I’ve been a customer of SiteGround since 2015, and this is my personal and unbiased review of the service I’ve received over the last six years!
Now, I’m well aware that there are literally hundreds of reviews of SiteGround already in existence. However, this review is different. At least I’d like to think so.
How and why?
This is my personal review of SiteGround. I’m an actual user, a paying customer of the service provided by SiteGround. My review is not just from a technical or statistical viewpoint, though I will share some stats and facts with you, but really more from a user’s perspective.
If you’re looking for a more technical review, I’m sure you can find some if you do a search in Google. If you’re using an alternative web hosting service provider and are thinking about moving to SiteGround, hopefully, you’ll find this review useful.
Let’s begin.
If you didn’t already know, SiteGround is one of the most popular web hosting providers in the business. Unlike many other web hosting companies out there, they are not a subsidiary company of a parent company. Siteground is an independent hosting provider. They are pretty well known in the WordPress community.
The company was founded by tech entrepreneur Tenko Nikolov in 2004. SiteGround today is made up of over 400 passionate entrepreneurs/employees and hosts more than 1.8 million domains.
The company continues to grow and is now one of the top-recommended web host providers for the WordPress open-source software (WordPress.org). Check out SiteGround and the company’s ‘about page’ to learn more.
In a nutshell, SiteGround offers affordable, reliable, and secure web hosting for website owners, businesses, and bloggers.
Their shared web hosting fees start from just $6.99 per month (Usually $14.99), which makes them one of the most affordable solutions out there, though we’ll talk more about pricing later on in this review.
Here’s a quick overview of what SiteGround has to offer –
SiteGround also offers Reseller Hosting, Enterprise Hosting, Dedicated Servers, and currently has data centers on 3-continents.
They also have in place hardware infrastructures and resources that provide blazing fast technology performance. This hardware list includes –
Way too many to list, however, some stand-out features of SiteGround’s service include –
I started my blogging journey with Bluehost, a web hosting company I reviewed here. I was going through a bit of a bad patch with Bluehost, experiencing frequent downtimes and complete outages. Naturally, as you do, I decided to vent some of that frustration on my Twitter account.
Had I not done so, I wouldn’t be using SiteGround today. Because, as well as Bluehost noticing tweet, one of the representatives of SiteGround at the time also noticed my tweet. They reached out to offer me an alternative solution, that solution being to migrate my blog to SiteGround.
After a quick chat online, I signed up for the GrowBig Plan, and they took care of everything. They even migrated my websites over from Bluehost. See the image below.
As the story goes, I’ve not looked back since. Here we are in 2021 and I’m still proudly using SiteGround.
OK, here goes –
1. The SiteGround Website and user interface
The SiteGround website has improved over the years. The dated-looking dashboard has been replaced with a nice clean user interface with improved navigation and new features.
2. Optimized for WordPress Users
Since everything that I do online involves WordPress, I love that SiteGround offers a WordPress hosting plan optimized for WordPress!
The SSD and dynamic caching technology SiteGround has in place gives WordPress users blazing fast loading times.
3. The Support Team
I’ve not once had a bad experience with the SiteGround support team. Maybe I’ve just been lucky, Just kidding. Honestly, I cannot fault their support structure.
I’ve only been in touch with SiteGround support a few times regarding a few small issues, which they’ve happily help solve for me.
In fact, recently, I got in touch with SG customer care because I was experiencing a problem with my broken website (CSS not loading issues), and they helped me solve the problem quickly.
Another occasion was when I had issues with Cloudflare. And just to prove I’m not making any of this up just to give praise to SiteGround, here’s a screenshot of the transcript!
4. Knowledgebase
The SiteGround FAQ page and knowledge-base is packed with a lot of useful advice and guides. It’s very good, however, it could be better. It would be nice to see SiteGround use videos to explain how some of their tools and features work.
Anyhow, from hosting, cPanel, applications, billing, there’s plenty of helpful ‘written’ content to dig into.
5. Technology
SiteGround hosting boasts a host of impressive features and technology including, SSD on all plans, one-click WordPress installation for non-hosting-techies (like me), Let’s Encrypt free SSL, Cloudflare CDN service, the latest PHP7, and website migration service.
6. Performance
In the six years period that I’ve used SiteGround, I’ve experienced zero downtime.
The very reason I left my last hosting provider, Bluehost, was because of the downtime as you know.
Having cutting-edge technology allows SiteGround to provide optimum-performance web hosting for all their customers. So, in a none-techy world, this means –
You can view the latest speed and uptime status here.
Here’s a screenshot of the page speed test that I ran for my site Magnet4Blogging.net on SiteGround, using Pingdom Website Tools.
Now, of course, I realize there are other factors that come into play when measuring page loading time. But this is a good start.
My WordPress blog, as of April 2021, runs on Oxygen Builder 3.6 and has 29 active plugins installed.
The simple pricing plans for their shared hosting make it perfect to choose the right hosting plan for your needs.
When I originally signed up back in 2015, I took out the GrowBig plan, and only then upgraded to GoGeek. In 2019, my blogs and websites had outgrown this plan and I moved over to SiteGround Cloud Hosting.
Recommended: Check out my SiteGround Cloud Hosting Review.
If you’re just starting out, SiteGround’s pricing tier makes it perfect for taking out the right plan. And as your website grows, you can scale up your hosting requirements accordingly.
It’s actually hard for me to pick one thing that I don’t like about using SiteGround, let alone a bunch of them.
I’m not that technically minded when it comes to web hosting, so I guess I’m one of those users who’s honestly and generally all-around happy with the service received.
If like me, your focus is on growing your business, you don’t want to be spending all your time and energy getting into the technical ins and outs of your web hosting provider. I’m not that interested, to be frank. I just want it to work, and it does.
I don’t expect any web hosting company to be 100% perfect, so if I had to be really nit-picky, here’s what I don’t like about SiteGround; however, I can live with –
Absolutely, wholeheartedly, yes. I can’t be any more honest and transparent than that.
At the end of the day, not everyone is a tech guru. As I said earlier, most people just want a reliable hosting provider that can get on with the job of hosting their blog or small business website with ease, reliability, and rock-solid security.
SiteGround does just that and much more.
I run all of my online businesses on SiteGround. So that’s the Magnet4Blogging blog, my eCommerce business, my freelance website, my online course, and several Amazon niche sites.
I think most people would expect to pay a lot of money for a high-quality hosting service. I’m not saying SiteGround is the best in the business, but it’s certainly amongst the best.
Some hosting services are beyond affordable. Kinsta, for example, can be quite expensive in comparison. SiteGround is surprisingly affordable, but it can become expensive later on down the line.
As I said earlier, if you’re signing up for the first time, just be aware that the price you pay for the first year might not be the same when renewing your hosting with SiteGround.
My hosting fees are much higher because I’m using SiteGround’s Cloud Hosting at $100 per month.
SiteGround is a rock-solid hosting provider. They have knowledgeable people. Although sometimes their tech support isn’t always able to solve technical problems, customer care really does care about helping you. That said, I’ve experienced nothing but great all-around service from SiteGround over the last six years.
However, you might be a SiteGround customer yourself with a completely different story and opinion of the company. If that is the case, I invite you to share your own personal review of SiteGround below in the comment section, if it’s open.
Once you’ve decided on the best hosting plan for your website or blog, simply head over to SiteGround here and begin the signup process.
Recommended: If you would like a detailed tutorial on creating a website or blog with SiteGround, check my post here.
Affiliate Disclaimer: For the purpose of transparency, this personal review post of SiteGround web hosting contains affiliate links. This means if you click on one of these links and purchase web hosting with SiteGround, I will be paid a small commission, at no additional cost to you. Thank you for your continued support, and you can read my full affiliate disclaimer following the link in the footer of this website or in the header menu nav.
