Ever since their establishment in 2004, SiteGround Hosting has been the company that online businesses and website owners go to for high-quality, “well-crafted” hosting solutions. Based in Bulgaria, they have been one of the fastest growing independent hosting company with great hosting solutions ranging from shared Linux hosting to Dedicated and Cloud server hosting.
A lot of people have written reviews about SiteGround Hosting and they have been mostly good words about the company; there are a few things you should know before signing up with them.
They have great speed & performance
A website’s speed is an important factor for success. If your hosting server is not able to keep up with the traffic and load up your website’s page fast enough, you’re in danger of losing the attention of your visitors, or worse, potential customers.
SiteGround promises high speed and performance for their clients and they’ve gone out of their way to do so.
For starters, their Time To First Byte (TTFB) scores high with an A grade, which basically means that their web server responsiveness is very fast. The way they do it is by implementing specific technologies that help improve and guarantee quick loading time for their clients.
Some of the features to speed things up:
- Solid State Drives for their databases which are a thousand times faster than regular drives.
- NGINX web server technology is used to speed up the loading time of all the static content on your website.
- Web Caching on the hand helps load up your dynamic content faster and SiteGround uses their own caching mechanism, SuperCacher, for a faster and optimized website.
- Content Delivery Network (CDN), which SiteGround provides for free, and HTTP/2 and PHP7 are used to speed up loading times around the world by making the content on your site more accessible.
They also conduct regular updates to make sure their technology is up-to-date and that your site won’t be affected by technological changes.
High uptime rate of 99.9%
If you’ve done your research on web hosting companies, then you’re probably aware of how important uptime is for a host. The better a company’s uptime percentage is, the less likely your website will suffer any “down” time or be unavailable.
While it’s impossible for any hosting service to provide 100% uptime, SiteGround is able to deliver the highest possible of more than 99.99% uptime for their clients. WHSR has been tracking SiteGround hosting for few years, since 2014 with the lowest uptime they’ve experienced was 99.95% in July 2016. This is still better than most web host providers!
That’s an impressive number for any hosting company and to put it in perspective that basically amounts to having as little as over four hours of downtime in any six month period.
Whether it’s for a huge online store or a travel blog, being online and accessible is important and SiteGround goes out of their way to make sure that their client remains online.
Multiple data centers across the world
We’ve mentioned earlier that SiteGround can offer high speed and performance through various features. Another key factor that helps improve server response time is their ability to provide multiple data centers that are located at strategic locations around the world.
Data delivery technology has vastly improved over years but having a shorter physical distance between a user and the server can still impact loading times. SiteGround solves that issue by maintaining data centers in key locations such as:
- Amsterdam
- Chicago
- Milan
- Singapore
- London
Sign up for a SiteGround hosting plan and you’ll be given the option to choose which centers you want your data to be stored in. If your audience is primarily within the Asian region, opt for the Singapore data center. Targeting the European demographics? Choose either in London, Amsterdam, or Milan.
Great discounts for their plans
Trying to get an idea of the different plans and pricing for a hosting can be overwhelming, let alone trying to review and compare them all. But what about SiteGround itself? Well, compared to the rest of the hosting services, SiteGround basic shared hosting plans are definitely on the pricier side.
Their 3 shared hosting plans, which are StartUp, GrowBig, and GoGeek costs at about $9.95/mo, $14.95/mo, and 29.95/mo respectively. While the pricing does reflect their quality of service, they are a bit lacking in features, such as being limited to a single domain for StartUp and having limited Disk Space.
Of course, you can circumvent the expensive regular pricing and just wait for their discounts, which SiteGround pretty much always runs. Don’t be surprised to see them offering heavily discounted rates for all of their sign-up periods with some going up to 60% off.
If you’re looking for an entry-level hosting plan for your website, you can sign-up for their StartUp with pricing as low as $3.95/mo!
Daily and multiple backups on their servers
Imagine losing your entire website due to a hack or an error? Or waking up to see that your entire site got deleted because of a terrible crash.
How well does SiteGround backup a site? Well, if anything does go wrong, you’ll be thankful that SiteGround performs regular and multiple backups of your website when you sign up for their service. All it takes is just a quick chat with their support team and you’ll have your website up and running in no time!
Now, it’s important to note that different hosting plan offers varying degrees of backups. The StartUp plan comes with one site backup per day, while GrowBig and GoGeek offer 30 backups per day for your website and comes with 1-click site restoration service. Or if you prefer, you can create your own manual backups via cPanel at any time.
Absolutely FREE site migration
Migrating your website to a new host can be a hassle. You’d have to deal with transferring all of your site’s asset and data and still make sure that your site works throughout the process. But with SiteGround, you won’t have to worry about any of that as they offer FREE site migration service.
Their free website transfer service not only applies to WordPress sites, but also other CMS platforms such as Joomla, Drupal, and even single websites or static HTML websites.
You will receive your free SiteGround transfer service when you sign up with any of their plans which include a free transfer of one website (regardless of size), transfer of email, FTP accounts, and addon domains for cPanel managed accounts.
Wrap-up
Going for SiteGround is a solid choice for anyone looking to create a website for their business. But at the end of the day, it all depends on what you really want out of a hosting service platform. Hopefully, you have a better understanding of what SiteGround can do for you and your website after reading this article.
Still not sure about SiteGround? Want to read reviews on other web hosting services? Check out InMotion, A2 Hosting, and GreenGeeks!
I prefer SiteGround any time over BlueHost. BlueHost is overrated and in comparison SiteGround provides a much better experience and customer support. Regarding blogging platform, WordPress is undoubtedly the best one for new bloggers. Thanks for the detailed guide.