Siteground Web Hosting Review
Siteground is a major web hosting provider behind the online presence of many companies. If you decide to start your own website, you will undoubtedly need to find a solid web host.
This review digs into our personal experience with the service over the last four years and some of the major points to consider. Whether you want to make money online or are motivated to set up a website showing your professional portfolio, Siteground web hosting is definitely a service to consider.
Snapshot Of Siteground
- Siteground offers web hosting, WordPress hosting, WooCommerce Hosting, and Autoscalable Cloud Hosting.
- Over 2 million domains are on Siteground hosting
- They offer a website builder
- WordPress migration offered
- Expert WordPress support along with advanced caching
- Their platform is powered by Google Cloud
- SSD persistent storage
- Also offers enterprise + student hosting options
Check out entry level hosting with Siteground here.
Siteground Web Hosting: Company Overview
Siteground was founded in 2004 in Sofia, Bulgaria by Ivo Tzenov with some university friends. Since then, they have grown to more than 500 employees. A lot of the people who started there a long time ago are still with them, too.
Company Values
- Do everything with care
- Work with purpose
- Challenge yourself
- Innovate using the power of technology
- Respect yourself and others
Siteground has divisions in the USA, Bulgaria, and Spain. That’s four offices and along with that a handful of datacenter locations around the world.
All Services
You have options for six different services with a few pricing options.
Siteground Web Hosting
Their flagship service for business and personal websites, this is what the company has been built on. Here are their current pricing tiers as of November 2020 and what each one includes:
| StartUp | GrowBig | GoGeek |
| $6.99/month (discounted from $14.99) | $9.99/month (discounted from $24.99) | $14.99/month (Discounted from $39.99) |
| 1 Website | Unlimited Websites | Unlimited Websites |
| 10 GB Web Space | 20 GB Web Space | 40 GB Web Space |
| ~10,000 Visits Monthly | ~25,000 Visits Monthly | ~100,000 Visits Monthly |
| Unmetered Traffic | Unmetered Traffic | Unmetered Traffic |
| Free SSL | Free SSL | Free SSL |
| Daily Backup | Daily Backup | Daily Backup |
| Free CDN | Free CDN | Free CDN |
| Free Email | Free Email | Free Email |
| Managed WordPress | Managed WordPress | Managed WordPress |
| Unlimited Databases | Unlimited Databases | Unlimited Databases |
| 100% renewable energy match | 100% renewable energy match | 100% renewable energy match |
| 30-Days Money-Back | 30-Days Money-Back | 30-Days Money-Back |
| On-Demand Backup Copies | On-demand Backup Copies | |
| Speed-boosting Caching | Speed-boosting Caching | |
| Staging | Staging + Git | |
| Add Collaborators | Add Collaborators | |
| White-label Clients | ||
| Highest Tier of Resources | ||
| Ultrafast PHP | ||
| Priority Support |
Our website has been running on their GrowBig plan and it works great. Everything that people are saying around the internet about Siteground’s uptime is true, too. We have rarely experienced issues in the four and a half years of working with them.
Customer Service
Their customer service is touted as among “the highest-rated support squads online, fast, multi-skilled and helpful.” That’s because they are. On more than one occasion in my first two years running this site, I have screwed something technical up.
They have helped with everything. From fixing my mistakes setting up SSL to helping me get our site back online after accidentally messing with the .htaccess file, their customer care team really has been top-tier. Additionally, they are all also very friendly!
Website Building
If you are completely fresh to the world of websites and want to get started quickly, they offer a website builder. You get to choose between WordPress or Weebly for these.
The free site building tools are available with all of their plans.
WordPress is the CMS that powers 30% of the internet (including this site) and it works pretty well for beginners. There are definitely some technical aspects that you need to learn, though. If you plan to be in it for the long haul, go with WordPress. There’s no monthly fee and the basic installation is free. There are more premium add-ons (called “plugins”) that do cost money, but, you can get pretty far along without them.
Weebly is great for absolute beginners who want to be able to build their website with a drag and drop editor. There’s a free version available, but it does come with a monthly cost if you want the website to look professional.
Siteground Web Hosting Migrations
Their migration team can help you move your website over to Siteground web hosting pretty quick and easily. They can also set you up with their automated migrations through the WordPress Migrator plugin.
Using their professional migration services is as low as $30.00/site. They migrate 50,000+ websites annually.
Ecommerce Solutions
You have a wide array of different eCommerce solutions with Siteground web hosting. Their different shopping cart options include: WooCommerce, Magento, Prestashop or OpenCart.
As mentioned earlier, they also provide free SSL and daily backups depending on your plan. We use the daily backup feature for our blog and it’s great. The only complaint I have about it is that the storage space tends to fill up pretty quickly and I need to go in and delete older backups every few weeks.
There may be a way to automate deleting the older backups, but I haven’t figured that one out yet.
Managed WooCommerce Hosting
If you want to start an eCommerce store quickly with Siteground web hosting, then you need to get off to a fast start. Their managed WooCommerce hosting is great for this because they do some major things for you.
These include installing WordPress and WooCommerce ahead of time so you don’t have to. Additionally, once that is setup you can sell any product or service.
These can range from physical and digital goods to members-only content. Once you decide what to sell, then you can accept payments out-of-the-box. The managed WooCommerce with Siteground hosting can also let you accept bank transfers, checks, Paypal and Cash on delivery.
Along with that, you can integrate 140 region-specific payment gateways like Stripe or Apple Pay to sell all over the world.
Siteground Web Hosting Configurable Shipping Options
In addition to the payments and types of goods, you also have a variety of shipping options and order management tools with WooCommerce. Together with that, you can even use Fulfilment by Amazon for some of the fastest and most efficient shipping out there.
The Free CDN
One thing that I do think is pretty important to mention with Siteground web hosting is that you need to be careful with the free CDN. The reason for that is because when we set it up for This College Life, it kind of didn’t work. It sort of did, but all of our articles disappeared from Google search rankings.
Initially, the website did move at an incredible speed. Everything was clipping along and Pingdom Tools showed that the site was lightening fast. However, all of our web traffic dropped off.
After frantically researching what the problem might be, I eventually figured out what it probably was. This is by no means a definitive answer, but, it seemed like because the free CDN through Cloudflare used a shared SSL certificate.
As a result of that, there may have been some bad (spammy or phishy) websites using it or something like that and they were dragging other ones down with them. Either that or the SSL itself was not functioning properly.
Either way, as soon as I went back the SSL we had through Siteground web hosting, everything worked and our traffic also came back. Yay!
Do We Recommend Siteground Web Hosting?
We do recommend their service. It’s been awesome the entire time we’ve been using it and nothing negative has happened in the 4+ years we have been using their services. Here and there we’ve experience minor things related to 3rd party services (like Cloudflare). However, any time we have contacted the help desk at Siteground, they have always hopped to it and helped solve any issue fast.
Click here to check out Siteground Web Hosting.
