GreenGeeks Review 2023: Expert Rated 4.3/5

What Are the Pros and Cons of GreenGeeks?

GreenGeeks is an 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 multinational corporations across multiple continents. Here are some of the other pros and cons of the service:

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
• 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, a 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 uses several innovative storage and processing technologies to help you cache and load its site data more quickly. All the plans come with the best 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 builders

GreenGeeks partners with Weebly website 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, above the industry standard of 99.9%. An uptime of 99.99% is considered the benchmark for the 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 rules

GreenGeeks offers all the standard hosting security features that are considered to be the industry standard. This includes 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.

Trees planted

To support their eco-friendly promise, GreenGeeks commits to planting one tree for each hosting plan. GreenGeeks also purchases carbon offsets of three times as much energy the company has consumed each year.

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 times

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 tools

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 comes with a free SSL certificate. 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 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, processing is delegated to several servers and 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 PHP 7 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 available to all users to help them improve site performance.

Compare GreenGeeks Alternatives

GreenGeeks might be among 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:

How I Rated GreenGeeks

I test web hosts based on the following factors:

• Plan value: What plans are available, and do they offer a good value?
• Ease of use: Is the dashboard easy to navigate?
• Support: How fast can you get help when needed, and is support genuinely helpful?
• Features: What features does the host offer, and how do they compare to similar competitors?
• Security: Does the host offer SSL certificates, Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack protection, backup services, and scans for viruses and malware?
• Speed and uptime: Does the provider offer a fast, stable environment for your website? How does it perform in tests, and what kind of servers does the hosting company use?
• Recent improvements: What has the host done lately to update its technology and services?

Learn more about our review methodology.