This siteground reviews covers everything you ever need to know before taking siteground hosting, domain or any other services. It is a honest siteground review as there are many of my clients and even few of mine website itself is hosted by them, so I can easily tell the pros and cons, features and what you can expect from siteground.
However, I have few other websites that are hosted on other hosting service providers such as Hostinger, Namecheap, etc.
You may ask why siteground is the best hosting provider? There are many reasons which I would be discussing in this post, but let’s start with some basic information about siteground and than gradually move to the reason.
If you want to know the basics of blogging and how to get started step by step than do check moneycontain blogging for beginners guide here.
Update: Siteground is no longer available in India, due to a combination of poor performance indicators and the growing regulatory complexities. However, if you’re not from India and looking for Siteground Hosting Review, this review is still valid for you.
So, if you’re from India and Need an Alternative to Siteground, then I have 2 best domain and hosting provider in mind Bluehost and Hostinger.
About Siteground:
SiteGround which is a web hosting company founded in 2004 in Sofia, Bulgaria and they serve users worldwide. Tenko Nikolov is the CEO of the company, Ivo Tzenov is the founder of siteground.
Siteground is also the official ‘WordPress’ recommended hosting provider. Quoting wordpress “SiteGround is “one of the biggest and brightest of the hosting world”.
When I say wordpress I am talking about wordpress.org not wordpress.com.
Siteground have more than 2,000,000 domains worldwide. It provides shared hosting, cloud hosting, wordpress hosting and enterprise solutions as well as email hosting and domain registration. In 2020, the company have employed over 500 people.
Siteground have 6 Data Centers in the USA, UK, Germany, Netherlands, Australia and Singapore.
This is really significant for the speed of your website, according to google “speed of your website is one of the factor in the search rank”. Websites which take much time in loading usually get penalized by google in search engine rankings.
Now you know the history of siteground let us focus are attention back at why siteground is best among its competitors, For this will review siteground on every aspect.
Siteground Reviews On Pricing:
SiteGround offers three Shared hosting plans:
The StartUp plan is perfect for people with one website that are starting now. This is best for a beginner, who are just starting out building either blog or a website.
The GrowBig plan is a great value for money offer, including the option for multiple websites and the SuperCacher that greatly improves website speed. This is best for medium websites who already have traffic and users or either thinking of building a website with large contents.
The GoGeek plan is perfect for people with e-commerce and larger sites, or more geeky development needs like more server resources and GIT integration.
It may seem to you the price are expensive for the hosting services in comparison to any other web hosting service provider, but it worthy enough to pay few little bucks and free from other 100 issues by paying little less.
I learned this lesson after trying many cheap hosting provider, and trust me you will get frustrated when your website does not take enough loads or you have to upgrade just to install a few extra plugins.
SiteGround Reviews on Hosting Plans:
Let’s check out SiteGround hosting plans and their features.
- Shared hosting: Shared hosting is recommended for new websites and beginners. It is appropriate for low traffic websites as you will be sharing resources with other websites hosted on the server.
- WordPress hosting: WordPress hosting is another version of their shared hosting plan. It is just that this plans are specifically optimized and designed for wordpress users.
- Cloud hosting: Cloud hosting is a step-up to shared hosting plans. The data gets stored in cloud based environment. It is most suitable for websites/blogs/business which already have traffic.
- Enterprise hosting: If you have a large business or thinking to open an online store such as amazon, ebay etc. Enterprise hosting is for you, apart from this you can also contact the siteground team if required additional space for your hosting services.
- Woocommerce Hosting: If you want to sell your own physical products online, it can be books, e-books, art, music, grocery etc. To do this you need to create a woo commerce website.
- Dedicated servers: As said Hosting on a dedicated server is like having a bungalow it is more expensive but gives you a lot more power as the resources are specifically established for your own website.
Let us discuss important features of shared hosting plans one by one:
1. Even with the startup plan you will get Free SSl certificate, Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) is the most widely deployed cryptographic protocol to provide security over internet communications. A blog/website with a ssl get benefit in search engine like GOOGLE, BING vs no SSL.
2. You will also get a free email account that can be used specifically for your website. All the plans comes up with 30-days money back guarantee in case you are not happy with the services. Trust me the chance are very rare for you to cancel. The plans are available on monthly and yearly bases as well.
3. With most basic startup plan you get Cloud flare Free CDN, A content delivery network (CDN) refers to a geographically distributed group of servers which work together to provide fast delivery of Internet content.
A CDN allows for the quick transfer of assets needed for loading Internet content including HTML pages, JavaScript files, stylesheets, images, and videos thus making your site deliver faster speed when a user based in US visits a website located in India.
The primary reason for using a CDN is to improve your user’s experience in terms of speed, and as you know speed matters in world of web.
4. Siteground do not limit the traffic that your website can receive. The 10,000 monthly visit (startup plan) is just the reference point, this is not at all a restriction. However, if you have a lot of monthly visitors (e.g. over 100,000), you may need to update the plan i.e. from startup to growbig.
5. Startup plan has 10 GB of disk space which is more than enough for any small to medium websites, usually i have seen personally on my website it won’t consume more than 3GB.
6. Data transfer is unmetered for all the plans which means you can have any no. of visitors on your site.
7. Free website builder Weebly with every plan, For a newbie to build website or blog it becomes really easy, as it is just drag and drop and within minutes you can build the website.
8. Siteground is powered by Google Cloud, which means now your websites will be hosted on Google Cloud platform and you can take advantage of powerful and technically superior hosting service.
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 your websites.
9. SG Optimizer is siteground inhouse developed super cache plugin to improve the performance of WordPress instances hosted on their hosting platform by multiple optimization techniques.
The SiteGround SuperCacher system provides several layers of caching for your site – Static Cache, Dynamic Cache and Memcached. Static Cache is switched on by default for all our users and is not WordPress specific. You do not need to buy any premium cache plugin as it is free for every user.
10. Siteground is best known for their outstanding 24X7 customer support via call, chat and email. You can talk to them anytime through different modes and trust me they will resolve your concern ASAP.
11. Automated daily backup, yes it is free for every user and they keep a backup of all your data for last 30 days. You can easily restore all your data within few clicks.
12. Unlimited Sub and Parked Domains, A subdomain allows you to create a separate website under your main domain name for example if your domain name is moneycontain.com the sub domain would look like blog.moneycontain.com.
Whereas you also get unlimited parked domain which means you can point or assign any other or multiple domain name such as moneycontain.net or moneycontain.gov to the main domain moneycontain.com.
There are many more features you can check the comparison of all the features for every plan on siteground website here.
Siteground Reviews on Performance And Speed:
The most important thing as a website owner should be the speed of the website and how your server responds to different location across globe.
Server response time is a measure of how much time a server takes to respond to a request before it starts delivering content to screens. Google’s recommended server response time is under 200ms, anything longer than that is a sign of lagging.
I have used a tool named Bitcatcha to check moneycontain server response time from different location and here are the results:
For the best user experience, the ideal rating for your server response speed should be B+ and above. At minimum, it should be C+. Here is how the servers are ranked:
- Anything below 180 ms is ranked A+
- 181 ms -210 ms is ranked A
- 211 ms – 220 ms is ranked B+
- 221 ms – 240 ms is ranked B
- 241 ms – 280 ms is ranked C+
- 281 ms – 360 ms is ranked C
- 361 ms – 520 ms is ranked D+
- 521 ms – 840 ms is ranked D
- 841 ms – 1,480 ms is ranked E+
- Anything above 1,480 ms is ranked E
As you can see the overall rating is A+, which is a sign of exceptional server response time, all thanks to siteground powered hosting. This test shows that if you are looking for a really fast and reliable website, then SiteGround is a perfect choice for you.
Siteground 99.99% Uptime Guarantee:
Even for a minute if your website is down it may cost you much not only in monetary terms but the users of your website will get affected as well.
That is why siteground is best when we talk about the uptime, it’s very clearly mentioned under there terms and condition, check below image:
It’s clearly mentioned that siteground guarantee network uptime of 99.99%, which is great. However on purpose i decided to check uptime for my website and below are the results:
The results are on spot on what siteground has promised in his SLA, uptime of 99.99%. SiteGround refunds you part of your money if your availability falls below 99.9%.
Siteground Reviews On Domain:
It is not just the hosting services siteground gives you the option to buy domain name as well. Check below image you can get domain name as per your need, there are many other extension also available.
But to be honest, the charges for buying domain are quite high and this is what can be counted as cons for siteground. So, instead you can buy a domain from the cheapest domain name provider in world Namecheap, you can get domain name as low as $1. Check moneycontain namecheap complete review here.
Siteground Reviews On PHP Version:
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Default PHP version managed by us (7.3)
Siteground closely monitor each newly released PHP version. When it reaches a stable point and it is both safer and better performing than our currently recommended PHP version, they automatically update your site to use the new one. Since December 2019 all new sites are activated by default to use their managed PHP service. The service can be easily switched on through Site Tools for older websites too.
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Custom PHP Versions available (7.4, 7.3, 7.2, 7.0 and 5.6)
Apart from managed default PHP version siteground allow each customer to choose between multiple versions of PHP for each of their sites and even for different folders under one site.
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Wide range of PHP modules
bcmath, bz2, calendar, Core, ctype, curl, date, dba, dom, enchant, exif, fileinfo, filter, ftp, gd, gettext, hash, imap, iconv, intl, ionCube Loader, json, ldap, libxml, mbstring, mcrypt, memcache, mysql, mysqli, openssl, pcntl, pcre, PDO, Phar, pdo_mysql, pdo_pgsql, pdo_sqlite, pgsql, posix, pspell, readline, Reflection, session, shmop, SimpleXML, soap, SPL, sockets, SQLite, sqlite3, standard, tidy, tokenizer, wddx, xml, xmlreader, xmlrpc, xmlwriter, xsl, Zend Guard Loader, zip, zlib
You can contact them for customization of the PHP version you want.
What Are Siteground Payment Methods?
Siteground accept directly the following types of credit card payments: VISA, MasterCard, American Express and Discover. Please note that the available payment methods may change depending on your region.
After submitting your order, you will be prompted to fill in your billing information and will be able to choose your credit card.
You can also use PayPal to pay for siteground hosting services, even though it’s not listed on their order pages. Simply contact their Sales department via the Live Chat button on top of the site in order to pay using PayPal.
How Siteground Cpanel Works?
cPanel is a web based control panel tool which will help you manage your web hosting account through a web interface instead of a console. With cPanel you are able to accomplish your tasks faster and even non-professionals can easily set their websites via cPanel.
SiteGround have developed a special cPanel theme named Crystal. It does provide some visual changes and adds a lot of extra functionality that you can’t find anywhere else.
The old cpanel that most of you have used including me does looked odd, at siteground they have developed unique cpanel where you can find all resources at one place very easily.
The best thing is the user interface which is fantastic, everything is assembled at one place and available on 1 click.
My Honest Opinion On Siteground:
Whether you are just starting out to create a new website or blog for yourself or for your client or looking to migrate existing website, Siteground is the best hosting service provider for all kind of creators and developers.
Above mentioned features are just some of them, you can get the complete features and comparison on siteground website here in detail.
Honestly, if you do not want any issues concerning to the performance of your website or blogs choosing siteground is the best thing.
I personally never faced any issues since I migrated my domain from other hosting service provider which usually lures by offering cheap hosting service.
Siteground have different plans for specific needs of users now it is up to you to decide which one is best suitable as per your need. If I have to rate siteground overall, I will give 9 out of 10 any day.
Having said that, there is one cons which I do forget to mention, The cost associated to siteground is quite high when you renew it. Therefore, make sure you buy hosting for at least 2 to 3 years itself in first billing.
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