SiteGround Review: Why have They Become Costly?

Headquartered in Bulgaria, SiteGround’s offices and servers are located around the world to ensure that its clients, globally, benefit from its 99.99% uptime and low page loading time (around 0.67 seconds). Being one of the fastest and most consistent hosting solutions, SiteGround offers exceptional 24/7, multilingual (English, Italian, and Spanish) customer support and packages at competitive rates.

In 2020, they moved to Google Cloud Platform which comes with advantages like State of the Art Network for Faster Sites, Easier scaling and resource management, Distributed storage for high data redundancy and Multiple opportunities for new data center locations. 

Let’s look more closely into the features that set SiteGround apart from other web hosts. 

99.9% Uptime Guarantee

In its Service Level Agreement, SiteGround guarantees “network uptime of 99.9% on an annual basis.” If it fails to do so, it promises one-month of free hosting for uptime between 99.9% and 99.00%, and “an additional month of free hosting for every 1% of uptime lost below 99.00%.” Of course, downtime caused due to scheduled maintenance or user errors is not included.

Better Basics

SiteGround provides free email, unlimited databases, unmetered traffic, daily backups, and free CDN and SSL on all its plans. With its StartUp plan, you get up to one website, 10 GB web space, and 10,000 monthly visits. The GrowBig and GoGeek plans allow you to host unlimited websites, but they come with 20GB and 30GB of web space, and permit up to 25,000 and 100,000 monthly visits, respectively. 

Free SSL Certificates and Cloudflare’s CDN

SiteGround offers free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates and Cloudflare’s CDN on all its plans. An SSL certificate is required for most websites; it proves that your site is secure, boosts SEO rankings, and protects personal details like IP addresses and credit card numbers. A Content Delivery Network (CDN) stores large files, such as images, on servers around the world to provide quick access. Cloudflare’s CDN will also protect your site(s) from “spammers, SQL injection attacks, DDoS attacks, excessive bot crawling, and more.”

Bot Protection and Free Transfers for WordPress Sites

At SiteGround, installing apps such as WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, and Weebly is a painless task. For WordPress, which officially recommends the company, SiteGround has designed its own bot protection system. This helps detect malicious attacks and login attempts on WordPress sites. WordPress users can also install a free WordPress Migration plugin that allows unlimited site migrations. 

Choose Your Server

SiteGround has multiple servers located across three continents. During the signup process, you can choose your preferred server location to enable quick site access and enjoy low loading time.

Some features of SiteGround, however, don’t get our approval.

No Free Site Migrations or Domains

Neither site migrations nor domains are free at SiteGround (It will cost $30). Although the larger plans come with a free website migration, if you need to transfer more than one site, you will be charged for it.

Refund and Renewal Policy

While the company has a 30-day money back guarantee for shared hosting, it has a 15-day refund policy for dedicated server, cloud server, and VPS plans. The refund policy, however, does not cover add-ons, domains, and plan renewals. It’s always recommend to go for longest term to enjoy the discounted rate for the long time.

Although SiteGround offers “monthly” plans, you will be charged an additional one-time setup fee of around $15 dollars. More importantly, once the month is up, you’ll be charged the renewal rate which is higher than the signup rate.

What’s the verdict?

Yes, yes, and yes. SiteGround is not a perfect solution and recently became costly because maybe they have moved to Google Cloud Platform, but it is one of the best web hosts out there. We say “yes” because SiteGround’s high-quality server performance and impressive customer support proves that it continues to be committed to its customers, no matter how large it has grown.