SiteGround Review for WordPress- All Features, Pros, and Cons

SiteGround is one of the top web hosting providers in the market today. It is thus important for us to review SiteGround Web Hosting so that our readers can make the right call in terms of purchasing the right web hosting.

It is also important to note that SiteGround is not the only web hosting provider in the market today. The process of owning a website has become simpler and cheaper. If you are planning to own a website, there are two important things that you will have to take care of – Domain Name and Web hosting provider.

We can choose from so many web hosting vendors in the market that provide the options of both buying a domain name and web hosting services. This does not mean that we can’t buy Domain Name and Web Hosting Service from different vendors.

Before talking about the features of SiteGround and why it is one of the trusted web-hosting providers, let us take a look at what is Domain Name and what is a Web Hosting Provider.

Domain Name

Domain Name is our website’s name. When we refer to Google, it means we are referring to the domain name, www.google.com. Similar is for Bing (www.bing.com) and any other website.

Your domain name is a unique identity on the web. Creating and assigning a DNS name is outsourced to Domain Registrars that are linked with Domain Registries. The registries take care of top-level domains (TLD) and should be informed when subdomains are allocated. The registries are managed by Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA).

Why do we require Domain Names ? If you know a bit about the internet, everything is accessible via an IP Address which can be denoted as W.X.Y.Z., or as an example 10.12.13.14. Every website that is accessible on the internet uses a unique IP Address as its core identity. As it all happens behind the scenes, so most of us don’t know and don’t care about it.

In day-to-day life, it is tough to remember the IP Addresses, and so Domain Names were defined. A Domain name is like a mask over the IP Address. It is used for human convenience to remember a particular website. We never say, as an example, “let us check 10.12.13.14”.

Web Hosting Provider

The other factor in owning and activating your website is a Web Hosting Provider. A web hosting provider offers its services as PaaS (Platform as a Service). PaaS provider takes care of all the hardware and software required to run your application.

For example, if you are planning to start a new website, you may want to go with creating a WordPress website. The web hosting provider will take care of the hardware requirements and also software requirements like installing WordPress, the latest versions of MySQL, PHP, etc. You will just have to start building your application on top of the hosted platform.

Web Hosting 

Multiple Registrars take care of Domain Names. Heard about GoDaddy? Yes, they help you in choosing and buying a Domain Name of your choice. I bought my domain name using GoDaddy, and it is cheap. There are also other registrars like Hover, Namecheap, etc. from where you can buy your Domain Name.

The Domain Name and the top-level domains define what type of niche you are targeting. Make sure you buy a relevant and niche-specific domain name. For example, if you are a health education-related company and want to have roots in India only, the domain name could be – healthXYZ.in, or healthXYZ.org, etc.

Once you have bought your domain name, you would now require a website hosting provider.

Note: If you already own a server for your website, then there is no need for a web hosting provider. If not, go ahead reading the article. It is always advisable to use a web hosting service rather than configuring your own server as it could pose technical challenges.

There are so many web hosting vendors out there today that provide services for setting up your web space. The most popular web platform to build websites used today is WordPress. The vendors provide WordPress as PaaS (Platform as a Service). This means that the web hosting providers provide the WordPress platform on which you can start building your website. No worries about buying and monitoring the hardware, and also no need to install the base software like PHP, MySQL, Apache, etc.

SiteGround Review

Following are some of the popular web hosting providers today:

1. SiteGround (also abbreviated as SG)
2. Bluehost (Check out our Bluehost Review)
3. Hostinger
4. HostGator (Check out our HostGator Review)
5. WPEngine

Before jumping to SiteGround review, let us first discuss some history around it.

SiteGround came into picture in 2004 in Bulgaria. As per the reports, SiteGround caters to over 2 Million domains. It deals with shared hosting, cloud hosting, and dedicated enterprise hosting. Apart, it also deals with domain registration and email hosting.

SG has data centers in the US, UK, Singapore, Netherlands, Australia, and Germany.

SiteGround provides the following hosting plans and packages:

• Shared Web Hosting
• Managed WordPress Hosting
• WooCommerce Hosting
• Cloud Hosting 

The following are the packages and pricing structure of each plan:

Shared Web Hosting

SiteGround provides options to build your website on WordPress or Weebly. The plan also provides the feature of transferring an existing website to SiteGround with the help of SG experts. A SiteGround’s WordPress migrator plugin is available for easy WP website migration.

WooCommerce Hosting

SiteGround has a web hosting plan to create and manage an eCommerce website. SG also has a feature/plugin to migrate an existing WooCommerce website to SiteGround.

Features like automatic updates for WordPress and WooCommerce, daily backups, staging tools, tackling security threats, etc. are also part of this plan.

Cloud Hosting

If your website is scaling up, then obviously a shared hosting plan will no more suffice. SiteGround offers customers to host their website on its cloud network in such a scenario and avail the benefits of private resources.

Using cloud hosting, the resources can be easily scaled up which means no extra headache of being vigilant.

SiteGround manages the cloud resources taken care by its experts. With this feature, customers can focus on their business applications without any distractions from the IT resources perspective.

WordPress Hosting

When I was undertaking a course in Content Writing and WordPress, SiteGround was the top choice. Reason? Let us review and look at some of the features of SiteGround that makes it a good choice for web hosting.

First, let us look at the WordPress Hosting packages provided by SiteGround.

Let us now review all the WordPress properties from SiteGround’s perspective.

SiteGround WP Installation Review

SiteGround provides free WordPress (WP) installation as part of WordPress-related packages. So, WordPress comes pre-installed. You just have to log in and start building your website.

Domain Management

SiteGround provides both domain registration and website hosting services. This means that both domain settings and website management can be controlled from one place. SG also provides domain migration services.

SiteGround Web Hosting Options

SiteGround provides both shared and dedicated web hosting options. SG recently migrated to Google cloud hosting and today, almost all of SiteGround’s customers are hosted on Google Cloud. Thus, Siteground is deemed to be fast as Google Cloud is pretty robust.

Factors like scaling and primary data backup are some of the key features present in the Google Cloud. All these features make SiteGround one of the best Hosting Providers.

SG provides options for WordPress Hosting, Simple Web Hosting, Cloud Hosting, and WooCommerce hosting. All the hosting plans have packages from which you can choose.

In the image above, there are three packages available for WordPress Hosting – StartUp, GrowBig, and GoGeek.

Control Panel (cPanel or Site Tools)

SiteGround offers a cPanel, now Site Tools as a space to control the features of SiteGound. Site Tools has options like File Manager to manage the files and folders. It allows access to the phpMyAdmin for DB. You can check for backups and filter out certain IP Addresses. You can also enable dynamic caching.

Email and DNS configuration can also be controlled via Site Tools. Following is a sample image of the Site Tools page.

SiteGround Speed Review

Speed is one of the big factors while ranking on Google. The faster the page is rendered or downloaded the better is the probability of website ranking on Google.

Availability

SiteGround claims to have 99.99% uptime, which is very good. In my experience, I haven’t seen any outage from SiteGround’s end. Uptime is another factor that can impact the reputation of your website. 

SiteGround Performance and Security Review

SiteGround is considered very robust and powerful against security threats. They have their own virus protection and firewall rules to monitor and filter the notorious requests hitting your webserver. 

Once I had an issue with an unknown spammy bot trying to access my website. I asked for help from SG support and they informed me that a firewall and anti-virus protection is available at their end and the requests of the spammy bot are already getting filtered out. So, SG’s security firewall takes care of any unwanted security threats. Cool, isn’t it?

If you want, you can also download a security plugin at your end to check for unwanted activity, bots, and viruses. In most cases, SG’s security should suffice.

SiteGround’s servers are considered to be very fast and efficient. They are known for their Performance and Security. The loading speed of any website should be fast and within Google guidelines. If not, your website might not make it into good Google Rankings.

SG Optimizer Plugin

SiteGround provides a plugin SG Optimizer for WordPress. This plugin has multiple features like Dynamic Caching, which is unique.

The plugin has options for DB and environment clean-up and optimization. Options like Minifying HTML, JS, and CSS files options are also provided by this plugin which is important to decrease loading speed. The plugin also takes care of image optimization. For minifying and image optimization you would probably require to two separate plugins, but with SG Optimizer, you get these two functionalities in one.

SSL

SSL is required for creating and maintaining secured data transfer between a user and your website. SiteGround provides free SSL for all its hosting packages.

Content Delivery Network

A content delivery network or CDN is crucial if you want your website to perform and load faster from every corner of the globe. A CDN makes copies of all or part of your website and deploys it at their data centers around the globe. This helps in the faster loading of the website. Without a CDN, a huge delay in loading is highly likely as the request would flow to the location of the webserver first, and then the response would be sent back to the source of the request. This will create a huge lag.

SiteGround offers the enabling of your website with Cloudflare CDN, which is one of the most popular CDNs. A free plan is available and if you have a small website, you probably would be good with using the free version only.

Daily Backup

SiteGround provides free daily backups of all your website data. Thus, there is no stress of losing your content when your website crashes or something goes wrong. I use an extra backup plugin due to some complexities in my Website, but SG’s backup files should suffice on their own. In the StartUp plan, there is no option of defining when a backup should run. In GrowBig and GoGeek plans, on-demand backup of files is available.

Email

SiteGround provides a free Email ID with all of its packages. Based on your domain name, you can create a mail id for yourself. 

Note: In many cases, Domain Registrars provide Email Services with the domain name service.

WP Migrator

SiteGround provides a free plugin – SiteGround Migrator for WP migration. Using this plugin, you can easily migrate your WordPress instance to SiteGround.

WP CLI and SSH

Siteground provides limited access to the WordPress command-line interface and SSH. This gives you a bit of control over your website, but it should be used with utmost care.

SiteGround Storage Review

SiteGround provides 10 GB of web space for the StartUp plan, 20 GB for the GrowBig plan, and 40 GB for GoGeek. This storage capacity seems low, at least for me when compared to other web hostings. There might be a scenario where all your functionality is working well with the StartUp plan, but because of storage needs, you might have to shell out extra money. So, if storage is your priority, then you might get disappointed here.

Free WP Updates

Once WordPress is installed, you would not have to rely on checking and manually updating WordPress versions. Whenever a new WP version will come out, SiteGround will take care of forwarding the notification that a new WP version is available.

Database & phpMyAdmin

SiteGround also provides an option to access the database of your WordPress site via phpMyAdmin, and provides the functionality to create unlimited Databases. This is a good option but should be used with great care.

SiteGround NGINX Direct Delivery Review

SiteGround provides free NGINX caching called NGINX Direct Delivery. Due to NGINX Direct Delivery, there is a reduction in webpage render times. 

Without NGINX, the web pages and resources were fetched in a traditional way. Before Direct Delivery, the static data was stored on the server’s RAM and fetched. This was not an ideal scenario as RAM should be used for Dynamic Content as much as possible. Using NGINX Direct Delivery, the static data is stored on SSD and fetched from there. This greatly reduces the load on the server’s memory which otherwise was also used for storing the static resources.

SiteGround Support Review

SiteGround has very good 24/7 customer support. You can chat with the support executives and even get over a call. The Support staff is great and if you describe the issue in-depth, they will proactively try to resolve it. If you are not satisfied with the resolution or if the support executive thinks that the issue is complex, an immediate ticket is raised to the technical team. 

Their technical team is quick and proactive and will update you from time to time.

Money-Back Guarantee

SiteGround provides 30-day money-back guarantee if you are not satisfied with the services. If we compare this with other web-hosting providers, some vendors have a 30-day money-back policy and some even have 45 days policy. Though 30 days is good, for some people it might not be enough.

Pricing

The biggest drawback I find with SiteGround is its renewal pricing. SG has cheap and discounted rates when it comes to buying a package the very first time. After the package expires, the renewal prices spike to almost 2.5 times than the original one. So, after a year, you will have to shell out extra bucks to continue with SiteGround.

SiteGround Properties Review Summary

Let us summarise all that we have discussed as part of the SiteGround review in this post.

*Yes, with caution – Recommended property but should be used with great caution. Any wrong use or misconfiguration can lead to the crashing of the website.

SiteGround Purchase Process

Here are some steps that you can follow to buy a SiteGround plan.

Step 1

Choose a Hosting Type (WordPress, WooCommerce, etc.) and then a Hosting Plan. Click on “Get Plan” to proceed.

Step 2

Register a domain. If you already have a domain, fill it in the text box, and click “Proceed” to jump to the next page.

Step 3

Fill in the necessary details on the page. Review and click on “Pay Now” to complete the process.

SiteGround Review Conclusion

That is a wrap-up of our SiteGround review. Overall, SiteGround is a decent option for your web hosting. We have given it a rating of 9.4 out of 10. SiteGround is equipped with robust, fast, and highly secured servers. The drawbacks of SiteGround are the high renewal prices and the limited storage capacity in all the plans.

The limited storage could make you review SiteGround as most other web hosting providers provide unmetered storage for most of their plans.

If you are a blogger and have not yet started earning money, the renewal price would be huge for you. For me, storage was not an issue as I knew I would not have too much data generated on a day-to-day basis, at least initially. Also, as I was a newbie, I went with SiteGround because my trainer of the Content Writing course told me to.

Keeping aside the two drawbacks of price and storage, I would still rate SiteGround as a good deal for newbies and bloggers (at least for the first year). It is a tested and trusted option as its servers are high-end and its security features are top-notch.

The first-year prices are cheap but are still high when compared with other hosting companies. Also, you will have to start thinking holistically and look for other options when your business or blog will start getting huge traffic, and when the storage graph will rise exponentially.

SiteGround Plans & Packages

Select from WordPress or other SiteGround hosting plans to enhance your web hosting experience.

Or, choose your hosting plan from the banners below to get started.

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