SiteGround

SiteGround is a web hosting service that was founded in 2004. From that time, the platform has grown to be one of the renowned hosting companies. Its headquarters are in Sofia, Bulgaria and has 6 data centres and office locations in three different continents. 

Currently, SiteGround has over 400 workers and hosts over 500,000 domains. It is among the top WordPress hosting companies. The platform is renowned for its reliable hosting plans and top-notch customer support.  The optimized hosting from WordPress has everything you will require in creating and growing a successful blog. This SiteGround review will help you to know whether it is an ideal host for your needs. 

The good thing about SiteGround is that it is extremely reliable and noticeably fast. The company has flexible hosting plans and offers one of the best customer support services in the industry. It explains why we recommend SiteGround as one of the best WordPress hosting services in the market. 

With this detailed SiteGround review, you will make an educated decision on whether it is the right host for your needs. It is a shared hosting provider that gives its users multiple varied hosting options. These include dedicated servers, cloud hosting, and WordPress hosting. 

We have been monitoring the cheapest shared plan for SiteGround for the last two years. We paid for a shared hosting account, established live test site, and have closely monitored the performance of the site using a third-party tool to deliver this transparent and unbiased review. 

Overall, SiteGround hosting ranks among the top web hosting services in the market. It boasts of a speed of 673ms and an uptime of close to 99.99%. It also has a friendly, fast, and knowledgeable customer support team. All the plans come with email accounts, SSL certificate, and CDN. Let us have a look at some of the key features of the SiteGround hosting service.

1. Good Performance

In the last 24 months, SiteGround reported an uptime of 99.99%. these statistics are based on raw data and actual statistics for the said period. The uptime performance of SiteGround has been nearly perfect over that period. 

An average of 99.99% makes SiteGround be among the most reliable web hosts. With such a reliable uptime, you can be sure that your visitors will be happy. The site will also be working most of the time and hence your clients will not miss out when they want to make a purchase. 

With such a strong uptime and above-average speed, SiteGround remains top on the game. It makes it to be an excellent option for both power users and beginners. 

2. Load Times of 673ms

The loading times of SiteGround are above average. Site speed is the second most important factor when choosing a host. It is a feature that comes after the uptime. According to research by Google, 53% of customers will leave any page that doesn’t load within the first three seconds.  

It is very little you can do to fix a host that loads slowly. You can compress images in order to make them light. You can also take some pressure off the server by loading them through a CDN. However, a slow host will always remain to be slow. 

However, with SiteGround, you will not have to worry about that. The company has an above-average load time of 673ms which is among the fastest in the market. This places SiteGround among the top ten sites when it comes to speed. 

3. Excellent Customer Service

We have been monitoring the performance of SiteGround for more than two years. You will rarely have any major issues with the customer support of SiteGround. The company has a knowledge base to help customers find their own quick answers. 

Alternatively, you can use the live chat option or call over the phone. With the live chat option, you will be connected within less than one minute. Unlike the other hosts, there are no noticeable delays in answers. The support team knows what they are talking about and will not search for answers whenever you raise a new question. You will get a good experience all around from the customer support team. 

4. Free Website Migration

Whenever you come across a website that offers ‘DIY migration,’ it will make users a little anxious. The reason is that most of them are not great and they put up a lot of burden on the clients. 

SiteGround is an exemption to this rule. The brand has developed a free WordPress migration plugin and you can upload it to any website. It does not have any boring and long walkthroughs. You will just generate a token from your SiteGround account and the plugin will help you in doing the heavy lifting quickly. 

However, the process requires you to do some additional work. The advantage is that you will migrate as many websites as you wish with this option. Unlike other hosts that claim to offer free migration, you will not be forced to make a payment after a certain point. 

If you need some professional hands-on assistance, you will get it from the higher-tier plans of SiteGround. If you go beyond the limit of any plan, you will be charged a small nominal fee for every additional website. 

5. Free CDN and SSL 

One good thing about SiteGround is that it offers a free Content Delivery Network (CDN) and SSL certificate. Google Chrome has begun to actively warn people if the site they are attempting to reach does not have an SSL certificate set up.

SSL helps in protecting any information that is sent back and forth between the website and the user’s device. It includes personal details such as credit card numbers and IP addresses. If you leave your website unsecured, other people can intercept this information easily. Therefore, Chrome is looking for the best interest of the users at this point. 

This makes SSL certificates to be a requirement for all modern-day websites. The good thing is that SiteGround gives you all this for free on all its websites. 

The other thing that comes in handy is the type of free Cloudflare Content Delivery Network (CDN). CDN is used to store large files like images on several servers in various locations globally. It helps to ensure that your files are stored as close as possible to the visitors. 

It means that they are accessed at a faster speed. The servers of SiteGround are spread across three continents. It gives a good customer experience by keeping fast loading times. 

6. Advanced to Beginner Features Available

The other good thing about SiteGround is that it has something for everyone. Bloggers and be happy that they are able to install popular website builders such as Weebly within a few clicks. Weebly has a simple drag-and-drop editor and hence you will have full control over the feel and look of your website. You will not dive into any form of coding when implementing this project. 

SiteGround also has integrations with Drupal, Joomla, and WordPress in addition to Weebly.  You can install each of these adds painlessly and quickly. However, you will be luckier if you are already a developer. 

You will get pre-installed on the big plans alongside phpMyAdmin, SFTP, WP-CLI, and SSH. You will get multiple PHP versions at your disposal. The other available feature is multi-level caching. You also have access to the staging environment for websites to test and prep before you push new features to production. 

SiteGround also uses a proprietary, Al-bot prevention tool to help up with the security. This technology tries snuffing out new attacks before they hit. According to their data reports, it blocks close to 500,000 to 2,000,000 brute-force attempts on their servers every year. Therefore, you will not be left to handle most of these headaches on your own.

7. 30 Day Money-Back Guarantee 

SiteGround hosting features a complete 30-day money-back guarantee on all the shared hosting platforms. In comparison, you will get their dedicated, VPS, and cloud hosting plans with a 15-day refund.

Like several other hosting websites, some extras like domain name fees are non-refundable. For SiteGround, this refund policy does apply to new customers alone. Therefore, you cannot get a refund for the renewal plan. 

The interface of SiteGround is user friendly and beginners don’t need any training to navigate through the various options. However, if you have a challenge with the control panel, you can take advantage of the knowledge base to sort it out.

Besides, you can contact the support team through the various options for any assistance. Therefore, you will not encounter the hefty costs of employing professionals to help you because of the complexity of the site. You will really enjoy working with SiteGround even if it is your first time to use a web hosting service.

The main indicator for the performance of a web hosting site is the uptime. With SiteGround, you will have a reliable website 24/7 without facing downtimes. On average, the uptime is far much beyond what the other hosts provide. Even a downtime of a few minutes will cost website owners a lot of money. 

SiteGround will surprise you in a good way. When you go through the service level agreement of the company, you are guaranteed uptime of 99.9% annually. If the company doesn’t meet the threshold, you will get some free months of hosting as the compensation. 

There are some few conditions that are used to calculate the uptime. Any emergency or schedules maintenance issues are exempt. If you do something like exceeding resources, installing applications that don’t work, or violating terms, SiteGround will not take the responsibility. Major external attacks on the company’s system can also sidestep this policy. Reliability calls for a website that is available 24/7/365 without experiencing any major downtime. 

Even though the price is a primary determinant of choosing a web host, you should never compromise on its performance. A host whose performance is poor can cost you a lot of money in the long run. As we have said, the most important factor is speed. It boosts your SEO and offers a good user experience at the same time. We have done a lot of speed tests for SiteGround websites and the performance is exemplary. 

How the server responds determines the amount of incoming traffic. However, websites that use the shared hosting account may be a bit slow. The reason is that your website is sharing resources with other sites on that server. 

Most of the shared hosting companies kill the server process automatically if they discover that you are using too many resources. Such action will course a downtime on your website. On several instances, SiteGround will give you an uptime of 100%. 

You should pay close attention to the content on your website as it is a big determinant of the loading time. For example, if your pages have a high resolution, it will increase the overall page loading time significantly. You can blame the web hosting service when the problem is actually on you. The speed test will accurately reflect the performance of your host server when you do the right things. 

In our evaluation, we look at the actual server response time in addition to the page load time. A tool like Bitcatcha is the best because it ignores the page content and tests the response time of the server alone. Bitcatcha also provides the average loading speed from various global locations. It measures the speed for every location three times before getting the average of the results. 

From this, it comes out clearly that SiteGround is an excellent option for your visitors especially those located in the United States. The server responds in a fraction of a second for those in the United States. However, it takes a bit longer to respond in Japan. If you have a target audience in this region, it is advisable to look for another web host.

There are so many praises for the customer service support of SiteGround everywhere. The company is remarkable when it comes to offering knowledgeable, helpful and quick support to its customers. You can be sure that the company will not leave you alone at the time of need. It does everything to make sure that you are comfortable as a customer. 

The customer support of SiteGround includes a highly reliable ticket-based support, 24/7/365 phone calls and live chat. The live chat and phone have a response time that is almost instant. The email also has a first response of less than ten minutes. 

If you are the type of user who prefers fixing your own things, SiteGround has you covered. The platform has a large collection of database articles with guides, tutorials, videos, and screenshots. Therefore, you will not get stuck at any point when using SiteGround to host your website.