Siteground has been in existence for nearly ten years now, and have become widely known and accepted in the industry for pushing the technological boundaries that make them one of the fastest, most reliable and secure web hosting providers around. Our Siteground Reviewreflects not only their great features but has also been influenced by the many hundreds of positive reviews left by our readers.
You will find that Siteground is our top recommended hosting provider and a firm favorite with our readers. No other host we have reviewed comes close to the positive feedback we have received.
Siteground Shared Hosting Review
Siteground Shared Hosting Plans
Siteground offers three different plans for their shared web hosting; Startup, GrowBig, and GoGeek. Also, they now offer a unique WooCommerce plan that is based upon their GoGeek plan.
You can see a quick comparison of the plans by feature, along with the pricing in the table below:
| STARTUP PLAN | GROWBIG PLAN | GOGEEK PLAN | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Space | 10 GB | 20 GB | 30 GB |
| Transfer | Unmetered | Unmetered | Unmetered |
| Websites | 1 | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| FreeDomain | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| FreeSSL | No | No | Yes |
| PCI Compliant | No | No | Yes |
| DeveloperFeatures | No | No | Yes |
| SuperCacher | Static Only | Static + Dynamic | Static + Dynamic |
| Price | $3.95 | $7.95 | $14.95 |
A summary of the most important features of each plan is below:
Startup Plan
This is Siteground’s basic plan that starts at just $3.95 per month. According to their website it includes:
- SSD Storage
- Free domain name
- Free setup & transfer
- 30 days money back guarantee
- 99.9% Uptime Guarantee
- 24/7 technical support
- Unlimited Traffic, Emails, DBs. NOTE – they indicate that it is suitable for up to 10,000 monthly visits.
- cPanel & SSH access
- Free Daily Backup
- Cloudflare CDN
- Supercacher Static Caching only
- WordPress & Joomla Toolkits – This allows automation of various tasks.
GrowBig Plan
Unless you need access to Siteground’s developer features, this is our recommended plan. Not only do you get all three levels of their awesome Supercacher (by this we mean caching for database and object cache), but you get the following:
- 30 days worth of backups with easy access to restore
- Unlimited websites
- One year free SSL
- Priority support
- Suitable for around 25,000 visits monthly.
The Supercacher uses Nginx and Memcached to cache both dynamic and static content and works with WordPress, Joomla and more recently Magento (update, their Magento Supercacher is only available on their Cloud Hosting).
GoGeek Plan
If you need some seriously great hosting, then you have to consider their GoGeek plan. This comes will all previous features discussed, in addition to the following:
- Fewer accounts on each server, meaning you can use up to 4 times more resources than their StartUp plan
- PCI compliant server for e-commerce allowing you to take credit card details on your site.
- Developer features – This is one of our favorite things about them. Automaticallycreate staging copies of your site so you can test changes before pushing them live with a single click. Not only that but for the more advanced developer you havepre-installed GIT, with automatic setup. There is also WP-CLI integration available, as well as Drush if you are a Drupal maniac. You can read our detailed summary of all of their developer features here.
A Closer Look at the Premium Features at Siteground
Siteground has been very proactive over the last couple of years creating custom solutions such as SuperCacher, Developer features, or Toolkits for WordPress and Joomla. It will be exciting to see what they have installed for us all next, as it seems we now have to update our Siteground review on a regular basis just to keep up with all the new features. Here is a brief summary of our favorite Siteground features as well as links for further reading:
- WordPress & Joomla Toolkits (all plans) – Automate simple tasks such as resetting admin passwords, fixing file permission issues, changing the domain address, or just deleting the installation. These tools arose as a result of SiteGround support repeatedly being asked to solve the same questions faced by their customers. By having access to these tools, you too can help your customers easily and quickly.
- SuperCacher with Nginx and Memcache (Static only on StartUp). This makes your WordPress, Joomla or Drupal website extremely fast, as well as see speed tests utilizing this technology below.
- Fantastic developer features (GoGeek only) such as Site Staging, WP-CLI, Drush integration and Git integration.
- PHP 7 + Opcache – This is a relatively new feature, which you can read more about here. You can also look at some benchmarks showing the significant speed increase PHP 7 has over earlier versions.
- HTTP/2 – This is a great new technology that significantly improves the performance of your HTTPS website. In fact, it is worth implementing HTTPS for the speed increase, as well as the SEO benefits.
We appreciate there is quite a lot to read up on, but that just demonstrates just why they are so great.
Siteground cPanel Control Panel
Click to enlarge
They use cPanel, albeit with custom styling to make it look professional. One thing we like is that the cPanel is readily available and integrated into their general billing client area.
The cPanel sports Softaculous auto installer, as well as their custom installs for Joomla, WordPress, and Magento. Along with the standard options, you can also access all the Developer and WordPress Joomla toolkits that we have talked so much about. Just take a look for yourself (click image to open larger version):
Fast Siteground Support – 15-minute ticket response
If something goes wrong, you need to know that someone will be on hand to help you out. Accidentally deleted your site? No problem. Messed Up your WordPress install or trying to work out a .htaccess 301 redirect but cannot get it to work? No problem. They have some of the most helpful, and fast support technicians we have seen.
If you sign up, just ask them a quick query. We guarantee they will respond within a few minutes. It is that fast. But it is not just about speed here.
Siteground are fanatical about WordPress, Joomla, and even Magento among many other talents. They have the technical ability to help you out, and if required can be hired to carry out more technical work too.
Simply the best and fastest support you will ever find at a web host, and our readers agree (see the Siteground Reviews at the end of the article).
Superior Uptime at Siteground
They have one of the best uptime figures going. They never have problems with their data centers, or have technicians make “mistakes” that cause downtime.
A screenshot of their publicly displayed uptime figures are shown below:
One of the reasons why their Uptime figures are so high is that they have built custom server monitoring software that can automatically resolve 90% of issues without human interaction.
They also track their servers in real time, not 1-5 minutes like other hosts. Furthermore, while other hosts can take the time to react to the downtime, you can see how their system can mean vastly less downtime.
Extremely Fast – Siteground Supercacher with Ram Based Caching
One of the most sought after things people look for in hosting is for their site to be fast. We gave them a spin with a standard theme we got offThemeforest, which although may be a little more bloated than we are used to seems to provide an excellent test to gauge the speed of the server.
We optimized the site using Siteground’s Static and Dynamic Supercache (Dynamic not available on their Startup Plan). We removed all third party scripts (social shares analytics) as we wanted to test just the server, not third party scripts that are loaded from other sites.
All these tests were carried out on Siteground GoGeek plan on their EU Server in Amsterdam:
No Supercacher
This mirrors the kind of speeds we have seen with other web hosts that offer no server optimizations.
NGINX Supercacher
With their Supercacher, no Caching plugins are required (i.e. W3 Total Cache), and it can be set up in minutes. You can see the significant improvement in page load times below:
If you have any difficulty setting up their Supercacher, just get in contact with their support and they will be more than happy to help.
Great Value at Siteground with fantastic features
For all the features, you get for the price is pretty incredible, especially with the discount on your first invoice with our Siteground coupons. While the GrowBig plan and GoGeek plan are more expensive that other hosts, this is because not only do they increase Bandwidth and Disk Space with each plan, but they increase CPU usage as well.
This means that Siteground’s GoGeek plan is more akin to a semi-dedicated solution, and even then with all the developer features and other functionality, it still represents an incredible value in comparison to the competition.
Final Thoughts about Siteground
Siteground are our favorite web hosting provider. They do so much more than any other host with additional Advanced Features that it is a “one-horse” race. Hopefully, you will have reviewed all the other articles we set out at the top of this Siteground review as there are many features you will want to implement (i.e. their Supercacher).
Siteground are also a big part of the WordPress and Joomla community regularly attending, sponsoring and giving talks at multiple events each year. If you ever go to a WordCamp event, the chances are you will see them there.
