SiteGround Hosting Review: Ground Breaking Hosting
Content
Founded in 2004, in Sofia Bulgaria, SiteGround gradually grew into one of the best hosting providers of shared hosting. SiteGround has over 600 employees working in Sofia, Plovdiv, and Stara Zagora in Bulgaria and Madrid, Spain. Siteground has data centers spread across four continents, hosting over 2,000,000 domains, and is partnered with open-source software powering the web today, such as WordPress and Drupal.
Pros
Cons
Quick Stats
Is SiteGround what you're looking for? If you're an eco-friendly person, then yes, it's one of many green web hosts. If you're looking for a host with free migration, unlimited bandwidth, and emails, then it might be what you're looking for. Climb abroad to know everything you need to know about SiteGround's shared hosting plans.
Eco-Friendly Web Host
SiteGrounds servers run on 100% renewable energy making it another popular green-friendly option for those who don't want to harm the environment.
SiteGround's Types of Hosting
Other than shared hosting, SiteGround offers:
- Reseller Hosting: If you want to sell your server to third parties, SiteGrounds gives you a chance with a price range between $6.69-$100.00/month.
- Cloud Hosting: Not the usual traditional hosting. Your website will work among several servers, ensuring flexibility and scalability. SiteGround offers cloud hosting starting from $100.00/month.
- WordPress Hosting: If you want to host your WordPress website, SiteGround's plans start from $3.99/month.
But as I previously mentioned, we're here to learn about their shared hosting plan, so let's get started.
SiteGround Shared Hosting Plans
SiteGround has three hosting plans StartUp, GrowBig, and GoGeek. These plans come with several features, including unlimited emails, databases, and unmetered traffic. That's only the beginning. Let's take a look at everything the plans offer in detail.
SiteGround doesn't provide a free domain with any of its plans.
SiteGround's three plans in detail:
| StartUp | GrowBig | GoGeek | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Number of Websites | 1 | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Web Space | 10 GB | 20 GB | 40 GB |
| Bandwidth | Unmetered | Unmetered | Unmetered |
| Monthly Visits | 10,000 | 25,000 | 100,000 |
| Backup | Daily | Daily | Daily |
| SSL Certificate | Included | Included | Included |
| Website Builder | Included | Included | Included |
| Domain Name | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| Free Email Accounts | Included | Included | Included |
| Databases | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Starting Price | $3.99/month | $6.69/month | $10.69/month |
| Renewal Price | $14.99/month | $24.99/month | $39.99/month |
SiteGround has a 30-day money-back guarantee for users, so you can try it for a full month before deciding if it's the service you want to go for or not!
Payment Methods
Like other web hosts, if you want to pay for your SiteGround plan, you can rely on major credit cards or PayPal. However, the payment method might differ based on your region.
Ease of Use
If you're a beginner, you're probably looking for an easy-to-use web host. Well, lucky for you, SiteGround is straightforward, and using it has never been easier since the backend was redesigned two years ago.
There's a website builder with a drag-and-drop function, so building a website is a piece of cake. But we'll get into the details of that later below.
Customer Service
Customer service is available 24/7 live help for users and can be reached by:
- Live chat support
- Phone call
- Helpdesk tickets
SiteGround also provides users with Instant self-help options, including:
- Pinned helped on all pages
- Smart AI chatbot
- Automated solutions
Advanced priority support is available for Premium users providing help with the most experienced personnel.
Security
SSL Certificate
Let's Encrypt free SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) Encryption. This changes your website from an HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) into an HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure).
SSL certification allows online payment transactions as many businesses have the HTTPS configuration to run their website.
SSL certification also makes your website more trusted (i.e., less likely to be blocked by antivirus services) and helps place it higher on search engines via organic searches.
Password Protected Directories
Protect parts of your websites with passwords so users won't be able to access your data. If you don't know how to try contacting SiteGround's customer service, they'll guide you.
Spam Assassin Protection
Spam Protection provides filtering protection against spam from incoming and outgoing e-mail messages.
Hotlink Protection
To prevent other websites from linking to your images, videos, and data, SiteGround has a hotlinking feature that will protect your data. All you have to do is enable it from the cPanel.
Web Application Firewall & DDoS Protection
Another security measure SiteGround considers is the Web Application Firewall that's made to protect your website from any attack like DDoS attacks. Plus, there's ModSecurity for extra protection.
Site Backup
All plans come with daily backup for your website. With advanced plans, you can get 5 on-demand backups with the GrowGeek and GrowBig plans, which is a huge advantage if you want to restore certain parts of your website.
Other Security Features
Anti-Hack system and help is another feature provided to help prevent hacking to your domain provided to all plans.
Proactive updates and patches to make sure the servers are as secure as possible.
Load Times, Reliability, and Features
Website's Speed
More speed boosting solutions from SiteGround:
SiteGround SuperCacher is a powerful in-house caching solution. It increases the website loading speed significantly by pre-saving some data on the server and loading it from the server.
Free Cloudflare CDN with Railgun is included in all plans, which means you get connected to the closest port available to your server, cutting the distance your data needs to travel and hence increasing the speed.
HTTP/2 Enabled servers. HTTP/2 is the newer, more improved form of HTTP, which allows servers to load websites faster.
WordPress users can boost their site speed even more with the help of our unique SG Optimizer plugin.
As a base for SiteGrounds' highly customized hosting infrastructure, they now use Google Cloud with its ultra-fast network, SSD persistent storage.
Features
Well, as you know, SiteGround's shared hosting plans come with a bunch of features. Let's take a look:
- Unlimited Emails
- Unmetered Traffic
- Unlimited Bandwidth
- Daily Backup
- Free Website Builder
- Free website migration
Unfortunately, it doesn't come with a free domain. That's why we think it's better if you choose one of the other excellent web hosts like HostGator.
For Advanced Users
There are plenty of features that are made for advanced users these include:
- MySQL Databases
- FTP Accounts
- CGI
- HTTP/2
- PHP 7
Other hosts might have more options, but trust us, SiteGround is an excellent choice.
Server Location
The closer the server is to your target audience, the better. That's why SiteGround gives you a choice between 3 different continents. Whether in North America, Europe, or Asia, SiteGround has multiple servers in different countries.
Website Building
SiteGround uses a simple and easy-to-use drag-and-drop style website builder that anyone can use.
SiteGrounds website builder has a wide variety of themes to choose from to suit individual needs.
E-Commerce
- Free shopping cart installation
With SiteGrounds click-and-install wizard, you can customize your preferred shopping cart software and have it installed on your account quickly. Your online store will be fully functional and ready for operations in a few minutes!
- Free SSL
SiteGround includes a free Let's Encrypt SSL for your e-commerce to secure clients' transactions and keep your site trustworthy. SSL certificates protect the data transmitted through your site by encrypting it and ensuring you meet the requirements of SEO criteria so that search engines don't flag your website as unsecured.
- Daily backups
The regularity with which Online stores get new content beats the other types of websites due to the continuous orders, products, and clients. That is why reliable backup to restore data is very important. SiteGround offers a regular daily backup service for free to ensure your saved content stays up to date.
WordPress
When it comes to WordPress hosting, SiteGround is one of the officially recommended options for WordPress. It provides many optimized plugins and allows for easy installation and migration. It also provides users with a free WordPress secure shell (SSH) and command line (CLI), making it one of your best WordPress hosting choices.
Final Verdict
Is SiteGround the Hosting service for you?
SiteGround has many features and supports WordPress hosting. Its servers are spread across four continents, and it provides free CDN and many features to ensure you have high speed when using your account. It is an excellent choice despite being slightly more expensive than other options in terms of shared hosting. However, it is noteworthy that they don't provide a free domain with their plans and don’t have dedicated servers nor VPS servers.