4.4
Very Good
The Best
Excellent uptime
High-speed web hosting
The Worst
Price
Paid for migrations
Starting From
$17.99 / month
SiteGround Review
Find out why in this complete review of SiteGround's product.
SiteGround is a Bulgarian company launched in 2004 by university students. Since then, it has grown steadily, and is now home to over 500 employees and nearly 3 million domains.
The tech support team is available 24/7 every day of the year. According to their website, they also seem to highly value loading speed.
There is a lot to process, and SiteGround promises tons of benefits. But is it all true?
After having tested SiteGround Shared hosting solution on our test site, I decided to write this SiteGround review, which I hope will help you decide whether it's the best option for your website.
SiteGround Pricing & Hosting Plans
The following SiteGround prices are for their shared hosting plans, which is the most popular service. SiteGround offers additional web hosting options (e.g. cloud hosting plans), you can see their costs here.
SiteGround Features | StartUp | GrowBig | GoGeek |
|---|---|---|---|
Websites hosted | 1 site | Unlimited websites | Unlimited websites |
Monthly visitors | Unlimited (recommended maximum: 10k) | Unlimited (recommended maximum: 100k) | Unlimited (recommended maximum: 400k) |
SSL certificate | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Support | Phone, email and live chat | Phone, email and live chat | Phone, email and live chat |
Priority support team | No | No | Yes |
Storage | 10 GB | 20 GB | 40 GB |
Inodes | 200,000 | 400,000 | 600,000 |
Database | Unlimited number Max. size 1 GB | Unlimited number Max. size 1 GB | Unlimited number Max. size 1 GB |
Subdomains, FTP accounts, email accounts and bandwidth | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
Free domain included | No | No | No |
Daily backups, Caching & Staging | 30 days, static & dynamic caching | 30 days, static & dynamic caching | 30 days, static & dynamic caching |
CDN (Content Delivery Network) | Free version included | Free version included | Free version included |
First term price | $2.99/month | $4.99/month | $7.99/month |
Renewal price | $17.99/month | $29.99/month | $44.99/month |
More information | |||
What can you expect from each SiteGround web hosting plan?
This hosting company offers 3 shared hosting plans, which, in most cases, adjust to the needs of most users – unless you have a really big website. Note that all the plans share the following features:
They do not limit the traffic that your website can receive. But of course, if you have a lot of monthly visitors (e.g. over 400,000), the shared hosting might fall short
Databases and unlimited email accounts
30-day money-back guarantee
SSD disks and it’s own caching system
24-hour phone, chat and email support
But, of course, not all SiteGround plans are equal. Below, we’ll take a look at their main differences.
StartUp: Ideal for users that have a single small-to-medium-sized website and need less than 10 GB of space. In this plan you’ll have the cache service, but not access to Ultrafast PHP. Advanced features (e.g. staging) aren’t part of this package either.
GrowBig: This plan was created to store unlimited sites and 20 GB of space. You’ll have access to the staging tool, and their (smart) on-demand backups system. This plan makes it possible to use Ultrafast PHP. You can host unlimited websites with this plan.
GoGeek: In addition to offering you more space (40 GB) and allow you to host unlimited sites, it comes with better-performing servers and pre-installed Git repositories. It also comes with support for white-label SiteGround hosting, something agencies will appreciate. You will have priority support with this plan.
So, Is SiteGround good enoug?
Uptime tests
I used StatusCake to measure the availability (uptime) of SiteGround’s servers. The fewer the interruptions the better. It’s recommended to have uptime figures above 99.95%.
SiteGround’s uptime results in our web host reliability tests, are impressive, as you can see in the chart below:
Only Kinsta have beaten them for uptime over the last 3 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.
And this hosting provider refunds you part of your money if your availability falls below 99.9%. If availability is one of your concerns, SiteGround is a hosting provider you can count on.
Is SiteGround fast?
In my experience, SiteGround is without a doubt one of the fastest and most consistent web hosts. When we compare it to other web hosts in our most recent tests, its loading time is pretty impressive:
And SiteGround has consistently performed well in our web host speed tests, for 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
As you can see, SiteGround have always had top results. This is great, as our own research consistently shows the importance of website speed for SEO, UX and conversions!
SiteGround’s WordPress Hosting optimization plugin
SiteGround has a plugin for optimizing websites for WordPress, that makes it easy for WordPress users to optimize websites. It’s amazing – it does the work of 3 or 4 plugins. On top of managing your website’s cache options, this SiteGround WordPress hosting also gives you options for:
Compressing HTML, CSS, JavaScript and images
Lazy loading images
Combination of CSS files
Optimization of browser cache
GZIP Compression
WordPress speed optimization SiteGround plugin
The results are exceptional. That’s why I think that SiteGround is one of the quickest web hosting services I have ever tried. If you need high-speed WordPress hosting for your project, I’d really recommend it.
SiteGround tutorial on how to install WordPress
Check out the following video-tutorial to see how to install WordPress with SiteGround:
CDN tests
Even though SiteGround now has its own CDN, I’d still say that one of SiteGround blessings is, that it has CloudFlare’s CDN pre-integrated. Cloudflare is one of the most popular services, and they offer a completely free account. I have to say that the free plan has some limitations, but it can still significantly improve your loading speed.
I tested how a single webpage loads with the enabled CDN and without it. The test website is on a server in England, and I wanted to check how it loaded from a geographical point further away. For this, we decided to perform loading tests from Dallas. We used the free Pingdom tool.
Test without CDN
We can see that even without the CDN, we get acceptable results. The total loading time was 3.20 seconds, we loaded 1.2 Mb and it received a score of 80 out of 100.
Here are the results with the CDN enabled:
Test with CDN
Repeating the test with Cloudflare’s CDN activated (in its free version), we see how loading time improves by nearly half a second. The size of the page is the same and our final loading score is better by 12 points.
So, if you’re going to use SiteGround for your website, it may prove very useful for you to activate Cloudflare’s CDN. Even the free version would help improve your website’s performance.
SiteGround Review: Final reflections
I was drawn to how SiteGround speaks about their own customer support team, their promises, availability and speed.
But do they meet expectations?
After years of trying them out, I think they offer a very good service. They have really fast loading speeds for shared hosting. The SiteGround support team is fast, effective and friendly, they are meant to be industry experts – many competitors fail here. Plus, if you’re looking for the best technology, SiteGround offers much more than average (e.g. Git or Staging environment).
Of course, this web hosting service is in the medium-to-high price range, and it would not be ideal for small-budget projects. Its advanced backup features are fantastic, but they aren’t available in the lowest plan for free. Also, be aware that each plan limits the sites that you are allowed to host.
I hope you found this SiteGround review helpful. But please, leave a comment below if you have any questions or comments.
