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SiteGround is one of the most popular and highest rated hosting provider in the WordPress community. They provide unique in-house WordPress speed and security solutions to make your site as fast and secure as possible. They are known for the best 24/7 support in the industry which is why they’re an official ‘WordPress’ recommended hosting provider. This is also why we use SiteGround for hosting the DigitalMarketingmedia247 website. SiteGround features include automatic upgrades, built-in WP caching, CDN, one-click staging and GIT version control. They are also one of the few companies offering location specific hosting with 6 data centers in USA, Europe, Asia, and Australia.
Siteground was founded in 2004, and since then it has grown into one of the most well known hosting companies.
It is headquartered in Sofia, Bulgaria with offices in 4 locations and data centers on three continents Iowa USA, London UK, Eemshaven, Netherlands, Frankfurt Germany, Sidney Australia and Singapore. Today, the company has more than 500 employees and hosts more than 2,000,000 domains.
What is SiteGround Web Hosting used for ?
SiteGround is used by Developers and web designers reliant on good quality and support.. It’s suitable for serious projects, and if you need more performance down the line, you can upgrade to one of its premium hosting plans (e.g. cloud or dedicated). Recommended for
- Online stores
- Professional bloggers
- Websites that run on WordPress (more information)
- Large corporate websites
- High performance websites
Remember that you can try SiteGround for 30 days with no obligation.
If you’re interested in web hosting, developing and building your own website you might have heard of Siteground back when web hosting was really starting to become more accessible to website designers and developers Siteground was leading the charge as one of the best and most developer friendly hosting service around but since then a lot of other competitors have entered the market Weebly, Wix, Hostinger,Godaddy to name a few and a lot of things have changed.
Siteground has been updated recently and there’s been some talk that it might not be as good as it once was so with those rumours spreading we decided to have an in depth look into the mechanics of Siteground with the intention of giving you a complete picture of how Siteground operates today in 2021 as well as any of the features that might be available with it or any of the downsides as well and hopefully help you decide if SiteGround is right for your particular situation
Siteground Hosting Plans
let us start out with having a look at SiteGround hosting plans to begin with there are three plans available there’s the basic plan which is called startup and that supports one website while the other two support unlimited websites that will come with 10 gigs of ssd storage and enough bandwidth to support around 10 000 monthly visitors your next two plans are Grow Big or Go Geek
With grow big you can have 25 000 visitors 20 gigs of space unlimited websites hosted and unmetered data transfer with the largest plan go geek you can get a hundred thousand daily visits 40 gigs of space unlimited websites hosted and unmetered data transfer. One thing to note with all of these if you are inexperienced in creating a website they do come with a free drag and drop like Weebly site builder also all the plans are based on nginx web server technology and that’s one of the most advanced and powerful options that’s actually available today. So already that’s going to set Siteground above some of the other competitors on the market now if you’re familiar with website hosting then you’ve probably heard of cpanel and that’s the control panel that many of these web hosting sites use well siteground has actually opted to move away from cpanel and they’ve instead developed their own panel called site tools
Traditional Cpanels
Siteground Site Tools & What It Means To You
What does the site tools mean for you.. well you’re not going to get soft taculous auto installer and that means that you also will not get its handy library of one click scripts for hundreds of content management systems but you do get SiteGround ‘s app manager and that supports 18 cms installations but you will need to install that manually now obviously things like wordpress Joomla and Drupal are supported but if you are interested in things like laravel or symphony frameworks they can only be installed manually but again if wordpress is your go to then you have a solid base so if you are a wordpress user and you are to using softaculous to create a staged version of your website which you can try out changes that don’t affect the live site. SiteGround does give you that option but it’s not included in the basic plan so if you are interested then you might want to increase your plan to take advantage of that feature
Website Security
One assumes that security is going to be a big thing with your website and you want to make sure that all of your users data is completely safe there are some basic security tools such as WAF that’s the web application firewall and a proprietary monitoring system included in all plans by default so as far as security is concerned you are not going to have to worry in that department you may or may not be surprised to hear that GIT which is a popular development tool that most cpanel hosts offer is not going to be included in the basic SiteGround plan and also again where security is concerned SSL certificates will be available with every plan and that’s going to be very important again to make sure that all of your users data is safe but you do have to make sure that you activate it in Sitegrounds SSL manager is very easy so you shouldn’t run into too many problems there
- Automatic Backups
if you are developing a site you want to make sure that you have good backups just in case anything goes wrong with your website and you need to reboot it back to an earlier version SiteGround automatically backs up the entire system every day and it keeps your backups for at least 30 days there’s a lot of hosts that don’t provide this feature so it’s very nice to have
- Super cacher performance booster
Is included as this is going to be crucial for your website, the Super cacher performance booster actually creates copies of your site and instead of rebuilding each and every them the cache versions so that’s going to take a huge load off your server making your website faster and smoother so that is going to be included in all plans but when it comes to the basic plan they do limit the power options so you will get some basic caching but if you want the full experience then you will have to upgrade
- Automatic Website Migration
One great feature that might be important to you if you already have a website built is it does have automatic website migration so you can actually take a website that you’ve hosted elsewhere and transfer it over to Siteground no problems all you have to do is install a simple plugin on your current website and then enter the generated token in the Siteground panel now that’s all well and good but this also depends on the complexity of the website that you’re transferring so if the site is very complex meaning that you have a lot of plugins and custom add-ons you might be presented with some problems transferring it over with a lack of compatibility with certain add-ons.
If you want you can pay an optional extra for their professional migration facility and have Siteground experts take care of everything for you it’s great that they do have that option but again you’re going to be paying more for it
For Developers and Website Designers
For developers and website designers who are just interested in basic website building their basic website plan is going to be a good option for you but it’s one of the most basic of the basic plans that we’ve reviewed across our web hosting sites now with these additional packages you are going to get a more features and a lot better performance but again you are going to pay more for them.
Now moving on as I mentioned that SiteGround does have their own control panel Site Tools and truly this self-developed control is incredibly user friendly, very sleek, smooth, it has a visually appealing modern look and it’s going to be an incredibly useful tool for you building your website.
For those who are truly considering SiteGround and you are trying to choose which plan might be right for you SiteGround is very very transparent about what each plan offers and that’s something you don’t see a lot on web hosting platforms they are very honest about the differences between each plan and what the higher tier plans can offer you
- Sign up
The sign up process can be a little frustrating and complicated to some and It is definitely not the most user-friendly experience. You are asked a lot of personal details which is uncommon with other hosting sites. For example you are asked to verify your phone number or authorise them to do a small charge on your credit card as part of the verification process and you have access to SiteGround ‘s full features
It is actually a great user experience like i said their interface is incredibly user friendly everything from installing SSL certificates to restoring backups it can all be done through this interface it has super clear tab names such as security speed and wordpress and you’ll be able to navigate through it with ease in no time also if you are a beginner in terms of building your own website then you might want to look into SiteGround ‘s proprietary wordpress starter plugin which actually walks you through the process of choosing a theme for your site and getting everything set up it also includes a lot of well-known wordpress plugins like yoast seo, jetpack, wp forms and more. Performance is going to be a big issue here you want to make sure that your website is both fast and that uptime is great and I can say that overall Siteground does have fairly good uptime but it’s definitely not as fast as it used to be
| Web Hosting Providers | Average Load Time |
|---|---|
|
Siteground |
2.02 secs |
|
Hostinger |
1.56 secs |
|
Kinsta |
1.2 secs |
|
A2 Hosting |
1.3 secs |
on average you are going get a loading time of about 2.02 seconds with 1.4 seconds being the fastest we were able to get and 2.5 seconds being the slowest and just in comparison to some other sites out there Hostinger gets an average of 1.56 seconds Kinsta is about 1.2, a2 hosting is about 1.3 so again that’s significantly slower than some of those other web hosting sites out there and some of these other faster platforms are actually cheaper.
This of course depends on what content you are putting on your website and how much load is on the server so if it is a bigger heavier website then chances are you could get load times over that three second mark and that is where you are really going to notice and really decide they have no use for your website now in terms of uptime
- Uptime
(This means how often the website was available )
Siteground actually does really well here with a 99.997 percent up time and that’s measured over three months and honestly that’s a fantastic number it means that your website is going to be up almost 100 of the time
- Support
The support that is available from Siteground is actually very good. Helpful and Knowledgeable.The potential downside is that you may have to wait a while to be connected . There are 3 support channels which are
- 24/7 Live Chat, phone or Ticket
Downsides
- Expensive
Siteground has always been on the more expensive side the problem here is the renewal prices
can be up to a whopping three times higher than the initial price.
Comparing this to other premium web hosting service providers this makes Siteground one of the most expensive hosting options available and that is just the basic plan. For the more expensive ones the price skyrockets
- One Month Trial
They do offer a one month trial but you will pay an extra setup fee equal to a few months worth of web hosting and if you do continue to use it after that first month you have to sign up for a full 12 months and you will not get your setup fee back. So if you are looking to test the waters our suggestion would be to definitely avoid the free trial
- Credit Cards and Paypal Payments
Siteground does accept credit cards and paypal but to use paypal you will have to specifically request it from support and manually generate a paypal payment request every month
- Database size:
Each SiteGround plan comes with a maximum size for each database. This will only be an issue for larger sites.
Conclusion
SiteGround does have some performance issues if your needs for web hosting are extremely complex it might not be the best option for you but for the basic website builder it has an excellent user experience and that could make it worth the money alone for that type of user. if you’re a little bit more inexperienced and maybe this is your first time hosting a website just keep in mind that support can be difficult to reach so you will need to have some patience, but when you do finally get in touch with personnel they are going to be incredibly helpful with getting you back on track.
- Also keep in mind the price point here if you’re somebody that’s okay paying a premium price for this product then maybe this is a great fit for you but again that’s going to depend on your particular situation and use.
I hope this Siteground review was helpful for you and by all means leave a comment
Disclosure: We are a professional review site that receives compensation from the companies whose products we review. We test each product thoroughly and give high marks to only the very best. We are independently owned and the opinions expressed here are our own.
