I have been using SiteGround since around 2006 and I have grown to love them. Of course I have to admit I haven’t used any other hosting company so I don’t know the differences between them all. I probably have a half a dozen sites with them now and a dozen domain names registered there and I don’t plan on leaving. I usually stick with something I like.
I apologize for not including the required information on this review.
(SitePoint admins) - please feel free to delete my old post if need be on this review. I tried to simply edit that post but couldn’t find an “edit” link.
Below is my review of Siteground hosting services. I am not associated in any way with Siteground, nor am I an affiliate of Siteground. I make this review based upon my direct experience with their hosting service that I used/use to build my own sites on their shared hosting platforms.
Siteground Webhosting Service
My personal rating is 10 out of 10
I have been using SiteGround since around 2006 and I have grown to love them. Of course I have to admit I haven’t used any other hosting company so I don’t know the differences between them all. I probably have a half a dozen sites with them now and a dozen domain names registered there and I don’t plan on leaving. I usually stick with something I like.
As I mentioned before, I have been using siteground’s webhosting service since I began building sites for whatever niche I was into at the time. I didn’t know a thing about web design or content, much less SEO at the time, but through the years I have been able to build better sites using the tools provided by siteground for their customers.
General Features
My personal rating is 10 out of 10
Webhosting
Reseller Hosting
Semi Dedicated Hosting
Dedicated Hosting
Cloud Hosting
They offer Mysql, PHPMyAdmin, PHP4, Apache, Cpanel, as well as other options and among many they offer support for Fantastico & Joomla as well.
Reliability
My personal rating is 10 out of 10
Siteground can compete with any webhost when it comes to reliability and features. My site is almost never down. If they plan on performing server side maintenance on the site (which is rare), I get an email as a “heads up” which lets me know that they are updating either features or are performing major backups.
Siteground brags about their 99% uptime and for good reason. I have 6 websites currently hosted with them and they are never down to my knowledge. There are only about a dozen times since 2006 that I can count that my site was down and it was usually for less than a few minutes at a time.
Customer Support
My personal rating is 8 out of 10
Although they offer free and paid support, I prefer the old days when I was a newbie at everything, when they would help me install a script for free and offer me access to their backups of my site for free in case I messed something up during an SEO or web design project or change on one of my sites. They still have great support, but most of it isn’t free anymore unless it relates to an issue to downtime or accessibility of my site, ftp access, the sitebuilder or the cpanel.
Pricing
My personal rating is 10 out of 10
The cost of a year of hosting with Siteground hasn’t changed much since 2006 and I am very satisfied with their price structure. There are also great benefits for current customers to refer new customers as they can take advantage of added benefits and deep discounts on new hosting packages.
Space
My personal rating is 10 out of 10
I’ll keep this short - I sell digital downloads sizing anywhere from 20 kilobytes all the way up to 100 plus megabytes and I have never, ever had an issue with space.
Bandwidth
My personal rating is 10 out of 10
Bandwidth on my “shared” hosting accounts with Siteground is unlimited. I have never had an issue with them on bandwidth. Although since some of my sites (stores) receive an upwards of 5,000 to 8,000 visits per month I do tend to exceed my accounts “Account Executions” limits pretty regularly. Sometimes just for a few minutes within any 24 hour period, but nonetheless, it hasn’t affected uptime or downtime of my sites. It may however slow down browsing or navigating my site.
I have also experienced high or even maxed out records on a daily basis of the “Processes Running” graph which keeps a log of the affect of the processes currently running on the server caused by my site (usually because of high traffic and the fact that I run several scripts on one domain & hosting account at one time).
Even though I seem to exceed or max out these two graphs on a regular basis, it hasn’t affected my website’s up or downtime at all.
Summary
My personal rating “Overall” is 10 out of 10
To retouch on my experience with web hosting as a whole, I have to remind you that I have never used anyone else. So my lack of experience with other web hosting services may or may not have an affect on my personal opinion or rating of Siteground’s service, to be completely fair.
I am still at Siteground after almost 6 years. I don’t plan on leaving or going elsewhere.
The Bad
The bad would definitely have to relate to tech support. The tech support end of Siteground’s web hosting service isn’t very easy to figure out. You use to be able to submit a ticket about any issue at all. Now you have to go on a link clicking journey to find out if someone else has solved your problem in the knowledge base before trying to find the proper ticket topic and actually submitting a ticket to support to request assistance with a problem or to alert them of your problem in hopes to find a solution for it.
Although I liked the old system much better, I think the changes to it came with their growth in the industry. They have waaaaay more customers now than they did back then, so they probably just don’t have the time to assist people like me with issues that are probably insignificant to experienced web designers and webmasters alike. But keep in mind, I was a total newbie when I first became a customer of Siteground, so I not only knew nothing, but I needed help with everything.
Would I Recommend Siteground?
Absolutely! In my opinion, Siteground offers just as many features and the same quality support as any other leading web host and their pricing is definitely as competitive as it can be.
Thanks, Davey, that provides a lot of information for other members!
Regards,
DK