SiteGround – Recommended WP Hosting

One of the questions everybody asks and justifiably so, is: “which is the best hosting service for a WordPress site?”. We see this question posted on forums, Facebook groups, and even by many of our clients. The answer almost always is SiteGround. However, we aren’t just recommending SiteGround because we enjoy using their service but because we’ve used loads of other hosting services too.

Before you sign up for a SiteGround account, we’d like to go into three primary reasons we recommend the service. If anything, it should give you a pretty good idea if this is the service for you.

 

SiteGround is Optimized for WordPress

We recommend SiteGround, especially for people who want to set up a WordPress site because it is optimised for WordPress. The hosting service is mainly customer-centric, with a custom-designed cache plugin (Supercacher) for WordPress, a free CDN account (Cloudflare CDN), and from our experience, excellent customer support.

In our experience, WordPress hosting on SiteGround is faster than on other platforms. Visitors are served pages faster than on the competition. Most people reading this may already know that slow loading times hinder their ability to rank well for most targeted keywords.

Google made a passing statement about websites with slow loading times back in 2010. That’s why today, speed optimisation is a significant part of SEO, and having a fast hosting service gives you a leg up over the competition out of the gate.

 

SiteGround is Up 99.966% of Times

Over the last couple of years, we’ve used hosting services that promise 99.9% uptime, but few deliver it. Our websites and those of our clients rely on being up, especially during busy sales weeks like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, the Thanksgiving weekend sales, etc. However, many other services weren’t able to keep up with traffic and fumbled the ball, so to speak, more than once, which cost us a lot of money.

SiteGround, on the other hand, has been pretty good. We aren’t suddenly losing uptime because of an increased number of buyers on our clients’ website. Plus, over the past two years, the average uptime has been 99.966%, which is way better than the 97%, 98%, and at best 98.9% uptime we were getting with other services, some of which even cost more.

 

The Best Customer Support in Our Experience

One of the reasons we continue to use SiteGround is their excellent 24/7 customer support. In the past, we’ve had to wait on hold, sometimes over an hour, to get a hold of technical support. Since time is money, that was costing us money, especially when compounded across the multitude of websites our team was managing. Consequently, good customer support would save us money, and it does, which is why we continue to use SiteGround.

SiteGround offers support via live chat, or their ticketing system, both of which work round the clock. Furthermore, once you get a hold of someone, they know exactly how to help you out, which mainly boils down to the company’s sales, support, developers, and admin, amongst others being put through training courses every few months.

In our experience, 90% of issues are sorted out within minutes of speaking with support. The ones that take longer often have to do with bugs in the system, which are rare, fortunately for the company. That said, we’ve not experienced any downtime because of any bugs in the system.

 

SiteGround Hosting Plans Explained

Now that you’re probably interested in hosting your website with SiteGround, it is essential to wrap your head around their hosting plans. Fortunately, in terms of pricing tiers, they are fairly affordable. Plus, depending on the website’s size and type, you can choose a plan and even upgrade later.

Below we’ll look at how the plans compare and leave you to check out pricing on their official website since this can change every now and then, mainly influenced by discounts and deals.

 

Startup to GoGeek – What Do You Get?

SiteGround sells three primary plans, with Startup being as the term suggests for startup websites, GrowBig is the next upgrade in line, followed by GoGeek, which is the company’s full-blown package. All three of these are managed WordPress hosting services, which means you get access WordPress optimised web servers. In addition to the differences you’ll find on their website, here are a few more in our experience:

• StartUp offers ten simultaneous server processes, while GoGeek offers 30.
• StartUp allows up to a 500MB database with GoGeek offering 1,000MB
• StartUp has 150,000 Inodes, with GoGeek offering 450,000.
• StartUp gets just 10% of server resources for database queries, and GoGeek is allocated up to 30%.

 

SiteGround Uses Google Cloud Platform

In early 2020, SiteGround made a major announcement that the company was moving over to using Google Cloud. Almost all their StartUp and GoGeek managed hosting plans would be migrated over to the Cloud. Plus, all new customers would default to their Cloud hosting as soon as they signed up. Existing sites would be gradually migrated over the course of several months.

Here is why Google Cloud matters:

• Google’s Cloud is immensely capable, and the Cloud offers numerous benefits over regular hosting, which include:
• It is easier to scale a website, and resource management is quicker, ensuring faster loading times for websites.
• The distributed storage helps to improve uptime.
• You have more choice over where your data centre is located to serve visitors in the shortest time.
• Sustainability assured by Google’s carbon neutrality commitment.

 

Finally – SiteGround Assures New Users of Easy WordPress Migration

Now, if you already have a WordPress website or even any other type, SiteGround makes migrating a website very easy.

People who choose the GoGeek plan get what’s called “hands-off WordPress migration,” which in other words means SiteGround’s tech team handles it. However, those who choose the StartUp and GrowBig plans can migrate using the company’s Migrator plugin.

In our experience, the plugin is straightforward to use and only requires following a couple of steps. Most people reading this article should be able to follow those steps and migrate their website within a few minutes.

The easy migration is another big reason why we recommend SiteGround to our clients because it makes migration super easy regardless of the size or type of website.