4.2
Very Good
The Best
Flexibility
Performance
The Worst
Support
Not the easiest to use
Starting From
$10 / month
GreenGeeks Review
With an average page load time of 1.29, our web host speed tests showed GreenGeeks was the fastest of all hosting providers tested.
Fun fact: do you know why Facebook moved its massive data center to Northern Sweden?
That’s because servers run hot, and cooling them down is expensive. Might as well keep them in a cold part of the world.
But more to the point in this GreenGeeks review: maintaining servers uses a ton of energy.
In fact, the Internet is one of the largest polluters in the world. Data centers account for 2% of the world’s CO2 emissions, about the same as the airline industry.
Well, if that’s a concern for you, I’ve got good news because the ‘green’ in GreenGeeks refers to their commitment to providing eco-friendly web hosting.
This is how it works, according to their website:
The platform is designed with a maximum use, no waste mindset.
For every amperage the company pulls from the grid, it matches it x3 in the form of renewable energy via the Bonneville Environmental Foundation
For every hosting account opened, they plant one tree via One Tree Planted.
While a growing number of hosting providers claim to take the problem of energy seriously, (here’s an example from DreamHost), GreenGeeks really puts their ethos front and forward.
But what about other pros and cons, features and alternatives? Let’s put GreenGeeks through the wringer to see how it fares.
GreenGeeks Prices
Let’s first look at how much it costs per month to host your website on GreenGeeks. The first option is for shared hosting (the one most website owners need). You’ll also find that they offer WordPress web hosting. As far as I could tell, there is absolutely no difference between the WordPress and the shared hosting option.
As always, we’ll only be mentioning the regular price, which is what you pay after a first year at a discounted price. The first 12 months can be 50 – 70% cheaper.
Feature | Ecosite Lite | Ecosite Pro | Ecosite Premium |
|---|---|---|---|
Websites | 1 | Unlimited | Unlimited |
Web space | 50 GB | Unlimited | Unlimited |
Monthly data transfer | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
Email accounts | 50 | Unlimited | Unlimited |
Emails per hour | 100 | 300 | 500 |
Inodes | 150,000 | 300,000 | 500,000 |
Domain name | Free for 1 year (around $14 a year thereafter) | Free for 1 year (around $14 a year thereafter) | Free for 1 year (around $14 a year thereafter) |
Databases | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
CPU Cores | 2 | 3 | 4 |
Physical memory (RAM) | 1GB | 2GB | 3GB |
Free SSL | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Price (after renewal) | $10.95 / month | $15.95 / month | $25.95 / month |
More information | |||
You can purchase the plans for 12, 24 or 36 months. There is a significant discount for the longer terms, as you can see below:
GreenGeeks also offers VPS hosting, which comes with better performance, but a lot of limits depending on the plan you choose.
Feature | 2GB Plan | 4GB Plan | 8GB Plan |
|---|---|---|---|
RAM (yes it’s what gives the name to each pan) | 2GB | 4GB | 8GB |
vCPU | 4 | 4 | 6 |
SSD Disk Space | 50GB | 75GB | 150GB |
Monthly data transfer | 10TB | 10TB | 10TB |
Free SSL | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Price | $39.95 / month | $59.95 / month | $109.95 / month |
Finally, I should also mention that GreenGeeks has a few add-ons you can purchase to expand your web hosting capabilities. These include:
Dedicated IP address: $48 per year
Premium AlphaSSL Wildcard: to secure SSL on multiple subdomains all at once.
WHMCS license: useful for resellers who want to bill hosting to their clients (note that GreenGeeks does offer a reselling option).
Last but not least, you’ll have to pay $25 for every backup restore, if you do it more than once per month (the first one is free).
What can you expect from each GreenGeeks plan?
As you can see in the above table, there’s a lot of unlimited stuff with their shared hosting and WordPress plans. That includes:
Unlimited bandwidth (or data transfer, which means the same thing)
Unlimited disk storage
Unlimited databases
Unlimited email accounts
Free SSL
The key limits to keep an eye on are maybe the number of inodes, which is another way of saying the number of files on your site. It’s a very large number, mostly there to ensure you don’t abuse GreenGeeks’ generosity by hosting a file sharing website.
Final GreenGeeks Review Comments
Testing GreenGeeks’ hosting
Uptime tests
As mentioned above, GreenGeeks offers a 99.9% uptime guarantee. In our independent tests, which we ran for a few months, we saw it went down to 99.97%, which isn’t bad at all.
In any case, if the rate were to drop below 99.90%, you’d get some money back towards your next monthly payment.
For reference, this puts GreenGeeks in 9th place in our ranking table for the best uptime. It has performed pretty well over the last three years:
2020 | 2021 | 2022 | |
|---|---|---|---|
Uptime % | |||
99.97 | 100 | 100 | |
99.99 | 99.99 | 100 | |
– | 100 | 100 | |
100 | 100 | 100 | |
99.73 | 99.95 | 100 | |
99.99 | 99.98 | 99.99 | |
100 | 100 | 99.99 | |
99.91 | 99.99 | 99.98 | |
99.98 | 99.98 | 99.97 | |
99.90 | 99.96 | 99.95 | |
99.48 | 99.92 | 99.95 | |
99.96 | 99.99 | 99.95 | |
98.45 | 99.85 | 99.95 | |
99.99 | 99.96 | 99.83 | |
– | 99.93 | 99.71 | |
To monitor uptime I use StatusCake, a tool that checks each website every 5 minutes.
Is GreenGeeks fast?
In terms of page loading speed, GreenGeeks was lightning fast, coming first in our web host speed tests:
In fact, GreenGeeks has been consistently fast over the last three years:
2020 | 2021 | 2022 | |
|---|---|---|---|
Page Load Time in Seconds | |||
2.39 | 1.56 | 1.29 | |
3.15 | 2.01 | 1.30 | |
3.40 | 1.94 | 1.44 | |
2.32 | 1.73 | 1.46 | |
2.14 | 1.54 | 1.56 | |
4.19 | 1.61 | 1.63 | |
2.21 | 1.65 | 1.66 | |
– | 1.60 | 1.69 | |
3.28 | 1.84 | 1.75 | |
2.98 | 1.77 | 1.82 | |
3.07 | 2.87 | 2.07 | |
– | 1.95 | 2.32 | |
4.36 | 2.75 | 2.58 | |
4.19 | 2.76 | 2.60 | |
3.77 | 2.78 | 2.72 | |
Results in seconds
Our own research shows the importance of loading speed for the success of a website.
And although there are plenty of other things you can do to fix a slow website and make WordPress faster, a fast web host is the bedrock of a speedy website.
So this is a definite plus point!
Final GreenGeeks Review Comments
GreenGeeks is certainly the provider we’ve tested that’s the most committed to protecting the environment. It’s an admirable choice, and businesses with a green goal will certainly be pleased to hear that they can host a website with a low carbon footprint.
On top of that, its performance is excellent!
But there are nevertheless a few downsides to consider. The lack of advanced options like team management features can be a dealbreaker for professional business owners. The limited backup features may be not enough for most.
And if you need a top-performing host, other (and more expensive) solutions like SiteGround, Kinsta or WP Engine could be considered.
There are also a number of cheaper web hosting providers out there. For example, at renewal DreamHost is more affordable and offers similar performance levels.
