Siteground is considered one of the best web hosting companies out there. But can they really be that GOOD ? Well, that’s exactly what this SiteGround review is all about . Are they as good as they say?
SiteGround is an international web host with many offices and server halls around the world. They have been around since 2004 and are a popular company with satisfied customers in many countries. In total, SiteGround is a web host for as many as two million domains from a variety of countries.
They are very knowledgeable in their fields and constantly strive to offer a service that meets the high standards of modern web developers.
SiteGround offers a number of different services, including:
- Web hosting
- WordPress hosting
- Support for WooCommerce
- Cloud services
Here we will take a closer look at mainly their web hosting service and what features they offer there.
SiteGround Hosting Review Details sum up
Rating | 4.5 / 5 |
Pricing | From $ 3.99 per month |
Hosting Types | Shared, WordPress, WooCommerce, clouds, resellers |
Speed & Performance | Ultra-fast PHP, PHP7, HTTP / 2 and NGINX + SuperCacher caching. CloudFlare CDN |
WordPress | Managed WordPress host. Easy WordPress 1-click installation. Officially recommended by WordPress.Org |
Servers | Google Cloud Platform (GCP) |
Security | Free SSL (Let’s Encrypt). Firewall. SG security plugin |
Control Panel | Website tools (custom) |
Extras | Backups on request. Staging + Git. White marking |
Refund Policy | 30-day money-back guarantee |
Owner | Privately owned (Sofia, Bulgaria) |
SiteGrounds offers in web hosting
Like many other modern web hosts today, SiteGround offers the opportunity to choose from a number of different ready-made package solutions. Individuals and smaller companies can advantageously choose one of their smaller packages to get started with their website, with larger businesses can go directly to one of the larger package offers.
The different packages include different amounts of data and are suitable for different amounts of regular traffic. At SiteGround, you automatically get a lot of good features, regardless of which package you buy. For example, you get:
- Weebly and WordPress to easily build a website.
- Super fast websites on well-equipped servers.
- Good security thinking, with SSL certificate available.
- Unlimited email accounts
- Simple overview and management of your websites
For those of you who have plans to expand the business, there is the opportunity to upgrade your package and adapt it to the size of your audience. At SiteGround, it is possible to build a website that can handle a very large load and you can also run many different sites under the same account on the web host.
Pros and Cons
SiteGround benefits
- 30 days money back guarantee
- Free daily automatic backups and restores
- Automatic WordPress installation (and officially approved by WordPress.org)
- Managed WordPress hosts all plans
- Innovative speed technology (Ultrafast PHP, PHP7, HTTP / 2 and NGINX + SuperCacher caching + more)
- Free SSL Certificate & Cloudflare CDN
SiteGround Disadvantages
- Limited data storage
- Strict policy for overuse of data
- High renewal prices
About SiteGround
- Siteground was founded in 2004 and is headquartered in Sofia, Bulgaria .
- They offer a range of hosting services; from shared host, cloud host, WordPress host, VPS, reseller host , to dedicated servers and enterprise hosting .
- All plans come with a fully managed host .
- Is an official partner for WordPress. Org
- Free SSDs are included in all shared host plans.
- Servers powered by Google Cloud, Ultrafast PHP, PHP7, HTTP / 2 and NGINX + caching
- All customers receive free SSL certificates (Let us encrypt) and CloudFlare CDN .
- There is a 30 day money back guarantee .
- Official website: www.siteground.com
SiteGrund’s main features reviewed
They have lots of great features, but there are four main features that really set them apart from other web hosts out there.
This helps explain why SiteGround is recommended by WordPress, Joomla and Drupal , and why it gets such enthusiastic user support and good customer reviews.
Server speed
When it comes to making a website user friendly, one of the most important issues is speed.
Here are some of the specific techniques they use to ensure fast charging times for their customers:
- SiteGround’s infrastructure is powered by Google Cloud with SSD-resistant storage and ultra-fast networking.
- Solid state drives (SSDs) are up to a thousand times faster than standard drives. All databases and websites hosted by SiteGround use SSDs for storage.
- NGINX web server technology helps speed up the loading time of static content on your site. All SG customers’ websites benefit from NGINX web server technology.
- Web caching plays a key role in loading dynamic content from your website. They have built their own cache mechanism, SuperCacher , which relies on NGINX reverse proxy. The result is faster loading of dynamic content and better optimization of website speed.
- Free Content Delivery Network (CDN) and HTTP / 2 and PHP7 enabled servers help speed up loading times around the world by making your content more accessible.
- Ultrafast PHP ensures up to 30% faster websites.
In addition to all of the above, SiteGround reviews and performs regular updates to their technology to ensure that the websites they are worth do not lag behind as they have not kept up with technical changes. The result is the fastest charging times available.
Security
SiteGround works committed to the safety of its customers. They have a focus on reliability, so that websites hosted by them will work quickly and flawlessly around the clock without interruption.
They also focus on counteracting attempts at intrusion by their customers and malicious traffic, through smart AI solutions. In total, their intelligent systems stop millions of intrusion attempts from malicious bot networks every day!
SiteGround also runs regular virus and malware scans on your site and sends reports to let you know about the results, so you always know what’s going on with your site. This is one of the things that users love about their web hosting service.
In 2019, SiteGround was extremely successful in keeping customers’ websites well secure. They responded to three times more threats compared to last year. Statistically:
- Wrote 250 new custom firewall rules
- Added 125 livepatch core modules
- Remedied 186 DDOS attacks
- Stopped 7 million brute-force attacks
- Stopped 160 M bad fix issues to customer sites
- every day with its anti-bot AI solution
Customer service and support
At SiteGround, you have access to fast support around the clock all week. They have received very good reviews for their customer service, which is one of the reasons why many customers recommend SiteGround.
SiteGround is a company that is proud of customer support. They prioritize customer service and this is shown in their reviews and through their customers’ loyalty.
In fact, their response times leave their competitors in the dust.
Their closest competitor has an average response time for a support ticket of 44 minutes – but SiteGround’s response time is only eight minutes.
They offer three ways to get support:
- The live chat support chat system gives you an instant answer and is available 24 7
- In the same way, telephone support is staffed around the clock and gives you an immediate answer
- If you send a ticket, you will receive a response in less than 10 minutes – and this response time is even less if you have paid for one of their priority services
Instead of waiting hours (or even days) for help with your website, you can count on this web host to provide you with a quick response. Of course, this means that you can pass on the same excellent services to the users of your site.
Review SiteGrounds pros and cons
The features they offer their web hosting customers are impressive, but the technical aspects of their service do not really give you an idea of what choosing SiteGround can do for you on a practical level.
With that in mind, let’s look at some of the real pros and cons of using this hosting company. As you will see, there are far more SiteGround advantages than disadvantages – which is not surprising given their commitment to excellence.
The benefits of SiteGround
The benefits of using SiteGround to host your site are undeniable. This is a company that prides itself on excellent service – and it shows.
SiteGround Uptime Warranty
If you have spent some time shopping for a web host, you know the importance of uptime. A hosting company’s uptime percentage tells you how often, on average, you can expect your site to be “down” or unavailable.
It is not possible for any web host to claim 100% uptime as there are too many variables in play to be sure that there will never be uptime. But they do guarantee a 99.99% uptime .
It is impressive by all standards, and they live up to it. They use monitoring software that notifies them immediately when there is an interruption and work quickly to resolve any issues.
To put this in perspective, 99.99% uptime means that your website can be down for just over four hours over a six-month period.
Their operating time percentage is really impressive. Their overall average is 99.99% uptime, and a look at their website in January 2021 revealed:
- An average monthly operating time over the last 30 days of 99.999%
- An annual average operating time for the last 365 days of 99.996%
In practical terms, their customers hardly need to worry about their websites not being available.
SiteGround server response time
Another clear professional is that it has very fast response times on the server . Server response time is a measure of how long it takes the server to deliver all the elements of your site to a user’s browser.
Siteground has an extremely fast server load averaging approximately 190 milliseconds over a six-month period. This means that no matter where your data is stored, the information on your site – both static data and dynamic data – can be delivered to a user’s browser almost instantly.
Why does this mean? Again, it has to do with the user experience. You want the people who visit your site to have as little time as possible to consider navigating away. When your server responds very quickly, as their servers do, your users are likely to stay on your site.
Several data centers
Part of the reason why their servers are so fast is that they offer their customers access to multiple data centers located in strategic server locations around the world.
When you register, you will have the opportunity to select the desired server location.
While the data rate as a whole has increased significantly over the years, the physical distance between a user and the server can affect the loading times.
To solve the problem, they have data centers in:
- Amsterdam
- Chicago
- London
- Milano
- Singapore
- Sydney
- Frankfurt
When you register for hosting services, you have the opportunity to choose where you want your data to be stored.
Free daily backups
You know how important it is to back up data on your website . Failure to do so risks losing both static and dynamic data, some of which may be replaceable.
If you set up your website with SG, you need to make sure you have a regular backup system in place, in case something happens to your website. But if your backup fails, they have you covered .
They appear daily backups on the website of all their customers’ websites so in the event that your backup fails or if for any reason you need to recover your information, you can contact customer service and get what you need.
You get free daily backups (only one backup per day on StartUp
Hosting backups are like website insurance. User errors, hacks, deleted files or website updates that have gone wrong can all be resolved directly with a backup.
- View and manage backups easily with their easy-to-use 1-click backup tool
- Create and restore website backups quickly and easily with one click
- Avoid data loss due to mistakes on the website
- Experiment with site updates that you can quickly undo
Openness
It is natural that the companies you buy from should be open to what they do and how they do it. This is especially important when you are going to trust a company with all the content on your site.
They have, for the most part, a good record with openness. When you visit their website, you will see that they show both their monthly uptime percentage and their annual uptime percentage so you can take a look at how their websites are performing.
SiteGround also provides – free of charge – each IP address for all their data centers . Why does it matter? To reveal the IP address, you can quickly test the loading speed of your website from each of the data centers so that you can choose the one that will deliver the best user experience to the website visitors.
Global reach
As a whole, the host industry is very US-centric, and this can be a problem for people living in other countries.
SiteGround is based in Bulgaria but they have a global perspective that makes them very accessible to companies and individuals around the world.
To begin with, they accept several currencies, including:
- US dollars
- British pound
- Euro
- Australian dollars
They also have a dedicated Spanish-language site and toll-free phone numbers in various locations. They also offer country-specific domain names, making it easy for local businesses to choose a domain name that is specific to their country. (FYI no longer offers a free domain name when you register.)
State-of-the-Art security
We talked earlier about website security, and one of the biggest benefits of choosing them to host your website is that you have peace of mind knowing that your website is protected by some of the best available security tools .
In addition to the built-in security features we already mentioned, you can get a lot of other advanced features that can help you protect your data – and your users.
- Anti-spam tools, including SpamAssassin and SpamExperts, to protect your site from spammers
- The ability to block certain IP addresses (very useful if you have been attacked)
- A free SSL certificate (available with some plans)
- HackAlert, a $ 1 / month add-on that notifies you immediately if your site is under attack
- Leech Protect, a feature that enables the administrators of your site to prevent users from publishing or publishing their passwords or login information
- Their free SiteCheck tool lets you quickly and easily check your site for malicious software to make sure your visitors are protected
They take security seriously, and it’s a great pro, especially if your site has an e-store or collects private information from users.
Summary
SiteGround is a large and well-established web host with many solutions, adapted for all sizes of websites. They are popular and have a well-functioning service, available support and many smart tools. If you want a world-class international web host, SiteGround can definitely be an alternative worth taking a closer look at!
SiteGround has set a new industry standard when it comes to high-performance shared hosting and WordPress hosting. While being beaten on price by competitors like Bluehost and DreamHost, SiteGround does much better in terms of speed, performance, security and core features. If website speed and security are important to you , then you should pay a little more and join SiteGround.
Questions and answers about SiteGround
SiteGround has excellent reviews on Trustpilot. They have almost 9,000 reviews and an average rating of 4.7 out of 5. Their customers are satisfied with the support, prices and services they offer.
Yes, SiteGround offers managed WordPress hosting. These packages include WordPress installation, automatic migration, automatic updates, and support that are experts in WordPress.
A web host at SiteGround costs from 3.99 euros a month excluding VAT. Then you get 1 website, 10 GB storage and traffic for 10,000 visitors per month. Read more about what SiteGround offers on our site.
SiteGround offers web hosting packages for smaller websites, growing websites and websites that are already large. They also have managed WordPress hosting, cloud hosting, WooCommerce hosting and domains.
Yes, SiteGround offers its customers support 24/7 every day of the year. They also offer a variety of guides and a knowledge base with answers to the most common questions.