One of the most important things to consider when owning a website is what web hosting company do you go with. There are quite a few of them out there with the most popular ones being GoDaddy, BlueHost and HostGator. However there is one web hosting company that stands out from the rest – SiteGround. Based in Eastern Europe, this web hosting company has been my number one choice to work with over the past 7 years and I plan on staying with them for many more years to come.
Before I begin to give my reasons for rating SiteGround as the best web hosting company, let me first address this question.
Who/What is a Web Hosting Company?
Simply put, a web hosting company is responsible for making your website visible and reachable on the internet. They store all the code and files that make up your website and ensure that people from all over the world can access your website. Depending on the level of service you pay for, some web hosting companies may provide additional services such as cloud hosting, security and automatic back ups as well.
So Why is SiteGround the Best Web Hosting Company?
I could give you close to 20 reasons why they are best but for the sole purpose of keeping this article short, I am going to give you my top 10 reasons.
1 – Constantly voted Number #1 in Most Facebook Groups
There is a very popular FaceBook group (I am a member) that comprises of over 14,000 individuals who are knowledgeable about web hosting. A poll was recently conducted to determine who the best web hosting company was and SiteGround was voted number 1.
They are also constantly voted number #1 in numerous other facebook groups. Check out the screenshots below.
As you can see, Siteground is a very popular option in so many and diverse groups.
2 – Incredible Speeds
This is without question the number 1 reason why I love them. They use an extremely powerful combination of NGINX servers, PHP7, Solid State Drives(SSDs) and 1-click CloudFlare CDN technology. Also, SiteGround WordPress developers created two plugins – SuperCacher and SG Optimizer plugins that can further boost speeds of WordPress websites hosted on their platform.
3 – Fantastic FREE Services
Siteground offers a ton of services and features designed to improve your website’s speeds, security and overall performance. Best of all is that many of these services are ABSOLUTELY FREE. Here is a list of them
- FREE daily backups and data retention for up to 30 days.
- FREE malware scans.
- FREE Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates for encryption and enhanced security
- FREE SG Optimizer plugin to keep your PHP updated with the latest version.
- FREE migration when you switch over to them
4 – World Class Customer Support
Unlike other web hosts who suck at customer support, SiteGround’s customer support is LEGENDARY. In all the 7 years I have been hosting with them, I have never had to wait more than 20 seconds to get support through their chat system and no I am not exaggerating this. You can try it out yourself – just visit their website, click on the live chat link at the top right hand corner, choose any of the three support categories that pop up and I guarantee you that in less than 20 seconds, you will be chatting with a real life Siteground representative.
Also for more advanced troubleshooting that requires opening a support ticket, I have never waited more than 15 minutes to get a solution to the problem.
5 – 99.99% Website Uptime
Unlike many other web hosting companies that falsely claim to provide 99.99% uptime for their customers, Siteground actually does provide this. If you have ever experienced internal server errors, bad gateways and connection failures, you will never get this with Siteground. How do they manage to be so efficient at this? Well this question leads up nicely to my next point.
6 – 4 Data Centers
Siteground has 4 data centers placed at strategic points across the world to ensure fast and efficient service for your website no matter where you are located.
When you sign up with Siteground, just choose the data center that is closest to your location to ensure your content loads faster. Also Siteground’s data centers use redundant storage so your website will never go down due to electrical issues.
7 – Resource Rich & Easy to Use cPanel
SiteGround’s cPanel is very easy to navigate through and contains many useful apps all designed to enhance the management and functionality of your website. Some of my favorite apps include –
- WordPress Installer – allows you install WordPress with 2 clicks
- SuperCacher – caches your website providing extremely fast access speeds
- phpMyAdmin – provides an easy to manage your databases
- Create/Backup Restore – this is the app you need to create and restore backups easily
- Let’s Encrypt – A very new app that allows you install SSL security certificates on your websites
8 – Excellent Feedback from Customers who Switched Over
SiteGround will migrate you for free when you decide to switch hosts plus people who do migrate to SiteGround very rarely ever cancel. Compared to this, the cancellation rate of HostGator is around 55%.
Also there have been many notable people who have switched to SiteGround and have taken to social media to express their satisfaction.
9 – Perks
When you become a Siteground customer, you are provided with great discounts for many top quality WordPress Products.
10 – Excellent Feedback on Social Media
Its not just me who loves Siteground. Hundreds of others have taken to social media to praise this company for the world class web hosting they provide.
Siteground Hosting Plans
Now that I have hopefully convinced you on why you should use Siteground for your hosting, its time to take a closer look at all the various types of hosting plans they offer.
Startup vs GrowBig vs GoGeek
These are the 3 plans that are offered in their standard shared hosting packages. The main differences are that Startup can be used to host just one website but still offers you lots of different features. GrowBig (the most popular option) offers hosting for an unlimited number of websites including additional resources. GoGeek offers even more hosting services to the point where it is considered to be semi-dedicated hosting.
Here is the full chart comparing all 3 packages.
Unless you are desperately short of cash, I would say avoid the startup plan. The fact that you are limited to just one website means its extremely limited. GrowBig is fantastic for a start and its the one I would recommend if your website isn’t getting much traffic at the moment. You can always upgrade to the GoGeek plan once its necessary to do so (more traffic, need more storage space etc).
Here is a chart comparing the resources available with each package.
Cloud Hosting
These plans are primarily for larger websites already receiving a lot of traffic. You will also receive even better speed, uptimes and security than the GoGeek package. This is because unlike the shared hosting plans, cloud hosting will host your website on unlimited machines and you will never be affected by anyone else.
If you can afford any of these plans, then definitely go for it. Cloud hosting is superior in every possible way to shared hosting.
Conclusion
I hope I have been able to convince you of just how awesome SiteGround are. If you have any more questions about them, feel free to ask them in the comments section below.
Cheers and have a great day.
Alex …
5 thoughts on “Why SiteGround is the Best Web Hosting Company in 2020”
I have researched a number of Wordpress Hosting companies for my daughter’s website. My main criteria for a Wordpress hosting company was great customer support, performance, scalability, protection, and simplicity.
As part of my research, I looked at SiteGround, Vultr, Cloudways, AWS, Pantheon, Digital Ocean, WPEngine, GoDaddy, and others. However, I ended up recommending WPCloud.ca which provides a high performance, scalable, secure and managed Wordpress hosting service. They are a Canadian based company with a redundant scalable cloud network with a CDN. The company protects your site and data.
My daughter’s website is still being hosted by them. There pricing is also very reasonable for the number of quality high-performance services you receive.
Based on my research and experience I would have to give WPCloud.ca the top spot beating out SiteGround as a Wordpress hosting company. Before you choose a Wordpress hosting partner for your business I highly recommend that you include WPCloud.ca in your list of Wordpress hosting companies as part of your due diligence. I personally am going to utilize WPCloud.ca for all of my current and future Wordpress sites.
Hey thank you so much for sharing this. I was really confused about choosing hosting. Now, I am thinking I should go with siteground. I have a blog about movies. Again thank you so much for this amazing article.
Very Comprehensive Review I must say, was looking for some good hosting options as my hostgator Baby cloud plan is about to expire this year, and their renewal prices are ripping you off. seems like i make up my mind for site-ground hosting as they are running 3 month trial during corona pandemic will surely test and hopefully migrate .cheers again fella
I tried GoDaddy before. It has website going down frequently. After going through the post, I switched to Siteground. Their customer support helped me all the way to migrate my website from GoDaddy to SIteground. So far all going smoothly and SiteGround customer support is really good and very responsive.
Interesting blog post. Customer service is quite an important aspect of web hosting service and we should consider this while buying web services. Thanks for sharing a useful guide here with us.