SiteGround Web Hosting Review 2023: Expert-Rated 4.8/5

What Are the Pros and Cons of SiteGround?

SiteGround offers some of the fastest and most trustworthy hosting for individuals and small to midsize businesses (SMBs) worldwide. However, some things may indicate this hosting company is not for you. SiteGround does not offer dedicated servers, has elevated prices when you pay monthly, and there are some limited concerns related to how much disk space you will receive.

Pros of SiteGround

1. Extremely steady: SiteGround always puts reliability above everything else. Testing confirms the servers are up far more than 99.9%, the amount most hosting companies guarantee. This is due to premium quality servers, redundant power and data circuits, and much more.
2. Over 18 years of experience: SiteGround has been in business for almost 20 years and has earned an exceptional reputation. The company is trustworthy with more than 2.8 million domains running on its servers.
3. Excellent for WordPress hosting: If you are one of the millions of businesses that use WordPress to build your website, you will likely love SiteGround. You can install WordPress with one click (for free) and use hosting packages configured specifically for this type of site, making it run faster and more reliably.
4. Premium support for small businesses: SiteGround offers wonderful support to all its customers, including small businesses. The company is staffed 24/7 and understands that a business website needs immediate attention since it can directly impact your bottom line.
5. Easy-to-use admin interface and features: SiteGround has done an impressive job of designing the back end of its hosting interface. The admin panel has all the different options you usually need in one convenient place. You can set up a custom backup schedule in minutes without any experience or install WordPress or other applications with a few clicks.
6. CDN included on all hosting packages: A CDN highly improves a site’s loading times. This technology distributes the larger files (like pictures, videos, and more) from a website onto lots of servers hosted in data centers worldwide. When visitors access your site, larger files are loaded from the closest possible location. SiteGround offers a solid CDN service to all its web hosting customers, regardless of their package. This makes your site more responsive, so visitors will be happy to stay. At other hosting companies, this feature is often either unavailable or comes with added costs.

 

Cons of SiteGround

1. No dedicated servers or virtual private servers (VPS): While SiteGround has many excellent hosting options, it does not offer any dedicated servers or even VPS. If your site gets a lot of traffic, you cannot upgrade to these higher-end options. The provider has excellent cloud-based hosting options that can handle a lot of traffic. Most small businesses, entrepreneurs, individuals, and others will never require a VPS or dedicated server so this won’t be a big obstacle in most cases.
2. Limited disk space on some packages: The entry-level hosting package offers just 10 GB of space, good for most sites. But maybe not if you are running an e-commerce page and loading lots of pictures or videos of your products. Most hosting companies offer unlimited disk space, so it would be nice to see SiteGround move in that direction, though this isn’t an issue for many users.
3. Monthly prices are a little high: Though the prices are reasonable compared to many other companies, you will be paying a couple of dollars more even for entry-level hosting. SiteGround never claims to be a discount hosting company; in most cases, the extra cost is well worth it.

Automatic WordPress installation and updates

SiteGround will provide you with the tools you need to automatically install WordPress and keep it updated. This feature is available on all its packages, but most people who use WordPress can use its WordPress-specific hosting packages.

Free email hosting

One of the biggest ways SiteGround stands out from other hosting companies is that it offers great email hosting on all packages. Get your own email set up and running quickly and easily with this hosting company.

Domain-specific email addresses

Email hosting is an important feature for many site owners, especially businesses. This allows you to create email addresses that end in your domain name, which gives you a professional look. Many hosting companies charge for this feature, but not SiteGround.

You can create as many email accounts as you need without any extra charge through your cPanel. Also, you can set up spam filters, email forwarders, and other related features quickly and easily.

Email migrator tool

Each hosting plan includes a free email migrator tool so you can transfer your emails to SiteGround and have everything hosted in one place. The tool requires only a few clicks and the interface is simple to use.

Out-of-the-box caching

SiteGround offers simple caching solutions on all its hosting accounts. Caching helps a website to load more quickly for people who have been to the site in the past. Having frequent visitors to your site is very important, so this can be a useful feature.

30-day money-back guarantee

SiteGround wants to make sure that all of its customers are happy so it allows you to try the services for a full 30 days. If you don’t love your experience, you can get a full refund.

Daily backups

All hosting packages from SiteGround can have daily backups enabled. Note you can set up your custom backup schedule if daily is not the right option for you.

Easy-to-use, customized cPanel

SiteGround has customized its version of cPanel to make it easier to use. The company ensures all your most frequently accessed tools will be found at the top of the page so you can access them whenever needed. This intuitive setup makes running a website simpler than ever.

Simple to manage your services

You can manage your whole site from one SiteGround login, but it is where you deal with everything for the servers only. If you install a content management system (CMS) like WordPress, you may create a separate login for that side of things. However, creating and administering your website, email, and other related services is all done from your cPanel page.

Grow your business with dozens of site tools and add-ons

SiteGround includes a variety of tools and features to make it easier to create and run your website. Whether you are an experienced webmaster or you are making your first site ever, these tools will help you get started.

Multiple options for creating your site

No matter which hosting package you sign up for, you can choose from various CMS, including WordPress — likely selecting one of the WordPress-specific options from SiteGround. Even if you are custom coding your own website, you can upload those files through either the secured FTP option or the built-in file manager tools.

99.9% uptime guarantee

SiteGround offers a 99.9% uptime guarantee, on par with the industry average. In our experience with using this system and running tests, however, it is up far more than this. It has one of the most reliable hosting environments in the industry.

Technology to support fast page load times

SiteGround knows site loading speeds are one of the most important things for its customers, so this is always a priority. Customers who choose SiteGround will get access to SSD, CDNs, and other excellent technologies that help optimize the speed of your site. It even has hosting servers specifically configured for WordPress, WooCommerce, and other popular types of sites to get the best possible performance.

Free Google CDN integration to speed up your site

SiteGround has partnered with Google for CDN and a variety of other features. As Google expands its cloud services, SiteGround will take advantage of it for customers. Google has data centers around the world so no matter where your site’s visitors are from, they will get the speed boost made possible by this premium CDN.

Advanced security options

SiteGround goes above and beyond with security features. A dedicated team is always looking for ways to improve the security of the servers in general, and each site it hosts. Some of the great features and tools that will help to secure your site include:

• Smart firewall configuration
• AI-powered anti-bot filtering
• 24/7 active server monitoring
• Distributed backups
• Advanced WordPress security features
• Free SSL certificate

Free SSL certificate

No matter which hosting package you sign up for at SiteGround you will be given an SSL certificate from Let’s Encrypt SSL, a leader in shared certificates. Having this certificate in place will not only help secure your site but boost your rankings with the search engines.

Uptime and reliability

According to our tests, SiteGround servers had an average uptime of 99.989% over the past 30 days, which is quite impressive.

Site response times

Many things will impact a site’s response time; the way a site is actually made is one of the most important. The servers and overall configuration of the web host, however, will also have a big impact. SiteGround does an excellent job at making sure its servers respond as quickly as possible to every request.

When I ran the tests on SiteGround, the average response time was an extremely impressive 622ms. This is just a measurement of how quickly the servers respond to a request though, so do your best to create your site in a way that ensures it can load quickly.

SSL certificates

We have briefly mentioned above that even shared hosting packages come with a free SSL certificate, but what is this and why is it important? Do you, as a small business owner, need one for your website?

SSL is an encryption protocol. You can think of SSL as the series of instructions your server and a user’s web browser must follow when sending and receiving information to make sure the data being transferred is not intercepted by and read by unauthorized parties.

I was very happy with the level of support provided by SiteGround. When you are paying a little more for hosting, you expect to get help when you need it; that is just what the company provided. The customer support team is staffed 24/7 and seems genuinely interested in making sure that you have a good experience.

SiteGround offers support via phone, live chat, and email. You will also get a ticket from the internal system in the unlikely event the company can’t solve your problems on the first call.

Another thing to keep in mind is that SiteGround regularly publishes and updates its help page with many articles that can provide the answers to most questions you may have. A quick search will get you pointed in the right direction so you can move forward right away.

The following are just some of the recent product improvements from SiteGround:

• Expanding into a new Madrid-based data center

• Improved security with the launch of new site scanner tools

• Launch of SiteGround’s custom CDN

• SiteGround optimizer plug-in made available for free to all WordPress customers

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How I Rated SiteGround

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 offerSSL 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 thehosting company use?
• Recent improvements: What has the host done lately to update its technology and services?

Learn more about our review methodology.