SiteGround is amongst the most popular and highly raved web hosting providers in the WordPress community. They provide unique in-house WordPress speed and security solutions that’ll make your site as fast and as secure as possible.
Is SiteGround good for WordPress you may ask, the short answer is yes. They are known for offering some of the best 24/7 support in the industry which is why they’re recommended by WordPress itself. This is also why many utilise SiteGround to host a WPBeginner website. Its amazing features include automatic upgrades, daily backups, built-in WP caching, free CDN, free SSL, one-click staging and GIT version control. Moreover, they’re also one of the few companies that offer location specific hosting boasting 6 data centres in USA, Europe, Asia, as well as Australia.
You may ask about SiteGround pricing; on top of all their features, they’re offering a special 63% discount for WPBeginner readers. How cool is that! We’ll get more into details about that shortly.
In this comprehensive SiteGround review, the areas we will cover are as follows:
- Performance: Speed is the backbone of any website. How fast will your website load with SiteGround?
- Reliability: Will your website be available 24/7/365 without struggling with any downtime?
- Customer Support: Can you rely on their customer support?
- Features: Does SiteGround impart all the features and tools you’ll require to build a quality website?
- Pricing: How much will it cost you? Are there any SiteGround deals that can help save you money?
A Brief Overview of SiteGround
SiteGround was founded back in 2004, and has since grown into one of the most well renowned hosting companies in the world.
Its headquarters is located in Sofia, Bulgaria with offices in 4 locations and data centres in 3 continents. In the present day, the company boasts over 500 employees and hosts more than 2,000,000 domains.
SiteGround Pros and Cons
Each hosting company comes with its own pros and cons. We can compromise some of the disadvantages with their advantages, but there are some of the cons that can appear as a total deal-breaker for your individual needs.
Prior to settling with this hosting provider, you may want to consider its pros and cons.
Pros
The reasons behind SiteGround’s top-rated status are as follows:
a) Extremely fast servers:
All SiteGround servers are optimised for speed. They avail themselves of Google Cloud platform for all new clients which is amongst the fastest platforms on the market as of today.
b) Sublime customer support:
SiteGround offers 24/7 phone support, live chat, and ticket based support so your website can avoid downtime.
c) Complimentary CDN and SSL
They provide an instant setup of Cloudflare’s free CDN and free SSL certificate from Let’s Encrypt.
d) Multiple server locations
The company has data centres across 3 different continents. You can select the location you prefer when you sign up.
Cons
As mentioned above, there are always downsides to each hosting company. After reading some of SiteGround negative reviews, the following are some disadvantages relying on them as your host:
a) Limited storage
All of their plans come with a fixed storage. Nevertheless, this storage is rather large, and if you’re just starting out, then you’ll most likely never need extra storage.
b) Higher charges for monthly billing
Their hosting service gets expensive if you opt for a monthly billing plan. Having said that, if you sign up for an extended billing period, then you’ll get a bigger discount and a lower rate. At the end of the day, they offer a 30-day money-back guarantee, so it’s a good idea to opt for a longer billing period upon signing up.
SiteGround Pricing
SiteGround currently offers 3 different tiers for their hosting options:
- StartUp
- GrowBig
- GoGeek
The pricing of each of these tiers remains the same across the board for standard shared web hosting, WordPress hosting, and WooCommerce hosting.
StartUp
As the name suggests, this plan is ideal for those new to business or seeking smaller websites. SiteGround StartUp plan gives you one website, 10GB of space, and up to 10,000 monthly visitors. Its pricing starts from $3.99 per month on the introductory offer, which requires a one-year commitment.
With that being said, here are the features you’ll receive:
- Free WordPress installation
- Free SSL
- SiteGround Optimiser plugin included
- Automatic daily backups
- Free Cloudflare CDN
- Free mail
All in all, it makes a great plan for those who are just about to get started. The only thing to be concerned about is to outgrow your monthly visitors limit. Suppose you wish to scale up quickly, it’d be worth starting straight off with the GrowBig plan.
GrowBig
The GrowBig plan is perfect for any medium-sized business owners or those who know they’ll be managing more than one website. You’ll have access to unlimited websites, 20 GB of web space, and up to 100,000 monthly visitors. The pricing of this plan begins at $6.69 per month for a one-year term.
On top of all the features included in the StarUp plan, this plan also comes with:
- On-demand backup copies
- Ultrafast PHP
- Staging environment
- Add collaborators to your site
We’re not surprised as to why GrowBig is SiteGround’s best-selling plan. It encompasses a variety of easy-to-use advanced features that’ll fit the brief most in need of a website out there that anticipates a steady traffic flow.
GoGeek
Out of so many SiteGround GoGeek reviews we’ve seen, this is the most extensive shared hosting plan this hosting provider has to offer. It’s specially designed for ‘technology geeks’ who crave for more control over their website.
The GoGeek plan gives you unlimited websites, 40 GB of web space, and up to 400,000 monthly visits. With that, we can tell that it’s designed for large businesses with an extremely high volume of traffic. Its pricing starts at only $10.69 per month when you sign up for a full year of hosting up front.
The GoGeek plan comes with all the features included in the previous two plans, together with:
- Register your clients with white-label access to Site Tools
- Utilise more server resources for higher process execution time
- Git integration
- Ultrafast PHP for faster page loads
- Priority support from SiteGround’s most experienced customer support agents
To sum up, this plan is for those of you who know what you’re doing with websites. Suppose you’re not familiar with some of the plan’s technological features, it may not be the most practical plan for you. Unless you have a specialist on your time whose job is to manage your website and need access to high volume traffic capabilities.
Cloud Hosting
In terms of cloud hosting pricing, there are 4 plans: Jump Start, Business, Business Plus, and Super Power.
Referring to the screenshot below, the pricing ranges from $100 to $400 per month. The biggest difference in the plans is CPU core, memory, and SSD space.
Courtesy of easy scalability of the cloud hosting options (which we’ll touch on shortly), you can kickstart with the Entry plan with confidence if you’re a beginner to cloud hosting.
What Does SiteGround Offer?
SiteGround Web Hosting
SiteGround imparts fast and secure web hosting for any kind of website. Their general web hosting product is optimised for a range of Content Management Systems (CMS), for instance, WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and many more.
With SiteGround full website solution, you’ll be able to develop and launch your website pretty quickly and easily. If you own an online store, you’ll be able to install and incorporate the shopping cart of your choice into your site for free.
On top of that, domain registration is easy and affordable. You’ll be able to enjoy the convenience and ease of managing both your domains and your sites in one place.
Finally, you’ll be able to access an unlimited number of email accounts when you create your domain, making it the best hosting provider to manage various areas of your business.
SiteGround WordPress Hosting
SiteGround is amongst the very few web hosting companies that actually offer specific hosting options for WordPress. As previously mentioned, they are even highly recommended by WordPress directly.
With SiteGround, manually downloading and installing WordPress is a thing of the past. Rather, you’ll be able to automate the process with a simple click of a button via the WordPress Launch feature.
Upon logging into your new website, you’ll be instantly prompted to set up your site with the SiteGround WordPress Starter kit. The entire process only takes minutes from start to finish, even for a beginner with no prior experience!
Amongst the most popular features available on SiteGround’s WordPress hosting is the free SiteGround Migrator plugin. This makes an ideal feature for users who may hold their website with another host and wish to transfer over to SiteGround.
Even better, if you lack confidence in your ability to navigate the migrator plugin, you can opt for a WordPress whiz from SiteGround to do it for you at an additional cost.
SiteGround WooCommerce Hosting
Furthermore, SiteGround also provides online shop wonders with hosting options through WooCommerce. This particular plan features a WooCommerce pre-installed, saving you plenty of time and hassle, allowing you to focus on uploading products to your online store straightaway.
With WooCommerce, you can sell any type of product or service online. SiteGround is there to support your ecommerce growth by protecting your website with a unique AI anti-bot system, free pre-installed SSL, and a custom Web Application Firewall (WAF).
If you opt for the WooCommerce GrowBig or GoGeek plan, SiteGround will also include a convenient staging tool. You’ll be able to safely build your store, test changes and updates made on the staging copy prior to going live.
SiteGround Cloud Hosting
Cloud hosting is a rather new method to host websites. This is an ideal solution for medium to larger sized businesses and websites, who have the capacity to grow fairly quickly. Suppose you are beginning to outgrow your shared hosting plan, opting for cloud hosting is the smart step.
With SiteGround’s Cloud Hosting, you’ll benefit from guaranteed resources with your very own RAM and CPU. Not enough? Feel free to upgrade the RAM, CPU, and disk space of your cloud plan whenever necessary. Even better, this process doesn’t come with any downtime—the resources are added immediately.
If you wish to automate the scaling process, you can, too! SiteGround comes with a unique auto-scale option that’ll adjust your CPU and RAM to meet the needs of unforeseen traffic surges, preventing potential slowness or downtime.
The best part has yet to come, the scalable amount is predetermined by you, hence you’ll still have total control over the scale’s parameters.
Last but not least, to cloud host with SiteGround will also include a complimentary dedicated IP. This feature will give you nothing but peace of mind that your website is fully protected from IP blacklists caused by other webmasters’ actions.
Better Yet, Here are The List of Additional SiteGround Features, Bonuses, and Extras Offered by SiteGround
- Developer features such as GIT integration, site staging, WP-CLI integration.
- WordPress and Joomla toolkits across all websites. These tools serve to automate a wide variety of tasks such as changing domain addresses, to resetting admin passwords, to solving file permission issues.
- An easy-to-use interface that incorporates all the crucial information under one web page.
- HTTP/2 technology to boost the performance of HTTPS websites.
- Features for freelancers and agencies such as collaborator and white-label.
Our Final Verdict: Is SiteGround the Best WordPress Web Hosting Service Provider?
Absolutely yes. They have a wide range of plans that caters for any business and budget, and they are even comparable with their competitors in terms of features. Throughout the years, they’ve excelled in site speed time and offer sublime customer service. With all this in mind, they really do seem like the best WordPress web hosting service provider you can rely on.
Frequently Asked Questions Regarding SiteGround Hosting
After looking into all the aspects of their hosting services in our SiteGround review, here are some of the most frequently asked questions about them:
1. Does SiteGround offer a website builder?
Unfortunately, no. The reason being that they want their users to have the option to pick the best website builder according to their needs.
This is why they allow you to easily install WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Magento, Weebly, and several other site builder platforms.
2. Does SiteGround offer cPanel hosting?
No, either. Ever since cPanel raised their licensing fees, SiteGround decided to remove cPanel hosting and instead, developed a far better web hosting control panel for both beginners and advanced users. This allows them to offer managed WordPress hosting-like features without facing hefty costs.
3. Is SiteGround a better alternative to Bluehost?
SiteGround and Bluehost used to offer the same features, but due to recent innovations, SiteGround has significantly outperformed Bluehost’s hosting technology.
In terms of overall performance, technology infrastructure, and support quality, SiteGround wins. Nevertheless, all these innovations also means higher pricing.
Hence when it comes to pricing, Bluehost makes a better choice than SiteGround because not only is its price 50% lower, but they also offer a free domain name with each account.
4. Does SiteGround offer any free domain name?
No. With that being said, feel free to register a new domain name upon signup or you can use an existing domain name. Alternatively, you can also purchase a domain name from another registrar and direct it to your SiteGround account.
5. Can I unsubscribe from my SiteGround account and get a refund?
SiteGround offers a 30-day-money-back guarantee across their shared plans. During this period, you can try out their services. Suppose you cancel your account during this period, you are eligible for a refund. Nevertheless, domain name registrations are non-refundable.