Similar to my previous Review of Bluehost Web Hosting, I want to do more reviews of web hosting services. As I have been using Siteground for close to a year, I felt now was a good time to review the service. The SiteGround company is a hosting company that is based in Bulgaria but has datacenters all over the world. Below is my Siteground Web Hosting Review.
Who this Product is For:
Perhaps you have a Facebook Business or Social Media you are using to run your business. Or you might use a service such as Squarespace or Wix has a platform to host your website. As your business grows you may want something that has features that these platforms do not offer.Hosting your own website is a lot similar to hosting on Facebook Business or Squarespace only you have a lot more control over the look and feel of your site. Siteground's customer base includes developers, marketers, and other small business professionals. Also, Siteground is highly compatible with WordPress. A bonus if you're already familiar with using WordPress as a site and blogging option.
Price & Length
Siteground offers three web hosting plans to choose from Startup, Grow Big, GoGeek. Outside of traditional web hosting, the company offers cloud hosting and enterprise hosting options. As with most web hosting plans, I would always choose the monthly plan to fully evaluate the service.
Additional Costs
As with most web hosting services, if you do not have a domain name you will need to purchase one. Siteground also offers a free "Let's Encrypt SSLs" certificate which must be renewed every three months. Siteground does offer a yearly SSL Certificate that cost around $99 at this time.
What You Get
The following features included in the basic plan are:
- Free Website Builder
- cPanel & SSH Access
- Free CMS Install
- 24/7 Technical Support
- SSD Storage
- Free Auto Daily Backups
- Unlimited Email Accounts & DBs
- HTTP/2 Enabled Servers
- Free Let's Encrypt SSLs
- Free Cloudflare CDN
- GDPR compliant
However, I think Siteground's strongest area is providing a reliable hosting service with relatively little downtime.
What You Won’t Get
A major issue that I had when using SiteGround was with it's Free Let's Encrypt SSLs. Siteground offers a free wildcard SSL certificate for your hosting. However, the free certificate must be renewed every three months. The SSL renewal tool had difficulty renewing the SSL when it expired. I needed to contact customer service in order to properly renew the SSL.Because of this, I'm a bit skeptical when it comes to using Siteground's Free SSL to manage an e-commerce site. I think it makes more sense to pay for their separate SSL certificate which renews yearly instead of every three months.Visitor Limitations:Another issue that many have reported regarding SiteGround is their monthly visitor limitations. Depending on the plan you select, if your website attracts over a certain number of visitors, Siteground will begin to slow down your website. For instance, if you're on the StartUp plan, and you attract 400-500 visitors a day, your website will begin to slow down due to the plan limiting to 10,000 monthly visitors.
Summary: Siteground Web Hosting Review
In conclusion, I found Siteground to be a major upgrade compared to Bluehost. I found that my website was stable and held up to incoming traffic. While SiteGround is a much better hosting service than Bluehost, the service needs some improvement. Having to renew an SSL cert every three months has been frustrating. Especially when you do not receive notifications on when your certificate is expiring. In general, I think Siteground is fine if you're starting out with a budget. However, I would find it hard to recommend if you have a website with high numbers of traffic and users.Finally, I would like to say thank you for reading this article. I hope you found it informative and helpful regarding SiteGround as a hosting platform.
