Siteground Review by ODMWorld: Pros and Cons of Siteground Web Hosting
Deciding between web hosting services isn’t easy, and you can spend days reading web hosting reviews without making much progress. This Siteground review will explore Siteground’s pros and cons so you can decide whether Siteground is the right web hosting service for you.
Siteground is a Bulgarian company founded back in 2004 by university students and has since grown exponentially to over 400 employees and 2 million domains, thanks to their great customer support and competitive loading speeds. We’ve used Siteground ourselves for a number of years and have been consistently blown away by their service, so read on to discover if they are right for you too.
Siteground Review: Pros and Cons
Of course, no web hosting service is perfect, and we all have features we prioritize over others, so let’s explore the pros and cons of choosing Siteground. Let’s start with Siteground’s strengths:
Pricing: One of the best things about Siteground (and what puts them ahead of other web hosting services) is their affordable pricing. Their pricing structure offers great options for small to medium-sized businesses and personal blogs. Their first-year pricing for their basic level (“StartUp”) is just £2.95 for up to 10,000 monthly visitors so there are no barriers to getting started whether you are starting something new or migrating a site from another host.
Customer Support: One of Siteground’s biggest strengths is their incredible customer support. We can’t vouch for everyone, but most customers seem to have an outstanding experience with their support team, and we’ve experienced the same. They’ve always gone above and beyond to ensure we get the support we need.
Speed and Uptime: You can’t talk about Siteground’s strengths without talking about their speed and uptime. Siteground offers some of the best hosting speeds and uptime available. They use SSD disks and software (such as SuperCacher and HTTP/2) to offer above-average speeds, and their uptime is almost 100%. This more important than ever before as Google values fast loading speeds and a slow site will affect your site’s SEO. In fact, if they don’t maintain a 99.9% uptime, they’ll give you a refund.
SSL: Sites without a valid SSL certificate are starting to be penalized by search engines – so it’s important you have one. Fortunately, Siteground includes a free SSL certificate with all their plans, which is ideal because they are often costly.
Storage: Siteground’s storage offerings are as good, if not better, than all major competitors. (10GB for their StartUp level.)
Bandwidth & FTP Accounts: Unlike other many web hosting services, Siteground offers unlimited bandwidth, unlimited FTP accounts, subdomains, and email accounts.
Backup: Backup is the same as most others in the industry: automated daily back up for 30 days. Their premium plans offer more advanced backup facilities.
Security: Siteground’s accounts are all isolated from one another, so if a neighboring IP is vulnerable, you won’t be affected.
Unlimited Websites: This is only for their “GrowBig” plan and above, but their GrowBig plan is extremely affordable for all it gives you. If you need to be able to host an unlimited number of websites (or even just two or three), you’ll find the pricing for this level of service extremely competitive. While there are cheaper hosting options for those who only need hosting for one site, their offer for an unlimited number of sites is worth paying attention to.
This adds up to a hosting service that is capable of not just basic websites, but large, complex websites that need high-performance capability from their chosen hosting service.
So, what about Siteground’s Weaknesses?
Pricing: As mentioned above, this is one of their strengths and their pricing for the quality of service they provide is great value. However, if you are looking for a rock-bottom price just to get a website up, they aren’t the cheapest. You also need to be willing to pay for a year’s contract upfront if you want to get the best savings, otherwise you need to pay a setup fee.
Site Migration: Siteground only offers one free migration for their “GrowBig” plan or higher, so if you just have a small site or multiple sites, migration won’t be free with Siteground.
Server Location: Siteground does offer a good range of server locations, you can choose from America, Asia, or Europe, but it doesn’t quite match the industry leaders in the range of server locations available. However, this won’t be a problem many people need to worry about.
Siteground is an ideal option for any personal blog or small to medium business. They offer the best site uptimes and load speeds for your monthly fee, and incredible customer support that is leagues ahead of some of their major competitors. We strongly recommend Siteground (as customers ourselves), so if you’d like to learn more about them, visit their site by clicking here.
Oh, and in case you still feel like shopping around, our friends at wpcity also wrote a great web hosting reviews article comparing Siteground with FlyWheel.
We hope you enjoyed this siteground review!