SiteGround Review – Are they really that good?

SiteGround is a popular web hosting company that offers different hosting plans, from shared hosting to dedicated servers. I have been a SiteGround customer for many years so I dedicated to write a review about them. I started on their StartUp plan and later moved to their Cloud Hosting. All their plans come with unlimited databases, free SSL, free CDN and daily backups.

Having used many different hosting companies, I have to say SiteGround is currently my favourite host and I recommend that you give them a try while they have this amazing offer. We will breakdown our SiteGround review into two sections: the pros and the cons of their web hosting service.

Pros of using SiteGround

1. Good performance and uptime

SiteGround’s speed and uptime has been amazing; we averaged an uptime of 99.99% and speed of 247ms. Google is now putting emphasis on website speed as a ranking factor so having a fast website is no longer just a user experience issue but also a search engine optimization factor. You don’t want to lose customers because of a slow website and you want your website to be available around the clock for customers to make a purchase. Here is a breakdown of our website uptime for the past 12 months:

March 2020 average uptime: 99.99%

February 2020 average uptime: 100%

January 2020 average uptime: 99.99%

December 2019 average uptime: 100%

November 2019 average uptime: 100%

October 2019 average uptime: 100%

September 2019 average uptime: 99.99%

August 2019 average uptime: 99.99%

July 2019 average uptime: 99.99%

June 2019 average uptime: 99.99%

May 2019 average uptime: 99.99%

April 2019 average uptime: 100%

2. Amazing Support

SiteGound has always been there when I needed them. They are always there to help you via support tickets or live chat and each time you talk to a different person. SiteGround is not one of those web hosting companies that offer 24/7 support but only have one support agent online at any one time. SiteGround is a large company and has many support staff online to help you. When you submit a support ticket and go to their live chat, you will see that different people reply to your questions.

I still remember why I decided to switch to SiteGround many years ago and that was because my old host just let me down. I was on a different host (which I won’t mention here) that was initially decent but one day someone decided to DDOS my website and my old host failed to mitigate the attack and instead just shut down my website to stop it from affecting other users on the same server. Being rather upset about it, I decided to switch hosts and I heard about SiteGround so I decided to give them a try. As expected, my website kept getting DDOS attacks but SiteGround manage to stop the DDOS quickly. Straight away I knew that the SiteGround support team are much more knowledgeable than my old host.

3. Free migration

SiteGround offers free migration for its customers on their GrowBig plan or above and if that is not enough, they also have a plugin that helps you migrate your WordPress website to SiteGround for free. The plugin was designed to make it easy for you to migrate your website. All you have to do is generate a token inside your SiteGround account and then the plugin will do the transfer for you.

4. Free SSL and CDN

Google Chrome now shows websites as “not secure” if there is no SSL Certificate. SSL Certificates helps secure information sent between the website server and the user’s device. The SSL Certificate will encrypt this information which will stop hackers from stealing sensitive data like passwords and credit card numbers. SSL is now becoming a requirement for all websites and it costs money to buy one from websites like NameCheap. Thankfully, SiteGround offers this for free with all their hosting plans.

SiteGround also offers a free Cloudflare CDN. CDN stores large files and images on different servers around the world. As you may know, a website will load faster if the server is closer to the location of the user. A CDN allows the large files to load from a server closest to the user, making the website load faster. Cloudflare also offers HTML, CSS and JavaScript minifying. This remove unnecessary characters in the file which is speed up websites.

 5. 99.99 uptime guarantee

A lot of hosts promise 99.99% uptime but fail to achieve it. I can tell you that SiteGround will achieve this but what if they don’t? Guest what, if they don’t, you get one month worth of free hosting! We have taken a look at their terms and conditions and it states the following:

You will get 1 month of free hosting if they don’t achieve 99.99% uptime.

6. 30-Day money back guarantee

SiteGround offers a 30-day money back guarantee on all their shared hosting plans and 15-day refund for their Cloud, VPS and Dedicated Server plans. Its worth giving them a try knowing that they will give you a full refund if you are not happy. If that’s not enough, remember, they are also offering you 3 months worth of hosting for just $0.99 ( £0.99 or €0.99).

Cons of SiteGround

1. No Free domain

SiteGround doesn’t offer free domains as part of any of their hosting packages and their domains start from $15.95 which is quite expensive. I can easily get a cheaper domain from Namecheap (which I do).

Other than that, I can’t really think of any other cons because I just love SiteGround. Do I recommend them? Of course, I do. Let me know below in the comment if you have any other questions for me.

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