Things about Siteground you should know

SiteGround Review

SiteGround is one of the most reputable and acclaimed providers in community WordPress hosting. We provide excellent in-house WordPress speed and security solutions to keep your site secure as quickly as possible. They are officially recommended “WordPress” hosting providers, as we know them as the best 24/7 support in the industry. This is also the reason to use SiteGround to host a WP Beginner site.

The features include automatic upgrades, daily backups built into the WP cache, a free CDN, free SSL, one-click playback, and GIT version control. It is also one of the few companies to offer per-site hosting with six data centers in the United States, Europe, Asia, and Australia. Even better, WPBeginner readers get a special 63% discount.

SiteGround is a Bulgarian company founded by students in 2004. Since then, it has flourished and now has over 500 employees and around 2 million domains.

The technical support team is available 24/7. According to their website, they also seem to appreciate the loading speed.

There are many processes, and SiteGround promises many benefits. But is this all true?

After testing the SiteGround shared hosting solution on a test site, I wrote this SiteGround review. We hope this review helps you decide which option is best for your site.

SiteGround hosting and pricing

SiteGround’s hosting service offers a wide range of options and generous storage to customers who need it. It is packed with features that appeal to both the consumer and the business user, such as e-commerce and server location.

For example, SiteGround provides a decent number of hosting options, plus tools that increase performance and help optimize sites. The service represents good value for money, given its range of features, ease of use, and support system. Its only drawback is the lack of VPS and dedicated hosting plans.

SiteGround offers three shared hosting plans. In most cases, the plans are sufficient for most users. However, if you want to host a very large or complex website (one with over 400,000 monthly visits), SiteGround’s shared hosting plans might not handle all of your traffic.

StartUp

A package for users who run small to medium-sized websites and need less than 10GB of storage. If you have a small-to-medium sized website, you’ll have the cache service available, but not Ultrafast PHP. Advanced features like staging aren’t included in this package either.

GrowBig:

This plan includes unlimited hosting for unlimited websites and 20GB of storage space. You will have access to the staging tool and their on-demand backup system. The plan also makes it possible to use Ultrafast PHP. GrowBig allows you to host an unlimited number of websites.

SiteGround features

SiteGround provides top-notch hosting services for large and small websites. If you’re starting a new blog or online store, it can be a great option. Plus, if you’re running WordPress, SiteGround offers managed WordPress hosting, giving you optimized WordPress performance with regular security updates.

One plan to note is its cloud hosting plan, which is designed for developers who need more power and flexibility than regular shared hosting offers.

SiteGround provides multiple security options, including an automatic scanner that tells you if your site is under attack, spam tools SpamAssassin and SpamExperts, HotLink protection, and IP address blocklists. The company scans all the links in your homepage to keep them clean.

SiteGround provides a feature called Leech Protect (which is available on many plans), letting administrators prevent users from giving out or publicly posting their passwords to portions of the site.

It also integrates with the CloudFlare content delivery network (CDN) service for better performance and security. While any site owner can easily sign up with CloudFlare, the integration (available for free!) means more people who did not know this was an option can now benefit.

Another tool is SiteCheck, a website scanning tool that scans your code for malware and checks your site for broken links. This tool runs automatically regularly, minimizing the chance that users will experience malware from visiting your site. SiteGround also has free daily backups to safeguard your data.

Ecommerce

Ease of installation and customization is one of the major advantages of choosing Weebly over e-commerce software packages such as PrestaShop, CS-Cart, and Magento. Softaculous, a Weebly option with 30 available platforms (including Zen Cart, ShoWare, OpenCart, and Axis), allows you to choose the best platform for your needs.

As a Magento Certified Developer, I created an attractive store using the drag-and-drop store builder.

I used the cart app if you only need a shopping cart, or if you want to focus only on invoicing and billing, there is an app for that, too.

To ensure the security of users’ data when purchasing products on your website, purchase a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate.

A web host provides this service for free with all plans above the shared StartUp tier.

SiteGround has also introduced Wildcard, a premium SSL certificate that secures your top-level domain and unlimited sub-domains at no additional charge when you sign up for the GrowBig or GoGeek packages. Otherwise, it can be purchased separately for $60 per year.

Time of load

•  They have independently tested SiteGround to provide excellent loading speeds.
•  As per Pingdom, SiteGround is one of the fastest web hosts in the world.
•  In a report from WPX Hosting, SiteGround loads sites faster than any other host out there.
•  Besides fast loading speeds for visitors, I also known their hosting for being fast for developers too.
• They use HTTP/2 and PHP 7 everywhere, which keeps websites running much faster than older setups with just PHP 5.6 or even earlier.
• These tests prove SiteGround is reliable and quick in loading times.
•  SiteGround says that shared hosting is only used for sites that get little traffic
• The old policy on shared hosting accounts was to end sites when they were using too many CPU resources, or slow down the entire server for everyone.
•  if an individual account on the server causes problems for other users, SiteGround will disable it until they fixed the problem
• If you want to get a site up and running quickly, choosing a package from SiteGround is a smart decision.

Up-time is an important aspect of web hosting. If your website is down, you may lose potential clients or customers.

SiteGround had 100% uptime on the test site during the two-week testing period.

I used an Uptime robot to monitor the uptime of my test site over a two-week period. Every 15 minutes, the tool pinged my website and sent me an alert if it could not contact the site for at least one minute.

The data revealed SiteGround is stable; our test site did not go down once during the two-week observation period.

Customer support

SiteGround’s customer support is excellent, and it provides users with a wealth of knowledge on its knowledge base, tutorials, and customer service wizards. Support is available by phone, ticketing system, and live chat.

I asked about the differences between SiteGround’s cloud hosting and dedicated hosting on SiteGround’s online chat.

They connected me with my chat representative quickly and gave me a rational response.

I called SiteGround’s phone number on a weekday morning to ask a representative about how to import my WordPress.com setup into SiteGround. The representative patiently walked me through the process.

SiteGround allows users to cancel their accounts within 30 days of the date they created the account.

I prefer DreamHost’s money-back guarantee, which allows people to cancel a paid service within 97 days of the date when their credit card was charged.

Website Building

SiteGround adopted Weebly as its site-building platform of choice.

This decision is sensible, because Weebly allowed me to create attractive web pages with a minimum of effort on my part.

I could create attractive web pages by adding text, images and video to my test pages with ease. For more information on this easy-to-use website builder, please read our Weebly review.

SiteGround offers WordPress Starter, a free WordPress content management system that comes with a set of free WordPress themes and plug-ins. It’s designed to help you get your personal or business website online quickly, with little effort on your part.

Who can use SiteGround?

SiteGround is clearly positioning itself as a hosting provider for small businesses and newbies, from its features to its support resources.

If you’re a mom-and-pop store, sole proprietor, or independent business that doesn’t have a lot of design time or advanced web skills, you’ll likely appreciate SiteGround’s services—as well as the simplicity of its plans and it not offering unlimited storage or monthly data transfers.

SiteGround’s secure hosting environment, which it offers at an affordable price, shows that it has small businesses in mind. Small businesses are highly vulnerable to website attacks, and chances are they will not invest in a site scanner to look for malware or a cloud provider to protect them from denial-of-service attacks.

That SiteGround does it for them makes it an ideal host for small businesses just starting out. However, if you need greater storage and capacity allotments or high-powered VPS or dedicated servers, consider moving up to Editors’ Choices DreamHost, HostGator, Hostwinds, or Liquid Web.

SiteGround offers Wi-Fi services that are suitable for serious projects of any kind, 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 recommend SiteGround for anyone who is looking for reputable and professional Web hosting services.

For more on getting started online, read our tips on how to create a website, register a domain name for your website, and make your site easy to maintain.