SiteGround is a web host that has been around since 2004, services more than 2 million domains and has over 500 employees (see the Wikipedia article here). This article is a compilation of comments and reviews on SiteGround that SiteGround customers have sent us, which should give you a pretty good idea of the quality of their service.
Here’s how SiteGround stacks up. Overall, the feedback we’ve received on SiteGround is very positive so far, and most people recommend it. Site speed for SiteGround is reported to be very good by most people (see here, here, here, here and here), with just a couple of people so far reporting that their site speed was better with other providers (namely Cloudways and WPX Hosting). Similarly, for support, most people speak highly of SiteGround (here, here, here, here and here, just to list a few) — people say you can use their live chat and get a response very quickly, and support staff are reported to be knowledgeable and efficient, though as with site speed there are a couple of comments saying that SiteGround has gotten worse over the years and is now sub-par (here, here and here). We can at least say that the majority of people who have commented so far are satisfied with their site speed and the support that they get with SiteGround. SiteGround is also said to have a very good dashboard that makes it easy to manage everything, and you should not have any problems using it.
As far as SiteGrounds problems go, beyond a couple of isolated issues reported by a single person below such as IP changes making a site go down (here) or email problems (here), perhaps the biggest thing you should watch out for with SiteGround is their pricing. Like with many (most?) hosts, SiteGround hooks you with a low initial price and it can then go up massively upon renewal. Taken from this comment, for example:
The first invoice is quite reasonable. For a mid-level shared hosting account it comes out to about $85/year. However, on renewal, the price drastically jumps. I’m looking at a renewal notice right now for an account we already migrated for $311. For one year of shared hosting, that is ridiculous.
So to conclude, we can say that SiteGround is a good experience for most people, and will probably work for you. But know that it’s not always perfect for 100% of people and that you may be hit with a larger-than-expected bill when it’s time to renew.
Finally, if you’ve used SiteGround yourself and would like to comment on your experience with them, please add a comment here. You are especially welcome to make a contribution if you have experience with SiteGround unlike any of the comments that have been submitted so far, or if you strongly disagree with anything here.
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I used Siteground for a couple of years for a number of client websites. The two biggest positives were the customer support and the site speed. The support was always very fast and responsive. As I was new to Siteground at the time, they walked me through the site setup process, and responded quickly when I reported slower server speeds for different parts of the world. Despite the occasional outage, I was impressed with the overall site speed, and the TTFB (time to first byte) was always consistently quick. I would recommend it for beginners due to simple features like a free SSL certificate with an easy install. However, when I migrated my own wordpress blog, I decided not to go with Siteground purely because of the cost and the one-time fees that felt slightly sneaky. At the time, they had a fee for setting up auto payments, and another for wordpress migration. It's an excellent web host but for wordpress beginners (with inevitably) small sites that will load quickly regardless of their servers, I feel that it's a touch expensive. --David Michael, David Michael Digital |
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I’ve hosted my website with Siteground for more than a year. Back then, it was the price that attracted me to choose this hosting. Support was responsive. I only had a small site that didn’t have much traffic. It had a few outages due to IP changes. Though they mentioned that there were constant reminders to remind site owners to change their IP in their DNS settings, I felt that the reminders weren’t frequent enough or the notifications were not prominent. I only knew about the IP change when I realized my website went down. The biggest outage was the site went down for 2 whole days. Also, when I upgraded my plan to a more powerful server I didn’t see any noticeable speed improvement. After migrating my site to Cloudways, the site loaded much faster and I’m paying almost the same price as my previous plan. Cloudways does require the webmaster to have a bit of technical background to bring up the virtual servers and WordPress applications. But so far when I have any issues, the support team would resolve them quickly. I would only recommend Siteground if you are just starting out because their prices are good. But be prepared to face IP changes issue as it happened to me quite a few times already. --Chee Zhiquan, TakeOutdoors |
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I've used various hosts over the last several years for different websites, including GoDaddy, SiteGround, and HostGator, and I can honestly say that SiteGround have the best performing and cost-effective hosting solutions. Even on a shared hosting account (which I'm using for my website currently), the speeds are incredibly fast and I've had no downtime at all. SiteGround support is also incredibly quick and I've managed to sort out a couple of backend issues within around five minutes. SiteGround were also very helpful during the pandemic by offering three months of their startup hosting plan for literally £1. Having recently changed their dashboard from cPanel, the new dashboard is very intuitive for beginners looking to start their first website, and it still maintains all of the previous functionality. --Itamar Blauer, itamarblauer.com PERMALINK: https://outwittrade.com/siteground-reviews#itamar |
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I originally used InMotion Hosting before moving to SiteGround. These are my observations compared to InMotion - Better load speed - Better support - Easier to navgiate The biggest pro with SiteGround is that they have servers in many locations around the world. I have businesses that are located mainly in Asia and Australia, we were able to choose a server in Singapore and Sydney rather than having a server in the USA. This drastically increased speeds for local traffic. I typically go on the 2nd tier GrowBig plan to take advantage of SiteGround's caching capabilites to get even faster load times. --Yujin Yeoh, yujinyeoh.com |
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I currently use Siteground on my blogs and here's my honest opinion about it. It is by far one of the best well rounded web hosting providers available. It's affordable, it's very beginner friendly and gets the job done without you having to constantly worry about making changes. And if you do end up needing some help, their customer support team is by far one of the best in the industry and is available 24/7. They have web hosting services for just about everything you'll need online - from beginners to enterprises alike. SiteGround is the perfect solution for anyone who wants a web hosting provider that can be there with them for the lifetime of their blog. --Terence, Is Blogging Easy PERMALINK: https://outwittrade.com/siteground-reviews#terence |
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I use SiteGround for all of my websites, but I have used a range of other hosts beforehand. I believe the top hosting services are much of a muchness. The reason I use SiteGround for all of my websites is mostly because of their customer service. Every time I’ve needed to contact them for help they’ve been quick to respond, and have gone above and beyond to help me. Keeping all of my sites under one of their plans has been a breeze. --Lucy Johnson, SHiDO |
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I don't use Siteground now, but I started all my sites on Siteground and first became a customer of theirs in August 2016. I researched hosts for months (too long) before selecting Siteground. It's hard to find honest, legitimate hosting reviews online because everyone is an affiliate for the host they recommend. So I was scouring the BBB site, Yelp, and forums and Facebook groups to try and get a better feel for who was good. Siteground was perfect for me in the beginning. They were inexpensive (somewhere around $3.00/month, paid annually). The site speed was good, the cpanel was easy to navigate and their 24/7 live chat support was 2nd to none. At my day job, we used GoDaddy, and I would often start a live chat and wait 20-30 minutes before being helped. Siteground was usually on within 5 minutes, and often instantly. I still think they are decent for beginners and still recommend them. But ultimately, I did move all my sites to WPX Hosting about 6 months ago, and am still glad I did. Here's why I moved: Siteground prices jump up significantly upon renewal. They hook you in with a low price (advertised as a monthly fee, but like most hosts, bill annually). But in the end, 2 years later, I was paying roughly 10 times as much as my initial rate. Siteground also has strict data caps on how many pageviews you are allowed to have monthly before you have to upgrade (and pay more). If you don't upgrade, it's not unheard of for them to just shut your sites down without warning, effectively holding them hostage. But more importantly, their support team got much worse. The wait times were still good, but more and more, they were refusing to help and would simply suggest I hire a developer to fix my problems. In the old days, they were always willing to help troubleshoot any technical problem. Lastly, I saw my site speed drop. These days, in the eyes of Google, site speed matters a lot. And my sites that had been in the 80s or 90s for Google mobile PSI scores had dropped into the 50s and 60s. They denied that the drop in speed had anything to do with them. But upon switching to WPX, the speed came right back with no other changes made. So ultimately, I think Siteground is perfect for someone just testing the waters of blogging, internet marketing, or e-commerce. But as the site grows, I don't think Siteground is the place to be once traffic is over 50,000 monthly pageviews or if you add additional sites. Also, knowing what I know now about their renewal rate increases, I would probably lock in 2-3 years with my initial contract. --Jeff Campbell, newmiddleclassdad.com |
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I have now been using SiteGround for my site for a year and a half now, and I can't complain about anything. From setting up my site and getting it up and running took probably less than an hour. After that, I haven't really had any major issues with it. It's fast and easy to use. The few times I've had a problem I have always received excellent help from the customer service. Fixing problems with my emails, DNS records and such. I can't compare SiteGround with many others, I've only used GoDaddy in the past. I have found SiteGround to be more user friendly and cheaper. --Per Englund, Go CryptoWise |
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We create and maintain websites for clients and have used SiteGround cloud hosting to host client websites for over 5 years. At present, we host about 100 websites on SiteGround. I highly recommend SiteGround. It is the absolute best website hosting company that provides a cPanel and email hosting, and it is among the top companies that provide cloud hosting. Some of the reasons we chose SiteGround and continue to use them include: The sites are hosted on Google Cloud with SSD persistent storage, which is one of the fastest and most reliable hosting networks. SiteGround hosting includes a cPanel, which enables us to host the client's email with the website at no extra charge. SiteGround hosting includes server caching, a free SSL, a free CDN, and a staging environment. SiteGround provides a plugin to easily manage server settings along with various other website settings to increase website speed, which is important for SEO. SiteGround support is among the best in the industry. --Allan McNabb, ImageBuildingMedia.com |
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I run a digital marketing company, Clicked Marketing. Siteground was our preferred host for clients who needed shared hosting accounts. They were reliable, affordable, and easy to use. We encountered two problems with them that made us shift all our clients to other hosting providers. First, if the client was relying on Siteground for managing email and not using a 3rd party provider like Google Suite, we had deliverability problems. Siteground partners with another company for email security and filtering spam. On several occasions, that spam software was having errors that caused all incoming client email to be held up for 24-48 hours. Siteground offered little in the way of help with the problem other than to tell us they were aware of it and we would just have to wait for it to be resolved. The second issue was that they changed their pricing structure. The first invoice is quite reasonable. For a mid-level shared hosting account it comes out to about $85/year. However, on renewal, the price drastically jumps. I'm looking at a renewal notice right now for an account we already migrated for $311. For one year of shared hosting, that is ridiculous. --Mike Friedman, Clicked Marketing |
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I started my blog in 2016 and used SiteGround from the beginning because I was impressed with other bloggers reports of their customer service. Being a non-tech person, I knew I would need help along the way and their tech staff have always come through. Whatever problem I’m having they either fix it for me or walk me through what I need to do. I probably would have given up blogging a long time ago if they weren’t able or willing to help me out of some frustrating situations. I highly recommend SiteGround for beginner bloggers. --Kimberly, Life Worth the Living PERMALINK: https://outwittrade.com/siteground-reviews#kimberly |
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I've used SiteGround for my clients websites earlier on. Their plans are extremely enticing - especially the ones that are heavily discounted for the first 3 years. That's one of the primary reasons why SiteGround attracts a lot of customers. Their infrastructure stack is pretty okay. It's not on par with other web hosts such as WP Engine or Kinsta, however it does a decent job when one is just starting out and scaling up a bit. They were one of the few web hosting companies who'd boast about superior customer service although I can't say that is the case nowadays. Even before the pre-Covid era, many customers saw their (once famous) customer support deteriorate and I (like many others I know) have moved our clients' websites away from SiteGround. In fact, from what I know now, they have shifted their chat function (one of the most used features) away from being very visible to a place that'll take serious exploration skills to find. One a scale of 1 to 10, I'd rate SiteGround a 6. As of now, I'm using FastComet and though their specs are very comparable to SiteGround but I'd highly recommend them given their customer support. --Noman Nalkhande, WP Adventure |
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I recently launched our company's WP website using SiteGround in April. I've previously used one other host - Aplus. I've really enjoyed working on SiteGround. There's nothing I can think of that I disliked and here are a few of the reasons that I've been satisfied. 1. Simple user interface - I felt that compared to the previous host that I used, SiteGround had a really simple user interface and everything was fairly easy to find. 2. Pricing - I felt that the pricing and value was very competitive compared to everything I found in the marketplace for hosts. 3. Support content - I googled a number of different topics related to SiteGround and invariably SiteGround would have a blog post with in depth instructions on how to accomplish what I was looking for. --Jonathan Mandell, Teepee PERMALINK: https://outwittrade.com/siteground-reviews#jonathan |
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We use SiteGround Startup plan for WordPress hosting paired with Cloudflare content delivery network to improve page speed, reduce bandwidth and CPU usage on the server. As a non-technical person, I really like SiteGround for beginners and new sites. The user interface is intuitive compared with other hosting services I’ve used in the past. The support set-up has also been helpful with several well-constructed tutorials and guides available. They don’t have live chat, but email support has been fast and good. My priority in launching my site has been accelerating content creation, so minimizing time and headache of technical set-up was a major benefit. Overall I found site setup to be simple, fast and cost effective through SiteGround. I’ve been advised by other site owners to avoid hitting SiteGround’s CPU limits. I’m told that in some cases SiteGround slowed or closed service to sites that surpassed their plan limits, without adequate warning to the site owner. As a new site owner I expect it will be many months before I run into any limitations, even when subscribed on the most affordable plan. --David Lewis, Kitchen Ambition PERMALINK: https://outwittrade.com/siteground-reviews#davidl |
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I run a food blog and I use SiteGround's WordPress hosting service. In my experience it has worked tremendously well. I don't experience any downtime in the service and SiteGround has an amazing support service to assist me with initial set-up and operations. The support team has responded to my queries instantly and I hardly had to wait. It is very cheap compared to other hosting providers like HostGator or GoDaddy. I started my hosting with Siteground for $ 0.99 for a span of 3 months and then I extended it by a year for $71. This is way too cheap compared to other providers who sell annual subscriptions for $200. I am very satisfied with Siteground and I highly recommend it. --Samiksha Rawool, Yummy Tummy Recipes PERMALINK: https://outwittrade.com/siteground-reviews#samiksha |
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I have been using Siteground since 2018 and would highly recommend their services. The level of customer support is impressive and you are connected to someone on the support team within a few minutes of sending a request. The support team stays online with you until whatever issue you have is resolved. They recently upgraded their user dashboard and it makes it easier to manage my websites and access services faster. Siteground also provides SG Optimizer, a plugin that links WordPress with SiteGround performance services. Optimization services within this plugin include super cacher, https configuration, and PHP configuration. The biggest draw in all the time I’ve hosted my websites with Sitegound remains - none of my websites have ever experienced downtime. The only other host I currently use besides Siteground is BigScoots. The services are comparable but when it comes to support on BigScoots, you have to send in a ticket and wait for a response. You’re not connected in real-time. I don’t think this a deal-breaker but comes down to personal preference. Additionally, 2 of my websites on BigScoots have experienced downtime once or twice for a few hours due to technical issues. They did send across an explanation for the downtime afterward. Overall, if I were to pick between the two for beginners, I would still recommend Siteground over BigScoots. --Anna Fani, The Writer Entrepreneur |
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I'm hosting my business with SiteGround's WordPress hosting (GrowBig plan) and I'm very satisfied with the service. First, when I transferred from Bluehost (which are also a decent host, no major complaints against them), I was able to use their custom plugin to move the site in less than 1h. It was a relief because switching hosts always seemed daunting to me as I never done it before. Second, I didn't know how to point my DNS from Bluehost to SiteGround, so I asked their support team. and got a reply in few hours. I was impressed. Third, SiteGround is a really fast host compared to my previous hosting provider (Bluehost). Just by transferring, my site's speed rose 20% across the board. But after I've fine-tuned their custom plugin (SG Optimizer), my blog's loading speed skyrocketed and now I'm getting 90+ scores for both desktop and mobile versions of the site. I'm impressed with SiteGround, and so far have no real complaint against them. I'm sure they're not perfect and that I could nit-pick if I wanted to; but overall I'm very satisfied.I'd recommend SiteGround's WordPress hosting to any blogger looking for an excellent hosting service. --Nikola Roza, nikolaroza.com PERMALINK: https://outwittrade.com/siteground-reviews#nikola |
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Siteground is a popular choice among Wordpress users due to the price and performance they offer. It's one of the best value for money hosting platforms I've used, making it the perfect option for beginners! I've used Siteground and various other hosts including A2, Bluehost, and WPX. WPX Hosting outperforms Siteground but it's also considerably more expensive. On the other hand, Siteground performed better than A2 and Bluehost, while also having far better support! I'd highly recommend Siteground for anybody looking to build their first Wordpress site. --Dylan Gordon, HustlerSource |
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I’ve been using Siteground for almost a year now and the most notable benefit it has over all other host companies is its exceptional customer support. You can literally get live support for any problem you have in 2 – 20 minutes (depending on the hour). The best part about it is that you will be chatting with a knowledgeable IT educated employee that can actually help with various custom problems, not only give general advice. This is extremely helpful for beginners as they often find themselves stuck and not knowing who or where to ask questions. The interface is very user-friendly and they offer you a free optimization plugin for Wordpress, called SG Optimizer, which is one of the best out there and also has great support and constant updates. As far as speed goes, you will want to choose the GoGeek plan, because it is one of the fastest on the market (definitely top 5). The other 2 are slower and lack some useful features, like the staging area, which allows you to make a copy of your website that acts as a draft so you don’t have to make changes you are unsure of on the live version. So far I had no issues whatsoever with Siteground and my website’s performance is top notch so I would recommend them to beginners and advanced users alike. --Dan Serbanescu, Leather Depot |
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I've used SiteGround to host my blog for a few years now and while they have served their purpose in the first few years, i'm searching for a new hosting provider. Pros If you're a beginner, SiteGround is relatively cheap to get started and their setup tools are relatively easy to use. They also tend to have sales during the year where you can upgrade your plan. I'm on the GrowBig plan and found it easy to setup additional sites and staging environments. Cons One of the big issues I've faced is the inconsistency of server response time. Often PageSpeed insights reports have flagged issues with Reduce server response times (TTFB). While the general uptime has been satisfactory, I recently experienced an outage of around an hour and found that the issue was on SiteGround's side. While this happens, there wasn't any acknowledgement from their side which was disappointing. --Chris, The Games Guy |
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I have experience with using Siteground Hosting myself amongst other plans (ie, GoDaddy, Bluehost, HostGator, etc) from when I consulted with and did web design for clients, and from working on our own websites. PROS: I never had any major issues or glitches with Siteground and the staging area for website development I found to be very easy to use. If there was something I wasn't sure of there was always thorough documentation to read up on and customer service was always right there to help. Though in the recent year they've undergone some changes that have affected it to some extent. CONS: Support is not what it used to be and is difficult to find, literally! You have to go searching for it on the website and go through a barrage of questions before you can actually get to the hidden chat support. It's certainly better than GoDaddy Hosting, which is fine if you've just got a landing page for a website. Enough said. But if you have a pretty robust website, with lots of plugins, media, and need the speed to be quick and reliable, then Siteground is a much better option. Here are some other top choices top choices I'd recommend: 1. Name Hero 2. Kinsta 3. WP Engine 4. A2 Hosting 5. Lyrical Host The last one is my host of choice right now as it's designed by bloggers, for bloggers. It's not one of the big guys, and the company has more of a family feel about it, but that's why I like it. In the end, you have to decide what's most important to you and not make your decision based on price alone. --Christie Love, christielove.com PERMALINK: https://outwittrade.com/siteground-reviews#christie |
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I have been using site ground for more than 2 years and it's much better than my previous hosting companies. Speed and performance of Siteground is impressive. I think it is due to 3 things: - It has its own caching and image optimization plugin called SG optimizer. - It provides native integration with Cloudflare. - It has many data centers all over the world. Secondly, their support is very good. In the last 3-4 months, I have faced some issues. Maybe that was due to Covid but overall I am happy with their support. I was previously using Inmotion hosting. Their servers were OK but I faced a lot of issues with their support team. I was not feeling so good while paying this much and not getting a good service so I switched to Siteground hosting. --Yash Sharma, Learnerzhub |
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I moved over all my hosting from Hostpresto to Siteground at the end of last year. Personally, It’s been one of the best decisions I’ve made. My site load times are now much quicker, and the support so far has been amazing both via the phone and ticketing system. One of the things I really like is the staging feature. I had a complete website design overhaul at the start of this year. Without this, I would have had a lot of downtime, and I managed to iron out any issues before going live with the new design. I’m going to continue to use Siteground as my traffic grows, and I will see how well it handles this overtime. One thing to note, I’ve noticed Siteground tend to offer massive discounts during big events such as black Friday. So if you’re thinking of switching, it might be beneficial to wait and make the most of these. --Luke, scamtested.com |