In order to bring out a clear list of SiteGround hosting service, our editors have carefully reviewed its price, feature, hosting performance and customer support based on our true experience in the real world.
SiteGround offers quality hosting service for personal and small business webmasters. The company now has over 500 employees, around 300,000 customers and hosts around 600,000 domains. It has 3 advanced data centers which are located in America, Europe and Singapore.
Price & Features
The company has 3 shared hosting plans as below:
In fact, the StartUp is a little bit limited in features, and the GrowBig is quite expensive compared with most other packages in the market that have the same features.
SiteGround utilizes cPanel control panel and offers a one-click installer named Softaculous as the mature method. With it, customers can install WordPress in a few clicks on the mouse that even beginners can manage their websites easily.
Besides, by utilizing the user friendly control panel, customers can manage the installed software including Drupal, Joomla, WordPress and Magento, and everything they expect to find like FTP accounts, email accounts, domain manager, and MySQL Databases.
Since more and more people tend to create their sites with the installed software mentioned above, we select Joomla hosting and Magento hosting of SiteGround to make an in-depth review as below.
SiteGround Joomla Hosting
SiteGround offers an excellent operating environment with 100% compatibility for Joomla. Thus, the company crafts unique tools which make it easy to run Joomla including auto installer for easy start, auto updater for great security, and dynamic cacher for great speed. In below, we have listed the related technologies that SiteGround adopts to make sure excellent compatibility for Joomla.
- PHP runs as suPHP for increasing security
- Apache 2.2 or higher installed with mod_rewrite module
- PHP 5.3 or higher with 128 MB PHP memory_limit & MySQL 5
SiteGround Magento Hosting
Many people who plan to start an eCommerce website may prefer Magento, a specialized eCommerce site building platform. SiteGround supports the installation of Magento and enables up to 30GB disk space for each hosted websites. However, for some shopping sites with a showcase of a large number of pictures, the limited disk space maybe not enough. Also, most eCommerce site owners have high demand on hosting speed and reliability, SiteGround performs not so well. Check the evidence in the following words.
Uptime
SiteGround spares no efforts in optimizing its network infrastructure so that customers are able to run their sites in a sound hosting environment. Declaring 99.9% uptime, the company has created unique downtime prevention software which monitors each server’s status in real-time with zero human interaction. Additionally, it employs enterprise-class electrical systems for redundancy with multiple power feeds, power generator and UPS technology.
To check the uptime in real practice, we keep monitoring a medium-sized website hosted with the service for over 6 monthsand come out with the result that the average uptime is 99.96% in the past 30 days.
Speed
The company offers strategic data center locations on the continents of North American, Europe and the Asia-Pacific region. Different locations allow customers to choose the closest one for best website performance. In all locations, there are top-of-the-line hardware, custom-optimized server configuration and all types of plans.
By the same token, we worked out the average server response time for the hosted site, which is approximately 621ms. Technically speaking, this outcome is beyond our expectation because the server response time in hosting market averages about 608ms. For eCommerce sites, a relatively slow page loading speed will no doubt stop visitors coming in.
Customer Support
SiteGround offers an effective support team that allows customers to contact in anytime. The support team is available 24/7 via telephone, email, support ticket, and live chat. Thus, if customers have any problem with their websites, this support team can resolve it immediately.
Having been in this area for at least 5 years, the support staffs are full of experience, and provide customers effective service with good manner.
In addition, the ticket system offered by the company is outstanding. Customers can get a reply within 10 minutes from a technician which is very quick. What’s more, if there is any emergency issues happen, the technicians can resolve the problems within hours.
Summary – Not Recommended
Generally speaking, SiteGround does not stand from the crowd owing to its a little bit expensive setup fees and deficiencies in server response time. Having tried web hosting services from hundreds of hosts, we have worked out the following table of recommended companies. These companies are remarkable for their services of reasonable price, high performance and responsive technical support.
All of these 3 companies are highly recommended by thousands of customers all over the world, and feature world-class data centers, advanced technologies, guaranteed hosting resources, affordable price and responsive customer support. Besides, they have been engaged in web hosting industry for over 10 years.