Siteground Website Hosting Review
I tried out Siteground web hosting after reading a bunch of great reviews touting premium service. Siteground claims they have super fast servers and top notch tech. So for this review I will do something a bit different to test out their claims. I uploaded a copy of one of my websites on a new shared hosting account with Siteground, and what were the results?
Both the old and test site were essentially identical. The speed tests showed a marked improvement over my previous host. After looking into it the reason for increased performance was clear, Google PageSpeed module. PageSpeed allows for Google's suggested site speed settings are used and applied automatically. All you need to do is install the module.
You can tune the module to how aggressive you want the performance to be. However, the more performance you try to eek out may result in some site features to stop working or have weird side effects. This is why most hosts won't use or permit the install of PageSpeed. Siteground also offers advanced site caching features, such as memcached.
Support
I created a support ticket fairly quickly and asked about my site transfer from another host. I received a reply in about six minutes, telling me it was being processed. Keep in mind if you use Siteground's site data transfer service the data must be under 1GB, otherwise it won't work out.
Uptime
I only tested Siteground's hosting for about a week, so I didn't experience any down time. Siteground claims to have a near perfect record for uptime. Proprietary prevention software monitors their servers in real time and can automatically repair issues as they appear. This can't really be tested unless you are a long time customer.
Cost
Siteground is generally more expensive than the top hosting competitors. Their basic plan starts at $3.95 a month, but that price is only charged if you go through our site and use the promo discount link. The basic plan is limited to supporting only one domain. Siteground offers a tiered pricing system with various plans and features. The more you spend the more features and resources you will get. The offered plan specs change from time to time, so it's best to review them directly on Siteground's website.
Advantages
Siteground's shared hosting is definitely not the speediest or cheapest. That being said, they do offer some features most don't.
* Three data centers based in Chicago, Amsterdam and Singapore. You can choose which one you want.
* Free domain for one year along with a shared hosting plan.
* Site isolation - meaning your site won't go down if another site on the same server acts up.
Conclusion
Siteground is a premium Web hosting provider, but it also comes with a premium price. They do offer more features than most, but not many people will need all of those features. You need to check what features you actually need and choose from there.
Siteground does have some hard limits on resources, such as max running processes. You will find limits on any host but it would be nice if these limits were clearly laid out.
Uptime, stability, cost and speed should be the primary concerns when choosing a host. Siteground does offer great uptime and stability, but at a cost and not the fastest speeds.
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