One of the best hosting companies today is without a doubt Siteground. Its servers have the technology “Ground Cloud”, it is also recommended for those people who have their web pages.
Join us in this review to know everything related to this hosting company; the elements that distinguish it from others and more.
We are known for carefully analyzing the best hosting companies. In this case we will base ourselves on the following elements for the Siteground analysis:
Reliability: Does the Siteground service allow your website to be available all year round, 24 hours a day and seven days a week?
Your performance: Much of the hosting companies team is all about speed. Is your website loading fast enough with Siteground?
User support: Do you have effective customer service?
Rates: How much does the Siteground service cost? What promotions do you run that help you save money?
Functions: Are you a company that offers all the tools and features your website will need to be successful?
On the other hand, if you don’t have time to fully read our Siteground reviews, we have the solution for you. You can take a look at our graphical summary of Siteground
site ground abstract
Performance Rating A+ Proximity Load Time 491ms Average Response Time 137ms Free Domain No Free SSL Yes One-Click Worpress Siteground Yes Customer Support Live Chat/Phone Support/Knowledge Base
By way of summary: in our study we have found that SiteGround provides a very reliable and fast service. In terms of their hosting plans and rates, they have a lot of flexibility. Customer service is among the best in the industry.
For this reason, our team of experts recommends SiteGround as one of the best for hosting WordPress pages.
About SiteGround
The SiteGround company formally began its activities in the year 2004. Since its market launch it has rapidly progressed to become one of the best known and sought after.
The business headquarters of this company is located in Sofia, Bulgaria. It has four locations where its service offices reside. With regard to its data centers, they are spread over three of the five continents.
Today, it is a company that has more than 500 workers and within its power it offers service to more than 2,000,000 domains.
SiteGround pros and cons
We must emphasize that all companies dedicated to hosting have positive and negative characteristics. It is a reality that the advantages can largely outshine or minimize the disadvantages.
However, we must also know that some of these weaknesses can have a direct effect on the specific requirements of the clients.
Pros
- Very fast servers: In our analysis we have been able to find out that all SiteGround servers are adequate to work quickly. In fact, for their new clients they use the Google Cloud platform; which is considered one of the fastest in the industry.
- Quality user support: the customer support system also called “Siteground Support” is considered first class. This is because it offers 3 contact channels, which are: live chat, telephone service, and requirements through tickets.
- Free SSL and CDN: The setup for the CDN as well as the SSL certificate is totally free.
- Lots of server locations: This company owns data centers located between continents. The client can choose the location they want at the time of registration.
Disadvantages
- Storage limit: the plans of this company are determined by a fixed storage. Obviously, the storage it provides is of a large size and for customers who are just starting out they should know that they will not need extra storage.
- Monthly plans have high fees: the hosting service offered by this company will become high in terms of price; either choose to pay a monthly plan. Customers who choose longer term billing plans will have considerable discounts.
Siteground Performance
The issue of billing and price always play an important role when we decide to choose a web host. However, we must know that it should not be what compromises the performance of a company.
For this reason, we have decided to carry out our own tests to fully understand the performance of this service provider.
Speed test and its result
It is worth noting that the speed of a hosting is one of the most important elements; therefore it is the first thing that customers notice. The user experience will mostly be based on whether the site is fast or not.
Similarly, a good speed has a positive impact on the SEO of the site. Such is the importance that a single second of delay can cause up to 7% in the decrease in conversions.
In addition, it can subtract 11% from page views and in regards to customer satisfaction it can affect 16%.
For our test we decided to create a WordPress site at SiteGround and added content with text and images to it.
Later, we used the Pingdom tool -special to measure the speed of the site- and the results were the following:
As you can see, the site we built for testing had a load time of 1 second, or 491ms to be exact. Obtaining a performance score of 94.
Now, although it is a gratifying result, we must add as a variant that they had almost no traffic. This means that using the Pingdom tool is not enough. So, we decided to know what would be the response of the Siteground servers with traffic.
To do this, we use a tool called k6, formerly known as Laodimpact. What the tool does is gradually send up to 100 clients; in order to know what the server’s response will be to the increase in traffic. Here are the results:
The green line represents the number of virtual users that were active on the site; while the blue line shows the response time of the server. From this it can be inferred that Siteground’s performance was great.
So, if you are looking to create a site that is extremely fast, the ideal is to use Siteground.
The great speed provided by this company is due to the fact that most of the servers are hosted on Google Cloud Platform. Also, because UltraFast PHP was added and they also created a custom WordPress plugin.
Finally, we test our site to measure downtime, with these results:
Siteground response speed
Users who are new to creating websites should know that the content of the site directly affects the loading time of the page. Therefore, if the content is expressed, the response time of the server will increase significantly.
This means that the tests carried out previously are not sufficient to reflect the precision; regarding the actual speed of the hosting server. Thinking about it, we decided to also test the actual response time of the server.
For this test we decided to use Bitcatcha, a tool that ignores page content; measuring only the server response time. Similarly, this tool provides an average loading speed; testing from different locations.
Let’s see the results in the following graph:
As we can see, Siteground turns out to be an excellent choice, whether the target audience is mainly the United States.
Response time was less than a second in all locations Bitcatcha used.
One of the things that this service provider allows is to change the location of your server. In this way you can locate it as close as possible to where your target audience is.
SiteGround Hosting Plans and Features
In total there are four Siteground hosting plans that users and customers can enjoy. Depending on your needs and how advanced your site is, you can choose any of them:
- Shared hosting plan: This type of hosting is recommended for websites that start activities. Small sites, bloggers, small businesses, or online stores. This hosting plan is the one indicated for websites where the traffic is small.
- WordPress Hosting: WordPress is what this shared hosting plan was all about. By purchasing it, you will get the latest WordPress updates from Siteground; which will undoubtedly help you improve the performance of your page.
- Cloud Hosting: a flexible upgrade to shared hosting solution is what this hosting plan provides. Obtaining this plan will be able to make use of the resources provided by the cloud architecture. This is a plan that is recommended for sites and pages that are growing.
- WooCommerce Hosting Plan: The same thing happens with this plan as eating WordPress hosting; only included is the optimized version of WooCommerce.
Overview of SiteGround Starter and Shared Hosting Plans
For those people who have in mind starting a website, the best recommendation is to purchase any of the shared hosting plans offered by SiteGround-
Here’s his breakdown:
- Start: with this plan the user can host a website. For this, a 10GB disk capacity is included. This special plan to host sites that have approximately 10,000 visits per month. By purchasing it they will have all the basic functions such as: one-click WordPress installation, website transfers, free setup, backups, free CDN, free SSL and more.
- GrowBig: This plan allows customers to host unlimited websites. Disk memory is 20 GB. The recommended for sites or pages that handle an estimated 25,000 visits per month. The user will automatically get all the features of the Startup plan.
- GoGeek: this is the recommended plan for specialized e-commerce websites. The number of monthly visitors that is handled is around 100,000 visitors. It provides all the features of Growbig and other advanced features.
All Siteground plans come with faster disk storage. Also, they have email accounts, free SSL certificate, network support and more.
Siteground Customer Service and Support
We must emphasize first of all that the customer service of this service provider is first class.
This includes telephone attention 24 hours a day, seven days a week. In addition, it has a system through email and finally through a room…