SiteGround Review As Good As They Say?

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SiteGround Pricing & Hosting Plans

The following SiteGround prices are for their shared hosting plans, which is the most popular service. SiteGround offers additional web hosting options (e.g. cloud hosting plans), you can see their costs here.

What can you expect from each SiteGround web hosting plan?

This hosting company offers 3 shared hosting plans, which, in most cases, adjust to the needs of most users – unless you have a really big website. Note that all the plans share the following features:

• They do not limit the traffic that your website can receive. But of course, if you have a lot of monthly visitors (e.g. over 400,000), the shared hosting might fall short
• Databases and unlimited email accounts
• 30-day money-back guarantee
• SSD disks and it’s own caching system
• 24-hour phone, chat and email support

But, of course, not all SiteGround plans are equal. Below, we’ll take a look at their main differences.

StartUp: Ideal for users that have a single small-to-medium-sized website and need less than 10 GB of space. In this plan you’ll have the cache service, but not access to Ultrafast PHP. Advanced features (e.g. staging) aren’t part of this package either.

GrowBig: This plan was created to store unlimited sites and 20 GB of space. You’ll have access to the staging tool, and their (smart) on-demand backups system. This plan makes it possible to use Ultrafast PHP. You can host unlimited websites with this plan.

GoGeek: In addition to offering you more space (40 GB) and allow you to host unlimited sites, it comes with better-performing servers and pre-installed Git repositories. It also comes with support for white-label SiteGround hosting, something agencies will appreciate. You will have priority support with this plan.

SiteGround Pros & Cons

When to use SiteGround hosting?

SiteGround offers unbeatable services and I’d recommend it in a heartbeat. 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 hosting or dedicated). I especially recommend it for:

• Online store (SiteGround WooCommerce hosting available)
• Professional bloggers
• Websites that run on WordPress (more information) – to have managed WordPress hosting services.
• Large corporate websites
• Developers and designers that want quality and good customer support
• Those looking for features like staging, Git repositories or SSH access
• In general, anything that will require high-performance solutions

Remember that you can try SiteGround for 30 days with no obligation.

When not to use SiteGround hosting?

Even though this hosting company adapts to many profiles, in some cases it might not be the best option, for example:

• If you’re looking for cheap web hosting
• If you want Windows-based servers (check InMotion Hosting or A2 Hosting)
• If you need a lot of webspace and have a small budget

SiteGround specifications

What does SiteGround’s backend look like?

At the beginning of 2020 SiteGround moved away from its old (but good) cPanel to a more modern approach. I have to say that I really like the new system, it looks much nicer than cPanel and it’s intuitive to use.

Besides the new design, my favorite dashboard (they call it Site Tools) enhancement is that now websites are treated (managed) individually. This means that each site will have their own separate admin panel, which makes things easier if you have a couple of projects hosted on SiteGround (e.g. you can back up 1 site as opposed to having to back up the whole account).

On top of that, it’s possible to add users to your admin panel and assign them to individual sites and roles. As you can imagine, this is a game-changer for big teams and agencies as they will be able to give access to clients.

SiteGround’s approach to Backups

Personally, I think that backups (alongside performance and a reliable customer support team) are one of the most crucial features of a hosting provider.

True, you can connect a 3rd party service that creates backups for you (e.g. UpdraftPlus for WordPress hosting), but I am of the opinion that having it integrated with your host is more efficient and easier to manage.

So I looked very closely at SiteGround’s backup system, and I have to say, it’s the best one I found for providers in this price range (e.g. WPEngine is better, but also way pricier).

Here is what I liked about it:

• The backup feature is seamlessly integrated with SiteGround’s system. So no foreign system which could create conflicts needs to be used.
• Backups for each site are managed individually, which means that you can create a backup for just one of your sites instead of having to create backups for all your SiteGround hosted sites.
• Having the option to create on-demand backups is a dream for those pushing code or system and plugin updates. Before doing so, you can create a backup for your peace of mind.
• Backups are useless unless you have an easy and effective way to restore them. SiteGround only requires a couple of clicks.
• And finally, the on-demand and restore backup options are included in the GrowBig and GoGeek plans at no extra cost – other web hosting companies charge for similar (worse) features.

There are a couple of things I’d like to be a bit different, for example, there’s a quota limit of 5 manual backups per site (you’ll have to delete an old one if the limit was reached), and there’s no way to download your backups, you can only restore them.

Testing SiteGround's web hosting

Uptime tests

I used StatusCake to measure the availability (uptime) of SiteGround’s servers. The fewer the interruptions the better. It’s recommended to have uptime figures above 99.95%.

SiteGround’s uptime results in our web host reliability tests, are impressive, as you can see in the chart below:

Only Kinsta have beaten them for uptime over the last 3 years:

To monitor uptime I use StatusCake, a tool that checks each website every 5 minutes.

And this hosting provider refunds you part of your money if your availability falls below 99.9%. If availability is one of your concerns, SiteGround is a hosting provider you can count on.

Is SiteGround fast?

In my experience, SiteGround is without a doubt one of the fastest and most consistent web hosts. When we compare it to other web hosts in our most recent tests, its loading time is pretty impressive:

And SiteGround has consistently performed well in our web host speed tests, for the last three years:

Results in seconds

As you can see, SiteGround have always had top results. This is great, as our own research consistently shows the importance of website speed for SEO, UX and conversions!

SiteGround’s WordPress Hosting optimization plugin

SiteGround has a plugin for optimizing websites for WordPress, that makes it easy for WordPress users to optimize websites. It’s amazing – it does the work of 3 or 4 plugins. On top of managing your website’s cache options, this SiteGround WordPress hosting also gives you options for:

• Compressing HTML, CSS, JavaScript and images
• Lazy loading images
• Combination of CSS files
• Optimization of browser cache
• GZIP Compression

WordPress speed optimization SiteGround plugin

The results are exceptional. That’s why I think that SiteGround is one of the quickest web hosting services I have ever tried. If you need high-speed WordPress hosting for your project, I’d really recommend it.

SiteGround tutorial on how to install WordPress

Check out the following video-tutorial to see how to install WordPress with SiteGround:

CDN tests

Even though SiteGround now has its own CDN, I’d still say that one of SiteGround blessings is, that it has CloudFlare’s CDN pre-integrated. Cloudflare is one of the most popular services, and they offer a completely free account. I have to say that the free plan has some limitations, but it can still significantly improve your loading speed.

I tested how a single webpage loads with the enabled CDN and without it. The test website is on a server in England, and I wanted to check how it loaded from a geographical point further away. For this, we decided to perform loading tests from Dallas. We used the free Pingdom tool.

Test without CDN

We can see that even without the CDN, we get acceptable results. The total loading time was 3.20 seconds, we loaded 1.2 Mb and it received a score of 80 out of 100.

Here are the results with the CDN enabled:

Test with CDN

Repeating the test with Cloudflare’s CDN activated (in its free version), we see how loading time improves by nearly half a second. The size of the page is the same and our final loading score is better by 12 points.

So, if you’re going to use SiteGround for your website, it may prove very useful for you to activate Cloudflare’s CDN. Even the free version would help improve your website’s performance.

SiteGround Review: Final reflections

I was drawn to how SiteGround speaks about their own customer support team, their promises, availability and speed.

But do they meet expectations?

After years of trying them out, I think they offer a very good service. They have really fast loading speeds for shared hosting. The SiteGround support team is fast, effective and friendly, they are meant to be industry experts – many competitors fail here. Plus, if you’re looking for the best technology, SiteGround offers much more than average (e.g. Git or Staging environment).

Of course, this web hosting service is in the medium-to-high price range, and it would not be ideal for small-budget projects. Its advanced backup features are fantastic, but they aren’t available in the lowest plan for free. Also, be aware that each plan limits the sites that you are allowed to host.

I hope you found this SiteGround review helpful. But please, leave a comment below if you have any questions or comments.

> You can take a 30-day, no obligation trial of SiteGround. Or check out our round up of the best web hosting providers next!

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