GreenGeeks is one of the best eco-friendly web hosting services available on the market today. Since its launch in 2008, the platform has become a leading WordPress hosting service for small businesses looking for reliable, secure, and above all, budget-friendly services. GreenGeeks founder and CEO Trey Gardner was already an experienced web hosting professional with over a decade of industry experience when he founded GreenGeeks.
Gardner’s mission was to create a smart and efficient web hosting service that led the change towards being more environmentally conscious. These services consume hundreds of kilowatt-hours of energy annually to support their servers and data storage facilities. While GreenGeeks uses energy like any other web hosting platform, it prioritizes the smart and efficient use of incumbent electricity.
The company also works towards offsetting its carbon emissions by working with the Bonneville Environmental Foundation. When a GreenGeeks server is purchased, it buys 3 times or 300% of the energy it uses in the form of Renewable Energy Credits from the foundation. Owing to its eco-friendly efforts, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) now recognizes GreenGeeks as a Green Power Partner, which is a company that helps the agency curtail carbon emissions.
The other feature that sets GreenGeeks apart from most of its competitors is its affordability. As compared to WordPress Engine Premium’s $20/month price point, GreenGeeks’ premium plans start as low as $8.95/month and include a dedicated IP address and an enhanced Secure Sockets Layer(SSL) certificate.
In addition to the standard web hosting catalog, GreenGeeks also provides:
- Free domain name for a year
- Free SSL
- Daily automatic data backup
- WooCommerce hosting for e-commerce websites built on WordPress
- Reseller web hosting
- Dedicated VPS
| GreenGeeks Standout Features | |
| Performance | Extremely fast, reliable and secure hosting |
| Average Load Time | 0.028 seconds |
| Average Response Time | Approximately 3450 ms |
| Free Domain | One free domain for the first year |
| SSL | Free SSL certificate from LetsEncrypt.org |
| 1-click WordPress | Included with all hosting packages |
| Support | 24/7 support via phone, email, or live chat |
There are several affordable web hosting services available on the market, but here’s what sets GreenGeeks apart:
GreenGeeks Allows for Easier Reseller Hosting
Apart from running in-house services, GreenGeeks also allows users to purchase Reseller Hosting packages where they can purchase and then rent out resource packages.go/g Businesses can bundle GreenGeeks’ advanced technologies like Solid State Drive (SSD) RAID-10 (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) Storage Arrays, PHP7 (Hypertext Preprocessor), Caching, and content delivery network (CDN) with their own services, and generate recurring revenue.
Every account comes with access to developer tools like:
- Secure Shell (SSH) protocol used for safer online communication access
- Git
- WordPress Command Line Interface (WP-CLI)
- Drush
- Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP)
- PhpMyAdmin
All of this is backed by scalable support that grows with your business. If you aren’t a ‘techie’ suffice it to say that GreenGeeks uses all the latest industry standard technologies to support your hosting.
Guaranteed Uptime of 99.99%
One of the most important features of a web hosting server is its uptime (the time for which a website or service is available to users). While a 100% uptime is considered ideal, server maintenance and repairs make this impossible. GreenGeeks guarantees a fantastic uptime of 99.99%, considered to be the industry standard for extremely high/borderline perfect availability.
Lightning Fast LiteSpeed Servers
All of GreenGeeks’ websites are hosted by LiteSpeed. The service caches websites in real time and optimizes other features like CSS codes so that the sites load much faster for visitors. GreenGeeks advertises its load time as being 50 times lower than that of competing web servers like Apache.
What Are the Pros and Cons of GreenGeeks?
GreenGeeks is a perfect, efficient, and affordable solution for small businesses looking for a comprehensive web hosting package. However, it doesn’t provide widespread international support so it may not be a good choice for bigger multinational corporations (MNCs) spread across multiple continents. Here are some of the other pros and cons of the service:
Pros
- Scalable hosting solutions: GreenGeeks allows users to choose from a wide range of scalable hosting solutions like Shared, WordPress, Virtual Private Server (VPS), and dedicated server packages. Businesses can dynamically change their plans to fit their changing business needs.
- Well-stacked help center: GreenGeeks sports a vast and diverse help center that contains numerous how-to guides, website tutorials, and even webinars for easier employee onboarding.
- Reliable uptime of up to 99.9%: The platform offers an excellent uptime of 99.99%, which is often considered the industry benchmark.
- Eco-friendly hosting methods: Apart from purchasing three times the wind energy credits that the company consumes, GreenGeeks uses energy-efficient storage and server solutions to reduce its carbon footprint.
- Automatic night backup: All data held in shared, private, or VPS servers are backed up each night and made instantly available to users in case of an emergency.
- 30-day money-back guarantee: GreenGeeks offers an unconditional 30-day money-back guarantee for even the most basic monthly plans.
- Free domain for a year: All users are given a free domain and migration tools for a year. GreenGeeks migration specialists help users switch from their current host to GreenGeeks free of charge.
Cons
- No provision for Windows Server Hosting: If you are currently using cloud servers hosted by Microsoft Windows, GreenGeeks won’t be able to integrate its services. These users will be required to switch to GreenGeeks or another supported hosting service.
- Fine print: You must commit to a three-year plan to use the advertised price. While the plan is easily affordable for small businesses, they can only receive these prices if they commit to GreenGeeks for at least three years.
- Pricier VPS and dedicated hosting options: The shared hosting option available on GreenGeeks (perfect for small businesses) is much cheaper than other services, but its VPS and dedicated hosting options are a little pricier owing to the special energy-efficient servers GreenGeeks uses.
- Domain costs more if you avail of the 30-day money back: If you take advantage of the 30 money-back guarantee, your domain name will cost more than most other hosting providers due to the equipment and migration costs.
GreenGeeks may be the best web host for: Small to medium-sized businesses looking for services that provide the right balance between affordability and faster processing/loading speeds and server efficiency.
GreenGeeks WordPress Hosting Packages
| Lite | Pro | Premium | |
| Price: | $2.95 – 36/mo term | $5.95 – 36/mo term | $10.95 – 36/mo term |
| Best for: | Small local businesses, personal sites, entrepreneurs | Small regional businesses, any site that requires multiple email addresses | Smaller e-commerce sites, small online businesses |
| Websites: | 1 | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Disk space: | 50 GB | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Bandwidth: | Unmetered | Unmetered | Unmetered |
| Email accounts: | 5 | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Email storage: | 100 MB / account | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Extras: |
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*Memcached is a caching system based on external, distributed memory where all data is stored in strings. Redis on the other hand, is an in-memory data structure that can store different types of data. This allows the Redis system to change the data in-place without having to reupload the entire thing.
Who should use WordPress hosting? The various shared hosting packages can meet the needs of a wide range of people including small businesses, entrepreneurs, e-commerce sites, and more. Shared hosting packages are often recommended to users looking for affordable and efficient web hosting services for a low-to-medium traffic website/project.
GreenGeeks WooCommerce Hosting Package Options
| Lite | Pro | Premium | |
| Price: | $2.95/mo | $5.95/mo | $10.95/mo |
| Best for: | Personal websites, small local businesses | Small regional businesses, sites that require multiple email addresses | Smaller e-commerce sites, small online businesses |
| Websites: | 1 | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Storage: | 50 GB | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Extras: |
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Who should use WooCommerce hosting? WooCommerce is a free WordPress plugin that allows you to add e-commerce functionality to your WordPress website. WooCommerce hosting is perfect for small to medium-sized businesses with WooCommerce websites and a slow but steady stream of visitors.
GreenGeeks VPS Hosting Package Options
| 2GB | 4GB | 8GB | |
| Price: | $39.95/month | $59.95/month | $109.95/month |
| Best for: | Midsize businesses, e-commerce sites | Sites that get constant traffic, larger local and regional businesses | Regional businesses and medium-sized e-commerce sites |
| Cores: | 4 | 4 | 6 |
| SSD RAID 10 Storage: | 50 GB | 75 GB | 150 GB |
| IP Address: | 1 | 2 | 2 |
| RAM: | 2 GB | 4 GB | 8 GB |
| Bandwidth: | 10 TB | 10 TB | 10 TB |
Who should use VPS hosting? If your website gets plenty of traffic, or you will be hosting videos and images, you can opt for one of the VPS options from GreenGeeks. All three options will provide you with a great hosting environment on which to run your site.
GeenGeeks Dedicated Server Hosting Package Options
| Entry-level server | Standard server | Elite server | Pro server | |
| Price: | $169/month | $269/month | $319/month | $439/month |
| Best for: | Larger e-commerce sites, companies with a national audience | Larger businesses with lots of pages, businesses with resource-intensive websites | Companies that get visitors from multiple countries, large e-commerce sites | Companies that get visitors from multiple countries and run resource-intensive pages, large e-commerce sites |
| CPU: | Atom 330 | Xeon E3-1220 | Xeon E3-1230X | Xeon E5-2620 |
| RAM: | 2 GB | 4 GB | 8 GB | 16 GB |
| Drive (SATA) : | 1 x 500 GB | 2 x 500 GB | 2 x 500 GB | 2 x 500 GB |
| Network Bandwidth: | 10 TB | 10 TB | 10 TB | 10 TB |
| Free Domains: | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| Dedicated IPs: | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 |
Who should use dedicated hosting? The dedicated hosting servers at GreenGeeks are quite impressive. However, they are only really needed for large sites that get thousands of visitors at a time. Very few small businesses, entrepreneurs, bloggers, or other similar people will ever need this type of hosting.
Hosting Features From GreenGeeks
All of GreenGeeks’ options come with a number of features that make them scalable, efficient, and faster than most other green hosting services available on the internet.
Here are some of the top features that GreenGeeks offers:
- Solid State Drive (SSD) Storage Arrays
- Best speed technologies
- Free site builders
- Customizable GreenGeeks dashboard
- 99.99% uptime
- Free Cloudflare integration (speeds your site loading)
- Free SSL certificate
- Advanced security features
- 1 tree planted
SSD Storage Arrays
GreenGeeks offers solid-state SSD RAID 10 storage for all VPS and dedicated hosting plans. It allows for combined disk mirroring and striping which ensures maximum redundancy and hence lower risk of data loss and much faster page load times.
Best Speed Technologies
One of GreenGeeks’ core USPs has always been its quick response and load times. GreenGeeks makes use of a number of innovative storage and processing technologies to help you cache and load its site data quicker. All the plans come with the best in speed-tech like LiteSpeed, LSCache, MariaDB, HTTP/2, PHP7, and free CDN.
GreenGeeks also provides assisted migration with in-house experts to make migrating to its platform quicker and much more efficient.
Free Site Builder
GreenGeeks partners with Weebly site builder to offer custom site building tools that let you create very attractive websites without having to know any programming. Simply drag and drop various site features where you want them, and the site will look just the way you want it. Weebly offers a number of add-ons and pre-designed templates for faster, more streamlined web designing.
Customizable GreenGeeks Dashboard
All shared packages come with the GreenGeeks Dashboard which can be seen as a customizable central control panel allowing you to create, manage, and edit all your websites. Users can access their GreenGeeks Dashboard by simply entering their login details onto the webpage. The Dashboard allows you to manage everything related to your domain name using emails, renewal periods, and other services availed by you.
99.99% Uptime Guarantee
All of the hosting packages at GreenGeeks come with a 99.99% uptime guarantee. Your hosting servers will be available to serve traffic at least 99.99% of the time, which is above the industry standard of 99.9%. 99.99% is often considered to be the benchmark for the highest/perfect uptime.
Free Cloudflare Integration To Speed Up Your Site
Your sites will be automatically configured to use the Cloudflare system, designed to take key files from your website and distribute them across various data centers. When someone tries to load your site, they will pull the largest files from a geographically-close server, so it will load more quickly.
Free SSL Certificate
All hosting packages at GreenGeeks come with a free shared SSL certificate from Let’s Encrypt SSL that will provide your site with significant security. It also ensures your site is following best practices regarding security, which Google confirms is important for proper SEO.
Advanced Custom Security Rule
GreenGeeks offers all the standard hosting security features that are considered to be the industry standard. This includes things like powerful firewalls to prevent unauthorized traffic to your site, monitored internet connectivity, and more. GreenGeeks also allows you to customize your security options by creating:
- IP address blacklists
- Password-protected directories
- Completely customizable private keys and digital certificates
- Word-triggered filters for email accounts
Another upside to GreenGeeks’ security is that it does automated backups every night without the need for any third-party backup service subscriptions.
1 Tree Planted
To keep with their promise of remaining eco-friendly, GreenGeeks commits to planting one tree for each hosting plan people sign up for.
Uptime and Reliability
GreenGeeks’ servers performed exceptionally well in our tests with a perfect uptime of 100%, which is as good as it gets. While the company still advertises an uptime of 99.99% for practical reasons, you can rely on your GreenGeeks website being up virtually all the time.
Site Response Time
GreenGeeks’ websites have excellent site response times due to various loading and processing speed-enhancing practices like CDN. While the servers might not be built to handle data from extremely busy websites from MNCs, they are more than capable of performing efficiently virtually all the time when it comes to small-to-medium-sized business websites with sizable traffic.
In addition to great servers, GreenGeeks offers CloudFlare services with many of its hosting packages, further speeding things up.
Our testing shows that GreenGeeks has an average page load time of 1.035 s, and an average response time of 478ms, so your site will load very quickly.
Optimized WordPress Tool
GreenGeeks also helps its customers by providing a variety of WordPress site-building tools. Customers using these tools can be confident their sites are properly made and configured to be up, stable, and load quickly at all times.
How SSL Certificates Provide Better Security
Every GreenGeeks hosting package (including the most basic, shared ones) come with a free SSL certificate. But why is that worth mentioning? What exactly are SSL certificates and why does your website need one?
Simply put, SSL certificates are encryption protocols used to protect your data from malicious third party interception. They help define a series of actions that your web browser and data servers (cloud-based in most cases) must execute every time there is an exchange of data.
Protection Against Data Erasure
GreenGeeks’ data servers are processed using the “RAID 10” protocol, which is an advancement on the RAID 1 protocol that most other services use. RAID 1 employs simple data mirroring, which duplicates data and uses it as a backup storage in the event of a server failure. RAID 10 both mirrors and stripes* data to increase data redundancy and hence significantly reduce the risk of data loss.
Striping in RAID is when data is divided into equal parts and stored on different servers. This way the processing is delegated to several servers and as a result is much quicker and safer.
Another great thing about GreenGeeks’ support: the team isn’t there just when something is wrong. It also offers some excellent training, migration help, and informational resources to help you to become an expert in hosting your site. If you have some extra time in your day, we recommend spending it learning more about how to optimize your hosting with GreenGeeks.
GreenGeeks’ live chat is very responsive. Customer support executives are assigned to users almost instantly and most user problems are solved easily by them. GreenGeek’s support team can be contacted easily even if you aren’t currently a subscriber of its services.
The following are just some of the recent product improvements rolled out by GreenGeeks:
- All its servers are now completely RAID-10 SSD-based as opposed to the previous SSD-cache-based setup which was less secure.
- Since last year, all of GreenGeeks’ servers are PHP7 enabled by default.
- GreenGeeks periodically updates its virus definition base which informs both the users and the system about the latest malware threats.
- WordPress support is now made available to all users to help them improve site performance.
Compare GreenGeeks Alternatives
GreenGeeks might be one of the best choices for small businesses that do not need hefty private servers. But the steep pricing for its VPS and dedicated hosting options makes it unfit for larger businesses who might not want to spend as much. I looked closely at the top alternatives, spent time using its services, and researched each one for hours. My research provides objective information about each company so you can find the best one for you.
See how GreenGeeks compares to other top-tier hosting companies the team here at Digital.com recommends:
Frequently Asked Questions About GreenGeeks
What Operating System Does GreenGeeks Use?
Does GreenGeeks Use cPanel?
How Do I Cancel My GreenGeeks Account?
What if I Didn’t Receive My GreenGeeks Login Email?
Site Migration Instructions for GreenGeeks
Here’s how site migration on GreenGeeks works:
Step 1: Navigate to the ‘Migration Request’ button on the dashboard present as a toolbar on the left side of your GreenGeeks window.
Step 2: Select your current hosting service.
Step 3: Enter the following details onto the webform that pops up:
- Previous Hosting Provider
- Control Panel URL
- Control Panel Type
- FTP Hostname
- Control Panel/FTP Username
- Control Panel/FTP Password
Once you press submit, the site migration team takes over.
How Many Customers Does GreenGeeks Have?
How Many Websites Can You Host on GreenGeeks?
Is GreenGeeks Good for WordPress Hosting?
Does My GreenGeeks Plan Include Email Hosting?
Will GreenGeeks Email Still Work if My Domain Registration Is Expired?
Is It Possible to Sign Up for GreenGeeks Without a Credit Card?
Does GreenGeeks Offer Forum Support?
How I Rated GreenGeeks
I chose to stick to a reliable, comprehensive rating method that evaluates web hosting providers both individually and in comparison with other market alternatives. While all parameters are considered important for writing a final review, some of them are weighed higher than the others. Site response times, customer support, and server efficiency are core parameters that for me, define the very crux of what a web hosting service offers. GreenGeeks fares excellently on almost all of these. The only areas where it seems to lag behind is a truly worldwide support (it isn’t available in a number of global locations) and a slightly steeper price point for VPS and dedicated servers.
It does, however, make up for it in terms of energy efficiency and its commitment to a better tomorrow for all of us. GreenGeeks is a nearly perfect web hosting service that is undoubtedly the best choice for energy-conscious businesses and personal users – 4.6/5
