SiteGround is one of the most popular web hosting providers that promise tons of benefits to users with its impressive features. The company is known for its wide range of hosting options, plans, reliable uptime, and phenomenal customer support.
Besides its generally superlative performance, SiteGround is also one of the highest-rated and most recommended WordPress hosting companies. By providing unique in-house WordPress speed and security solutions, they have displayed their genuine commitment to helping their customer succeed in their online ventures.
In a nutshell, SiteGround performs excellently and fares exceptionally well against rivals.
If you are in the market for a new web hosting provider and are considering SiteGround, this article is for you. The post will discuss everything you need to know about SiteGround to help make an informed decision. Read on!
SiteGround Overview: What is SiteGround?
SiteGround is a Bulgarian company launched in 2004 by three university students. Since then, the company has built an impressive reputation, becoming a hosting provider that’s well worth considering.
Currently, Siteground is one of the largest independently owned hosting companies and has earned the trust of over two million website users globally. They cater to bloggers, small businesses, enterprise clients, and startups looking for state-of-the-art quality hosting, user-friendly interface, affordable pricing, advanced security, and excellent performance.
While SiteGround is well-known for its WordPress expertise, it is worth noting that the hosting provider offers optimized hosting for Joomla, Drupal, and e-commerce platforms.
SiteGround is headquartered in Sofia, Bulgaria, but has data centers in four continents. For optimal performance, it is best to choose the data center that is closest to your target audience.
SiteGround Features
SiteGround is one of the widely recognized hosting providers. Thanks to its impressive features, it is officially recommended for WordPress and WooCommerce. The company has also partnered with some of the most popular theme providers as their integral part of helping customers succeed on their web ventures.
If you’re considering investing in SiteGuards hosting services, here are some of the things that will likely cause you to fall for SiteGround.
Excellent uptime
Uptime refers to the amount of time when a server stays up and running. Thankfully, SiteGround servers offer magnificent availability. Let alone the nearly perfect uptime performance in the last 12 months, SiteGround host has delivered a solid uptime for a few years now. Data shows that SiteGround has an average uptime of 99.99% efficiency and their uptime guarantee ensures that you will probably never have any downtime issues.
Under their Service Level Agreement, SiteGround guarantees “network uptime of 99.9% on an annual basis,” and is ready to return part of your monthly cost or give you a free month of hosting whenever uptime drops significantly.
SiteGround is now on the Google Cloud platform
SiteGround has been working hard to enhance its hosting technology so that website users can enjoy incredibly fast loading speeds. In this regard, they are now using the Google Cloud platform for all their data centers.
Whether you are an old customer or are building a new website, SiteGround offers you an opportunity to enjoy the many benefits of hosting websites in the cloud. With their powerful and technically superior hosting services, you will reap benefits like:
- Distributed storage – your website data is stored on Google’s SSD Persistent Storage which has high-level redundancy and promises optimal speed.
- Faster network and faster sites – you will have a chance to leverage state-of-the-art Google Cloud infrastructure for better performance. After all, Google is the benchmark for site load speed.
- Distributed storage for improved uptime
If you are building a new website, you can take advantage of SiteGround expertise for a guaranteed optimized hosting environment.
Amazing page loading speed
SiteGround is undoubtedly one of the faster and most consistent hosting providers. By using a slick combination of software and hardware, they promise to keep sites light and speedy.
Besides using cutting-edge hardware and their strategic software deployment, SiteGround has optimized caching systems with their very own SuperCacher. The new technologies promise to boost page loading speeds by up to 4x faster while enabling your site to handle up to 100 times more hits.
On average, SiteGround has page loading speeds ranging from 20 ms to slightly over one second.
The incredibly fast website load time is attributed to speed technologies, including NGINX, PHP 8, HTTP/2, QUIC, full-SSD storage, Brotli Compression Algorithm, Google Cloud infrastructure, SG optimizer, and Cloudflare CDN.
1-click WordPress Installation
First off, SiteGround is one of the few hosting providers offering optimized WordPress hosting. They are officially recommended by WordPress, and each of their plans has in-house WordPress tweaks to boost speed and overall performance.
Well, with this SiteGround, you don’t need to download and install WordPress manually. Instead, you can install WordPress from the setup wizard with only one click. The easy-to-use interface makes the process pretty straightforward.
SG optimizer plugin for performance
With SiteGround, you get a comprehensive WordPress performance solution that dramatically speeds up your site.
They have created SG optimizer, a custom WordPress caching plugin that allows you to manage your site’s caching from inside the WordPress dashboard. Interestingly, this WordPress plugin is exclusively for GroundSite users and is installed on all new WordPress sites hosted by SiteGround by default.
Majorly, SG optimizer helps improve the performance of your WordPress website. It has a user-friendly interface and gives you ultimate control over how technology is applied to your site.
Free SSL certificate
Security is very essential for a website. It protects your site from hackers, malware and guarantees your users that their data is safe on your site.
SSL certificate, which stands for Secure Sockets Layer, helps to protect any information sent back and forth between your website and user’s device. It encrypts all the information sent between server and site user, including personal details like IP addresses and credit card numbers. Ultimately, this keeps away any party with ill intentions.
The good news is that SiteGround offers a free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate to all its customers upon signing up with their web hosting plans. Installation on any domain name is straightforward.
If you want advanced security, you can purchase a different certificate through SiteGuard.
Free Cloudflare CDN
Using CDN (Content Delivery Network) is an excellent way to ensure all site users experience similar loading times regardless of their location. Thankfully, SiteGround has in-built support for Cloudflare’s CDN in all its hosting plans.
The CDNs make up-to-date copies of your website on a regular basis and store them in cities around the world. As you can expect, the result is a faster page loading speed.
CDN is essentially a distributed network of proxy servers that store large files, like images. Considering that browsers fetch data from the nearest CDN, the free Cloudflare CDN integration enhances the performance of sites. All the same, it is noteworthy that the free plan has some limitations. For superior performance, you should consider upgrading to paid Cloudflare CDN service.
Good customer support and 24/7 Live Chat
SiteGround is well-known for its excellent 24/7 customer support. They have professional, fast, and friendly in-house customer support staff to help you with any hosting issues.
Whatever issues you have, SiteGround has always ensured that there is someone on the other end to take care of your issues. They offer 24/7 live chat, phones, and email ticket-based support, so you can pick what is to your liking. To ensure questions are answered and issues resolved on time, the company deliberately places more than enough customer support representatives on each shift.
SiteGround also provides high-quality guides and extensive tutorials where you can find answers and educate yourself.
30-day money-back guarantee
Although SiteGround is not the cheapest hosting provider out there, they offer a 30-day money-back guarantee with all their shared plans. During this period, you can try out their services and remain eligible for a 100% refund if you cancel within 30 days of joining.
Notably, admin fees, domain names, and add-ons are non-refundable.
Again, if something goes wrong and your website doesn’t function as you expected it to, you can also have your hosting fee refunded.
SiteGround Plans and features
SiteGround has plans to cater to all users. Here are the different hosting plans offered by SiteGround.
- Shared hosting: Recommended for anyone starting a new website, this plan is suitable for low-traffic websites because your site will be sharing server resources with other websites. It is an excellent solution for small business building their websites has three levels to cater to different users with different budgets. Options are Startup, GrowBig, and GoGeek.
- Managed WordPress hosting: This is a version of the shared hosting plan, but it is optimized for WordPress websites. It includes the SG optimizer for enhanced performance.
- WooCommerce hosting: WooCommerce is an optimized version of a shared hosting plan suited for those starting an online store. It comes with optimization meant to enhance the performance of online stores.
- Managed Cloud hosting: This is a flexible upgrade to shared hosting that allows you to use resources of multiple dedicated servers on a cloud architecture. It is an ideal option for growing businesses or popular bloggers.
Conclusion
SiteGround has created and continues to create in-house solutions to make customer’s sites run faster. Those looking to create a WordPress website will appreciate the user-friendliness delivered by SiteGround. Overall, SiteGround is a high-quality and budget-friendly web host committed to delivering the best user experience and helping their customers succeed in their online ventures.