Siteground Review: Pros and Cons
This Siteground review is for you if you are looking for a solid hosting provider. Let’s check if SiteGround is a good fit for your project. I’ll, show you its pros and cons, and what to expect from the service.
Siteground was founded in 2004, but in recent years its popularity has tripled. At first glance, it all sounds good: fast websites, reliable service, 24-hour support and affordable prices, at least in the first year.
But let’s check under the hood to see if all of this is actually true. The first thing you’ll notice, is it’s cheap prices, but be aware that these are only for the first term. Once you renew, you’ll be charged the full amount.
If you sign up to Siteground, especially after renewal, its shared hosting solution has three plans, all with unlimited bandwidth. The Startup tier is suitable for smaller one site projects that don’t need more than ten gigabytes of storage and are cool with paying extra for advanced backup options.
The Grow Big package allows you to host multiple sites and gives you access to a faster server on demand; backup and restores are included in the price. It also comes with staging areas for WordPress.
Finally, the Go Geek plan is suitable for larger sites that need higher performance, pre-installed, git repositories and faster support.
That was everything there is to know about site grounds.
Siteground Review: Pricing
Pricing. In 2019, SiteGround moved away from the good old cPanel to a new dashboard. At first it may look confusing for cPanel users, as the backend looks a bit different.
However, you’ll only need a couple of minutes to get the hang of its interface. I think it’s pretty well organized and intuitive, and the flip side is that it comes with some features that sets Siteground apart.
The billing section is where you can add your payment details, check out your invoices and handle your renewals, but let’s, move on to more interesting things from your website’s, tab you’ll, be able to add, manage and delete your sites.
What’s cool about their new system is that each website is managed independently and you can even add different users for each one. This makes Siteground a good option for big projects with several team members and even web development agencies with multiple clients.
A nice extra is that you can customize your dashboard to show certain features, but no worries all the features and tools are accessible from the left sidebar where you’ll be able to create FTP accounts, staging areas and manage your caching options.
One of my favorite features is the on demand backup and restore system which is available on the Grow Big and Go Geek plans. This Siteground solution allows you to access and restore any of the available backups or even request your own backups instantly. A really useful feature for those coding a lot or managing many system updates.
Siteground: Security
Some statistics suggest that more than 50,000 sites get hacked every day. Let’s, see what Siteground does to avoid yours being compromised.
First of all, you should install an SSL certificate. They offer an easy way to get Let’s Encrypt for free. Siteground lets you use the latest PHP version and this minimizes security risks.
Their system is set to PHP 7 by default. They automatically manage updates for WordPress and your plugins. You can, however, choose how they should handle this to fully fit your needs.
On top of that they isolate your website, so attacks on neighbor sites won’t affect you and they also create their own security patches. Overall, I have confidence that SiteGround does a good job here. I run a lot of hosting tests and SiteGround is one of my favorites.
Let me tell you about my experience. Many mediocre providers neglect their server uptime. You should aim to have uptime rates of more than 99.95 %. I monitor several sites hosted at Siteground and I’ve, never seen them go below 99.98 %, which is really impressive.
Siteground Hosting: Speed
Speed is also crucial for site owners. Again, nothing to complain about here. Siteground makes a good effort to optimize their servers with the latest technology.
Like SSD drives HTTP 2 and PHP 7. They also have their own caching system. It will speed up your loading time by allowing faster access to your site’s content, in addition to that they offer an integration with the CloudFlare CDN, which will make your site even faster.
Additionally, you can choose to host your website in one of the several data centers available in America, Europe and Asia. The closer your site is to your audience the better.
Most of us use WordPress to create our sites with. Let me show you Siteground’s optimizer plug-in, that does a lot more than caching. If you head over to the front-end optimization tab, you can enable a bunch of options to make your site faster, for example, by minimizing your HTML CSS and JavaScript, combined CSS files in one file to lower HTTP requests or asynchronously load your JavaScript.
It also compresses your images and allows you to enable image lazy loading. I am really impressed with this plug-in. It allowed me to get rid of a whole bunch of plugins I used to achieve the same results.
Siteground Review: Support
Support is available by email, phone and 24 hour live chat. I have to say that I find the live chat the most helpful and efficient. Their help is useful and support agents are polite and friendly. In my experience, they’ve generally ended up fixing my issues. The waiting times are normally not too long, but in some cases I had to give up and contact them later on.
But let me summarize the main pros and cons on the bright side.
It offers outstanding performance both in uptime and speed, is easy to use, comes with great support, doesn’t limit your traffic and has some exciting advanced features like the Siteground optimizer plug-in.
My main concerns are the steep price increase at renewal and the limited backup options of the startup plan. I hope you found this site ground review useful.