SiteGround Hosting Review: Service Quick Overview

SiteGround excels in all the important aspects of web hosting (i.e., performance, uptime, security, and customer support). On top of that, the company’s hosting services have tremendous features, some of which are not offered by other web hosts.

So, whether you’re a newbie or a pro, SiteGround is a great web hosting option as you enjoy efficiency, reliable uptime, flawless performance, exceptional support, class-leading security, and premium features, regardless of the hosting plan you purchase.

You also get a generous 30-day free trial to request a refund. However, we recommend you always do homework before committing to any hosting provider.

SiteGround Hosting Review: What are the pros and cons of SiteGround?

So is SiteGround any good? Before making your decision, consider the pros and cons listed below.

What makes SiteGround stand out?

If you are a consumer who prefers the creative boutique to the big box brand, then SiteGround should be on your web hosting shortlist.

Big companies are gobbling up many hosting companies. Sometimes the special qualities that define a host get left behind in the process.

Rather, SiteGround’s pride in ownership stems from its:

• Hosting solutions developed in-house.
• Frictionless scaling for small businesses.
• Advanced optimization of your hosting architecture to deliver excellent performance and speed.
• Software solutions are available to improve performance and tighten security, such as artificial intelligence to protect your website from breaches and operating system improvements that have become part of what is known as the Linux kernel.
• An enthusiastic community where SiteGround staff meets and mentors users worldwide and sponsors WordCamps, Joomla Days, and other tech conferences in major cities worldwide.
• Well-trained in-house customer service staff. Unlike most web hosts, you’ll see who you’re talking to, their name, how many customers they’ve assisted, and how customers have rated that person’s service.

SiteGround is committed to helping its clients succeed in their online businesses. The company also goes beyond what is normally expected of web hosts to include its own malware/virus scanning software and isolation technology that prevents infected websites from taking down other websites on a given server.

Types of SiteGround web hosting

SiteGround offers just about everything you would expect a web host to offer. There are various cloud and shared web hosting packages and managed WordPress hosting plans to choose from.

They also offer special packages designed for resellers, WordPress users, and even business customers. Their custom solutions are one of the most popular features.

Hosting options with SiteGround include:

1. shared hosting
2. cloud hosting
3. WordPress hosting
4. WooCommerce Hosting

SiteGround Shared Hosting

Their StartUp shared hosting plan comes with 10GB of storage, and unlimited emails, allows one website, handles network traffic for up to 10,000 visitors per month and supports Cloudflare web performance and security service.

Below, we’ll show you how the prices and features of this starter plan compare to entry-level plans offered by other hosting providers.

SiteGround also offers many other hosting packages besides the StartUp plan – these plans come with additional resources and features.

SiteGround WordPress Hosting

Many people think of WordPress as just a blogging platform, but many businesses rely on it for much more. In fact, the most popular eCommerce software application in the world is WooCommerce, a WordPress plugin.

With WordPress, you can do almost anything you want.

SiteGround WooCommerce Hosting

Although many businesses start out wanting the equivalent of a business card online, they often grow. Your business is already at that point. There is little difference between selling products in your physical store and selling them through your website.

There’s only one extra step to selling online: shipping. What’s amazing about SiteGround is that it allows you to do this with their lowest-cost plans, where you’ll have access to Magento, PrestaShop, OpenCart, and more.

You can even do drop shipping, where you sell stuff you don’t even keep in inventory. Your e-business may grow faster than your physical store.

For those running WordPress, WooCommerce can turn your existing site into an eCommerce site.

If your eCommerce hosting needs are particularly demanding, consider SiteGround’s GoGeek plan seriously. It offers to host resources and features that are powerful enough to handle high-volume online store traffic.

SiteGround Cloud Hosting

SiteGround’s cloud hosting plans are a distinct step up from their Shared and WordPress plans. Unless your business is already very well established on the Internet, it is unlikely that you will need them.

On the other hand, if you have a lot of visitors to your site, need to do a lot of calculations, or store a lot of data, cloud plans offer quite a bit.

They start with the entry plan that provides 4 CPU cores, 8GB of memory, and 40GB of SSD storage space for $100 per month. And upgrade to the Super Power plan that provides 16 CPU cores, 20GB of memory, and 160GB of SSD storage for $400 per month.

All cloud plans provide 5TB of data transfer per month. Cloud hosting is often a good alternative to dedicated hosting. When your business needs this, support staff can be very helpful in making your decision.

SiteGround Reseller Hosting

SiteGround offers a reseller plan for businesses that want to host websites as their core business or want to add hosting as an extra. For example, a web designer might want to offer to host to their clients.

SiteGround reseller prices start at $9.99 per month. All of their reseller plans allow you to host unlimited clients.

SiteGround Plans and Pricing

SiteGround offers a wide range of hosting solutions, from shared, VPS, and dedicated servers, to cloud hosting and WordPress. Here is an overview of their plans and the current price list. For the latest and most up-to-date pricing, visit the SiteGround website.

Plan Name	Disc Space	Bandwidth	Monthly Price
StartUp Shared Hosting	10GB	10K Visits	6.99
GrowBig Shared Hosting	20GB	25K Visits	9.99
GoGeek Shared Hosting	40GB	100K Visits	14.99
Entry Cloud Hosting	40GB	5TB	100
Business cloud hosting	80GB	5TB	200
Business Plus Cloud Hosting	120GB	5TB	300
Super Power Cloud	160GB	5TB	400
StartUp WordPress Hosting	10GB	10K Visits	6.99
GrowBig WordPress Hosting	20GB	25K Visits	9.99
GoGeek WordPress Hosting	40GB	100K Visits	14.99

SiteGround Money Back Guarantee

SiteGround offers a 30-day money-back guarantee. If you cancel within 30 days of the session, you will get a 100% refund.

Domain names, administration fees, and add-ons are non-refundable. Most web hosts give you a credit equal to the fee you paid, but with SiteGround, you can apply a credit to your account or a full refund to your credit card.

Do you need a website or an online store? SiteGround offers the Weebly site builder for free. It has a mobile app that tracks sales from your cell phone. SiteGround also offers WordPress Starter, which helps users who prefer the WordPress platform get their sites up and running quickly.

However, if you decide to cancel after 30 days, you will only receive a prorated fee for the remainder of the term.

Features included with SiteGround hosting plans

SiteGround is widely recognized as one of the top hosting providers. They are officially recommended by WordPress and WooCommerce and have partnered with some of the most popular theme providers (Envato, Elegant Themes, etc.). SiteGround is on its way to becoming a household name like GoDaddy.

SiteGround’s commitment to greatly improving its technology and fine-tuning its behavior has allowed them to develop powerful speed tools available exclusively to its customers.

Supercacher, one of the best features of Siteground, increases the number of visits a site can handle and increases the website’s loading speed.

Supercacher is continually innovating with the recent release of dynamic (full page) caching, which is now available on all plans, providing a 50%-500% boost in WordPress performance.

You will also get the new compression algorithm provided by Brotli to help compress websites to allow them to load faster. SiteGround has enabled Brotli by default on their Site Tools servers, so websites hosted by them can get up to 15-20% speed gains.

SiteGround also offers the new blazing-fast PHP settings that provide 30% faster speeds and lower TTFB (available from GrowBig and GoGeek) for all sites, including the latest edition of MySQL settings implemented for faster query processing. Database faster.

SiteGround is a gem regarding reliability and quality web hosting services. Their strategy is to provide services specially designed for each client’s unique needs.

SiteGround Tools

SiteGround recently replaced cPanel with its own in-house developed Client Area and Site Tools.

With this new interface, it’s easier to manage your sites. SitGround built its new interface using REACT as a single app, allowing you to work efficiently while accessing your account through any device.

Cloudflare CDN

Each of these data centers uses high-end hosting technology and practices. For example, they use multiple power feeds to avoid power outages and multiple carriers to avoid interruptions in network connectivity. These world-class data centers offer high availability, low latency, and exceptional reliability.

The Cloudflare CDN amplifies this network. CDNs (content delivery networks) make updated copies of your website regularly and store them in cities around the world.

This is so that a web visitor can access your site from a data center location closer to them—the result: your site loads quickly.

Your website will be propagated across all Cloudflare global network nodes (pictured). Image courtesy of Cloudflare

Cloudflare currently has locations in over 200 cities in over 100 countries, from Reykjavik to Riyadh and from Baghdad to Boston.

SiteGround for Small Businesses

SiteGround is especially good for small businesses for many reasons.

Are you starting?

If you’re starting a brick-and-mortar business, you want a website for the same reason you want a sign above your store: to say, “We’re here!”

When people hear about a business, the first thing they do is search for it on a search engine. You want them to find a simple site that tells them what products and services you provide, plus your location and phone number.

A Host Your Business Can Grow With

SiteGround allows you to grow without moving to a new hosting company. Moving hosts takes a long time, and there could be problems. Whenever possible, it’s good to stay with your current host. SiteGround makes it easy.

SiteGround offers many hosting options, so moving hosts should be optional. You can start with their StartUp shared hosting plan and grow to whatever you want: the Super Power Cloud Hosting plan or hundreds of dedicated servers to build your cloud with OpenStack.

They also offer business hosting, where they will build a server for your exact needs and then manage it for you.

Secure Sockets Layer (SSL)

At this point on the Internet, most hosts provide Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) for all hosted sites. The information sent between the server and the visitor will be encrypted. You’ll see this in the URL, which will send data over HTTPS instead of unencrypted HTTP.

But if you sell things on the Internet, you need an SSL specific to your site. This also requires your site to have its IP address. SiteGround provides these types of SSL for you.

If you’re not selling products online, you won’t need an SSL certificate beyond the one SiteGround provides. The same goes for your IP address.

Additional SiteGround Features, Bonuses, and Extras

Other great features offered at SiteGround include:

• Developer features like GIT integration, site staging, and WP-CLI integration.
• WordPress and Joomla toolkits for all websites. These tools automate many tasks, from changing the domain address, resetting administrator passwords and troubleshooting file permissions.
• An easy-to-use interface that incorporates all the necessary information in a single web page.
• HTTP/2 technology to increase the performance of HTTPS websites.
• Features for freelancers and agencies like partners (customers can use their admin area instead of needing their account login credentials) and white label (offer SiteGround hosting as a service to your customers without SiteGround branding).

Bonuses/Extras

Additionally, SiteGround has a security layer that ensures the plugins and themes you install are clean and secure and have a securely encrypted connection to your website. This layer of security protects the sensitive information on your site by making it difficult for them to be breached.

Users can also pay a regular fee for SiteGround’s “SG Site Scanner.” This service checks your website daily and immediately notifies you if your website has been breached or injected with malicious code.

Other great SiteGround bonuses include:

• Free website builder
• Regular software updates to keep your website running at its best
• Freedom to choose the server location closest to your users
• Premium support option
• Advanced caching technology for super-fast speeds
• A 30-day cancellation window

Do you need a website but want something easier than WordPress or Drupal? SiteGround offers the Weebly site builder for free. Visit Weebly to learn more about the builder and examples of entrepreneurs using it.

What is the performance and uptime of SiteGround?

Server downtime is the worst enemy of any business site. This is because every time your website goes down (even for as little as 30 minutes), you lose potential customers, lose faith in your current customers, and can drop your SEO ranking.

This is why it is advisable to go with a web host with at least the current average of 99.9% uptime.

Uptime Guarantee: 99.9%

SiteGround offers a 99.9% uptime guarantee and gives you credit if you still need to achieve this. If your uptime drops below 99.9%, they will give you a free month of hosting. For every 1% uptime below 99.9%, they will provide you with an additional month of free service.

Our experience is that SiteGround rarely has this problem. So what you get is solid web hosting instead of refunds.

Real-time monitoring

Unlike web hosts that track their servers in 1-5 minute intervals, SiteGround tracks in real-time. As a result, they detect server problems immediately, so they are fixed much faster. This real-time tracking, coupled with innovative server technology, ensures minimal downtime.

Our test site, launched seven months ago on SiteGround’s GoGeek plan, has had 100% uptime.

Performance and Response time

Many of us need clarification on uptime and response time.

Uptime: Uptime is the amount of time the server is available.

Response time: The response time is the time it takes for the server to send a web page. As with their uptime, SiteGround provides excellent response times.

This is possible because SiteGround only uses the latest technology in its server hardware. User accounts are also occasionally moved from older hardware to new, faster, upgraded servers to ensure flawless performance for all your hosted websites at all times.

Fast website load times

The company is one of the fastest web hosts, with load time speeds ranging from 20 milliseconds to over a second.

The speed technologies provided include:

• The Cloudflare CDN.
• Supercacher. You can choose between static or dynamic caching or Memcached. (Memcached is a powerful open-source caching system.)
• SSDs (Solid State Drives) are used in all accounts. These are superior in speed and reliability to HDDs (hard disk drives).
• NGINX: Web server technology that speeds up the loading time of your site.
• HTTP/2 enabled servers. This is the newest network protocol and contributes to speed.
• PHP 8: PHP is a server-side scripting language usually used to create dynamic website content. This version of PHP has been found to increase speed considerably. Additionally, SiteGround’s GoGeek and cloud hosting plans have lightning-fast PHP enabled.
• QUIC: This technology allows your pages to load quickly, even when the visitor has a slow Internet connection.
• Brotli Compression Algorithm: Brotli is a next-generation compression algorithm that significantly reduces the size of data moving from server to visitor.
• SG Optimizer: This WordPress plugin was developed by SiteGround and is exclusively for SiteGround users. It includes several features to improve your WordPress site’s performance.

How does SiteGround keep your site secure?

SiteGround implements sophisticated intrusion detection and prevention systems that continuously scan for and block malware and viruses.

Their proprietary systems allow them to troubleshoot immediately and anticipate issues to take proactive action. This is unlike certain other web hosts, which perform their scans once a day or once a week.

Artificial intelligence defends itself against rogue bots

In April 2017, SiteGround launched an artificial intelligence (AI) platform to block malicious bots. Bots use brute force attacks that use massive server resources to breach a website login.

Shortly after the launch of the AI, SiteGround’s Hristo Pandjarov stated: “We are already seeing amazing results from the operation of the system. Every hour it blocks between 500,000 and 2 million brute force attempts across all of our servers.”

Protection Against Breaching

Additionally, SiteGround has a unique isolation system, which protects your website from breaching if someone else’s site on your server is compromised.

SiteGrounds managed WordPress hosting handles the plugin and core updates for you. Since outdated plugins often lead to breaching, this service benefits WordPress users.

This SiteGround security video playlist illustrates some of their top security strategies.

Data center security and breach alerts

Server security is the responsibility of your web host. But you are responsible for the security of your website or application. Bad coding leaves the door wide open for breacher.

SiteGround offers breach Alert, an early warning system developed by GlobalSign, or helps you. BreachAlert informs you about hidden malware on your site before the malware goes live.

SiteGround data center security includes:

• Redundant power supply through UPS (uninterruptible); multiple power feeds and generators.
• Human monitoring of servers 24/7
• Biometric Access Points
• Access control traps
• bulletproof hallways
• Video surveillance

SiteGround even goes so far as to have replacement components for all server parts and replacement servers on hand to ensure performance is never compromised for too long.

Does SiteGround handle site backups?

All SiteGround plans offer free backups and “restores” (restoring to a previous version of your website). Specifically, you get free automatic daily system backups and 30 automatic backups.

Restoring your site to a previous version is easy – it only takes a single click.

• Instant backups and restores are free on all plans.
• On the GrowBig plan, you can schedule backups (“backups on demand”) to occur at a specific time.

Instant backups on demand

You can create an “on-demand” backup instantly at any time. This option is available for free on GrowBig plans and above. Situations where this is useful include before you publish significant changes to your website.

Backups and restores are free on all plans.

When you create an “on-demand” backup, you can back up files, folders, emails, or your entire account.

How is SiteGround Help and Support?

Another of SiteGround’s strengths, according to users of the web host, is the quality customer support that is professional, fast, and friendly.

Support team with more staff

SiteGround purposely places more than enough customer service representatives on each shift to ensure your questions and issues are addressed quickly, whether you choose the live chat, email, ticket, or phone support route.

This overstaffing of customer support representatives makes SiteGround respond instantly to phone calls and live chat inquiries, while submitted support tickets wait at most 10 minutes for responses.

SiteGround also has a wide range of tutorials and webinars in its customer support arsenal. They have useful basic and technical information on almost all web hosting topics.

Unlike most web hosts, SiteGround provides live chat support from in-house professionals. You’ll see a picture of the person assisting you (not a stock photo), their real name, and how customers have rated them. Click on his “profile” button to learn more about his background.

SiteGround Advanced Priority Support

Advanced Priority Support is a premium feature that prioritizes your service request above all others and assigns it to the most experienced team members.

This premium customer support service was launched at the end of March 2019 and is available on GoGeek plans and above.

SiteGround Quality Customer Service

For us, the best thing about SiteGround is its customer service. Sure, they have all the infrastructure you could ask for. But most business operators are not computer experts: this is why SiteGround ensures that their support team is knowledgeable.

They are also willing to help you make the best use of your site. They see their job as something other than simply answering your questions and moving on to the next call. Instead, they act more like partners. Your support team member will help you figure out your options and will often install software or change your site for you.

This may sound like overkill, but we have had extensive experience with SiteGround and many other hosting companies. SiteGround’s customer service is some of the best we’ve experienced.

Another area where SiteGround’s support team helps is when spammers visit your site. Users had this problem with SiteGround. But instead of upgrading, they worked with one of the web host’s technicians.

The Technician made several changes to the site to limit the damage caused by spammers. The user reported, “…I haven’t had a problem since.”

What are some good alternatives to SiteGround?

How does SiteGround compare to WP Engine?

Why would anyone choose a managed WordPress host like WP Engine when it costs much more than SiteGround? WP Engine only does WordPress hosting; therefore, all their hardware and software are tuned to host WordPress.

This approach in WordPress provides many benefits, but the biggest one is page load speed, which search engines consider in their rankings.

On the other hand, SiteGround offers several services that WP Engine does not, such as email. For most business users, SiteGround will be fine. But for some, the extra cost of WP Engine is more than worth the extra cost.

What are the other best SiteGround alternatives?

SiteGround is a rock-solid hosting provider and will impress you. However, the best SiteGround alternatives are

SiteGround FAQ