Name: SiteGround
Plans: Shared, VPS, Cloud, Dedicated, WordPress Managed.
Website: www.siteground.com
Summary: SiteGround is a solid hosting company. They have years working in the hosting field. I highly recommend them to anyone seeking a host. These SiteGround hosting reviews show what other webmasters are saying about them.
Be the first to leave a review.
SiteGround combines long-term experience in the web hosting industry with top of the line technology and a no-nonsense customer service support team. SiteGround has three data centers on three continents. However, you might be wondering what webmasters are saying about SiteGround. Are they loving them or hating them?
Whenever I review a web hosting company, I like to look at many different things. First, I look at their features. I like to see what all types of plans they offer their clients. Then I like to check their performance and uptime. Last but not least, I like to test out their customer support. At the end of the review, I will write a SiteGround summary which either recommends their service or doesn’t recommend their service. There is a rating system at the top and bottom of this review which shows how I rate them. Get ready to learn everything you have ever wanted to know about SiteGround.
SiteGround Features
SiteGround has many different web hosting plans that will meet any webmasters needs. No matter how little or big your website is, they should be able to support it. Meaning, they offer shared, reseller, cloud, and dedicated hosting plans. Along with the hosting plans offered they also offer WordPress, Magento, and Joomla services.
Shared Plans
For shared hosting, they offer three different plans. The details are up above:
Reseller Plans
For Reseller hosting they do it a little different that any other company I have seen. Meaning, the way in which you do your reseller accounts is based on a credit system. So, I am going to explain how this works in the simplest way I know how. When you sign up, you have to buy a minimum of 5 credits. Credits are cheaper the more you buy.
- $49 for 1-4 credits
- $45 for 5-10 credits
- $42 for 11+ credits
So hopefully, I haven’t lost you yet. So to start up a reseller account, it’s going to cost you $225 (5X45). This means you get 5 StartUp shared plans, so 50 GB web space, each plan can support 10,000 monthly visitors, free domain names, free setups & transfers free CloudFlare CDN, daily backups, and cPanel & SSH Access.
Now, I was a little unsure of how this works, so I did jump on live chat to chat with them about it. They stated that you could use the five credits however you want. Meaning that you’re not limited to 5 reseller accounts for the five credits. That is what I thought at first, but it turns out I was wrong. So, you can have ten reseller accounts with 5 GB of space. Bare in mind you can divide it up however you want since it’s your reseller account.
This means for your starter reseller plan you’re only going to be paying roughly $18 per month for the reseller account. That is pretty cheap for what your getting. I can see some webmasters setting up reseller plans and selling them to their customers and making some decent money.
Cloud Plans
For cloud hosting, they have four different plans. The prices are up above:
What I like about these cloud plans is you can choose where you want your datacenter to be located. They have data centers in the United States, Europe, and Asia-Pacific. Just like reseller hosting they have daily backups, advanced server monitoring, Joomla & WP Optimizations, WHM + cPanel + SSH, etc.
Dedicated
For dedicated hosting, SiteGround has three different options. The details and prices are up above:
All the same great things that come with reseller and cloud also come with dedicated.
WordPress Sites
SiteGround has a special service that a lot of WordPress users will love. They have a WordPress hosting starting at just $3.95/month. You always have the option to upgrade to a GrowBig plan for $7.95/month or a GoGeek plan for $14.95/month. All of these plans come with 1-click WordPress installation, free domain name for life, templates, some how-tos from SiteGround, free transfers, etc.
Joomla Sites
Just like the WordPress service SiteGround also offers plans for Joomla users. It also runs $3.95/month. You do have the option to upgrade to the GrowBig plan for $7.95/month or a GoGeek plan for $14.95/month. They have a 1-click installer for your Joomla sites. Just like the WordPress plan you do get a free domain name for the life of your account. They have some templates and tons of how-tos that should help you on your way to developing a Joomla site.
Control Panel
A lot of webmasters including myself prefer to use cPanel. With SiteGround they don’t use an in-house control panel or anything like that. In fact, they use cPanel. It’s the same great control panel I have used for years. They even have a demo on their site where you can poke around on the backend of cPanel if you have never used it before. It’s very easy to use. Just in case you have any questions they have a how-to section which shows you everything you need to know about using cPanel.
Now, that I have covered the features that come with SiteGround lets take a look at their performance, uptime, and then customer support. Then at the end of the evaluation I will either recommend their service or recommend that you go elsewhere.
SiteGround Uptime & Performance
Uptime
SiteGround has a 99.9% uptime policy that they guarantee their users. A lot of web hosting companies make these bold claims, but some them do not deliver. Meaning, all to common companies will state that if you host with them, you’re guaranteed that your website will be up 99.9% of the time. A lot of webmasters take companies up on that offer only to be let down. However, with SiteGround webhostingstuff.com has monitored them for 3,372 days and noticed that SiteGround backs up what they say on their website. I have used SiteGround’s hosting on some clients websites and haven’t ever noticed any downtime at all. You can trust that your site will be up as close to 100% as possible.
Performance
A lot of web hosting companies will also tell you that your website is going to run super speedy when you host with them. Just like uptime webmasters will take them up on their offer only to be let down. This is not the case with SiteGround. They state that your website will load quickly and they truly do deliver. I have tested their site with isitdownrightnow.com. What this does is tells me the response time of their servers. I use it to gauge how quickly their servers respond. To my surprise, the response time was 12.82 ms (milliseconds). This is lightning fast! To get an understanding of how I grade performance 20 ms and under is fast, 21-50 ms is average, and 51 ms or more is considered to be slow. As you can clearly see SiteGround falls in the fast category.
SiteGround CDN
Seamless CDN setup in a click
- Static content caching for blazingly fast page load time
- Convenient instant purge of all cached resources with a click of a button
- Development mode for checking the latest website changes live quickly and ensuring everything looks good
- Up to 10GB CDN bandwidth per month on the free plan
- Option to upgrade to premium CDN with unlimited traffic, management for subdomains, advanced dynamic caching, custom time to live, and “always online” mode.
SiteGround Customer Service
If you are new to my reviews at tbwhs.com, you’ll notice that customer support is very important to me. Meaning if I have problems I don’t want business hours for customer support. All to commonly, web hosting companies will put business hours on their support. This drives me up the wall. However, there are no business hours with SiteGround. You can reach them three different ways. The first way you can reach them is a ticket request. This is a 24/7 ticket system and the first reply is usually 10 minutes or so. Very quick. The next way you can get ahold of SiteGround is by their telephone support; it’s around 24/7. At any time of the day, you can get ahold of a rep and get your questions answered. Lastly, is my preferred method of contacting SiteGround. This is through live chat. Just like telephone support, you can get ahold of them 24/7. Unlike Hostgator, it doesn’t take 30-60 minutes to get your questions answered. I have tested their live chat out, and it only took 1 minute between questions to get them answered. Very speedy!
To show you a screenshot of their live chat which I found to be interesting it shows a profile picture of the agent that is helping you. Then gives a little bit of details about him. But, one thing that is cool is it shows how many people he/she has helped. As you can see the screenshot of Boris he has helped 11,668 customers and acquired a 4-star rating from customers, he has helped. This is a good system that SiteGround has going on, and I wish a lot of other web hosting companies would start implementing it into their business.
SiteGround Hosting Reviews Summary
So, do I recommend that you use SiteGround for your web hosting needs? The answer is a definite yes. They were founded in 2004 and have run strong for ten years now. They have services and plans that are on par with just about every other web hosting company in the industry. They are certainly a feature rich web hosting company. I highly recommend that you do business with SiteGround because they are truly an awesome company. If you would like to check out SiteGround.com and see what they can do your online business, please click here.
Did this SiteGround review help you on deciding whether or not they would be a good fit for your hosting needs? Do you have experience working with them? Please if you could take a couple of minutes out of your day would you mind leaving me some feedback on your experience. If you found this review helpful would you mind sharing it on any social networking sites you actively participate on? Thanks for reading!
However, if SiteGround won’t work for you, I would encourage you to check out my GreenGeeks and A2 Hosting reviews. Both of those businesses are top notch!
SiteGround research.
Intervews with SiteGround customers.