SiteGround is a Bulgarian company launched in 2004 by university students. Since then, it has grown steadily, and is now home to over 500 employees and nearly 2 million domains.
The support team is available 24/7 every day of the year. According to their website, they also seem to highly value loading speed.https://wpsupport360.com/wordpress-hosting/#
There is a lot to process, and SiteGround promises tons of benefits. But is it all true?
After having tested its hosting services, I decided to write this SiteGround review, which I hope will help you decide whether it’s the best option for your website.
But if you don’t have time to read this SiteGround review, just watch this short video I put together for you:
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What can you expect from each SiteGround plan?
SiteGround offers 3 shared hosting plans, which, in most cases, adjust to the needs of most users – unless you have a really big website. Note that all the plans share the following features:
- They do not limit the traffic that your website can receive. But of course, if you have a lot of monthly visitors (e.g. over 100,000), the shared hosting might fall short
- Databases and unlimited email accounts
- 30-day money-back guarantee
- SSD disks and it’s own caching system
- 24-hour phone, chat and email support
But, of course, not all SiteGround plans are equal. Below, we’ll take a look at their main differences.
StartUp: Ideal for users that have a single small-to-medium-sized website and need less than 10 GB of space. In this plan you’ll have the cache service for static and dynamic content (this will make your website faster). Advanced features (e.g. staging) aren’t part of this package.
GrowBig: This plan was created to store unlimited sites and 20 GB of space. You’ll have access to the staging tool, and their (smart) on-demand backups system. On top of the caching system for the static and dynamic content, this plan makes it possible to use Ultrafast PHP.
GoGeek: In addition to offering you more space (40 GB) and allow you to host unlimited sites, it comes with better-performing servers and pre-installed Git repositories. It also comes with support for white-label hosting, something agencies will appreciate.
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What is SiteGround used for?
SiteGround offers unbeatable services and I’d recommend it in a heartbeat. It’s suitable for serious projects, and if you need more performance down the line, you can upgrade to one of its premium hosting plans (e.g. cloud or dedicated). I especially recommend it for:
- Online stores
- Professional bloggers
- Websites that run on WordPress (more information)
- Large corporate websites
- Developers and designers that want quality and good support
- Those looking for features like staging, Git repositories or SSH access
- In general, anything that will require high-performance solutions
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When not to use SiteGround hosting?
Even though SiteGround adapts to many profiles, in some cases it might not be the best option, for example:
- If you’re looking for cheap hosting
- If you want Windows-based servers (check InMotion Hosting or A2 Hosting)
- If you need a lot of webspace and have a small budget
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What does SiteGround’s backend look like?
In 2019 SiteGround moved away from its old (but good) cPanel to a more modern approach. I have to say that I really like the new system, it looks much nicer than cPanel and it’s intuitive to use.
Besides the new design, my favorite dashboard enhancement is that now websites are treated (managed) individually. This means that each site will have their own separate admin panel, which makes things easier if you have a couple of projects hosted on SiteGround (e.g. you can back up 1 site as opposed to having to back up the whole account).
Here is what I liked about it:
- The backup feature is seamlessly integrated with SiteGround’s system. So no foreign system which could create conflicts needs to be used.
- Backups for each site are managed individually, which means that you can create a backup for just one of your sites instead of having to create backups for all your SiteGround hosted sites.
- Having the option to create on-demand backups is a dream for those pushing code or system and plugin updates. Before doing so, you can create a backup for your peace of mind.
- Backups are useless unless you have an easy and effective way to restore them. SiteGround only requires a couple of clicks.
- And finally, the on-demand and restore backup options are included in the GrowBig and GoGeek plans at no extra cost – other providers charge for similar (worse) features.
There are a couple of things I’d like to be a bit different, for example, there’s a quota limit of 5 manual backups per site (you’ll have to delete an old one if the limit was reached), and there’s no way to download your backups, you can only restore them.
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SiteGround’s WordPress optimization plugin
SiteGround has a plugin for optimizing websites for WordPress. It’s amazing – it does the work of 3 or 4 plugins. On top of managing your website’s cache options, it also gives you options for:
- Compressing HTML, CSS, JavaScript and images
- Lazy loading images
- Combination of CSS files
- Optimization of browser cache
- GZIP Compression
