Siteground offers a variety hosting plans that will appeal to anyone from beginners to established businesses.
These guys are the real deal, which is why they’re currently the #1 overall recommended web hosting company (see the full rankings here).
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Siteground was founded in 2004 and ever since has maintained a reputation for quality hosting servers and top-tier customer service.
Here is how they’ve trended over the years:
Features
Siteground offers some of the best features any hosting site has ever offered.
Here are just a few of them:
1) Optimized Setup for Popular Applications: Almost all web hosting companies support most popular applications like WordPress, Joomla, or Magento. You can install any of those CMS, typically with a one-click installer. But that’s where they stop. Siteground is unique in that they offer special hosting solutions for WordPress, Joomla, Magento, and other popular applications.
These solutions come with Siteground’s proprietary optimized server setup, security, speed systems, free templates, and detailed tutorials. There are multi-tier plans – StartUp, GrowBig, and GoGeek – to meet any hosting needs, including web space, number of visitors, and application-specific features like caching, staging, and repo creation.
Support is optimized for specific applications. For example, on a WordPress plan, you’ll deal with experts who are knowledgeable in WordPress. Premium support is included with higher plans (GrowBig and GoGeek).
2) Student Hosting: Student web hosting is surprisingly uncommon, which is a shame since everyone knows students can really use discounts. Siteground offers student plans starting at $1.99 a month, which includes all the features of a regular hosting plan excluding free domain.
This robust plan includes 10 GB of storage space, multiple versions of PHP, unlimited traffic, unlimited MySQL databases, automatic daily backups, fast speed, and user-friendly cPanel. This plan is suitable for beginners and advanced users.
Not only that, there is also Faculty Partnership that includes a custom sign-up page for a specific school or course. Best of all, Faculty Partnership is offered for free. The high level of support applies even to these low-priced or free accounts. Everyone has access to the 24/7 support by experts.
3) Unique Account Isolation Technology: Siteground was one of the first web hosting companies to use isolation technology, to isolate each account in its own directory for their shared hosting. They use unique chroot mechanisms to achieve this. The biggest advantage of account isolation is that if there is a single account that’s corrupt or has a major security flaw, other accounts on the same server wouldn’t be affected.
Also, the common problem with a shared hosting plan is that if one account hogs too much resource, it affects the others on the same server. The account isolation technology helps manage server resources more efficiently even on a shared server. If you want maximum security and resources, you’ll always be better off with VPS or dedicated hosting, but since that’s not always affordable, it’s reassuring that Siteground has this isolation technology to ensure one black sheep in the herd doesn’t jeopardize the good accounts.
Customer Support
Siteground is one of the best in the hosting industry, if not the best, in terms of customer service.
They offer in-house chat and ticketing systems for excellent customer communication. Their platform even allows you to work with reps you’ve rated and worked with before (you won’t find that with BlueHost, GoDaddy, or A Small Orange).
Their CEO said himself that their claim to fame has been their customer service, without a doubt (1).
If you really value customer support in a hosting company, it’s hard to beat Siteground.
Reviews
We looked at several different online sources to find honest opinions about Siteground. We found many users had positive things to say about their tech support and quick resolution times.
One happy customer writes: “The service to get things repaired are quick – usually within 1 hour, but generally about 15 minutes for me. Many times the tech team already has an issue discovered and is working on it before I contact them!”
Another reviewer agrees saying: “They boast about a 10 minute response time to their tickets, and that’s no idle boast. The last four tickets I raised were responded to in an average of 8 minutes, and all of them resolved immediately.”
We also found some negative reviews. Users here are upset with the site speeds and service with Cloud hosting.
One frustrated customer writes: “I moved from shared hosting to Cloud hosting, and ever since I started spending more money with them it’s been awful. My sites are slower, they gave me an IP address that was on email blacklists.”
Another reviewer had a similar issue saying: “They advised me to upgrade to their cloud service. Once upgrade the service went from bad to unbelievably bad, they then advised me to downgrade to my original plan, by the time I had done this I had spent over $300 for nothing!”
Pros
1) Uptime Guarantee: Siteground a offers real server uptime guarantee of 99.99%. Their yearly uptime is purported to be 99.996%, while their monthly uptime is 99.999%.
2) Good Support: Siteground is reviewed highly by users on neutral review websites for their outstanding support. They offer the standard 24/7/365 support through phone, chat, and tickets. They claim their phone and chat reply time as “instantly,” while their tickets are initially responded to in 10 minutes.
3) Popular Apps Hosting: Siteground has customized plans for popular apps like WordPress, Joomla, and Magento.
4) Multiple Plans: Siteground offers shared, cloud, and dedicated hosting, with multiple options for each.
5) Highly Rated: Siteground is one of the highest rated web hosting companies for their features and support.
Cons
1) Expensive: While their introductory prices are on par with other companies, their regular pricing can seem steep, especially the GoGeek plan at $29.95 per month on regular pricing.
2) One Website for Lowest Plan: The lowest plan only allows one website on the account, although this is relatively common for lowest-tiered plans on competitors as well.
3) Doesn’t Accept PayPal: Siteground only accepts Visa, MasterCard, and Discover as their payment options.
Summary
Siteground is a good choice for people preferring WordPress, Joomla, or Drupal.
Their pricing isn’t the lowest, but it’s backed by good user reviews and superior support. The glaring disadvantage is that they don’t offer unlimited disk space for shared hosting plans, but it’s highly unlikely you’ll ever need unlimited disk space for any of your websites.
I have been using SiteGround for 6 months now and couldn’t be happier. The SuperCacher plugin provided by them for Wordpress websites is the best! On top of that, they give free SSL service with new hosting plan purchase. I just wish they were a little cheaper because $15/mo is expensive for the normal GrowBig plan.
Yep, this is why I recommend SiteGround over the 70+ hosts I reviewed (50 of them that I’ve personally used).
$3.95/mo for beginners is unheard of for what they provide in service and hosting speed. And the $15 is more-than-fair for sites that get tons of traffic (compared to $40+/mo with LiquidWeb or $99+/mo with WP Engine)