Launched in 2004, Siteground is one of the highest-rated shared hosting service providers in the world. The company hosts over 2 million domains and has over 500 employees. It is independent and has headquarters in Bulgaria.
Siteground is one of the first choices when it comes to managed WordPress, Joomla, WooCommerce, Magento, and cloud hosting. It is one of the few hosting companies recommended by the WordPress core developers.
Does Siteground offer better support than other hosting providers? Are its plans affordable? Here’s our honest review of Siteground.
Data centers and used technologies
Although SG is a Bulgaria based firm, Siteground has a data center in Singapore, Amsterdam, Chicago, and London. Users can thus choose a data center closest to their country. Siteground uses top-notch latest generation products to power its servers. The servers of Siteground are powered by the Nginx web server. Nginx is a lightweight and high-performance web server. It has been configured to use the HTTP/2.0 protocol instead of HTTP. The servers ship with the latest and most stable edition of PHP i.e PHP 7.0 and an indigenously built SuperCacher module that makes your website blazing fast by serving cached pages instead of serving the pages generated by PHP.
Users can configure the SuperCacher from the Siteground dashboard. The module provides options to manually purge cache files. It also lets users enable/disable image, frontend, and environment optimization.
Siteground supports Letsencrypt SSL certificates. It offers a one-click HTTPS enabler tool which automatically activates the Letsencrypt SSL certificate for your website. The company uses a custom-built tool to protect your site from DDOS attacks.
Siteground’s dashboard features a Softaculous tool that you can use to install 100s of software, CMS, or framework of your choice with a few clicks of the button.
WordPress hosting
Siteground provides three shared WordPress hosting plans to the users. The cheapest plan of the company i.e. Startup plan costs $3.95. This plan has some limitations. You can host only 1 site with traffic up to 10000 visitors/month (320 per day). Also, you can store up to 10GB data to the server. If you’re experimenting with blogging or you want to launch a personal blog, this is a great plan.
The GrowBig and GoGeek plan costs $5.95 and $11.95 respectively. It enables you to host unlimited websites. The total traffic your websites hosted on the GrowBig server can receive is 25000. On a GoGeek server, your websites can get up to 100K visitors. These two plans are ideal for users that have more than 1 website and are looking forward to hosting their websites with the same hosting provider.
The other two plans offer 1 click staging tool which you can use to test new themes/plugins before using it on a live site. Users can also avail the on-demand backup, free website transfer, and SuperCacher service.
The shared hosting plan doesn’t have bandwidth limitations. They let users enable/disable the Cloudflare CDN service. This plan also allows you to create unlimited MySQL databases and create a free business mail account. Siteground offers free WP migrator tool and CLI/SSH access to the users. Users of these two plans also enjoy one-click daily back up service.
The company offers 30 days money-back guarantee to the users. If for some reason, you’re unhappy with Siteground, you can apply for account cancellation from the dashboard’s billing interface.
Note: The pricing of Magento, Drupal, Joomla, WooCommerce, and Prestashop hosting is the same as that of WordPress hosting.
Cloud Hosting
Siteground’s cloud hosting plans are divided into the following four categories:
- Entry
- Business.
- Business Plus.
- Super Power.
Each plan lets users transfer/receive up to 5TB data. The Entry-level plan costs $80 per month. It gives users a server with 40GB SSD, 4GB RAM, and a dual-core processor. The business plan is priced at $120. This server ships with a 3 core processor, 6GB system memory, 60GB SSD. The Business Plus plan’s server is equipped with a 4 core processor, 8GB RAM, and 80GB Solid State Disk. It costs $160. The last plan i.e. Super Power gives users access to a server with 8 core processor, 10GB system memory, and 120GB SSD.
Siteground’s cloud hosting platform is powered by the advanced Linux Container technology. They let users scale resources. SG also backs up your website data automatically. It keeps up to 7 backups of the files on your server.
Dedicated hosting
This type of hosting is suitable for large websites or users that own several websites with a good amount of traffic. Like cloud hosting, Siteground’s dedicated hosting is fully managed which means, you don’t have to worry about configuration or optimizations. The company’s staff will take care of this. Siteground dedicated hosting plans start at $269. This plan, which is also called as “Entry Server” plan offers a server with an Intel Xeon E3-1230 quad-core processor with 8MB cache, 16GB DDR3 RAM, and 480GB SSD.
The 2nd dedicated hosting plan i.e. Power Server gives users a server with an Intel Xeon E3-1270 processor, quad-core processor, 32GB DDR3 RAM, 960GB SSD. It costs $349 per month. The last plan i.e. Superpower is priced at $729. It offers a server with an Intel Xeon E5-2630 hexacore processor with 15MB cache memory, 64GB DDR3 RAM, 2 x 960GB Raid 1 SSD. The servers offering dedicated hosting are powered by the Centos operating system. The servers support Nginx and Apache web servers. Their network bandwidth is restricted to 10TB.
Users of the Siteground dedicated hosting plans are given access to WHM/Cpanel/Softaculous tools, 5 dedicated IP addresses, SSH access, Exim mail server. It also offers a tool for creating GIT repositories.
Siteground’s pricing for dedicated hosting is the same for the US and European regions. They are costlier in the Asia Pacific region.
Support and knowledgebase
Siteground offers phone, ticket, and live chat support to the customers. The company is known to respond to user tickets quickly. Also, your call won’t be placed in a long queue to avail the phone support. Siteground’s website gives you access to 1000+ articles and tutorials related to website hosting, domain registration, etc. You can find these articles in the knowledgebase section. This section provides a search tool that users can use to find articles by their names.
Performance and Uptime
I’ve used Siteground shared hosting for a year in the past. My sites were never down nor did I face any performance issues. The uptime, according to me is 100%.
Pros
- Several plans for different budgets.
- Fully managed.
- Excellent uptime of over 99%.
- High-quality free tech support.
Cons
- None
Discount + offer
Click here to get up to 70% discount on all Siteground shared, Cloud, and Dedicated web hosting plans.
Final thoughts: Siteground offers several budget-friendly web hosting plans. It also bundles several features with its plans. Because of top-class customer service and excellent knowledgebase, Siteground is a newbie friendly web hosting service provider.
