SiteGround Reviews
Siteground Shared Hosting Review
Siteground have
been in existence for nearly 10 years now, and have become widely known
and accepted in the industry for pushing the technological boundaries
that make them one of the fastest, most reliable and secure web hosting
providers around. For that reason (among others) you will find that
Siteground is our top recommended hosting provider, and indeed is a firm favorite with our readers too. In fact, no other host we have reviewed comes close in terms of technical ability, features and performance.At the last count in 2012 Siteground had well over a quarter of a million customers, and has recently even been recommended on the Google blog for their adoption of latest hosting technologies. They are a fast growing web host, and we suspect they will become much more widely known in the public eye over the next couple of years.
Indeed, since 2013 when Siteground changed their focus to premium hosting they have been having significant growth. In the last couple of years they have introduced many new features, and now have around 220 employees. One great thing about SiteGround is that they have sponsored 30-50 events globally (and counting), and given 9 talks at events such as WordCamp and JoomlaDay.
Our readers have also left 100’s of Siteground Reviews, so be sure to check those out at the end of the article.
Shared Hosting Plans
Siteground offer 3 different plans for their shared web hosting; Startup, GrowBig and GoGeek:Startup Plan
This is Siteground’s basic plan that starts at just $3.95 per month. According to their website it includes:- Free domain name
- Free setup & transfer
- 30 days money back guarantee
- 99.9% Uptime guarantee
- 24/7 technical support
- Unlimited Traffic, Emails, DBs. NOTE – they indicate that it is suitable for up to 10,000 monthly visits.
- cPanel & SSH access
- Free daily Backup
- Cloudflare CDN
- Includes Static Caching only
- WordPress & Joomla Toolkits – This allows automation of various tasks.
GrowBig Plan
Unless you need access to Siteground’s developer features, this is our recommended plan. Not only do you get all three levels of their awesome Supercacher (by this we mean caching for database and object cache), but you get the following:- 30 days worth of backups with easy access to restore
- Unlimited websites
- One year free SSL
- Priority support
- Suitable for around 25,000 visits monthly.
GoGeek Plan
If you need some seriously great hosting, then you have to consider their GoGeek plan. This comes will all previous features discussed, with the following in addition:- More powerful hardware. We discuss the different hardware that they use later in this review, but suffice to say, you get more RAM, SSD storage for Databases and SAS storage for files.
- Less accounts on each server, meaning you can use up to 4 times more resources than their StartUp plan
- PCI compliant server for e-commerce allowing you to take credit card details on your site.
- Developer features – This is one of our favorite things about them. Automatically create staging copies of your site so you can test changes before pushing them live with a single click. Not only that, but for the more advanced developer you have pre-installed GIT, with automatic setup. There is also WP-CLI integration available, as well as Drush if you are Drupal maniac. You can read our detailed summary of all of their developer features here.
| Plan | Space | Transfer | Websites | FreeDomain | FreeSSL | PCI Compliant | DeveloperFeatures | SuperCacher | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| StartUp | 10 GB | Unmetered | 1 | Yes | No | No | No | Static Only | $3.95 |
| GrowBig | 20 GB | Unmetered | Unlimited | Yes | No | No | No | Static +Dynamic | $7.95 |
| GoGeek | 30 GB | Unmetered | Unlimited | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Static +Dynamic | $14.95 |
Highlighted Features
Siteground have
been very proactive over the last couple of years creating custom
solutions such as SuperCacher, Developer features, or Toolkits for
WordPress and Joomla. It will be exciting to see what they have install
for us all next, as it seems we now have to update our Siteground review
on a regular basis just to keep up with all the new features. Here is a
brief summary of our favorite Siteground features as well as links for
further reading:- WordPress & Joomla Toolkits (all plans) so you can easily Reset Admin Passwords, change your domain, fix broken permissions, configure SSL, Secure the admin page, and move delete your installation. You can see a full review of all the features here.
- SuperCacher with Varnish and Memcached (Static only on StartUp). This makes your installation extremely fast, and you can read more about it here, as well as see speed tests utilizing this technology below.
- Amazing developer features (GoGeek only) such as Site Staging, WP-CLI, Drush integration and Git integration. We have written a detailed summary of all these features, which you can read here.
cPanel Control Panel
They uses cPanel,
albeit with custom styling to make it look more unique and
professional. One thing we like is that the cPanel is easily accessible
and integrated into their general billing client area.The cPanel sports Softaculous autoinstaller, as well as their custom installs for Joomla, WordPress and Magento. Along with the usual options, you can also access all the Developer and WordPress Joomla toolkits that we have talked so much about. Just take a look for yourself (click image to open larger version):
Fast Support
If something goes wrong you need to know that someone will be on hand to help you out. Accidentally deleted your site? No problem. Messed Up your WordPress install or trying to work out a .htaccess 301 redirect but cannot get it to work? No problem. They have some of the most helpful, and fast support technicians we have seen.If you sign up, just ask them a quick query… we guarantee they will respond within a few minutes minutes. It is that fast. But it is not just about speed here.
Siteground are fanatical about WordPress, Joomla, and even Magento among many other talents. They have the technical ability to help you out, and if required can be hired to carry out more intensive technical work too.
Simply the best and fastest support you will ever find at a web host.
Superior Uptime
They have one of the best uptime figures going. They never have problems with their data centers, or have technicians make “mistakes” that cause downtime.If anything sets them apart it is their reliability (well, there are many things that set them apart, but lets not get distracted). A screenshot of their publicly displayed uptime figures are shown below:
One of the reasons why their Up-time figures are so great is that they have built custom server monitoring software that can automatically resolve 90% of issues without human interaction.
They also track their servers in realtime, not 1-5 minutes like other hosts. Furthermore, whilst other hosts can take time to react to the downtime you can see how their system can mean vastly less downtime.
Of course, the problem with “advertised” uptime figures, is that you have no way of knowing whether they are telling the truth, or if it is just a marketing ploy.
Ram Based Caching
One of the most sought after things people look for in hosting is for their site to be fast. We gave them a spin with a standard theme we got off Themeforest, which although may be a little more bloated than we are used to seems to provide a very good test to guage the speed of the server.We optimized the site using the inbuilt Supercacher, W3 Total Cache as well as CloudFlare (see here for a tutorial for W3 Total Cache + Cloudflare). We removed all third party scripts (social shares analytics) as we wanted to test just the server, not third party scripts that are loaded from other site. You can see the result of the Siteground test below. Not bad eh?
Great Value for amazing features
For all the features you get for the price is pretty incredible, especially with the discount on your first invoice with our Siteground coupons. Whilst the GrowBig plan, and GoGeek plan are more expensive that other hosts, this is because not only do they increase Bandwidth and Disk Space with each plan, but they increase CPU usage as well.This means that Siteground’s GoGeek plan is more akin to a semi-dedicated solution, and even then with all the developer features and other functionality it still represents incredible value in comparison to the competition.
Siteground Review – Final Thoughts
Siteground are without a doubt our favorite web hosting provider. They do so much more than any other host with additional Advanced Features that it is quite frankly a “one-horse” race here. Not only that, but they are a big part of the WordPress and Joomla community regularly attending, sponsoring and giving talks at multiple events each year.Hopefully you will have reviewed all the additional articles showcasing the extra features such as Site Staging, WordPress & Joomla toolkits and the SuperCacher. Admittedly, there is much to take in, but that just reinforces how great they really are.
Of course, you will see 100’s of Siteground reviews left by our readers below.
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