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SiteGround

SiteGround Reviews

SiteGround is one of the most popular and highest rated hosting provider in the WordPress community. They provide unique in-house WordPress speed and security solutions to make your site as fast and secure as possible. They are known for the best 24/7 support in the industry which is why they’re an official ‘WordPress’ recommended hosting provider. SiteGround features include automatic upgrades, built-in WP caching, CDN, one-click staging and GIT version control. They are also one of the few companies offering location specific hosting with 3 data centers in USA, Europe, and Asia. On top of all this, they have а special 70% discount for WPBeginner readers.

Last seen 8 hours ago
Reviewed by: Syed Balkhi
Rating:

SiteGround Review from Our Experts

Siteground is one of the most recommended WordPress hosting companies. They are known for their top notch customer support and fast reliable hosting plans. Their WordPress optimized hosting includes everything you’ll need to create and grow a successful blog. Read our complete SiteGround review to find out if SiteGround is the right host for you.

In this detailed SiteGround review, we will put their promises to test. These are the areas we will look into:

  • Performance: Speed is crucial for the success of your website. How fast will your website load with SiteGround?
  • Reliability: Will your website be available 24/7/365 without facing any downtime?
  • Customer Support: Can you count on their customer support?
  • Features: Do they offer all the features and tools you will need to build your website?
  • Pricing: How much it would cost you? Are there any SiteGround deals that can save you money?

Bottom line: Don’t want to read all the details? Let us summarize it for you. We found SiteGround to be noticeably faster and extremely reliable. Their hosting plans are flexible, and their customer support is one of the best in the industry.

That’s why we’ve chosen to recommend SiteGround as one of the best WordPress hosting companies.

Now let’s dive into our detailed SiteGround review, so that you can see how we reached that conclusion and decide for yourself.

About SiteGround

SiteGround was founded in 2004, and since then it has grown into one of the most well known hosting companies.

It is headquartered in Sofia, Bulgaria with offices in 6 locations and data centers in three continents. Today, the company has more than 400 employees and hosts more than 500,000 domains.

Siteground

Pros and Cons of SiteGround

Each hosting company has its own pros and cons. Some advantages can overshadow the disadvantages, but some cons can be a total deal breaker for your individual needs.

Before making a decision, you may want to review these SiteGround pros and cons.

Pros

Here are some of the advantages that make SiteGround one of the top rated hosting companies in the world.

  • Super fast servers: All SiteGround servers are highly optimized for speed. They are equipped with latest hardware like SSD drives and custom software to make sure that your site is super fast.
  • Top Notch Customer Support Their customer support is amazing to say the least. They offer 24/7 phone, live chat, and ticket based support.
  • Free CDN and SSL They offer instant setup of Cloudflare’s free CDN and free SSL certificate from Let’s Encrypt.
  • Multiple Server Locations They have data centers in three continents. You can choose the location you prefer during signup.

Cons

As we mentioned earlier, there are some downsides with every hosting company. These are some disadvantages of choosing SiteGround as your host.

  • Limited Storage: Their plans come with fixed storage. However, this storage is quite large, and if you are just starting out, then you will most likely never need extra storage.
  • Setup fee for monthly billing: There is a $14.95 setup fee if you choose monthly billing. But if you sign up for a longer billing period, then you’ll get bigger discount and no setup fee. They offer a 30 day money back guarantee anyway, so it’s a good idea to choose a longer billing period when you sign up.

SiteGround Performance

While price often plays a significant role when choosing a web host, you cannot compromise on performance.

This is why we decided to run our own tests to thoroughly review SiteGround’s performance.

SiteGround Speed Test Results

Speed is one of the most important performance metric that you should look for. A faster website offers good user experience and boosts your SEO at the same time.

In fact, a single second delay can cause 7% decrease in conversions, 11% fewer page views, and 16% decrease in customer satisfaction.

Website speed study by Strangeloop

We created a WordPress powered test site on SiteGround and filled it with dummy content for theme development with images.

After that, we used Pingdom’s website speed test tool to run our tests. These were the results we got:

SiteGround speed test

As you can see, our test site loaded in less than a second (649 ms to be precise) for a server in Dallas, Texas. That means our site is faster than 95% of tested sites.

This is incredible, but this website had almost no traffic so the Pingdom test alone is not sufficient.

To test how SiteGround servers would respond to increased traffic, we used a tool called LoadImpact.

This tool gradually sends up to 100 users to see how the server would respond to increased traffic from multiple connections.

You can see the results in the chart below:

SiteGround loadimpact test results

The blue line is the number of active virtual users on the site, and the green line is the server load time. SiteGround performed almost consistently except for a spike when there were 50 users on the site. It quickly recovered and page load time remained steadily low even with more users.

This test shows that if you are looking for a really fast website, then SiteGround can be a perfect choice for you.

Typically, websites hosted on shared hosting account slow down a bit during top traffic hours. That’s because your site is sharing resources with other websites on that server.

Most shared hosting companies automatically kill server process if your site is taking too many resources. This causes downtime on your website.

We tested our SiteGround site for the downtime and got 100% uptime result.

SiteGround uptime test results

SiteGround Server Response Time

Your website’s content has a huge impact on page load time. For example, if you have high resolution images on a page, then it will significantly increase the overall page load time.

This means that speed test results may not accurately reflect how fast your hosting server really is.

Instead of analyzing page load time alone, we decided to test the actual server response time as well.

To do this we used a tool called Bitcatcha. It ignores page content, and only tests response time of the server.

Bitcatcha also gives you average loading speed from different global locations. The speed for each location is measured three separate times, and then the results are averaged.

Take a look at the results in the screenshot below.

SiteGround server response time from multiple locations

As you can see, SiteGround is a great choice if your target audience is mostly located in the United States. The server responded in fraction of a second in the United States.

It responded within less than a second for all locations, except Japan. If your target audience is mostly located in Japan, then you can ask SiteGround to move your site to their Asia-Pacific data center.

SiteGround Hosting Plans and Features

SiteGround offers shared hosting, WordPress hosting, cloud hosting, and dedicated hosting plans. If you are just starting out, then their shared hosting plans would be a perfect fit for your needs. However, your site will eventually grow, and you want to make sure that they have other plans that you can upgrade to.

Let’s check out SiteGround’s hosting plans and their features.

  • Shared hosting: Shared hosting is recommended for new websites and beginners. It is suitable for low traffic websites as you will be sharing resources with other websites hosted on the server.
  • WordPress hosting: This plan is WordPress optimized version of their shared hosting plan. It comes with SiteGround’s in-house WordPress optimizations to improve performance of your website.
  • Cloud hosting: Cloud hosting is a flexible upgrade to shared hosting. It allows you to use resources of multiple servers on a cloud architecture. It is suitable for growing websites, popular blogs, or businesses.
  • Dedicated servers: Dedicated servers give you a complete server for your website. It is more expensive but gives you a lot more power. The downside is that you will have to manage the server yourself.
  • Enterprise hosting: This plan is for large businesses and high traffic sites with challenging server requirements. Get in touch with SiteGround team and they will create a tailor-made plan to suit your needs.

Breakdown of SiteGround’s Shared Hosting Plans

SiteGround’s shared hosting is the best way to start a new website. Their shared plans are available in three levels to match different budgets.

  • Startup: This plan is limited to hosting one website. It includes 10 GB disk space and is suitable for hosting a website having 10,000 monthly visitors. You’ll also get all essential features like 1-click WordPress install, free setup, website transfer, daily backups, and more.
  • GrowBig: The GrowBig plan lets you host unlimited websites. It comes with 20 GB disk space and is suitable for hosting websites having 25,000 monthly visitors. You’ll get all the features of the Startup plan, plus you’ll get premium features like Super Cacher, 1-year free wildcard SSL, and more.
  • GoGeek: GoGeek plan is suiteable for small eCommerce websites. It can handle websites having 100,000 monthly visitors. In addition to all GrowBig’s features, you’ll get access to more advanced features like one-click git repo creation, WordPress and Joomla staging, and more.

SiteGround shared plans

SiteGround Support and Customer Service

You will see high praise for SiteGround’s customer support service everywhere. They are remarkably good at offering quick, helpful, and knowledgeable support to their customers.

Their customer support includes 24/7 phone, live chat, and ticket-based email support. Their phone and live chat response times are almost instant. Email’s get first response within less than 10 minutes.

For users who prefer to fix things on their own, SiteGround offers a large collection of knowledge base articles with screenshots, videos, tutorials, and guides.

Conclusion: Is SiteGround the Right Choice for You?

After reading our detailed SiteGround review, you might be wondering if SiteGround is the right choice for your website?

If you want fast and reliable web hosting service with great customer support, then SiteGround is perfect for you. They have hosting plans for every budget and each plan comes with great set of features.

All their shared hosting plans include SSD storage, easy setup of Let’s Encrypt free SSL and Cloudflare CDN service, 1-click WordPress installer, and free migration.

If you are just starting a website for the first time, then you will certainly appreciate SiteGround’s customer support.

Ready to get started with SiteGround? Click here to choose your hosting plan today.

SiteGround Coupon

WPBeginner users get an exclusive 70% off discount and free SSL with our SiteGround coupon code.

All you have to do is click on this link to purchase. The discount will be applied automatically.

1,714 SiteGround User Reviews

  1. carlos says:
    Sep 18, 2018 at 7:39 pm

    Support were great, this guy spend 20 minutes to help me i appreciate it, ill order a hosting in 2 days.

    Reply
  3. Cheryl Kent says:
    Sep 18, 2018 at 12:50 pm

    Support staff was very helpful and explained what I needed to do clearly and also gave me some places to look in case I have more questions.

    Reply
  4. Rob says:
    Sep 17, 2018 at 2:08 pm

    Siteground has awesome customer support services! Any issues are resolved quickly and professionally. Would recommend Site Ground to anyone needing hosting solutions.

    Reply
  5. Dan Carpenter says:
    Sep 17, 2018 at 9:15 am

    Tech support took several minutes to help me completely resolve my domain and hosting issues. When there were things she could do for me from her end, she did it for me, which helped a lot! Thank you!!

    Reply
  10. jessie kosten says:
    Sep 16, 2018 at 3:38 am

    i had to set up the email on my i phone and he got i right the first time what is great thank you again

    Reply
  12. Meika D says:
    Sep 15, 2018 at 9:40 pm

    SiteGround is amazing! OMG after going through nightmares with other hosts they came to my rescue! There is this super cool tech guy name who answered every question I had and walked me through the whole migration! I’m in love already with these guys! So happy I found this site!

    Reply
  16. Kay says:
    Sep 14, 2018 at 10:13 am

    Horrible and Rude! I asked if I could renew and the guys said sorry, you need to start from scratch, we terminate your stuff after a month. Yes, you need to start all over. Nothing we can do. No further explanation. Waste of money! Be sure to keep a backup and go to another host that provides a copy to you when you leave. What a rip off!!!!

    Reply
  18. Gary Fujioka, Sr. says:
    Sep 14, 2018 at 4:35 am

    I left an effusive review about 5 years ago, and I’m still beyond impressed by the SiteGround support. They’re highly knowledgeable, very fast, and are super friendly with a culture in which they go beyond what one might expect. The SiteGround support system is a finely tuned machine.

    Reply
  20. Layla says:
    Sep 13, 2018 at 7:59 pm

    Amazing support! They went out of their way to help me, and solved an issue that had been bugging me for months!

    Reply
  25. Bob says:
    Sep 13, 2018 at 1:22 am

    The representative was truly patient and helpful, helped me to answer all my questions and clarified all the details I wanted to know. I would say “A” excellent service but I can’t quite do that – I was promised to be sent the transcript of our chat (there were some useful information in the chat that I wanted to go back to later) right after the chat was over but I did not get any email at all. Maybe there was an option to click to receive this email, but going to this survey and clicking the 5 stars review, I am not sure where that option went. Anyway, apart from this small thing, really great support. Thank you!

    Reply
  30. Peter Dau says:
    Sep 12, 2018 at 4:43 am

    It was the second time that tech rep helped me out. Both times great support and quick solutions. Thanks again

    Reply
  31. Dean Richter says:
    Sep 11, 2018 at 9:37 pm

    I have on occasion had configuration problems and have always had immediate help. The staff are super knowledgeable and are very quick with their resolution of any issues. I am very impressed!

    Reply
  32. Tammy says:
    Sep 11, 2018 at 9:10 pm

    I’ve used many hosting services in the past. Siteground has the best support of all of them!! I highly recommend them! A+++

    Reply
  34. Chip Sheppard says:
    Sep 11, 2018 at 4:33 pm

    I had what seemed to be an odd request… but I guess it wasn’t. Had everything I needed in less than 10 minutes.

    Reply
  35. David Taylor says:
    Sep 11, 2018 at 4:29 pm

    I have been genuinely by the excellent service from SiteGround. their chat support is prompt and effective.

    I would certainly recommend them.

    Thanks

    Reply
  36. Marta Kovacs says:
    Sep 11, 2018 at 8:04 am

    He gave me an excellent support. Patience and helpful. Can’t recommend enough!

    Thank you

    Reply
  38. Nika says:
    Sep 10, 2018 at 4:08 pm

    Excellent Service! She downgraded the system so that it could handle the coppermine gallery! She did an excellent job!!!! I am overjoyed that I can use this gallery on your platform and that you install it for me! I used to have to pay people to install it! Great service!

    Reply
  40. George says:
    Sep 10, 2018 at 1:52 pm

    As a business owner, this is the kind of support that I try to provide all my customers.

    Support was very helpful, patient and walked me through what I needed step by step, and this is why I recommend SiteGround to all my business colleagues.

    Thank you.

    Reply
  42. Chris Myers says:
    Sep 10, 2018 at 2:03 am

    I moved over to SiteGround hosting at the weekend. I wanted to leave a review to say how utterly fantastic their support is! I have had several support chats and opened a ticket with them.

    They have exceeded my expectations!

    Thanks guys it really helps knowing you have the team there to help.

    Chris

    Reply
  44. Richard says:
    Sep 9, 2018 at 11:58 am

    support analyzed the problem highly professional and found a very practical solution. I am grateful for this service. Thank you

    Reply
  45. Sharon says:
    Sep 9, 2018 at 9:57 am

    GREAT SERVICE! Tech support picked up the chat in seconds, fixed the issue promptly, and gave me multiple advice comments on the remaining migration questions I had.

    Reply
  47. PaddScott says:
    Sep 9, 2018 at 7:48 am

    An incredibly helpful company. Very easy to get hold of them and they are always quick to help.

    Reply

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