GreenGeeks

Reviews and Expert Opinion

GreenGeeks

By Mashum Mollah

“From experience, I can confidently state that GreenGeeks is among the best web hosting services. Apart from being environmentally-friendly, GreenGeeks has an uptime of 99.98% and response time of 252ms. From the many reviews that I have done, this web hosting services actually comes out among the best. You will also get amazing support from phone, live chat, email, and a knowledgebase. Even though it is a bit expensive especially the VPS plan, you will get value for your money. It is a reliable host that hosts more than 300,000 hosts as per now.”

GreenGeeks Hosting In-Depth Reviews

5.0Based on 1 reviews
  • Features
  • Ease of Use
  • Performance
  • Support
  • Pricing
Pricing Details
  • Web Hosting $2.95 - $11.95
  • VPS Hosting $39.95 - $109.95
  • Dedicated Hosting $169 - $439
Server locations
  • Chicago-flag Chicago
  • Phoenix-flag Phoenix
  • Montreal-flag Montreal
  • Amsterdam-flag Amsterdam

Overview

GreenGeeks Overview

GreenGeeks is one of the best web hosting services in the market. The solution virtually provides anything that you need to host your website. The software guarantees users a reliable, secure, and fast web hosting. 

The GreenGeeks solution was founded by Trey Gardner in 2008. Currently, the service boasts of having more than 300,000 sites. The commitment that this web hosting service has to the environment is what makes it unique. It replaces the energy that clients use with the wind power credits. 

The company partners with the Bonneville Environmental Foundation of Oregon to buy 3 times as much wind energy as their consumption. This leaves GreenGeeks and all its clients carbon negative. 

Therefore, as the name suggests, GreenGeeks values the element of environmental responsibility.  You can confidently say that the company is powered by 300% renewable energy. It means that GreenGeeks returns 3 times the wind power credits that it uses which is approximately 600,000 kilowatt-hours annually

In addition to the net positive carbon footprint, it is also one of the best web hosting services. However, the company is smaller in comparison to the other leading hosting services. It has over 35,000 clients who host more than 300,000 sites on the platform. The brand makes up for this with high personal attention. 

The company gives customers a free domain to start them off. You can also add an unlimited number of new domains to your hosting plans that begin at a few dollars every month. 

With GreenGeeks, your site will assist in creating renewable energy and not soaking it up. Therefore, if one of your priorities is sustainability, make sure you add GreenGeeks to the shortlist.  

When using GreenGeeks and environmental protection resonates with your business, inform them that you power your website with 100% carbon-neutral hosting. It may encourage other individuals to take a similar step.  Here are the main features of GreenGeeks web hosting services; 

Features (4.4/5)

Above Average Uptime 

GreenGeeks has gone ahead to make a bold claim that it guarantees users an uptime of 99.90%. The good news is that the company has been able to live to that promise. According to an in-depth analysis of the last 24 months, the uptime of GreenGeeks was standing at 99.98%. Very few websites can hit this mark in practice.

After tracking GreenGeeks for 24 months, it only had a downtime of 4 hours (46 outages). The company has had an exemptional performance, especially in the last 12 months. The uptime for most of the last 12 months has been between 99.98 – 100%. It tells you that GreenGeeks is among the most reliable web hosting services in the market. 

Good Page Loading Time (445ms)

The other thing that we tested in the last 24 months for GreenGeeks is the page loading times. The speed of this web host is far above the industry average by clocking to approximately 445ms. It places GreenGeeks among the 10 top fastest hosts that we have ever reviewed. The page loading speed of this host is true of exemplary performance.

Good Support and Quick Answers 

The other good thing you will love about GreenGeeks is its customer review. You get connected to a customer support agent within one minute. These professionals answer your questions concisely and quickly. 

Overall, you will be happy with the experience that you get from GreenGeeks. We have so many other customers who are happy with the support that you get from GreenGeeks. It has a highly responsive 24/7/365 customer support team to serve users.

You will also get an extensive knowledge base where you can search for answers to your questions. It is an extensive park for those who prefer to get self-help over asking help from customer service reps. 

GreenGeeks has so many various categories and subcategories of articles where users can select from. You will get video tutorials, billing questions, VPS hosting, reseller hosting, general hosting, and sales questions. If your solution is not within the mentioned categories, you can utilize the search bar. In this way, you will always get access to the help that you need. You won’t get stranded even if the live chat feature of GreenGeeks is offline for one reason or another. 

Free Website Migration and Domain Name 

GreenGeeks offers free registration and transfer of domain names. If you use them to acquire your domain name, the company will keep it free for as long as you are using their services. Isn’t this kind of a web hosting service? If you are already hosting your website somewhere else, GreenGeeks will transfer it free of charge. It is one of the best features to enjoy from the company. 

Environmentally Friendly 

GreenGeeks makes the bold claim of being green. However, we have people who don’t know the exact meaning of this statement. The company buys three times the wind energy credits to make up for the energy that is utilized by its services in powering your website.

GreenGeeks replaces over 615,99kWh every year. To put all this is the right perspective, the consumption of an average American is 12,000kWh of electricity annually. GreenGeeks is a recognized partner of Green Power with also the EPA (the United States Environmental Protection Agency). 

30-day Money Back Guarantee

If you are not happy with the idea of moving over to GreenGeeks, just know that the company has a full 30 days no questions asked money-back guarantee on almost all the hosting plans. Not all web hosting services will give you such a guarantee. There are a few exemptions that you can get in terms of and conditions of the company.

Nightly Backups 

There are times when bad things just happen. It could be self-inflicted or a person with a malicious intention could by trying to get his way in.  Whatever the case, GreenGeeks gives users nightly backups to add to SSH access. With this in mind, you will have a sound sleep knowing that even if something wrong happens, your data is being backed on a regular basis. 

For more security measures, the company offers real-time security scanning, span association protection, automatic brute force protection, and the ability of password protecting your directories. It is among the best web hosting services that give users such amazing nighty backups

Multiple High-Quality Servers 

The data centers of GreenGeeks are in four locations. These include Amsterdam, NL, Montreal, CA, Phoenix, USA, and Chicago, USA. You can create a huge positive impact on the SEO of your website by choosing the right server location. A server that is close to you guarantees you faster speeds. 

The other guarantee that GreenGeeks gives customers is that it will keep all the servers up to date. There are several specifications that the company uses at this point. Therefore, with GreenGeeks, you will be sure that your data is stored on high quality and state of art servers. It is one of the elements that this host scores highly among the other web hosting services. 

Free CDN

All people interact with a Content Delivery Network or CDN on a daily basis when browsing the web. It does not matter whether they are looking towards shopping online, social media pages, or news sites. 

GreenGeeks gives its users a CDN that is powered by the Cloudflare. These are great news for site optimization especially if you have a global reach. The best part is that you get all these services absolutely free. 

Cloudflare allows you to cache content and use the servers that are closest to your website visitors to have it delivered. Due to this, web surfing is faster for all the people who visit your website.

Ease of Use (4.4/5)

GreenGeeks cPanel

When you launch the cPanel from the web dashboard of GreenGeeks, it will open a full-features cPanel setup that provides several ways of creating and managing a website. 

Access to Softaculous allows for the quick installation of popular apps like Drupal, Joomla. MediaWiki, and WordPress among others. The market has more powerful auto-installers – logos and GoDaddy use Installatron that is stuffed with features. However, Softaculous supports more applications and has all the functionalities that most users require. 

The cPanel of GreenGeeks will also give you access to the SitePad website builder. Unusually, there is not just one single launcher as the cPanel also displays thumbnails of website templates in the section of SitePad Themes. It is a nice touch that makes it easy for beginners to see what SitePad can do at a glance. 

When you launch SitePad, you will get more templates and you can customize any of them in a capable drag and drop editor. Add a new page widget (contact forms, maps, social media links, multimedia, buttons) and replace the default images and test and you will have a decent website that is ready to go. 

Unlike other hosting services, GreenGeeks does not limit the size of your SitePad website and the number of pages and hope that you will pay to upgrade. You are able to add an unlimited number of pages, images, and the other elements that you need. The other options are uploading your website files through FTP or manually add them through a browser-based file manager. 

GreenGeeks bundles an incredible cPanel to help you in managing your websites regardless of the way you create it. Your website can have a standard installation with the options of viewing server status, manage status, create email accounts, control security, and do everything else that you want.

You will also get one to two bonus options including the integration with Cloudflare CDN. This does not do so much and you still need to separately set up your account. You will get an icon that makes it easy to access your settings. However, it is still a small-time saver and you will be happy to see it in the package. You will really enjoy that experience that you will get when using GreenGeeks. 

Performance (4.6/5)

No matter how comfortable or warm you feel about the environmentally conscious hosting of GreenGeeks, it is more important for the host to be reliable. There is no need to have a website that will be unavailable whenever your visitors want to access it. 

We use the uptime.com to monitor the availability of websites over a long period. Uptime downloads the main pages on your website every five minutes. It logs its failure or success and the response time of the server. 

GreenGeeks has managed a perfect uptime of 100%without even one outage for more than 2000 checks. It is something that you can expect over a short test but it is not a guarantee by no means GreenGeeks claims to offer an uptime of 99.9%. Even though this sounds good, a downtime of 0.1% will translate to approximately 10 minutes per week. In the last 24 months, GreenGeeks went above this mark by proving an uptime of 99.98%.

The uptime of GreenGeeks is respectable at 252ms. The top hosts hit approximately 150-200ms for the shared hosting. Most of the others are able to manage approximately 200 – 350ms. It means that GreenGeeks is somewhere in the middle of the pack. When you upgrade on GreenGeeks, you stand to get even better results. 

The main issue that can come up is the inconsistency of the response times that is evident in the very spiky graph. The response time of most of the web hosts tends to vary by 20ms across the day. GreenGeeks is close to 200ms and hence visitors may notice real variations in the speeds of your website over time. 

However, GreenGeeks is not so bad in this issue and the response times vary from 186-510ms over a test week. The worst-case scenario of 510ms because most hosts have regular delays of one second or more on overall. The performance that GreenGeeks delivers is very acceptable especially for the price that you are paying.

Support (4.5/5)

One of the indicators of the best web hosting services is having good customer service. GreenGeeks knows this quite well and this explains why they offer multiple methods of assisting clients. Therefore, you will not get stuck if you have an interest in using the services of the company. If you want direct support, you can contact the company through live chat, email, and phone.

You will get very reliable phone support from the company during business hours. Phone support basically runs from 9:00am to 12:00am EST Monday to Friday and 9:00am to 8:00pm on weekends. However, you can reach the customer support agents via the live chat 24/7/365. When you connect through the email, GreenGeeks claims to give you a wait time of 15 to 20 minutes.

However, GreenGeeks does not offer any forum support. However, it has an online help center which includes FAQs and a searchable knowledge base to help their users in troubleshooting the common web hosting services. 

The website of GreenGeeks also has an educational center where you will find so many helpful articles, videos, and tutorials. The knowledge base of GreenGeeks is extensive if you prefer to learn on your own instead of talking to people.

Pricing (4.7/5)

One good thing about GreenGeeks is that it is a web hosting service that will grow with your website. The company offers Scalable Linux-based hosting services at various price points. Therefore, you can upgrade the server resources if your website outgrows the initial plan. There are so many features that you can expect from the hosting plans from GreenGeeks. These include; 

Shared Hosting: The shared hosting from GreenGeeks features are fairly typical of what you can expect from most of the web hosting companies. It offers unlimited emails, storage, and bandwidth and it places no limit on the number of MySQL domains and databases that you can host.

This is a plus, especially when dealing with small businesses. Users can also install the popular eCommerce web apps like Magento and ZenCart. GreenGeeks also offers free domain transfer and registration as well as supporting Google Apps integration and SSH access. 

VPS Hosting: If you want better control over the computing resources and root access to the server, the ideal choice is VPS hosting. When using VPS hosting, you will have full knowledge of the amount of bandwidth, RAM, and disk space that you have at your disposal. Also, GreenGeeks offers a proprietary portal that allows users to manage their virtual private server with a lot of ease. 

Even though GreenGeeks is slightly more expensive than some of the affordable hosts, it competitively prices when using the all-SSD infrastructure. There isn’t a problem in paying one or two extra dollars per month to get the upgrades software. The company includes so many bonus features in its hosting packages. However, the excitement that surrounds high-end hosting bargains will begin to diminish at advanced levels. The price tag for the VPS is close to double what the top hosts offer at the same level. The dedicated servers are a bit a better bargain but this web host remains among the most expensive options.

Pricing Details

GreenGeeks Web Hosting
Hosting Plan Web Space Performance Website Price View Details
Lite Unlimited Web Space Standard Performance 1 Website $2.95/mo Click here
Pro Unlimited Web Space 2X Performance Unlimited Websites $5.95/mo Click here
Premium Unlimited Web Space 4X Performance Unlimited Websites $11.95/mo Click here
GreenGeeks VPS Hosting
Hosting Plan SSD Disk Space SSL Certificate Core Price View Details
2GB 50 GB Free SSL 4vCPU $39.95/mo Click here
4GB 75 GB Free SSL 4vCPU $59.95/mo Click here
8GB 150 GB Free SSL 6vCPU $109.95/mo Click here
GreenGeeks Dedicated Hosting
Hosting Plan RAM SATA Drive Cores Price View Details
Entry Server 2GB DDR3 1x 500GB Intel Atom 330 Dual Core $169/mo Click here
Standard Server 4GB DDR3 2x 500GB Xeon E3-1220 3.1Ghz $269/mo Click here
Elite Server 8GB DDR3 2x 500GB Xeon E3-1230 3.2Ghz w/HT $319/mo Click here
Pro Server 16GB DDR3 2x 500GB Xeon E5-2620 2.0Ghz w/HT $439/mo Click here

User Reviews

Nadine Kaivens

Thanks for cooperation
(5/5)

GreenGeeks is one of my best experiences within hosting. I wish to the company the best and continuity for long-lasting.
June 3, 2020
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Bottom line

One of the things that make the services of GreenGeeks to stand out is that fact that it takes an environmentally-friendly approach. Therefore, the brand does not struggle to stand out in the crowded wen hosting industry.

The decision to use GreenGeeks or not ultimately depends on your hosting needs and budget. It also depends on how the company fares on against the competition. In overall, GreenGeeks is an interesting price choice, competitiveness, performance, and reliable server performance in addition to the green effort.

Customers of GreenGeeks get a lot of value for their money. Now that it is a green energy brand, we have companies that choose this host to help them proudly claim that their brand isn’t creating a carbon footprint. 

Now that users only have 30 days for claiming a refund, you should do your research well before you make any kind of commitment. Remember it is a company that has a bigger mission other than just providing web hosting services. 

It is one of the best web hosting services because of the good customer support, solid uptime, and speed that it provides. These are reasons enough to motivate you to choose GreenGeeks over the competition. 

However, you have to subscribe for the long term if you would like to benefit from the lowest rates. Plus, your money-back guarantee and free domain may not be iron-clad if you choose to go for a refund. 

The underpowered and basic product range of GreenGeeks is of great concern. However, the full-features shared hosting plan from the company is of really good value. You will not also come across the 300% power offsetting promise with renewable energy elsewhere. If you are an ecowarrior, GreenGeeks is a smart web hosting solution for you.

Mashum Mollah

Mashum Mollah has been there in the blogging industry for over a decade. He has always believed that blogging holds the most potential in the digital marketing industry. With years of research, he has created some of his best blogging practices, which have helped him establish himself in the industry as a Blogging Engineer. Now he is on a mission to help others and spread the concept of Blogging Engineer.