SiteGround Review - is this the Best Web host in India?

Overview

Why Siteground is the ideal Web Host?

1. It’s the fastest!

We as humans have evolved to be this “instant gratification” wanting creatures. We appreciate the speed, especially in something like websites which we tend to open thousands of times.

Research by Google shows 53% of people leave the website if it doesn’t load under three seconds. Another significant change seen during the same study is in the bounce rate.

If the load time increases from

This means website load time also affects your SEO. And John Mueller of Google is with us on this.

Long story short, speed is crucial.

And one of the prime factors that directly affect the speed is the hosting provider.

In hosting too, there are numerous factors for speed optimization: The technology they use, the hardware they allocate, the software they optimize, the protocols they support, and whether or not they use a content delivery network(CDN).

Siteground has considered all these factors for a top-notch performance⁠— in fact, in our experience with several of the top of the line hosting providers, Siteground has proved to be fastest. And there are a few reasons behind that, including:

To wrap up this point, Siteground is fast— Superfast.

2. The server response time is exceptional.

Server response time, for those of you who don’t know, is the amount of time a web server takes to respond to a request from a browser.

Google recommends having this number under 200ms because if it takes more time, the person searching will notice a lag and possibly bounce off.

Now, granted, there’s nothing you can do to improve this number. It entirely depends on the server optimization by your hosting provider and the location of their datacenter.

But, if that hosting provider happens to be Siteground, you’ve got it sorted.

With an average response time of approx. 125ms, Siteground has got one of the fastest server response times in the business. And if your business’s audience is in the US, that number goes significantly lower to under 50ms. Also, as we discussed in our “Best hosting in India” article, it’s astonishing at around 60ms.

Another reason to choose Siteground for an excellent server response time is its data center option. SG has five fast, secure, and redundant data centers, i.e., Chicago, Amsterdam, London,  Milan, and Singapore. This spread across three continents is part of the reason it’s successful worldwide.

Just make sure to select a nearby(to your target audience) datacenter while setting your Siteground account and forget the worries about higher response time.

3. Uptime? Always up.

In their SLA (Service Level Agreement), Siteground guarantees network uptime of 99.9% on an annual basis. If they fail to keep their promise, they compensate by giving an additional month of free hosting for every 1% of uptime lost.

In our experience with Siteground, the uptime has been 100%, and chances are if you opt for SG, you will get similar results. The reason? Thanks to some of the 500 experts we talked about earlier, Siteground uses tailor-made solutions to predict and avoid downtime. Some being:

There must be many more underlying optimizations & technologies used in there, but the thing you should know is, your server, perhaps, won’t go down ever, if you choose Siteground.

4. Ideal for Wordpress CMS

Wordpress is the largest global Content Management Systems out there. And Siteground is Wordpress’s one of the three officially recommended hosting providers, the other two being Bluehost and DreamHost.

Being is such a rare list ensures quality— speed, security, support, and overall reliability. Additionally, exclusive functionalities come with this feat, such as:

Overall, if you are using Wordpress or planning to, Siteground is the perfect hosting choice

5. Free Backups, Site migration, CDN, SSL, and more.

The services Siteground give for free are unbelievable. All these “free” services combined might cost as much as the hosting itself if you choose some other hosting providers.

Siteground provides:

Overall, you will get most of the things you will ever need for free.

6. Secure

Siteground is secure, period. Like yours, it’s their top priority too.

Overall, everything’s super-secure with the latest security patches. And just in case somebody is able to break the security, they can block all the access and restore from those free daily backups.

7. Incredible Customer Support

Siteground’s support page says: “Our Support: The #1 reason our client love us!” And we attest to that.

The 500+ experts team they have includes some competent customer support people. They undergo intensive training, a long mentorship period, and get frequent feedback and evaluations of their work to keep their expertise at its best.

If there’s any help you need, there are multiple channels to get one:

All in all, the support is incredibly fast. 

And from what we’ve experienced and heard, these individuals know the ins and outs of anything and everything you ask for.

We believe their support team is one of the primary reasons why Wordpress recommends it.

8. Awesome Introductory Prices

For what it offers— speed, response time, uptime, support, and much more, their introductory prices are a steal deal.

Depending on the requirement for your personal/professional use, you can choose from three plans, starting at $3.95/mo.

Overall, these introductory prices are competitive, but for the sheer value SG provides, the cost is unbelievable. However, there’s a catch. What’s that catch? Well, let’s look at it in the “Con” section.

2 mildly-infuriating things that can be improved about Siteground

1. Renewal packages are pricey

The catch is: The renewal packages are pricey, especially compared to the introductory ones.

The Startup plan goes straight from $3.95/mo to $11.95/mo. Similarly, GrowBig and GoGeek ones see hike from $5.95/mo to $19.95/mo and $11.95/mo to $34.95/mo respectively.

But...But…

For the functionality it gives and the perfect performance it provides, even renewal prices seem reasonable.

There’s no doubt it’s still a value-for-money deal, but our advice would be to purchase a 3-year plan at the introductory price and saving on renewal fees. 

2. Not for big-need sites

Another downside of buying Siteground hosting is big-traffic sites can’t enjoy their managed Wordpress or web hosting plans.

Of course, for most 100,000 visitors/month is a dream come true, and for those, even their GrowBig plan may suffice.

However, if you are aiming for traffic in millions, neither of these plans will be sufficient. Our recommendation, in that case, would be to check out their cloud offering.

Nonetheless, if you want to host for a limited traffic site, Siteground is excellent. We can go as far as saying it’s the best out there.

Siteground Hosting Plans and Features

Although we emphasized mostly on their value plans, Siteground has a few more varieties that, altogether, are suitable for business of almost any size.

Whether you need higher performance, more memory, a setup less prone to downtime, or an experience optimized for a specific task like e-commerce, Siteground has it for you with their Web Hosting, Managed Wordpress Hosting, Managed Woo solutions, Cloud hosting, or Enterprise hosting plans.

Just pick the one for your needs, and you’re all set. But, which one’s ideal & better value for you? Let’s find out.

1. Web Hosting:

We covered Siteground’s web hosting plans extensively throughout the review, but let’s summarize it from your needs standpoint.

As of writing this review, Siteground offers three web hosting plans, namely Startup, GrowBig, and GoGeek.

2. Wordpress Hosting:

Siteground’s Managed Wordpress hosting plans are nothing but their web hosting plan, right from naming them to performance capacities and features. The only difference being, these plans are crafted for Wordpress-based sites.

In fact, any Managed Wordpress hosting’s underlying architecture is based on some or the other form of hosting, which in this case is Shared’s.

The pluses you get if you choose Managed Wordpress over Shared hosting comes in the form of:

3. Woocommerce hosting:

Again, the plans are almost the same as Managed Wordpress.

Woocommerce, for those of you who don’t know, is an open source Wordpress plugin for building e-commerce stores.

To keep it brief, if you’re planning to start a Woocommerce-based e-commerce store, Siteground’s woocommerce hosting plans are one of the finest. With these plans, apart from performance capabilities, you benefit in:

4. Cloud Hosting:

Now for the big league guys.

In cloud hosting, your site is powered by a network of servers instead of a single server. Moreover, and at least in the case of Siteground’s plans, you can expect top-notch everything- speed, uptimes, security, and the overall performance. Additionally, you can scale up/down your resources whenever needed.

Primarily, Siteground offers four cloud plans, namely:

Apart from these four plans, you can configure your own cloud too. For every $10 you add to the Entry plan, you can either add a CPU core, an extra gig of memory, or 20 GB SSD storage. In total, you can customize a beast computer with up to 32 cores, 128 GB RAM, and 1 TB SSD space.

5. Others:

A couple of other hosting services Siteground offers are Reseller hosting and Enterprise hosting.

The reseller hosting is for the ones who manage multiple client sites. Basically, you can purchase the GoGeek plan and share resources among others' sites. Once allocated, you can give the client’s white-label access as well. The only downside with this is, if there’s any problem with the server, all sites will go down at the same time(which might never happen if you are buying from Siteground BTW).

Enterprise hosting is for big organizations. If, by chance, you are looking for hosting for an enterprise, Siteground has some fantastic services to offer. Based on your requirements, they can build a reliable architecture, set up a server infrastructure, and provide the needed resources. Moreover, these servers are highly scalable because of their private cloud infrastructure, comprising multiple virtualized nodes. 

In a nutshell, Siteground has hosting plans for businesses of any size.

Siteground Control Panel

Siteground used to offer cPanel, developed by cPanel, LLC to control web hosting. Cpanel is a great tool from a functionality standpoint, no doubt. However, the UI is cluttered, and there’s not much thought put into the UX.

Therefore, Siteground decided to gather all the pluses and remove all the minuses to build their own site management tools. Moreover, for Siteground, this is a step to becoming more independent.

As for the new control panel, it’s sleek and minimal as expected. And this simplistic design doesn’t compromise with functionality at all; if anything, it enhances the experience.

You can access the File Manager, add FTP accounts, manage MySQL databases, keep an eye on security and speed, create emails, and do much more.

Furthermore, you can interact with their service settings as well⁠:

All in all, it’s the ultimate control panel. Both functionality-oriented individuals and people with OCD will enjoy it.

Siteground Pricing, Discounts & Coupon codes

We won’t get into numbers here because we already discussed those. However, what we will discuss is, ‘Are those numbers justifiable?’

For us, they definitely are. Siteground has managed to give the right mix of value and quality for their users. On one side, they provide incredible hardware, expert customer support, excellent uptimes, and much more; and on the other, it doesn’t cost much. Overall, they are part of a rare group of hosting companies that provides the best value for money.

And add our discounts/coupons[link] to the already great value, and you’ve got what we would like to call “a hell of a good deal”. 

Conclusion | Do We Recommend Siteground?