What is Siteground?
Siteground is a website hosting company. They specialise in WordPress website hosting, including WooCommerce hosting.
I’ve used Siteground for over 10 years now, across multiple businesses.
Features
Infrastructure
Siteground utilise the Google Cloud infrastructure. They have data centers in seven locations:
- London (UK)
- Eemshaven (Netherlands)
- Frankfurt (Germany)
- Madrid (Spain)
- Singapore
- Sydney (Australia)
- Iowa (USA).
Safety & Security
Siteground utilise a number of safety and security features to protect your website and account. This includes a Web Application Firewall (WAF), backups, LetsEncrypt SSL support and Two factor authentication.
Support
For support, Siteground offer chat, tickets and phone support. Their support agents are professional, escalate support requests as required and they really care about their customers.
Plans & Packages
Shared Hosting Plans
Shared hosting plans are suitable for smaller to medium sized websites. With a shared hosting plan, the resources of the server are shared between several customers. Siteground offer three shared hosting plans:
- StartUp
- This plan really is for start-ups and allows for 1 website, 10GB of web space and around 10,000 visits per month.
- Costs from £11.99 / month (available discounted for £2.99 / month)
- GrowBig
- Grow is a step up and offers unlimited websites, 20GB of web space and around 100,000 visits per month. It also offers ‘staging’ websites, making it suitable for professionals and agencies.
- Costs from £4.99 / month (available discounted for £19.99 / month)
- GoGeek
- GoGeek also offers unlimited websites, but increases the storage space to 40GB and visits to 400,000. GoGeek also offers high performance and priority support. It’s a good plan for agencies.
- Costs from £7.49 / month (available discounted for £29.99 / month)
All plans include core features including daily backups, LetsEncrypt SSL certificate, free CDN, Unlimited database.
Cloud Hosting Plans
Cloud hosting is suitable when you want guaranteed performance and for larger websites. With cloud hosting, the cloud server resources are solely used for your websites. Siteground offer four cloud hosting plans, or you can create a customised plan. The four plans are:
- Jump Start
- This plan offers 4 CPU cores, 8GB of memory and 40GB of SSD space. Although it’s the lowest cloud hosting plan, it’s more than capable of hosting several moderate sized WordPress websites.
- Costs from £60 / month
- Business
- This plan offers 8 CPU core, 12GB of memory and 80GB of SSD space.
- Costs from £120 / month
- Business Plus
- This plan offers 12 CPU core, 16GB of memory and 120GB of SSD space.
- Costs from £180 / month
- Super Power
- This plan offers 16 CPU core, 20GB of memory and 160GB of SSD space.
- Costs from £240 / month
The customised plan allows you to configure your own server, with a specific number of CPU cores, amount of memory and SSD space. The costs for this customised plan are the same as the above plans. So it’s good if for example you need a particularly large amount of disk space, but a relatively lower amount of CPU or memory.
The cloud servers with Siteground also include all the core features that the shared hosting plans have – plus some extras such as a dedicated IP address.
Pros
1. Constant Innovation & Improvement
Siteground and constantly innovating and releasing new and improved features. In particular their Siteground Optimiser plugin has improved hugely over the years and is now comprehensive and better than many competitor plugins.
2. Good Performance
Particularly since the switch to Google Cloud infrastructure, the speed of websites hosted on Siteground has been very good. The cloud hosting plans in particular are extremely solid with good performance.
3. Great Support
Siteground support is available 24/7 and is always responsive.
4. Good Reliability and Uptime
Aside from a few minor incidents (of which all hosting providers have now and again), the reliability and uptime of Siteground has been good.
5. Green / Carbon-Neutral
Due to the underlying infrastructure being Google Cloud, Siteground hosting also offers the Google Cloud benefit of being carbon-neutral.
Cons
1. Discounted Rates Confusing for New Customers
The discounted rates on the shared hosting plans can be great to get new customers to join Siteground. However they can also be confusing, as some customers don’t realise that when they renew, the rates will be higher. As the discounts are large, the renewal price is significantly higher, so therefore more of a surprise for some.
2. Occasional Slow Communication
On the rare occasions that problems or downtime occurs (which does happen sometimes with all hosting companies), Siteground can sometimes be slow with initial communication.
Conclusion
Overall, I highly recommend Siteground for WordPress website hosting.
In the 10 years I’ve been using them, they have been extremely reliable, with good quality and responsive support. They offer a variety of plans and packages, which are good value.
There have been very occasional incidents / downtime, but the cause is quickly identified and fixes put in place. The only negatives are the discounted rates (which can be confusing for new customers) and occasional slow communication during incidents.
