Siteground Review

Here comes the latest revolution in the world of hosting. Cloud hosting is all the rage nowadays, with more and more people opting for it over the traditional options like dedicated hosting and VPS hosting.

And there’s a good reason for that. The technology it’s based on is a lot more powerful and versatile than what the traditional hosting options are based on. Cloud hosting also doesn’t subject your website to any of the risks the traditional hosting options typically do, which is again that makes it a clear winner when it comes to people that can’t afford to risk their site getting negatively affected or suffering any downtime.

Let us explain what cloud hosting is all about, though. Simply put, it’s a pool that combines multiple servers to offer the best of hosting experience to every site hosted on each of the server that’s a part of it.

For example, a VPS hosting service would allow you to use a part of one of its servers. If something goes wrong with the server, all the sites hosted on it would be affected or face a downtime. Similarly, when using a dedicated hosting service, if the server you bought doesn’t perform the way it’s intended to, it may lead to various issues, including a downtime.

However, in both these instances, your site may not get affected in any way in case it uses cloud hosting. This is because instead of just having one server, it has a “pool” comprising of multiple servers. So when something goes wrong with one of them, your site instantly starts using the resources from one of the many other servers, meaning that the chances of something happening to your site or it having a downtime are very, very rare.

This hosting technology also allows you to use as many resources as you need by accommodating your changing requirements. For example, let’s say your website suddenly has huge traffic spikes due to some large-scale promotions you recently did.

Now, if it were hosted on a shared hosting server, it would probably fail to handle the traffic spikes. However, with a cloud hosting service, it would simply use additional resources from one of the other servers in order to easily handle the suddenly increased traffic of your site.

This is something that also makes it a lot more scalable than a VPS. As it’s a large network of servers, you can probably scale as much as you want, while there are limitations on the scalability when it comes to VPS hosting, due to limited server resources.

However, cloud hosting is not just about the benefits it offers to your site. It also allows hosting providers to easily handle the increased server resources requirement by simply adding more servers to the network. This makes it so much easier for them to handle growing use of their server resources, which could be quite challenging if it there VPS or shared hosting. So it’s a clear win-win situation for both.

But there’s more to the benefits cloud hosting offers. While your website always being up and running – and using as much resources as it needs is great – it’s also protected by a much better level of security.

For one, cloud hosting puts your site in a much better position against DDoS attacks, something that have been growing increasingly and worryingly common in recent times. With a network as large as a cloud hosting one supporting your site, the DDoS attackers would have quite a task flooding the servers with tons of requests that could cause the network to fail.

Similarly, due to being able to handle traffic spikes better and access to a huge amount of resources, your site also tends to load a lot faster with a good cloud hosting plan.

As far as its limitations are concerned, then there’s perhaps only that it doesn’t offer the kind of flexibility and control that a VPS or dedicated hosting service does. You’re not provided root access, meaning that you cannot customize the server based on your needs.

However, that’s not going to bother most people looking for a hosting service, and the benefits of cloud hosting far outweigh this one obvious downside. Due to this, cloud hosting may definitely turn out to be a great option for:

• Pretty much every site that can’t risk going offline even for a very small duration of time
• Established online stores that are growing steadily
• Site owners that are getting large amounts of traffic but don’t want that to lead to a lower loading speed for the visitors
• Ecommerce sites that want to better handle the traffic spikes during the sales season or big promotional campaigns

Factors to Consider

Well, now that you’re aware of pretty much every type of hosting out there and what each of them brings to the table, you may easily be able to figure out what exactly you should be going for. However, only deciding on the type of hosting is not even half the job done, as the more important decision is WHICH hosting service to go with.

After all, even the right type of hosting offered by a wrong hosting service may still lead to disappointing results.

This is the reason it’s important to spend some time exploring the various important factors of a hosting service – which, in this case, happens to be an increasingly popular one out there – SiteGround.

But before we get down to that, please note that we will only be discussing about the shared hosting plans of SiteGround for the most part, as that’s what most people reading this article would be interested in. Also, as far as the other types of hosting services are concerned, then most of the other popular hosts, too, offer a great quality of service. This isn’t rocket science to understand, as those SiteGround plans are priced significantly higher than shared hosting.

Most of the issues are typically associated with shared hosting, which is what most people are usually after, so we would only be focusing on it in what is going to be one of the most in-depth SiteGround review.

Uptime

The uptime is THE most important factor when it comes to any hosting service. It refers to the time for which your hosted site stays online. Of course, you would like this number to be as close to 100% as possible, as 100% means that it’s always online, which is pretty much what you want.

However, a poor uptime is one of the most common issues with many of the shared hosting services out there. While the obvious downside of a poor uptime is your site not being available for your visitors and potential customers when it’s down, there are actually some deeper issues at all that are not so obvious.

It’s a proven fact that if a site stays offline for too long or goes down too often, it’s going to affect its rankings in Google and other search engines in a negative way. If your site relies on organic traffic, this could mean your sales taking a hit over a period of time.

Similarly, even visitors or potential customers that find your site offline too often wouldn’t have a very good image of your brand in their mind. This may translate to a poorer brand image, something that’s much harder to repair than some lost traffic or even lost rankings to a certain extent.

But luckily, you won’t have to worry about any of these things if you decide to go with SiteGround’s shared hosting plan. This is because a lot of research and tens of tests have been made to test its performance and if they really have an 100% uptime, and all of them have concluded that SiteGround offers an unbelievably high uptime of 99.5% to 100%.

In fact, during some of the tests, there was no instance of even a second of downtime, with the uptime turning out to be a staggering 100%. With some of the other tests, the uptime was just a tad bit lower between 99.9% and 100%, with only just one test reporting it to be 99.51%.

This means that it’s safe to conclude that the SiteGround uptime is going to be about 99.9% at the least with SiteGround’s share hosting service, though there may be a rare few cases where it ends up being just a bit lower. And if you’re new to shared hosting services, then let us tell you know these are the best numbers you will ever see associated with a shared hosting service’s uptime.

You can be sure of getting the same kind of uptime as what was recorded during these tests, as they were not based on just a couple months’ results, but over a long period of time. Hence, these numbers are actually quite reliable, and you will find your site, too, being online pretty much all of the time, with there being no major instances of even a minor downtime.

Of course, you can never get an uptime as high with many of the other shared hosting services. In fact, a large majority of them seem to get as low as just 95%, or even lower with their uptime, which can obviously be disastrous for any growing business or even a blog.

SiteGround apparently manages to achieve such impressively high uptime by not relying on readily-available software solutions, but instead developing their own in-house ones. This itself translates to a much higher quality of hosting experience.

Also, based on the data available about the kind of hosting technology SiteGround uses, some of the other benefits with respect to the uptime include:

• The site managing to stay online even when there’s a sudden influx of a large amount of traffic; the servers are designed in a way that allows them to handle such large, unexpected traffic spikes
• SiteGround boasts some of the best security features among all hosting companies, meaning that you may never experience those large instances of downtime caused by external factors – something that are worryingly common with some of the cheaper hosts out there
• SiteGround has also managed to develop one of the most advanced hosting system that automatically monitors their servers every 0.5 seconds, and also automatically fixes most issues that may lead to a downtime without the need of any human intervention

Finally, as far as the average uptime is concerned of SiteGround’s shared hosting services, then you would be pleasantly surprised to know that it’s at least 99.79%, if not higher.

Server Response Time (Speed)

If there was ever a feature as important as the uptime, it has to be the server response time or speed. Just like the uptime, the loading speed of your site is capable of making or breaking your online success.

Just as none of your visitors or potential clients would like to see your site offline when they want to access it, they sure wouldn’t be pleased if it takes a long time to load, either.

With the internet coming up with more advanced and better technologies, everything has become so fast that not many would be willing to wait like 10 seconds for your site to fully load, only to again have to another 10 seconds when they click on another page on your site.

Needless to say, this is going to lead to a very poor user experience. And if you don’t already know, search engines like Google are all about the user experience. If you can’t offer a great user experience to the people visiting your site, they will quickly knock your rankings down for the keywords that have been helping you attract all your potential clients or buyers.

Just to talk some real data again, there have been extensive tests made to find out what impact would a delay of just a second in the loading speed have on your overall online business. And the results clearly suggested that it could lead to a 7% decrease in conversions, lower your page views by 11%, and decrease the quality of the overall customer satisfaction by about 16%.

And of course, it’s worth noting that this would only be due to your site taking just a second more to load. It’s more than common with some of the cheaper hosting services to have more than a few seconds of delay, which is often not even temporary.

This is usually when they start crowding their servers by overselling their service at dirt-cheap prices. You obviously don’t want to fall for their seemingly super low prices, as they may cost you a lot more in the longer run.

With all that said, SiteGround again comes out a winner here. And again, nothing what we are saying here is our own opinion. All the numbers that we are talking are a result of multiple extensive tests and a lot of thorough research.

SiteGround has been pretty consistent with its server response time, although it does seem to be hovering in a rather slightly wide range. Getting to the number you’re looking for, most of the tests performed to determine the accurate loading speed of the site(s) hosted on SiteGround’s shared hosting servers found that they fully load up in well under a second.

In fact, in many cases where the server resources being demanded were on the lower side, the time taken for the site to load up turned out to be under 400ms. Now, that’s quite some speed for a shared hosting service.

More importantly, the server response times are fairly stable and consistent; although, as we said, they tend to be in a bit of a wide range. For example, with a growing number of visitors flooding your site, it may go from under 400ms to, say, about 800ms, but it definitely wouldn’t spike up to crazy high loading times like more than a couple seconds.

A particular test also had a much different approach to finding a more accurate server response time offered by SiteGround’s shared hosting services. What it did was, instead of simply checking the loading speed on a dummy site, it actually sent a hundred visitors to the site.

However, it did this in a way that the site starts demanding a lot more of the server’s resources out of nowhere. This is because while new visitors kept coming in, the old ones didn’t leave. In other words, the site started having more and more visitors browsing it at the same time.

This was done to find out how SiteGround managed hosting handles those tricky situations when there’s a sudden spike in the traffic and hundreds of visitors are browsing your site at the same time. However, to your surprise, SiteGround didn’t have any hiccups with this challenge as well.

Its loading speed still remained in its impressively consistent range of 400ms to under 800ms. In fact, even at the time when there were 100 users sending requests to the server, the server response time was just about half a second.

But guess what? We don’t want to leave any stone unturned in finding out as much as we can about SiteGround’s server response time. And to do that we actually went ahead and picked a REAL site being hosted with SiteGround’s shared hosting server, and performed tests on it to find out what SiteGround had to offer to this site.

Now, before we reveal the results, let us tell you that this was no 10-page site or even a 100-page blog. The site in question has well over a massive 2000 pages indexed in Google. Here’s a screenshot of the Google result where we only searched for all of this site’s pages.

What’s more, this was not one of those usual sites getting a few hundred visitors a month. As you can tell from the screenshot below, it had about a hundred thousand people frequenting its site the month we performed this test.

Now, this is actually an extreme example, as not even 10% of all the sites hosted on shared hosting services boast such numbers. So after taking everything into consideration, we were beyond impressed when our test result for this site’s loading speed came out.

If you think this result is on the higher side given all the numbers we discussed here, think again! This is a site getting close to a hundred thousand unique visitors, while having as many as about 2200 pages indexed in Google.

In addition to that, the majority of its posts are media-rich, meaning that they consume a lot more of the server’s resources than most of the other posts would. When you take all these factors into account, the page loading speed of 1.84 seconds is more than what you can ask for from a shared hosting service allowing you to host such a beast of a site for well under $10 a month.

Another important piece of information we discovered during the test that we would like to bring to your notice is that there were just 166 sites hosted on the server the said site was hosted on. This too is something worthy of appreciation, especially given many shared hosting services have a reputation for allowing thousands of sites to crowd just a single server, resulting in a very poor server response rate for all of the sites hosted.

Finally, while everything we discussed above already makes SiteGround one of the best shared hosting services out there – if not THE best shared hosting service – there’s something more that helps it absolutely stand out even from the more reliable and popular hosting providers.

SiteGround, unlike most other shared hosting providers, has as many as 5 different data centers. They are located in different countries across the world, which has been done to offer the best possible level of performance to every buyer that purchases a shared hosting plan from SiteGround.

Again, if you’re new to all these rather technical details, let us tell you why it makes a difference. The thing is, when someone visits your site, they send a request to the server your site is hosted on, which the server returns with the information they are looking for. But this also means that the “requests” here have to travel a long distance to both reach the server and then be returned to the user.

While a server located in Utah may be perfect for US traffic, it’s not going to be ideal if the majority of your traffic is coming from a country located thousands of miles away from the US. This is going to affect the server response time significantly, and it may not turn out to be good enough even if your hosting provider actually offers a decent loading time to users visiting your site from places near to the location of the server.

And this is precisely why SiteGround stands out here. It has its data centers located in:

• Chicago (USA)
• Amsterdam (Netherlands)
• Singapore
• London (UK)
• Milano (Italy)

Thanks to strategically locating its servers at just the right places, SiteGround manages to offer a great performance for every site hosted on its servers no matter where the users are coming from across the world.

You can choose the location nearest to the country of your potential users or buyers using the Data Centers dropdown menu that can be found under the “Hosting Services” section when placing your order with SiteGround. Here’s a screenshot that may help you explain it better:

Price

The pricing can be just as important as the other two factors we discussed above for most people. After all, the reason they are looking to go for a shared hosting service in the first place is because it’s very cost-effective and affordable way to go online.

However, more often than not, new site owners end up going for the cheapest service they can find and, as you would expect, end up regretting doing so big time.

This is simply because it’s not difficult for a shared hosting service to offer dirt-cheap prices if they don’t want to care about the performance. They can simply sell space on the same server to more and more sites that is already hosting thousands of sites.

Hence, only going by the pricing when choosing a hosting provider is a recipe for disaster. You may not only lose what you pay such a hosting provider, but also trigger a host of other issues that may take a lot of time, efforts, and, in many cases, financial resources to recover.

For instance, if your site’s rankings in the search engines have been affected due to the poor quality of the hosting, you may have to hire an SEO expert to help you regain them. Similarly, if the visitors and potential customers that tried to visit your site in the past didn’t had a good experience due to frequent downtimes or an annoyingly long server response time, they are not very likely to return to your site.

While there may be many other issues, too; but we hope you get the idea based on these things. Now, with that out of the way, let’s get to the pricing of SiteGround.com’s shared hosting plans.

We understand you do not want to spend big on things just yet as you may not be sure about the success of your online business. But, we don’t believe affordability should come at the cost of performance, and that’s pretty much why we highly recommend SiteGround as a shared hosting service.

It offers an amazing balance of affordability and superior performance, which is also clearly evident in it becoming one of the most popular shared hosting solutions on the market despite being founded as recently as in 2004.

Let us now take a quick look at SiteGround’s shared hosting plans.

StartUp

It’s the most basic shared hosting plan being offered by Site Ground, priced at just $3.95. It allows you to host one website, offering 10GB of web space and being ideal for sites getting up to 10 000 monthly visits.

However, despite being the most basic plan and priced so low, it comes with all the great hosting features Site Ground offers, which it terms as “Essential Features.”

GrowBig

The name does a pretty good job of explaining what type of users it may be a good fit for. Priced at $5.95 per month, the GrowBig plan allows hosting multiple websites, with the amount of web space offered being 20GB.

As far as handing the traffic is concerned, it wouldn’t have any problem allowing your sites to run smoothly and load quickly as long as they are getting up to 25000 visitors combined.

Now, something we would like to note here is that being ideal for a certain number of visitors doesn’t mean your sites would go offline if you end up getting more traffic, or even that they would instantly start having very long loading times or other issues.

You may easily be able to use the Grow Big plan even if you’re getting considerably more traffic than 25000 visitors per month, although the performance may not be as good as if your traffic remains under the recommended traffic limit by SiteGround.

Finally, the GrowBig shared hosting plan at SiteGround also comes with four Premium features, besides all the Essential ones that are also included with the StartUp plan.

GoGeek

GoGeek is the biggest shared hosting plan offered by SiteGround, and you can get it for $11.95 per month. While it too allows hosting multiple websites like the GrowBig plan, it offers a much higher amount of web space at 30GB.

Similarly, it’s a very powerful shared hosting service and would deliver top-notch performance across all your websites getting up to 100,000 monthly visitors combined.

Apart from the Essential and Premium features, the GoGeek plan also comes with what SiteGround terms as “Geeky Advanced features,” something that may definitely appeal to some of the more technically experienced site owners out there.

Site Ground’s Pricing – How Does It Compare to the Others?

While the SiteGround’s shared hosting services are surprisingly cheap, you may be wondering whether the prices are anything better than some of the other popular shared hosting services on the market. So we will help you get a very detailed view of what the pricing looks like across a few different reliable hosting options, although we are not going to discuss any of the hosts offering temptingly low prices and then disappointing on the performance front.

SiteGround vs. Bluehost

We probably wouldn’t be wrong if we said that the SiteGround vs. Bluehost comparison is one of the most popular shared hosting comparisons in the industry. And that’s for a reason.

Both these hosting providers enjoy a great reputation, are believed to be more reliable than most other options you can go for, as well as offer pretty much the same prices across their shared hosting plans.

Bluehost prices its hosting plans at $3.95, $5.95, and $5.95 per month, respectively. As you can see, the prices are exactly the same except for the most premium plan, which is available for just $5.95 per month at Bluehost while costing $11.95 per month at SiteGround.

Besides the pricing difference between their premium shared hosting plans, there are many other major differences as well. While the number of sites you can host with Bluehost’s shared hosting plans is exactly the same as with Site Ground’s plans, the amount of server resources offered by the former is significantly higher.

Bluehost offers 50GB of web space with its basic plan, and unmetered or unlimited web space with its other two plans. On the other hand, you get 10GB, 20GB and 30GB of web space, respectively, with each of the SiteGround’s three plans.

So Bluehost is a clear winner, isn’t it? Well, it’s certainly not as easy to decide as it might seem, and it’s also not exactly what it seems to be at the surface.

This is because despite Bluehost seemingly having a clear edge over SiteGround, the performance of the former is far from considerably better than the latter. One of the major reasons for this is that while SiteGround offers SSD disk space, Bluehost does not. And this right here can be quite a difference-maker, and make the otherwise modest web space of 10GB (with the most basic plan) more than enough for most small websites.

Also, another thing is that while SiteGround recommends a particular amount of traffic for each of its shared hosting plans, it actually doesn’t put a limit on the amount of traffic you get. So while you may get the best possible performance if you get up to 10,000 visitors a month, it may still be pretty decent even if you’re getting a lot more traffic.

Many more features like free daily backup and advanced security features, too, that you get with a SiteGround shared hosting plan are not included with Bluehost’s plans, and you’re required to purchase them separately.

Another important consideration to make here is the number of sites hosted on each server. It looks like SiteGround is much more careful with the number of sites it allows on each server than Bluehost.

Without going into further and more technical details, you may get a much better experience with SiteGround than Bluehost as far the overall performance is concerned. However, maybe some site owners that are very new about internet marketing and don’t know a thing about websites may find Bluehost to be a slightly better option due to it being extremely beginner-friendly.

SiteGround vs. Hostgator

Hostgator offers exactly the same prices as Bluehost, meaning it has a bit of an edge over SiteGround if you’re considering to go for the premium shared hosting plan. However, for the other two plans, the price is going to be exactly the same with both the hosting providers.

Again, just like Bluehost, Hostgator allows you to host one website on its most basic hosting plan while you can host as many sites as you want on the other two more expensive plans. It also offers unmetered bandwidth and storage, against SiteGround’s unlimited bandwidth but limited storage.

However, unmetered really isn’t all that great when there are hundreds or thousands of other sites getting the same kind of unmetered storage as you, hosted on the same server as your site. Of course, this takes a toll on the overall performance, which is why we see Hostgator no longer dominating the hosting space as it once used to.

With that said, we think SiteGround is a clear winner in this comparison, especially if you’re looking to buy one of the first two shared hosting plans it offers.

SiteGround vs. GoDaddy

This is perhaps the easiest comparison of all. Most people familiar with the shared hosting industry know that GoDaddy has a pretty bad reputation as a hosting provider.

It might be the most popular web hosting company for domain registration, but it sure isn’t anywhere as popular among site owners looking for a shared hosting solution.

GoDaddy’s first two plans are considerably cheaper than SiteGround’s basic plan, but ONLY if you decide to buy it for a period of 36 months. When you’re only buying for 12 months, SiteGround’s basic plan may turn out to be more affordable than the second basic plan of GoDaddy.

Both the plans of GoDaddy offer a storage of 30 GB and 100 GB, although you wouldn’t really feel you’re getting anywhere near as much when your site is actually hosted with them. They both allow hosting one site each.

While the Deluxe and Ultimate plans of GoDaddy might be more accommodating, you would be paying just as much as you would for SiteGround’s GrowBig and GoGeek plans. But when you consider the performance and other important factors like security features, you would find SiteGround to be an absolute no-brainer over GoDaddy’s plans that don’t even offer a pricing advantage when you only buy for 12 months.

Long Plan Commitment

So we just gave you quite some insight into how SiteGround stacks up against some of its biggest competitors. We will now find out whether you can get a bit of a pricing advantage if you buy any of the SiteGround’s shared hosting plans for a period longer than 12 months, which is where the hosting companies decide to offer much more attractive pricing.

Now, here’s the thing. SiteGround offers the same price regardless of whether you buy for 12 months or 36 months. On the other hand, most other hosting providers, including the ones we discussed above, make you buy for a period of 36 months to get their best price.

This means that you actually get a pretty big pricing advantage with SiteGround over its competitors if you’re not looking to buy for anything longer than 12 months. Also, it speaks volumes about SiteGround’s confident in its service.

It doesn’t have to “lock-in” its customers by luring them to buy for 36 months to get the best price. It believes in its hosting technology, and a look into its performance history over the years tells us that we have a reason to believe in it too.

However, you do get a great advantage if you buy for 36 months, although you still pay the same price. The thing is, while SiteGround prices its plan as low as $3.95 per month, the regular price for the same plan is $9.95 per month, which is what you will be paying when the initial hosting period of your plan expires.

So by going for the 36 months plan, you actually get the great price for 3 years, and would have to pay the higher regular price only after that.

Let us know explore some of the other important areas of SiteGround hosting below.

Security Features

SiteGround is really big on security features. In fact, there’s probably no other shared hosting provider out there that offers the kind of advanced security features that SiteGround does. It’s quickly go over its security might.

Unique Account Isolation

We are sure you have never heard of it. Well, it’s a feature that SiteGround has employed to ensure that, even when one of the sites hosted on the same server as your site is hacked or faced with other similar issues, the other sites – including your site – aren’t affected.

Now this is really a crucial feature that helps you get around one of the biggest drawbacks of shared hosting. Unfortunately, none of the other shared hosting providers seem to offer this feature, making SiteGround a clear winner if the security of your site is of utmost importance to you.

Software always being kept up-to-date

Something that makes sites easy targets for hackers is the server using outdated software. According to SiteGrounds, all the top 5 shared hosting providers use outdated software in some or the other form.

It also goes on to say that even hosts that immediately upgrade the software as soon an update is released, may still not be secure enough. This is because often times, even when a software is compromised, it takes days or even months for an update to be released to address the issue.

This delay may obviously leave your site in a much more vulnerable position as there may be hackers aware of the security holes and the servers not being as secure until the update is released and implemented.

To get around this, SiteGround not only always keeps all its software up-to-date, but also writes its own patches to fix any issues until an official update is released by the developers.

Needless to say, you couldn’t even dream of getting this level of security with most other shared hosting services. What’s more, SiteGround also has many anti-hack systems in place, as well as offers great help and technical support if you need to discuss anything related to the security of your site.

Then there’s also a SPAM experts spam protection feature, which helps you get support right from security experts if your site faces a spam attack or anything that puts the security of your site at risk.

The daily backup creation and other backup features make it great for you site to get back up without losing any data if it does end up getting hit by a hacking or spam attack.

Customer Support

SiteGround Customer support is usually one of the best features of their shared hosting services. As they only get a few dollars per month for hosting your site on their server, they are not exactly very keen to help you with time-consuming issues. 

They do have an extensive knowledge base and so, most of your issues could be solved just by having a quick look in there.

However, this is another area where SiteGround absolutely blows its competition away.They offer 24/7 live chat support, while you can also contact their representatives by calling SiteGround’s official phone number.

The email and phone support is just as impressive, and they are surprisingly quick at resolving issues once you open a ticket.

More importantly, however, their customer service representatives aren’t a part of the general customer tech support part, which is often the case with other hosting companies, but are actually knowledgeable about everything that has to do with hosting.

Ranging from changing nameservers to upgrading your domain from http to https, to even helping you with the email setup and other much more complex issues, there’s probably little the customer service guys at SiteGround support team can’t help you with.

Other Features

Besides the security and other features we discussed above, SiteGround also comes with a host of other great features. Let’s take a quick look at the three of the best ones below.

Free Website Builder

Anyone new to hosting their site is going to love this feature. It makes setting up the hosting account and making sure your site is hosted in the right way a breeze. SiteGround offers one of the best website builders on the internet.

It’s actually quite a feature to have for free, as some other shared hosting services seem to be charging a hefty price for it.

Lots of Extras

For something as low as $3.95, you really wouldn’t expect much, would you? But that’s exactly where SiteGround.com surprises you, as it offers more than a few great free features just like the one above.

Some of these include:

• Free daily backup
• Free Cloudflare CDN (Content Delivery Network)
• Free SSL certificate
• SuperCacher for faster loading

Very Beginner-Friendly

Advanced security and other features and beginner-friendliness is a very, very rare combo when it comes to shared hosting. To our surprise, SiteGround manages to offer that as well.

Despite all the advanced features and superior security, SiteGround magically manages to be just as easy to use as some of the other most beginner-friendly hosts that having nothing similar to offer in terms of security and other advanced features.

With SiteGound, you have the drag and drop builder as a part of the beginner-friendly site-builder feature, unlimited free email accounts (that are easy to set up and use), free site transfer or CMS install, availability of both SiteGround cPanel and Softaculous, unlimited sub and parked domains, and many more.

These features not only make the users’ online marketing journey a lot simpler, but also saves them a lot of initial costs as these features might cost a bomb if you were to buy them separately at another hosting provider.

Integrations/Apps

Just like some of the other popular hosting providers, SiteGround offers Google Apps integration as well right from your account. However, setting it up and using it seems to be a lot more easier at www.SiteGround.com than others.

All you would need to do is select the free domain you want to use Google Apps with, as well as choose the apps to use, and you will be good to go. Deleting a Google App you no longer want to use would be just as simple, as you would easily be able to do it by deleting it from the Google Apps Manager.

This might not seem like a big deal but if you go through some detailed SiteGround reviews of customers who have been with them for a few months or more, you will know how convenient things get when everything you want to do with Google Apps is usually just a click away.

Similarly, SiteGround makes sure it’s a breeze to install and use the two most popular applications for your site: WordPress and Joomla.

There are auto-installers available for both, as well as other features like auto-updater, superchacher (to make your site load faster when using these applications) and even something known as Staging & Git for advance users.

Backups

When using Site Ground for your hosting needs, you will not have to worry about losing your precious data overnight. It keeps daily backups for you for free, but you may have to have their backup service enabled to restore the data.

For shared hosting, SiteGrounds keeps backup of up to 30 days, while with cloud hosting your data is stored with them for up to 7 days.

Site Migrations

If you’re looking to transfer your site to a new hosting from its old one, then many other popular shared hosting services may make it an expensive affair. Bluehost, for one, charges $149.99 for migrating up to 5 sites and 20 email accounts.

SiteGorund, surprisingly, offers free site migration. It’s easy to see how you may actually be able to get more than 3 years of hosting with SiteGround.com for the price of just the site migration service at Bluehost.

Refund Policy

SiteGround is very clear and transparent with its refund policy, which is hard to come by when you’re dealing with shared hosting providers. It offers a 30 day money back guarantee, under which you’re eligible to get a full refund for your hosting charges should the service fail to meet your expectations.

Domain names and renewal charges are not covered under this policy, but only the initial hosting costs. Also, cloud and dedicated hosting services, too, do not allow you to request for a refund.

As for the reseller packages, you will be eligible for a full refund only if you cancel the entire account; refund is not allowed for cancelation of individual accounts.

When requesting for a refund, you would have to do it from your user area. It would probably also keep you updated about the refund status once you request it.

Everything at a Glance

Now that you have just read through what may definitely be one of the most in-depth SiteGround hosting review, let us help you quickly go over its major pros and cons.

Pros:

• Great uptime, with pretty much no instances of any serious downtime
• Great server response time even for large sites with thousands of pages and a huge amount of visitors
• The most affordable performance to price ratio arguably ever offered by a shared hosting service
• Perhaps the most secure shared hosting service on the market
• Likely the only shared hosting service where one of the sites on a server being hacked doesn’t affect the other sites hosted on the server
• Highly knowledgeable customer support that you can get in touch with 24/7 through the always-online chat option
• Tons of additional features offered for free which are certainly worth quite a bit if you were to buy them separately
• Very beginner-friendly with tons of detailed tutorials that are second to none in the industry; the user settings and the overall user interface is fairly simple to understand, customize and use
• Free daily backups giving you the peace of mind you need with respect to your precious data
• Free site migration service, which costs $149.99 at Bluehost
• 30-day refund policy that allows you to get a full refund on your hosting charges if you’re not satisfied with the service within 30 days of use

Cons:

• The web space being a little limited when compared to some of the other shared hosting services, but SiteGround being an SSD host more than makes up for it
• No real pricing advantage when paying for 36 months of hosting together over 12 months of hosting; but it does allow you to get the promotional pricing instead of the higher regular prices for a longer period
• Some of the features can be a bit too advanced for someone without any knowledge of SiteGround web hosting, but they may not need it anyway so it’s not something to lose any sleep over
• Some of the features we highlighted in this SiteGround review were specifically designed for developers and can be absolutely useless for other users (again, you don’t have to bother yourself with it – and can safely ignore them)

Here’s Our Final Word

To cut right to the chase, we honestly doubt if we could recommend a shared hosting better than SiteGround. It goes above and beyond as a shared hosting service, and offers a lot more than what you would expect at $3.95 per month.

Be it the overall performance, uptime, speed, security features or even the ease of use; SiteGround just doesn’t leave much to be desired at all and it's a top contender for the best web hosting service.

And if there was any room for confusion, SiteGround easily overcomes that by offering a free migration service, a feature that could save you up to $150 if you’re migrating from another hosting provider.

Our verdict is based on some extremely well-researched factors and our own tests, although there are probably hundreds of SiteGround hosting reviews where the customers are proudly vouch for their services.

All said and done, regardless of whether you’re hosting a site for the first time or migrating to a new host, SiteGround may totally turn out to be your best bet. And if it doesn’t for a reason well beyond us, there’s absolutely nothing to lose, thanks to the 30-day full money back refund policy.