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Introduction

Siteground has been a reputable and favored web host for many year now. They offer some pretty awesome shared hosting packages, and cloud VPS services. But as of recently they’ve come under some scrutiny for the communiy, we’re here to see what all the noise is about.

Siteground is based out of Europe, and have data centers all around the world. They’re famed for being a bloggers favorite by offering great speed, reliability, plus super friendly responsive and professional support.

Bottom Line:

Great hosting for beginners and professional. No hassle backups, updates, and site management.

Excellent speed, security, and uptime

High quality hosting with great features, good support, and reliability.

Shared Hosting Packages:

We think the “GrowBig” option is the beset value for money. For whats on offer, you get a lot more flexibility and power. Unless you plan on only ever having one website, its would be wise to opt for the GrowBig or GoGeek plans. The GoGeek option might be too much for most peoples needs; unless you’re planning on running several websites and trying to draw a lot of traffic to your website. Professional bloggers, and other online entrepreneurs should consider the GoGeek plan as the best option for them.

UPDATE as of October 2020:

Site ground has increased their pricing since writing this article by nearly double for each plan.

Reason and justifications for the price increase:

We spoke with a customer service agent at SiteGround about why the prices have jumped so much, here’s what they had to say

“We reached a point where we have the strongest combination of performance, reliability, support and features included in the hosting market. This is creating a value of our product which is well beyond its previous positioning and product pricing. Over the past decade we have invested most of our revenue right back into research and development so that we can keep the hardware and software we use up to date and keep providing a contemporary, fast and secured hosting environment for all of our customers. We have added a lot of enhancements to our services and platform, starting with the migration of all of our servers to the fastest and most powerful environment provided by Google Cloud Platform. We are using Google’s latest technologies as SSD persistent storage, N2 CPUs, a highly well developed and maintained global network, all giving us the great advantage of providing a complete and extremely well optimized hosting solution to our end customers. We also introduced a whole new in-house management interface for easier user experience, and a number of enhancements to our already existing features like new backups on demand, an improved auto-update system, not to mention we continuously invest in keeping all sites faster and more secure through implementing the latest PHP versions and creating hundreds of security patches every year. That was all at our own cost so far, so the only logical step was updating the prices so they can match the value of the services. Rest assured, the change was not whimsical and it actually took us several months of evaluation of our product value, the impact of inflation and the cost of the human resource that stands behind it.”

SiteGround

Things To Note

Siteground Has migrated all of their servers on to cloud hosting, meaning that even the shared hosting is a cloud based service. The shared hosting shares resource, IP addresses with other customers on that server. Siteground also offers a “Cloud Hosting” package which as all of it’s resources and IP dedicated to one individual person.

Opinon

SiteGround is one of the best, if not the most premium web host available to consumers. Their customer support, technical support, and hosting plan features are some of the best in the market. The site load times are excellent, the server uptime is great, and there are servers located across the globe. The servers are well managed and provide top of the line technology and software. Nevertheless, if you can do without some of these features and the idea of having “the best” you may be better off check out our review of NameCheap or DreamHost; as they both offer excellent hosting for great value. At nearly $25.00 per month, you’ll be paying a whopping $300 per year for their “Grow Big” shared hosting package.

Update- Debate, and Rant

As of December 2020, we’re writing to address a few concerns we’ve seen about Siteground. After the recent price increase in October 2020 we had a feeling that something wasn’t quite right, and many other clients feel the same way.

We would have liked it, if Siteground had announced or at least given a small amount of notice to current customers about the price increase. This would show transparency, openness, and overall willingness to communicate with existing customers. Alas, the price hike came out of no where, and many customers fear the same thing will repeat in the not so distant future.

We understand that running a business takes money, and in all fairness it can be okay to increase prices. User of Siterground may have felt a lot more comfortable with the price increase if there was a blog post or something simply explaining the justification for the price increase. Nevertheless, we never saw anything of the sort.

Some users have noted that the overall quality of Siteground since the price hike has started to dwindle. Claiming things like poorer speeds and support:

” I am looking to gradually move away from SiteGround, as their support and server performance is rapidly going down hill.”

More over some users noted that if your site is above 5GB total, Siteground will not allow you to create a backup to export the site to a different web host. The backup is still possible, just a lot more of a headache. We are currently working to verify if this claim is true or not

What does this all mean?

We still stand by our review of Siteground being overall excellent. Nevertheless, we will continue to monitor the situation and post any updates as we learn them. Our load times with Siteground are still excellent, and our overall experience with the customer support has been good.

Cloud Hosting

Siteground offers managed cloud hosting, which is somewhere in-between shared hosting and a VPS. Normally, with shared hosting you’re sharing IP addresses and resources with other customers, whereas managed cloud hosting you’re entitled to your own IP address and all of the resources are dedicated to your account.

Plans and Pricing

If you’re looking for a lot more power and resources, plus the best customer and technical support, consider a cloud hosting plan. Sometimes your site may “outgrow” shared hosting packages, in which case you’ll have to opt for the CloudHosting options if you’re on SiteGround. Nevertheless, it’s hard to stomach the $80/month price tag. Consider that the entry level plan will set you back almost $1000 for a year of hosting.

Features Included with Cloud Hosting

• Dedicated Resources
  • Unlike a shared hosting plan you’ll get a certain amount of RAM and CPU dedicated just to yourself. This generally equates to overall better performance as well.
• Fully Managed
  • One benefit of the cloud hosting is that the SiteGround developers are taking care of the server and software for you. The developers at Siteground will update and maintain the cloud hosting for you, as well as apply security updates and patches when necessary.
• Options to Scale
  • You can upgrade your package at anytime if you want more resources, or select an ‘auto scaling’ option. Auto scaling will allow your site to adjust to traffic and resource demands, ensuring that if you get a surge of traffic your site will stay online by automatically adjusting the amount of resources needed.
• Custom Packages are Available:
  • If you’re not happy with any of the standard packages offered you can select the amount of ram, CPU cores, and disc space you want. Select up to 33 CPU cores, 133GB of ram, and 1TB of disk space.

Opinon

Overall the managed cloud hosting is great. They give you quite an ample amount of RAM and CPU power, but we feel the storage is a bit lacking. Overall, it’s hard to beat in terms of features, speed, uptime and customer service. Nevertheless, we aren’t convinced that it’s great value for money, as there are many similar type hosting packages for much cheaper. Therefore, we consider SiteGround cloud hosting a premium option, and businesses looking to save money on hosting should find better value for money elsewhere.

Pros:

Speed:

Everyone wants their website to load fast. Siteground has quite good load times in comparison with comparable web hosts such as HostGator. Thanks to the fact that they have servers all around the world, you can rest assured that your website will load quickly. Their average load time for a page is about half a second, which is superb.

Web Hosting For All (for noobs and pros):

Whether you’re just the average joe and want to get a website up, or you’re a professional web developer SiteGround is a good choice for both of you. SiteGround offers easy to install content magagment systems like WordPress and Weebly for beginners, with easy drag and drop web designers. For professionals there is a host of options like staging, PhP myAdmin, FPT, and lots of other features you’ll be happy are available.

Up-Time:
SiteGround has one of the best up time percentages out of any web host available, they’re not quite at 100%, but they are basically as close as you can get to 100%

Siteback Up:

I really like this feature. SiteGround automatically backs up your site everyday. No need for extra plugins or anything like that. They also make it super easy to restore to these backups if anything ever goes wrong.

WordPress Automatic Update:

Another great feature, we really like this feature. Instead of being worried about updating your WordPress core, Siteground will do it automatically!

Free WordPress Site Transfers:

If you’re running wordpress you can install the Siteground WordPress Migrator Plugin and transfer your site for FREE, easy.

If you need professional migration, Siteground will do it for you for $30/per site.

Cons:

Renewal Rates:
When it comes time to renew your service in a year, or however long you selected initially, the price will be higher. This is a bummer, as what seemed like a great deal, is no longer that great.

If you read next to the ” * “ you’ll see that they do mention the price is only for your initial term. The only way around this is to buy 3 years worth of hosting from the get-go. This can be a let down as the renewal rates are quite expensive… up to $220/year if you calculate it at $20 per month!

C-panel

Some other hosts offer more in-depth C-panel views, with options for in-depth web traffic statistics, redirect options, and other various options which may be useful for more advanced users.

Extras Cost MORE:

Things like “Site Scanner”- which is a tool to scan for malicious code and make sure your site is nice and squeaky clean, costs extra. You would expect for the premium price you’re paying, that such services would be already included.

Wrap Up

Overall SiteGround is a great option for pretty much everyone, from beginner to professional. Nevertheless, if you want the most bang for your buck, go ahead and buy 3 years worth of hosting up-front. Their tricky, high renewal rates are somewhat duplicitous our view. SiteGround offers high quality web hosting service, which is hard to beat, but you’ll also pay extra for better “quality”.

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