SiteGround Review 2024 | How Does SiteGround Compare?

SiteGround Review — Updated April 2024

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Benefits of Using SiteGround 

If you’re looking for the best hosting company to host your website, then you may want to take a more in-depth look at what SiteGround has to offer. They are a reliable hosting provider with many benefits and features that you can take advantage of. 

When you’re in the process of finding a hosting company, you’ll want to be sure that they have a lot of features that you’ll be able to use on your website. This will help you grow your website by choosing the best hosting company. 

In this SiteGround review, we’ve done our research on this hosting company, and now we provide you with our overview of their hosting services. Here’s what we found:

1. Reliable Server Uptimes

When you’re in the process of choosing a hosting provider, you’ll want to find a web host that can provide a reliable server uptime. Without excellent uptime, your website will be inaccessible to your audience until your server is up and running again. This causes frustration for your audience, and will likely hurt your customer relationship, causing them to take their business elsewhere.

You need a hosting provider that’s able to provide a reliable uptime. This will ensure your website is live and available to your audience at all times.

When you work with SiteGround, you’ll be able to rely on their uptime because they have had an uptime of over 99% for the last two years. This is a pretty reliable record and a strong indicator that they’ll be able to provide excellent server uptimes for your website. Read more about SiteGround’s uptime rate.

2. Good Load Times 

If you’re trying to grow a website, then you’ll want to make sure that your website is fast. If your site isn’t fast, then your audience will leave your website out of frustration, and this will result in poor search rankings due to a high bounce rate. 

Search engine experts report that you have a 3-5 second window for your website to load, or your audience will begin to leave your website. This is because people have come to expect fast websites, and if your site doesn’t meet their expectations, then they’ll navigate away from your site.

We have reviewed over 30 different hosting companies, and we found that the industry average load time was 700ms. When we tested SiteGround, we were happy to see that they beat the industry average by recording a load time of just 684ms. 

This is pretty quick loading time, and while it’s not the fastest that you can find, it’s good enough to load your website quickly so that you keep your viewers attention. Check out more about SiteGround’s server speeds.

3. Free Website Migrations

If you’re working with a hosting company that you don’t like, then you may be wanting to change your hosting provider. If you wish to switch hosting companies, then you’ll need a website migration to transfer your domain name to another web host. 

Website migrations can be a complicated process unless you know what you’re doing. If you switch to SiteGround, however, you’ll be able to take advantage of their free website migration service. 

The team at SiteGround will migrate your website for free as long as you purchase hosting from them. This is a pretty good deal because it helps you out of a bad situation and at no extra costs. 

Many web hosts would charge up to $150 for website migration, so it’s nice to have this feature thrown in for free with certain hosting plans. 

4. Free SSL Certificate and Cloudflare CDN 

One of the reasons we like SiteGround is that they offer the essential features that every website should have to operate. When you buy hosting, you’ll be given a free SSL Certificate and a Cloudflare CDN.

First off, we are happy to see that SiteGround is taking steps to ensure that their customers are safe while they’re online. With a free SSL Certificate, SiteGround is ensuring that every website and its users are protected.

SiteGround also knows that the speed of your website is essential and that your website will succeed if it’s faster. This is why they went out of their way to provide a free Cloudflare CDN for all their customers.

Site speed and website security are two of the critical features that Google looks for in a website when calculating your search ranking, so it’s nice to see that SiteGround is setting their customers up for success by giving them the tools they need to succeed.

5. 30-Day Refund Policy  

If you’re going through the process of choosing a hosting provider, you should always check the refund policy of the web hosts that you’re considering. When they have a reliable refund policy, it can save you a lot of hassle because you’re able to “test drive” their hosting services before committing long-term. 

With the 30-day refund policy from SiteGround, you’ll be able to set up a simple website, contact support and test any other features from SiteGround before making your final decision. This test period will help you make an educated decision about SiteGround and decide if their hosting plans are right for you and your website. 

6. Good Customer Support 

When you’re looking for web hosting, you’ll want to find a hosting provider that has an excellent support team. While you never wish for mistakes to happen, it’s always good to be able to contact a support team that can handle any issues you may come across. 

If your support team isn’t able to provide adequate assistance, then you’ll quickly become frustrated, and the issue will take longer to resolve than it needs to. 

When you work with SiteGround, you’ll have access to their extensive knowledge base to help answer any questions that you may have. If their knowledge base doesn’t solve the problem, then you can contact the Sitground support team. Their support team can be reached through live chat, phone, or support ticket on a 24/7 basis. 

We found that the SiteGround support team knows what they’re doing, and they are real experts within the hosting space. Their customer service was also very helpful and easy to deal with. They were more than happy to spend time on our support requests to ensure that we received a full solution to our problem.

7. Recommended by WordPress 

If you’re using WordPress to build your website, then you’ll likely want to use a WordPress hosting plan to ensure that your hosting is optimized for WordPress websites. 

One of the beautiful things about SiteGround is that they offer WordPress-specific hosting plans that you can use to grow your WordPress website. SiteGround is also 1 of 3 hosting companies that are recommended by WordPress themselves. 

This recommendation is a massive vote of confidence, since WordPress powers about half of all the websites on the internet. If SiteGround is good enough for WordPress themselves, then we would definitely back up this recommendation. 

8. Good Track Record 

One of the things that you’ll want to look for when you’re choosing a web host for your website is the track record of the hosting company that you’re considering. You don’t want to be using a web host that hasn’t stood the test of time or is a fly-by-night type of company. 

SiteGround has been around for almost two decades, and they currently service over 1.8 million websites. This is a strong indicator that SiteGround is a high-quality hosting company and one that you can rely on to host your website. 

If you’re worried about the longevity of your hosting provider, then you’ve got nothing to worry about when you use SiteGround. They are a quality hosting company that’s well established in the hosting space. 

Disadvantages of SiteGround 

When you’re searching for a hosting provider, you’ll find that there are flaws with each hosting company that you see. Every hosting provider will have its pros and cons, which means that you’ll have to make an educated decision on which hosting provider is the best for you and your website. 

We took an in-depth look at SiteGround, and we found some of the disadvantages that you’ll experience when you use SiteGround as your hosting provider. Here’s what we were able to find during our SiteGround review:

1. Higher Renewal Rates 

While this isn’t necessarily a disadvantage, one of the things that you’ll want to be aware of before you purchase your hosting is the renewal cost after your initial contract has expired. You don’t want to buy hosting, then realize that the price of renewing is too high. This might cause you to change hosting providers yet again, which is an unnecessary inconvenience if you do your research.

It’s important to note that this practice isn’t SiteGround-specific. This is a common practice for almost all hosting companies, as they reduce the price of their initial contract term to attract customers.

When you purchase hosting, you’ll notice that there’s a low price that seems too good to be true. This reduced price is only applicable to your initial contract term. When you renew your hosting contract after your initial contract has expired, you’ll be required to pay their regular price. 

Always be aware of a hosting company’s standard hosting price, so you’re not caught off guard when you need to renew.

2. Limited Base Plan 

If you purchase hosting through the base shared hosting tier that SiteGround has to offer, then you may find that their “unlimited data” is pretty close to being limited. While they don’t limit the amount of data that your website can receive, you’ll find that your website’s performance will drop if you receive a high amount of traffic on your website.

These spikes in traffic may force you to upgrade your hosting plan to help guard against traffic overloads, which can cause a poor user experience for your audience. 

In general, SiteGround base plans will be able to handle up to around 10,000 viewers per month, but as you get close to this number, you’ll notice a drop in performance, which could indicate that it’s time to upgrade. 

SiteGround Hosting Plans and Pricing 

When you’re in the process of choosing the right hosting company for your website, you’ll want to look at what hosting plans the company offers. There should always be enough hosting plans to allow you to quickly scale your hosting, based on the needs of your website. This will help ensure they your website is agile and able to respond quickly to traffic spikes.

The hosting plans should also have the features that your website needs and at a price that you’re willing to pay for your web hosting. This way, you’ll get the best hosting plans at the right price.

When you work with SiteGround, you’ll be able to choose between 4 different types of web hosting for your website:

• Shared Hosting
• WordPress Hosting
• Cloud Hosting
• Dedicated Hosting

We will review each of these hosting tiers so that you can make an educated decision on which hosting plans are right for you and your website. 

If you’re still unsure about which plans are right for you, you can quickly get in touch with the SiteGround support, and they will be happy to help find the best hosting plan for your website.

SiteGround Shared Hosting

The most popular form of web hosting is the shared hosting tier. This is because shared hosting is cheap, and the plans have smaller amounts of hosting data, which makes them ideal for smaller websites that don’t get lots of traffic. 

When you use a shared hosting plan, you’re sharing a hosting server with many other websites, and you’ll have to share the hosting resources with the other sites on the server. 

This can sometimes cause issues if there’s a faulty website on your server because a website can bog down the server resources, leaving nothing for the other sites on the server. Also, if your website tends to get traffic spikes, then a shared hosting plan may have trouble handling spikes in website traffic. 

If you decide that the SiteGround Shared Hosting tier is right for you then you’ll be able to pick between 3 different hosting tiers:

• Startup Plan — Starting at $3.95 per month 
• GrowBig Plan — Only $5.95 per month 
• GoGeek Plan — Just $11.95 per month 

If you need quality hosting for a smaller website, then you should consider using the SiteGround shared hosting plans. These hosting plans offer everything that a small site will need, and it costs less than a cup of coffee to get started. 

These hosting plans are ideal for anyone who has a website that is getting under 100,000 viewers per month. Always check the amount of data that you’re using so that you know when it’s time to upgrade your hosting plan. You don’t want to provide a poor user experience just so that you can save a few bucks on your hosting. 

SiteGround WordPress Hosting

If you’ve never heard of WordPress, it’s a Content Management System (CMS) that allows you to easily build a website through pre-built themes. WordPress powers almost half of the sites on the internet, and it’s a reliable, robust framework for building your next website.

When you’re using a WordPress website, then you may want to use a hosting provider that has WordPress specific hosting plans so that your hosting is optimized for WordPress performance.

One of the best WordPress hosting companies that you can use is SiteGround. They are so good that WordPress has officially recommended SiteGround as 1 of 3 hosting providers that you should use if you’re hosting a WordPress website. That’s a massive vote of confidence! 

If you decide to use the SiteGround WordPress hosting then you’ll be able to choose between 3 different hosting tiers:

• Startup Plan — Starting at $3.95 per month 
• GrowBig Plan — Just $5.95 per month 
• GoGeek Plan — Only $11.95 per month 

These hosting plans come with automated WordPress installation, free website migration for WordPress websites, daily backups, managed WordPress security and optimized WordPress performance.

If you’re looking to get ahead with your WordPress website, then you’ll want to start using the SiteGround WordPress hosting plans. These hosting plans will be able to handle up to 100,000 viewers per month before you’ll need to upgrade your hosting plan. 

These hosting plans are also quite cheap, and they will be easily affordable for those who are trying to get their website started inexpensively. 

SiteGround Cloud Hosting

If you find that the Shared hosting tier doesn’t provide enough data for your website, then you may want to start using a Cloud Hosting plan. The Cloud hosting plans are much faster than traditional hosting plans because they use Solid State Drives (SSD) for website storage instead of Hard Disc Drives (HDD). 

When you use Cloud Hosting, your website will also be given a guaranteed amount of hosting resources every month, which means that a faulty website won’t be able to eat through your hosting resources. 

This will help your website handle those spikes in traffic, and you’ll always be able to provide a pleasant viewing experience to your entire audience. 

If you use the SiteGround Cloud Hosting, then you’ll be able to choose between 4 different hosting tiers:

• Entry Plan — Starting at $80 per month 
• Business Plan — Only $120 per month 
• Business Plus Plan — From $160 per month 
• Super Power Plan — From $160 per month 

When you use the Cloud Hosting from SiteGround, you’ll be able to quickly scale your hosting plans by a click of a button. This means that you can upgrade or downsize your plans, depending on your website needs. 

If your website is getting up to 500,000 viewers per month, then you may want to start using the SiteGround Cloud hosting plans. 

SiteGround Dedicated Hosting

If you have a massive website that gets a lot of viewers every month and is content-heavy, then you may want to consider using a dedicated web host. A dedicated hosting plan is a hosting server that’s dedicated to hosting just one website. 

In short, your website will have access to all of the hosting resources within your server, and you won’t need to share any data with another site. This is nice because there won’t be other websites that will be able to steal your data and make your website slower. 

Dedicated Hosting is one of the most expensive forms of web hosting, so there are fewer websites that will use this option because it’s much cheaper to use a large Cloud Hosting plan or a Virtual Private Server (VPS). 

If you use the SiteGround Dedicated Hosting, you’ll be able to choose between 3 different hosting tiers:

• Entry Server — Starting at $269 per month 
• Power Server — From $349 per month 
• Super Power Server — From $729 per month 

One of the beautiful things about using a dedicated web host is the fact that you’ll gain root access to your hosting server, which will allow you to customize and configure your server settings. This will enable you to achieve optimal performance from your hosting server and give your website the best chance of success. 

If your website is getting over 500,000 viewers per month, then it may be time to upgrade to a dedicated hosting plan. Always check your data usage to ensure that you actually need a dedicated server to host your website, as it is the most expensive hosting option.

Do we Recommend SiteGround Hosting? 

Yes, we would recommend SiteGround Hosting to just about anyone because they are a high-quality web host that’s able to provide fast loading speeds and reliable uptime for their customers. 

SiteGround also has some cheap hosting plans, which make them perfect for any website owners that are trying to build their website on a budget. You can easily get started with SiteGround for just a few bucks per month.

They also provide a free Cloudflare CDN and security features, which means that your website will become even faster while you’re protecting your audience while they are on your website. 

We also love the support staff that is at SiteGround. From our experience, they are fast to respond, helpful, and they know what they’re doing. They are willing to spend as much time as necessary to ensure that your problems are properly taken care of.

Another thing that we love about SiteGround is their policies. They offer a 99.9% uptime guarantee for all their customers, and they also provide a 30-day refund policy, which will allow you to test the SiteGround services before committing to a long term contract. 

SiteGround hosting is also 1 of 3 hosting providers that are officially recommended by WordPress themselves, which means that they are perfect for anyone who needs to host a WordPress website. 

Overall, we are impressed by SiteGround, and we would recommend them to anyone who needs hosting for their website. It doesn’t matter whether your site is small or large; SiteGround has a hosting plan for everyone.