GreenGeeks Review – Solid Green Hosting

GreenGeeks is California’s own green energy web hosting service provider and was started in 2006 by its CEO Trey Gardner.  A lot of webmasters have used GreenGeeks over the years, but what is the feedback about their service stating? Their management team has over seven years of experience in providing an affordable and eco-friendly website host. This web hosting provider uses wind power, utilizing the natural force of nature (as its name suggest).  GreenGeeks has proven that they have the ability to replace three times the energy used by their servers with wind power.  So if you’re going to do business with them, you’re supporting the environment.  Since I do live on earth, I do support good old mother nature.

GreenGeeks has accumulated a ton of awards over the years from various web hosting review websites.  When I review a web hosting company, I like to look at some important factors.  I will be rating GreenGeeks on features, uptime, server speed, customer service, and last but not least cost.  For a quick overview on how I rate them, please see the ratings, pros, and cons at the top of this page. In this GreenGeeks review, I am going to show why I recommend their service over the other hundreds of web hosting companies.

GreenGeeks Features

With their service, you can choose from shared, VPS, or reseller plans. They also have multiple data center locations you can choose from (Chicago, Phoenix, Montreal, Toronto, and Amsterdam). GreenGeeks provides 300% green energy web hosting which means this hosting company advocates the preservation of our environment.  At this time I do have a shared plan with them which I have been using for two years.  I haven’t ever had one single issue with my server and love it!

Shared Plans

GreenGeeks offers shared hosting starting at only $2.49/month.  Is one of the cheapest shared plans on the market, but not the cheapest.  What I do like about their shared hosting plan is you don’t have to sign a long contract if you don’t want to.  A lot of web hosting companies like A2 Hosting, and WebHostingHub you do need to sign a 12/24/36 month contract.  However, with GreenGeeks.com you can select a monthly shared plan and you’re not tied to a yearly contract.  Is great for those webmasters that are on a tight budget.

VPS Plans

They offer five different plans for VPS.  Depending on which plan you choose the price will be $39.95/month, 59.95/month, $79.95/month, $99.95/month, or $159.95/month.  So, if you’re a webmaster you certainly have a lot of options on what plan you can use.  Based on the memory, CPU, RAID-10 storage, transfer, and IP you can choose a plan that will best suit your needs.

Reseller Plan

GreenGeeks offer five different plans to choose from just like VPS plans.  The plans that are offered are “SEED” ($19.95/month), “SPROUT” ($24.95/month), “PLANT” ($39.95/month), “TREE” ($59.95/month), and “FOREST” ($99.95/month).  I should note that if you need 10-250 cPanel accounts, you should choose the best plan that suits your needs.

There Is A Limit

I was easily allow to have 150 unique visitors per day with no issues on a shared plan.

Most of the plans offered by the GreenGeeks Eco site are mostly unlimited packages like unlimited disk space for your storage files needs, an unlimited amount of bandwidth for your site’s visitors.  Please read this post on unlimited bandwidth offer. This plan allows an unlimited amount of your domain names and along with this unlimited amount of emails.

Watch out for the words “unlimited” because there is a limit (relating to bandwidth). It is more of a sales pitch than anything. Yes, I am fully aware that it is unrealistic to have an enormous site that gets well over 2,000 unique visitors per day. So if you are looking for more than that, you should check out there VPS package. A high amount of bandwidth being allocated to there shared server wouldn’t be very practical and they would ask that you, please move it. I have tested it out and no issues with smaller sites.

Control Panel

GreenGeeks provides the easiest to control cPanel (much like InMotion) for your hosting customers which include Fantastico script library (they do use cPanel), which simplifies things with its one-click installation so that you can install all the scripts. This can make installing WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal a breeze with the standard control panel (or even migrating your site from another host).

GreenGeeks offers two special templates that even a newbie can use for their sites. The programs that can be used to build websites are called SoHo Launch and RV Site Builder. After you use the template based website program later on you will be able to construct a more modernized website. Whether you are moving your existing website to the green hosting service this company through its staff will give you their all out support to do the migration for you. It is pretty easy, and I have had some clients sites moved from one host over to GreenGeeks without any problems.

Now that we know GreenGeeks features & plans we can put their uptime, reliability, and the customer support to the test.  At the end of this review I will either recommend them or recommend another web hosting company over them.

GreenGeeksUptime and Reliability

Uptime

GreenGeeks consistently delivers an uptime of 99.99% (unlike GoDaddy) which is quite phenomenal for a website host provider. This company is somebody who cares for its customers that they are willing to go the extra mile to correct anything that is not right. For anybody who wants an honest to goodness web hosting provider, GreenGeeks is your type of provider. Their rapidly growing clientele will attest to their full commitment to promoting green issues.

As stated above in the features section I always recommend them to those clients that are looking for a monthly plan.  Uptime is one of the most reliable features you can expect with them.  Nothing is worse for a webmaster; that constantly has to deal with downtime issues.  I can promise you that you won’t have a problem with downtime.  However, I have tested their uptime and was impressed with the results I found.  From the screenshot above you can see that GreenGeeks has been tested for one year.  They have only had three outages in a year.  That is very impressive.  The data shows that they have been down for 67 minutes in 2014!

Performance & Reliability

Obviously, you don’t want your sites to run slowly.  Nothing is more frustrating than going to a website and waiting for it to load for 20 seconds.  I have run some sites on their shared servers, and I didn’t notice any slow loading times.

However, whenever I want to check a hosting providers performance I like to go to isitdownrightnow.com.  What this does is give me a screenshot of their downtime.  However, I am not interested in the downtime when I got to this site.  I am really checking the response times of their servers.  I consider under 20 ms response times to be quick, 21-50 ms response times to be average and 51 ms or over to be slow.  As you can see from the screenshots above GreenGeeks servers do respond in 53.59 ms.   This is slower than I hoped to see.  I was actually shocked because as I stated above I haven’t ever seen any problems with performance.

I then went to byecheck.com and found out there Time To First Byte (TTFB).  Saw that their response time was .182 which is what I was expecting.  So at a glance, you might think that their response times are slow, but the TTFB is very fast!  Rather than ramble on about it I will just state this; performance is not an issue with GreenGeeks!

GreenGeeks Customer Service

GreenGeeks customer service is amazing. I have talked to customer support a number of times (mainly when moving a site) through live chat. They are always quick to respond and make sure that everything runs smoothly and I can count on them to get the job done right. If you ever have any issues with your server you can always call them on there 24/7 tech support line and they will bend over backwards to help assist you.  I prefer to talk to them on live chat, but you can always call them or fill out a support ticket if you want. Moreover, they don’t use overseas customer support so you know that your call will be routed to the closes location to you (this is a huge plus!).

GreenGeeks Hosting Review Summary

GreenGeeks is amazing, and I support them. For anybody who wants a web hosting provider that has their commitment to mother earth coupled with excellent service and support beyond your expectations. Whether you are new to building your website or a veteran in this field you can appreciate the hard work and diligence that this web host provides its clients.

You can’t go wrong with GreenGeeks! Take advantage of GreenGeeks and a free domain with your hosting! However, if you find they simply won’t work for you I would recommend reading my Inmotion or WebHostingHub review. I would ask that if you have anything you would like to add about GreenGeeks please feel free to do so up above in the user reviews section. Please share this review with other webmasters on Facebook or Twitter down below (or any other networks you participate on). Thanks for taking the time to read my review on GreenGeeks.

Research on GreenGeeks.com.