Last Updated | May 2022

SiteGround is a Bulgarian web hosting company that provides five different hosting plans, excellent features, and is also affordable. Started in 2004, SiteGround now hosts more than 2 million domains worldwide.

SiteGround hosting comes with Web Hosting, WordPress Hosting, WooCommerce Hosting, Cloud Hosting, and Reseller Hosting. According to other expert and user reviews, this web hosting has a happiness rate of 99.7%. Let’s check first-hand whether that’s true or not!

Is SiteGround the Right Host For You?

SiteGround is a popular, top-quality brand. But To be honest, when I first got the opportunity to do the SiteGround review, I wasn’t quite sure what I would come across, as I wasn’t familiar with SiteGround hosting.

When I started testing SiteGround and checking out the many expert reviews, as well as customer reviews, what got my attention was the company’s motto, which says: ‘Crafted for easy website management’. Meaning that this web hosting is suitable for beginners too. As I got more into the research, I was surprised by the hosting plans, prices, available discount, advanced features, and the excellent loading speed.

SiteGround hosting surpassed my expectations, but will it be enough for your website’s needs? Find out by reading this thorough SiteGround review.

Here is How We Review:

Our SiteGround brand review process consists of five easy steps.

1. We purchase the hosting provider’s plan.
2. We meticulously explore each feature that the plan offers, including speed and performance testing.
3. We analyze the pros and cons of web hosting, check their customer support, and make sure that their service is worth the price.
4. To achieve a reliable expert review, we also consider the customer reviews and put together the final score.
5. We publish the review and also update it throughout the year.

Note: We constantly check for new information about the chosen web hosting and update our review as often as the circumstances require.

Pros and Cons

Pros:

Cons:

SiteGround Prices & Plans – 2022

One of the most crucial things when doing research is whether the price of the hosting plans is affordable. I’m happy to say that so far, my SiteGround research only surprises me positively, and I hope that’s how it will continue.

SiteGround comes with three hosting plans suitable for anyone’s budget and for different types of websites.

• SiteGround Shared Hosting is ideal for small businesses, low-traffic websites, and beginners overall. It starts at $3.69/month
• SiteGround Cloud Hosting is most suitable for growing websites and popular blogs. This plan starts at $100/month
• SiteGround WooCommerce Hosting is an optimized version of the web hosting plan. It starts at $3.99/month
• SiteGround WordPress Hosting is an optimized hosting plan for WordPress. This plan starts at $3.69/month

Each of these SiteGround’s Web Hosting plans comes with different features (free SSL, free email, daily backups, etc.) that are suitable for the type of website you have.

First is the Shared Hosting plan, which, as we mentioned, would be best if used for new websites, small business websites, when starting an online store, or for bloggers. This plan is also suitable for low-traffic websites.

The second plan, known as SiteGround Cloud Hosting, is best for bigger and growing websites and successful sites. This is a flexible update to the shared web hosting plan, and it starts at $100/month.

The third plan is WooCommerce Hosting, an optimized version of the shared hosting plan, and it provides SiteGround optimizations that drastically improve the website’s performance.

Last but not least is the WordPress Hosting plan. This is also an optimized version of the Shared hosting plan, which comes with in-house WordPress optimizations.

All of SiteGround’s hosting plans come with three levels (except for the Cloud hosting plan, which comes with four).

These three levels come with similar features, such as free email, out-of-the-box caching, 30-days money-back, free SSL, etc. They differ regarding the number of websites (1 or unlimited), how many monthly visits they hold (10,000, 25,000, or 100,000), and the webspace (10GB, 20GB, or 40GB).

Additionally, you’ll see extra features that come with the Grow Big and the GoGeek including:

• On-demand backup copies
• Ultrafast PHP
• Staging
• Priority support
• White-label clients
• The highest tier of resources

Features & Benefits

SiteGround hosting is one perfect package of superb features and benefits that bring the customers’ experience to the next level. No matter whether you are a beginner or a big brand that looks for the best, SiteGround has everything a business needs.

1. Their Own Panel

One of the best things that came to my attention is that instead of using the well-known cPanel, SiteGround decided to develop its own – Site Tools. You will work with SiteGround’s App Manager, which supports 18 CMS installations, including WordPress, Drupal and Joomla.

2. Global Presence

SiteGround is a Bulgarian company that aims to spread worldwide. Their servers are located in Europe, Asia, Australia, and America. This showcases SiteGround as a reliable, independent, and serious company.

Their servers provide a highly optimized speed (457 ms) that doesn’t disappoint their customers.

3. Security

One interesting fact we discovered while doing our SiteGround review is that the CEO of SiteGround is a lawyer. Perhaps this explains why the company offers such superb security features. You can find Backups, SSL Manager, HTTPS Enforce, Protected URLs, and Blocked IPs in the Security category within the ‘Dashboard.’ All SiteGround’s servers are developed with the latest PHP 7 version with the latest security fixes and have installed ModSecurity.

4. Automatic System Backups

SiteGround takes into consideration that by daily backing up your data, both the security and the uptime will remain highly ranked. Therefore SiteGround automatically backs up your entire system every day and keeps each backup for 30 days.

5. SuperCacher Performance Booster

Caching is crucial for every website. Your web server creates copies of your site, and instead of rebuilding each and every page for all visitors, it sends them the cached versions. Due to the caching performance, your server has a huge load off. However, if you don’t upgrade your plan, you’ll only get some basic caching options.

6. Automatic Website Migration

If you have a website hosted elsewhere, you can use the automatic migration option in the panel. The process is relatively simple – Install a plugin on your current website and enter the generated token in the SiteGround panel.

This feature works for simple websites, but if your website is too complex (many plugins, custom additions, particular fields, etc.), you may face some issues. Your website can be migrated via FTP, File Manager, or MySQL, or you can pay extra for the SiteGround experts to take care of it.

7. Superb Support System

SiteGround provides a team of experts that will help you resolve issues in a few ways – by contacting them, by ticketing system, or through live chat. The live chat is what works the best for me from all these, as you can get a response from an agent immediately.

8. Website Builder

SiteGround comes with a panel that supports WordPress, one of the best website builders. Your WordPress account can be installed with just one click. The website builder makes your journey easier by helping you customize every part of your website.

* Learn more about the best website builders out there

Performance

Speed – CDN, Which Takes Pressure off the Servers

If your website is slow, visitors will leave. Sometimes even compressing the images won’t be enough. That’s why I highly recommend purchasing SiteGround hosting, as it provides a site speed of 457 ms. This might not be the fastest speed you’ve come across, but the good news is that the speed has improved from a previous speed of 651 ms.

Uptime – Magnificent (Maintains at 99.99%)

One of the most important elements web hosting should have is excellent uptime. SiteGround’s hosting plans offer magnificent availability, meaning your website will look dependable, mature, and reliable.

SiteGround hosting has an uptime of 99.99%. In other words, your site will be up at all times so that you won’t disappoint or lose your customers.

Loading Time – Two Specific Features Increase the Speed

SiteGround provides an above-average loading speed with two specific features that boost your website’s speed – SuperCacher and Cloudflare.

This speed feature comes with three different options for the best performance of your website – NGINX Direct Delivery, Dynamic Cache, and Memcached. SiteGround claims that the websites using these caching options can handle 100 more hits than any other site without caching.

What’s incredible about this feature is that besides working flawlessly with customers worldwide, it also protects your web page by analyzing the traffic you get. By analyzing the traffic, it is easily divided into legitimate and malicious.

Level of Support

In order to please your customers and to make their experience pleasant, it is a must for your website to have support.

You can find help on SiteGround by clicking the question mark in the top right corner.

Then, if you click on ‘View Help Center,’ the site will take you to the following screen.

SiteGround provides Tutorials, Knowledge Base, 24/7 Live Chat, Ticketing System, and Phone Support.

You may find the solution to your problem in the Knowledge Base, but you can always ask for help from their team. To get in touch with the experts’ team, click on ‘Contact Us’ and then choose a category.

In my case, I went for Billing and account management to see whether their experts would be pleased to make a refund.

I was taken to this screen, where I have further chosen Cancellation & Downgrades. Next, I was requested to choose a service.

Once I did it, I was forwarded to select a plan.

Then, I clicked on the ‘Cancel Service’ button, after which I was asked – When? This is where I was positively surprised, as SiteGround offers to cancel the service immediately or at the expiration date. I chose later.

Afterward, I continued to the part where I filled in a request for a refund.

SiteGround immediately offered a refund, which surprised me. The company states that it may take between 7 and 21 days to have the refund in my bank statement.

SiteGround made up for the issues I had with the registration. The whole process is easy and thoroughly explained, and it is also fast. They proved why their ranking on the market is so high.

Live Chat, Ticketing System and “Call Us” options are available.

If you go for the Live Chat, you’ll be instantly connected to a professional agent. Once your conversation ends, you can also leave feedback, which helps them improve and live up to your expectations. Your feedback is always taken into consideration.

On the other hand, the Ticketing System provides a straightforward form in which you can explain your problem. You will be requested to enter Category, Topic, Subject, and Website. After doing that part, you need to provide the details.

If you choose the link ‘Call Us’, SiteGround displays a phone number, respective to the country from which you are using the site. Then, a one-time access code is provided for identification.

Next to ‘Contact Us,’ you will notice Support History. This channel is an easy way to find all your tickets from the interaction with SiteGround’s support team.

If you ask me what I like the most about SiteGround’s support, it would most probably be the live chat. The best thing about it is that you can use it even if you aren’t registered.

User Friendly

While doing my SiteGround review, my attention was mostly held due to the simplicity of this platform. Everything is thoroughly explained and straightforward, so you shouldn’t have any issues while using it. SiteGround comes with affordable prices and impressive features that vary from beginner-friendly to more advanced ones. I was curious to see whether this web hosting company is user-friendly in every field.

1. Creating an Account with SiteGround

You can create an account with SiteGround in three simple steps that can be done in less than 15 minutes. Isn’t that great?

• Choose the web hosting plan – Once you choose it, you should click on the ‘Get Plan’ button to proceed to the next step.
• Choose your domain – Here you can either register a new domain name or use another if you already have it.
• Review, Pay & complete – Once you get to this step, you need to fill in payment information, and that’s it. Your SiteGround account is ready.

2. WordPress Migrator

Usually, the web hosting providers that come up with a ‘DIY migration’ option aren’t great and burden the customer. However, SiteGround is an exception with their free WordPress Migration plugin that you can upload to any website.

You can simply generate a token from inside your SiteGround hosting account, which the plugin will quickly migrate to as many websites as you want.

3. Installing WordPress

Installing WordPress is just as easy as creating your SiteGround account. Due to the SiteGround app manager tool, which is a one-click auto-installer tool, this process is a piece of cake. SiteGround makes sure its customers don’t waste any time, which is really great.

Step by Step Walkthrough – SiteGround

After explaining everything in detail, it’s time to show you how to go through this SiteGround journey.

Step 1 – Choose a hosting plan by clicking on the ‘Get Plan’ button (I went for StartUp).

After choosing your plan, you will be transferred to the following screen.

Step 2 – Register a domain or use one you already have. SiteGround offers many different domains. You can find generic, country-specific, or popular domains. I already had a domain, so I used that, as the domain isn’t included in the plan price.

Step 3 – Review & Complete, where you are asked to enter your Account, Client, Payment, and Purchase Information.

If you don’t have an account, you should enter your email and password to continue with the process. SiteGround recommends using between 6 and 50 characters. From those characters, at least one has to be a letter, number, and a special character/capital letter.

Step 4 – Payment. This step is also straightforward as it requires only your card number.

Step 5 – Select your plan in the Purchase Information section.

Step 6 – Choose a Data Center. SiteGround automatically chooses one for you, depending on your location, as you’ll get the best site performance. This web hosting company has data centers in Iowa, USA, Singapore, Asia, Sydney, Australia, London, UK. As for Europe, they have servers in Frankfurt, Germany, and the Netherlands.

Step 7 – Select the hosting period. SiteGround provides their plans for 1, 12, 24, or 36 months. Keep in mind that the longer the period, the lower the price. However, you get the best deal if you go for the annual plan.

By doing the SiteGround research, the monthly plan made the least sense to me, so it would be best not to purchase it.

However, I went for the monthly plan because I was testing SiteGround’s services. Once you choose everything, the page automatically calculates your payment.

SiteGround includes some extra services, for example, SG Site Scanner. This service monitors and immediately notifies you if there are any hacks or malware.

If I decided to add this additional service, my balance increased, so I didn’t include it, even though I highly recommend it.

Another security measure is the verification of your number. Once you’ve entered, you will be requested to verify your phone number, but if you haven’t, you’ll receive an SMS with a verification code.

After clicking ‘Next,’ you’ll receive an email just like the one they sent to me.

With this, your SiteGround step-by-step walkthrough is finished, and you are ready to dive into a new adventure.

Personal Experience  – Although SiteGround comes with a straightforward registration system, my personal experience wasn’t as smooth as I expected. The first obstacle was that my country, North Macedonia, wasn’t on the list, so I had to use my friend’s address in the UK.

The greatest shock was when SiteGround took my money and didn’t activate my account. Can you imagine? I tried to stay calm and contact their support team. Here’s how it went.

The agent was really friendly and tried to help me, so it kind of made up for this terrible experience. The agent offered a refund and told me that I would get my money back in the period of 48 hours.

But, I was very disappointed because I received my money after a week, way longer than the agent claimed. In the meantime, I was angry because my domain was taken, and my SiteGround account was reserved. Yes, the account was created, but I couldn’t access it. After a long week, I finally got my account. The process wasn’t challenging, and it was pretty simple, but this experience was really shocking.

Using and Managing Your Website on SiteGround

As you load your account, the well-organized page will be the first thing you will notice. Right next to the SiteGround logo, you will see the Main Menu.

By scrolling down, you will find a guide to get you started. SiteGround provides eight steps with do-follow buttons.

• Install or Migrate WordPress
• Point Your Domain
• Use a temporary URL for your site
• Transfer Domain
• Change The Domain Of Your Site
• Create Email Accounts At Your Domain
• Transfer Email From A Previous Host
• Set Up Your Email On Phone Or Desktop

Now, you need to click on ‘Point a Domain,’ which will take you to the following screen.

SiteGround transfers you to the Help Center. Here you can find the ‘Tutorial Menu’ on the right side, which is an excellent guide.

Next, in the ‘Websites’ tab, you can find Websites and Collaborations.

As you can see, I only have one website, which I cannot use, so I clicked on ‘Complete.’

Then, I was taken to this screen, where I clicked on ‘Skip & Create Empty Site’ to speed up the process.

As I previously mentioned, SiteGround comes with an SG Site Scanner. I clicked ‘Finish,’ and I could finally manage my site.

After you are transferred to this screen, you can click on ‘Manage Site,’ which will take you to the following screen.

Dashboard

In the ‘Dashboard,’ you will find Pinned Tools, Site Information, and This Month’s Statistics for your site. In this section, you have an option to edit your pinned tools, so by clicking on ‘Edit Pinned Tools,’ you can pin more tools.

• Site
• Security
• Speed
• WordPress
• Domain
• Email
• Statistics
• Devs

Site

In the ‘Site’ section, you will come across PostgreSQL Manager, FTP Accounts, and MySQL Manager.

Security

The ‘Security’ section consists of Backups, SSL Manager, HTTPS Enforce, Protected URLs, and Blocked IPs.

Speed

This section is pretty short. It only comes with SuperCacher and Cloudflare CDN. However, being that short doesn’t stop SiteGround from performing perfectly well.

WordPress

As displayed on the image above, there is also a WordPress section that consists of Staging Copies, WordPress Migrator, WordPress Auto Update, and WordPress Search & Replace.

Domain and Email

Two other important sections are the ‘Domain’ and the ‘Email.’ In ‘Domain,’ you will find Parked Domains, Subdomains, Domain Redirects, and DNS Zone Editor. In contrast, in ‘Email,’ you’ll come across Email Forwarders, Email Autoresponders, Email Filters, Email Authentication, and Spam Protection.

Statistics and Devs

Lastly, in the Dashboard section, you will find the subsections – ‘Statistics’ and ‘Devs.’ Traffic, Error Log, and Access Logs are part of ‘Statistics.’ On the other hand, ‘Devs’ provides Git, Cron Jobs, PHP Manager, SSH Keys Manager, and App Installer.

After explaining the Dashboard section, I will take you a bit back to the Main Menu.

Websites

In the ‘Website’ section, you will find Websites and Collaborations. I’ve already mentioned the Websites part, so I will skip it this time and go straight to Collaborations.

To add a Collaboration to your site, click on ‘Click Here,’ and you’ll proceed to the following screen.

Furthermore, we’ll transfer to the next section in the Main Menu, the ‘Services’ tab.

Services

This section consists of Hosting and Domains. In the Hosting section, you can get ‘New Hosting Plan’ – Shared Hosting or Cloud Hosting.

Billing

You can find this tab also in the Main Menu, next to the logo. This section is divided into Billing Details, Payment History, and Renewals.

In ‘Renewals,’ you can choose to change the hosting plan when the term ends.

Referrals

In ‘Referrals’ are displayed the Referral Program, My Referrals, and Become Affiliate options.

As you can see from the image, SiteGround hosting offers up to three months of free Hosting to one of your web hosting accounts for each new customer, depending on your account’s plan. The process is very simple. You just need to share the referral link by ending it to your friends directly, posting it on your website, or sharing it on Facebook, Twitter, and any other communication channel.

Next, in ‘My Referrals,’ you can track your referrals or check for any missing referrals.

You should fill in this form if you can’t notice an award added to your plans, but you have referred a client to SiteGround.

If you have an established presence, you can earn some commissions just by spreading the word about SiteGround with their Affiliate Program.

Marketplace

The last section we will consider is the Marketplace. Here, you can find Domain Services, Hosting Services, and Partner Perks.

The first subsection, ‘Domain Services’, offers you to purchase a Domain Name or Add Domain Extras, Domain Transfer, or Domain Privacy.

The following subsection is ‘Hosting Services’. This section comes with Web Hosting, WordPress Hosting, WooCommerce Hosting, and Cloud Hosting. Along with these come two additional services, such as Hosting Relocation or Dedicated IP.

Last but not least, SiteGround allows you to browse perks by category in the ‘Partner Perks’ subsection.

Here, you will find WordPress Development Services and Other Partner Services. The WordPress Development Services come with WP Tech Support, Fixmysite.com, and WP Buffs, whereas Other Partner Services include OptinMonster, WPForms, Tusant, Satchmo, Envira Gallery, Weglot, Castos, and Iubenda.

Overall, this is all about the Main Menu, but we are still not done. I want to show you something more aside from the menu.

Let’s check out the My Account section.

Here, you can set up Owner Profile Details, 2-Step Verification, Language, and Data Management in Login & Profile Settings.

The Two-Step Verification adds an additional layer of security.

What I especially like about SiteGround is the multilingual platform. You can choose between English, Spanish, and Italian.

Another great feature of SiteGround is that it offers an immediate deletion of your account. SiteGround automatically deletes your profile and data 24 months after you no longer have active services.

Conclusion: Do We Recommend SiteGround?

Yes, we do!

SiteGround has significantly improved over the years (as can be noticed from the research images in the performance part). The web hosting’s uptime guarantees that your customers will enjoy your website at all times. Also, they won’t face any issues due to their location because SiteGround comes with two specific features that provide fast-loading sites worldwide.

When it comes to the price, it would be best if you choose the longest term possible because the renewal prices increase. Even though the hosting plans are affordable, keep in mind that the domain isn’t included in the price.

After doing this detailed SiteGround brand review, I can say that SiteGround is definitely an attractive and worth-trying web hosting provider. You get fantastic features and the process of managing and using your account is simple.

Monthly Updates

During May, SiteGround Hosting:

• Introduced its SiteGround CDN officially.
• Announced a giveaway for tickets to the West Ham vs. Manchester City game.
• Announced its Twitter newsletter.
• Experienced issues with the login on its site.

During April 2022, SiteGround Hosting:

• Introduced SiteGround Cloud CDN in Beta.
• Introduced its own Private DNS service.
• Offered a special discount for its 18th birthday and Site Scanner for free for 3 months and other features.
• Conducted an interactive game for its 18th birthday.

During March 2022, SiteGround Hosting:

• Released a new SiteGround Security plugin.
• Patched new critical Linux kernel vulnerability.

During February 2022, SiteGround Hosting:

• Announced that the SiteGround Optimizer plugin is now available and free for all WordPress sites.

During January 2022, SiteGround Hosting:

• Announced that it started the year with a 98% Client Satisfaction Rate.
• Announced that it has a serious security issue in All in One SEO Plugin.
• Announced a giveaway of tickets for a football match.
• Experienced a glitch between Amazon and Google’s networks.
• Made updates on its DNS servers.
• Made a quiz with which users could win a portable speaker.

During December 2021, SiteGround Hosting:

• Announced a giveaway of five branded portable speakers.
• Announced a giveaway of tickets for a football match.
• Announced that all websites that they host are safe from the recent security exploit of the Java library.
• Won the silver award for Best WordPress Hosting at the Monster’s Awards, and its Security Plugin won the silver award for Best Security.
• Had a security issue with its WordPress plugin.
• Announced a giveaway of tickets for a football match and the winners.
• Published a marketing guide that people can get for free.

During November 2021, SiteGround Hosting:

• Introduced the new SiteGround Optimizer plugin v6
• Offered up to 69% off on web hosting plans
• Had some trouble with the DNS Service
• Experienced issues with Google’s LoadBalancers
• Introduced availability of services in German 
• Offered the possibility for old users to invite friends and receive benefits for each referral

During October 2021, SiteGround Hosting:

• Offered up to 69% off on web hosting plans
• Had a giveaway: two tickets for WestHam v Tottenham on Oct 24th
• Received a nomination for the Monster’s Award 2021 (the biggest WPCommunity award)
• Offered one year of free GoGeek hosting

During September 2021, SiteGround Hosting:

• Web Hosting Summer Sale: Up to 69% off offers
• Introduced a new and improved SG Site Scanner Security Service
• Sponsored the biggest WordCamp in North America – WordCampUS
• Updated SiteGround clients to the newest WP version 5.8.1.

During August 2021, SiteGround Hosting:

• Became the official partner of London WestHam United Premier League Club
• Introduced PHP 8.1 BETA 1 Elephant (available for testing on all servers)

During July 2021, SiteGround Hosting:

• Had an issue with its email services; some clients experienced issues with the login form
• Added the option for Multisite SFTP access with a single SSH key
• Reworked their DNS service to make it faster, safer, more flexible and easy to use
• Completed a 2.5-year-long software development cycle
• Added WordPress 5.8 Tatum to its services
• Introduced the “Add Collaborators” Heavy check mark feature to its StartUp plan