Welcome to my SiteGround review that will give some insight into whether or not it is good for WordPress.
We are also going to dive in and check out the history of SiteGround, some speed tests, and some pros and cons.
Hope you enjoy it. Now, let’s dive down.
SiteGround Review and Is SiteGround Good For WordPress?
Have you stopped to wonder why SiteGround is an official WordPress recommended hosting provider?
SiteGround is numbered among the few, best web hosting service providers for WordPress in the WordPress community with good reasons.
With SiteGround, your website won’t only have the kind of security every website owner dreams of but will also have the kind of speed that impresses website visitors so much they keep returning.
SiteGround provides unique, in-house website enhancement solutions for you and your website visitors.
Furthermore, the SiteGround customer support team is always there to help you at any time of the day, no matter your time zone.
Does that mean SiteGround has no downsides?
We’ll get to that in a moment.
Some other SiteGround benefits include automatic upgrades, inbuilt WordPress caching, CDN (Content Delivery Network), GIT version control system, and so on.
SiteGround is one of the few hosting providers offering location-specific web hosting with three data centers in the United States, Asia, and Europe.
Their services are also wallet-friendly.
Talking about wallets, let’s take a closer look at SiteGround’s pricing along with some other SiteGround benefits.
We’re going to provide unbiased answers to the following questions and point out the good and bad sides of SiteGround in this extensive review:
- How much does it cost to get a SiteGround hosting plan?
- Are there any special SiteGround deals to reduce the cost for you?
- How fast will your site load, using SiteGround’s hosting?
- How reliably will SiteGround host your website without any downtime 24/7/365?
If you run into any challenge, can you get instant help from SiteGround’s customer support team, or are there times when they won’t be there for you?
Does SiteGround have all the features and tools needed to build your website?
There are only 2 things that you will need with SiteGround a domain name and optionally but recommended would be an autoresponder service.
For a domain name I would suggest checking out my NameCheap review to learn about my recommended domain registrar and for an autoresponder service, I would recommend checking out my Aweber review for a great autoresponder account.
For people who don’t have enough time to go through the whole review, this is the takeaway:
SiteGround is the absolute best web hosting provider for your WordPress-powered website because they offer everything beginner bloggers and other website owners at any level of their internet entrepreneurship need to grow their blog or website from nothing to a steady, sustainable income stream.
After a series of tests, we observed that SiteGround is faster, more secure, more reliable, and has better customer support provision than its competitors. The only downsides are in connection with storage capacity and a setup fee.
But there’s a way around each, depending on what you want for your internet business.
Now, let’s dig into how we made those findings to enable you to reach an informed, personal conclusion.
A Brief SiteGround History
SiteGround was started in 2004, and since then it’s developed into one of the all-time favorites among hosting companies.
Its head office is in Sofia, Bulgaria with other offices in six other data centers and locations on three different continents.
As of the time of this post, it has an upward of 400 employees and plays host to more than half a million domains the world over.
Every hosting company has its upsides and downsides.
However, the upsides of some far outweigh their downsides.
That’s not to say some of the downsides of such companies can’t constitute a deal-breaker for the needs of some individuals.
Therefore, before you decide for or against SiteGround, it’s best for you to carefully consider the facts and figures of this SiteGround review.
SiteGround’s Pros
Servers on steroids:
Every one of SiteGround’s servers is intensely optimized for speed.
The servers are provided with state-of-the-art hardware such as SSD drives and customized software to ensure the super speed of your website.
Super-efficient customer support:
SiteGround’s customer support is out of this world.
You can pick up your phone, dial their customer support number, and get the help you need at any time of the day, including midnights and weekends.
You can also engage their customer care personnel via live chat for all the answers you need.
Again, if you’re more comfortable communicating your issues via tickets, SiteGround has you covered.
Does SiteGround Offer A Free CDN and SSL?
They offer free Content Delivery Network (CDN) services and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) services that both serve your website visitors with pages customized to their needs, according to their geographic locations, and secure their interactions and shared, personal information by high-tech encryption, which keeps you and them safe from the malicious, prying eyes of cybercriminals.
Several Server locations!
Their data centers are distributed among three continents.
That offers you the option of choosing the location relatively nearest to you when you’re signing up.
Server nearness to website location has the advantage of reducing server turnaround time (how long the server takes to send a webpage to a website user).
SiteGround’s Cons
As stated earlier, every hosting company has its downsides.
These can influence your decision for or against SiteGround.
Storage capacity:
SiteGround doesn’t offer plans with unlimited bandwidth and disk space.
They offer plans with fixed storage.
But the storage capacities they offer are quite large.
For most bloggers, especially beginners, the storage will be more than enough for their WordPress blogging purposes.
What’s The Monthly Billing & Setup Fee?
You’ll pay a $14.95 setup fee if you settle for the monthly billing plan, which isn’t recommended as it’s more expensive in the long run.
However, if you settle for the longer billing plans, you’ll benefit from significant discounts and won’t have to pay any setup fee.
Again, SiteGround offers a 30-day money-back guarantee to enable you to test run their service before you choose to keep it and or make a refund request.
So, there’s no risk in signing up for any of the longer billing plans.
SiteGround Pricing vs Performance
Pricing is a significant selling point for settling for a web hosting provider.
But performance is a bigger selling point than pricing because it makes the difference between a successful blog and an unsuccessful one, which is why it can’t be compromised.
For that reason, we decided to do a thorough test run on SiteGround’s performance to enable us to provide you with this unbiased review.
SiteGround Speed Test
Speed is a major yardstick to measure the performance of a web hosting service.
A faster website doesn’t only give your website visitors a great user experience that makes them keep returning but also boosts your website’s ranking on the search engines.
One second of delay can cost your website a 16 percent decline in customer satisfaction, an 11 percent decline in page views, and a 7 percent decline in conversions.
We created a WordPress test blog on SiteGround and populated it with dummy test content.
After that, we tested our WordPress blog with Pingdom’s website speed testing tool.
The following were our results:
You can see that our dummy blog loaded in less than one second (precisely 649 milliseconds) for a Dallas-based server in Texas.
Our server, as shown above, was faster than 95 percent of tested websites.
Our test results were unbelievable, but our test website didn’t have any traffic.
So, the Pingdom test wasn’t enough.
Therefore, to see how a SiteGround hosted website would respond to a rise in traffic levels, we tested our dummy blog with another tool called LoadImpact.
LoadImpact slowly sends up to 100 site visitors to a site to see how its server would respond to a traffic growth from several connections.
Our result is shown in the chart below:
The blue line represents the volume of virtual, active visitors on the site, while the green line represents how long it took the server to load.
SiteGround’s performance was consistent across the board except for when there was a sharp decline by 50 visitors on the site.
However, there was a quick recovery, and the load time of the page stayed consistently low, even with increased visitors.
Our test revealed that SiteGround is the best choice for users who are looking to own superfast websites.
Typically, if your website is hosted on a shared hosting plan, it will slow down a bit when traffic levels are high.
That’s because it’s sharing common resources with other sites on the same server.
The majority of shared web hosting service providers automatically terminate server processes if a website is using too many resources, which leads to server downtime on your site.
When we tested our SiteGround site in this regard, we got 100 percent server uptime.
The Server Response Time of SiteGround
The kind of content you put on your website significantly affects how long your page takes to load. For instance, if you upload high-quality images on your webpage (which is a good thing), it will take longer for that page to load.
So, it was clear that just testing the speed of the site isn’t enough to show how fast your hosting server is.
Therefore, instead of observing only page load time, we decided to also look at the actual response time of the server.
To achieve this, we used Bitcatcha. Bitcatcha bypasses page content and tests only the server’s response time.
It also calculates the average loading speed of the server from various geographic locations.
It measures the speed for each location three times and calculates the average.
See our Bitcatcha results below.
It’s clear that SiteGround is a perfect choice for you if your audience is mostly situated in the U.S. The SiteGround server response was less than a second for U.S.-based site visitors.
That’s also true of other locations, except Japan.
If you’re targeting a Japanese audience, however, you can send a request to SiteGround to move your website to their Asian data center (an added advantage that comes with SiteGround’s distributed data centers).
Final Thoughts & Conclusion
Now that you’ve read our objective and extensive SiteGround review, what do you think?
Summarily, for someone who wants a reliable, secure, and fast web hosting service, with an amazing customer support team, SiteGround is the perfect way to go.
They offer hosting plans for everyone, no matter their budget.
This is a no-brainer for someone who knows what they want for their potential, income-generating website.
In fact, I am so confident with SiteGround, Digital Cash Kings is hosted with SiteGround hosting!
Get onboard SiteGround’s service by clicking the button or link below for an awesome web hosting plan now.
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Thank you.
