Siteground Review: Is Web Hosting Really That Good?

In this Siteground Review  I am going to take a look at the features that Siteground offer and why they are different to your standard hosting company.

Trying to find a reliable and reasonably priced web hosting service is tough.

Most of us use Bluehost or Hostgator (or similar hosting), but their service has been on a downward spiral since they were bought out.

Sometimes my Bluehost website goes down for no reason.

There are other issues with my hosting that I do not like such as:

• the lack of a decent backup (which is key to a safe website)
• no serious caching to speed up the site (relying on WordPress is not ideal)
• only one hosting location (which means if you are far from the server, your site is slow)

And many of these things you have to solve yourself. Which is not good if you are not technical.

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What Does Siteground Hosting Offer?

You have probably seen a lot of hosting offers, and they are all quite difficult to read (and boring, I know).

But here are some of the things that Siteground Hosting offer that others do not normally have:

• They have servers in three locations (US, Holland and Singapore) so you can choose where it is hosted
• Daily backups (you don’t have to do it yourself anymore)
• Free Setup & Transfer of your website (so no tech skills required to move your site)
• WordPress management tools (caching, staging, versioning – when you want to get serious)
• Auto-Updating of WordPress and Plugins (normally an expensive service from sites like WPEngine)
• No limitation on plugins you can use (not the case with Premium hosts like WPEngine)

Of course the standard things you expect are also there too:

• Free Domain Name when you signup
• 99.9% Uptime Guarantee (last year 99.996%)
• 24/7 Technical Support
• 30 Days Money Back Guarantee
• Unlimited Traffic, Emails, DBs
• Free CloudFlare CDN

So they more or less have it all covered. And they go above and beyond the standard hosting with Bluehost and Hostgator.

Siteground vs Bluehost or Hostgator

A common question people have is what is the difference:  Siteground vs Bluehost or Hostgator.

Long term SIteground is a little more expensive than Bluehost or Hostgator, but their service, uptime and features are worth it in my opinion. My main site is on Siteground. My side projects use my old account on Bluehost.

Because Siteground do pricing a little differently to Bluehost or Hostgator, I recommend you check the Siteground prices yourself.

The first year is always discounted, then the standard price from the second year onwards.

Bluehost locks you in for 1, 2 or 3 years and gives you cheaper deals for longer times.

Hostgator is a little more flexible than Bluehost but their basic plan for one month payments is $8.95. So Siteground is a lot cheaper (and better).

As for features, they are very similar on the basics (space, bandwidth, support etc).

The main differences are:

• Siteground has better uptime (ie their servers are up more reliably)
• Siteground offers servers in three international locations (USA, Europe and Asia)
• They do better backups and more often
• They have fantastic caching which speeds up your website a huge amount

In general I find them to be more knowledgeable and have better support (including migration of your site for free).

What are the Siteground Hosting Prices and Plans?

No Siteground Review would be complete without a rundown of the hosting plans and prices available.

Below are the basics to give you an idea of what is in each plan.

The main difference between them is the amount of traffic you expect, and some extra features you might want (eg. Premium features I will go over below)

So, if you expect less than 10,000 visitors a month and do not need anything special in terms of extra features you can go for the Startup Plan for $3.95 a month (the same in Euros, for all the Europeans out there).

Bigger Plans and Premium Features

The bigger plans (GrowBig and GoGeek) are for 25,000 and 100,000 visitors respectively but also have some other features you might want to consider.

GrowBig hosting plan also has some Premium features which includes:

• Free SSL Certificate (if you need https for your website)
• 30 Days backup of your site (gives you options of what day to get from backup)
• Priority Support
• Supercacher (faster caching for your site)

Some of these features might be worth paying for even if you have less than 25,000 visitors. You just have to consider what they are worth to you. (** An SSL Certificate with GoDaddy costs about $80 a year).

GoGeek hosting plan includes all of the above, plus some Advanced Geeky Features:

• Less Accounts on the server (which means improved security)
• Git and staging (great for developers)
• PCI Compliance
• Advanced Hardware

So unless you understand what most of the above means, and don’t have over 100,000 visitors a month – you can ignore this plan.

Siteground WordPress Hosting

Like many hosting companies today, Siteground offers a very simple one-click install of WordPress. So if you are not at all technical, it is quite simple.

During the setup you can tweak a few things if you want, and know how. Things such as:

• whether you want a www. website or not
• language of your website
• admin name and password (I recommend you change this to something other than “admin” as hackers use this all the time)
• adding the limit login plugin (definitely worth doing to stop backers again)

WordPress Caching – Speeds Up Your Website

One of the key things Siteground provides over other hosting companies is the special plugin they have developed to help speed up your WordPress website. Ir works with WordPress and Joomla and is relatively easy to set up.

You just have to add the plugin and turn it on as well as switch it on on your cPanel on Siteground (so two steps).

This is an amazing speed increase for your site, so I recommend you use it if you run WordPress. And if you need help you can either refer to the Siteground tutorial on this or contact support. Either way they will have you up and running in no time.

By using this plugin alone, my site almost halved the time it takes to load! Amazing.

SiteGround Performance

One of the biggest concerns of website owners is uptime and hosting performance. After all, it severely affects how our websites run and our business as a result.

Lucky for us Jerry Low at WHSR has recently done a review of SiteGround and their web hosting performance so we can take a look at the results.

In his post he shows that overall they have about 99.9% uptime. Recently they have dipped to 99.5, however over the previous year it has almost always been 99.9% which is very close to 100%.

Final Words

It has been a while since I moved to SiteGround hosting, and I have even moved more websites there. They are fast, reliable and very helpful. And I use them for all my customers as well.

Not only do they offer what the others do, they go above and beyond with:

• their own hand-built caching system (speeds up your site)
• hosting in 3 locations around the world (with CDN to help)
• specialists in WordPress and Joomla (people I have met, who really know their stuff)

I will certainly update you all as my experience continues, but so far I have been impressed with their personal service, knowledge, friendliness and help.

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