Siteground Review: 8 Reasons Why It’s the Best Web Hosting Service

I’m convinced that Siteground offers the best web hosting service for new site owners — bloggers and entrepreneurs.

Over the past 5 years as a blogger and web developer for various businesses and organizations, I had the opportunity to test a variety of different web hosts including Bluehost, Dreamhost, Hostgator, Digital Ocean, WP Engine and currently, Siteground. I’ve been with each of these hosts for a minimum duration of six months so I did get a good chance to compare them all and come up with a list of pros and cons.

After the comparisons, I concluded that Siteground is the web host I would be using for this and other sites to come.

My goal for this article is to guide you into choosing the web hosting service provider I feel is best for you as a new blogger or web owner, especially since you’ll be locked into a web host for a minimum of one year after signing up.

**Disclaimer: This article contains affiliate links**

Why is Siteground the Best Web Hosting Service Provider?

Here’s a quick summary of why I think Siteground offers the best web hosting service:

• • Competitive pricing
  • Fast server response times
  • Siteground Optimizer Plugin
  • Instant HTTPS integration
  • 24-Hour Live Chat Support
  • Better hack prevention

1. Competitive Pricing for Performance

Siteground offers extremely reasonable pricing for its hosting packages. For as little as $3.95 USD a month for the first 1-3 years, you can have your website up and active in no time.

As a new site owner, it’s very likely that you’re going to be trying things out. You want to take this time to discover the potential of your new site and see where it goes without having to fork out insane amounts of cash. Most people determine within this time frame if blogging or online entrepreneurship is right for them so it’s best to minimize your spending in this time period.

To lock into the $3.95/month Siteground hosting price, you’ll have to pay for a minimum of one entire year in advance which works out to $62.40 USD, taxes included. A one-year advance payment is common with most web hosts.

I would recommend signing up for 3 years right off the bat to take advantage of the $3.95 discount for 3 years. It’ll work out to $157.20 USD for 3 years of hosting.

2. Fast Server Response Time and Uptime

The screenshot above is a page speed test I conducted on one of my websites using Pingdom. It shows that the Siteground-hosted site is faster than 78% of all of their tested sites.

That’s because, with Siteground, my website has lower server response times.

I checked page speed on all the other web hosts I’ve tried and only WP Engine and Digital Ocean had comparable speeds. Except you pay $30/month for WP Engine and Digital Ocean requires some basic coding knowledge to set up your site (what a hassle).

Server response times makes all the difference in the world as it’s what determines how much time it takes for a web server to respond to browser requests—in other words, lower response times will give you a faster website.

If you’ve ever visited a slow website, you’ll know just how frustrating it is to wait for pages to load. Among all other things, those websites are most likely using web hosts with slow server response times.

After I made the switch to Siteground a few months ago, I noticed immediate improvements in my page load times and I never had to waste my time fiddling with plugins to try to make my site faster again.

If you click around on my site, you’ll notice that my pages load quickly, whereas only a few months ago I’d personally be waiting around 8 – 10 seconds for my own pages to load.

As for uptime, Siteground guarantees an incredible uptime of 99.99% for all websites it hosts so you won’t have to worry about your site going down from server issues.

They have proactive server monitoring that detects immediate issues and fixes them on the fly because they know how important it is for us to have our websites up for our readers.

3. Speed up Your Site with Siteground Optimizer

Siteground has its very own caching plugin that works extremely well! The plugin—Siteground Optimizer, was developed by their team of server optimization experts so it’s able to provide all of Siteground’s customers with an advanced web optimization solution.

Best of all, this caching plugin is made specifically for Siteground’s web servers so you can expect blazing quick speeds when activated. I don’t know any other web host that has its own caching plugin for speed optimization.

SG Optimizer also provides you with the options to add instant HTTPS configuration for added SSL security and PHP configuration for a huge boost in speed which you’ll learn about in the next section.

4. Free SSL and Instant HTTPS Integration

HTTPS is the secure version of HTTP. When implemented, it can offer much higher security for your website than HTTP can.

With Siteground, you’re able to obtain a free SSL certificate that can enable you to use HTTPS on your site.

Learn More | SSL Certificates and HTTPS

Google has mentioned that HTTPS plays a huge role in site ranking because security is a priority to them. They want their search engine users to stay safe while browsing.

It’s not the easiest of tasks to integrate HTTPS on your website which is why Siteground offers a one-click feature to instantly add HTTPS to your website (as seen in the image above).

If you look at your address bar right now, you’ll notice that my website is using HTTPS as well. I enabled it using Siteground.

5. 24-Hour Live Chat Support

I can’t count the number of times I’ve accidentally touched things I wasn’t supposed to in the backend of my site which caused it to crash. What I do know is that Siteground’s support team was always there for me when I needed them and will continue to be there for me down the road.

Siteground offers 24-hour live chat support to assist its customers with all troubleshooting and problem-solving. Not to mention, they have the most professional tech support I’ve ever experienced in my life because they’re knowledgeable, friendly and will stay with you until your issues are resolved.

They really saved my ass a bunch of times, let me tell you.

I’ve dealt with many other web hosts where my site was down at night and I had to wait until the next morning to receive the support I needed because all they offered was email support or ticket support.

Sorry, but I do not like waiting up to 24 hours or sometimes even days for assistance when I need urgent help right away. Definitely not a fun situation to be in.

Sometimes I even have general questions that Siteground would be more than happy to answer. This kind of customer support is what significantly separates Siteground from other web hosts.

You can tell from the very beginning how much they value their customers and this is one of the primary reasons they won me over.

6. Increased Hack Protection

Site security is very important to me because I’ve spent thousands of hours on my blogs and other online businesses and the last thing I want is for them to be hacked. To be honest, I’ve been hacked before by something called “URL injection” back when I was with Bluehost and it took a while to restore my site. It’s something that I don’t want to ever go through again.

This is one of the reasons why I believe Siteground offers the best web hosting service. It gives me site security and peace of mind.

Within the first 48 hours after vulnerability announcements, Siteground will patch their servers to prevent potential risks for their customers. This is vital to preventing hackers from messing around with your website.

Siteground actually did a comparison test with 12 other web hosts and found out that even a month after vulnerability announcements, most of the other web hosts only partially patched the vulnerability or didn’t do anything at all.

7) Free Professional Website Transfer

Siteground offers FREE website transfer for all of their hosting packages. When you switch to Siteground from another web host, Siteground will migrate your entire website over so that you don’t have to do it yourself and risk losing files during the process.

All you have to do is select the website transfer option during the sign-up procedure or contact them via their support team. They’ll have your website up and running on their servers in no time at all.

8) Amazing Affiliate Program

If you feel as strongly about Siteground as I’ve shown myself to be, you can apply for their affiliate program. It’s easy to apply and get approved on their website.

The program gives you special affiliate links and banners that you can promote throughout your site. When you refer people and they successfully complete a transaction on Siteground’s website, you’ll get a decent chunk out of the sale. When I say decent, I mean deeeeecent. Check out their commission rates below:

Yes, you saw correctly. You can earn up to $100+ for EACH sale if you reach the required monthly sales. That means your affiliate earnings with Siteground could be enough to potentially replace your day job.

Conclusion

Siteground’s speed, security, customer support, and competitive pricing is why I’ll continue to say that Siteground offers the best web hosting service. The affiliate program is just a bonus for me.

When it comes to optimizing my websites and my clients’ websites, I’m not a half-ass kind of person. Because of the perfectionist in me, I like to do my research to find the best of the best and that’s the only time you’ll see me settling down with something.

Based on my experiences with other web hosts, I see no benefits to reverting back to any of them and will continue to stay loyal to Siteground all the way because I’m the happiest customer alive.

Sign up here to claim your $3.95 Siteground discount!