Gaining ground in the WordPress World
Introduction
SiteGround was formed in 2004 by University friends in Sofia, Bulgaria. They host over 2,000,000 domains in 5 data centers across the United States, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and Singapore.
Although they have been in operation for nearly 15 years, they remained somewhat obscure until they partnered with Joomla for a free hosted website solution in 2015.
Then they catapulted into marketplace recognition when WordPress.org listed them as a recommended hosting provider.
I was excited to open an account with them for this review. I had never hosted a website with them before, and I wanted to see for myself what they were all about.
SiteGround has developed their own speed optimization software, a custom WordPress plugin for performance, and their servers run on all Solid State Disk storage. I wanted to see what this all translated to in the real world.
So far, I am totally impressed. Their performance is outstanding based on our monitoring on our custom test beacon:
http://sg-openhostingreviews.com
Uptime – 99.98%
Response Time – 993 ms
WordPress Render Time – 91 milliseconds
Quick Overview
July 2019 Thru June 2022
| Average Page Speed | 993 ms |
| Average Render Time | 116 ms |
| Average Uptime | 99.98% 60 minutes over 6 outages |
| Average Security Threats | 2 attempts |
| Support | Tickets 24/7 - Live Chat 24/7 - Phone 24/7 |
| Apps | Supports more than 500 applications |
| Features | Unmetered bandwidth, SSD storage, free CDN, free backups |
| Plans | Shared, WordPress, Cloud, Reseller, Enterprise and Dedicated Servers |
| Transfer | Free on GrowBig and GoGeek plans |
| Pricing | Starting at $3.95/mo (renews at $11.95/mo) |
Three Main Considerations
Speed and Reliability
No one wants their website is down or run slow. In many cases you have less than a second to win over a new web visitor.
All companies that deliver technology solutions should strive to provide 99.95% uptime. Ideally a web server should load pages in less than 1 second. You should be able to track load time in milliseconds.
We are constantly monitoring the uptime and page load speed of SiteGround’s service. Then we publish our testing results on a monthly basis. We have setup a simple WordPress website as a testing beacon.
Here is a link to that site:
http://sg-openhostingreviews.com
Since we started our testing, SiteGround has consistently exceeded our expectations for uptime and page load speed. They are also beating out most of the competition.
Here is a breakdown of their performance by month:
July 2019 average uptime: 100% average load speed: 726 ms
Aug 2019 average uptime: 100% average load speed: 819 ms
Sep 2019 average uptime: 99.88% average load speed: 1,041 ms
Oct 2019 average uptime: 99.98% average load speed: 695 ms
Nov 2019 average uptime: 99.99% average load speed: 740 ms
Dec 2019 average uptime: 100.00% average load speed: 879 ms
Jan 2020 average uptime: 100.00% average load speed: 1,210 ms
Feb 2020 average uptime: 100.00% average load speed: 912 ms
Mar 2020 average uptime: 99.92% average load speed: 1,276 ms
Apr 2020 average uptime: 99.99% average load speed: 1,293 ms
May 2020 average uptime: 99.97% average load speed: 1,327 ms
June 2020 average uptime: 99.95% average load speed: 999 ms
July 2020 average uptime: 100.00% average load speed: 1,043 ms
Aug 2020 average uptime: 99.96% average load speed: 1,098 ms
Sep 2020 average uptime: 99.97% average load speed: 1,568 ms
Oct 2020 average uptime: 100.00% average load speed: 1,451 ms
Nov 2020 average uptime: 99.99% average load speed: 1,404 ms
Dec 2020 average uptime: 100.00% average load speed: 1,640 ms
Jan 2021 average uptime: 99.92% average load speed: 1,078 ms
Feb 2021 average uptime: 100% average load speed: 931 ms
Mar 2021 average uptime: 100% average load speed: 366 ms
Apr 2021 average uptime: 99.98% average load speed: 993 ms
May 2021 average uptime: 99.97% average load speed: 437 ms
June 2021 average uptime: 99.99% average load speed: 436 ms
Quality of Support
SiteGround makes it easy to get support. You can reach an agent 24/7 via phone, chat, or email/support ticket. Another thing worth mention is their self-service.
Their online Knowledge Base is powered by their own AI engine and the search returns amazingly accurate results:
Their Knowledge Base also has great starting points to get you to the information you need quickly for a lot of common scenarios. You can tell that they put a lot of thought into their customer experience:
I have a go-to test that I use to gauge the quality of support a hosting company has. I simply start a chat with their support agents and ask an easy question that any data center operator should know without thinking:
“What version of RHEL or CentOS is my website running on?”
It shouldn’t be too hard for them to know, or find out quickly, what Operating System they are using.
Nearly all Web Hosts are running Linux, either Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) or CentOS. You can find out quite a bit about a Data Center Operation by finding out what version they are on and how easily the staff knows.
Staying up to date is important, for security and performance. The more a technology provider is staying on top of updates, the better they are being managed.
Here is a screenshot of my support chat:
I was ecstatic with my experience with SiteGround support. The support chat connect to Gabe within 5-10 seconds. Amazingly he answered my question accurately within less than a minute. (The worst chat in all of our testing was over 40 minutes, and they still didn’t answer the question.)
You could tell that Gabe knew the answer off the top of his head, like he should, and I was able to fit in a follow up question. All in less than 5 minutes. This was just stellar performance, and a head above the competition.
The chat software itself performed without any glitches, and I liked how it showed the support agent’s picture. Or at least what they want me to think how Gabe looks. I also liked the duration counter.
The only thing I thought could have been improved is that there wasn’t much account verification, except for the fact that I was already logged in. Besides that, it was top-notch support.
Affordability
SiteGround is an affordable web host. Their basic packages have an introductory offer of $3.95/month. You are required to purchase 12 months of hosting at the time of signup.
The basic package includes hosting for one website, 10GB of storage, and performance suited for ~10,000 visits. Their plans do come with unlimited data transfer.
Like nearly all web hosting companies, the advertised rates on their websites are introductory offers for new accounts. The regular priced for their basic package after renewal is $11.95/month or $143.40/year.
Here is a copy of my receipt from SiteGround of my initial purchase. I got their Basic package for 12 months:
Available Plans, Pricing, and Details
StartUp
This is SiteGround’s basic package for Shared Hosting. The price for the StartUp package starts at $3.95/month. This plan is geared for beginners just starting out with their first website.
GrowBig
The next tier plan from SiteGround is the GrowBig plan, the introductory price is $5.95. With this plan you can host unlimited domains and websites, and you also get almost the storage and performance than the StartUp plan.
The GrowBig plan comes with 20GB of storage and performance for ~25,000 website visits. This plan is really suited for websites that are maturing and growing in popularity.
GoGeek
The GoGeek plan is their highest tier plan and has an introductory offer of $11.95 per month. It has everything in the GrowBig plan plus 30GB of storage for your website, and performance for ~100,000 web visits.
Plan Feature Comparison
Plan Features
- Includes Domain: No, domain names are not included with any SiteGround hosting plans. They can be purchased a la carte for $15.95/year.
- Easy Setup Process: Just fill out an easy two-step registration form. The form will also let you register a domain name with them if needed.
- Admin Dashboard Experience: The Control Panel to manage your account is fairly average. Accounts use cPanel for site administration.
- 3rd Party Application Support: One-click integration with Softaculous and PrestaShop for easy installation of popular scripts like WordPress, Weebly, Joomla, Drupal, OpenCart, and more.
- Server Information: Linux CentOS 6, PHP 5 or 7, MySQL 5.6, PostgreSQL 10
- Payment Methods: Visa, MasterCard, and Discover.
- Hidden Fees and Clauses: No refunds are given on any domain names. Renewal rates for both domains and hosting increase.
- Upsells: Some Upsells. But it’s common in the web hosting industry, so don’t worry about it.
Other Hosting
If you need additional features, Bluehost also offers other web hosting types, including VPS, cloud, and dedicated data center services.
Do We Recommend SiteGround?
Yes, we recommend SiteGround, without a doubt. SiteGround hosting is fast and they are very innovative. Their uptime is very solid and your site should stay online nearly all the time. It is even guaranteed.
They do a lot of advanced things to deliver their uptime and speed. SiteGround. Beginners may have to take some time to learn about hosting infrastructure to ensure they are taking full advantage of the features they are paying for.
We recommend that you signup with the longest term that you can afford. Their renewal rates are some the higher that we have seen.
Visit SiteGround.com