SiteGround, one of the most popular and highly rated web hosting service provider. Is it really that good? Does the web host actually meet the claims? Should you consider it? Is it suitable for WordPress or WooCommerce?
We will answer all those questions as we have evaluated SiteGround ourselves on the following parameters:
- Pricing & Hosting Plans
- Features
- Up Time
- Load Time
- Customer Support
We believe that these are some of the most crucial parameters that one should look for before deciding which web hosting should they choose for their website. Web hosting is going to be one of the most important factors for your website(s) success and these are usually long term decisions, as you probably would not want to change a web host every month.
To help you make the right choice we have also compared SiteGround with its nearest competitors, Hostinger & Bluehost.
Therefore, lets go ahead and see what are the outcomes on the said parameters. Before we proceed in detail over the outcomes, here is a short summary for you.
Table of Contents
Our Verdict
Pros
- Fast load time of 649 ms
- 99.99% Up Time (up time guarantee of 99.9%)
- Excellent Customer Support
- Free CDN, SSL Certificate and other features
- 30 Days Money Back Guarantee Refund Policy
- Constant Technology Advancements
Cons
- High renewal rates
- Limited storage capacity
- No free domain
- No Free Website Transfers/Migration
UP-TO 80% OFF
Use our coupon and stand a chance to avail a discount up-to 80% on SiteGround Hosting Plans
Yes, we recommend SiteGround as one of the fastest, safest, trustworthy and reliable web hosting service provider.
If you are looking for the best web hosting company to host your first or existing website, then you are probably looking for SiteGround. It hosts more than 2 Million Domains and is a real value deal for money.
All the plan offerings have their own recommendations. Every plan is designed for a purpose and we have all plan recommendations along with the plan details below.
About SiteGround
SiteGround was founded in 2004 in Sofia, Bulgaria by few university students. Today it is reported hosting more than 2 Million Domains. It has offices in 4 locations (Sofia, Madrid, Stara Zagora & Plovdiv) and have employed more than 500 people.
The web host has data centers spread across the globe in the following countries:
- United States
- Netherlands
- United Kingdom
- Singapore
- Germany
- Australia
It runs Apache, PHP, CentOs, MySQL & cPanel on its servers and provides hosting services for WordPress, Joomla, Magneto, WooCommerce, PrestaShop and Drupal websites.
To know more about SiteGround, you can visit the about us page.
One of the things for which SiteGround really stands out is the constant technological advancements and upgrades that they keep on doing to ensure amazing experience and service.
SiteGround Pricing & Hosting Plans
SiteGround is one the most reputed web hosting service providers. It has earned this reputation due to the perfect 99.7% Clients Happiness Rate and Excellent Customer Service. Therefore, it is not surprising if you are keen on knowing what does it really cost.
SiteGround prices its plans on the basis of resources that it provides like all other major players, but SiteGround does a few cool things with its pricing and hosting plans.
SiteGround Hosting offers a variety of plans and customisation options. So, if you are a blogger, business, enterprise or any individual who needs a web hosting space, it is very likely that your needs will be met by either one of the many plans or else you can customise your own. That is really cool.
These are the hosting plans offered and we will discuss the pricing and features of them in detail.
SiteGround pricing of hosting plans
- Web Hosting – $6.99 to $14.99
- WordPress Hosting – $6.99 to $14.99
- WooCommerce Hosting – $6.99 to $14.99
- Cloud Hosting – $80 to $2100
- Reseller Hosting – $14.95
- Enterprise Hosting – Quote
The most crucial thing that you should know is, SiteGround provides a Money Back Guarantee. Using this you can try the web host services and in case if you don’t like it, you can get your money back.
Shared Web Hosting (WordPress & WooCommerce)
These plans are best suited when your website is not that big, it means you does not require intense resources and have close to or less than 100,000 visitors per month.
As the word “shared” clearly says it all. The resources offered in this plan are shared among multiple users and therefore these plans are cheapest amongst all the remaining hosting plans.
Web Hosting, WordPress Hosting and WooCommerce Hosting are all shared hosting plans.
The Web Hosting, WordPress Hosting & WooCommerce Hosting plans of SiteGround are more or less the same. The difference between them is that with WordPress and WooCommerce plans you get pre-installed applications which you can do with the basic hosting plans also.
If you choose the basic plans, you can always install wordpress and woocommerce and it will still run the same way. SiteGround has a 1-click installer which will install wordpress for you in just a click. The resources offered are the same and therefore the pricing is also same.
All the three of them offer these 3 sub plans,
- StartUp
- GrowBig
- GoGeek
| Plan | Initial Promo Price | Renew Price |
| StartUp | $6.99 | $14.99 |
| GrowBig | $9.99 | $24.99 |
| GoGeek | $14.99 | $39.99 |
*All the prices above are per month basis
The table offers all the pricing information about the plans. They do have other features and offers along with it. StartUp plan hosts just 1 website while the other two can hold unlimited websites. Storage capacity is distributed as 10 GB, 20 GB & 40 GB respectively.
The best part about the entire thing, there are no up-sells as such offered in the plans. All the resources and features are stated upfront.
So you don’t have to scratch your head on various fancy features and wonder if you need them or not. All important/necessary features are covered in the plans.
If you want to avail amazing offers on SiteGround, you can use our affiliate link and get extra available benefits. Go ahead and try it as you have a 30 Days Money Back Guarantee.
StartUp Plan
The StartUp plan is best suited when
- You are a business and you just need a website to showcase yourself to your customers.
- A short term or occasion based website with limited traffic. By limited we mean somewhere close to 10,000 visitors a month.
- You are new to websites and want to start slow. There is always an option to scale with SiteGround.
- A blog with limited traffic or a new blog.
In such circumstances, startup plan can be the best option for you, besides the fact that it is the cheapest plan available.
This hosting plan does have a few limitations, like no dynamic caching and staging which can make your website load way faster, but the vital limitation is only 1 website can be hosted on it.
Please note that when we say 10,000 visitors or any such counts, it is not hard and fast. It can be more or less than that also. These numbers are just to give an approximate idea.
The table below describes the StartUp plan in detail,
| Features | StartUp Plan |
| Price / Month | $6.99 |
| Renewal Price / Month | $14.99 |
| Storage | 10 GB |
| Number of Website | 1 |
| Free SSL | Yes |
| Daily Backup | Yes |
| Free CDN | Yes |
| Free Email | Yes |
| Free Website Transfer | No |
| Dynamic Caching | No |
| Staging | No |
GrowBig
From all the shared SiteGround plans, this is the most widely recommended plan. It overcomes the limitation of 1 website in startup plan.
The difference between StartUp and GrowBig is, that it is much faster as it has Dynamic Caching, Staging and also comes with a free website transfer.
This plan is best suited when
- Your website has a high traffic and you want to scale from the basic plan.
- You have a website with another host and want a professional to transfer the website for you. Website transfers can get really messy.
- Business e-commerce websites.
- You have or want to have multiple websites that can share these resources with each other.
SiteGround hosting plan GrowBig, is the plan for you, when you want to scale. It offers a wider storage capacity and comes with some of the features Siteground is well known for.
The table below describes the GrowBig plan in detail,
| Features | GrowBig Plan |
| Price / Month | $9.99 |
| Renewal Price / Month | $24.99 |
| Storage | 20 GB |
| Number of Website | Unlimited |
| Free SSL | Yes |
| Daily Backup | Yes |
| Free CDN | Yes |
| Free Email | Yes |
| Free Website Transfer(s) | No |
| Dynamic Caching | Yes |
| Staging | Yes |
GoGeek
When the GrowBig starts getting short on resources, your next stop can probably be the GoGeek plan. This is the ultimate plan in shared hosting space.
This hosting plan has all you can think of, speed, storage, priority support. Definitely the price is also twice as that of the GrowBig plan.
This SiteGround plan is best suited when
- Your website is extremely large and has a traffic of more than or close to 100,000 monthly visits.
- E commerce store or any sort of website with complex operations and you need priority support.
- If you are a reseller, then this account is the perfect for you as it comes with white label option too.
SiteGround hosting plan GoGeek, does seem very exciting but, if it was me who had to consider, I would definitely check out Hostinger Cloud Hosting instead. You can use our coupons and avail the latest benefits.
You get your own resources, no sharing of resources and 40 GB storage. Just a personal note, I would look forward to Hostinger Cloud option than GoGeek for this particular reason, cost of Hostinger Cloud $7.45 / month and GoGeek Plan $11.95 / month.
For me the bargain is very simple, the price is lower and it is cloud hosting, still you should make your choice and check for what suits you.
The table below describes the GoGeek plan in detail,
| Features | GoGeek Plan |
| Price / Month | $14.99 |
| Renewal Price / Month | $39.99 |
| Storage | 40 GB |
| Number of Website | Unlimited |
| Free SSL | Yes |
| Daily Backup | Yes |
| Free CDN | Yes |
| Free Email | Yes |
| Free Website Transfer(s) | No |
| Dynamic Caching | Yes |
| Staging | Yes |
| Priority Support | Yes |
| White Label | Yes |
SiteGround vs Hostinger vs Bluehost
Now let’s see how SiteGround shared hosting plans stand in comparison with the competitors. Hostinger and Bluehost stand as close competitors and therefore we will compare with them.
Pricing
Starting with price, the below table will clear the picture for you,
| Shared Plans | Min Price | Max Price |
| SiteGround | $6.99 / Month | $14.99/ Month |
| Hostinger | $0.99 / Month | $3.99 / Month |
| Bluehost | $3.95 / Month | $13.95 / Month |
Hostinger, definitely has the lowest price offering. They offer 3 plans. The basic plan is the one which you never take, considering the required features to run a website, you will probably end up with the premium or business plan, that is $2.89 or $3.99 / month respectively.
On comparing with Bluehost, it also does offer a number of up sells and is more lenient on storage space. The actual price per month is a bit higher than what you see in the plans (just like Hostinger).
SiteGround, on the other is very clear on the pricing and features. Only one up sell option, which is up to you. Clean and up front, I really like that about them.
The performance of all three is almost the same. Bluehost and Hostinger load faster than SiteGround when compared on default wordpress website. If price is key factor, Hostinger does stand out tall.
Storage
The storage capacity offered by Hostinger is the same as SiteGround. Whereas for Bluehost, the basic plan has a storage of 50 GB and the rest have unlimited storage.
Free Domain
Bluehost offers a free domain in all the plans. Hostinger on the contrary, offers in the premium and business plans and SiteGround does not offer any such free domains.
This gives Bluehost and Hostinger an edge over Siteground. They have a price lower or similar with a free domain. If you have to buy a domain it would cost you $14 per year.
Back Up
SiteGround has a free back up on all the plans and Hostinger offers it only in the most expensive plan. Bluehost offers automated back ups on “Choice Plus” and above plans.
Free SSL & CDN
SiteGround offers it in all the plans, but Hostinger offers it only in the most expensive plan. Bluehost offers only Free SSL on all the plans but no word on CDN.
This brings us to the end of shared hosting plans. Now we will go ahead to cloud hosting plans.
Cloud Hosting
When you feel that your website is ready to scale, you can always opt for cloud hosting. It makes your website super fast and now you have your dedicated resources which are not shared by anyone.
Coud hosting is when your website is hosted in the cloud, that means you do not share your resources with others.
The resources that you pay for are only utilised by your websites. This ensures a number of advantages.
- Website loads and operates with a much greater efficiency.
- Quick load time.
- Scale-able and immune to server hardware issues.
Cloud hosting is one the eye catching deals of SiteGround web hosting. It offers 5 different options for you to choose from and 5th one is simply amazing.
- Entry
- Business
- Business Plus
- Super Power
- Configure your own cloud
Yes, the last one is a customised option. If no option suits you, go ahead and decide the amount of resources you need and pay only for that. Isn’t that so cool ?
Well the cloud hosting is expensive and the money back guarantee is also only 14 days.
The table compares the per month prices of the plans,
| Plan | Price / Month |
| Entry | $80 |
| Business | $120 |
| Business Plus | $160 |
| Super Power | $240 |
| Customised Cloud | $80 to $2100 |
When Should I Consider Upgrading to Cloud Hosting?
This plan is best suited when
- Your website is large and you would prefer dedicated resources and not shared.
- The website(s) have a major dependency on the security aspect. In such, cases traffic may not be high but security alone could be a compelling reason.
- Time is of essence. A downtime of your website can cost you a loss of revenue and in such cases you would consider dedicated resources and definitely not shared resources. E-commerce stores, blogs, websites where data is refreshed very often.
SiteGround vs Hostinger vs Bluehost
The plans offered by the competitors like Hostinger and Bluehost have a limit to the resources. SiteGround too has limits but there are way more choices for you. This alone is what makes the cloud hosting plans interesting.
The only problem here, is the pricing. SiteGround plans are way more expensive than the competition. By expensive, it is almost 10 times more expensive than that offered by Hostinger. Check it out in the table below,
| Min Price | Max Price | |
| SiteGround Cloud | $80 / Month | $2100 / Month |
| Hostinger Cloud | $7.45 / Month | $37 / Month |
| Hostinger VPS | $26 / Month | $250 / Month |
| Bluehost VPS | $19.99 / Month | $59.99 / Month |
As you can see, the pricing of SiteGround is way higher.
The thing that still makes SiteGround stand out is that you can have up to 32 cores, 128 GB RAM and 1 TB SSD and that is really cool. Neither Hostinger nor Bluehost have this large a plan.
You can use our coupons and avail maximum monetary benefits on all the three web hosts. These are affiliate links and we might earn a commission from a purchase.
Enterprise Hosting
If by any chance, you feel that these plans do not meet your requirements, then you can check out Enterprise hosting plan.
This is a complete customised plan. You place your requirement with SiteGround and they design a complete plan for you. You also get to choose the amount of control that you would like to share.
This is the highest level of customisation possible and is offered by SiteGround. The company does make sure that your every possible need is met. Not to mention that they do have a fantastic customer support team. This plan however does not come with a money back guarantee.
SiteGround Refund Policy / Money Back Guarantee
Well yes, there is a 30 days money back guarantee. This is to help you try SiteGround with confidence and find out whether it is a good fit or not.
The guarantee does have a few clauses which are vital for you to know. The detail breakdown of the policy can be found here.
The money back policy is however not a 100% money back policy. There are clauses that are excluded and for which there will be no refund.
- Renewal orders are not covered for money back.
- Domain name & domain privacy (ID Protection) fees are not refundable. It may be due on cancellation even if you have availed it as a free or special promotion.
- Dedicated hosting services, paid support or third party services are non refundable.
- Reseller hosting packages are only covered if the entire package is cancelled. No refund on termination of individual accounts.
You can go through the entire policy in detail on the following links.
The duration of the money back guarantee is different for the plans. Below is the table which states the number of days before which you have to cancel your plan to get back the money paid.
| Plans | Money Back Guarantee |
| Web Hosting | 30 Days |
| WordPress Hosting | 30 Days |
| WooCommerce Hosting | 30 Days |
| Cloud Hosting | 15 Days |
| Reseller Hosting | 30 Days |
| Enterprise Hosting | No Refund |
Features
Every plan comes with its set of features. There are some available for free, some paid. Our focus is on free features and how exactly do they help the website. More importantly do you need them ? Read on to find out.
Free SSL Certificate
SSL encryption certificate has become one of the mandatory requirements these days. It is so because Google ranks website with an SSL encryption higher than a non encrypted website.
This is a security technology which enables encrypted communication between web browser and web server. It is more like a trust badge for site visitors that their data is safe. You need them to rank better in organic searches and it is provided for free.
SSD Storage
The technology they use to store data is SSD (solid state drive). This is the latest technology and it is more reliable and faster than HDD. It helps your website data load faster. This helps in SEO and increases your organic ranking as pages that load faster are ranked higher.
The only problem is that there is no unlimited storage with SiteGround. All the plans have a defined limit of storage which ranges from 10 GB to 30 GB.
Free CloudFlare CDN
CDN stands for Content Delivery Network. A CDN stores large files on multiple servers in different locations across the globe. This helps to access and load the site faster as the files are now as close as possible to the visitor’s location.
Free Daily Backups
It is a very important feature. You should have a backup to fall back on in case something goes wrong with the website and ensuring a daily backup is an ideal feature. We still do suggest that you should have an offline backup too.
White Label
If you are reseller, then this feature is for you. The white label feature lets you showcase the hosting space as yours to your clients and you can bill them for the same. Very few hosting companies offer this feature and it is of great value.
Staging
Staging helps you to make changes to the websites without affecting the liver version of the site and visitor experience.
Staging creates a non live identical version of the website on your hosting environment. You can run by changes such as themes and see the impact of the same on the duplicate version.
This feature is very useful when you need to change things in your website that impact visitor experience. Imagine the scenario when you are browsing a website and the theme or the layout suddenly changes.
This can lead to negative visitor experience. We do not say that there are no other ways of doing it, but staging on the same hosting environment saves a lot of time and effort.
If you have ever changed your theme before, you know what we are saying. Changing of theme is a very common example, there are many uses of the staging environment.
Website Migration
From 20th May 2020, SiteGround updated it’s offerings by adding more of storage space in the GoGeek plan and removing Free Website Migration completely.
The total storage for GoGeek plan is now 40 GB and the free manual website transfer service is now a paid service.
The charges for a manual website transfer is $30. This may seem an unpleasant news but there is always a way out. SiteGround did take away the manual website transfer service but they in exchange provide a free automated wordpress website transfer plugin. This plugin should in itself be able to take care of transferring your website from other hosting provider to SiteGround.
This plugin is available to all the hosting on all plans and you can transfer a website with it in just a few clicks. Here is a link to the WordPress Automatic Migrator plugin. It contains a detailed guide explaining how you can activate and use the plugin to transfer your website to SiteGround hosting.
You can always use the SiteGround provided website migration plugin or you can also use All in One WP Migration plugin.
There are multiple tutorials available on YouTube that can help you transfer your website with ease.
UP-TO 80% OFF
Use our coupon and stand a chance to avail a discount up-to 80% on SiteGround Hosting Plans
Up Time
One of the most crucial elements of a web host is up time. For a better understanding, this is the amount of time server stays up and running. So when someone visits your website, they will be able to access your site. That is exactly what you would want, your website to be up all hours of the day, but there are times when you do see a downtime.
In a server downtime, your website cannot be accessed. So this one of the most crucial thing you would want to consider before choosing a web host. There are many that say they offer a 100% up time but this is really difficult.
SiteGround is however among the very few who offer a guarantee on server up time and reimburse in case they are not able to uphold it. It guarantees a 99.9% server up time on an annual base. For a drop of every 1%, they will compensate 1 month free hosting. it is mentioned in their terms of service.
When we tested it over a period of time, we saw an average up time of 99.99% which is outstanding.
UP TIME
99.9%
LOAD TIME
649 MS
Load Time
Load Time, another very crucial element. The load time is the time taken by web host to load your website whenever a visitor visits it. The study by Google shows, that if the waiting time is more than 3 seconds for the web page to load, 53% of the visitors are likely to leave the web page.
Google, has load time as one of the parameters to rank your website and you would want to make sure that you get this right. To feature in organic ranking, you need your site to load as quickly as possible. Most of the time, it depends on how quick your web host is.
With SiteGround, we have seen an average load time of 650 ms which is just a fraction of a second. This has reduced from 700 ms earlier. The change is due to the constant technology enhancement. Some of the recent updates done by them are the QUIC Speed & NGINX Direct Delivery technology. This has helped reduce load time.
Customer Support
SiteGround customer support does exceed our expectations. They are available 24 x 7 and usually solve queries under 10 minutes. It is very important that the quality and speed of support has to be commendable. So when you run into a problem, support will be able to help you.
You can reach the support over
- Phone
- Live Chat
- Tickets
They respond to you in no time. They also have a knowledge base, where solutions to common problems are available. You are likely to find your solution there in most cases.
SiteGround Domain Prices
The most crucial thing you need to get your website online is a domain name. Though SiteGround is recommended for its hosting services and customer support, they also offer domain hosting and transfer services.
You can buy a domain from SiteGround but we do not recommend that in the best interest.
I agree it is really easy when the domain and web hosting is on the same platform but we have our reasons for it.
You can check the table below where we have compared the price of a “.com” domain between SiteGround, Google Domains & Namecheap.
| Web Host | Domain Price |
| SiteGround | $27.95 |
| Google Domains | $12.00 |
| Namecheap | $9.06 |
The above prices are for a “.com” domain with privacy protection for 1 year. We can clearly see that Namecheap stands out.
As you know, a domain can be pointed to any web host, we recommend and prefer using Google Domains and Namecheap for buying and transfer of domains.
Latest Technology Advancements
QUIC Speed & NGINX Direct Delivery
Increases the site loading speed considerably when you have poor internet speed. It is one of the next gen technology and SiteGround is among the few to adopt it this quick. It helps in maintaining your visitor experience and lower bounce rate.
Google Cloud Infrastructure
The processors used to host websites have been updated to Google cloud infrastructure from 20th May 2020.. This has enhanced the CPU’s performance by roughly 40% from the previous.
Both the shared and cloud users would benefit from faster delivery of dynamic content with more efficient script execution. In other words, your website will load faster and handle more traffic in the same resources.
Leotics Consulting LLP we specialise in digital marketing and marketing analytics.
We have helped a number of clients achieve their goals of reaching more customers and converting to sales.
You can check out our services from the header menu. We can help you optimise, strategies and make the right choices.
We do review web hosting companies and you can view the detailed reviews of them on the links below:
Some important links that might help you,
These contain all the necessary policies that can help you to know more.
