Speed & Performance
Pricing
Features
Customer Support
Inside This Article...
Overview
In this SiteGround review, you’ll discover that SiteGround is a popular web hosting company, recommended by WordPress. They are known for offering powerful web hosting with great speeds, along with awesome customer support.
They offer a range of hosting packages to suit beginners and seasoned pros, including shared hosting, VPS hosting, WordPress hosting, and dedicated servers.
I’ve had my fair share of experience in the hosting market, and what I’ve noticed time and time again is that hosting companies are being reviewed, with little to no actual data.
I took it upon myself to sign up to SiteGround’s StartUp plan and monitor the performance of my website, including uptime and response time. My aim is to give you a true representation of what SiteGround is actually like, covering the following areas:
- Pros and Cons
- Performance and Speed
- Features
- Pricing
- Customer Support
Does SiteGround Sound Right For You?
Speed & Performance
One of the best things about SiteGround is its performance and reliability. SiteGround offer a 99.9% uptime guarantee and will compensate their customers if their SLAs fall below a certain level.
- 99.9% – 99.00% uptime: 1 month free hosting
- An additional month of free hosting for every 1% of uptime lost below 99.00%
On top of this, they offer a 30-day money-back guarantee, which just reassures me even further of their confidence to deliver a great service.
Like I said at the beginning of my review, I wanted to really test out SiteGround’s performance by monitoring my website I set up with them.
I signed up to UptimeRobot so that I could track uptime and server response, with accurate details of any downtime.
Not surprisingly, SiteGround offered a solid overall uptime of 99.998% with only 1 minute of downtime. In 30 days, there are 43200 minutes, so when you consider that my website was down for just 1 of those minutes, that’s pretty damn impressive!
According to LittleData, the average server response time is 553ms. Anything below 302ms would put your website in the best 20% of sites surveyed.
Anything about 998ms would put you in the worst 20%. Of course, no one wants their website to be considered in the worst percentage of anything, let alone when it comes to speed.
Thankfully, my SiteGround website outperformed my expectations. I recorded an average server response time of just 160.96ms which puts my website in the best 20% – hurrah!
However, I couldn’t leave my investigation there. A great review will look at multiple data sources, and that’s exactly what I’ve been doing.
Next up, I checked out my site on Bitcatcha which looks solely at server speed response. Bitcatcha displays test results for their recommended web hosts. As you can see, SiteGround sits comfortably at the top of the table with an A+.
I input my website’s URL into the search box and received the following results. It’s worth noting that when I signed up for SiteGround, I selected their west coast USA server.
We can see from the data below that SiteGround’s server response time for USA west is just 69ms, that’s 0.069 of a second!
Choosing the same data center as mine, if your target audience is in the U.S., Canada, Australia, Asia, and Europe, your response times are going to be below average.
However, London didn’t fair too well. If you plan to get most of your traffic from the U.K., simply switch your SiteGround server over to their U.K. data center – viola!
Pricing
SiteGround aren’t just a shared hosting provider, they also offer WordPress hosting, WooCommerce hosting, Cloud hosting, and dedicated servers. Let’s take a look at the types of hosting they offer in more detail:
- Shared Hosting: Shared hosting is ideal for beginners, new websites, and small businesses. Because shared servers share resources, shared hosting is better for low traffic websites.
- WordPress Hosting: If you have a WordPress website and you’re serious about it, SiteGround WordPress hosting has been optimized using their in-house tools.
- Cloud Hosting: Cloud hosting gives people more control, it’s also flexible and easier to upgrade. If you have a growing website, cloud hosting is a perfect solution.
- Dedicated Servers: If you rent a dedicated server, you’ll have full control of it, but it is more expensive. You’ll have to manage the server yourself, so this is really only recommended for more advanced users.
Currently, SiteGround is offering its StartUp plan for just $3.95 per month. SiteGround’s advertised prices are valid for a 12-month term and renew at the regular rate displayed on their website. If you want to trial their services, you can sign up for just 1 month, however, this will incur a $24.95 setup fee.
When you go through to SiteGround’s checkout, there are some extra services you might want to consider. Firstly, SiteGround doesn’t offer a free domain with their StartUp plan, so if you want to register one, it will cost $15.95 for the year.
If you would like to protect your domain from publicly sharing personal information, this is going to cost $12 per year.
The last feature that SiteGround offers as an extra is their Site Scanner. This monitors your website on a daily basis and will alert you if your website is under attack or has been hacked; a very handy feature of $19.80 per year.
Let’s take a look at the plans in more detail:
- StartUp: You’ll only be able to host 1 website with this plan and it’s limited to 10GB disk space. Saying that most eCommerce websites won’t use more than 4GB storage, so this isn’t too much of a worry. If you don’t expect to receive more than 10,000 monthly visitors, this is a good starting option.
- GrowBig: GrowBig takes things up a notch and allows you to host unlimited websites, with a total of 20GB disk space. You’ll get a free SSL, free CDN, free site transfer, and up to 25,000 monthly visitors.
- GoGeek: The GoGeek plan is ideal for small eCommerce websites with up to 100,000 monthly visitors. It also gives you access to more advanced features like staging + git, white-label clients, and priority support.
Features
Most web hosts offer similar basic features, however, this is where SiteGround is different to most, and another reason why I highly recommend them.
SiteGround build their own in-house tools and include them as part of their web hosting plans like SG Site Scanner and SG SuperCacher.
Some of SiteGround’s awesome features include:
- Speed: SiteGround uses super-fast SSDs and their platform is built on Google Cloud, meaning you’ll have access to an ultra-fast network.
- Security: All shared hosting plans include a free Let’s Encrypt SSL as well as daily backups to keep your site secure.
- WordPress: SiteGround don’t just offer 1-click WordPress installs, they also include auto-updates, expert WordPress support, and the WP Starter wizard.
- NGINX: SiteGround now uses NGINX Direct Delivery for static images and things like HTML and CSS. It loads static content from the SSD, improving browser caching, and speeding up your website.
- Health Checks: Their unique monitoring system performs real-time health checks every 0.5 seconds, preventing potential issues with your website.
- Support: SiteGround’s dedicated support team is available to help you 24/7/365, so there’s always someone on hand.
Customer Support
SiteGround’s customer support is second-to-none, and I’m going to show you exactly why that is. As well as offering a wealth of support on their website, they’re also very active on social media.
Their Facebook page has over 40,000 followers. What I’ve noticed with SiteGround is that they interact with their customers a lot, responding to their comments on Facebook within a matter of hours.
Considering they are such a big company, I’m really impressed by how quick they are to respond.
They also post regular updates about what’s going on, what’s new, and invite people to give feedback to them. The same can be said about their Twitter page too, which has 33,000 followers.
There’s certainly a lot of love for SiteGround, and I honestly can’t say I’m surprised. Beyond their social media channels, SiteGround offers 24/7 live help, including live chat, telephone support, and support tickets.
They also make it really easy to seek help if you come across something on their client interface that you don’t understand simply click the question mark and they will offer some easy-to-access answers to the most common questions.
If you require technical help, you’ll need to login to your account so SiteGround can access your details to make everyone’s life easier.
Their Help Center is packed full of information to help you. If you’re struggling to find an answer, simply type your query into the search box and the most relevant information will appear. You can search through their tutorials, knowledgebase, or review your support history.
If none of that helps you (which I’m sure it will), you can contact SiteGround directly. My experience with SiteGround has always been superb.
I honestly can’t find a reason to complain about them, and I’m really glad about that. If you’re looking for a web host who can provide an awesome service as well as awesome hosting services, you’ve pretty much won the golden ticket.
SiteGround Review: Summary
After reading my in-depth SiteGround review, I’m hoping you’ve been able to come to your own conclusion about whether SiteGround is right for you or not. Let’s review some of the reasons why I highly recommend SiteGround:
- They offer a 99.9% uptime guarantee (but my own tests resulted in 99.998% which is really great)
- Their features are much better than other web hosts (and that all comes at a small price of just $3.95 per month)
- SiteGround’s server response times and speeds are super-fast (my website came in the best 20% in terms of server response time)
- You’ll get a free SSL and free CDN with any shared web hosting plan (HTTPS is recommended for all websites to reassure your visitors that it is secure)
- If you’re worried about changes you’ve made to your website or any potential security issues, SiteGround offers daily backups and regular monitoring
If you’re looking for a fast and reliable web host who is affordable, our SiteGround review tells us that SiteGround really is your winner. They offer great customer support, fantastic features, and 1-click installs for WordPress. Not only that, but they are also one of the few hosts recommended by WordPress.
Whether you’re starting your first website or you’ve been around the hosting block a few times, SiteGround will certainly meet your needs, offering scalable hosting solutions for every website.
If you haven’t already, go ahead and check them out, and remember they offer a 30-day money-back guarantee so there’s nothing to lose! If you loved this SiteGround review, why not check out some of our other hosting reviews?
Are You Ready to Try SiteGround?
SiteGround Review: FAQs
SiteGround is a great all-round web host. It’s ideal for small websites, blogs, medium-sized websites, and even high-traffic eCommerce websites. Because of its in-house tools like SG Optimizer and SuperCacher, your site will be stable and fast for your website visitors.
SiteGround’s StartUp plan offers plenty of resources for small websites, personal websites, and blogs. This plan is recommended if you don’t plan to exceed 10,000 website visitors per month. Although StartUp only offers 10GB storage space, most websites will not exceed 4GB on average.
SiteGround’s StartUp plan is only $3.95 per month. However, you will need to commit to a 12-month period to receive this price, and you’ll need to pay upfront to receive the best discount.
SiteGround unfortunately doesn’t offer a free domain with their shared hosting plans, however, you can use your own domain or purchase one from them. Domain prices start from just $15.95 per year.
User Reviews
SiteGround Pros:
- Great 24/7 customer support including live chat
- Free SSL on shared hosting plans as well as a free CDN
- Superfast server speeds, using the SSDs and the latest technologies
- Plenty of server locations to choose from across the world
SiteGround Cons:
- StartUp hosting plan comes with limited storage compared to other hosts
- Monthly billing incurs a setup fee of $14.95 unless you sign up for longer
