25 Aug
You must be thinking about choosing a highly affordable and reliable web hosting after the drastic economic effects due to COVID-19, right? Here are the most honest SiteGround reviews 2020 to know more about the Bulgarian first class host. After crafting our blog or an online store in one of the popular content management systems known as WordPress, best web hosting is the uttermost requirement we need to fulfill.
A web hosting company allows us to put our data on internet in dashing styles and beautiful themes so it goes live for the public. Therefore every WordPress blogger or startup looks for the best hosting company. These SiteGround Reviews are focused on managed wordpress hosting offered with best performance, excellent support services relatively at highly affordable price.
While competition is really high and a number of wordpress hosting companies provide excellent and best WP hosting along with top performing cloud services in the world. Yet we have to think and search which one wouldn’t be too heavy on our pocket.
Launching a website, a wordpress blog or an e-com store requires a lot of hard work, time and patience initially. However, we need it highly available all the time and our website should load in no time. Therefore, I have mentioned 6 major checklists to choose an ideal host in 2020. So, if you are looking for a fast,highly affordable and best web hosting for wordpress sites with excellent support and premium features, SiteGround should be your ultimate choice.
SiteGround is highly recommended for personal wordpress blogs, online stores and E-commerce websites and best web hosting for wordpress sites. More importantly, it’s a great hosting platform with super fast & high speed servers where you can build and migrate websites easily in few clicks.
1. SiteGround Reviews 2020: World's Best WordPress Hosting Platform
There is no doubt about SiteGround being the best in the hosting industry. Their support team is amazing and provide quickest support with high professional attitude. So, let me shed some light on the amazing features you can enjoy in SiteGround.
Features
- Officially recommended by wordpress.org
- Ultra high performance servers with 99.99% guaranteed uptime
- Amazing support, available 24/7 by phone, chat and ticket
- SSD disks and PHP 7 with OpCache
- Free Sitebuilder, Free Cloudflare CDN, Free SSL
- Linux containers with isolated resources
- Proactive server monitoring
- Free Email Accounts
- WordPress staging
- Daily backups in all hosting plans
- Unlimited MySQL databases
- Super Cacher for fastest speeds
- Unlimited data transfer
- HTTP/2 enabled servers
- Anti-hack systems
- PHP libraries and encoders supported
- Encrypted and highly secure file transfers
- Unlimited FTP accounts
- SSH and SFTP access
- PostgreSQL also support with phpPgAdmin
- Resource allocation
- 30 day money back guarantee
2. Who Owns SiteGround?
The Bulgaria based SiteGround has a wonderful history, it was 2004 when a group of university friends founded it in Sofia. It has got immense growth from that day and now they host over 2 Million websites over the globe. They have world class data centers in 3 continents with modern infrastructure, redundant electrical systems and super fast speed and uptime technologies. Above all, SiteGround team has now more than 500 employees worldwide who provide excellent and prompt support.
For the reason that 2 Million people trusting such a wonderful hosting brand, words speak louder than actions. But that shows how committed SiteGround’s team is to provide excellent services. Above all, it is their excellent support that brings the company at the top among the best web hosting services providers.
3. Is SiteGround any Good? Performance and Uptime
Leave all the plans or offers SiteGround provides for a while. First of all let’s talk about the performance and uptime as these are our main concerns. More importantly, we want our blog or website to load with exceptional speeds with no downtime. When a website is in business, we can not bear with a downtime of a second.
SiteGround promises 99.99% Uptime Guarantee.
In addition, SiteGround uses the following tools and technologies for websites and webpages to load very fast:
- Servers colocated in 3 regions with highly secure and redundant data centers in Chicago, London, Iowa, Amsterdam, Eemshaven and Singapore.
- Customizable server level caching with Supercacher and Opcache plugins, NGINX, CDN, PHP7 & HTTP/2
- SSD drives for rocket speeds on all hosting plans.
- Isolated Linux containers
- 24/7/365 server infrastructure monitoring to keep all the servers alive.
- Extremely effective Artificial Intelligence solution that stops between 500K and 2 million brute-force attempts per hour
- CHROOT account isolation of accounts on shared servers at a time which means you will not be affected by any account
- Dynamic caching and optimization that makes it best web hosting for wordpress sites
- Daily backups for all the hosting plans. Hence your critical data is in safe hands.
SiteGround has an official recommendation of WordPress.org
Furthermore, you can always check the Server Status Update of your host server in the user area under support tab to get the quick and latest stats.
4. Hosting Categories and Plans
SiteGround offers the following types of hosting services to its customers around the globe. In addition, there are 4 major hosting categories which are subdivided into the hosting plans created intelligently as per customer’s need. Every plan is enriched with excellent features. The following are the major hosting categories:
- Shared Web Hosting
- Managed WordPress Hosting
- WooCommerce Hosting
- Cloud Hosting
Now let’s explore them one by one.
There are 3 plans in shared hosting starting from the lowest special price at $3.95/month and that’s my recommended plan for a beginner because it will save a lot of money.
3 Bigger Plans
These are the 3 major shared hosting plans offered by SiteGround:
- StartUp @ $3.95/month
- GrowBig @ $5.95/month
- GoGeek @ $11.95/month
No setup charges if you sign up for a year or more
a.) StartUp Web Hosting
More importantly, if you are a startup and going to launch your wordpress blog, It’s highly recommended to go with StartUp web hosting plan, it is ideal for one website. But why?
Potential Savings & Features
Here are the potentials savings & features you’ll enjoy in this plan:
- SSL certificate included for FREE
- Get free Cloudflare CDN with each account
- Free Email accounts
- Drag and Drop builder
- Website Builder
- CMS install
- Unlimited MySQL
- Unlimited subdomains and parked domains
- Suitable for a website with 10K monthly visits
- Unlimited FTP accounts
- Free setup if you sign up for a year or more
- 99.9% Uptime Guarantee
- 10GB SSD disk space and unmetered bandwidth
- Free SSH & SFTP access
- Multiple PHP versions supported
- Spamexperts spam protection
- Fully refundable for 30 days.
- Plan will renew @ $11.95/month
The total price for 3 years plan is $142.20 & you’ll save $288, isn’t it amazing?
Hence you’ll save big on a 3 years plan with their special discount offer.
It’s certainly the most popular plan with premium performance features. For the reason that you’ll get not only the startup features but you’ll enjoy more premium features. The most noteworthy features include free site transfer, wordpress staging and advanced on demand backup.
GrowBig Hosting Features
Let’s take a quick look at all the hosting features of GrowBig plan:
- SuperCacher caching service for fastest loading speed
- Instant advanced on demand backup
- Lifetime SSL certificate included for FREE
- Website setup at no charge
- Collaborators can be added
- WordPress stating, highly recommended for wordpress sites
- 99.9% Uptime Guarantee
- 2X Processing Power & Memory
- 20GB SSD disk space and unmetered bandwidth
- Can handle around 25K monthly visits
- Host unlimited websites
- Fully refundable for 30 days.
- Plan will renew @ $19.95/month.
Hence the total price for a 3 year plan is $214.20 and you’ll save $504.00, so go ahead and start your website with premium GrowBig hosting plan.
As the name says, this It’s very powerful hosting plan suitable for web and tech geeks. Above all, the premium hosting features are available in this plan adding even more. Though GoGeek is a bit costly but the performance and pre-installed technology tools make it worth it. All the essential and premium features are already available plus more advanced tools are added.
GoGeek Features
Here is the list of the amazing features of GoGeek plan:
- Support on high priority bases
- Robust server performance & large volume of server resources allocated
- Suitable for websites and apps with high volume of traffic
- Handles upto 100K monthly visitors
- Create GIT repository in a single click
- White-lable hosting and client management
- Cloudflare protection included for free
- Daily backups for free
- Unlimited databases
- Lifetime SSL certificate included for FREE
- Website setup at no charge for at least 1 year plan
- 99.9% Uptime Guarantee
- Highest Processing Power & Memory
- 30GB SSD disk space and unmetered bandwidth
- Fully refundable for 30 days.
- Finally plan will renew @ $34.95/month.
ii. SiteGround Reviews 2020: Managed WordPress Hosting
As I’ve stated earlier, SiteGround is officially recommended by wordpress.org for its managed WordPress hosting. As per the Websitebuilder stats, 32% of the Internet is Powered by WordPress. Even the most notable brands in the world use WordPress. Above all I just love it and my blog is using WordPress too. Therefore SiteGround is offering all wordpress features in StartUp, GrowBig and GoGeek managed wordpress hosting plans fully focused on wordpress launch, performance, security and transfer.
Managed WordPress Hosting Plans
There are 3 wordpress hosting plans just like shared hosting:
- StartUp @ $3.95/month
- GrowBig @ $5.95/month
- GoGeek @ $11.95/month
Why should you go with wordpress hosting at SiteGround? Because not only it provides all the features of shared hosting, it adds the following to make wordpress site management much easier.
Managed WordPress Hosting Features Overview
SiteGround managed wordpress hosting offers the following features:
- Free wordpress installation
- WordPress auto updates
- Free migrator
- WP CLI & SSH
- WordPress staging
- Excellent support regarding wordpress issues
- WP Super Cacher
- WP–CLI and GIT for developers for fastest wordpress developments
- Enhanced security by using server’s firewall
- User-friendly access manager
- Front-end and image optimization
- Guaranteed 99.9% Uptime
- Free WordPress transfer
iii. WooCommerce Hosting
It is the best time to start an online store at an affordable budget. If you have a plan to start it, SiteGround has got WooCommerce hosting for you. Most noteworthy, it is officially recommended by Woo Commerce, Yoast and wordpress.org. Gladly, the WooCommerce hosting plans are available at the same prices as the shared hosting plans. It is pretty easy and very simple to install WooCommerce in few steps. With a professional-looking Storefront theme and a free site builder, your store will attract high volume of buyers and that will result an increase in sales. Please see the prices and plans above under shared web hosting to get the full details.
iv. Managed Cloud Hosting
Cloud is the most hot and demanding technology. For the reason that people are shifting to the cloud, SiteGround offers auto scalable & easy to use Managed Cloud hosting. The cloud hosting was launched back in 2010 and it uses the latest virtualization technology. It is highly suitable for websites with large volume of traffic because it is highly flexible, redundant and reliable.
Managed Cloud Hosting Features Overview
- Highly scalable, resources can be added without a reboot
- Super powerful LAMP hosting stack
- Free SSL, Free CDN, Private DNS and Daily Backups
- 5TB data transfer for all plans
- SSD disk drives
- Lightweight Linux containers
- Dedicated RAM and CPU resources
- Auto-scaling available to add resources automatically in peak hours
- Unlimited number of hosting accounts
- Accounts with separate control panels
- Secured with security patches and updates
- Constant pro-active monitoring
- Sun powered cloud storage
Cloud Hosting Plans:
There are 4 managed cloud hosting plans
- Entry @ $80.00/month
- Business @ $120.00/month
- Business Plus @ $160.00/month
- Super Power @ $240.00/month
Cloud issues reported on chat or ticket are assigned with priority.
You can configure your own cloud starting from 2 to 8 CPU cores, 4GB to 10GB RAM, 40GB to 120GB SSD disk space.
v. Dedicated Servers
For a website that has outgrown so much and needs powerful dedicated resources, you can get a dedicated server as well. SiteGround offers dedicated servers in its Europe, Asia Pacific and US regions.
Dedicated Servers Plans
There are 3 dedicated servers hosting plans:
- Entry Server at $269.00/month
- Power Server at $349.00/month
- Super Power Server at $729.00/month
Dedicated Servers Specs & Features
The dedicated servers are built with high performance and stable machines. In order to choose a dedicated server that meets your all requirements, these servers come with the following features and specs:
Hardware Stack
- Backed by Intel Xeon processors
- 8MB to 15MB CPU cache
- 16GB to 64GB DDR3 RAM
- Upto 2.00GHz CPU clock speed
- 4 to 12 CPU cores
- SSD disk drives upto 2TB space
- 10TB bandwidth for all plans
- 24/7 VIP support
- cPanel & WHM
- 5 Free Dedicated IP addresses
- Softaculous Autoinstaller
- Multiple PHP versions
- LAMP with Apache/Nginx
- Private DNS server setup
- Free Cloudflare CDN
- MySQL 5 & PostgreSQL
- Exim Mail Server
- Full root access
- Git integration
- WordPress staging
5. Free Web Hosting for Students
It is the best and highly affordable hosting plan available specially for students worldwide. Keep in mind, you’ll have to sign up using your university email address like [email protected] All the hosting features that are offered in StartUp plan are available for students at an un-beatable price of only $1.99/month.
Furthermore, the Faculty Partnership program offers free web hosting.
The student web hosting will cost you $1.99/month for one year, after that regular price of $11.95/month will apply.
6. SiteGround Reviews 2020: Multilingual Support
SiteGround is the industry’s leading host that provides the best, prompt and quality support every time. Above all, you don’t have to wait too long and there are always support guys to facilitate your queries. To be honest, whenever I contacted them, I got an immediate response.
SiteGround provides support in English, Spanish and Italian
Live chat support is always available for the people with any sales queries. Furthermore, a ticket can be submitted at User Area for any queries, you’ll get a reply in minutes. Also to remember, there is 24/7 phone support in SiteGround, you can call at 1.866.605.2484 for any kind of assistance.
For sales questions or hosting plan information, open Contact Us, fill up the form with your name, email and question and start chatting
7. Free SSL Certificate
Not all hosting companies provide free SSL certificates. An SSL certificate is a must for your website because all search engines rank websites with SSL certificates. Most importantly our website’s data and content will be protected.
The SSL will be free for life time, saving $8 each year.
8. SiteGround Security: Two Factor Authentication
In order to improve your hosting account security and to make the login credentials and critical data safe against hacking & identity theft, SiteGround lets you enable this extra security layer on your account. It is highly recommended and the best practice to keep your account secure, so please immediately enable it after you sign up.
There is a great how to tutorial to enable two factor authentication and you can read it here.
9. The New Promising Client Area
The newly developed client area is a fully controlled interface from every aspect giving the best user experience. In short, more ease and more functionalities have been added. Additionally, you can fully manage your account, billing, domains, SSL & website’s data on the get go. It’s simply amazing and very user-friendly, looks absolutely gorgeous and intuitive. As a result, it is indeed a big innovative step towards a modern hosting setup. Similarly lots of new features and tools available on the get go.
Features and Site Tools
Here is the list of the features and the site management tools lucratively available in the client area:
- Manage all hosting accounts and subscriptions
- Build wordpress websites quickly
- Easy site migration with Migrator plugin
- Manage domains, Email and FTP accounts
- 1-click backup creation and restore
- Full control to modify any tool
- Manage SuperCacher caching
- Add collaborators to the website
- Promising dashboard and account related notifications
- Billing details
- Buy or cancel any service
- Get technical assistance right away
- An ideal and best web hosting for WordPress sites platform
Hence, with this powerful tool you can manage, improve, and grow your website effortlessly. Also, the left side of the panel gives us the general overview of our account. Additionally, number of domains and email accounts you are using are displayed as well under their respective sections. Furthermore all details regarding name servers, website builder, file upload and databases are summarized under one interface.
10. Easy WordPress Installation
Though a number of content management systems are provided in CMS hosting included but not limited to WordPress, Drupal, Joomla and PrestaShop, their installation is pretty quick and takes no time in the newly developed client area.
Initially, click on Setup Site button when you login for the first time, select Start New Site and then down below, select wordpress to install it.
Browse the extras if you want them to add to your site and click Finish to complete the installation.
11. SiteGround Migrator Plugin
It is a free wordpress migration plugin to move your website to SiteGround. Its use is pretty simple in which you need to get a transfer token from your SiteGround hosting account under Migrator tool in the client area. After that, paste the token in your SiteGround Migrator plugin and press Initiate Transfer. That’s it, your site will be migrated to SiteGround. You can download the plugin here.
12. SiteGround WordPress Tutorials
To be very honest, SiteGround has excellent WordPress tutorials, E-books & a huge knowledge base. If you have any issues regarding your website, monitoring its performance or setting up email accounts, you’ll have it all. I have checked and went through some of the tutorials and found them enriched with quality content.
Being a beginner, I would say these tutorials are a must. There are step by step guide to make a blog or an online store. Above all, there are separate tutorials for each content management system highly organized with great content.
13. SiteGround Change Language to Spanish and Italian
Meanwhile, SiteGround website is translated into 2 more popular languages with English. For good reason, it attracts potential customers even more. Though English is dominant over the globe, but SiteGround solves this problem by translating their website into Spanish & Italian languages.
In my opinion, that’s how SiteGround attracted 2 Million users around the world and have excellent reviews about their customer support in multiple languages. Furthermore, it gives an aha moment when you find it in your own language.
Aha! Spanish is there, I’ll buy this hosting
It’s just an example, however you can see a Spanish edition of SiteGround below:
14. SiteGround Security Measures
Most importantly, all our data and personal information is in safe hands. It is equal for users and non-users either you sign up or just visit the website. Also, the whole platform is fully encrypted which means all our personal data, credit card information, physical or email address, login information and identity verification are safe and protected.
15. Money Back Guarantee
Well I don’t think that wouldn’t be the case but for any reason you want to cancel your account, you’ll get your money back. Keep in mind, it’s a 30 day guarantee, therefore for a full refund, it should be within 30 days.
16. SiteGround Reviews 2020: The bad side
After going through a long list of amazing features, high performance and uptime SiteGround provides, yet there are some drawbacks that disappoint a bit.
i. No Free Domain
SiteGround does no offer a free domain name any longer, you need to pay an additional charge for domain registration.
ii. A Hefty Fee on Trial
A monthly trial comes with heavy setup charges different for every hosting plan, therefore I don’t think it’s a good idea to go with trial.
iii. Hike in Renewal Prices
The prices go exceptionally high on all plans after your first invoice ends up. That’s the reason I’ve mentioned all the discounts mentioned above under shared hosting plans you can get on 3 year terms.
17. SiteGround Sign Up
Finally, after going through all the unlimited hosting features, reviewing the plans, pricing structure, performance and uptime, I am excited to say:
It’s time to conquer the internet.
SiteGround is my strong recommendation if you are really looking for high quality hosting at an affordable price.
Whom should I recommend it to?
- It is a great platform for wordpress bloggers who are trying to learn and build their website in wordpress.
- Best web hosting for WordPress sites who love WP
- Highly recommended for bloggers and online marketers.
- Certainly a great fit for small businesses and online stores.
- If you are a student, don’t worry, there is student hosting plan as well where students can get a special discount.
Therefore, if you are a beginner, let’s get started with the StartUp web hosting plan. Click the get started button below to proceed.
Choose the StartUp Plan and click the Get Plan button. Please see my hosting plans sections above to get full review about all the features.
Register a new domain, that will cost you $15.95 as an additional charge as SiteGround does not offer free domains. Click on the “I have a domain name” checkbox if you have it registered somewhere.
Now proceed to checkout, and put all the required account and client information in SiteGround account setup wizard. You’ll need to provide your full name, an email address, password, country, address and phone number.
Fill up your credit card credentials under payment information section. SiteGround accepts Visa, MasterCard and Discover. Paypal is NOT listed in their payment options. However, you can pay via PayPal by contacting SiteGround’s sales team via live chat.
Double check the purchase information, selected plan and the data center that is more convenient for you and select the payment period, re-check the total price including the domain price.
Now click Pay Now down below after confirming all the information you provided. In the next step, you’ll need to verify your phone and email and afterwards, the account will be created.
Welcome to SiteGround!
18. Conclusion
Finally, after reviewing all the features and excellent services that SiteGround provides to its users around the world, I would like to say it is the best web hosting for WordPress sites. Furthermore, it will be the best choice you’ve made and you won’t regret it. There is a 99.9% uptime guarantee and mostly its maintained. Most noteworthy, high performance servers, faster loading speeds and excellent support are the features making SiteGround an ideal host in the world.
SiteGround is recommended as one of the best WordPress hosting companies
Additionally an SSL certificate powered by Let’s Encrypt will be free for lifetime. WordPress installation is quick, easy and fast. Live chat support is always available 24/7 for any issues you encounter. All payments are secure and personal information is very safe & there’s a 30-day money back guarantee.
At the end, its a yes from me and I’ll highly recommend it.
Let’s Get Started with SiteGround…
Hi, I am Faisal Rehman
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