SiteGround Review

Are SiteGround right for you? Find out with our review below

SiteGround’s review scores

The scores below show the industry average along with our own users’ reviews. Go to ✅ SiteGround

Disclosure: Your support helps keep the site running! We earn commission for some of the services we link to on this page. Read More..

SiteGround were founded in 2004, and the Bulgarian based web host has exploded on to the scene. The company currently manages over 2 million domain names across multiple territories.

SiteGround have not gone down the path of bolting on a ton of supplementary products like Office 365 or marketing services, focusing their efforts on providing hosting technology and platforms to power your websites.

Their web hosting services include:

• Shared hosting
• Managed WordPress hosting
• Managed cloud hosting
• Reseller hosting
• Domain names

SiteGround’s datacenter locations are across three continent, with servers in London, Chicago, Singapore, and Amsterdam.

Their network is further supported by Cloudflare’s CDN (content delivery network). CDNs make up-to-date copies of your website on a regular basis and store them around the world.

New SiteGround hosting customers are hosted on Google’s Cloud servers. In SiteGround’s word, you get the following benefits…

Distributed SSD persistent storage

We are using Google’s SSD persistent storage, which has multiple redundancies. In the rare occasions where the hosting server fails, we can just spin up a new virtual machine on another hosting node in our cloud space and simply attach the distributed storage volume to the new instance, instead of the faulty one, without losing time in backup restores.

State-of-the-art network for faster sites

Google is known for maintaining one of the fastest and most powerful networks, which means that using their service will result in a high speed for our clients’ websites. One can hardly think of another global network that is better connected!

100% Renewable energy match

Our partner matches 100% the energy consumed by their global operations with renewable energy and maintains a commitment to carbon neutrality. Google has been a leader in energy efficiency with their achievements in reducing the compute emissions by improving higher efficiency of data serving and storage and diverting waste.”

It is worth noting that SiteGround are one of the few hosting companies that haven’t been hoovered up in the great industry consolidation of the past few years.

WordPress hosting

SiteGround were one of the earliest pioneers of WordPress specific hosting packages, an their first-mover status shows with the breadth and depth of WordPress-based features on offer.

SiteGround’s WordPress plans include:

• One-Click WordPress install
• Automatic WordPress updates
• Automatic backups
• Staging environments are available with the GoGeek plan
• Specific security for WordPress-related vulnerabilities

SiteGround customers can use the cPanel control panel for the majority of its hosting plans. Therefore, anyone who has used cPanel before should be bale to pick it up very quickly. cPanel is the most popular web hosting control panel for good reason, so even if you haven’t used it before, you’ll find it quite easy to get started.

SiteGround offers all customers a 99.99% monthly uptime guarantee. This works out at guaranteeing no more than just over 4 minutes of downtime per month and just under an hour per year.

As someone who has worked for web hosts, I can assure you downtime is a matter of when, rather than if. 99.99% is a bold promise and if they can keep it, one you should consider.

Most web hosts monitor their servers in intervals of between 1 and 5 minutes, which can mean they find out about a server’s downtime through customer calls or social media!

SiteGround performs real-time tracking. The upside being server problems are detected the instant they occur and can be fixed much faster.

All SiteGround plans offer free backups and restoration to an earlier version of your website. This includes automatic daily system backups and 30 automatic daily backup copies.

For additional peace of mind, if you are using a GrowBig plan or higher , you can choose to create an “on-demand” backup at any time.

Shared hosting

Their entry-level startup shared hosting plan comes with

• 10 GB of storage
• Unlimited emails
• Space for a single website
• Up to 10,000 visitors a month

Other hosting packages above the Startup Plan come with better features including more storage (with dedicated web hosting packages 2TB disk space being the highest), unlimited websites, a higher allowance of monthly visits, free daily backups and restores, and SSL certificate for security.

What about ‘unlimited hosting’? Many hosting companies offer “unlimited” web space and bandwidth. What it really means is that the host does not monitor your resource usage, but will step in and disable your website if your it causes a drag on other websites hosted on the same server.

The most expensive plan is the GoGeek plan at £8.95 per month (first year only, £24 per month thereafter), that does come with some super-useful features:

• Unlimited webstes
• Up to 100,000 visitors per month
• 30GB web space
• Staging and Git
• Priority support
• White-label clients

However, at £24 per month, this does start to be come difficult to justify.

Additionally, SiteGround domain names are very expensive, with a .uk domain costing £15 per year. You’ll find that significantly cheaper pretty much every where else.

Managed cloud hosting

SiteGround’s Cloud Hosting products are essentially managed VPS, the same as 123-reg’s ‘Premium Hosting’ and Heart Interet’s ‘Managed VPS’.

Cloud Hosting is an attempt to bridge the simplicity of shared web hosting and the more powerful, but more technically difficult VPS (Virtual Private Servers). SiteGround is responsible for maintaining the server, providing you with access to a control panel to manage your hosting and website.

A couple of key reasons why you should consider using Cloud Hosting include:

• Fewer websites sharing your server resources (faster page loads)
• Load balancing (with a 99.99% uptime guarantee)
• Dedicated IP address
• Direct SSH access to your cloud account
• Private DNS
• Free SSL certificate
• WordPress auto-updates

Ordering with SiteGround

SiteGround’s order process is simple and easy to follow, almost stark in comparison to the likes of 123-reg. There are next to no attempts to up-sell or cross-sell me.

£14.95 (excluding VAT!) for a .uk domain is far too high. In fact, I would expect a modern hosting company to bundle at least one domain name free with my hosting.

SiteGround let you choose from their data centre locations around the world at the ordering stage.

It is worth pointing out that SiteGround prices do not include VAT. I assume they get away with this because they claim to specifically target business customers, so they do not have to include it.

So, if you’re not a business customer, what ever price you see advertised is going to cost you 20% more at the till.

SiteGround customer service

SiteGround have clearly invested a lot of money in their support teams, providing multiple channels to contact them 2×7. You can get hold of them by phone, live chat or tickets.

SiteGround claim they successfully resolve 90%+ of the live chat inquiries they get and the average wait time on the phone is only 2 minutes.

My personal preference for technical support is through a ticket system, and SiteGround advertise they reply within 15 minutes on average.

With those stats, you can feel confident SiteGround will be able to help you when you need them. They also offer an extensive knowledge base for those who want to self-help.

Money back guarantee

SiteGround offers a 30-day money-back guarantee for its hosting products. Domain names, admin fees, and some add-ons are non-refundable.

SiteGround uptime and reliability

For every 1% uptime below 99%, they will provide you with an extra month of service free. It is worth noting that this is quite a lot of downtime for a host, so a month’s free hosting is reasonable.

That said, very few web hosts commit themselves to any for level of compensation for downtime.

Visit SiteGround

SiteGround user reviews 💬

Read user reviews and leave your own below