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Siteground Expert Review 2017

SiteGround are not only our Editor's top choice for web hosting but also the Highest Rated by our readers.

They do so much more than almost every other shared hosting provider with their advanced performance related features and 10 minute support response times that it is a "one-horse" race. Our readers seem to agree, with their consistently high reviews which you can read above.

We urge you to dig down into some of the articles linked later in this review as we go into a little more detail on some of the features.

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.

10 Great Reasons to use SiteGround Shared Hosting for your website or Blog

The primary consideration for choosing any web hosting provider must be reliability, performance and support. After all, without the whole purpose of your website is undermined.

We will of course touch on these points, but SiteGround really sets themselves apart from the competition for a whole range of different reasons. We take a look at the most important ones:

#1 NGINX + SSD + Memcached + PHP 7 + HTTP/2 + OPcache — All the ingredients for a very fast website.

SiteGround employs a number of technologies that seek to significantly increase the speed of your website. Furthermore, no complicated setup is required, with everything easily configured within a few clicks and the installation of their specially built SuperCacher plugin.

Let's take a look at all the different technologies in turn:

• NGINX — This is a high performance web server that can be placed in a reverse proxy to Apache, providing increased performance caching static and dynamic content.
• SSD — Solid State Disk storage increases the performance of your website, but decreasing latency, I/O Input and Throughput, as well as increasing reliability. You can read more about SSD Hosting here.
• PHP 7 — The latest version of PHP is significantly faster than the previous version 5.6, with some benchmarks indicating it can handle nearly double the amount of requests per second.
• Memcached — This is a memory based caching system that significantly improves the performance of your website by improving the performance of your database calls, API calls and page rendering by storing the data and objects in the server's RAM.
• 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. You can read more about its launch at SiteGround here.

One of the most sought after things people look for in hosting is for their website to be fast. We gave them a spin with a standard (badly optimized) theme we got off Themeforest. We use this theme for our tests, as it amplifies the differences, and is more representative of websites used by every day businesses and bloggers.

We optimized the website using the Static and Dynamic SuperCacher. 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 websites.

Editor's note: Dynamic caching is not available on their Startup Plan, but see our tutorial for our recommended setup for their Startup Plan using W3 Total Cache + CloudFlare.

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:

For more speed test comparisons of various configurations at SiteGround see this article.

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. They should be able to walk you through the whole process in just a couple of minutes (it is that easy to implement).

#2 Insanely fast and knowledgeable support. 10-minute ticket response times by people that can actually fix things.

If something goes wrong, you need to know that someone will be on hand to help you out. Accidentally deleted your website? 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).

#3 A web host that actually delivers on their uptime promise.

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 percent 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.

As we have said in the past, Uptime Guarantee's are worthless (find out why here), so when a hosting provider actually delivers on their uptime promise, like SiteGround, it is something that must be pointed out.

#4 Managed WordPress Hosting that gives you the best of both worlds.

SiteGround advertise their plans as including "Managed Services on all Plans". While this is correct, you should not mistake it for a fully managed WordPress Hosting Solution like WP Engine, even though it has the majority of features that they offer.

We class "fully managed" WordPress Hosting as something that takes care of absolutely everything for you (security, highly specialized server environment, WordPress Upgrades and more), but on the other hand, will have a large number of restrictions such as no access to the control panel \ server environment, restrictions on what plugins you can use and will often charge by the page view.

SiteGround, as you will read elsewhere in this review has all the things that a Fully Managed WordPress hosting provider has, but none of the negatives. You still get to use the control panel, setup email, install multiple websites and generally have a high degree of control over your hosting environment. 

Plus, if you really want to go mad and utilize some of the latest technologies such as HHVM (the same technology as Facebook uses), then you can do so by a cheap upgrade to their Cloud Hosting, rather than having to pay $1000's per month for an enterprise solution. Of course, PHP 7 + OpCache is great too, and that comes even on SiteGround's StartUp plan.

#5 Site Staging, WP-CLI, Drush & GIT integration, plus other tools make it perfect for developers.

WordPress & Joomla tool kits (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. You can read more about the Toolkits here.

Fantastic developer features (GoGeek only) such as website Staging, WP-CLI, Drush integration and Git integration. We have written a detailed summary of all these features, which you can read here.

#6 Security is taken seriously with patches routinely applied within hours of new exploits becoming known.

For shared web hosting, they are one of the most proactive providers we know for ensuring the security of their servers. While most web hosts rely on third party software such as CloudLinux, the success of SiteGround is due to them creating their own system.

This gives them the talent pool within their organization to adjust and implement changes to new security threats, including rolling out fixes to prevent zero-day exploits (i.e. exploits that have just been discovered) threatening your website.

SiteGround's servers run a system called Hive, which runs under their own brand 1h.com. This has the following features:

• Account isolation — Their shared hosting is more akin to a VPS hosting environment, in that each account is isolated from the others. Furthermore, the Linux system is modified to disable or change any commands or tools that might be used to hack the system.
• Hacked website detection — They have developed scripts to check for hacked content so that if the worst does occur, you will be notified. This is their add-on called Hackalert.
• 1H Hawk Intrusion Prevention System — This will identify any brute force attack (attackers trying to guess your passwords) against your website or services such as email.
• Monitoring — This is done in real time so that any threats are caught instantly. Furthermore it monitors load, attacks including the network, hacking attempts, spam, abnormal resource usage and irregularities on a server level. This ensures not only is your website secure, but it won't become sluggish due to attacks being made against other users on the server.

#7 Integrated cPanel Control Panel for easy management of your hosting account

SiteGround use one of the most popular control panels to allow easy management of your hosting account.

While they use cPanel, they have added their own custom styling to tie in with their own branding. Because they have also integrated the control panel with their own website, it is easy to access from your main client area, unlike with many other hosting providers which require you to keep separate login details.

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 tool kits that we have talked so much about. Just take a look for yourself (click image to open larger version):

#8 Easily upgrade to handle more traffic.

One of the benefit's of SiteGround is that each Shared Hosting Plan has an increasing amount of resources available. The StartUp is sufficient to handle around 25k page views per month, where the GoGeek plan can handle 100k. This means you do not need to upgrade to an expensive Cloud hosting plan until your website becomes really busy.

If you do decide to make the jump to their Cloud Hosting, then you can even make it autoscalable on demand, so if you run an advert or make a post go viral, you know your website will remain online.

#9 Thirty-day money-back guarantee. Try them out risk free.

All of SiteGround's plans currently offer a 30-day money-back guarantee. This allows you to try them out risk free.

Editor's note: Add-ons such as Free Domains, SSL Certificates (excluding their free Let's Encrypt SSL), malware monitoring etc. are not included in the money-back guarantee.

#10 Free transfers for your existing website make it easy to sign up.

As we have already mentioned, their support is second to none. If you need help moving your website across, they will very quickly migrate one website for you free of charge.

If you have multiple websites, they can help too, for a modest additional fee.

Are their any downsides to using SiteGround hosting?

There is no doubt about it; SiteGround is our Editor's choice when it comes to shared hosting. That being said, any review would not be complete without looking at some of the negative things we have found. 

#1 Their StartUp plan does not come with their SuperCacher or Premium support.

This is not the end of the world as you still get SSD storage, PHP 7 and OPcache, so using that combination you can still get some impressive speeds.  

Furthermore, even though you do not get premium support, your queries are still dealt with very quickly. In fact, your tickets will still get answered more quickly than pretty much every other hosting provider we know.

But ... we do think their GrowBig plan offers better features and is overall better value.

#2 They charge a setup fee if you want to pay monthly, and you can only pay monthly as a trial for the first month.

It is very common for web hosting to be better value the longer you sign up for. As part of the marketing strategy, the price advertised is usually for their longest billing term. In this case, 12 months.

SiteGround allow you to pay monthly, but you have to pay an extra $14.95 setup fee. Furthermore, after the first month, you will have to pay yearly, but you won't then have access to the 60 percent initial discount.

It gets worse, though. You cannot then get a refund for the setup fee under their money-back guarantee.

If you sign up for their one month trial, you are literally mad. Just get the yearly plan, take the discount AND if you decide they are not for you, just get a FULL refund under their money-back guarantee (free domains are deducted from refund).

In other words, don't make the mistake of signing up for the month's trial.

SiteGround Shared Hosting Plans

A varied mix of resources and features

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 that you can read more about here.

You can see a quick comparison of the plans by feature, along with the pricing in the table below: