
Finally, cloud hosting with SiteGround will also include a free dedicated IP. With this feature, you can be sure that your website is protected from an IP blacklist due to the actions of other webmasters.
The best WordPress web hosting service
Not selling that SiteGround is a perfect fit for you? Or maybe you just want to know what else is out there so you can make sure you've picked the best of the best. I get it.
This is why we wrote an entire post on the best WordPress web hosting services. Here are the candidates I reviewed:
1. Bluehost – Best WordPress New Website Hosting
2. DreamHost – Most Versatile WordPress Hosting Plans
3. Nexcess – The best for tailor-made managed hosting solutions
4. SiteGround – The best for scalable traffic
5. WP Engine – Best Managed WordPress Hosting
6. A2 Hosting – Best for Site Migrations
7. IONOS from 1 & 1 – the best for pro users
Bottom line: would I recommend SiteGround for your web hosting needs? Absolutely.
They have a range of plans for every business and budget, and compete well with their competitors in terms of features. They are characterized by a fast speed on site and offer phenomenal customer service. With that in mind, they're a good choice.
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