SiteGround Review 2021 - 8,500+ Words! 10,150 Views

About The Company

Founded in 2004 by a few university friends, SiteGround gradually but steadily turned into a leading web hosting service provider. With only a handful of people working from their university dorm rooms in the beginning, today the company has more than 400 employees and is constantly growing. They process 1500+ tickets, 1000+ phone calls and 3000+ chat requests per day. Today, They host more than 500,000 domains with this number growing by the hour.

is a well-known hosting company that has over a decade of experience in offering top-notch hosting solutions to individuals and companies worldwide. Experience is important. There are a lot of small issues that need ironing out when you offer hosting solutions. It's the nature of the technology. Dealing with a company that has worked their way through those teething problems mean you'll receive a much smoother experience. You don't want to become the guinea pig for a company, new to hosting.


Their CEO and leader from the start, Tenko Nikolov, says their vision was to provide more help to customers than standard hosting companies did at the time. That’s it. Another successful company whose backbone is serving their customers.Since the company technically started a few months before WordPress, they also had the luxury of growing with WordPress and acquiring in-depth knowledge of their systems. This early exposure to WordPress served them well over the years and prompted them to cater their service even more to WordPress users through the creation of free WordPress themes for their customers and creating very detailed tutorials on how to get the most out of WordPress.


With the rise of small and mid-sized e-commerce retailers, Siteground has become a go-to destination for WordPress-based stores that have outgrown the capacities of their budget hosting providers.The service promises to offer a wide spectrum of hosting solutions characterized by cutting-edge tech innovations, great developer features, superior performance and reliable client support. Compared to other popular web hosting service providers I have used in the past, SiteGround’s almost perfect average uptime (approximately 99.99%) sets it apart as it is well over the current industry standards.

In addition, the site offers 3 different web hosting plans/packages, namely, StartUp, GrowBig, and GoGeek for the average customer. The “Start-Up” plan is a great choice for newbies in website creation, the “GrowBig” plan provides an excellent choice for those who grow their website, and the “GoGeek” plan is specially crafted for those wanting an affordable solution for larger sites. In short, each SiteGround packages make a great fit for those with or without technical expertise and provides room for the future growth of your website. They also offer several Cloud, Reseller and Dedicated Server packages for those with more specialist requirements/needs. They have Data Centers in Amsterdam, Chicago, London and Singapore.

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Table Of Contents

• About The Company
• Data Centers
• Performance - Speed And Uptime
• Security And Backup
• Information and Features
• Control Panel
• Customer Support
• Plans And Pricing
• Shared Hosting
• Cloud Hosting
• Dedicated Hosting
• Reseller Hosting
• Enterprise Hosting
• e-Commerce Hosting
• WordPress Review
• SiteGround Pros
• SiteGround Cons
• SiteGround Comparisons
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Conclusion
• SiteGround Discounts

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SiteGround Data Centers

SiteGround owns data centers on three continents, allowing you to optimize your website performance depending on from where you expect the majority of your visitors to view the site from. This allows you to fine-tune the performance of your website by hosting your web content in geographically nearer locations.
The data centers themselves are backed up with multiple redundancies in the form of wide branching networking backbones, electrical redundancies, and physical security. You can rest assured that your data is safe in one of SiteGround’s Data Centers. These data centers are located in United States, United Kingdom, Netherlands, and Singapore.

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Performance - Speed And Uptime

SiteGround offers good speed and uptime with data centers located in five locations on three continents: Asia (Singapore), Europe (Amsterdam, London), and North America (Chicago). All plans including shared, give you the option to select the data center that is closest to your target audience to give them faster access and load times to your website.

Uptime

SiteGround offers a 99.9% uptime guarantee, averaged over a 12 month period, which means a very negligible down time. They are able to achieve this with the help of their custom server monitoring software. This software monitors the status of every server in real-time and also minimizes downtime by automatically resolving more than 90% of the server performance issues that come up, without human interaction.

If they fail to meet that level of uptime they provide a credit to your account. The level of credit they add depends on the level of downtime experienced. The credits for excessive downtime are automatic and you don’t need to apply for them or prove your case, they monitor their own service level stringently and are very upfront with compensating for this. The credit rate is basically the cost of one month hosting for every 1% of downtime below their guaranteed level. So if you have 98% uptime, 1% below the 99% guarantee, you will be compensated with one month free hosting. Credits cannot exceed either your current contract term or 12 months, whichever of the two is shortest.The SiteGround team continuously experiments with different configurations and keeps upgrading their hardware and server architecture for their dedicated servers. They ensure that their hosted accounts are instantly migrated to the latest hardware configurations after upgrades. This makes their server performance to be optimum at all times.

Speed

The main reason why performance speed is a vital criterion to consider when selecting a web hosting service is that it determines the amount of traffic your website will get. Most users expect the pages they wish to access to load in less than 3 seconds. That's the current time period that's been backed up by study after study. On average, 40% of users will opt to abandon your site if they wait for more than three seconds for your site to load. I don't know of any site that can willingly accept that they're going to lose 40% of their traffic due to something that's easily fixed. Needless to say, this is the main reason why I have switched from one web hosting service to another over the years - As most hosting companies tend to get slower as their customer base grows. That was my experience, until now. I must admit, out of the multiple web hosting services which promised to deliver quick and efficient server performance, my experience with SiteGround has been truly refreshing. I have been enjoying an average page loading time MUCH quicker than most sites out there.

Siteground runs NGINX rather than Apache on shared and cloud plans, and also offer this as one of the performance boosters for dedicated plans. They also provide their own ‘Super Cacher’ caching mechanism built on NGINX reverse proxy, for applications like WordPress and Drupal. This can have a positive impact on optimizing website speed through MemCached and Google page speed. For a further efficiency boost, SiteGround also deploys CDN, HTTP2, PHP7, and HHVM. Many of the network monitoring and technical tools used at SiteGround have been developed in-house by its team, including a custom take on Linux containers, a bespoke backup system, custom server monitoring tools, and security features developed in-house.

Reliability

SiteGround is leader when it comes to server reliability and uptime. The Servers used by SiteGround Hosting are second to none, which goes along way to explaining why they have near perfect uptime score. From our own personal experience, we've never knowingly suffered from any downtime at all. It's been faultless. But we all know that perfection doesn't exist but this is about as close as you can get, at 99.9%. They have top of the range data centers that are very well located. They use the very best hardware and software and lead the way with security measures. This all leads to delivering market-leading reliability.

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Security And Backup

Security

SiteGround’s Data Centers are protected by high-end security at all times. Some of the key security measures implemented at their data centers include 24×7 human security, access control, mantraps, biometrics, bulletproof lobbies, and constant video surveillance. With SiteGround, you get a distinct mechanism that isolates various shared server accounts from one another, which prevents the possibility of a vulnerable server account affecting the entire server. Thus, if any other site hosted on the same, shared server as yours is compromised, you need not worry, as your site will remain completely safe. The unique isolation mechanism ensures that a shared server is as secure as a dedicated server is.

In case of any hacking attempts or related vulnerability in pre-installed server software (which are always kept updated) such as PHP, Exim, security gaps are instantly identified (due to continuous monitoring) and software patches are installed to fix the issues. Some key security measures available include SiteScanner (as an add-on for $19.80 per year that notifies you if your site is under attack), hotlink protection, IP address block lists, and anti-spam tools, SpamExperts and SpamAssassin. It also provides a unique feature called ‘Leech Protect’, that lets administrators prevent users from publicly posting their secret passwords to different portions of the site.

Backup

In terms of backups, SiteGround stores up to 30 days backup copies of your website, and you can create your own manually too. But if you need to restore any of them, you have to pay an additional price.

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SiteGround Information and Features

Feature	Overview
Founded	2004
Server Location	• United States • United Kingdom • NetherLands • Singapore
Services	• Domain Hosting • Domain Transfer • Shared Hosting • Cloud Hosting • Dedicated Hosting • Reseller Hosting • Enterprise Hosting • Dedicated WordPress Hosting • Dedicated Joomla Hosting • Other CMS Dedicated Hosting • e-Commerce Hosting • Student Hosting • Weebly Website Builder
Unlimited Website	Available With Selected Hosting Plans
Unlimited Storage	Not Applicable - Limited
Bandwidth	Unmetered
Domain Hosting	Yes
Linux Hosting	Yes
Windows Hosting	No
WordPress	Optimized
Joomla	Optimized
Drupal	Optimized
Magento	Optimized
PHP Hosting	Optimized
e-Commerce Hosting	Optimized
Email Hosting	Unlimited Account Available With Any Shared Hosting Plan
SSL Support	• Free Let’s Encrypt SSL • Wildcard SSL • EV SSL
Dedicated IP	Yes
Free Site Migration	No
Free Domain	No
Domain Privacy Protected	Yes
Money Back Guarantee	30 Days
24/7 Support	• Ticket • Live Chat • Telephone
Control Panel	Linux Hosting (cPanel)
One-Click Installation	Softaculous
Website Builder	Weebly
Automated Backup	SiteGround Backup System. Take a backup in 30 days back.
Content Delivery Network (CDN)	Cloudflare
Security Features	• SSL • Secure Account Isolation • Own Firewall Security Rules • 24/7 Live Monitoring • Add Security Rules and Custom Patches on a Weekly Basis
Payment Methods	• Visa • MasterCard • American Express • PayPal Available Upon Request

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Control Panel

Of course, we need to take into account the usability of the service, when we are reviewing a web host. In addition, the simplicity & intuitive behavior of the web hosting panel user interface is also a very prominent factor. Like most of the industry-leading web hosting companies, SiteGround also depends on cPanel. This is good. It provides a consistent level of functionality for the end-user. In addition, SiteGround has dedicated support for the most popular CMS and web-based platforms, such as WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla etc. These all provide developer-friendly behavior and stylistic design. You get the industry-standard cPanel, which gives you access to the Softaculous auto-installer, along with their custom installs for WordPress, Joomla, and Magento. The cPanel is easily accessible from the general billing client area of your hosting account.

You get access to SiteGround’s SuperCacher (a web caching service) that has been specifically built on NGINX reverse proxy and developed based on Varnish and Memcached. It makes retrieving web pages faster (by storing the page on the visitor’s browser cache when requested for the first time). Thus, it reduces the load on your server significantly. You also get WordPress and Joomla Toolkits that enables you to easily modify your domain, reset admin passwords, fix any broken permissions, secure the admin page, configure SSL and move/delete your installation. The multitude of script languages that Siteground support includes Perl, Ruby On Rails, Python (when running inside the CGI-bin folder) PHP7 including the HHVM PHP execution engine, as well as other versions of PHP. You can even use special developer features (GoGeek plan only) such as WP-CLI, Site Staging, and Drush and Git integration. Overall, the SiteGround control panel and hosting account offer a pool of features that make your work a lot easier.

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Customer Support

One of the most critical factors that should influence your decision to opt for a hosting provider is the kind of customer service they offer. As a webmaster or blogger, 24/7, excellent customer support is necessary because you never know when you might encounter some issue that needs immediate resolution.

Customer support is also super essential to the efficient running of your website. And as your website is an investment you need to try and see the bigger picture, not focus just on upfront price. If you've ever had a bad customer support experience where you get to the point where you feel like slamming your head again a brick wall over and over, with overwhelming frustration, you'll know what I'm talking about. Ok, perhaps a little overdramatic, but you get the point.Sure, surfing the internet for tutorials might be an option for fixing minor website and code errors, after all, the information is out there, if you know how to filter the valuable from the rubbish, but when it comes to unexpected server errors, however, you can’t waste valuable time and money (you have paid for the service) waiting for your website’s colossal failure. It's a false fallacy. You think you're saving time but the reality is, how do you value your time? Let's say you value your time at $30 an hour and you spend 4 hours searching 'how to' videos and fixing it, almost as much by trial and error as any skill. Then it's cost you an additional $120. This is exactly where SiteGround scores heavily with a support team of highly talented technical professionals. You not only get a quick response, but they can easily handle any kind of issues with your hosting account or website.

Siteground uses load balancers for their support requests, so inquiries are spread efficiently over available operators and not given a chance to bottleneck. They provide support on all issues from hosting to applications and modules, above the norm for a hosting provider. For instance, with the optimized hosting plan for Magento Community Edition, specialized Magento support is offered as part of that hosting package. Support for scripts and applications is normally redirected from a host to the third party that owns the app which can result in a lot of back and forth, so this is a real added bonus. There are even free Magento tutorials in the Siteground knowledge base.
Their Support is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and 365 days a year via the ticket system, live chat or telephone support. They lend a personalized touch through the support personnel (via live chat or helpdesk) you discuss the issue with. You can view the support person’s profile, technical background, areas of expertise and interests along with years of experience.

The comprehensive self-help Tutorials and Knowledge Base, along with SiteGround webinars provide you access to a vast pool of information and troubleshooting guides.

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Siteground Plans And Pricing

Price shouldn’t be the biggest factor when choosing your hosting provider. However, with SiteGround you get $3.95 a month shared hosting for first-time customers. It doesn’t get much cheaper than that. Especially with all the features, SiteGroundgives you over a rock-bottom price hosting company like Hostgator. Every plan comes with features like unlimited free email accounts, unmetered data transfer, cPanel and Softaculous access, and much more. However, each plan gives you some slightly different resources that are tailored to your individual needs. All plans offered by SiteGround include 99.9% uptime, and cPanel.They provide SSD storage on all shared and cloud hosting plans for ultimate speed and managed WordPress hosting on all accounts. The different hosting categories and plans are discussed below.

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Shared Hosting

SiteGround offers three different plans for their Shared Web Hosting service. Startup, GrowBig, and GoGeek.
All Shared Hosting Plans offer free CloudFlare CDN, and unlimited MySQL DB. The SiteGround Shared Hosting Plans are as below :

Startup Web Hosting Package The Startup plan is great for people who are new to building websites. The site’s hosting is suitable for sites up to 10,000 visits per month and allows you to build one website on its 10GB SSD. At $3.95 per month (70% OFF The Regular) with free setup (subscription for 1-year, 2-years or 3-years) or 1-month trial for $3.95 per month with $14.95 setup fee, with 1 website and 1 copy of free daily backup.

GrowBig Web Hosting Package

The GrowBig plan is perfect for people building multiple websites like serial entrepreneurs or website developers. With it, you can build unlimited websites and you will have your backups saved for up to 30 days for restoration if needed. And you also get priority support. This hosting plan is suitable for up to 25,000 visits per month across all the sites you build on a 20GB SSD.
At $5.95 per month (70% OFF The Regular) with free setup (subscription for 1-year, 2-years or 3-years) or 1-month trial for $5.95 per month with $24.95 setup fee. In addition to the standard features you get in the Startup plan, you receive premium WordPress caching, premium support, daily backups, SuperCacher for optimized speed and access to a premium site backup and restore service.
GrowBig is the plan I recommend you sign up with. You can host multiple websites, you get 2x more resources (resulting in a faster loading website) than the Startup plan.

GoGeek Web Hosting Package

The GoGeek plan is ideal for large websites that have more than 100,000 visits per month. With it, you get dedicated servers and fewer accounts on those servers which end up giving you about 4x more resources to boost your website speed and make it withstand traffic spikes that put your site under heavy stress. You get all the bells and whistles that come with the GrowBig plan and you get a 30GB SSD.
At $11.95 per month (70% OFF The Regular) with free setup (subscription for 1-year, 2-years or 3-years) or 1-month trial for $11.95 per month with $24.95 setup fee, with multiple websites, 30 copies of free daily backup, priority technical support, SuperCacher for optimized speed, free PCI compliance and less accounts on server.You get all the benefits of the StartUp and GrowBig plans, plus geeky features and 4x more resources compared to the StartUp plan.

The GoGeek plan is for heavily-visited or resource-intensive websites and it comes with 4x faster servers than the StartUp hosting plans.

Finally, SiteGround offers a 30 Day Money-Back Guarantee. They give you the peace of mind of trying it out, and if you’re not satisfied, then you simply get your money back. The Detailed Features of these Shared Hosting Plans are as follow.

To see the latest prices on Shared Hosting Plans click on the link.
SiteGround also offers dedicated WordPress hosting, with the same plans as mentioned above but with special features for the popular CMS.

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Cloud Hosting

SiteGround provides auto scalable and ultra-fast Cloud Hosting Plans based. They are suitable for any small development project or a high-scale enterprise website.

Cloud Hosting Specifications

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Reseller Hosting

You can kick-start your own white-labeled hosting company with Reseller Hosting Plan offered by SiteGround. They offer one single plan named GoGeek with fixed $11.95/mo price.
They had a reseller program before in which you had to buy credits (which one credit equals to one year hosting and was $42/credit) and you had to buy at least 5 credits initially to be a part of reseller program, and get all the benefits of a reseller hosting account. And the space was 10GB. But recently they have changed it to a much more attractive and yet simple plan in which they offer more features as below like 30GB of SSD space instead of 10GB and much more at a much less price! You are also entitled to a non-branded cPanel along with a Private DNS upgrade to enable better server name branding.

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Custom-Made Enterprise Hosting

The Custom Made Enterprise Hosting Packages are plans that are tailored specifically to a client's needs. They are not ready made ‘off the shelf’ plans and as such pricing will differ on a case by case basis. Siteground take the time to discuss and identify the client's needs then craft the infrastructure based on those needs. This could involve cloud public or private configurations, whatever the client needs. You could have versions of your site available simultaneously in different physical locations if your audience is global so to make sure load time and latency are as low as possible. A customer in Europe would connect to the site hosted on a European Server and a U.S. customer visits the site based on the U.S. server.


These custom hosting solutions are scalable and based on Linux containers. Being an enterprise solution, they need to be scalable and able to handle peaks and spikes in traffic, as this type of solution is certainly not for a small business or website. The hosting infrastructure is fully managed to allow you to focus on your business while Siteground focuses on the hosting in the background. A customized enterprise solution does not come cheap. Unlike the ‘off the shelf’ ready to go hosting plans, these solutions are tailor-made and for that level of service, there is, of course, an added value and therefore a higher price. This type of solution should be researched amongst competitors as part of a normal ‘request for quote/proposal’ process to make sure you get the best solution for you, that meets or exceeds exactly what you need, with room to grow.

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e-Commerce Hosting

What makes a good e-commerce hosting platform?
I could just get right into the numbers and raw parameters of this hosting platform, but before I do that, let’s take a moment to discuss what actually makes a quality e-commerce host and what to look for when choosing your perfect hosting plan.

PCI Compliance : This is something required by law if you intend to process any credit card data of your customers (which is the case for nearly all e-commerce stores).
Dedicated IP Address and an SSL Certificate : A dedicated IP means that your site gets an exclusive address that’s not shared with anyone. Whereas an SSL authenticates your site on the web.
Uptime/Server Tier : Quality data centers are classified as Tier 4. This means they guarantee that you’ll have less than 0.8 hours of downtime per year. Tier 1 is the lowest – nearly 30 hours of downtime per year.
Good Server Specs : The more RAM the better. It will make your store quicker and improve the customer experience.
Data Center Location : Get a server near your target audience’s geographical location.
Good Security Mechanisms And Policies : I won’t get into detail here, but the general idea is that your web host needs to have some security mechanisms and policies in place. The more they’re willing to share about this (either in their promotional materials or somewhere else), the better.

Features in SiteGround E-commerce Web Hosting

Here’s what you get with SiteGround e-commerce hosting :

• Free PCI compliance depending on the plan you select.
• Free SSL certificate also depending on the plan you select.
• Up to 30GB of disk space on the server.
• Server configuration optimized for speed: RAID10, SAS HDD, MySQL on separate SSD, 24 CPU cores.
• Priority daily backups that include the storage of 30 copies and free manual restore.
• Priority support depending on the plan you select.
• You can set up unlimited websites and MySQL databases.
• Can handle up to 100,000 visitors/month.
• Good security with power and hardware redundancy, server monitoring, SPAM prevention, anti-hack systems, and more.
• Data centers in Europe, United States, and Singapore.

Who’s SiteGround E-commerce Web Hosting best suited for?
SiteGround really knows WordPress/WooCommerce and everything related to it. They have nicely optimized hosting environments that can handle a WooCommerce store of any scale. However, when it comes to their other hosting plans - particularly for Magento or OpenCart - it seems that they are just standard shared hosting plans that are only cleverly advertised. When you select them, at some point you’re going to be redirected to either SiteGround’s normal shared hosting plans, or their WordPress hosting plans. What this basically means is that you’re best off hosting your WooCommerce store with SiteGround, but taking your business elsewhere if you want to build your store on top of some other e-commerce platform. Also, make sure to select the right plan, which won’t necessarily be the cheapest one they offer.

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SiteGround WordPress Hosting Review

SiteGround makes it affordable and easy to host a WordPress website and recommended by WrodPress.org as one of the best WordPress hostings. offers 3 optimized plans, all plans offer unlimited bandwidth, SQL database, cPanel, free migration (GrowBig and GoGeek Plans) and top notch security, 24/7 US Based customer service. The top level plan called (GoGeek) offers free SuperCacher to improve the page load speed, plus advanced users have been staging for WordPress to help do more testing on the website, SiteGround WordPress Hosting Plans are worth to try, Starting Price $3.95 / month if you sign up for 12 months. Click the link to view SiteGround WordPress Hosting Plan details, features and comparison. Our SiteGround WordPress hosting review revealed a lot. Namely that the in-house innovations and the team backing them are market-leading. If nine nines for an uptime guarantee (99.999%) doesn’t impress you (it should), then the multiple layers of caching, WordPress staging, and Git versioning control will. From a custom downtime prevention mechanism to 1-click staging for WordPress and user-focused support software, WP hosting with SiteGround is one of the best customer experiences you’ll find in the industry. Read the highlights of our review below :

• Officially endorsed by WordPress.org as a top host for WP
• FREE WordPress transfer (Only GrowBig and GoGeek Plans) or site setup with 1-click install
• Pre-installed Git, 3 caching levels, and FREE CDN
• FREE WordPress setup wizard, staging, and auto-updates
• 99.9% uptime, 24/7 support, and custom chat system
• Auto-migration with WordPress setup done by in-house experts
• 1-click WordPress staging to get your site visitor-ready
• 99.999% uptime guarantee so your new site stays online

Great Designs With SiteGround : WordPress Themes and Templates

Designing your dream site, powered by WP, is super simple with SiteGround. WordPress themes are available by the boatload, both premium and free options, and it only takes a few intuitive clicks to get your site’s template downloaded and installed. Are you running a burgeoning business and in need of an eCommerce theme? What about the artist types out there who want an aesthetically dynamic online portfolio? Maybe you just need a few pages to connect with potential clients for a freelancing side gig. Whatever your website needs, you can bet there’s a theme for it. If you’re on the hunt for a killer website design, this article features the best WordPress themes, plugins, and templates. Your dream SiteGround site could be a reality in minutes.

WordPress Tutorial and 24/7 Support

In-house innovations really help the team shine when it comes to WordPress hosting service :
Support Ticketing System uses an advanced algorithm to match tech ops team members with support tickets based on skill and experience. Live Chat System gives customers access to on-call support experts 24/7. They can return to previously helpful agents with future questions and offer feedback on the service provided. WordPress Tutorials via videos and online guides get you through any WP hiccup. SiteGround’s 1-click cPanel installation for WordPress is super easy to execute. If you get stuck, though, SiteGround has WordPress how-to tutorials for beginners available. Just follow their online video lessons and you’ll be a WordPress pro in no time.

What’s more, you’ll get all the hosting essentials: cPanel license, and CloudFlare CDN. The team has covered all of their bases in ensuring users a hassle-free, WordPress-friendly hosting experience.

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What SiteGround Does Right? (Pros)

There's no two web hosting providers that do things in exactly the same way. Pricing, performance, features and free perks are just some of the attributes that differentiate from one company to another. I’ve thoroughly examined the various strengths of SiteGround to present you with some of the areas in which the firm stands a cut above most of its competitors. Peruse the information below, and then create your account at SiteGround now.

Website Speed

The low-latency delivery of content is what web hosting is all about. Security protections, developer tools and the other benefits that come with a SiteGround membership are nice, but when the rubber meets the road, speed ought to be one of your top considerations. This is because slowly loading sites really annoy visitors, and they can even lead to penalties from Google and other search engines. Fortunately, SiteGround serves up web content with speeds that are some of the best on the market today. Many reviewers, third-party testing groups, and ordinary users agree Your website guests will be treated to blazing-fast speeds if you choose SiteGround as your hosting provider.

It’s not because of random chance that SiteGround has been able to keep its speeds so high. Through the use of solid-state drives, the company is able to transfer data rapidly. This technology contains no moving parts, so it’s not subject to the physical limitations of reading data from spinning platters. Another factor contributing to the lag-free performance offered by SiteGround lies in its use of the CloudFlare content delivery network. By caching files in multiple places around the world, this system allows pages to be sent from whichever spot is best depending on the location of the user.

Enviable Uptime Record

You probably want your readers or customers to be able to access your site at all times, and this is just what the SiteGround web hosting solution allows them to do. The organization claims to have maintained 99.996% uptime over the last 12 months :
This handily beats the 99.9% guarantee offered by the web hosting site. Under the terms of this guarantee, you’ll receive a credit of one month of free hosting after any year during which your site suffered more than 0.1% downtime. In case the uptime of your site dipped below 99%, you’ll get an extra month free for every percentage point below 99%. This means that when you join up for web hosting at SiteGround, you’ll be able to rest easy in the knowledge that your web pages are always available. In order to accomplish this challenging feat, the firm continuously monitors its servers around the clock to identify and correct issues before they result in system failure. Custom monitoring software reduces response times and predicts when problems are likely to occur so that the necessary actions can be taken to forestall them. Other measures developed to handle potential technical troubles include the use of regular data backups, customized account isolation protocols and in-house modifications to the Linux kernel to make it more stable. When it comes to safeguarding customers files, SiteGround doesn’t believe in relying solely on standard-issue implementations developed by others.

Choice of Data Centers

As befits its international scope and worldwide reach, SiteGround operates multiple Data Centers. They’re located in widely separated areas of the globe, allowing for better performance according to the requirements of each individual client. There are four such facilities, which are housed in :
Chicago, Illinois
London, United Kingdom
Amsterdam, Netherlands
Singapore

Each center contains redundant electrical infrastructure, including generators, allowing them to weather local utility outages and natural disasters without compromising server integrity or operation. There’s also physical security present, which includes human personnel and biometric systems. The company boasts of “access control man traps” and “bullet proof lobbies,” which sound like they come straight out of a James Bond movie. When you turn to SiteGround as your web hosting site, you’ll get to indicate which data center you want your websites to be hosted on. Make your decision based upon the expected geographical distribution of your users, and you’ll be able to cater to their convenience by improving page loading speeds even beyond SiteGround’s winning everyday performance.

Customer Support

If you should encounter a concern that you want to reach out to SiteGround about, then you’ll be glad to see that there are multiple avenues of support present. You can place a telephone call, launch a live chat session or create a support ticket. You’ll get to connect with a human being instantly through telephone or live chat, and SiteGround states that you’ll get an answer within 10 minutes through the ticketing system. All of these support channels are available 24/7, which is no less than you would expect from a firm that has customers in many countries and time zones.

Besides just asking questions strictly related to hosting service, you can also inquire about other topics as well. The staff members at SiteGround have a broad range of knowledge and experience related to content management systems, applications, plug-ins and a variety of other subjects. If you’re keen on expanding your own personal skill sets, then you’ll find the Knowledge Base a handy resource. Articles are listed in categories, like “cPanel,” “SSL” and “Search Engine Optimization,” letting you browse to the documents that you’re most interested in. There are Tutorials on how to use WordPress, Magento and other popular programs. Be sure to check out the video lessons if you’d rather see the information presented in the audiovisual form.

Easy WordPress Management

WordPress may be the most widely used content management system on the internet today, so it certainly merits your attention if you plan on creating websites. Originally designed as a blogging platform, this software has grown over more than a decade to become a fully featured tool for crafting not just blogs but also e-commerce stores, corporate pages and almost every other kind of website. When you become a customer at SiteGround, you’ll get to employ sophisticated tools for making your WordPress experience go more smoothly and effortlessly. This starts with one-click installation through the cPanel interface. Going forward, all security patches and updates will be automatically applied, sparing you the hassles of making sure that your installation is up to date. The security team will even stay alerted for threats and try to keep your instance of WordPress safe with tailored web application firewall rules. No-cost, daily backups of your WordPress files give you the peace of mind you deserve.

SiteGround has coded and deployed what it calls a SuperCacher that works with WordPress to make your dynamic content show up more quickly in users browsers. Unfortunately, this SuperCacher isn’t available with the basic StartUp package but only with the two higher tiers of service. Those who opt for the high-end GoGeek hosting plan will also get to use a staging area where they can preview changes to their WordPress pages before altering their live websites. SiteGround’s familiarity and competence in handling WordPress hosting have caused WordPress.org to list it as a hosting partner, one of only four companies so honored. The firm also takes pride in the special features it offers for Joomla and other CMSes, so there’s plenty for you to look forward to, even if you decide that WordPress isn’t for you.

Well-Arranged cPanel Interface

When you buy web hosting service from SiteGround, you’ll be able to control all aspects of your account through the well-renowned cPanel interface. This web hosting control panel is the most popular such program available because it contains powerful functionality combined with a clean user interface. Within cPanel, it’s a breeze to purchase additional services, install applications with a single click, manage your databases, and conduct all other tasks that are vital in keeping your site functioning well. SiteGround has made certain additions to the standard cPanel in order to expand its utility and present the information in the most convenient way to customers.

Corporate Culture

Although they can’t be measured in gigabytes or milliseconds, the corporate values of a web hosting organization will have an impact on its employees and therefore on the service they extend to customers. SiteGround maintains a relaxing work environment with game rooms, company vacations, short Friday hours and many other perks for its personnel. Evidently, execs at SiteGround believes that a happy worker is a productive worker. It’s not just a party every day at SiteGround’s offices, however. The firm invests heavily in making sure that its workforce is competent and prepared to meet the complex needs of clients. This includes comprehensive training, often consisting of one-on-one sessions between junior employees and more senior supervisors. All managers are promoted from within, leading to a cohesive team structure. Whatever the company is doing, it seems to be working. According to a survey that SiteGround ran at the end of 2016, it scored a 96 percent customer satisfaction rate for the year with 95 percent of clients rating the firm as better than other webhosts that they’ve used.

Extra Goodies

SiteGround does its best to provide a lot of freebies on top of its secure and dependable hosting products. When you purchase web hosting service from SiteGround, you’ll have the opportunity to take advantage of several free assets offered to keep you happy. They include :

1. Free Let's Encrypt SSL Certificate
Secure Socket Layer is a technology that keeps communications between your website and its visitors private. It’s rapidly becoming a must-have element of any successful web presence, and Google even gives a search boost to pages that use it. Ordinarily, you have to pay a yearly fee to obtain an SSL certificate, but you’ll get Let's Encrypt SSL without any additional payment required for a year as part of your SiteGround web hosting account.

2. Free Site Migration (Only For GrowBig and GoGeek Plans)
If you already have a website at another web hosting provider, you can have it, along with its domain name, transferred to SiteGround for free (GrowBig and GoGeek). You can choose to handle the transfer yourself or receive assistance from support. If your existing host uses the cPanel interface, then your whole account, including settings and emails, can be migrated over; otherwise, only your files and databases will be moved to your new account. There’s a limit of one site transferred for free.

3. Website Builder
Although it’s not as sophisticated as products available from some other web hosting companies, SiteGround does have a drag-and-drop website builder supplied by Weebly. It allows you to combine text, images, videos, forms and other elements to make good-looking web pages with no coding experience required. It generates responsive pages, meaning that users will be able to conveniently access your content from their mobile devices.

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SiteGround Weak Points (Cons)

In spite of all the advantages of SiteGround as a web hosting site, there are a few minor quibbles that you might wish to think about before you join up at Siteground for shared web hosting. I don’t feel that any of these drawbacks are deal-breakers by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s my duty to tell you about them here.

Plan Limitations

Regardless of the level of service you choose at SiteGround, you’ll be able to run unlimited databases, and there’s no hard limit on the amount of traffic to your site. However, your storage space is strictly limited: to 30 GB with GoGeek, 20 GB with GrowBig and a paltry 10 GB with StartUp. To add insult to injury, StartUp customers can only host one website on their account at a time. Most new sites should fall comfortably within the 10 GB limit; however, certain types of media, like videos and uncompressed photos, can cause your storage requirements to become much higher. In any case, this cap on the size of your files might hinder your growth going forward. It’s perhaps understandable that SiteGround wishes to restrict the resources used by customers with the cheapest service package, but it’s nearly unconscionable that the firm’s top-of-the-line shared hosting service, GoGeek, still offers only a relatively small amount of disk space.

There’s another method by which SiteGround limits your resource consumption, and it doesn’t really advertise this fact too openly. The number of CPU cycles consumed by your account is strictly tracked, and if you use too many in a month, then you might find your hosting service suspended. This isn’t entirely under your control because a number of CPU cycles used will depend, at least somewhat, on the number of hits your pages get and what users do while browsing. There are a few steps you can take to reduce processor time required, but these aren’t immediately apparent unless you’re already familiar with how servers work.

Pricing Idiosyncrasies

There are lower-cost shared hosting plans available at other sites, but most of them don’t quite offer the same features and security that SiteGround does. For what you get, opening up a SiteGround account is a pretty attractive value proposition.However, this only applies if you purchase a plan for a year or longer. If you elect to buy only one month at a time, then you’ll be charged a setup fee, which is several times more expensive than the monthly rate for a 12-month or longer package.

Focus on the Power User

The hosting services provided by SiteGround come with a wealth of tools and settings that advanced users will undoubtedly appreciate. On the other hand, some of this potential will likely remain untapped by less tech-savvy customers. An example of this is the CloudFlare CDN, which is available to all clients free of charge. You must manually activate it in the cPanel, though, which means that if you don’t know about it, you’ll be missing out.

On the whole, this is only a small point against SiteGround. While it would be nice if there were more hand-holding for newbies, they can get help if they really need it by contacting support.

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SiteGround Comparisons

Out of the most well-known hosts that I’ve used as a customer or consultant, here’s how SiteGround compares directly to each.

SiteGround vs GoDaddy GoDaddy is the biggest brand in the web hosting industry. GoDaddy has better overall and short term pricing. However, SiteGround’s support and technology are much better than GoDaddy, despite GoDaddy’s improvement in this area since 2013. Unless you have reasons to go with GoDaddy, you’ll get a much better product from SiteGround.

SiteGround vs HostGator HostGator is one of Endurance International’s other well-known brands. They are best-known for offering good web hosting with unmetered features for very affordable prices. I use them for small personal projects - and they beat SiteGround on pricing and core hosting features. However, SiteGround has better support and performance. So again, between them, go with SiteGround for better value & better performance and HostGator for better (or short-term) pricing and/or unmetered features.

SiteGround vs InMotion InMotion Hosting is SiteGround’s big independent (ie, also not owned by a big holding company), competitor. They both have great features, knowledgeable support, and high performance. However, InMotion’s pricing is better overall, especially once you factor in upgrade fees. InMotion also has a longer (90 days) guarantee, better onboarding, and clean WordPress installs. On the flip side, SiteGround has features like automatic staging, free Let's Encrypt SSL and global data centers. I use InMotion for most of my projects, but SiteGround is a solid choice as well, especially if you value their unique features. Here you can read my review about InMotion Hosting.

SiteGround vs Bluehost Bluehost is one of Endurance International’s most well-known brands. They beat SiteGround on pricing. However, SiteGround does much better with performance and core hosting features whereas Bluehost has better “bonuses” and side upgrades. If performance matters more to you – then pay a bit extra for SiteGround. If you’re just running a simple, straightforward project, then Bluehost is good.

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SiteGround Frequently Asked Questions

Here are some Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) you may have about SiteGround Hosting :

What is SiteGround?

SiteGround is a web hosting company that offers a range of hosting services, including Shared, Cloud, and Dedicated Hosting. The company is located in Sofia, Bulgaria. It has data centers in Chicago, London, and Amsterdam.

Can I choose a data center location?

Yes. SiteGround uses Data Centers in Chicago, London, Amsterdam, and Singapore. If you sign up for a dedicated hosting plan, you can choose the continent that your server is located in.

Is there a money-back guarantee?

Yes. There is a 30-day money-back guarantee. You can cancel your service within the first 30 days and receive a full refund. The money-back guarantee does not cover cloud or dedicated hosting, and there are some restrictions on reseller plans. You must raise your request through the User Area to claim your refund.

What payment methods does SiteGround accept?

SiteGround accepts payment by VISA and MasterCard. Payments must be made for one, two or three years service. However, if you want to trial its service, you can also pay for one month before committing to a longer contract.

Will SiteGround back up my website?

SiteGround stores 30 backup copies of your website at any time. These backups are user-accessible, so you can restore them yourself from cPanel. Many hosts don't allow you to access their backups, so this is a good feature to have. You can also create manual backups through cPanel at any time.

Does SiteGround offer free site migration?

Yes, SiteGround will migrate one existing website free of charge, without downtime. This includes WordPress websites. If you need more help, SiteGround provides 24/7 support to get you up and running quickly. If you need help moving your domain to SiteGround, it has Step-by-Step tutorials in its help center.

Does it offer one-click installers?

SiteGround has a WordPress and Joomla! auto-installer, so you can get your site up and running within a few minutes. It also has an automatic updater tool, a caching feature (Premium plans only), and the ability to create staging instances. The host offers multiple tutorials, as well as free themes for both platforms. All of these resources are available via its website. You can also access more than 230 one-click installer scripts via Softaculous. Note that Fantastico has been discontinued by SiteGround. If you don't want to create a Joomla or WordPress site, you can use the SiteGround website builder to build a site using templates.

How does SiteGround secure web hosting accounts?

SiteGround isolates shared hosting accounts from each other, which prevents malware from spreading from one shared hosting customer to the next. The company has also rolled out more than 800 custom firewall rules to prevent malicious hacks. You should still take measures to keep your website safe from hacking, including using a strong password for your account, and taking advantage of its automatic updates for WordPress and Joomla.

Is Windows hosting available?

SiteGround offers Linux hosting only. It does not offer Windows hosting.

What's SiteGround's uptime guarantee?

SiteGround guarantees 99.9% uptime, averaged over a 12 month period. If it fails to provide that, it will provide an account credit. The amount of downtime will determine the value of the credit you receive. SiteGround does this proactively, so you don't need to monitor uptime yourself. It provides an uptime calculation in its User Area for each customer.

What Control Panel does SiteGround offer?

All plans come with cPanel. There are no extra fees for cPanel on any plan. Reseller, dedicated, and cloud hosting plans also come with WHM.

Does SiteGround offer VPS hosting?

SiteGround provides Cloud Hosting instead of VPS hosting. Cloud hosting offers very similar specifications to VPS hosting, with the ability to scale up your plan on demand. All cloud hosting packages are fully managed.

Is there a reseller hosting plan?

Yes, SiteGround has a reseller hosting plan with a scalable volume discount, so you receive a better price as your requirements increase. Resellers also benefit from a discount price on domain name registrations.

Does SiteGround offer management with dedicated hosting plans?

Yes. Management is included as standard on all dedicated hosting plans.

What programming languages does SiteGround support?

SiteGround supports many scripting languages, including Perl, Ruby on Rails, and multiple versions of PHP, including PHP 7. It also supports Python, but you'll need to run Python scripts inside the CGI-bin folder.

Can SiteGround provide specialized Magento support?

Yes. SiteGround has a hosting plan optimized for Magento Community Edition. The plan includes shared hosting with CloudFlare and Railgun, free Magento install (via support or Softaculous), free site transfer from another host (Only GrowBig and GoGeek plans), and specialized Magento support. SiteGround provides Free Magento Tutorials on its website.

Which version of Linux will I get on my dedicated server?

SiteGround uses Apache/Nginx and CentOS on its dedicated servers.

Do SiteGround plans come with a CDN?

Yes. All SiteGround plans include CloudFlare.

Does SiteGround offer unlimited storage and bandwidth for shared hosting customers?

SiteGround does not include unlimited storage with its shared hosting accounts but bandwidth is unmetered on all plans.

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Conclusion

Today’s web hosting landscape is pretty crowded and competitive, which can make it a chore to identify the best web hosting sites. Hopefully, you’ve read enough about SiteGround by now to realize that it’s a stellar webhost for your new website. With three levels of shared hosting service, you have the opportunity to select the one that’s best for the size and characteristics of the site you’re planning to create. There’s a clear upgrade path for you as your traffic volume increases. You may even outgrow SiteGround’s shared hosting and progress to one of the four fully managed cloud hosting services that are offered. At the high-end, SiteGround provides three tiers of dedicated server hosting, which will be great for you if your website turns into a major internet destination.

They have industry-leading and impressive uptime levels, fast servers, strong security features, and excellent customer service that leave the competition in the rear-view mirror. The few downsides of choosing SiteGround as your web host, in my opinion, far outweighed by the upsides. Provided that your site doesn't go over SiteGround’s resource limits, you can be confident that your site will load quickly, be available when you need it, and will be secure to protect your data and your visitors’ privacy. If you’re still sitting on the fence about SiteGround then take advantage of their 30-day money-back guarantee, meaning you can “try them out” and if you aren’t happy, then you will get your money back.

There’s a reason SiteGround Hosting is one of the fastest growing independent hosting companies. They have a solid product and a great support. Being headquartered in Bulgaria allows them to be much more globally oriented than many US companies while offering a truly world-class product. If they would disclose and/or remove their auto-WordPress install, they would be that much better. If you are looking for a hosting company with an international bent, a focus on solid technical features, and a full path of plans for a website that will grow, you can get a 67% OFFdiscount on SiteGround’s plans here. And If you are looking for a hosting company with all the benefits of SiteGround - but with better pricing, I’d go with InMotion Hosting. Get InMotion’s discount here.

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SiteGround Discounts

Get 67% OFF Shared Web-Hosting Plans here. Only $3.95/month instead of the regular $11.95/month.

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Have you used SiteGround’s hosting services? What were their best features and major disadvantages as per your experience? Let us know in the comments below, and thanks for reading!

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