SiteGround Hosting Review: Check the Facts Before Buying – 2021

SiteGround, a popular shared hosting provider offers multiple different hosting options. Offerings include WordPress hosting, cloud hosting and even dedicated servers. We’ve been monitoring SiteGround’s cheapest “Startup” shared plan for over three years now. We paid for a shared hosting account, hosted our blog , and have been closely tracking the performance to provide this unbiased, transparent review.

Honestly, SiteGround hosting ranks among the top of all web hosting companies for both uptime (99.99%) and speed (673ms). Most importantly, their customer support team is knowledgeable, fast, and friendly. This is a rare beast, and a hidden gem in the web hosting market. Despite minor niggles, SiteGround eclipses many of its big rivals on most of the features small businesses needs such as speed, uptime, and customer support.

Summary of SiteGround “Startup” Plan Review

SiteGround Hosting Detailed Review

SiteGround starts strong with 99.99% uptime, above-average speeds, and tons of extra features that are perfect for both beginners and power users.

SiteGround Customer Support Review – Friendly and Knowledgeable Team

When picking a hosting company one of the most important things is support and reviews from real people and customers. Whenever we look for a product we first tend to look at the reviews and see if other people are happy with the product they bought and if they recommend it for other people to buy it or use it. SiteGround has over 4,787 reviews from real people, support is what makes or breaks a company and SiteGround invested in their people so they can give the best and fastest support to help you solve your problem and that is what makes them one of the best hosting company in business. You can read real-time reviews on their website and see for yourself. SiteGround Reviews by thousands of real customers.

SiteGround Performance Review – Uptime at 99.99% and Load Speed at 534ms

One of the most important things about hosting is their performance and uptime so you want to be sure that your website is always live and not going down every other day. SiteGround has the best performance and uptime with an average of 99.99% to 100% which is the best in industry.

SiteGround prefers in-house crafted solutions to ensure high-quality hosting experience.

• Their platform is built on Linux containers that provide great stability in times of unexpected traffic spikes.
• SiteGround were the first that introduced the account isolation technology for client security.
• They built their own proactive server monitoring system that monitors their servers every 0.5 seconds and also proactively fixes any problems without human intervention, thus ensuring amazing uptime.

You can be sure that your website will be always on and live which is what every customer wants. Since SiteGrounds uses the best technology and has their servers in 3 continents and 6 different locations you will also enjoy knowing that your website loads fast within milliseconds vs few seconds or minutes which by Google speed standard is unacceptable so you can be sure and happy knowing that your site loads very fast. You can also run through the GTMetrix website and test for speed performance.

SiteGround Money Back Policy Review

SiteGround have a 30 day money back guarantee for all of our shared hosting plans and 15 days money-back guarantee for cloud hosting plans. Their money-back guarantee gives you peace of mind that our services will meet the expectations set out in the TOS. To the maximum extent applicable under national law and without affecting your rights as a consumer, the money-back guarantee is your sole and exclusive remedy should our services fail to meet the expectations set out in this TOS. More details on the policy from SiteGround

SiteGround Technology Platform Review

With the NGINX Direct Delivery SiteGround started serving standard caching headers for static files. This optimizes the way your site is using the browser caching and CDN caching. In our previous Static Cache setup you had to use the SG Optimizer WordPress plugin or number of .htaccess rules in order to properly configure browser cache. Now this is all set for you and you don’t need to do anything. They have configured the periods for which browsers will cache static content by the official Google guidelines and we communicate them with the headers. With the Static Cache, CDN servers sometimes failed to detect that a static resource is modified.

They run on an in-house implementation of Linux Containers with Apache as a web server and Nginx as a reverse proxy. Their platform is built to provide an incredibly fast hosting service. SiteGround are constantly among the first hosting companies to provide their users access to the latest speed technologies. Their customers do not have to wait in order to take advantage of the newest PHP versions or the most innovative protocols like HTTP/2, TLS 1.3, OCSP Stapling and QUIC. SiteGround SuperCacher is a powerful in-house caching solution based on Nginx reverse proxy and Memcached.

Free Cloudflare CDN with Railgun is included in all plans. WordPress users can boost their site speed even more with the help of our unique SG Optimizer plugin. They were one of the first to integrate Let’s Encrypt and issue and renew automatically a free SSL for every site created on our platform. They also give users the opportunity to click and add an SSL from their control panels.

SiteGround Datacenters Review

All SiteGround data centers offer high availability, low latency, and reliability. Electricity outages are prevented by multiple power feeds, on-site power generators and enterprise-class UPS technology. Uninterrupted network connectivity is guaranteed by the simultaneous usage of multiple major carriers. Redundant N+1 power and cooling resources are regularly inspected to guarantee stability. Route optimization technologies, connections to internet backbones, and other mechanisms are in place to guarantee high bandwidth capacity and fast connectivity. Their customers can have their site content cached free-of-charge on Cloudflare’s CDN network spanning 90 countries and 194 cities worldwide. This large network ensures better loading speed by using the nearest location to each of your site visitors. Additionally, it improves site security and reliability by monitoring millions of websites and taking mass action, protecting all CDN users whenever an issue is detected.

SiteGround Free Website Transfer Service Review

SiteGround will transfer for free your existing website from a previous host for 24 hours, in comparison this process may be paid or can take up to 30 days with other hosts. You only get one free professional website transfer, but you won’t have to lift a finger or wait a month to get it. SiteGround’s support agents handle it all. SiteGround support agents have broad experience in this as they move hundreds of websites every single day. You can request a site transfer by using the Account Setup Wizard. On the pop-up window, just select Transfer a website and click Confirm.

SiteGround Hosting & Pricing Review – Which one is best for you?

StartUp – $3.95/mo – 1 Website, 10 GB Web Space, ~10,000 Visits Monthly
GrowBig – $5.95/mo – Unlimited Websites, 20 GB Web Space, ~25,000 Visits Monthly
GoGeek – $11.95/mo – Unlimited Website, 30 GB Web Space, ~100,000 Visits Monthly

We recommend starting with the cheapest plan on website hosting as its only $3.95/mo and then you can always upgrade as your website grows and your traffic picks up. Clients now can enjoy super fast website performance! SiteHround make websites fly thanks to servers that run on SSD disks and PHP 7 with OpCache. On top of that, they offer NGINX Direct Delivery and a free CDN service to further boost your website’s performance. They manage the security of your sites at server and application level. They offer free Let’s Encrypt SSL that keeps your data safe and daily backups that ensure your peace of mind. Easily manage your site built on the most popular Content Management Systems such as Joomla, Magento, WordPress, and more. Get started with their friendly Site Tools, packed with tons of features that save you time and effort. Customers enjoy the convenience of managing both your domain and site in the same place. They offer affordable domain registration and transfer services, a friendly domain management panel, DNS services, and more. Create an unlimited number of email accounts with your own domain and check your email from anywhere with their friendly webmail clients. SiteGround added SpamExperts to protect you from SPAM.

SiteGround Managed WordPress Hosting Review

All WordPress hosting plans include free Let’s Encrypt Standard and Wildcard SSL certificates. For your convenience, the Standard SSL comes preinstalled on your site. SiteGround back up your account daily and keep up to 30 copies. You also have the option to create instant on-demand backups with the click of a button. Making changes on your site has never been easier. Make a copy of your site in a click, work on it, and then push the changes live with our staging tool. Advanced users will love our tools like WP-CLI, SSH access, PHP version control, Git integration and more that make workflows easy and fast. Get a comprehensive WordPress performance solution that dramatically speeds up your sites and optimizes resource usage. This includes a free CDN, powerful caching, front-end and image optimizations, PHP version control & more

SiteGround Managed WooCommerce Hosting Review

Key features of Woocommerce hosting:

• Easy WooCommerce Store Setup
• Start With WooCommerce
• WooCommerce Migration
• Increase Your Sales With A Faster Website
• Free Cloudflare CDN
• Smart Caching
• Ultra-fast WooCommerce platform
• AI anti-bot system
• Custom WAF

Site speed is an important factor for your eCommerce success. Faster websites have better search engine standings and higher conversion rates. That is why we provide technology specifically designed to make your store run fast. Building a beautiful WooCommerce store is easy with SiteGround. It only takes a few clicks to install WooCommerce with the professional-looking Storefront theme. Bring over your Woo shop in just a few clicks with the free SiteGround Migrator plugin. A professional transfer service is also available and free on GrowBig and GoGeek plans.

SiteGround Hosting – What is not so good?

There are few things about SiteGround hosting that are not so impressive. Even though they are not deal breakers, we thought of adding them here as well to complete full review.

SiteGround Hosting – Monthly Billing Review

They advertise an obscenely low ‘monthly’ price. The catch is that you often have to sign up for two or three years in order to get it. Most other web hosts don’t even offer a true ‘month-to-month’ option, with a one year deal being the shortest they’ll go. The good news is that SiteGround’s pricing is straightforward and doesn’t play that game. Their low advertised price is for the 12-month deal.

They also do offer a true ‘monthly’ option if you want it. AND it’s the same low advertised price. The only problem is that they also charge a one-time ‘setup fee’ on these ‘month-to-month’ plans of an extra $14.95. And you don’t really find out about this extra fee until the very last second when you’re entering your credit card details.

Conclusion? Don’t pay monthly.

SiteGround Hosting – Storage Space Review

Compared with other web hosts, SiteGround’s storage space is a bit on the small size (so you might want to clarify disk space if you think it’ll be a concern). They will, however, offer a helpful note as to how many monthly visitors you can safely handle without experiencing any issues.

However, if you’re just starting out, the “StartUp” plan will usually be more than enough. If your site grows, you can easily upgrade to a more robust server/plan which is likely to have more power. With the StartUp plan, you’ll get 10 GB of web space. SiteGround recommends this plan for about 10,000 monthly website visitors.

SiteGround Hosting Review – FAQs