Siteground Review

Company Information

Siteground is a privately held web hosting company that was founded by a group of University friends in the year 2004. For the initial years, they continued to operate from the university dorm rooms and today nearly 13 years after their humble beginnings, they have progressively turned the company into a flexible web hosting organization that offers solutions and experience very different from the usual run-of-the-mill hosting companies.

Currently the company is being led by Tenko Nikolov (CEO), Reneta Tsankova and Nikolay Todorov. Siteground has 5 data centers located in 3 continents (America, Europe and Asia-Pacific), employs close to 300 staff members and globally hosts over 450,000 domains (at the time of writing) with this number increasing by the hour.

Siteground Hosting Products & Services

Siteground offers different plans in the shared hosting, cloud hosting, dedicated hosting and reseller hosting space. Whatever your goal, from personal blog to ecommerce store to online app to big business website requiring huge resources; all of these can be fulfilled with a hosting plan from Site Ground.

Shared Hosting

Siteground’s shared web hosting offering includes 3 plans:

1. StartUp Plan – Aimed at beginners who are just starting with a blog or small personal or business website, with up to 10,000 unique visitors per month
2. GrowBig Plan – Suitable for heavily-trafficked website or multiple average-size websites with a unique monthly visitor count of up to 25,000
3. GoGeek Plan – Suitable for popular, resource intensive website or medium-sized ecommerce store expecting around 100,000 unique monthly visitors

Shared hosting plans from Siteground start at a price of $3.95 per month and come with an array of features including cPanel interface. The set of essential features included with all plans are a free website builder, SSH access, Cloudflare CDN, app installs, daily backups, unlimited emails and databases. Additionally, customers can request a free transfer of their website from another webhost. A set of premium features are available with GrowBig and GoGeek plans that include SuperCacher, 1-year free SSL certificate, PCI Compliance, Priority Customer Support to name a few.

Managed Cloud Hosting

Siteground offers fully managed cloud hosting solutions for those who need more space, faster performance and capability to scale-up (which cannot be satisfied by shared hosting). You have the option to choose from 4 cloud hosting plans – Entry, Business, Business Plus and Super Power plans, based on the number of CPU cores, RAM requirements, diskspace you need and traffic bandwidth that you would want to be included in your plan. Cloud hosting packages are priced starting at $80 a month and go up to $240 a month.

All cloud hosting plans come with preinstalled OS and other software and the entire infrastructure is managed by Siteground. Also you can set these to be auto-scalable or manually add more resources with a single click. All cloud servers are Linux based SSD disks that promise ultra-fast speeds.

Dedicated Servers

Siteground also offers dedicated servers with a range of CPU, RAM, bandwidth and storage configurations. The company promises high-class and stable machines with highly innovative proprietary software to pump up the server performance. So if you want to host traffic-intensive websites or any other powerful applications, and want the server to be managed by smart professionals, Siteground dedicated servers are a great alternative. The only limitation is that all dedicated hosting solutions are Linux based; Windows server option is not available.

Reseller Hosting

Siteground also offers a Reseller hosting program which is targeted at web designers and developers who create and maintain their customers’ websites and can thus host all of these at Siteground under one reseller account. This is a white-label hosting and you can sell it under your brand name too. Siteground’s reseller hosting works on a credit system, where you need to buy at least 5 credits (each priced at $42) to join the reseller program.

Siteground Philosophy & Premium Features

Siteground believes in and maintains “The Handcraft Philosophy”. This means they work to create custom solutions to suit every client’s needs, because standard solutions come with a lot of restrictions. In a bid to come up with own innovative solutions, Siteground pays a lot of attention in hand-picking hardware, building server architecture and devising custom software solutions. All the custom software is developed by in-house team of experts who then operate, support and continue to improvise it. The company does not delegate any part of it’s services to outside agencies. This has led Siteground to develop ground-breaking technology solutions that guarantee maximum security, performance, speed and uptime.

Let’s take a look at some of the custom solutions built by Siteground, available as premium features to customers.

WordPress & Joomla Toolkits

Siteground crafts special hosting solutions for WordPress & Joomla. They have created a set of tools that can help customers to manage their WordPress and Joomla installs – reset admin passwords, change primary domain, change website permissions, moving application across folders, configuring SSL, removing an application installation etc. These toolkits are available to the customers in the User Area in their accounts.

SuperCacher

Siteground customers have access to their special web caching service built on NGINX. It offers 3 levels of caching – static, memcache and dynamic cache that makes websites ultra fast and stable.

HTTP/2

This technology gives a considerable boost to speed of HTTPS websites. You need to install an SSL certificate to enable this protocol. Additionally there are several SEO and security related benefits.

PHP 7 + Opcache

PHP 7 offers a significant speed improvement in page load times.

Developer Features (Preinstalled Git & Staging and more)

Siteground offers several geeky features for advanced developers, like one-click site-staging for WordPress & Joomla websites, Drush Command line interface (CLI) for Drupal, WP CLI for WordPress and GIT integration.

Server Account Isolation

Siteground has successfully implemented an in-house server isolation technology that isolates server accounts from each other. It identifies and prevents any vulnerable accounts from taking down the entire server. This is a great security feature for shared hosting.

Auto Updates

Siteground automatically updates all WordPress & Joomla core and plugins that keeps the customer sites safe and protected against any vulnerability.

Daily Backups

Siteground takes daily backups of all customer accounts and maintains up to 30 backup copies at any time.

Multiple Data Centers

As on date, Siteground has five data centers in 3 different continents. At the time of purchasing hosting, Customers can pick up a server location closest to their visitors that results in fastest page load times.

1. Chicago, US – best suited for North America, South America and Africa
2. London, UK – best suited for Europe and Russia
3. Amsterdam, Netherlands and Milano – best suited for Europe and Russia
4. Singapore – best suited for Asia, South Pacific, Australia and New Zealand

Uptime & Performance

Siteground continually invests into building highly efficient server machines. Hardware upgrades, software updates, server configuration tweaking & testing and devising of custom security software are a regular thing in the company. Siteground employs unique downtime prevention software to monitor server status in real time. Their custom software can track down and resolve 90% issues without requiring nay human interaction. They also use account isolation technology to detect and separate any vulnerable accounts. Spare parts for all hardware are kept on-site. In event of any security exploits, their in-house software experts write patches quickly rather than wait for software’s developers to come up with fixes. The data centers are equipped with multiple failover options (like, multiple power feeds, UPS and power generators) to achieve high level of electricity redundancy. All these measures ensure that Siteground delivers on its promise of 99.9% uptime. In fact Siteground over-delivers on this promise, all the time.

No other web hosting company comes even close to providing high standards of speed, security, uptime and reliability as Siteground, especially in the comparable price range. In fact they perform far better than other high priced premium hosting providers.

Customer Support

Siteground offers one of the best customer support in the entire web hosting industry. Support is available 24/7 through chat, phone or ticket system. It is fast and super helpful.

The ticketing system used by the company has been developed in-house and is designed to assign customer’s support request to the best suitable agent based on skill and expertise level. This leads to quick resolution of tickets and in-turn happier clients.

The chat system is also custom built. There is a beautiful element of human touch added to client interactions with the picture and profile of each customer representative added in the chat system portal that details their experience, skills and interests. So the customers know with whom they are interacting and can give personal feedback for every interaction.

Siteground guarantees a ticket response window of 10 minutes, which is great.

Apart from these, Siteground has developed a setup wizard that guides the first time customers through the User Area for things related to hosting account setup. Tons of self-help hosting material is available in the form of tutorials and webinar series.

It seems nearly impossible to pick a bone with the customer support experience provided by Siteground team.

Money Back Guarantee

Siteground offers a 30 day money back guarantee on its Linux shared hosting accounts. So if a customer cancels within 30 days of making the payment, a refund is issued. Post 30 days of account purchase, there is no provision of issuing any refund. Also any domain registration fees are deducted from the refund, if applicable. The customer has a choice of receiving the refund into the credit card used for purchase or as Siteground Virtual Wallet credit (which can later be used against any new purchases or renewals).

Read real Siteground customer reviews here.