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SiteGround is one of the most popular web hosting providers out there. They host over 2.6 million domains currently.
They offer a wide range of hosting options, plans at different price points, and phenomenal customer support. Whether you’re a small blog, medium-sized business, or large online store, SiteGround has an option for you.
In a nutshell, SiteGround is a host that your business can grow with, which is pretty darn important.
SiteGround Compared to The Best WordPress Web Hosts
SiteGround fares exceptionally well against other products in its category. It’s without a doubt a key contender for top web hosting for WordPress services.
But what I love most about it is that they’re both extremely scalable and dedicated to supporting your WordPress website. They are actually one of only three web hosts that are officially recommended by WordPress.
And their plans are built to handle your site, no matter how popular you get. Their mid-tier GrowBig plan supports 100,000 visits each month, while their top-of-the-line GoGeek plan can handle around 400,000 monthly visitors.
SiteGround also supports your WordPress website with their specifically designed features (which we’ll discuss below) and their 24/7 WordPress wizard customer support team.
But I appreciate that you may have different needs or wish to explore your hosting options a bit further before committing to one host.
That’s why we’ve taken the time to research and test some of the top web hosts for WordPress for you. Be sure to see all of my top picks before making your decision.
Who is SiteGround Best For?
If I were extremely broad, I would say SiteGround is excellent for just about anyone who wants to host their website on WordPress.
But to get specific, I’d say SiteGround is best for a small website owner who has little to no experience running a website and expects their website to grow over time. With flexible plans and excellent customer support, SiteGround is great for beginners and scaling over time.
SiteGround: The Pros and Cons
The Pros
Top-Notch Customer Support: Ever had seemingly unresolvable issues with technology and tried everything under the sun to fix it to no avail? Yeah, me too.
Building a website doesn’t have to be scary or traumatic when you have SiteGround support on your side—your wish is their command. The customer support team is phenomenal. They receive almost a 100% satisfaction rating every year.
Their 24/7 support comes via a live chat channel, phone support, and a helpdesk ticketing system. Even the most complex issues are resolved in an average time of 15 minutes, so you can get back to business asap.
These things are super important for a beginning website owner to combat the inevitable challenges they face.
WordPress Recommended: SiteGround comes recommended by WordPress, and with good reason. Their WordPress hosting plans are some of the most comprehensive and feature-rich you’ll find today.
Many of the support team are highly trained in WordPress and will happily assist you with WordPress related troubleshooting, compared to other hosts, who will simply tell you it’s not their issue (which truthfully, it isn’t).
To further earn its place as a WordPress-recommended host, SiteGround keeps developing new features for their WordPress hosting plans.
From automated WordPress updates and on-demand backups of your sites to their SuperCacher technology which speeds up your site without you having to touch a thing, SiteGround supports WordPress users so well because they understand the most pressing needs their websites face.
Low Introductory Price & Money-Back Guarantee: With a monthly hosting solution starting as low as $3.99 per month, SiteGround is a perfect option for even the most beginner website creators.
Furthermore, the lead-in hosting plan includes all of the key features a new website owner would want in a plan, rather than having the absolute bare-bones to get the user to commit to a higher plan immediately.
If something goes wrong, or your website doesn’t function the way you expect it to, you can get a full refund of your hosting fees within 30 days of signup.
Excellent Uptime & Site Speed: Uptime and site speed go hand-in-hand. Uptime refers to the amount of time the server stays up and running, while site speed refers to how quickly your website loads.
Between independent tests my team has run and what I’ve heard from other longtime users of SiteGround, you can count on reliability in both these aspects.
Uptime is never a problem for SiteGround to maintain, especially after they’ve made some upgrades to their servers in recent years. On my most recent month-long test of their shared hosting, I only experienced two seconds of total downtime for the month. That’s extraordinarily reliable.
And site speed was nothing to sneeze at during that testing period, either. Shared and WordPress hosting aren’t exactly known for lightning-fast loading times. I’ve seen some big-name providers (who say all sorts of glowing things about site speed on their servers) return tests where they’ve averaged well over a full second for during a month.
Averaging over one second implies either it’s never faster than that or that there were significant periods where page load times approached or even exceeded two seconds.
In today’s internet, that’s an eternity.
But for our most recent test of SiteGround’s shared hosting, we found our demo site consistently loaded in just over half a second, averaging around 600 milliseconds. Better still, it was steady just about the entire month, with no crazy spikes in load times that would have ruined a visitor’s experience if they had found the site during that period.
That speediness is further bolstered by some extra features SiteGround has developed. The SiteGround Optimizer handles optimization and caching to help you deliver your content to visitors in the blink of an eye. And, the company’s proprietary Ultrafast PHP (available on the GrowBig and GoGeek plans) reduces the time to first byte by 30%.
Free Website Transfer: Many people are worried about making the switch to a new host. After all, it’s a scary process. What if you lose your entire website or cause irreparable damage?
With SiteGround, you don’t need to worry. They’ll do it for you.
Most hosts will just move the files over. But SiteGround will also make the necessary tweaks to ensure everything is working smoothly for you after the transition.
No blood, sweat, tears, or big bucks required in switching to a new host. SiteGround includes the WordPress migrator plugin in their plans, though if you prefer a professional to do it, it will cost you only $30 per website.
Free Daily Back-Up: Most hosts will only back your website up every other day or even once a week. So, if anything happens to your website that you can’t fix, you might be forced to go back an entire week, meaning you’ll lose everything you’ve done in the meantime.
But, with SiteGround, the worst-case scenario is that you’ll only lose the changes you’d made in the 24 hours since the last back-up. If that’s not peace of mind for someone making constant changes to their website, I don’t know what is!
Great for Scalability: When you’re just starting out in business, there is no way but up, right? With SiteGround’s flexible range of plans, you don’t have to worry about outgrowing your host. Simply upgrade your plan as your business grows.
The Cons
Renewal Price: As dreamy as the promotional rates of SiteGround’s hosting plans are, once the honeymoon is over, it’s truly over.
When you renew, your rates will jump up quite high. The cost of your plan will essentially triple across the board once your promotional period is over. Ouch.
One of the main issues with this is that SiteGround’s best deal is usually for a one-year term and not the longer-term two- or three-year options.
However, there’s an easy workaround to reducing the pain of steep renewal rates. You can still grab the best deal for your first year and then minimize the renewal spike by renewing for a longer term. You get 20% off the renewal rate when you renew for 24 months or 30% off if you commit to 36 months.
Storage Limitations: The low amount of storage space available on the shared hosting plans is unlikely to bother most of you reading this post. However, if your site does grow beyond 40 GB, you’ll have no choice but to switch to the more expensive cloud hosting plans.
The StartUp plan includes just 10,000 site visitors, so if your website traffic grows exponentially too quickly off the bat, you may find yourself needing to upgrade your plan sooner than you think.
SiteGround Pricing
SiteGround offers three tiers for their hosting options:
- StartUp
- GrowBig
- GoGeek
These tiers’ pricing remains the same across the board for standard shared web hosting, WordPress hosting, and WooCommerce hosting.
Cloud hosting has its own levels and pricing, which we’ll discuss in a bit.
StartUp
As the name suggests, this plan is perfect for those new to business or looking for smaller websites. The StartUp plan allows you one website, 10 GB of space, and up to 10,000 monthly visitors. Pricing starts at $3.99 per month on the introductory offer, which requires a one-year commitment.
However, it’s no slouch when it comes to included features. With this plan, you’ll get:
- Free WordPress installation
- Free SSL
- SiteGround Optimizer plugin included
- Automatic daily backups
- Free Cloudflare CDN
- Free mail
Overall, it’s a great plan for those who are just getting started. The only thing to be wary of is outgrowing your monthly visitors limit. If you think you’re going to scale quickly, it would be worth starting straight off with the GrowBig plan.
GrowBig
The GrowBig plan is perfect for medium-sized businesses or those who know they will be managing more than one website. You’ll have access to unlimited websites, 20 GB of web space, and up to 100,000 monthly visitors. Pricing starts at $6.69 per month for a one-year term.
Aside from the features included in the StartUp plan, this plan also includes:
- On-demand backup copies
- Ultrafast PHP
- Staging environment
- Add collaborators to your site
It’s easy to understand why GrowBig is SiteGround’s best-selling plan. It includes a range of great features that are easy to use and will fit the brief most in need of a website out there that expects a steady traffic flow.
GoGeek
The GoGeek is the most extensive shared hosting plan SiteGround has to offer. As the name suggests, it’s designed for ‘technology geeks’ who want lots of control over their website.
The GoGeek plan will give you unlimited websites, 40 GB of web space, and up to 400,000 monthly visits. Needless to say, it’s truly designed for large businesses with a high volume of traffic. Pricing starts at just $10.69 per month when you sign up for a full year of hosting up front.
The GoGeek plan includes all the features mentioned above, as well as:
- Register your clients with white-label access to Site Tools
- Use more server resources for higher process execution time
- Git integration
- Ultrafast PHP for faster page loads
- Priority support from SiteGround’s most experienced customer support agents
In a nutshell, this plan is for those of you who know what you’re doing with websites. If you don’t understand some of the plan’s technological features, it may not be the best plan for you. Unless, of course, you have a specialist on your team to manage your website and need access to high volume traffic capabilities.
Cloud Hosting
We’ll touch on the cloud hosting product offerings shortly, but in terms of pricing, there are four plans for SiteGround’s cloud hosting: Jump Start, Business, Business Plus, and Super Power.
As you can see in the screenshot below, the pricing ranges from $100 to $400 per month. The major difference in the plans is CPU cores, memory, and SSD space.
Due to the easy scalability of the cloud hosting options (which you’ll learn about shortly), you can confidently start with the Entry plan if it’s your first time using cloud hosting.
SiteGround Offerings
SiteGround Web Hosting
SiteGround offers fast and secure web hosting for websites of any kind. Their general web hosting product is optimized for a range of Content Management Systems (CMS) such as WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and more.
You’ll be able to build and launch your website quickly and easily with their full website solution, including your choice of site builder: WordPress or Weebly. If you’re an online store, you’ll be able to install the shopping cart of your choice for free.
Domain registration is easy and affordable with SiteGround, so you’ll be able to enjoy the convenience of managing both your domain and your site in one place.
You’ll also have access to an unlimited number of email accounts when you create your domain, which is perfect for managing different areas of your business.
SiteGround WordPress Hosting
SiteGround is one of the few web hosting companies that offer hosting options specifically for WordPress. As mentioned previously, they are even highly recommended directly by WordPress.
With SiteGround, you won’t need to download and install WordPress manually. Instead, you’ll be able to automate the process with a simple click of a button using the WordPress Launch feature.
Upon login to your new website, you’ll be prompted to set your site up simply and easily with SiteGround’s WordPress Starter kit. The whole process takes minutes from start to finish, even for a beginner!
One of the most popular features of SiteGround’s WordPress hosting is the free SiteGround Migrator plugin. This feature is perfect for users who may hold their website with another host and wish to transfer over to SiteGround.
Better yet, if you’re not confident in your abilities to navigate the migrator plugin, you can have a WordPress whiz from SiteGround do it for you for an additional fee.
SiteGround WooCommerce Hosting
SiteGround also offers hosting options for users looking to build a powerful online shop using WooCommerce. This plan comes with WooCommerce pre-installed, saving you time and hassle, allowing you to straightaway focus on uploading products to your online store.
With WooCommerce, you can sell any type of product or service online. SiteGround will support your ecommerce growth by keeping your website safe with a unique AI anti-bot system, free pre-installed SSL, and custom Web Application Firewall (WAF).
If you choose the WooCommerce GrowBig or GoGeek plan, SiteGround will also include a convenient staging tool. You’ll be able to develop your store safely, testing changes and updates made on the staging copy before going live.
SiteGround Cloud Hosting
Cloud hosting is a relatively new way to host websites. It’s an ideal solution for businesses and websites of medium to larger sizes, who have the capacity to grow very quickly. If you are starting to outgrow your shared hosting plan, cloud hosting is the next step.
SiteGround’s cloud hosting will provide you with guaranteed resources with your very own RAM and CPU. You can also upgrade the RAM, CPU, and disk space of your cloud plan at any time. Better yet, there is no downtime with this process—the resources are added immediately.
If you want to automate the scaling process, you can do that, too! SiteGround’s unique auto-scale option will adjust your CPU and RAM to meet the needs of unexpected traffic surges, preventing any slowness or downtime.
The best part is that the scalable amount is pre-determined by you, so you’ll still have control over the scale’s parameters.
Finally, cloud hosting with SiteGround will also include a free dedicated IP. This feature will give you peace of mind that your website is safe from IP blacklist due to other webmasters’ actions.
The Best WordPress Web Hosting Service
Not sold that SiteGround is the perfect match for you? Or maybe you simply want to know what else is out there, so you can ensure you’ve chosen the best of the best. I get it.
That’s why we’ve written a whole post about the best WordPress web hosting services out there. Here are the contenders I’ve reviewed:
- Bluehost — Best WordPress hosting for new websites
- WP Engine — The best for managed WordPress hosting
- Hostinger – The best for cheap WordPress hosting
- SiteGround — The best support for affordable WP hosting
- DreamHost — The lowest day one spend for WP hosting
- Nexcess — The Best For Customized Managed Hosting Solutions
- A2 Hosting — The best for moving an existing site to better WP hosting
The bottom line: Would I recommend SiteGround for your web hosting needs? Absolutely.
They have a range of plans to suit any business and budget, and they compete well with their competitors in terms of features. They excel in site speed time and offer phenomenal customer service. With all this in mind, they are a sound choice.
from Blog – Neil Patel https://ift.tt/3dMqTF9
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