SiteGround is a web-hosting company since 2004 established by a group of university students in Bulgaria. Now their hosting servers have more than 2 millions user accounts and the company has more than 400 employees.
Their support team is available everyday 24/7 even on public holiday to answer your call, if trouble keeps shooting you, the team has a direct contact you can phone, email or livechat with them. SiteGround claims to have a high value of site loading speed, let us test and see if it is true.
After we have tested and went through their service, we will evaluate their web-hosting quality and see if it is appropriate to use to host your website.
Startup
- 1 Domain
- Phone, Live Chat, Email Supports
- 10G Space
- 500 MB Database
- Unlimited Email, FTP, subdomain & Bandwidth
- 30 Days Static Caching
GrowBig
- Unlimited Domain
- Phone, Live Chat, Email Supports
- 20G Space
- 750 MB Database
- Unlimited Email, FTP, subdomain & Bandwidth
- 30 Days Static Caching & Dynamic
GoGeek
- Unlimited Domain
- Phone, Live Chat, Email Supports
- 30G Space
- 1000 MB Database
- Unlimited Email, FTP, subdomain & Bandwidth
- 30 Days Static Caching & Dynamic
A month trial is available to purchase but be mindful that there is a setup fee included.
SiteGround has 3 price structures with different shared hosting plans, each plan has different features with choices that adapt to the needs of their users. All hosting plans shared the same features as below:
- Unlimited number of traffic to your website. If you have tons of visitors per day to your site like over 100K, then you are giving your website loading speed a hard time.
- Unlimited database and email accounts
- Money-back guarantee within 30 days
- Owned SSD disks and caching system
- 24/7 live chat, phone and email support
Each hosting plan that offer by SiteGround has different features, let break them out and see what features are included in each hosting plan that is suitable for some users:
Startup
For users who wish to focus merely on 1 domain. As for business owners, if your business size is between small to medium and requires only 10G of storage space on the server. In this plan, the cache service is only for content static only, not including advanced features such as staging.
Grow Big
For users who have more than 1 domain to host on the server and equipped with a 20G storage space. Advanced features are available for this hosting plan such as ‘staging tool’ (which is a tool in the Cpanel that allows you to create and modify the Joomla and wordpress website) and smart data backing-up system. Dynamic-content caching is possible for this plan.
GoGeek
Ideal for running a large database of content on websites and eCommerce platform. It offers 30G of large storage space with high efficiency performance. For developers, this hosting plan includes a pre-installed git repositories feature which is a system for tracking changes in the source code. For eCommerce or online shop business owners, this plan features a PCI (Payment Card Industry) compliant server which is a necessary element for online retailing.
If you need a VPS or dedicated cloud server, we highly suggest you to check out ‘Interserver‘ as they offers a budget price hosting service.
We have tested the hosting server with multiple websites and below are the results of Pros and Cons we have discovered:
Pro
- Server Uptime nearly 100%
- High-speed loading time which is their core feature. With a top-notch SSD disk and SG optimizer and HTTP/2 software solution which make this hosting service that no other companies can beat for now.
- Easy & Simple to operate: Even if you aren’t knowledgeable in the IT field, you can set up your website with ease.
- Superior Support: SiteGround support cares more for their clients, their knowledge base offers high quality tutorial and guide.
- Free website migration for GrowBig hosting plan
- Server Region Choice: When you first sign up for the account, you can choose which location you want your website to be hosted. (America, Europe and Asia).
- Unique features incorporated only on SiteGround: Git repositories, staging and own caching system that others hosting companies don’t provide. Furthermore, free integration with Cloudflare and SSL encryption are available as well.
- Drive unlimited traffic to your websites and SiteGround doesn’t measure the amount of traffic that comes to your websites.
- Multi-account creation: If you are an organization, you can create different accounts for your users at different levels to access.
Cons
- Expensive: SiteGround isn’t the least expensive hosting service provider on the market but from what the company is offering it has its advantage for developers, programmers, eCommerce and business owners which would worth the value.
- Extended Contract Sign-Up: if you sign up for an account with more than 12 months period, you will get a free set up service otherwise you will have to pay an additional fee for it.
- Migration Issue: Not suitable to migrate a website with huge content and complex databases which may cause some unexpected issues during the migration.
SiteGround is recommended for:
- If you aren’t sure if SiteGround is suitable for you to use as a web hosting option. In this section, we will list a suitable type of status or job which you can use to run your website. We can say that SiteGround is more fit for large project management and the account can be upgradable anytime you desire. The following below is SiteGround webhosting best suit for:
- Ecommerce Store
- Serious Blogger
- Use wordpress as the main platform to run websites
- Big companies websites
- Programmer and developer who require efficient technical support
- Git-Repository, SSL, Staging, SSH access are the main elements to work with
- High performance hosting solution
Not recommended if you are looking for:
- Less expensive hosting package
- Window-based server
- A limited budget but require large web space (BlueHost offers large storage space for less)
Summary
Overall, SiteGround is a high quality web-hosting service provider with unique and high quality features that only a few other companies can keep up. It can handle huge amounts of databases and run complex data efficiently. However the fallback is the limitation of web space compared to the expensive prices.
The smart back-up system allows to backup all the data on the server with ease and not worrying about losing anything. The advanced features of Git-repository, staging, and own-acaching system may favor many web-developers. Large corporate, professional bloggers and eCommerce owners can run their project in an efficient way with high performance.
If you have a high budget and require a high quality web-hosting package, then SiteGround is for you! We have done several tests and experiments with this web-hosting, we will list it in a seperate post from this article.
Alternatives webhosting for SiteGround is Dreamhost, A2 Hosting and NameCheap