SiteGround Review: SiteGround Hosting Pros and Cons

SiteGround comes with a unique set of features that help you create a blazing fast website with ease. Let’s take a look at some of the important features you need to look for when hosting a website.

Free SSL

With every SiteGround hosting plan, you get a free SSL certificate. When you host your website on the SiteGround platform, a free standard SSL certificate is automatically enabled without any effort.

SiteGround integrates with the Let’s Encrypt project to provide SSL certificates to its users. An SSL certificate will protect the user data and helps meet the requirements for search engines to improve your website rankings.

Free Cloudflare CDN

SiteGround offers a free CDN which enables the website to load from the nearest data point for a user. Cloudflare’s CDN clubbed with SiteGround hosting ensures your website loads quickly and has the fastest response time.

Free Email Service

SiteGround lets you create a free email address with your domain name. There’s no limit to adding email accounts to your hosting plan.

The email tools include a user-friendly webmail interface, email forwarding option, auto-responders, and more. It also supports SMTP, POP3, and other email protocols to deliver your emails smoothly.

Super Caching

By default, SiteGround enables a caching system for all users on their servers. This means, your site will load faster than usual from the memory of the server.

It comes with a SuperCacher service to provide further improve the website loading speed. This service is available specifically for their premium plans (GrowBig and GoGeek).

Free Auto Daily Backups

A lot of web hosting services don’t back up your site on a day-to-day basis. However, all SiteGround plans come with daily automatic backups ensuring you don’t have to remember backing up your site regularly.

You can also generate backups on demand from SiteGround’s provided tools. This service is free on the premium plans and costs a minimal fee on the starter plan.

Website Transfer Tool

When moving a website from one host to another, you need to be careful of the traffic, security, backups, and a lot of other things. SiteGround offers a free WordPress plugin that works magically to move your WordPress website without effecting your content or configuration.

SiteGround also provides a professional website migration and transfer service. This is a paid service where a team of experts will move your site while you sit back and relax.

SSD Storage

Instead of Hard Disk Drives (HDD), SiteGround uses Solid State Drives for storage. Since SSD doesn’t have moving parts, it’s proven to improve your site performance than a website that uses HDD storage.

Advanced Security

Security is the key concern when hosting a website with any provider. SiteGround provides free in-house SSH to restrict user account access for your hosting.

It gives an encrypted connection to your hosting account, so web developers and website admins can access the web server in a secure environment. This also helps manage large files and databases securely.

SiteGround Hosting Pros:

Let’s take a look at how SiteGround stacks up against the competition:

Choose Your Data Center

Even with a shared hosting plan, you’ll be asked to choose your preferred data center. This way you can ensure your site is hosted on servers that are closer to your audience geographically.

Amazing Customer Support

SiteGround is well-known for its superior customer service. Best of all, you don’t have to wait more than a few seconds for the next available operator because they have additional support staff in all shifts, so there’s always someone to pick up the live chat.

Unmetered Bandwidth

The bandwidth is unmetered meaning you’re not charged based on the bandwidth. SiteGround’s StartUp plan, GrowBig plan, and GoGeek plan comes with an unmetered data transfer that you can use as much as you like.

Money-Back Guarantee

SiteGround offers a 30-day money-back guarantee on all their plans. This will allow you to test the service and tools with full options for up to a month and if you feel SiteGround isn’t the host for your site, you can request a full refund.

The refund doesn’t include the domain registration fees. The domain name will be your property anyway.

SiteGround Hosting Cons:

Here’re some limitations of SiteGround Hosting…

Expensive Plans

Compared to other hosting providers like Bluehost, SiteGround’s pricing is a bit expensive. However, SiteGround offers several unique features than Bluehost for faster page rendering.

No Free Domain

Unlike popular web hosting services, SiteGround doesn’t offer free domain names with their plans. If you’re starting your website, this will be an additional cost to your budget.

SiteGround Uptime Guarantee and Speed Tests

SiteGround ensures a 99.9% uptime guarantee. Best of all, if you ever experience more than 0.1% downtime on a yearly basis, you will be compensated.

To provide our users with real facts, we built a WordPress test site environment and perform several speed tests using the following tools:

• Pingdom
• Load Impact
• Bitcatcha

According to Pingdom’s website speed test, our test site loads in less than a second for a server in Dallas, Texas. That’s faster than 95% of all tested sites.

Apart from Pingdom, we also used a testing tool called Load Impact to figure out how SiteGround handles visitors during a traffic surge. Load Impact sent some virtual users (VUs) to our site and gradually built up to 100 visitors at a time.

In the chart, you can find a blue line (VUs active) which shows the number of virtual users sent to our SiteGround site and a green line (VU load time) which represents how much time it would take to load a web page for a user.

SiteGround performed almost consistently except for a spike when there were 50 users on the site. It quickly recovered and page load time remained steadily low even with more users.

It’s worth noting that the site never went down during our speed test. Take a look at the report below.

SiteGround Server Response Time

The content on your website has a huge influence on page loading time. For instance, if your site has too many images, it will take more time to load than a lightweight site. In fact, images account for most of the downloadable bytes in a typical site.

To get accurate results, instead of the analysis of page load time alone, we decided to test the actual server response time by entirely ignoring the content of our SiteGround site.

To track our SiteGround server response time, we used a tool known as Bitcatcha. Bitcatcha works differently from Pingdom.

Bitcatcha ignores the content of your page and records the page loading time from eight different global locations: New York, LA, London, Brazil, India, Singapore, Japan, and Australia. The speed for each location is measured three separate times, and then the results are averaged.

From the result, it’s evident that SiteGround is the perfect choice if your target audience is mostly located in the United States. In the United States, the server responded in just a fraction of a second. In all other locations, except Japan, the server responded within less than a second.

If your target audience is mostly located in Japan, it’s in your best interest to move your site to their Asia-Pacific data center for the best results.

SiteGround Customer Support

Most hosting providers advertise excellent customer support, but SiteGround is the one who actually delivers it. SiteGround’s customer service team is well-known for their quick response time and resolving customer issues quickly.

SiteGround offers 24/7 support via 3 modes: tickets, live chat and phone.

With SiteGround, you don’t have to wait more than a few seconds for the next available operator. They also have extensive documentation that walks you through every aspect of web hosting with SiteGround. You can also find a webinar series where they share hands-on knowledge on the industry trends.

SiteGround allows you to manage your website and hosting account with cPanel.

They also offer dozens of one-click installer for popular website scripts such as WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal.

You’ll also get a basic drag and drop builder with every SiteGround hosting plan to create a website the way you want.

SiteGround Pricing

SiteGround offers one of the most competitive prices in the industry for its level of service and performance.

Here are some of the hosting plans offered by SiteGround.

Having helped thousands of users choose a web hosting plan and start their website, we have answered just about every question you can think of. Here are some of the most frequently asked questions about SiteGround.

Why should I choose SiteGround to host my site?

Below are a few features that make SiteGround hosting sets apart from its competitors:

Even with the basic shared hosting plan, you’ll get…

• Free daily backups
• Cloudflare CDN
• Let’s Encrypt SSLs
• Your files will be stored in SSD (Solid State Drive) storage as opposed to HDD (Hard Disk Drive), which doesn’t compromise page speed and overall performance.
• You’re allowed to choose from 6 different data centers of SiteGround for the best performance.
• Unlike most other hosting companies, SiteGround never hard sells hosting addons when you purchase a hosting account.

Which SiteGround plan should I get?

It depends on your hosting needs. If you’re just starting out, we recommend you choose one of SiteGround’s shared hosting plans, and you want to quickly launch a WordPress site without having to install WordPress manually, you may choose a website hosting plan. If you’re after an online store powered by WooCommerce, you may choose one of their WooCommerce hosting plans designed to handle eCommerce websites.

Where are SiteGround servers located?

Here’s a list of the SiteGround server locations:

• IOWA, USA
• London, UK
• Eemshaven, Netherlands
• Frankfurt, DE
• Singapore
• Sydney, AU

Can SiteGround handle high traffic?

SiteGround is capable of handling high traffic around the clock. They offer different hosting packages to their customers and it all depends on which plan you’re on. If your site is found to consume too many resources, they’ll request you to upgrade to a higher plan.

Can I upgrade my SiteGround plan later?

Of course! When you’re starting out, you can choose the most basic plan. As you grow, you can always upgrade to a higher plan per your needs.

Does SiteGround offer a month-to-month payment option?

SiteGround does not offer month-to-month payment options for their shared plans. For higher plans like dedicated servers, they do offer monthly payment options. However, it’s important to note that they offer significant discounts for longer-term deals.

Can I create subdomains in SiteGround?

Yes, you can easily create subdomains in SiteGround using the cPanel.

Do I have to register my domain name with SiteGround?

No, you do not have to register your domain with SiteGround. You can use Godaddy, NameCheap, or any of your preferred domain name registrar.

Does SiteGround offer free SSL?

Yes, SiteGround offers free SSL with all of their plans. eCommerce plans come with dedicated IPs and private SSL.

Does SiteGround offer free CDN service?

Yes, SiteGround has a partnership with Cloudflare CDN to provide free content delivery network (CDN) service to all its customers. This will help speed up your website loading time for users in different locations in the world.

Do I need to purchase the addons that SiteGround offers me?

No, you do not need to purchase any addons at the time of purchase. Should you decide that you need them later, you can always add them to your account.

How good is SiteGround support?

SiteGround offers 24/7 support via 3 modes: Live chat, phone, and ticket. SiteGround is well-known for its speedy response. Unlike other hosting providers, they don’t make you wait more than a few seconds for the next available support agent. Their extensive documentation helps you walk you through every aspect of web hosting.

Can I create an eCommerce site on SiteGround?

Absolutely! SiteGround’s WooCommerce hosting plan comes pre-configured with all the things you need to start an online store.