A Comprehensive SiteGround Review


SiteGround is known to be a fierce competitor in the web hosting industry. It is one of the best service providers for all web hosting solutions currently present in the market. We have compiled this detailed review to test out these claims about SiteGround.

To reach a verdict about whether or not SiteGround is the right choice for you, we conducted thorough research. We checked out all the features that SiteGround offers and even got in touch with their customer support. Our findings have been neatly compiled in this review. We are sure that this review will answer all the questions you have and help you make an informed decision.

Before moving towards the finer details, it would be wise to inform you that SiteGround houses excellent security and core hosting features. They remain unbeaten when it comes to speed and performance as well. Although SiteGround charges more for its services than most web hosting services, it is still a small price to pay if these features are essential for you.

About SiteGround

One of the most important things to keep in mind while setting up a website is to select a reliable web hosting service. A good website, be it business-related or otherwise, needs to have consistent backend service. This is to ensure that your customers do not face technical problems while browsing through your site. Technical glitches and sites shutting down randomly never seem reliable to people. In such scenarios, you tend to lose money rather than make any.

Founded in 2004, SiteGround has its headquarters located in Sofia, Bulgaria. They provide a wide range of web hosting services such as :

  • Shared hosting
  • Cloud hosting
  • WordPress hosting
  • VPS
  • Reseller hosting
  • Enterprise hosting
  • Dedicated servers

SiteGround is an official WordPress.org partner, making it one of the best hosting services to start and maintain a WordPress blog. All of their shared hosting plans come with free SSD drives. Every customer gets a free SSL certificate along with Cloudflare CDN. SiteGround’s superior speed comes from their servers powered by Google Cloud, Ultrafast PHP, HTTP/2, and NGINX+caching. To top it all off, they honor their 30-day money-back guarantee.

Overall, SiteGround shapes your interaction with the internet majorly. Through its interface and services, you get a different outlook into online business and blogging.

The Main Features Of SiteGround

With the basic overview in mind, let us start inspecting features that help SiteGround retain its spot as one of the best web hosting companies. Four features give SiteGround the edge that they enjoy: server speed, security, customer support, and dedicated WordPress hosting.  These allow SiteGround to get glowing recommendations from customers and top sites such as Joomla, WordPress, and Drupal.

Without further ado, let us begin.

1.   Server Speed

If you want your website to be user-friendly, speed is one thing you cannot compromise. Even if your interface were very interactive, it would not make any positive impact if visitors keep on waiting for long periods. SiteGround is known to provide faster loading speed for its customer’s websites. User reviews have confirmed this claim. Customers have noticed how their websites started loading faster the minute they made the switch to SiteGround.

Let us be honest, if your site takes time to load, the chances are that they will not rise to the top in their respective category/niche. While this might seem like a whimsical statement to make, various studies have found that even a delay of one second while loading a webpage on a mobile device leads to conversion rates being heavily impacted. If you are baffled by this figure, take some time to think about how long you yourself wait for a page to open on a browser before giving up on it. Even if you were to be patient individually, that is not the overwhelming quality found in most people surfing the internet. Three seconds and people are already searching for something else that is faster. People moving away from your page due to delay on the part of your servers heavily dampens the traffic flow of your page.

SiteGround prioritizes speed over everything else. Their team of expert developers continuously works to improve the time taken for a site to load. SiteGround relies on heavy technology to ensure that you do not lose out on customers due to speed. Take a look at them:

  • Google Cloud is the engine that powers SiteGround’s infrastructure. This, combined with SSD-persistent storage units and ultra-fast network speed, sets SiteGround apart from the competition.
  • SiteGround relies on Solid State Drives or SSDs for all their storage-related needs. Databases and sites hosted with SSDs are nearly a thousand times faster than others, such as HDDs.
  • SiteGround uses NGINX web server technology to decrease the loading time for all static content. This is available for the benefit of all SiteGround customers.
  • For dynamic content, SiteGround makes good use of Web caching. They have an in-house caching mechanism known as SuperCacher. It functions on the NGINX reverse proxy. The motivation behind using this is to decrease loading times for dynamic content and optimize website speed.
  • SiteGround employs a free Content Delivery Network, HTTP/2, and PHP7 servers to speed up the process of loading. This also leads to your content becoming more accessible all around the globe.
  • Ultrafast PHP powers up the speed and makes sure that all websites on SiteGround servers are up to 30 percent faster.

These are the necessary checks in place so that you, the customer, never have complaints regarding speed. SiteGround does not stop at this juncture; they conduct regular reviews to provide updates ensuring that no program is outdated. They want to make sure that you do not have to face problems because of a lack of effort or complacency.

2.   Security

Running a website on the internet comes with its own set of threats. You and your website are both prone to getting hacked. There are multiple security breaches happening every day on the internet. From individuals and corporations to government organizations, anyone can be hacked. The danger here is the misappropriation of the data. This means that not only you but even the customers and visitors of your sites are under constant threat.

SiteGround ensures that customers have access to the most reliable and up-to-date security features. While they do not absolve you of your own responsibilities, these will make life easier for you. Take a look:

  • If there is a security breach on one of the websites hosted on the same server as yours, you do not have to worry about your own site. SiteGround employs site isolation to locate the specific site to have been breached and shut it down. All measures taken to counteract the damage is restricted to one particular website.
  • SiteGround ensures that all their servers use HTTP/2 technology to secure the websites on them. We have found that many web hosting services do not make an effort to include such high-end security protocols within their services.
  • All websites on SiteGround servers are protected by the Web Application Firewall or WAF. This service provides regular protection against security breaches. SiteGround regularly updates this service.
  • Customers are notified when there are new threats emerging. They are provided with proactive patches to secure their websites from further threats.

SiteGround is very efficient with routine malware and virus scans on all websites that are on their servers. The results of these routine tests are compiled and sent to the respective owners. If you choose to sign up with SiteGround, you will have a comprehensive idea of your website’s security conditions.

The year 2019 yielded great results for SiteGround’s security services. They responded well to threats. Here is a small overview:

  • 250 new custom firewall rules were written and installed.
  • 125 livepatch kernel modules were added.
  • 186 DDOS attacks were stopped.
  • 7 million brute force attacks on websites were stopped.
  • 160 million bad bot requests were denied thanks to SiteGround’s anti-bot AI system.

SiteGround stands tall on its claim of providing quality security services towards client websites. You will not be disappointed by the kind of vigilance and support they provide in matters related to website security.

3.   Great Customer Support

Any company that solely functions on providing services for paying customers cannot shy away from strengthening their customer support team. Similarly, for a hosting service, simply relying on top-of-the-line technology and great security features will not suffice. If customers cannot make good use of these lucrative adages, then there is no point. Which is why they too need to invest in fortifying customer relations and support.

SiteGround has one of the best customer support services in the web hosting industry. Assisting their customers is a top priority for them. One look at their customer base will allay all concerns about the quality of service provided. With a response time of 8 minutes, SiteGround leaves all competition behind in this particular area.

There are three major ways to access help –

  • Live Support – This feature is available 24/7. You can simply chat with one of the executives to resolve your issue or query. Responses are lightning-fast.
  • Phone Support – Like the chat support feature, this too is available round the clock. Waiting time on an average is 2 minutes. There are experienced operators on call who will help you find answers to your questions.
  • Helpdesk Tickets – Advanced technicians take care of your technical problems. Response time is around 15 minutes. Nearly all problems are taken care of in one single submission.

Before using these solutions, you could also try out –

  • Smart AI Chat Bots – SiteGround has an in-house AI to solve basic problems you might encounter. This does not require you to wait for tech experts to help you out.
  • Automated Solutions – When you submit your problem to customer support, it is analyzed thoroughly. If similar problems have been dealt with by the support team before, solutions are instantly provided to you.
  • FAQs – Every page has a separate section where frequently asked questions are pinned. These will lead you to articles that help you navigate through the problems you might face.

Timely responses are not an issue with SiteGround. You can depend on them for providing quick and crisp responses to all your queries. Do not worry, the same benefits can be passed on to the users of your site as well. Overall, you can be assured that SiteGround will help you as quickly as possible so that there is no loss of business on your end.

4.   Dedicated WordPress Hosting

WordPress is the best Content Management Site in the world. Currently, they are responsible for more than half of the content available on the internet. It is a known fact that nearly all the top content available is created on and powered by WordPress.

All hosting plans offered by SiteGround include managed WordPress hosting as well. Take a look at the features that come along with this –

  • Free SSL Certificates – Let’s Encrypt Standard and Wildcard SSL certificates are available for free with all hosting plans. You will find the standard SSL pre-installed in your site.
  • Daily Backups – Your data is backed up daily and up to 30 copies are kept. You can also create instant, on demand back ups.This way, you will not lose important information.
  • Email Service – You have the ability to create unlimited email accounts thanks to the webmail interface. You are also eligible to use the free SpamExperts service.
  • Staging Tool – You can make a copy of your site, make the necessary changes and get them live by using the staging tool. It is quite a handy feature.
  • Dev Toolkit – Tools such as WP-CLI, SSH access, PHP version, Git integration along with many others are available for advanced users.
  • Collaboration Tools – With this you can add collaborators, ship sites to clients and give them whitelabel access to site tools.

Take a look at some of SiteGround’s top of the line WordPress-related features:

  • All SiteGround plans are equipped with fully managed WordPress hosting services.
  • SiteGround regularly keeps an eye out for WordPress updates. They do it automatically, so that you do not have to worry about missing out on updates.
  • All plans also have automatic updates for WordPress plug-ins.
  • With a dedicated SiteGround team in hand, nearly all WordPress vulnerabilities are detected and sorted via writing WAF updates.
  • WordPress websites heavily benefit from the technology put to use by SiteGround to increase their speed.

The SuperCacher plug-in included with your SiteGround subscription will help you to increase the number of hits for your website. You will have a site that loads faster even when you see overwhelming site traffic. While selecting a plan, remember that Startup is equipped with static caching whereas GrowBig and GoGeek are equipped with static, dynamism and Memcached caching.

It is important to note that while SiteGround chooses to make WordPress its primary focus due to the dominating presence, they are also suitable for Joomla and Drupal. Both Joomla and Drupal are famous Content Management Systems. While the features listed above have been tagged under WordPress, they are still favourites for other synonymous services as well.

Individuals and companies want fast loading sites, quality uptime, top class security, and brilliant customer services.

The Pro’s And Con’s of SiteGround

We have covered the main features that SiteGround provides to its web hosting clients in the last section. Let us now take a look at what they have to offer in terms of real life service and experience. We want you to read this section carefully, because it will give you an honest opinion about the company from a user’s perspective.

Do not be surprised when you see that the pros for SiteGround are more in number than their cons. This is bound to happen when a company is dedicated to provide excellent service to their customers. Let us take a look at both sides of the coin.

The Pros Of SiteGround

Here is a detailed list of pros –

SiteGround Uptime Guarantee

Uptime percentages are an important factor to judge web hosting companies. This method of judgement is applicable for newcomers and experienced players alike. The uptime percentage of any hosting company will clearly indicate the average time for which you can expect your website to be unavailable.

No hosting service in the world can guarantee a 100% uptime. If anyone wishes to tell you otherwise, it would be prudent to take their word with a pinch of salt. It is impossible to provide zero downtime because hosting a website on the internet includes too many variables spread across the world.

SiteGround guarantees a solid 99.996% uptime overall. With the help of advanced monitoring software, they are able to quickly pinpoint issues and work on them. A team of software engineers are always ready to make a move whenever there are technical difficulties.

A 99.99% uptime essentially means that there is a possibility of your website being down for around 4 hours in the span of 6 months. Their monthly average uptime is around 99.99%. We have to admit that these are impressive figures.

The reasons that allow SiteGround to provide such uptime are –

  • Software Stack – With Apache as a web server and Nginx reverse proxy, SiteGround works on an in-house implementation of Linux containers. Their custom PHP handling setup is additionally optimized by an OPCache extension. Speed and reliability are constantly maintained.
  • Latest Technological Updates – SiteGround makes it a point to acquire and use the latest quality speed technologies. If you have a subscription with them you will not have to worry about using the latest PHP versions or protocols such as HTTP/2, TLS 1.3, OCSP Stapling, and QUIC.
  • Great Speed Boosting Solution – SiteGround has an in-house caching solution known as SuperCacher. It uses Nginx reverse proxy and Memcached. All plans have access to free CloudFlare CDN and Railgun. SiteGround also has an unique SG optimizer plug-in.

If you are a SiteGround customer, you will rarely have to worry about your website not being available

SiteGround Load Time

You remember how we told you that most of us barely give any time for a website to load? Three seconds is not a lot of time. To deliver this experience on your website, your hosting partner needs to be capable. We checked a lot of sites hosted on the SiteGround servers to test this capacity. We found out that such sites have an average load time of around 1.3 seconds.That is even higher than the basic metric of 3 seconds.  This speaks volumes about the company’s capacity and dedication to provide solid quality hosting to its customers.

Server Response Time

Server response time is a metric to calculate the amount of time required for a server to deliver and present all the elements that make your website to that of the user’s browser. SiteGround does an excellent job in this area. They provide super fast server response times.

Over a period of six months, SiteGround server load time averages around 190 milliseconds. It can deliver both static and dynamic data from your website to your user’s computer instantly. It does not matter where your data is currently located.

This alleviates user experience by a mile. SiteGround thus fares pretty well against its competitors simply because it delivers on the promise of catering quality service to the user. When users have to deal with the least amount of hassle while exploring a website, not only do they come back regularly, but they also get new people to try the site out. Using SiteGround to cater to your users is a brilliant idea.

Data Center Density

It is SiteGround’s prudent planning that allows its servers to be this fast. SiteGround clients have access to numerous data centers, strategically located across different locations in the world. On signing up with SiteGround you get to choose a server location according to your preference.

Focus towards server locations is important because even with technological advancements, the geographical distance between the user and server may impact the time taken for a website to load. SiteGround has data centers in:

  • London
  • Chicago
  • Sydney
  • Milan
  • Singapore
  • Frankfurt
  • Amsterdam

Daily Back-Ups

Websites are nothing but data. Everything that you have to showcase and sell, at least on your site, is present in the form of data. Information of and about those who visit your site is also data. So, if you do not backup the data on your website, you are putting yourself, your site, as well as your visitor’s personal information at risk. Your choice to not back up data endangers both dynamic and static data. You should know that damage caused will be irreplaceable.

SiteGround ensures that your site has access to a backup system in place. It will regularly ensure that your information is secure in the event of a mishap. In case your own backup has not been successful due to technical discrepancies, you have SiteGround backup to remove your worries.

Daily backups are performed on all client websites. The moment your own backup fails, you can easily get in touch with the customer service and get your data back within minutes. For the StartUp plan, SiteGround offers one free backup per day, and backup and  restoration services along with 30 backups when you are on the GrowBig or GoGeek Plans.

Think of backups like insurance for your websites. Errors made by users, hackings efforts, lost files, and erroneous updates are problems that can be solved in an instant with the backup restore facility.

  • You can manage backups with a simple 1 click backup tool
  • Restore backups that you have creates with just one click
  • Minimize and avoid data loss
  • Try out updates and see if they suit your style

All of this can be done easily via the 1-click backup restore tool present in your cPanel.

Transparency and Accountability

If you are purchasing something from a vendor or a company, it is important to have all the details about the product as well as the company itself. This becomes top priority when your relationship with the company is to be a long standing one. You entrust your personal data and content with the hosting company of your choice. Which is why you must have complete knowledge about the functioning of the company.

SiteGround can boast of a great record when it comes to being transparent. Their web page displays both the monthly uptime percentage as well as the yearly uptime percentage for the benefit of the customers.

SiteGround provides IP addresses for all the data centers they use, free of cost. Once you have the IP addresses, you can manually test the loading speed of your site in all the data centers. You can choose the data center of your choice to provide a seamless experience for your users.There are no hidden prices included in any of the SiteGround plans. You get exactly what you pay for.

Global Presence

One quick look at the top hosting companies currently in the market will be enough to tell you that the industry centres itself around the United States of America. This often becomes a roadblock for those who live in other countries. SiteGround is based out of Bulgaria. Adopting a global outlook is what makes SiteGround highly accessible to companies and individuals all around the world.

They accept multiple currencies, some of them are:

  • American dollars
  • Australian dollars
  • Euros
  • British Pounds

SiteGround offers country-specific domain names. This is a desirable feature for local companies so that they can paint their website in a very familiar light to their customers. For example, SiteGround has a spanish language page for their spanish customers. They also have multiple toll-free numbers for customer care located in different parts of the world. However, SiteGround is not offering a free domain name on signing up anymore.

Top Grade Security

Your website on SiteGround will be protected by state-of-the-art security features and tools. Like we discussed earlier, you do not have to worry about your website’s security with SiteGround.

Apart from the built-in security features we have discussed, there are a lot of other services and tools you can make good use of. These will provide additional security for your website as well as your users. Take a look at them –

  • Spam Protection – Multiple anti-spam tools are made available to you. SpamAssassin and SpamExperts are two of these tools to help you protect your website from spam attacks.
  • IP Address Block -SiteGround gives you the ability to block select IP addresses of your choice. This will help you isolate accounts and users that might have been responsible for attacks on your website.
  • Certain plans on SiteGround provide customers with free SSL certificates.
  • Hacking Security -You can get a subscription for HackAlert at $1 per month. It is an add-on that will immediately notify you, if and when your website is under attack
  • Website Security – You get access to Leech Protect. It is an useful feature that gives access to the administrators of your website so that they can prevent users from handing out or posting their login credentials online.
  • Malware Protection – SiteGround has a free tool known as SiteCheck.This awesome tool will allow you to instantly run a check on your website for malware. This will make sure that you, your visitors, and all sorts of data remain protected.

SiteGround is very serious about maintaining their security standards. They make it a point to keep up with new and updated systems security software.If your website houses an e-commerce store, or depends on collecting information from users with consent, this outlook towards security will be of major help.

Customer Support

For those who have been dabbling with websites for some time, custom support is not exactly the top priority. For everyone else, it is one of the things that tops the list of priorities. Without good customer support there is very little chance that newcomers can excel in the website development game.

SiteGround definitely has one of the best customer supports in the market. You can easily get in touch with them via their chat support and over the telephone 24/7. Waiting time is minimal and you will be notified about the number of people ahead of you, waiting for their problems to be solved. You can also raise a support ticket on the SiteGround Website. Your problem will be efficiently handled.

SiteGround manages to take care of problems quickly because of their service representatives. They have a group of dedicated individuals who work tirelessly, around the clock, so that issues are resolved at lightning speed. These service representatives are extremely helpful and patient. They are the perfect group to work with especially when you are starting out in the internet business game.

WordPress Migration

One of the major problems you might face while switching web hosts is that of migrating your website.SiteGround has a perfect solution to your migration problems. They offer a free WordPress site migration service. However, if you do not run your site on WordPress, and want to migrate more than 1 website, you can avail SiteGround’s services for $30 to have the site transferred. In this scenario, the money that you are paying is for professionals to migrate your site without any data loss. SiteGround offers these services for all Content Management Systems such as Drupal and Joomla. They are also applicable for static HTML websites and single websites as well.

The transfer service is inclusive of transferring one website of any size along with transferring unlimited email accounts you might have, FTP accounts, and add-on domains for all accounts managed via the cPanel control panel.

To make use of this process you will have to fill a website migration form. They will get back to you promptly. Your WordPress site will be transferred to your SiteGround account within 24 to 48 hours. Now, that is some impressive speed.

You can also make good use of the SiteGround Migrator plugin. This will help you transfer your WordPress website from another hosting service to Siteground seamlessly. Install the SiteGround Migrator plugin on your WordPress website. Select the migration option on the plug in. Input a destination domain as well as a destination folder. After this, the SiteGround Migrator plugin will complete the entire process on its own.

Cloudflare CDN

SiteGround offers a free subscription of CloudFlare CDN with all their plans. You can simply activate it in a click from the cPanel. WordPress, the leading name in CMS, recommends the use of CloudFlare CDN for optimizing the speed of your website. This is so that users can have a great experience on your sites.

Once you activate your CloudFlare subscription, the CDN will move to cache the content on your website. It will then distribute it to multiple data centers located all across the world. Simply move to the settings tab, under the cache management option, set CloudFlare caching level to aggressive. Now under the section marked as speed, switch Javascript, CSS, and HTML on, in Auto Minify(speed optimization). Turn the Railgun option on under the same option. This will speed up the connection between CloudFlare and the hosting server. Your site will become extremely fast and do wonders for your load time. Your users will be able to access your site efficiently.

The Cons of SiteGround

While the pros for SiteGround are plenty, it is equally important to be aware of the cons as well. In order to make the correct decision for yourself, consider these downsides carefully.

Data Storage Limits

One of the major drawbacks of SiteGround is their limited storage capacity. This means that the amount of data you can keep on your site is pretty average. The rationale used by SiteGround here is that there should be no compromise on the speed of the websites they host. Load times are directly proportional to the amount of data being stored on SiteGround’s shared hosting servers.

This might be a major problem for those who have image and video heavy websites.
The minimum storage capacity provided by SiteGround is 10 GB and the maximum they provide is 40 GB. These ranges are great to host text-based sites.

You have to make a good guess about the requirements for your website. Calculate the amount of storage you will need for your site to function. After you have an estimate in mind, see which plan suits your data and storage limits. They have three plans to offer –

  • The StartUp Plan: This offers 10 GB of storage space. It is adequate for most non-CMS and non-WordPress powered sites.
  • The GrowBig Plan: This offers 20 GB of storage space. It is great for sites driven by WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal.
  • The GoGeek Plan: This offers 40 GB of storage space. It is a great deal for e-commerce websites along with those that are hosted by WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal.

Limits on Resources

SiteGround has a monthly allowance of ‘CPU seconds per account’ limit set. This restricts the amount of resources that your site is free to use every month. If you go over the given limit regularly, SiteGround has the wherewithal to place your website on hold till the time your monthly allowance is restored. This can become a formidable roadblock to overcome.

Take a look at their monthly resource limits –

  • The StartUp Plan – Has a limit of 10,000 site visits per month.
  • The GrowBig Plan – Has a limit of 25,000 site visits per month.
  • The GrowGeek Plan – Has a limit of 100,000 site visits per month.

Even with the GoGeek plan, there is a possibility that your account might be frozen even below 100,000 site visits. If you think your website will attract over 3000 visitors per day, it is entirely probable that the GoGeek plan might not be suitable for the kind of vision you might have.

If you see your website getting more than 3000 visitors per day, it is advisable that you do not opt for shared hosting at all. Any cloud hosting plan, or even a VPS plan would be a perfect fit considering that they offer more resources and data limits as well.

SiteGround Plans and Services

SiteGround has three different hosting plans for customers to choose from. Take a look at the major details of the plan –

1.   SiteGround StartUp

                                                            StartUp Plan
Main Features:

●     You can host 1 website only

●     You  have a limit of 10,000 monthly site visits

●     You are allotted 10 GB of disk space

Essential Features:

●     SSD storage

●     Completely free site setup & site transfer

●     Robust 30 day money back guarantee

●     A99.9 percent uptime guarantee

●     Round the clock technical support

●     Unlimited bandwidth, email accounts, and databases

●     Free SSL & HTTP/2

●     Free daily backups

●     Free CloudFlare CDN

●     SuperCacher static caching only
PHP7 + OpCache

●     WordPress & Joomla tools
cPanel & SSH access

This is a great plan for those who are entering the website hosting game. Remember that you can host only one website in this plan. The Startup plan will provide you with all the features necessary for the smooth functioning of a website.

2.   SiteGround GrowBig

The SiteGround GrowBig plan packs premium features along with the essential ones that have already been listed in the StartUp plan. This plan provides you with premium WordPress caching, regular backups, and premium backup and one click restore services. The GrowBig plan also offers a free one year subscription of Wildcard SSL certificate.

                                                          GrowBig Plan
Main Features:

●     You can host unlimited websites on this plan.

●     You have a limit of 25,000 monthly site visits

●     You are allotted 20 GB of disk space

Premium Features –

●     SuperCacher dynamic & memcached caching

●     30 daily backups

●     Priority customer support

●     SSD storage

●     Free 1 year Wildcard SSL certificate

●     Free Backup & restoration service

●     Get 2x server resources

●     Get 2x database resources

●     Get 2x email resources
————————————–
Additional Features –

  1. On Demand Backup copies
  2. Speed-boosting Caching
  3. Staging
  4. Ability to add Collaborators

If you have a clear vision about the kind of business you want to conduct, the GrowBig plan would be suitable for you. With this plan you can host multiple websites and get two times the resources offered by the StartUp plan.

3.   SiteGround GoGeek

The SiteGround GoGeek plan combines all the benefits of the StartUp and GrowBig plans, while adding more features to the mix. You get easy WordPress Staging, Completely free PCI compliance,  along with 4 times the resources offered in the StartUp plan.

                                                          GoGeek Plan
Main Features:

●     You can host unlimited websites on this plan

●     The site visit limit is capped at
100,000 per month

●     You have access to 40 GB of disk space

Premium Features:

●     SuperCacher dynamic & memcached caching

●     1-click WordPress staging

●     SG-Git for repository creation

●     Pre-Installed Git

●     Free PCI compliance

●     Premium backup & restoration service

●     4x server resources

●     4x database resources

●     4x email resources

———————————————

  1. On-demand Backup Copies
  2. Speed Boosting Caching
  3. Free Staging+Git
  4. Ability to add and manage collaborators
  5. Cater to White-Label Clients
  6. Highest Tier of Resources available
  7. Top Priority Support

This is a plan for those who already have a sizable amount following and can garner a lot of traffic. The GoGeek plan is best suited for those websites that see a lot of traffic and are inherently resource intensive.

Deciding on a SiteGround Hosting Plan

While purchasing a hosting plan from SiteGround, there are a couple of major things to consider. Take a definitive call on your budget, make sure that you have a rough plan in mind, and keep a rough estimate of the kind of traffic your site might see.

The StartUp plan allows you to host only 1 website. Both the GrowBig and GoGeek plans allow you to host unlimited websites with them. As you could have guessed, GrowBig and GoGeek are plans that offer more server resources leading to websites loading quickly. There is priority support available for both these plans, as well as multiple daily backup options.

While the GrowBig plan offers 2 times more resources than the StartUp plan, the GoGeek plan claims to multiply server resources by 4. The GoGeek plan has premium website backup facilities and great restore services. It is also PCI compliant.

Let us take a look at the main differences between StartUp, GrowBig, and GoGeek plans that SiteGround has to offer.

We have prepared two comparisons to help you decide. The first comparison is between StartUp and GrowBig, and the second one is between GrowBig and GoGeek.  .

‘All SiteGround plans sport comfortable prices; resources are proportionate to the plan of your choice.

StartUp Plan vs GrowBig Plan

SiteGround’s Startup plan is the cheapest available. The entry-level plan is packed with features that are great for those who are entering the internet scene. If you are looking to host a single website, be it for blogging or are looking to start a small online business, this is the one to choose. Due to its low pricing, features and resources are limited. However, these will be enough to help you reach minimal goals.

The SiteGround GrowBig plan is geared towards business owners who want to have a solid internet presence. This plan is also suitable for bloggers who use WordPress to manage their blogs. If you sign up for this plan, you get access to double server resources and a plethora of advanced features in comparison to the SiteGround StartUp plan.

With the GrowBig plan, you are not restricted to hosting a single website. You are free to host multiple websites on this plan. You can use the Supercacher static, dynamic, and memcached caching technology. The GrowBig plan will provide you with a free wildcraft SSL certificate for one year.

A few differences between StartUp and GrowBig are stark. On one hand, StartUp allows you to host only one website. Whereas, on the other, Growbig lets you host as many as you want. If it is your intention to create a larger network, make sure that you select the GrowBig plan for subscriptions. .

Although in the StartUp plan SiteGround backs up your website’s data, it has no particular provision for restoring it back to you. The GrowBig plan has basic backup and restore settings. You get to have more backup files to access. This means that there is a larger scope for experimenting with updates.

With the StartUp plan, you can only expect the standard SiteGround support, which is still pretty good.The GrowBig plan on the other hand sports a premium support for its users. You can expect to have a wholesome experience with the support team. Their friendly nature and quick solution fixes will help you sail through your website hosting problems.

Here are a list of things that you should consider if you are hoping to choose the SiteGround GrowBig plan:

  • The vision for your project has to include more than just one website on your subscription for hosting accounts
  • The project has to require two times the server resources. Speed has to be fast and distributed amongst your websites.
  • 30 daily backups as opposed to one daily backup offered in the StartUp plan
  • You require premium support rather than the standard support provided with the StartUp plan
  • You need 20 GB of space because 10 GB that comes with StartUp is too less
  • You need to use SiteGround’s basic backup and restore service
  • You have use for SiteGround’s static, dynamic and memcached caching and the static caching that comes with StartUp does not cut it
  • A free wildcard SSL certificate for one year is crucial for you

GrowBig Plan vs GoGeek Plan

The GoGeek plan offers more server resources than the GrowBig plan. Due to its comparatively steep price, here are less users to share the resources with this plan. With the GoGeek plan, your users get to enjoy very fast website loading speeds. This is the initial difference that sets the both of them apart.

SiteGround markets the GoGeek plan as geeky. It packs a lot of technical features that are of great use if you like tinkering around with your website.Take their site staging feature for an example. With this feature, you can copy your live site to test new codes, designs, and updates separately. If you think the changes are suitable, you can instantly transfer them to your live site as well. GoGeek also comes with pre-installed Git, which allows you to create repositories of your website.

SiteGround’s GoGeek plan comes with the premium backup and restore services along with free PCI compliance. All of these features come together to create a secure environment for your website online.

Take a look at the list of things that should be considered if you are going for the SiteGround GrowGeek plan:

  • Your vision requires you to have 4 times the server resources. The obvious objective is to have a fast loading website. Fewer users will mean restricted sharing of server resources.
  • You want to have technical control over your website.GoGeek makes staging environment features possible.You are able to copy your live site and test new updates, codes, and design. If you like it, you can publish the changes directly on the live site
  • 40 GB of storage space is required for your site to function smoothly.
  • Free PCI compliance is a must to give credence to your e-commerce website online.
  • You need to create and restore repositories of your website. GoGeek comes with a pre-installed Git that allows you to do so.
  • Premium backup and restore services are required for the functioning of your website. The basic service provided by the GrowBig plan will not cut it for you.

Which One Should You Opt For?

Now that you have a detailed idea about what SiteGround web hosting plans have to offer, you are at a better place to make the call. This will obviously require you to have a clear vision about what you want to create. It is important to point out that you can upgrade to a higher plan whenever you want to.

Our recommendation for you in terms of which plan to pick:

  • The StartUp plan is best for you if you want to go with a simple website that runs on a static or HTML base.
  • The GrowBig plan is the most popular plan that SiteGround has to offer. It has plenty of features to offer to its users. If you want to run a CMS powered site on the likes of WordPress and Joomla, this is the perfect plan for you.
  • If you are thinking about running a major e-commerce site that requires regular staging, pre-installed Git, and premium backup features, GoGeek is the plan that you must opt for.

Frequently Asked Questions

Let us answer a few questions that frequently plague the minds of new customers when trying to look for subscriptions.

     1.  Does SiteGround have a money-back guarantee?

There is a 30-day money-back guarantee offered by SiteGround. You are free to cancel your subscription within the first 30 days and can expect a full refund. There are a couple of premium services that will obviously not warrant a return. Charges for domain name registration and cloud hosting are two such features where SiteGround does not offer refund.

    2. Can I get free website migration services with SiteGround?

SiteGround offers free website migration for WordPress users, provided that they use SiteGround’s Migrator Plugin.If you require professional help, or want to migrate a website hosted elsewhere, you will have to pay a fee of $30. All you have to do is submit a site migration request with customer support. You can expect a quick response and problem solution from their support team.

    3. What  are the payment methods supported by SiteGround?

You can use your credit cards to pay at SiteGround. They support both Visa and MasterCard.  You can also choose to make your payments via PayPal. One of the great things about SiteGround’s payment scheme is that you can make payments in advance. Either make monthly payments or pay upto three years in advance.

Conclusion

SiteGround is a service that we definitely recommend. It stands out from the crowd due to its premium features, great website speed, and complete transparency about operations. Their customer support is top-of-the line with sporting great communication skills and problem solving abilities.