SiteGround Business Web Hosting Review in 2024

This is an honest review based on my personal experience with SiteGround over many years. SiteGround did not fund the creation of this article nor does it have editorial control over the content. This article contains some affiliate links — these help cover the costs of running this free website. So if you think SiteGround web hosting suits your needs, click here to give it a try.

SiteGround review in a nutshell

Who is SiteGround?

SiteGround has been offering web hosting services since 2004. The company was founded by some university friends in Sofia, Bulgaria. The company now offers hosting services for over 3 million domains worldwide. In 2020, SiteGround migrated all of its domains to Google Cloud.

Beware of cheaper alternatives!

SiteGround charges a very fair price for its hosting, but beware of cheaper alter­na­tives. I’ve used web hosting from several providers over the years and some have been really terrible. A host, who we choose not to name, caused all of my websites to be hacked due to serious back-end security issues. Additionally, the automatic backups didn’t work properly, so I couldn’t restore my data. Luckily, I had created my own offline backups. They also blamed WordPress and my website design for the poor website perfor­mance. It turned out that the slow servers were to blame.

SiteGround, on the other hand, was a breath of fresh air. I’ve never had a single security incident, backups have worked flawlessly, and site perfor­mance has been excep­tional. More on that later. As with all things in life, you get what you pay for!

Is SiteGround a good WP Engine alternative?

WP engine were in the press recently after an argument with Automat­i­cally CEO, Matt Mullenweg. WP Engine describes itself as “The Most Trusted WordPress Platform” But basically it’s just a WordPress managed hosting provider. I won’t go into detail about why they are now at war with each other. However, if you are consid­ering leaving the WP Engine platform, they have written one You can find a helpful migration guide here.

My general business ethos is that you should never be beholden to a single provider and web hosting is no different than any other service. The beauty of an open source environment like WordPress is that it can be hosted by anyone. SiteGround is hosted on Google Cloud archi­tecture, making it a cost-effective and scalable alter­native worth consid­ering for many businesses. This article will give you a general overview of how every­thing works. If you want to try SiteGround, here is a link.

The SiteGround control panel

Your hosting account is managed through a compre­hensive, customized control panel. Depending on your hosting package, you can manage either a single or multiple websites from here. I use the GoGeek hosting plan, so your options may vary slightly depending on the plan you purchase.

Creating a new SiteGround website

Creating a new website from scratch is incredibly easy. By default you can create:

• An empty website
• A WordPress website
• A WordPress website with WooCom­merce pre-installed
• A Weebly website

By default, the system chooses the closest physical data center, but you can change this if necessary. At the time of writing, there are 11 data center locations to choose from:

The SiteGround control panel

SiteGround has its own compre­hensive and customized control panel. The operation is a pleasure – quick and intuitive.

The control panel provides access to every­thing from email and file management to basic analytics, backups and website security. I won’t bore you with screen­shots of every page of the panel, but here’s a rough breakdown of the structure. To say it is compre­hensive is an under­statement:

Automatic website backups

Automatic backups run every day. These secure your files, databases and email accounts. By default, backups are possible for 30 days. The GrowBig and GoGeek plans also allow you to create up to 5 manual ad-hoc backups. This is very useful if you are planning a major website update and need a safety net to fall back on. In my experience, the backups worked perfectly.

Web hosting performance

In my opinion, there are two basic qualities that one should look for in a web host — namely Security And Perfor­mance. I like using it GTMetrix to assess website perfor­mance and the results speak for themselves:

I am not a profes­sional website developer and I achieve top-notch perfor­mance on all my websites with minimal effort. These all use the latest version of WordPress with the Astra or Memberlite themes.

What about website security?

As mentioned, an insecure web host can lead to all sorts of problems, from backend database hacks to malware and viruses. I’m happy to say that in my more than five years of working with SiteGround, I’ve never experi­enced issues like this.

Of course, free SSL certifi­cates from Let’s Encrypt are included as standard. If necessary, you can also order a Premium Wildcard certificate. At the time of writing, premium SSLs cost £70 plus VAT per year and come with a $10,000 guarantee.

SiteGround also has its own custom security plugin for WordPress. This can replace Wordfence, for example. Although it’s not as compre­hensive as some paid security plugins, it still offers an impressive selection of website protection tools.

The plugin is available through the normal WordPress plugin directory. Just search for SiteGround and you will find it along with the excellent Speed ​​Optimizer cache plugin (also developed by SiteGround).

How much does SiteGround hosting cost?

You can use SiteGround for just £1.99/month — billed annually and includes a free domain name. That works £28.66 including VAT for your first year for a single website. This is an absolute bargain, but there are heavily discounted prices.

Note that your first year of hosting is signif­i­cantly discounted. Therefore, I would generally recommend regis­tering for a longer period of time if possible. 2 years of hosting is billed at £5.99/month, total £172.51 including VAT. The discount starts at £13.99/month, so expect a renewal price of £201.46 per year. Also don’t forget the cost of domain renewal after the free first year — at the time of writing this is £14.99 plus VAT per year for a .co.uk domain.

There are also some optional extras to choose from, but you don’t need them to get started. You can always add them to your plan later if you need them:

My Thoughts on SiteGround Hosting

As mentioned, I have been using SiteGround for a LONG time and have never had any problems. The support was quick and friendly. Using your control panel is a pleasure. Safety and perfor­mance are excep­tional. As I said, they’re not the cheapest providers on the market, but you really do get what you pay for.

Try it yourself and see how you do. At less than £30 for your first year, the risk is minimal and offers lots of potential benefit. We would be very grateful if you could use the links on this page when regis­tering. Thank you very much!

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Last updated on September 27, 2024 by Andy Mac

Author: Andy Mac

Andy MacLellan has been running his own businesses for almost 30 years. During this time he has founded award-winning companies and provided consulting services to some of the world’s largest blue chips. His life now revolves around providing independent assis­tance to small businesses.