Overview

Siteground ranks among our top three web hosts. It’s difficult to say which host is “best,” largely because they’re all strong in different areas, however Siteground excels on customer service, uptime and technical features. When we compare Siteground to other popular hosts there are upsides and downsides. For example, Bluehost charges for website migrations, is more expensive in the first year (but cheaper in the second year) and lacks the quality of customer support provided by Siteground. That said, Bluehost offers a free domain, allows customers to host unlimited websites (Siteground only allows customers to host one website per shared hosting account) and is broadly equal to Siteground on uptime but significantly better for server response time. Overall, we’re impressed with quality of Siteground’s StartUp package, particularly its technical features and customer service.

Pricing

Like most web hosts, the price you’re advertised isn’t the price you pay when you proceed through checkout. The entry-level ‘StartUp’ package is marketed at $3.95 per month but to qualify for this rate you must pay at least 12 months in advance. If you want to subscribe for 12 months the annual cost is $47.40 payable upfront (which, when compared against its rivals, is cheap considering the features offered). Unlike a lot of web hosts, it doesn't vary the monthly rate depending on whether you subscribe for 12 months, 24 months or 36 months – it’s set at $3.95. Where SiteGround really get you however is with the renewal rate: it’s $143.40 and thus over 200% more expensive than the introductory rate. It appears to have increased its rates recently - the annual renewal price used to be $119.40. Unfortunately, this process - increasing prices upon annual renewal - is standard across web hosts (with the notable exception of a few hosts, see here); 1&1's renewal price for its entry-level hosting package is 700% more expensive than its introductory price. It also offers a one month trial for $3.95 which increases in price to $11.95 per month for each subsequent month. The trial is also accompanied by a $14.95 setup fee. SiteGround also increased the price of one year .com registrations recently, up from $14.95 to $15.95 per year. This is high relative to some of its competitors and unfortunately, unlike some of its competitors, it doesn't offer free domain name to new customers. Hosting with SiteGround is great in the first year and its features, uptime and customer service are excellent; however, expect to pay a premium for these benefits in subsequent years.

Technical

Siteground provides more details on technical restrictions than any other web host we’ve reviewed. The most important restrictions Siteground set relate to domains, CPU usage and script executions.

• You can only host one domain on its StartUp package (many hosts at this price point allow customers to host unlimited domains);
•  ‘StartUp’ hosting accounts are limited to:
  • 20% of CPU usage and for a period of no longer than 20 seconds;
  • 10,000 CPU seconds per day (or 1,000 per hour or 300,000 per month); and
  • 10,000 script executions (eg requesting an index.php file) per day (or 1,000 per hour or 300,000 per month).

Siteground doesn’t seem to provide data on how it limits entry processes (simultaneous script executions e.g. loading a Wordpress file), seemingly preferring instead to limit based on daily rather than simultaneous script executions. What do their restrictions on script executions translate to? Siteground believes your resource restrictions will capably handle up to 10,000 visits per month. If you reach 80% of your allotted script executions or CPU seconds Siteground will send you an email detailing what you need to do to reduce them. This could involve anything from blocking resource intensive IP addresses or implementing caching. The restrictions are reset each month and don’t apply to static content (eg HTML content), they only apply to dynamic script executions. Importantly, there’s also a restriction on database queries: they can't take up more than 10% of server resources (all WordPress installations rely on database queries to render page templates). Providing you’re not a heavy user it’s unlikely these restrictions will affect you, however it’s worth keeping them in mind when evaluating Siteground’s service. You’ll also see a ‘running processes’ metric in the sidebar of your admin panel when you first login. This metric refers to the number of active processes on the server-side particularly as it relates to cPanel, email accounts, FTP accounts, multiple login sessions to cPanel from different browsers, etc. It is not affected by HTTP connections made by your visitors. Bandwidth is advertised as ‘unmetered’ (this means SiteGround doesn't monitor it). It’s worth noting SiteGround state in its terms of service that this only applies to web pages (eg, HTML page or PHP pages) and not to the upload or storage of video, pictures or music files. It also states the following in relation to bandwidth: “While we do not meter traffic, the maximum availability at any time will depend on current traffic usage and the technical specifications of our equipment”.

Service

The StartUp package offers a single website backup per day. These backups aren’t available in your admin panel (unless you subscribe to the premium backup and restore option) and you’ll likely have to pay if you require a restore. The GoGeek package – the most expensive package – includes 30 backups taken over 30 days and unlimited professional restores. Siteground offers a 30 day money back guarantee. This is standard however a number of hosts, eg Hostgator, Dreamhost and InMotion, offer superior guarantees. Siteground also offers a 99.90% uptime guarantee (advertised as 99.9%) and the compensation it offers for failing to honor the guarantee is as generous as any other host. If uptime in any given month is between 99.90% and 99.00% then they’ll give you one month of free hosting (they’ll also give you an additional month of free hosting in increments of 1% downtime). Finally, Siteground is the best host we’ve reviewed for customer service – they provide both ticketing and live chat support. They responded to our support ticket in less than eight minutes. Their live chat is equally impressive; all of the questions we had – irrespective how technical – were answered promptly. Ordinarily we'd go into significantly more depth on a host's customer service however SiteGround just handles customer service the way it's supposed to be handled. If customer service is your primary concern then there's no better host at this price range.