SiteGround WordPress Hosting Review 2020

SiteGround WordPress Hosting Review
5

Summary

The most affordable WordPress hosting for the beginners, comes with top notch features, offers extensive set of WordPress tools, and needless to say, brilliant support.

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SiteGround WordPress hosting review
The most detailed and unbiased SiteGround WordPress Hosting review, by an ex-user experience

I’ve always recommended SiteGround WordPress hosting, especially for beginners who want a reliable WordPress hosting on a budget. You can barely find any negative reviews about SiteGround, the primary reason behind a higher customer satisfaction rate at SiteGround is the usage of modern server technologies and a very responsive support team.

At an affordable monthly cost starting at $3.95, SiteGround WordPress hosting bills fits easily into anyone’s pocket, and that truly classifies them as trouble-free WordPress hosting. The perfect blend of modern WordPress hosting, customer-friendly support, and almost 100% uptime is an assurance for your site’s success.

As I had mentioned in my earlier articles, I had personally used their services for hosting this site for a year between 2014-2015. In those days, I was very much impressed by their WordPress hosting, and happy to mention that within the whole period I hardly need to contact them regarding any issues, except raising a ticket for transferring my site.

Therefore, I’ve always wanted to share my experience and write down a SiteGround WordPress hosting review, but somehow I couldn’t. Fast forward to today, I managed to subscribe to their GoGeek plan, and as usual, I’ll try to write the most detailed review about SiteGround.

Why SiteGround?

Before we begin, I want you to introduce the history of SiteGround. Headquartered in Bulgaria, the company was founded back in 2004 by a few university friends. Today, SiteGround has more than 320 employees and is now hosting more than 500,000 domains. Not just shared hosting, they also provide cloud hosting and dedicated servers, with data center locations to choose from USA, Netherlands, UK, and Singapore.

Now comes the question why choose SiteGround WordPress hosting?

Recommended by WordPress
SiteGround WordPress recommendation

There are literally, hundreds and thousands of WordPress hosting providers but, it’s a rarity to get officially recommended by the makers of WordPress itself. SiteGround is recommended by WordPress.org as one of the few ” best and brightest of the hosting world,” now that’s a bold claim and I believe there’s no reason to not to trust on the WordPress recommendation.

Modern server technologies

Usually, a typical WordPress user doesn’t know much about what server technologies are running behind a traditional WordPress hosting. I’ve talked with many beginner WordPress users, they mostly talk about no website they can host, the so-called unlimited storage, bandwidth, free email accounts, database, etc. But, very few people actually know about what impacts the performance of their website.

SiteGround Modern server technologies

Once you host your site with SiteGround, you’ll instantly notice the boost in the performance of your site, despite the fact that this is a shared hosting platform. The magic behind this speed boost is the usage of today’s speed solutions. Let me tell you about each of the techs, used by SiteGround for its WordPress hosting plans.

  • All SSD – The regular shared hosting providers use old storage drives, HDD which are very restricted in terms of speed and are more prone to failures. Whereas at SiteGround they use SSD on all shared plans, SSD is built for speed, it’s claimed to be 1000x increase in input/output operations, in comparison to regular HDD.
  • NGINX – Typical WordPress shared hosts relies on old Apache webserver to host your sites, whereas NGINX (pronounced Engine X) is relatively much faster than Apache, at serving static content, also NGINX consumes much less memory for concurrent requests, so its memory usage is also low. Overall, NGINX results in faster performance from the same hardware.
  • SuperCacher – This is a unique caching system at SiteGround built for CMS like WordPress, based on the NGINX reverse proxy mechanism. SuperCacher is a 4 level server-side caching solution for the maximum optimization of your site, it increases the site capacity to handle the number of hits, as well as improves the site loading time. I’ll talk more about SuperCacher, later in the review.
  • HTTP/2 Enabled – HTTP/2 is the next major update to the old HTTP 1.1 network protocol, it’s designed to boost load time of websites in the browser. HTTP/2 requires an encrypted connection that’s why SiteGround also provides you with free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates.
  • PHP7 – PHP7 is the latest version of PHP, that allows faster PHP executions, in order to take advantage of PHP7, your hosting server must run the same. I was with MediaTemple and despite being a managed WordPress hosting, they had not implemented PHP7 on their servers. But, here with SiteGround, you can freely choose which version of PHP you’re willing to use on your hosting account, from PHP 5.3 to PHP 7.0. The PHP 7.0 ensures faster execution of your plugins and theme.
Global Data center
Siteground global datacenters

It’s not compulsory, that you’ve to choose the default data center located in the US, while your targeted audience is from Asia. With SiteGround, you can choose the data center for your hosting account, it can be in the US, London, Amsterdam, Singapore. You can also relocate your account to a different data center location, by paying a one time fee.

Nothing Unlimited – Fair play
plan pricing siteground wordpress hosting review

One thing I really loved about SiteGround, is that you won’t get that usual “everything unlimited” plans alike other typical WordPress hosting providers, with false marketing gimmicks. Here, they give you the exact amount of resources that you’re promised with your plan. I’ll discuss more plans later in the review.

Nearly 100% uptime
siteground uptime

Server Uptime contributes the most to your website’s success. No matter, how amazing your website is or how engaging or unique content you’ve published on your site, all will go vain if your website experiences frequent down times. I remember, how frequent my site used to go down when I had created my first website with Znet India, just one word, terrible!.

With SiteGround you can remain assured that your site will remain online, as you can see the track record for their server uptime in the last 12 months was a healthy 99.996%, while the uptime for the last month was 99.999%, that’s nearly 100% uptime. They also promise you compensation if your site experiences more than 0.1% downtime in a year.

Responsive customer support

I’ve to admit it openly today, that I’m a fan of SiteGround support after using numerous hosting services for over four years, I had found SiteGround support to be really astounding. Customer support at SiteGround is easily available so that you don’t have to wait for a long time while staying in the queue over chat, the ticket system is pretty fast ( definitely not faster than WPOven, bakers at WPOven truly owns the crown for the fastest ticket support system, forget minutes they often respond in seconds.) They also offer a phone-based support system, which I had not used so far. I’ll show you later in the review, that why I love SiteGround support.

Geeky tools for WordPress

Average WordPress users don’t want to deal with advanced tools such as WP-CLI, GIT support, and staging tools. However, if you’re a Geeky WordPress user, then SiteGround has a lot to offer you. You can use the staging site feature to quickly test anything on your existing site, and push the changes to your live site, within a few clicks. Similarly, there’s a pre-installed GIT support for WordPress to enable version control.

If you want, then you can also enable automatic WordPress updates feature, this feature will automatically update the WordPress version of your site, as well as, all your plugins which are from the WordPress repository.

I believe I had given you enough reasons to choose SiteGround WordPress hosting, now let’s take a dig into the actual SiteGround interface, features and the most crucial thing, the performance.

SiteGround WordPress Hosting Review 2020

Let’s first take a quick overview of all the plans available with SiteGround, as of now there are three different plans available under shared WordPress hosting targeted for various users.

 Startup plan starts @ $3.95/mo – For Beginners and first time WordPress users

  • You’ll get hosting for one website
  • 10 GB of SSD webspace
  • The plan is claimed to handle ~10,000 monthly visitors.

GrowBig plan starts @ $7.95/mo – For Beginners who wants more

  • You’ll get hosting for multiple websites
  • 20 GB of SSD webspace
  • The plan is claimed to handle ~25,000 monthly visitors.
  • Additional Premium perks that include, Priority support, SuperCacher, 1-year Wildcard, and 30 Day backup

GoGeek plan starts @ $14.95/mo – For Geeky and Pro WordPress users

  • You’ll get hosting for multiple websites
  • 30 GB of SSD webspace
  • The plan is claimed to handle ~100,000 monthly visitors.
  • Additional Premium perks that include, Priority support, SuperCacher, 1-year Wildcard, and 30 Day backup
  • Geeky Advanced features, Fewer account on the server, PCI compliance, WordPress staging, and Git-repo creation

All the above plans users will get a free domain name

  • Free website builder, cPanel & SSH access
  • Free website setup and Transfer
  • 24/7 support
  • Free Daily backup
  • Unlimited emails & Databases
  • HTTP/2 enabled servers
  • Free Let’s Encrypt SSL
  • Free Cloudflare CDN
  •  If anything goes wrong, then you’re assured with 30 days money-back guarantee.

Today, we’re going to review the GoGeek Plan, as you could see its the best in terms of resources and features. I’ve used my spare domain likedesk.com to float a site for this Siteground WordPress hosting review.

3 Step WordPress Installation

Once you finish sign up an account with SiteGround hosting, you’ll be prompt with this setup box.

SiteGround WordPress installation review 3

This wizard is designed to assist you in quickly creating your site with SiteGround. The first tab is to associate your domain name with your SiteGround hosting account, so if you already have a domain name registered with somewhere else, choose I already have a domain name. Else if you want to register a new domain name then select the second option, and click on the confirm button.

The next three options are to choose the way you want to set up your website on SiteGround. The first one is to create a new website from scratch, the second option is for transferring your existing WordPress site to SiteGround, and the third is simply for no help, at all. I had chosen the first one since I wanted to create a completely new website from scratch.

You need to select the type of website box, so obviously I’ve chosen WordPress, followed by entering your desired WordPress login credentials.

Note: If you want to transfer your site to SiteGround, then choose the transfer a site option, then a site transfer form will appear to enter your existing site’s login credentials.

Final WordPress install

Lastly, in the enhance your account box, if you’re interested then opt for Add HackAlert monitoring service or else click on the confirm button skipping this service, click on the complete setup option and you’re done.

The WordPress will be installed on your site, and you’ll be taken to your customer area.

setup customer area

And, that’s it, WordPress is now installed on your site, now all you need to do is to point your domain name to your SiteGround’s hosting account.

Finally, the setup assistant will take you to your user area, from where you can access all the other features of your hosting account.

Configuring nameservers

siteground nameservers dns

It’s considered a best practice to configure your domain name with your hosting account, as soon as you finish signing up your hosting account. You need nameservers or DNS information, which you can find under the “My accounts” tab inside your SiteGround user area. To correctly point your existing domain name to SiteGround, you can use this guide.

Although they say it may take up to 48 hours for your domain name to fully propagate with SiteGround, usually it takes much lesser than that. My domain registrar BigRock India instantly updated the DNS information for my domain name, and within no time my domain was fully paired with my SiteGround hosting.

SiteGround WordPress installed

However, in an another tab I accessed my site, and found that WordPress was successfully installed.

Well, that was quick, I mean it took me mere 2 minutes to create a WordPress site from scratch, at SiteGround.

Inside the Dashboard

SiteGround default WordPress

The default WordPress install at SiteGround comes with the latest build of WordPress, and other than the native WordPress plugins, SiteGround adds their own caching plugin SG CachePress or Supercacher, which controls the SiteGround’s server caching features, right within from your WordPress Dashboard.

SiteGround Account

SiteGround manage account

Before we test the SiteGround services, I want to take a look at a brief look at the user area inside the SiteGround account. Under the information & settings tab, you’ll find all the details related to your account, including your primary domain name, account DNS, account IP address.

SiteGround offers WordPress hosting under the good old cPanel, which you can access from this section. I’ve chosen the Singapore datacenter for my account, though you can anytime change it by clicking on the relocate button. Your other account details such as FTP credentials, Email details for your email client are available in this section.

In any case, if you messed up your site or somehow deleted crucial data from your account, then you can use the backup service from this page by clicking the restore button. There’s also an integrated Cloudflare CDN, with each WordPress hosting account at SiteGround.

You can notice, in the bottom area there’s a list of all the external domains registered with SiteGround, you can notice mine “likedesk.com,” if you’ve any domain registered with SiteGround itself then you’ll also find it over here.

manage extra services siteground

Under the extra service, you can use the restore feature for your account. I being a GoGeek account user, got the premium support which means less waiting time, and priority support. There’s also a Wildcard Shared SSL certificate, which is bundled with the account and can be activated from here for free.

Further, there is other paid add-on for your account such as HackAlert Malware monitoring, goMobil website builder to create a mobile version of your site, which I believe is no longer needed since a majority of themes nowadays are responsive and built with a mobile-first approach. Dedicated IP is also available for each account at an annual fee.

Total WordPress installations

The next tab installations show the total no of WordPress sites that you’ve installed on your account, as you could see that I’ve installed one WordPress site on this WordPress hosting.

SiteGround cPanel

SiteGround Cpanel home

The cPanel at SiteGround is a custom-skinned, it serves as a gateway to access all sorts of server-level features and various tools related to your WordPress site. On the top left, you can check all your account details, a SuperCacher tab that shows the status of SuperCacher, along with a button to flush the cache. On the bottom left, you can anytime take a quick glance at your site resource usage, from CPU usage, disk usage, or bandwidth consumption, etc.

WordPress auto installer

WordPress Softaculous autoinstallers

In order to set up a new WordPress site, you’ve to use this WordPress auto-installer feature from cPanel, powered by Softaculous web script. The script also shows your other WordPress installations, and even allows you to clone your existing WordPress installations.

WordPress Tools

SiteGround WordPress tools

SiteGround has also added a few more tools to enable hassle-free experience for WordPress site users. I’ll quickly brief you about each of the features.

WordPress auto-updater

Sitegorund WordPress autoupdates

Alike other Managed WordPress hosting providers, SiteGround also gives you the premium feature to automatically update your WordPress version, as well as not just WordPress, the updater at SiteGround also updates your plugins. However, only those WordPress plugins will be updated which are listed in the official WordPress plugin repository.

WordPress Toolkit

WordPress toolkit

There’s also a set of specially crafted tools to quickly overcome your common WordPress related issues including

  • Resetting your WordPress admin password.
  • Tighten WordPress admin security by IP level restriction.
  • Fixing incorrect file-level permissions.
  • Re-configuring website domain with a new domain
  • Move WordPress installation to a different directory
  • Configuring SSL certificate
  • Completely remove WordPress installation by wiping everything from your selected WordPress site.

SuperCacher

SuperCacher

The most unique feature at SiteGround is its SuperCacher feature crafted especially for applications such as WordPress. It’s a 3 stage server-level caching feature that catches all your static and dynamic content. Further, there’s also a Memcache, which takes website optimization to a whole new level and boosts database calls by storing data and objects in memory, resulting in lesser database queries and increases the ability to scale server load.

There’s also a feature called Google PageSpeed, which is a web server module and can be enabled to automatically reduce the page load time of your WordPress site. Unfortunately, it’s not compatible with Static and dynamic cache hence, it can be used simultaneously.

The SuperCacher panel works in conjunction with SiteGround’s SuperCacher plugin, that comes pre-installed with each WordPress installation. I will discuss and SuperCacher feature in the performance testing later in this SiteGround WordPress hosting review.

WordPress Staging

SiteGround staging

The staging feature at SiteGround is largely similar to the site staging service, provided by other WordPress hosting which I had used and reviewed so far. You can create a staging version of your existing WordPress site in a single click, which took less than one minute to be created for me, but timing is varied with the size of database and media content.

Site staging WordPress SiteGround

You can easily manage or test changes at the staging version of your WordPress site, and push the changes to your live site with a click of a button. You can even replicate the staging version of your site, or even better create a repository of the staging site with the SG-Git Repo.

SG-Git for WordPress

SiteGround Git for WordPress

In case if you don’t know, Git is an open-source system to manage a project, a set of files, as they change over time with new versions. in simple terms, it holds the history of your work. Git allows easy cloning and can be shared by other persons. The Git is popular among advanced users, especially developers which, allows them to manage a WordPress site in a similar way as of any other software project.

Creating a Git repository of your WordPress site at SiteGround was fairly easy, with a single click. Once the process finishes within a minute, it provides you all the information required by you such as Git clone command, SSH key, the private key password to access the Git repository of your existing WordPress site.

Other Advantages

Although, managed WordPress hosting is widely popular nowadays but, If you had created a website in the past, then it’s highly likely that you’re familiar with the cPanel, it offers a greater level of control for all things related to your website server. There are several other advantages of using shared server-based hosting, at least for “beginners.”

Emails

email hosting with Siteground

Like in all those Managed WordPress hostings, none of them provides integrated email hosting, which means you’ve to get your email hosted elsewhere, whereas, with SiteGround’s shared WordPress hosting, you can host any number of emails with your hosting account without paying any extra charges.

PHP Version Manager

PHP version manager

If you had used managed WordPress hosting, then you must know how restricted it feels when your hosting providers don’t enable support for the latest version of PHP i.e. 7. When I was with MediaTemple they were still using PHP 5.6, which is outdated and is relatively slow in comparison with PHP 7. There’s no option to change your PHP version with Managed WordPress hosting, it all depends on them, the provider.

Whereas, with modern shared WordPress hosting providers such as SiteGround, it offers you to change the PHP version of your site, according to you. You can anytime, make your site running with PHP 7 or make it downgrade with the earlier version of PHP.

Better file manager

file manager

One thing I never liked about managed WordPress hosting is limitations with a built-in file manager or even accessing desktop-based FTP manager such as FileZilla is restricted, as you can’t create a zip or extract any zip archive natively with FileZilla. Some managed WordPress hosting providers such as MediaTemple, don’t even care to provide a web-based file manager, all they provide you is FTP credentials.

However, with shared hosting plans, you get cPanel which has never let me down with it’s a fast and useful built-in file manager. You can do any sort of file-related tasks such as copying, moving, creating and extracting zip files, along with that if you need to quickly modify a line of code in any file, then there’s also a built-in code editor, dare to do it with FileZilla, not only it will consume more of your time but, also it does it in-efficiently with limitations.

HTTP/2 ready

HTTP/2 ready SiteGround test

Being a shared WordPress hosting, SiteGround always keeps things up to date, my previous Managed WordPress hosting provider doesn’t have HTTP/2 support yet, despite the fact that HTTP/2 is the first major update to HTTP protocol and brings significant improvements in performance, efficiency and security. In addition, HTTP/2 also enables faster-encrypted connections, such as SSL.

As you could see, my test site hosted with SiteGround passed with HTTP/2 test, you can also check your site for HTTP/2 support using this tool at KeyCDN.

Let’s Encrypt free SSL

SiteGround let's encrypt free SSL certificate

Let’s Encrypt is amazing, it provides security certificates for website owners for free. SiteGround was one of the first WordPress hosting providers to integrate Let’s Encrypt with their services. Unlike traditional SSL certificates, you don’t need to pay for them annually, they are always free, require no validation emails, no dedicated IP and are trusted by all popular browsers plus they get renewed automatically.

Let's Encrypt certificate SiteGround

You can install Let’s Encrypt Free certificates for your site, from your SiteGround cPanel.

SiteGround WordPress Performance Test

Okay enough about features, but in WordPress hosting what really matters is the speed. Being a SiteGround fan, I had already talked a lot about them, it’s time to test the performance, and how their WordPress hosting servers prove their mettle.

First website load test with stock WordPress, no caching enabled

Theme : TwentySixteen

Plugin(s) active : SG CachePress

Speed test SiteGround WordPress hosting

 Link to this test

I tried testing the SiteGround WordPress hosting with the stock WordPress installation, no additional WordPress plugins installed, and no post content. Though the results are not something not to be proud of, considering the data center location (Singapore) and the website speed test location (Melbourne, Australia) the results aren’t bad at all.

With no plugins installed except SG CachePress, the site managed to load under 990 milliseconds, and it’s claimed to be faster than 90% of tested websites by Pingdom.

Second website load test with stock WordPress, caching enabled

Theme : TwentySixteen

Plugin(s) active : SG CachePress

Fourth website test with caching

Link to this test

I did a second test with caching all caching enabled including static cache, Dynamic cache, and Memcache. The results were much improved as the site managed to load under 746 milliseconds. That’s the impressive load time for an affordable WordPress hosting.

Website Speed Test with Dummy content

dummy posts

Any WordPress hosting can do good with minimal or little to no content however, often when you add start adding content, plugins, etc, the performance of the site starts gets worse. I tried to install a few fake contents with the help of FakerPress plugin, I tried generating some hundred dummy posts, some pages and also installed few popular plugins such as Yoast SEO, Contact Form 7 and Akismet.

Website Speed test with Dummy content

Total number of posts : 100

Total number of pages : 16

Total number of plugins active: 5

Database size 19.5 MB

Speed test with dummy content

Link to this test

As you could see, despite adding content, plugins and an increase in the database size, the load speed of the website remains unaffected. The performance for SiteGround WordPress hosting is truly impressive, and to make a point where I had literally done zero optimization to my site. Additionally, I had also not configured any CDN to the site yet, as it’ll further help in reducing the load time of the website. Overall, the performance of the SiteGround WordPress hosting is appreciable.

SiteGround WordPress hosting stress test

It’s good for a WordPress hosting to deliver reliable performance in terms of load times but, the real challenge for a host is to sustain sudden traffic load. Sometimes, when one of your posts goes viral and you’re on a typical hosting account then you’re already aware that your site is bound to get crashed.

Let’s test the same user scenario with SiteGround, can they sustain sudden simultaneous traffic on your site? let’s see

I created a little stress test, with a traffic load of 100 virtual UVs for the duration of 5 minutes and here are the results from the Load impact.

SiteGround WordPress load test

Link to this load test

The SiteGround WordPress hosting qualified this stress test of 100 virtual users for consecutive five minutes, with an average response rate of 2.04s, and without generating even a single error.

Active load and response rate

Except, in the beginning, the average load time of the server remains constant at 2 seconds. The response time of the site is a bit higher, but considering the fact that the server location is far from the testing region, that’s why it’s acceptable.

Still, these test results aren’t 100% accurate since virtual users are largely different from the real users but still I’ll consider results, as reliable.

Overall, it’s proven that if your site faces sudden load then it won’t get crushed and it will merrily survive the incoming traffic.

SiteGround support

After the service, the very next question that comes to our mind about any hosting providers is how about support? and that’s an obvious question. In website hosting anything can go wrong anytime, it’s the nature of this system. However, good support by any hosts keeps your issues resolved and stick to their services.

I had used SiteGround support, and they had never let me down. One thing I always love about SiteGround support is they are customer-friendly, listen to what you’re saying, try to resolve your issues. Instead, I’ve seen many hosts who just throw pre-generated messages for your problems.

Ask any random host’s support that you are experiencing issues with the performance of your WordPress site, most likely he’ll reply you that “the culprit is this plugin or that WordPress script such Wp-cron and ask your developer to fix it.” That’s insane, I mean I knew everything about WordPress then why would I have contacted you? or if I am rich enough to hire a developer then why would I host my website on your cheap WordPress hosting?

So, these are a few bad experiences, which I had faced in the past for my sites. But never with SiteGround, they always go the extra mile to support you and that too, in a rapid manner.

Just before yesterday, I had approached the SiteGround customer support, regarding getting extra service for a day or two, so that I can finish this SiteGround review without losing access to my SiteGround account. And here is the entire chat conversation.

SiteGround Support system

Here’s the full chat transcript for my readers.

Your Chat Transcript on 03/10/2016
Pavlin I.: Hello Pranjal
Pavlin I.: Welcome to SiteGround Hosting Services!
Pranjal Gupta: Hello Pavlin
Pavlin I.: Let me assist you
Pavlin I.: The account should be renewed throughout the day. We cannot give an exact estimate as the answer may be misleading and we wish to avoid that
Pranjal Gupta: Owh, actually I don’t want to renew my account, I just bought the account to review your service, somehow I couldn’t finish the review in time, and right now I am finishing writing the article.
Pavlin I.: Do you need some more time, Pranjal? I can also help you renew for a month
Pavlin I.: so that you can continue working safely
Pranjal Gupta: I just need a day, not a whole month
Pavlin I.: I understand
Pavlin I.: Let me assist you shortly
Pranjal Gupta: Sure
Pavlin I.: As we discussed, you’re writing an article about the service and need some more time – so I made sure the account will stay live within 24-48 hours after its expiration
Pranjal Gupta: That would be great, Pavlin
Pavlin I.: The new agreement has already been set. I have disabled the renewals on your account but in case you wish to renew, you can certainly do that manually via the Billing section
Pranjal Gupta: Thank you so much, Pavlin. That would be really helpful for me :)
Pavlin I.: You’re certainly most welcome! :) Glad we could assist you
Pranjal Gupta: Thanks a lot :)
Pavlin I.: Pleasure was all mine, Pranjal
Pranjal Gupta: Thank you, Goodbye :)
System:Pranjal Gupta has ended the chat

Indeed, I was writing a review article about them, they couldn’t miss an opportunity to serve me better, but still, I’ve to appreciate their support.

Conclusion

That was a detailed SiteGround WordPress hosting review, I tried to cover almost all possible features but I know that I missed a few things knowingly to further limit this review. As I said earlier, I had used their hosting and they had improved a lot since then, SiteGround always has a tendency to update their hardware and technologies to the latest, which makes their services stand out from the rest of the WordPress hosting providers.

I would recommend their hosting to any new WordPress user any day, but they still have plenty of room to make their services better. To be very honest, they might have a fancy website on the front-end but, I’ve never liked the back-end interface of the user area, it reminds me of those crappy old hosts which, I had used in the past. I’ve used MediaTemple WordPress hosting, and they’ve created such an eye-pleasing interface, SiteGround should definitely work on the back-end user interface.

Another thing, I miss at SiteGround is the lack of a bigger plan for the high-end WordPress sites with bigger traffic. Currently, their biggest plan is suggested to handle monthly traffic of ~1,00,000 visits and costs $14.95/mo. What if my site has a daily traffic of 5,000 – 10,000 visits? the answer is going elsewhere? why? because it’s clearly indicated that their current biggest WordPress plan can’t support my high traffic WordPress site, and I can’t even pay bills at $60 monthly to use their cloud hosting for WordPress. That’s what actually happened with me when I had to drop SiteGround services and was forced to look elsewhere.

Disclosure: All my sites are now hosted on WPOven WordPress hosting.

FAQs

Are the visits suggested under each SiteGround plan are the actual and will they suspend my site, if monthly traffic on my site goes beyond that limit?

No, they won’t suspend your site after that limit is crossed, it’s just a fair indication that this plan is suitable for this much of traffic and there’s no limit for traffic, as long as your site is not crashing with the given amount of resources, your site will continue to load, no matter how many visitors are on your site.

This seems to be typical cPanel based shared WordPress hosting which is available for cheap, then why they are charging higher?

It’s true that SiteGround WordPress hosting actually uses cPanel as the primary gateway to access all features of their respective accounts. But, this hosting is different from those typical shared hosting for WordPress, as they had highly customized their service for performance, they had created several additional tools just to make hosting WordPress a much better experience than a typical shared host. They had brought the top-notch features such as NGINX web server, Varnish caching, Memcache for the masses at relatively affordable prices. If they are charging higher, then I have no objection, after all, they deserve it.

You’ve mentioned that you himself are no longer using SiteGround, why?

I figured out that my site had outgrown the SiteGround shared WordPress hosting environment and I can’t afford to pay $60 monthly for SiteGround’s Cloud hosting or 300% higher amount of my existing GoGeek plan, which was $14.95 a month. That’s why I switched to MediaTemple at that time, which used to charge $30 a month for hosting all my WordPress sites.

So would you recommend SiteGround for my WordPress sites?

Absolutely, SiteGround WordPress hosting is perfect for WordPress beginners, who had just started exploring WordPress. It’s also a perfect hosting for those individual WordPress bloggers who are making a living with WordPress blogs and are getting monthly traffic of around ~1,00,000.

For those who are planning to switch to SiteGround, and have got any doubts related to their services, feel free to ask your questions in the comments below. If you had used, SiteGround WordPress hosting in the past, don’t forget to add your reviews or feedback below.

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