A Bit of Company Overview

The SiteGround was found in 2004, by a bunch of people who attended university together. In the beginning, the operations headquarters were in university dormitory rooms but grew gradually, and it became a not that famous, but quite stable and trustworthy web hosting service provider. Nowadays, there are over 400 employees throughout the world (SiteGround has several data centers throughout the globe), and the company is growing fast. As it turns out, the people behind know the drill quite well, and they provide the clients with a top support, an amazing service and nowadays, they host over half a million domains. Their services are great, and we are quite sure that you will find them just great for your own needs. The company endeavors to be modern and to be a good place to work at. They have organized vacations, happy Fridays and other perks which make the employees feel better. And a well-feeling, satisfied employee works better, and thus, the clients are even more satisfied.

The SiteGround Hosting Services

Shared

Before we jump straight into introducing the different shared hosting plans, let’s take a look at the so-called “Essential Features”. These are included with every shared hosting plans, and they offer the most essential features one might need to easily start a website. You get access to both the cPanel, and to a free website builder to boost your start. The Essential Features include free site transfer, 24/7 support and 30 days money back guarantee. Also, the free ClouldFlare Content Delivery Network access, the free SSL, and the unlimited email account or the daily free backups are included too. So, as you can see, it’s a really strong package! The traffic is also unmetered for all shared plans. So, let us tell you more about the plans (the starting prices will be featured in pricing section):

StartUp:

This is the “simplest” shared web hosting package, and it gives you access to basic hosting services. This plan offers the option to launch one site and to have up-to 10,000 monthly visitors, and an SSD storage up to 10GB.

GrowBig:

The second plan is a good starter if you expect a higher visitor number per month, as it’s suitable for 25,000 visitors. To be honest, that’s a lot, and if you manage to have that many real visits, then you are good to go for a VPS or other advanced hosting later. Apart from the Essential Features, this plan offers you 20GB storage, and you can host several websites.

GoGeek:

The largest shared website hosting plan is claimed to be “crafted for real web geeks”. Well, it’s up to you to decide whether you are a geek or not and whether these services are for you, or not. We can only say that it’s good for about a hundred thousand visits a month and offers you 30GB SSD, and the option to have as many sites as you want.

GoGeek and GrowBig also include Premium Features: you can take advantage of the Priority Support, you get one-year SSL, and access to the “SuperCacher”, along with 30 backup copies option. The GoGeek has even more for you, which they call Geeky Advanced Features, and things like fewer hosted sites on the same box at which yours is, PCI compliance, and Git repo creation, along with WP and Joomla staging option.

Cloud Hosting

The Cloud hosting at SiteGround is basically the VPS hosting, with only one difference: your virtual server is a part of the cloud. Thus, it can be dynamically changed, and your site will load faster through the cloud, especially with CloudFlare. Every plan of the cloud hosting includes access to this fascinating fast platform, scalability, dedicated support, backup and free CDN for better loading times and delivery. Also, all of these cloud servers are fully managed, you don’t have to worry about the everyday IT maintenance. The actual plans go on like this – the 5TB monthly traffic is included in every plan:

Entry:

With this plan, your Cloud-VPS will have 2 CPU cores, 4 Gigabytes RAM, SSD storage up to 40GB and a monthly 5TB data transfer.

Business:

3 cores, 6 GB RAM, and 60GB storage are included, so it’s good if you have a mid-sized business and you expect some higher traffic.

Business Plus and Super Power:

Well, these two plans are kind of of-the-grid for everyday users. They aren’t just on the expensive end, but they way too powerful for a user who just wants to run a blog or small shop. But, if you plan to run series of sites, then these two plans might be perfect for you.

Dedicated

The Dedicated servers are the top of the line. These are actual, physical servers, provisioned only for you. If you are looking for the best possible solution, the dedicated plans are for you. As they are quite pricey, it’s just expected from them to provide the ultimate power. With the SiteGround dedicated hosting, you get access to fully managed dedicated servers built from some top-grade hardware. You can pick Windows or Linux servers, and you can get access to either WHM or cPanel control panels. One free domain name is also included, and you get access to five dedicated IPs for free, an actual mail server and free CloudFlare access are granted too. The most basic dedicated server grants you a four-core CPU at 3.20GHz, 8 MB cache, 4 GB Ram, five terabytes traffic, and a half-terabyte HDD storage. It’s a quite strong machine, and we are certain that it would serve you well.

Special Shared Hosting Plans:

WordPress Plans:

The SiteGround offers a full-round hosting plan for those who would like to run their site with WordPress. This plan offers you more WordPress features you could hope to get: free install, free transfer, and WP auto update is just a few of the many features. You also get access to a selection of advanced features, such as advanced security and WP-CLI. If you go for the GrowBig or GoGeek, you get even more! The GrowBig WP-special plan offers WordPress special cache too, while the GoGeek has one-click WP Staging and offers SG-Git to create WordPress repo.

Joomla Hosting:

This is another specialty in the shared hosting field at SiteGround. Those who prefer to use Joomla would be perfectly satisfied with these extra features. Apart from the free transfer and install, you get the auto update, advanced security features. Special features include the SiteGround SuperCache for Joomla, staging option, and SiteGround-Git to create Git repo.

Building a Website With SiteGround

The SiteGround doesn’t offer its own customized website building platform like some of its competitors does. However, it does support most of the popular CMS systems. As we already mentioned, you can use WordPress and Joomla, but Drupal is also supported, along with several other e-commerce CMS (more on this later). It’s quite easy to build your site if you choose to go with Joomla or WordPress, as the SiteGround has a huge library of templates for these. You can choose whichever you like for free, then customize it to fully fit your needs. This makes it quite easy, and really fast to have a site that reflects your personality and the goals of your company.

eCommerce Solutions

There are three major e-commerce solutions the SiteGround supports. You can install Magento, PrestaShop or WooCommerce. Magento is the most well-known these days. In case you are not a person who loves to spend a lot of time with design, then having your Magento store on SiteGround would be a perfectly good idea. There are many themes for you to pick. This way, the overall experience is great, and you can get your store up and running in a jiffy. Adding items to your store will be really easy with Magento, but the PrestaShop and the WooCommerce are great too, and if you know them, then use them! But, SiteGround has specialized support for the Magento Community edition, and that’s something one must consider when he or she plans to launch a store.

Installing Add-Ons

Just like almost every other website hosting service provider, the SiteGround offers one-click installs. This way, you can add every feature, script, and software to your site in a minute or so. The add-ons include different Wiki engines, for example, a lot of PHP add-ons (e.g. phpMyAdmin, phpFormGenerator, etc).

Email Solutions

If you plan to have an active e-mail account, then the SiteGround offers you just what you need. Apart from the industry-standard security features, the SiteGround grants access to unlimited email storage, and it supports the three most popular web-email clients: SquirrelMail, RoundCube, and Horde.

Domains

The Shared and Cloud hosting plans don’t offer free domain names, you either have to buy your own somewhere, or buy one via SiteGround when you set up your account. You can create, however as many sub-domains and parked domains as you need, you can assign them to your SiteGround-hosted website easily.

As far as the hosting prices go, it’s always hard to find the really good deal. The SiteGround offers you some great starting prices, and as for the renewal prices… well, those are nice too. One of the most important and most positive attribute of the SiteGround is that it doesn’t try to rob you if you choose the WP or the Joomla-specific plans! We have seen some website hosting providers offering WP hosting for some really interesting prices. SiteGround, however, offers you some really nice discounts for the shared hosting plans: $3.95 per month for the StartUp plan, (for the WordPress and Joomla plans too), $7.95 is for the GrowBig and $14.95 for the GoGeek plans. These are industry-standard discount prices, but as you are going to see, the recurring fees are also good.

The Cloud Hosting isn’t discounted at this time, but you would only need that if you expecting a high growth in data or visitors to your site. The Entry level of cloud virtual server hosting is $64 per month, and the biggest one, the Super Power is only $192 per month, but it’s worth just as much as a dedicated plan.

As for the additional prices. You will have to pay for the domain name if you are going for the shared plans and you are not going for the high-level ones. When you sign up, you can add two more features to your account registration: domain privacy which hides your WhoIs information and shows the SiteGround’s info instead. And for some better security, you can opt in for SG Site Scanner, which grants you a monitoring service. This service alerts you if your site got hacked or injected with any malicious codes.

Now, the SiteGround is one website hosting service provider which exceeded our expectations. Actually, they keep their promise as far as the uptime is concerned. The SiteGround boasts a 99.99% uptime, and as our tests, and others’ experience shows, they actually keep this promise. The SiteGround uses Linux Servers, it has its own backup system and monitors the servers closely. The SiteGround has top-notch account isolation system, which makes it possible for every user to rest assured that their account is safe and is isolated from others. The uptime of SiteGround is amazing, and if almost-constant online presence is what you need, then this website hosting service provider is a top choice.

The website speed is also a strong feature of SiteGround: you will see your website to be more appreciated, as it loads lightning fast. To ensure this speed, SiteGround offers SSD drives, NGINX server to boost static content loading times. They have a special “SuperCacher” service, which gives you the option to have your content even faster. SuperCacher is available for WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla. Another booster for the speed of the websites is provided by the CloudFlare CDN network – access is faster as your site always loads from the nearest data center.

Stability and speed are ensured by the different data centers located in the USA, the Asia-Pacific region and in Europe. This way, no matter which part of the globe your visitors come from, they can view your site as fast is if it was hosted from next door!

SSL security is optional in most cases, and whey you sign up (and later too), you can opt-in for some extra features like SG Site Scanner. Be sure to check your site regularly, and ask for help if you notice something shady.

The support team of the SiteGround is one of the best ones we’ve encountered. They are real experts, who know their job, and in technical matters, they are quite knowledgeable. The team is available via phone, on-site live chat, and the ticket system/email. We didn’t have to wait too much for them, and it means you are going to get on the line with them in seconds or so. You should consider paying a visit to the knowledge center too! You could find there all the information you seek when you are looking for help. From how-to-install guides to how-to-use guides, everything is available. If you just signed-up, you can even use a wizard to get going. As for the support, they are well-endorsed throughout the online world, and as our research brought it to light, the SiteGround’s support is often considered the best one out there.

The SiteGround is a highly recommend web-host. Its shared plans are one of the best out there, and the starting prices are just too good to skip this action, especially if you are a Joomla or WordPress user! Set up your site in minutes, and jump into the world of online business and marketing… or whatever you are making your website for!