What is the best web hosting service for your needs?
This is a question that many people have, and it can be difficult to find an answer. With so many different web hosting services available, it can be hard to determine which one is right for you.
In this comprehensive SiteGround hosting review, we'll take a look at one of the best web hosting services available. We'll discuss what SiteGround has to offer, as well as its advantages and disadvantages. By the end of this review, you should have a good idea of whether or not SiteGround is the right web hosting service for you.
Brief History
SiteGround is a web hosting service that has been around since 2004 and was co-founded by university friends.
The company is based in Sofia, Bulgaria, but it uses servers all over the world.
Advantages of using SiteGround Hosting
Web Hosting Packages to Suit Your Needs
SiteGround offers a variety of different hosting plans, including shared hosting, and cloud hosting packages are tailored to suit your website's needs.
Shared hosting, which is perfect if you want a small or medium-sized site with light traffic, cloud servers provide enough power for larger websites.
Shared Hosting Plans
Shared hosting is a type of web hosting service where many websites are hosted on a single server, including websites that you don't know about, this can lead to reduced performance, and stability for your website if one of those get's hit with a lot of traffic.
StartUp
This is a great option for those with not much content, who want to host their website on an affordable plan. It's perfect if you don't have too many pages or posts but still need some space so your visitors can get what they need from visiting one page, such as a portfolio or resume!
GrowBig
You can run a small business site to display your work. This is an affordable option that doesn't require much commitment but will provide you with great results!
GoGeek
This hosting plan is ideal for medium business websites or small eCommerce that has a small amount of traffic.
Cloud Hosting Plans
When you need to host your larger business website, I recommend going with a cloud hosting service.
Cloud hosting is reliable, and allows you to set up your custom resources, and set the location of where your servers are located, the closer servers are to your users the faster website will load for your users.
Upgrade Resources Any Time
If things get too hectic in terms of traffic on the server, simply upgrade your server resources by adding more RAM, CPU Cores or SSD Space.
Automatic Up-Scale
When your cloud reaches 75% of its available processing power, you can scale it up automatically so that you don't experience downtime or slowness with your website/s.
Security
One of the things that set SiteGround apart from other web hosting services is its focus on security.
All of SiteGround's servers are equipped with robust security features, and the company has a team of experts who constantly monitor the servers for any potential threats.
Free SSL
SiteGround offers free Let's Encrypt SSL, and a Let's Encrypt Wildcard SSL which is great if you've got subdomains, and for your staging websites.
You can also enforce HTTPS, so all of your websites get redirected to a secure HTTPS connection from HTTP.
SiteScanner
For an additional fee, you can get server-side malware detection which scans your website daily to detect any early warnings.
Free SG Security plugin
With every WordPress installation, you get automatically a SiteGround security plugin installed and activated on your website, which reduces the need for expensive security plugins such as Sucuri and Wordfence Security plugins to keep your website more secure.
99% Server uptime guaranteed
SiteGround offers 99% uptime for all the websites it hosts, there is one less thing to worry about your website going down from the hosting provider.
24/7 Custom Support
SiteGround stands out with its customer support, as I have contacted them over 50 times since I started using them in 2019 for small queries, and some complicated tech queries.
The company offers 24/7 customer support, which means that you can always get help when you need it. Whether you have a question about your account or you need help troubleshooting a technical issue, the SiteGround customer support team will be there to assist you.
I've always been lucky to get custom support instantly via chat, there is also an option to call you.
In some cases, the customer support in chat can't help with some of the more complicated questions, but they pass this on to the senior technical team, and the wait on average is 15 minutes, and you will get an email notification once they have replied.
Temporary Domain
A great feature to set up your WordPress website live on a temporary domain to show the website for a review, and once you are ready to move it to the required domain you can do it easily in your SiteGeound panel, and then point domain nameservers to SiteGround.
Developer Friendly
SiteGround is a developer-friendly hosting company with features to meet the needs of any website.
User-Friendly GUI - SiteTools
It's much better than Cpanel or Plesk to get the tasks done, and there are a lot of features to make your website management a lot easier, you can see all the available options inside SiteTools on the left.
WP-CLI Managed by SiteGround
It has WP-CLI installed by SiteGround on all WordPress websites. You can check my tutorial on how to get started with WP-CLI on SiteGround.
Easy To Manage Staging
With a few clicks get your staging site set up, and push it live when it's ready to go back live.
Centralised DNS
This feature is really handy, all you have to do is to point your domain to a centralised DNS that works on SiteGround, which means the nameservers always stay the same.
ns1.siteground.net
ns2.siteground.netShare Access with Others
You can easily share individual websites with other users to access SiteTools and with the limited capabilities, this is handy when you have other users that require access to DNS, or other Web Developers/Designers collaborating on the same project.
Whitelabel
If you are looking to Whitelabel your hosting, you can do so with the SiteGround Whitelabel site tools, which also enable you to become a SiteGround hosting reseller if you want to make a few extra quid(bucks).
Disadvantages of using SiteGround Hosting
Features that could make SiteGround more convenient, and improve its services.
Support for the local environment
If you ever came across a Local WordPress development tool, it offers to deploy websites with WP Engine and FLYWHEEL hosting platforms, from its tool.
SiteGround could create a solution for developers, that will speed up staging websites locally, and deploy back to the server, it will be a huge time saver! Currently, you would have to use a plugin like the All-In-One Migration plugin or manually move sites to the server from your machine.
Developing a WordPress website locally speeds up the process.
Global user account management
For security reasons, I don't share access with anyone else for the full SiteGround global access of where the servers are located, and domains are, and there is a slight issue with not being able to add extra users for the full overview of all websites or add a user with a specific role such as an accountant to view billing information, which is becoming the norm in the industry.
This can be a valuable option for agencies, allowing multiple web developers to access the hosting account with limited capabilities, or having billing managers on the account that can view invoices.
For example, if I am away on holiday, which means any issues arise with the account itself, I will be contacted to resolve it, and sharing the same account details with another person is not a sensible option, and plus if you have 2FA enabled.
It can be more convenient to share the limited access to accountants, so they can download and view invoices in the billing section.
I've contacted support in SiteGround to request an option to access the account with limited options, but that's the reply I got:
Fully understand, however, as much as we would love, for the moment it is possible to access it directly only via the owner profile or this way by manually providing the invoices. Still, I do see your point and will make sure this is forwarded to our team as a feedback so it can be checked and eventually if possible such feature implemented for convenience.
SiteGround Support Team
Inaccurate Usage Statistics
The only time I got a server down was when I was low on space, I got an email to tell me that I was reaching the space limit and it may impact the server.
Checked SiteGround server resources, and the statistics looked fine with about 50% of space left, next day websites are affected with some being temporary down.
Even checking the space with the SiteGound support, they told me there is plenty of storage left.
Yes, there should be plenty of storage left. Can you tell me what is the error you see?
SiteGround Support Team
But I had a migration plugin that told me there isn't enough space, which I told the support and they forwarded the ticket to senior support staff, to which I got a reply.
Please note that the Statistics tool in the Client Area does not take into account the size of the MySQL, OS and accompanying software. Our developers are aware of this and are working on a fix, but we can't provide you with an ETA at the moment.
SiteGround Senior Support Team
The advice here is to increase your space when you get an email from SiteGround telling you are low on space.
Steep Prices
If you are concerned about the budget, you may find that the shared hosting plans have huge discounts on them, but after some time they can increase a lot, so watch out for those.
Conclusion
SiteGround is one of the best web hosting services available even with the small downfalls it has, and it offers a variety of features that make it a great choice for businesses and individuals alike.
And I really like their user-friendly site tools!
If you're looking for a reliable and secure web hosting service, SiteGround should be at the top of your list.