SiteGround Shared Hosting Review

Developing a successful website for your business goes beyond designing and filling up your web pages with content. You need to gather and use the right resources to achieve and maintain high performance for your site. One of the most critical decisions you have to make is choosing web-hosting solution, offering the ideal disk space, bandwidth, speed and uptime for your site. With a variety of web hosts in the market today, it can be confusing to pick the right package for your needs. Here is a SiteGround shared hosting review exploring various features available for your WordPress site.

We Use SiteGround

Decade back we have started this site on blogger then moved on to Weebly and finally settled with self-hosted WordPress platform. When we moved our Weebly site WordPress, the first challenge was to choose a good hosting company.

Initially we started with Bluehost and then moved to SiteGround GoGeek plan on 2016. Later we moved to cloud VPS and it’s been years we are running this site with SiteGround VPS. Therefore, this is a genuine review based on usage and we will also tell you why we have moved from shared hosting to VPS later in this article.

SiteGround Hosting Overview

Since its establishment in 2004, SiteGround has grown to become one of the most popular web hosting companies. The company is based in Bulgaria and hosts over 2M domains worldwide. They are well known for their fast and reliable hosting plans, as well as exceptional customer service. SiteGround had the opportunity to grow with WordPress, enabling them to provide optimized hosting solutions for WordPress users. Technically, SiteGround offers all you need to build and grow your WordPress site/blog. It is also one of the officially recommended hosting partners by WordPress.org site.

SiteGround provides different types of hosting plans ranging from shared, cloud to dedicated packages among other specialized plans. Within the web development community, SiteGround has been branded, the cheap/shared hosting solutions providers, offering feature-packed shared plans. Besides, customers get free SSL certificates and Cloudflare CDN with almost all the plans.

SiteGround Shared Hosting

Shared hosting is the most feasible solution for most of the web owners, except for larger websites, which may require dedicated or VPS/cloud hosting. SiteGround offers 3 shared hosting plans, packed with a range of features to cater for hosting needs for a variety of sites. SiteGround also optimized their features for WordPress, setting themselves apart as the best Managed WordPress shared hosting providers.

If you are looking for reliable shared hosting for your WordPress site, below are some of the features you get with SiteGround plans.

SiteGround Shared Hosting Features

1. cPanel Site Tools Control Panel

SiteGround servers run on the CentOS Linux, making it possible to provide cPanel, a site management tool that is popular with website owners and developers. This enhances its adoption as no need to learn how to use the tool. Additionally, cPanel makes it easy for users to migrate their sites to or from SiteGround if need be.

If you wonder the cPanel in SiteGround looks very old simply change the default X3 theme to “paper_lantern” to make it modern similar to Bluehost cPanel. You can also use “Change Style” app to enable light, dark and other styles. SiteGround guys also recently updated the website interface to access the features quickly.

SiteGround stopped cPanel and migrated to custom Site Tools interface. You can learn more about this in this article.

2. Bandwidth and Disk Storage Space

SiteGround offers a reasonable bandwidth limit for each shared plan. Each plan limits the sites to an approximate maximum number per month, reflecting the resource usage. This helps you to choose the ideal plan depending on the type of your website. Moreover, the technical support team provides tips to help you optimize resource usage while staying within your limits.

The share plans disk space ranges between 10 and 40 GB on a fast Solid-State Drives (SSDs).

3. One-Click Web Applications

SiteGround shared hosting includes one-click Softaculous installer. It supports the installation of a host of web applications including E-commerce, blogs, forums, social channels and CMS among others. The new Site Tools interface comes with App Manager from which you can install and manage WordPress and other apps. This is even much simpler and easier than using Softaculous installer.

4. Free Website Builder

This is a plus for users with little to no website development skills. SiteGround offer a Weebly site builder enables users to drag and drop elements to create new site pages and structures including e-commerce features.

The basic plan is free and you can upgrade to Weebly premium plans for enhancing your site’s features. This gives a very good flexibility that you can manage WordPress and Weebly sites on the same platform. In addition, you have options to install Drupal, Joomla and PHP forum software like phpBB.

5. Free Cloudflare Content Delivery Network (CDN)

CDN saves copies of your site in various locations across the world to speed up page loading for visitors, who are far away from your main web server. Further, SiteGround shared hosting plans allows you to use the same CDN for your multiple sites.

6. Free Secure Socket Layer (SSL) Certificate

SSL certificates provide encryption for your online shop as well as increase user and search engine trust. You will get Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates free and pre-installed for all the plans.

7. Website Speed

SiteGround servers use Google Cloud platform with multi-level caching on GoGeek and GrowBig plans. You will get amazing speed and easily get 100/100 score in PageSpeed Insights tools.

Related: Bluehost Shared Hosting Review.

SiteGround Shared Hosting Plans

SiteGround has 3 different plans for the shared hosting package, catering for diverse site needs and budget. It is important to understand your hosting requirements to choose a plan that serves you best. The GoGeek plan is the highest plan under shared hosting category.

1. SiteGround StartUp Plan

This is a basic option suitable for building a single site. The plan offers 10GB SSD disk space and a limit of 10,000 visitors per month. New customers pay $6.99/ month but the regular renewal rate is $14.99/ month. It also offers a range of essential features.

2. SiteGround GrowBig Plan

The GrowBig allows building unlimited sites making it a suitable plan for web developers or users running multiple sites. It allows a maximum of 25,000 visits in a month and 20GB SSD disk space. On top of the essential features, it provides additional premium features like staging sites, caching and adding collaborators.

3. SiteGround GoGeek Plan

The GoGeek plan is a great option for sites that receive over 100,000 visits in a month. Further, it provides Git support, Ultrafast PHP and white labelled client access. With GoGeek, you get 40GB SSD disk space and several additional advanced features.

Pricing of Shared Hosting Plans

Remember the discounted prices are applicable for the first contractual term only. You have to pay almost three times more when renewing the contract. Below table gives you the details of first and renewal term rates per month.

Plans	First Term Price	Renewable Price	Get Deal
StartUp	$6.99	$14.99	Get 53% Discount on StartUp Plan
GrowBig	$9.99	$24.99	Get 66% Discount on GrowBig Plan
GoGeek	$14.99	$39.99	Get 62% Discount on GoGeek Plan

Unfortunately, SiteGround increased the pricing few times in last few years. The lowest StartUp plan will cost $6.99 for 12 months contract which is 3 times higher than the price of Bluehost shared hosting.

Customer Service

Well, we really need to mention that SiteGround offers excellent customer service in the industry. In fact, we have noticed other competitors like Bluehost started following the support model of SiteGround. Remember, you will priority support only for GoGeek plan and customers from other two plans need to wait for a day to get your issue addressed.  

SiteGround also offer large WordPress tutorial articles that rank well in Google. You can easily find SiteGround tutorial articles directly from Google Search.

Other Features

You can get three levels of in-built caching options for GoGeek and GrowBig shared hosting plans. These three static, dynamic and memcached options make your site super fast. You can enable NGINX Direct Delivery to optimize serving of static resources. SG Optimizer plugin also offers many other features like updating PHP version, image lazy loading, minifying of CSS and JavaScript files and image compression.  

Some additional features are:

• The Cloudflare integration has additional features like Railgun for SiteGround customers.
• There are also free theme collection with WordPress Starter plugin. You can try this for your new WordPress site.
• Free daily backups and unlimited MySQL databases.
• You can have any type of websites like WordPress, Weebly, PHP forums, HTML websites, Drupal and Joomla.
• Unlimited subdomain and add-on domains.
• Free emails and FTP accounts on all plans.
• Servers in USA, Europe and Asia. You can request for switching data centre for a payment of $30.

Shared Hosting Vs Cloud VPS

As mentioned above, long back we have moved our site from GoGeek plan to Cloud VPS. Here are the reasons for that:

• Shared hosting plans have limitations on CPU executions and number of visitors. You can learn more about the SiteGround limitations in our earlier article.
• Though the visitor limit is a soft limit, crossing the limit will lead to temporary suspension of your account.

Unfortunately most of the SiteGround reviews on the internet do not explain this truth. So, remember the shared hosting plans are for the sites that are getting limited traffic within the allowed limit. Due to the fact that we get more traffic, we moved to customizable cloud VPS platform without the executions limit.