Why I Left SiteGround: Overpriced Hosting With Long History Of Issues Covered Up By Affiliates, Facebook Groups, Legal Threats

220 Comments...

1. I cannot start to express my history and experience with siteground. the worst experience I’ve ever had with a company. any company. it’s been 3 years which instead of being a business owner and growing my business I’ve rather become a person held back from my business spending my full days and nights on server issues and site ground tickets with complete ignorant support and Unwilling to do a single thing. just lying and killing my business keeping me stressed and stacked with issues.

   I wish I can publish something lime this and take action on them.

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   • Curious, why haven’t you left yet? Not trying to make a sale. I know they make it harder to leave with custom products (e.g. Site Tools) if that’s why.

     Ya, pretty done seeing all these SiteGround-controlled Facebook groups spamming fake endorsements. I’ve been with SiteGround for 3 years and never had 1 issue! Lol BS…

     Here ya go:

     https://www.trustpilot.com/review/www.siteground.com
     https://www.yelp.com/biz/siteground-com-alexandria
     https://www.bbb.org/us/va/alexandria/profile/web-hosting/siteground-0241-235659097
     https://www.google.com/search?q=siteground+901+N+Pitt+St+Ste+325+Alexandria%2C+VA+22314&sca_esv=b9eca7660d2a1203&rlz=1C5CHFA_enUS968US968&sxsrf=ACQVn08U4cFZKkiuMtD_PcgrUZhZQfNERA%3A1707334245613&ei=ZdrDZa32JOS0qtsPkMGO2Ag&ved=0ahUKEwjtvOPZ-5mEAxVkmmoFHZCgA4sQ4dUDCBA&uact=5&oq=siteground+901+N+Pitt+St+Ste+325+Alexandria%2C+VA+22314&gs_lp=Egxnd3Mtd2l6LXNlcnAiNXNpdGVncm91bmQgOTAxIE4gUGl0dCBTdCBTdGUgMzI1IEFsZXhhbmRyaWEsIFZBIDIyMzE0MgUQIRirAkihB1D-Alj-AnACeAGQAQCYAaQBoAGkAaoBAzAuMbgBA8gBAPgBAvgBAcICChAAGEcY1gQYsAPiAwQYACBBiAYBkAYF&sclient=gws-wiz-serp#lrd=0x89b7b17f47a6634b:0xf72bdd209edd47cb,1,,,,
     https://www.reddit.com/r/webhosting/search/?q=siteground&restrict_sr=1&type=link&t=all&sort=top

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2. I completely agree. I used them for years then with the change in support (everytime I knew more than the “WP expert”).
   While looking for another host I was paying Monthly and it was over 80 euros.
   Were good in the beginning but not anymore, Im trying Greeengeeks, who are okay and still have Cpanel rather than SGs crap “Site Tools”.
   Ill have a look at your host…

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3. Yeah ok don’t approve my comments. Google my name sometime. I might just talk about this site how one sided it is bc compared with wpjohnny atleast I was able to comment like I’m not necessarily on anyone’s team. Look at this long url, this long scroll of a page, and you play rocket league & you reject my comments. yea ok. serial killer documentarys weird. I like having 2 peoples sites some what similar in comparison to talk about. Johnny’s def wins . Everyones entitled to their opinion and I believe I’ll start outranking.

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   • I’m in the middle of moving and you just left your comments earlier today. I’ll approve them but may not get to responding to everything until later.

     I get a lot of spam so yeah, I look over and approve them first to make sure it’s not spam, not because I don’t approve comments from people who disagree with me. Sheesh, quick to jump to conclusions.

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4. My conclusion was right just for some reason some sort of staging thing is broken. – just like else where I’m not impressed with staging. Seems much more accurate to just back up tons of times lol. So glad they fixed it. Siteground isn’t that bad. I really didn’t wait THAT long. Wpmudev was literally stuck for days and became broken unhelpful. Still though Interested in hostinger non vps and vps option both look good. 0.o if anyones the 1# at being the worst its wpmudev

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5. Prob everyones unhappy everywhere. Hostinger looks good. Def interested in my own vps.

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6. This makes me real nervous 0.o Siteground made out as if I discovered Wpmudev. I have a very particular issue going on right now that Wpmudev gave me hell about resolving, let me tell you, I am so mad with wpmudev I went all out and purchased some of their domains, proud owner of wpmudev.io which I think they wish they had.. I’ll do something good with it hopefully rank higher than them, they literally transferred my main domain over to another account regardless of all ownership info pointing to me and it being renewed up to 2027; such sketchy business.. so I’m unable to transfer it off….All stemming from lack of Nginx technical support; IDK how a host is allowed to legally do this?. Found your site while randomly searching after hours went by my issue still isn’t resolved with SG. IDK why I’m so surprised. Similar problem but very different. I guess even when it comes to resolving technical staging / back up / restore errors…… that takes 5+ hours, asking myself why. What’s the hold up. Honestly if there’s any host that resolves this stuff within an hour I am sold. Fresh wordpress fresh, plugins already deemed no issues by previous host, & I logged in to see SG has deactivated some like they are clueless trying to debunk this. No factory reset/ w/e resolves this if its similar at all some how with not even being caused the same way thru hidemywpghost plugin. I should have never tried doing staging with already knowing what the plan is, guess it’s just for those trying things. I’ve seen nothing but issues with staging. Xfered staging over to main thing with specific plugins not even added yet all like cautious yet this still got messed up and staging’s xfer did it.
   You know. I had no issues with wpmudev until they had such problems resolving the technical website breaking thing it was that problem +++ unable to create users or generate passwords and unable to drag rearrange menu items. + I realize now being with SG how slow they were, everything is much smoother here.
   I’m so tired of stressing about hosts and very technical issues. & your site makes me fear SG might be capable of pulling the same wpmudev crap with such poor lack of service – yeah great sales chat service but what about afterwards. Honestly is there any actual insurance or protection against such companies if they straight up decide they feel like ignoring you and keeping your properties hostage? & Imagine asking this question under a lawyer group or on quora……. I honestly feel like there is some problems that are so rare and unheard of that the world is so easy to brush it off & mod it / not even acknowledge it as if its not a problem. Sorry your problem is so bad It doesn’t exist, this never happened. IDK.
   Sorry SG if you swiftly resolved it.. I wouldn’t be here.

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7. Siteground is absolutely the worst provider on the planet. There’s a reason why Bulgarians are hated by the rest of Europe — just saying. Their culture encourages criminal corruption and scumbaggery at every level and these guys are the worst scumbags I have ever dealt with in my life — they are horrible human beings, and they don’t speak English well enough to even communicate the rules of their website and they are just plain EVIL. Stay as far away from them as you can get.

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8. Is was curious so I checked out ChemCloud. What I always do as one of the first things, is to check the performance of their own site – chemcloud.com. Not impressed at all – for example TTFB > 4 sec? excuse me. If you are not even figuring out how to deliver impressive performance for your own site, then how can I be sure you deliver it to clients?

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   • Before they redesigned their site, Rocket.net didn’t have great performance either. But they definitely deliver fast hosting and CDN. I get your reasoning, but the two aren’t always correlated.

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9. IF siteground has taken down a site because of CPU limits
   what can I do to move to another site? How do I get my files from them?

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   • You may be able to access the files you need in Site Tools but not 100% sure.

     Otherwise, you have to ask them for temporary resources (explaining your situation, at least so you have access to your site) or wait until your CPU limits reset.

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10. As someone who worked for them as a tech support agent I can confirm you’ve hit the nail on the head with all points. The only exception is the point about fake reviews. They definitely exist but no one from the actual tech support team was ever asked to post positive reviews as far as I’m aware. I think that was just marketing and the same people responsible for the social media channels.

    To pull the curtain a bit more, the company is a complete mess internally. The representatives on chat either have 0 tech knowledge or are very talented but never get a chance to rise to a tech position and thus are completely demotivated. Chat operators are also extremely limited in terms of what they can see and do.

    Tech support is also a joke. Everything is becoming automated and the new Site Tools system is so locked down the only way to solve issues is to contact the devs who are the only ones that have full access. It’s incredibly inefficient.

    They also laid off half the Tech Support team in the shadiest way possible, completely disregarding the contracts that they had signed. As a result the team morale is incredibly low and no one is motivated in the slightest. Almost all the people who actually knew what they were doing have left the team.

    So if you ever contact the support team and feel the responses are inadequate, that’s the reason why. It also doesn’t help that all the supervisors recommend you BS your way around a client’s request/question instead of actually properly addressing it.

    Ever since they started implementing Site Tools the company is a complete mess internally and there are rumors it’s in preparation to sell it off to a bigger organization.

    So, as someone who spent a number of years working for and watching the company go downhill, definitely look for other hosts or move your sites elsewhere asap.

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    • Good to hear from someone internally and I appreciate your honesty.

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11. …they never admit it!!

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12. I have an agency with over 120 client sites on SiteGround and we’ve been having more and more problems that point to their hosting direction, another GoDaddy bottom feeder (IMO), and they keep point to my client websites traffic. But all records, including theirs, do not collaborate their solutions.

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    • That’s a lot of sites. I found one of the biggest problems is that when there is an issue, they will rarely admit it, if ever… so it becomes a guessing game. Hope you find a good alternative because there are definitely better ones out there.

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13. Nice article. I’m not super technical, but I just Googled “SiteGround customer service sucks” and found this, so I must be doing something right.

    I just found out they changed their spam detection service without even a customer email! I asked, and they didn’t address it. Instead, they said they “made a blog post about it” here: https://www.siteground.com/blog/moving-to-a-state-of-the-art-in-house-built-spam-protection-solution/ That is literally terrible customer service. “Ooops! You didn’t see our blog post about that? Our bad!”

    Okaaaay.

    And state-of-the art? My own personal Gmails went to my business email’s SPAM. That’s how I found out! I got alarmed when I couldn’t get the message, so I went to my Spam protection in Site Tools for my business website, and found the old Span provider GONE!

    The state-of-the-art in-house solution did not even have a search interface! It’s just a list of “blocked emails” and a trash can to delete them. No way to see what the even email is! How would I even know if it was a customer email?? I wouldn’t.

    So they tell me I now have to log in to web mail. Email address by email address, and check the Junk folders to TRAIN THEIR NEW PROGRAM. I have over 30 emails and 5 websites. Are they kidding? Nope.

    Worse still, in my Junk folder are some major SAFE URLs like Udemy, MasterClass, etc. ALL OF THEM IN MY JUNK! Any spam program worth two cents would not flag major URLs like this. I pay like $360 a year to SiteGround. I’m pissed!! I feel so screwed over.

    I’m so out of there. I’ll end up paying an arm and a leg to move my sites because I don’t know how to do it myself. UGH.

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14. Soon they’ll be under investigation of money laundering and illegal sponsorship of political parties in Bulgaria/ I hope so/..Just to mention, they’re in close connection with NEXO / who are under investigation in US and Bulgaria/to influencing political landscape in Bulgaria, by donating huge amounts of money to two political parties DB and PP , which are basically political projects of one of the biggest oligarchs in Bulgaria Ivo Prokopiev.

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15. Thanks for the hard work you put into this post. I, like many others, have had an increasing difficult time with Siteground’s devolving support and service. This is the 3rd time I’ve been on this ride with a host that was so good that they attracted a ton of users and couldn’t maintain the level of quality that attracted everyone initially. What really sucks is I’m just trying to give my clients the best websites they can afford and many of them are so loyal that they get dragged along on this revolving door hosting roller coaster as I find them new hosts and then have to migrate them again after a few years when things degrade and then again…. Makes me look bad. I’m working overtime to make sure they are protected from most noticeable issues but that’s getting harder and the quotas have become real deal breakers. I’m happy to pay extra for good service for crying out loud! (taking a deep breath… returning to work… preparing for the inevitable but still hoping for a miraculous return to their roots)

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    • Yeah I’m kind of the in the same boat. Have to completely change tons of content to recommend another host because the previous one gets too big and quality goes down. Before I left, I had a long conversation with them and it definitely did not sound like they planned on going back to their roots. They essentially said: this is what we’re doing, deal with it. And that was at least a year ago.

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16. I like how they threaten to sue companies. If they are threatening say to sue Facebook (AKA Meta) I would love it. They suck. Facebook has targeted my website with DOS attacks. I confirmed it with Siteground. So, maybe it’s just liberals pissing and moaning that they can’t attack conservatives and playing the victim card as if thy are being censored when in reality it is them who censor everything not the other way around. You are right about the SG Optimizer plugin conflicting with other plugins though. I have experienced that but I haven’t seen them censor anything and I have been using them for multiple years. Their support is second to none! Very responsive and whenever there is an issue they have worked it out in a timely manner for me. Nobody is perfect so yes, they have things to work on too. However, I would rather give a company like Siteground my money and work through their learning curve with them over giving my money to corrupt left wing companies like Shopify any day. Shopify literally took my whole store down because I wouldn’t comply with their libtarded selling restrictions because my products offended them. In true libtard fashion, they even tried to say the Betsy Ross Flag was offensive (amongst other things). These companies need to just do their jobs and butt out and stop trying to control people and organizations. I value how Siteground loves free speech and freedom in general because I myself do as well. Go SITEGROUND… It’s your BIRTHDAY!

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    • Oh and a couple more things, you can’t knock them for removing service in unprofitable countries. Although that sucks if you are someone in those countries and you want to use them, they are a business. What do you expect them to do? IT’S NOT PROFITABLE… DURRRR.

      As for the CPU limitations, that is true but if you know what you are doing with managing your site you will do just fine even on their cheapest plan and can reduce CPU Usage. Their prices have gone up though but everything has gone up in price thanks to the likes of Democrats and Crooked Creepy Joe Biden and their New World Order of out of chaos agenda.

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    • 

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17. An extremely eye-opening article, thank you very much for defending the truth, Tom. As always, you are providing facts and evidence. 3 years ago, I signed up for Siteground hosting at your recommendation and using your affiliate link. I wrote to you then that I would be back in 3 years to get another hosting provider due to the high increase in price. Today I purchased 3 years of Plus Cloud Plan with Namehero with your affiliate link.

    Let me say that as a Bulgarian (astrologer), I am ashamed of my compatriots at Siteground. Their behavior is unethical, unprofessional and unacceptable. I work with clients on a daily basis and if I treat them like this, my reputation will be tarnished and before long I will be out of business. But it is not just about business. For example, I did not have any problems with Siteground during these 3 years. My websites are small though and do not fight for shared resources. Having said this, my websites were also down, and I learned here that is was because of Siteground.

    Aside from the price, the most important reason I am leaving Siteground is because of your article which exposes their actions and threats. Also, I too did not want Google cloud. They did not say they were planning on moving to it when I signed up with them. Had they been upfront about it, I would have chosen another hosting provider. Thus even if there was no change in hosting price after the 3 year period, I would have still left them without hesitation.

    So, add me to the list of the 3,000 people whom your referred to Siteground and have now moved to another hosting provider thanks to you. :) And see you in 3 years possibly for another hosting provider.

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    • Yessss I appreciate your long-term support Alex!

      Man, it’s such a problem. Can’t tell you how many times I see a SiteGround “brand ambassador” pretending they’re a customer and recommending them in Facebook Groups – such a POS company now. So backwards how they threaten people yet they’re literally spreading lies left and right.

      Thank you for leaving them and thank you for taking the time to write your comment and using my aff link. I hope NameHero works out for you (lmk because I want to make sure it does). Of course I appreciate using aff links and honestly, anyone who leaves SiteGround – it’s a win in my book.

      Cheers to that and please lmk if you need anything.

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18. We currently have about 30 websites hosted with Siteground. By the end of 2023, we will gradually transfer all of them away from Siteground. Their “Support” is essentially a grift to always have you upgrade to a higher-paying service. They do not allow you to backup your emails in bulk. The system they use allows you to only backup one email received at a time. Meaning if you have 1000 emails, you will click and export 1000x to back them up and then click and Import 1000x. Also, if you are hosting multiple websites on a bulk hosting account PLEASE STAY AWAY FROM STEGROUND. You will end up with 40 GB of space but you will only use about 12 GB of it as they use a made upo INODES policy which runs up fast on your account thus preventing you from using the rest of your 28GB. They are not really giving you 40GB as they promised. They use NOPES to force you to keep signing up for higher services. Siteground is the most notorious grifting platform and provider I have ever used. We are moving away by the end of 2023. I have all the transcripts of how they confidently grift you and feel justified doing it. STAY AWAY if you have multiple websites you are hosting. You will REGRET IT!

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19. It used to be a great hosting platform because it is easy to use with a lot of features, although expensive.

    Unfortunately, they are deceptive about their renewals by saying they are set to expire, when in fact they are set to renew. Last year, they renewed a domain that was set to expire and refused to give me a refund. Customer support told me how to turn off auto-renew and I did. This year when I got the emails saying the service was set to expire I double checked it was in fact set to expire, but even logging onto the platform to confirm your service will not renew is confusing because it clearly states at the top, ‘service set to expire on X Date.’

    Just woke up to an email saying I was charged AGAIN for a a domain I’ve literally never even used and again, customer service refused to refund me because they don’t actually manage their own domains, they are purchased through a third-party.

    I don’t like deceitful marketing. If you have a good product, you shouldn’t have to deceive people to renew it.

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    • I’ve heard they do this although I’ve never experienced it. Totally agree with your last line in all aspects of business.

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20. Thanks, about to register but found this post ;)

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21. Thank god someone wrote this! I’m personally moving away all my clients from there. As I always say, SiteGround is getting godaddy’d.

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    • Yeah, completely changed company since 2019. Should be illegal what they’re doing hiring brand ambassadors who act as “customers.” If they were actually still good, they wouldn’t have to do these shady things.

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22. adding affiliate links to overpriced alternatives and “hoping” people would trust you…

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    • $25/mo for a shared hosting plan (GrowBig) with SATA SSDs, bad cache plugin/CDN, and strict limits on a host with a history of issues is what I’d consider “overpriced.”

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23. I am using SG from 1 month because my ecommerce imported to much data for Hostinger plan. I started stright from cloud plan, because GoGeek was to small for me.

    TTFB for my site right now? around 3 sec.

    shop with 15k products. 18 GB space, 2 crons working 2 times/daily, just few light version plugins, 0 backups or security plugins at site are installed. well writed htaccess and using catching.

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    • Ouch, yeah I would move. I used their cloud hosting and I always hear the same thing now: it’s not good.

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24. I have only used Siteground (not very long I’m new) and haven’t had a issue and have one affiliate sale pending so reading this is super helpful since i’m not in too deep with them. What is funny is this is the only bad review of siteground on the first page of google, all the rest are like 5 star reviews. So what you say definitely makes sense, I saw NameHero and Cloudware was recommended. What other companies would you guys recommend?

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    • Rocket.net is great and I think has a lot of potential (definitely the fastest host I’ve used) but some people are scared of low storage/bandwidth. Cloudways, NameHero, then maybe ChemiCloud/Scala Hosting are good options. Most mainstream hosts are garbage, but more people have heard of them. So it depends which route you want to go.

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25. So, who do you suggest has comparable pricing and server space to GoGeek? I have been with SiteGround for over five years and am tired of the shenanigans. Now they have implemented this “inode” limit. Seriously? How do you advertise that you can have as many websites on GoGeek as you want yet limit inodes? If 1 inode = 1 file, it is impossible to have unlimited websites. SiteGround is pulling a bait and switch here, and someone should put together a class action lawsuit and force them to clean up their act.

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    • NameHero (i.e. Turbo Cloud plan) and Cloudways Vultr HF are usually 2 good alternatives to SiteGround. But if you’re already paying $25/mo with SiteGround, I’d definitely look into Rocket.net. Most hosting companies say unlimited but have strict limits in their TOS that prevent you from hosting too many sites. Unfortunately, this is common in the industry and isn’t just SiteGround.

      Keep in mind most “premium hosts” like Rocket.net and even Cloudways don’t offer email hosting, so if using them, you would need to use a third-party service like Google Workspace.

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26. siteground has simply down staffed and makes you beg to submit a ticket to a skilled technician now. everything has to be done on online chat and mostly all they do there is tell you is go hire a web developer .

    we used to love their email tickets but you’ll be lucky if the high security of the chat operators allows you to even make a ticket now ………….they’ll keep you chatting for an hour even to prevent it its insane stupidity frankly .
    because the ticket system most issues could be solved in email tickets far quicker but they make you double the work now.
    never mind the fact that so many companies are less than half the price for better service.

    site ground tricks you by making the first year low but then read the small print the increase after that is exponential. Weve just moved to a hosting company charging less than half and doing twice as much for it with a proper support ticket system.

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27. Hey Tom,

    Thought I’d share this excellent tool for checking out the TTFB performance of a website: (i.e., hosting company)

    https://speedvitals.com/ttfb-test

    Prior to using the above tool — and to ensure an accurate reading — I highly recommend performing two sets of tests: The first set (3 tests) with CDNs and caching plugins disabled; the other set (3 tests) with CDNs and caching plugins enabled.

    Note: As the tests are repeated, the TTFB results get better, so for benchmarking purposes I recommend using the average value of the 3 TTFB tests performed for each set.

    Target TTFB = 200ms or less.

    Cheerio!

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    • Thanks! Yes I plan on mentioning SpeedVitals more in my articles for benchmarking and that way of testing TTFB looks like a good way to do it (and sorry for the late response, I’ve been hiking in the mountains the last few days).

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28. this is one of the best thing that i want to do

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29. Hey Tom,

    Great article. But why bash another company, much less target a company representative?

    Every company or service has its Pros and Cons, wouldn’t you agree?

    We use SiteGround and, while everything is not perfect, we’re happy with their services.

    Please be careful, your article is borderline defamatory.

    Cheerio!

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    • Hi Generosus,

      I appreciate it, and I guess my response would be: because it’s true. How am I supposed to write a good review about a company that covers up their mistakes with censorship and cease and desist letters? I’m personally willing to put everything on the line if it means telling the truth.

      • DNS blocked by Google: sourced (SiteGround denied responsibility)
      • History of TTFB issues: sourced (SiteGround denied it)
      • Censorship: sourced multiple times
      • SiteGround Optimizer lacking core web vitals optimizations: is my table not correct?
      • CPU limits: sourced (search non-SiteGround moderated FB groups)
      • SiteGround was using Google Cloud N1 servers and now use N2: sourced on their own blog
      • Price increases: public knowledge
      • Declined support: somewhat opinion-based I guess
      • SiteGround CDN has 14 PoPs: look at their data center page
      • Price cuts (no free migration, now only 1 year of intro price): public knowledge

      Who is lying here, me or SiteGround?

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      • Hey Tom,

        We meet again. Great reply (and great articles by the way, I read them all and have helped us tremendously).

        Concerning your key points, you are 100% correct, but what you’re experiencing is probably the result of management changes, company policy, competition, culture (yes, culture), unanticipated growth (or shrinkage), and new internal goals. It happens. Let’s hope their changes are working for them and helping their bottom line. After all, that’s what a free market and competition is all about.

        For us, the key traits of a good hosting company are (in no particular order): TTFB, Price (generous discounts for loyal customers instead of exorbitant last-minute price increases), Timely and Efficient Support, Features, and Flexibility (i.e., ability to combine their services with 3rd party suppliers – which is quickly becoming more difficult to achieve).

        That said, we’re up for renewal with them soon and are seriously considering migrating to another hosting company (one that includes webmail) that meets the key criteria you’ve shared via your articles. Any suggestions? Must admit, SG’s webmail service (unlimited accounts, included in their plans) is superb. If you know of an alternative host that includes it (or a low-cost add-on service), please let us know.

        Again, thanks and keep those articles coming! :)

        Cheerio!

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30. I have seen your articles, you have a vast amount of knowledge. Now as you are always talking about the drawback of different hosts and all. Could you please recommend a host for us. I am very satisfied with your blogs. Help me out

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    • I generally recommend NameHero for shared hosting or Cloudways / Rocket.net if your budget’s higher. Of course, it depends on many things like which server location you need, budget, etc.

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31. Could you please share your Facebook group link? I’d like to search more about hosting providers. Thanks.

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    • The one I recommend is here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1518060691663542

      It’s not necessarily a hosting group, but it’s got a lot of good hosting info which isn’t moderated like most other groups. It’s not my group, it’s run by Gijo from WP Speed Matters.

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32. I just switched to cloudways hosting and it’s working fine.. however when I go to update the cache with the wp rocket plug-in… it just crashes the CPU… Any solution or alternative?

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    • Try tweaking the preload settings and automatic cache clearing. They have helper plugins for this. Only preload important sitemap URLs, increase the preload crawl interval, and ideally use a cron job to control cache clearing. Otherwise, WP Rocket will clear the entire cache when you take specific actions.

      Cache logged-in users, separate mobile cache, and remove unused CSS features are also common causes for this. Try increasing remove unused CSS batch size (using another helper plugin) but I would use Perfmatters or FlyingPress for removing unused CSS. I already switched to FlyingPress and recommend it over WP Rocket.

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33. Wow, I’m glad I read this. I was going to move to SiteGround in the next few weeks. I’ll have to rethink now.

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    • Yeah, just trying to get the word out there cause ya know, SiteGround tries to block everything.

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34. 100% agree, Siteground sucks.
    It seems that Every single WordPress group on facebook is controlled by Siteground or has them as a sponsor, and they delete all negative comments.
    There is one WordPRess hosting group where they will ban you for saying anything negative about siteground.
    Most reviews are just affiliate link clickbait.

    read my review/story here: https://michaels.me.uk/siteground-review/

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    • Yep, careful or they might threaten to sue you too! Check their affiliate TOS. Already happened to me. I’ll be publishing screenshots on their censorship attempts soon so more people know. If they put more effort into improving their hosting instead of shutting people up, maybe they would actually be better.

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35. I cant believe you didnt mention thier inode scam, I have 3 years left on my plan with them and am leaving.
    I went to dream host which has unlimited inode

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    • Most shared hosts have very limited inodes which usually become a problem when you bundle web/email hosting together.

      Even hosts advertising unlimited inodes (bandwidth, or whatever) typically have hard limits in their TOS/hosting agreements. Is this what you’re referring to? Not that I agree with it but this is common practice with what I’ll call “mainstream hosts.”

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36. Very interesting article. Never heard a single complaint about SG.

    I’m curious as to why you didn’t discuss the cause of the high CPU issues. Did I miss that? Usually that’s due to too many queries hitting the database.

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    • You probably haven’t heard more complaints because they censor things everywhere and take action against people who speak out about them.

      I’m redesigning my site and already rewrote the article about their CPU limits. TLDR: when you move away it instantly fixes it for most people. So it’s 100% with SiteGround, nothing related to all the excuses they usually come up with because they will never admit their own fault.

      Reply

37. Siteground are a shocking company to deal with. They ignore you and using their hosting package will damage your site. They are very clever at posting false positive reviews and try hiding the honet bad reviews of their service.

    Everyone i know of who has used their service have left. When your site goes down they make excuses. I use a lot of hosting companies and have never come across a hosting company like siteground.

    They try and get you to upgrade all the time. You could be on the biggest package in the world and when that goes down they invent another package to get you to spend money.

    Don’t waste your money, go to a professional hosting company and not siteground

    Reply

38. I couldn’t get away fast enough after the debacle of the past 2 years. Learned a valuable lesson – don’t pay for 3 years at a time.

    All the points made above are valid.

    I went with A2, and I’m running the exact site as as SG. It hasn’t been disabled, I’ve never had a notice of overuse, and support actually helped me get it setup and optimized for their servers. The cost was considerably less than the package SG told me I needed ‘for such a big site’ (72 subdomains). I’ve had no downtime at all.

    After seeing how my own site performed there, I removed all my clients from SG.

    Reply

39. paid three years upfront left after 18 months due to no chooce. GROW BIG had advertised 24/7 ticket support originally but thats become only for go geek and they wont refund despite changing the game plan after one has paid three years upfront., s no GROW BIG has to beg for any support at all
    Ill never pay for more than 6 months to hosting company again
    . a few of there their online chat operators can manage the smallest problems only. after keeping you often 30 min they finally write the ticket they should have let grow big users write themselves . . most of what they do is copy/paste the FAQ and tell you to go do it yourself or hire a developer ..the smallest problems.
    worst support service,. ridiculously expensive cost double after your first year what most of hosters can provide for half the rates.

    Reply

    • That sucks, sorry to hear that. SiteGround’s support is pretty bogus compared to what it used to be. They just want your money.

      Reply

40. I wanted to use Siteground for my hosting after doing quite the research. I stumbled on many reviews and believed Siteground was the right hosting solution for me until recently when I stumbled on a bad review about their page speed. I almost couldn’t believe it cause their speed and uptime was greatly hyped by a review I read few months ago.

    All things considered, I believe it was an honest review but reading yours I believe there’s a lot of things hidden from new subscribers and they often find out too late.

    I’m glad I read this review. Thank you for putting all the time and effort to save people from needless and long drama. I can’t believe their support is now as you say it is. It’s absolutely sad that an organisation could forget people and focus only on profits and they’re not even delivering as promised.

    I would try Cloudways or some other hosting I can use with WordPress.org with.

    Thanks again for the review. It really saved.

    Reply

41. Finally an honest review about siteground. Me personally been banned from a few FB groups speaking the truth about Siteground. Most of the popular FB groups are ran by siteground mods or affiliates.

    Reply

    • I don’t understand what happened to disclosing you’re associated with the company. Those FB Groups are pretty strict about it, except if it’s SiteGround.

      Reply

42. Great review on siteground. They are really over really priced.

    What is your view on Greengeeks?

    Reply

    • Haven’t used to them… I know they used LiteSpeed but looks like they have an alarmingly amount of of bad reviews for bad billing practices on TrustPilot.

      Reply

43. All I can say is AGREED. As a blogger, I originally found Siteground to be super helpful and faster than any other basic hosting like GoDaddy or Blue Host, but over the past 2 years or so I’ve noticed things slip and tech support wasn’t really tech support anymore it was “I’ll create a ticket for you.” Finally we continued to have a problem that we couldn’t get to the bottom of. I know enough to be dangerous and knew the code my site was spitting out had clues to the issue but they wouldn’t even talk to me about it, I was willing to admit that it was “our” problem, I just needed a little help to move in the right direction to fix it. Nothing.
    Obviously, that was the last straw for us. We found a platform (Bigskoots) that actually manages WordPress and works as a partner to dig into problems without asking, and helps even if it ultimately turns out to not be server related.
    Unfortunately, we had to leave Siteground with 8 months left on our contract, but we had no choice, downtime = losing money.

    Reply

44. Had so many issues with a very simple WP and Elementor website on Siteground TTFB was terrible using there caching and it didnt agree with WP-Rocket, so moved it to Namecheap shared cheapest hosting EVER and it works fantastically TTFB is brilliant

    Reply

    • NameCheap actually has a pretty solid TTFB from what I’ve seen.

      Reply

45. Not sure what’s wrong with your page but it shows the same 5 comments repeatedly.

    I’ve not had problems with SiteGround at all. That may be a function of the kind of sites I develop (very small biz). Speed isn’t an issue.

    The move to Site Tools – only thing I miss is the ability to download a backup of the entire site.

    Support – I have chat, although this isn’t the first time I’ve seen it mentioned that chat is gone, I guess only for some? (I have the GrowBig plan.)

    The pricing – a definite ouch. The intro pricing is confusing – I’ve never seen a price scheme like that. And the raise in pricing is a concern on the GrowBig and GoGeek plans. That said, my clients are mainly on the startup plan, which is reasonable. As people take their bigger accounts elsewhere, I think the pricing will get adjusted, because they will start losing money with it.

    And they finally gave in with SiteTools and extended the Collaborator feature to the Startup plan (I asked for it as soon as SiteTools was announced – took them another year to do it.)

    But the deletion of negative reviews is disturbing.

    Just my $0.02.

    Reply

46. Well written review with supporting technical details, infact its the first Siteground review which is negative with lots of supporting things to explain whats the problem with SG. Till date I just come across of the affiliate reviews for siteground which hardly shows the other side of the story.
    This shows how important it is to have a good hardware, resource limited, good technical assistance to help customers. I don’t say there is a prefect host around but daily we need to learn and try to evolve for what customer require. As a hosting provider our-self we try to give preference to customer requirement to the best possible limit we can.
    You review is truly a learning experience of us as well to understand and improve on the aspects we are lacking.

    Reply

47. We have had nothing but problems with Siteground recently. We transferred a domain to them that we simply wanted to manage in the same dashboard, and learned quickly that if you don’t buy hosting for each domain you park with them, Siteground provide NO ABILITY to redirect or forward that domain. Now we have to wait 60 days to transfer to another service provider. We have written a complaint to Siteground about the lack of visibility into this – almost all service providers we have used provide you the option to manage your domains with forwarding, masking, and redirects regardless of hosting platform.

    We have decided to leave Siteground and migrated our site overnight to another hosting service, we, however, cannot get our EP CODE from Siteground now. We have requested our EP Code four times from Siteground today and their customer support team has a different answer each time. “We will send it manually,” “We will get it to you in the next 24 hours,” “We will update the support ticket with the EP code shortly.”

    They have an extensive push through all of their digital channels to increase their ratings and reputation online. The customer support is very quick and responsive but we cant help but feel there is some delays in assisting us due to complaints filed and a review on Trustradius.
    We are filing a complaint with ICANN shortly if not resolved.

    Reply

    • OOf, that sounds frustrating. Seems like every single thing revolves around money with them now. Hope you can get that code but wow, talk about taking something hostage.

      Reply

48. Hey Tom. i just had to drop a note. I just tried to sign up and they have some weird verification thing. Perhaps others are talking about it. This has to be costing them like 90% of the clickthrough. I tested your site and its so fast. Might want to mention the verification email and process. I really had to look for a way to do anything after I clicked off the page that had the email. I literally had to recreate a new account to get back there. When trying to sign in it say to send a chat but that is not loading. Yes, i checked my browser adblocker too. Their system just puts you into a forever loop. Anyways i had to find an article about it and find this email: av@cloudways.com Now I am waiting to hear from then to see if I can have an account. Wow! Your site was that fast though… :-)

    Reply

    • Yes I’ve heard about verification problems. I’ve been really focused on getting my office setup to do more YouTube videos (coming soon) but will add a note about the verification trouble. I wasn’t aware it was still a problem.

      Yeah! Site is faster than ever now since moving from Elementor to Gutenberg and getting on that Vultr High Frequency. Had some help from WP Fix It who helped in the process.

      Reply

49. Hi Tom,

    Thank you for your genuine review. Seriously I am seeing one negative review about SG for the first time. I always wonder why everyone is so happy about SG, and no one is making any bad reviews. It was so surprising that there were no such reviews too. In all the reviews, the SG’s uptime and load time were always ahead of other hostings.

    But now only I saw something different, and thanks for sharing with us.

    Reply

    • SiteGround will do anything to prevent people from writing a bad review even if it’s true. Everyone used to be happy (for the most part) a couple years ago, not anymore. They just want commissions.

      Reply

50. I’m really happy I found this. I’ve been soooooo unhappy with SiteGround for the last year or so in particular. I have an issue right now and I cannot even find out where/how to contact them. I’m stuck in a loop on their useless support pages. Just absurd. Definitely time for a switch.

    Reply

51. Hi Tom. Thank you for writing this review. Having been a Site Ground customer for a few years (and not for much longer thank goodness) i would like to say that I cannot agree more .Your review is spot on and totally accurate. I also despise SiteGround. If you want to know what is wrong with SiteGround (from my personal experience also) just read Tom’s review . If you have any kind of website that you care about in the slightest avoid SiteGround like the plague .

    Reply

    • And I didn’t even mention the whole limiting websites fiasco for new customers.

      Posted from the WPCrafters Facebook Group:

      We got some good news..based on our “data” we realised its not good business practice to rip people right off and because we couldn’t get away with it to the extent we wish we could, we have reverted our pricing plans back in a desperate attempt to stop the bleeding.

      Reply

52. Interesting review, and I see many of the comments here mirror your sentiments.

    I’ve been a SiteGround user for 1 year now and (luckily) share very little of the problems people are listing here.

    I’m on their shared hosting, GoGeek.

    For starters, speed and TTFB. I’m looking at the TTFB of a long how-to manual with loads of elements, and get a TTFB of 117ms in GTmetrix. I tested another page (product overview round up) and it has a TTFB of 181ms. These scores should look even better I assume on their cloud hosting.

    My websites are having GTmetrix and Lighthouse scores which are 97(%) .

    I must say that one thing that has started to irk me a bit is their customer support. They’re making it harder and harder to get a hold of them, even though I feel they are still as fast and helpful as in the beginning. But having to click thru 4-5 pages to end up in their live chat for sure works on my nerves.

    On top of that, taking away a bunch of payment methods is pretty absurd. Cost savings must have been a big motivation here as well.

    Re Cloudways, a friend of mine switched to them because he thought SiteGround was getting too expensive. His website has 100s of thousand of visitors a month. While he indeed ended up saving money, he said he saw 0 performance increase after the switch.

    Even though I for the most part can’t really find me this review, I do appreciate the no holds barred approach. It’s one that more bloggers should take. :)

    Reply

    • That’s interesting and thanks for sharing. SiteGround can work for some people. Above all, I just get irritated when an issue arises, they are totally defensive about it and will justify their decision at all costs. Glad your TTFB is good and hopefully they treat you well. Tried to make this review as honest as I could.

      Reply

53. i am using siteground. It is quite expensive, costing me 480 usd for 2 years, which means 20 usd per month.
    Their optimizer is a trap. If buyer uses tagdiv newspaper theme, uninstalling the optimizer will make error(A big X in navigation & search bar), which makes users hard to change the hosting company.
    I consider to change to Hostinger.
    But to be honest, I have used siteground for 4 years, 0 time server down, very quick live chat response, web speed is quite good with cloudflare APO.
    I just can’t stand with the Optimizer plugin and high price.
    salute to you to say good bye to 90% of affiliate income for telling the truth.

    Reply

    • Hey Emily,

      Yes, I’m no longer an affiliate for them and started promoting Cloudways instead, so I guess I’m still a “sellout” but I just don’t think SiteGround is the best option anymore. They’ve done some pretty shady things and although I’ve never had that happen with SG Optimizer, I wouldn’t be surprised.

      As for Hostinger, if you talk about unethical, they are at the top of the list. As I show in my Hostinger review, they have a track record of doing shady things (posing as customers, reviewing themselves, voting for themselves in FB polls, and even copied my entire site and changed hosting recommendations to Hostinger). I will never recommend them :/

      Reply

      • Crazy to hear they copied your entire site. I will watch your review. If really consider to change, hopefully uses your affiliate links. Thx a lot, big help.

        Reply

        • Yep, I took a screenshot before they finally took it down. I appreciate that!

          Reply

54. I’m From India!

    Thanks for Sharing the Details!

    Reply

55. Thank you for your review. I used Siteground for a few years but dropped them about 4 years ago because they kept going up in price and I wasn’t happy with their support team. I am with another company right now but I am checking out Cloudways thanks to your post.

    Reply

    • There’s some good cloud hosting options out there, Cloudways is definitely one. Not sure who you’re currently hosted with but glad it’s not SiteGround :)

      Reply

56. I had Siteground for a while, site was fast, cpanel was easy to use. Then over some time my site became unbearable slow, down to 20s loadtime and support told me there was nothing wrong and refused to try to change serverlocation

    Changed to cloudways, paying less, and site went to 2-3s loadtime……

    FU Siteground for lying to me. You guys are POS

    Reply

57. Thank you very much Tom for this review. In fact we were with Verio. Then Endurance took over and it was awful. After careful research back in 2016-17 Siteground was very good.
    Some recent changes such as the increase in price change and the migration to Site Tools have left me wandering about my situation.
    I will see how things evolve in the next few months. cloudways definitely seems to be a good alternative if they can assist for the migration.

    Reply

    • Hey Balil,

      Yes, some people are still happy with them but a lot of people left too. Above anything else, they have become unethical and constantly defend themselves instead of being open minded on some of the complaints going around. If they work for you, stay on them. If not, Cloudways is a good alternative.

      Reply

    • I can warmly recommend cloudways for you. And their support are staggeringly amazing

      Reply

58. Hi Tom
    i should have read this before I bought a 3 years plan

    initially it was all good until I felt my site got slower and slower, support got worse and started answer huge texts in 2 seconds (clear indication for text expander support) and lastly they tried to make delete my review in wp org.

    so – is https://www.cloudways.com/en/pricing.php?id=262128 still an option you recommend?

    managing several sites and in need of a developer friendly host who knows what honesty and a name from action and not name from long gone times is

    aporeciate the input

    Reply

    • Sorry for the late reply Beta. Yes, Cloudways is a good option. RunCloud and GridPane are good too.

      That sounds like SiteGround, they threatened me if I didn’t delete this post too. They’re being exposed and I’m glad to be part of it.

      Reply

      • Hi Tom and thanks for the reply

        Reply

59. SG really is a big disappointment now how they banned affiliate program for asians.

    Reply

    • Lots of people aren’t happy with them, they’ve done a lot of unethical things.

      Reply

60. siteground is a horror show – the number of screw ups technically, advice, migrations – i swear they are attrocious.These include slow speads, odd caching issues, SG optimiser clashes …lots..decreasing stats and cpanel functions, way too strict cpu limits, failed migrations, upgrades, downgrades and migration to new cpanel. You know they force you to update WP versions as soon as they come out – you have to ask them nicely not to – theres such an over stepping of control – they’re like the stasi now. i dont know why im still there… Been on shared grow big for a few years – horrible time-wasting experience. recommendations for VPS pls…

    Reply

    • Can’t say I can give I recommendation on VPS since I’ve never used one. I personally use Cloudways DigitalOcean. For VPS, you might want to post a question in the WordPess Hosting Facebook Group and get feedback there (sorry). Agreed on everything you said about SiteGround.

      Reply

61. I am unhappy with siteground for two reasons: slow pagespeed and bad customer support.
    Problem: I still have a contract with them for 2,5 years. Any suggestions?

    Reply

    • Stick with them or consider it a sunk cost. 2.5 years is a long time to deal with those issues.

      Reply

      • Thank you so much! I will probably migrate my website to cloudways in that case. Too often I have to go through pagespeed optimization and the lack of customer service will only cost me more time (money) if I stick with siteground. Thanks again!:D

        Reply

        • Many people are moving away from them, you’re not the only one. Let me know how it goes!

          Reply

          • I just moved too. Your post helped me realize I wasn’t crazy and my site wasn’t the worst site in the world. They pointed fingers at me while they were the ones with issues. They convinced me to get a developer from their partner perks and ended up paying 200 plus dollars for things I had already done like optimizing the database and deleting trash comments.. I was pisssed..my last week with them was spent watching the statistics and every spike caused a 500 internal server error (every 5 mins during high traffic) my traffic dropped by 1000 visits and was on a constant decline.

            I read your post and it gave me the courage to leave. I felt bullied towards the end at shiteground, so many fingers pointed at me and my poorly designed site. I am now using cloudways and I am finally able to get some rest and peace of mind. I keep waiting for a 500 internal server error and high cpu usage (the stuff of nightmares) but they haven’t come yet…It will take me some time to get back to the most important thing, which is working on my content because of the horrible experience.

            Please avoid shiteground. They are horrible, Terrible!!

          • It’s crazy how many stories you hear like this now. What they were in early 2019 compared to now is unbelievable. Have to wonder what conversations went on in upper management to turn them into such a horrible company. Congrats on moving.

      • ask them for refund! Thats what i did and they did my refund!

        Reply

62. I agreed 100% with you Siteground, is no more a viable option. they really was in the past, I’m changing to A2, from Gogeek to Turbo Boost, price is near the same but with better support ( like old days Siteground ) and a much faster nvme environment, with a much better Unlimited  RAID NVMe Storage 2 cores 2GB Website Staging, and the old fashioned Cpanel who all loves, Not this %$%^ site tools who is useless, BYE BYE siteground you are to greed to have me as a customer

    Reply

63. SiteGround has always been most of those things that you correctly criticize: expensive renewals, CPU limits, mediocre speed and support. I bet when Cloudways makes changes to their recurring affiliate program, you’ll equally become a righteous anti-Cloudways superhero.

    Reply

    • I wouldn’t assume that, not really recurring either.

      Reply

      • Not convinced at all, Tom. If it was all about a better price tag, better support and better performance, you could really benefit from e.g. WPMU DEV or ServerPilot. But those two only offer account credit, not cash. Cloudways instead pays handsomely.

        Reply

        • That’s fine. BunnyCDN only has account credit, still recommend them as well as GridPane who doesn’t have an affiliate program. Cloudways is a usually a solid choice for people regardless of commissions.

          Reply

          • Thanks for your replies. Cloudways is definitely better than ANY shared hosting. Regarding referrals, bunny.net’s commissions pale in comparison with those of Cloudways ($1 vs $30-$50 ) and GridPane is a platform for large agencies (certainly not the readers of this website).

64. SG really is a big disappointment now how they banned affiliate program for asians.

    Reply

65. I was really really pleased with Siteground and dealt with their first price increase by streamling my website and moving down a tier on their pricing system… I was SHOCKED when they put up their pricing AGAIN – for no good reason i could see – in fact, if anything, i had noticed that their support seemed *a little* less responsive than in the past… I didn’t want to leave but their prices were just untennable for me, in the middle of Covid, even more so…I found new hosts who are just fine so far and who are also eco-friendly, and payed about half of what I would have paid for 1 year with Siteground but or 3 years!!! ( initial price… will go up after 3 years… )

    Reply

    • That’s why most post people leave. They might be ok for initial prices but renewals are not worth it.

      Reply

66. Hi, Tom
    After reading your blog I switched from siteground to cloudways digital ocean server. Because my growbig plan is going to expire and the renewal price is too high.
    And I am happy that I switched.
    I saw a drastic change in my website performance and loading speed.
    Now it loads under 2 secs with 90 scores in google pagespeed insights.

    Reply

    • That’s awesome, glad the new GTmetrix/Lighthouse scores reflect the faster loads you get with hosting. Thanks for sharing.

      Reply

67. Thank you for a very honest review.

    I’m from Asia and I recently tried to sign-up a client through their affiliate program. It didn’t go through.

    I have a 3 year contract with SG. I’m now on my 2nd year. I won’t be renewing.

    SG is not the same anymore. In 2 occasions I wrote technical support. I didn’t get any help and my tickets were deleted.

    Sadly. My site is down again for the 3rd time this year. I don’t know why and I don’t expect any help from technical support.

    I think they have more clients than they can handle.

    Reply

    • I think so too, seems like they’re intentionally trying to steer people away but the way they’re doing it is very unethical. Sorry to hear that happened to you.

      Reply

68. I just paid a year’s fee to host SG，If you want to switch to cloudway, does that mean you wasted 10 months of SG fees. . .

    Reply

    • Yes, unfortunately they make you pay for a year minimum upfront.

      Reply

    • ask them for refund! they refunded me.

      Reply

69. I have read some good reviews from Namehero users. Did you check them out when looking for a new hosting company? If you have an opinion on them, I would like to hear it.
    I am concerned about the changes going on at SG, so I am looking for hosting options.
    Thanks for your straightforward articles.

    Reply

    • Honestly haven’t tested them beyond a simple TTFB/load time test. But from what I understand and have read in threads, it’s good budget hosting and uses LiteSpeed but is still budget hosting and likely not great for running resource-hungry tasks like WooCommerce, heavy themes, plugins, etc.

      Reply

70. Hi Tom, It is really an informative content. However, I don’t have that much complaint against SG, except their high renewal price. And I am looking for a change. I have a travel blog with US audience 15k pageviews which is increasing. Please suggest which one should I choose? Cloudways vultr HF or digital ocean?

    Reply

    • I would start with DigitalOcean, you can always clone the site on Vultr HF and compare results. DO is slightly cheaper yet still very fast.

      Reply

      • Just want to share one thing. I used to get 1.5-2.4s for TTFB. I use Siteground(hosting) & Ezoic(ad service). I contacted with Ezoic support team to increase site speed. They made some changes in caching. Surprisingly, my TTFB is now around 300-500 ms.

        Reply

71. Hi, thanks for the great review! I moved also to Cloudways last month, but there was one little unpleased fact come up today: the off-site back-ups for $0,033 per GB per back-up cannot be disabeld. I found out after receiving my first invoice. https://support.cloudways.com/do-you-charge-for-off-site-backups/

    Reply

    • Yes, this is true they charge for backups. You can change the backup frequency but can’t disable it completely.

      Reply

72. I am reading this review as SiteGround just stopped supporting the Asian region, specifically the Philippines. I also heard they stopped support in India (with a very mature IT landscape??), New Zealand, Singapore, and the rest of Asia. Currently leaning a lot towards Cloudways, as it’s what I use for test servers making websites before handing the website over to clients, but I’ll still need to do more research.

    Reply

    • Yep, I personally refuse to support such an unethical company. I moved my site to Cloudways awhile back and refer all my readers to them. Others are moving to A2, etc but they’re not as good IMO.

      Reply

      • Just wanted to say I moved one of my client sites to Cloudways, and using WP Fastest Cache and your tips on speeding up in Cloudways, it’s much faster than SiteGround! Though, there is the chance I didn’t optimize my site for SiteGround, I am happy with Cloudways for my small business clients. Hope they will be impressed with their sites speeds because of me.

        Reply

73. nice review i was using siteground hosting earlier but now will definitely change it to something better

    Reply

74. You took a right decision and leave siteground, We also start using Cloudways due to their flexible price and good speed.

    Reply

75. I have been coming to the same conclusion. When I started with them years ago the customer service was great. But, sadly, not any more. I appreciate the review of Cloudways. Def moving in that direction.

    Reply

76. I moved to SG initially (from Bluehost actually) as it was recommended by all the affiliate marketers and review websites. Support was pretty good, but I sometimes got 5xx errors which was a bit worrying. Now they just shut down my website for high resource usage caused by one of my plugins without any prior notice to fix the problem.

    I’m considering moving to Cloudways (or maybe Kinsta). Which plan do you recommend for sites with 10-20k sessions a month? Also, do you recommend Digital Ocean because it has the best infrastructure or because it’s the cheapest option vs Linode and Vultr? Thanks!

    Reply

77. After reading this, looks like cloudways indeed the best hosting now

    Cloudways seems good now but they are small compare to others.
    How we know if they grow big enough they won’t “change”.
    And they ask passport ID information for sign up an account ?
    Do the background check
    their office based on Malta Spain Pakistan, CEO from Pakistan also
    Not being racist but it’s doesn’t look safe…

    Reply

    • The changes they have made are actually good… adding Vultr High Frequency servers, improving support, etc. We don’t know the future but their history has been focused on making legit improvements without raising prices, cutting back support, etc. Even if they’re based out of Pakiston, they have an excellent reputation in Facebook Groups. Many hosting companies based in the US have done terrible things, so I wouldn’t judge a host based on their location. Yes, sometimes they ask for passport ID which can be a hassle, I think it’s for security/verification.

      Reply

78. Hello Tom,

    Great Insights and research. I was too on Siteground but after a year of my hosting I have seen poor server performance from them. Sites frequently get down. When I chat to their support team they did not give me the precise answer and sometimes charge for extra addons. It seems to be a bad practice. They are becoming very greedy now. Their current pricing is really huge and can’t acceptable as there are many other reliable hosting out there. Thanks for sharing your experiences.

    Regards,
    Vishwajeet Kumar

    Reply

    • Of course, just trying to keep it honest over here. So strange how they moved to Google Cloud yet their servers are slower than ever.

      Reply

79. I agree with this 100%. I have had my own heated discussions with Hristo, which ultimately got me banned from a Facebook group that he is an admin of.

    The only reason I had the cloud services package was so that my clients could have individual cPanels. But then I found out GoGeek offers separate logins for each website now with Site Tools.

    Oh… but you forgot to mention that the intro price is for one year only. If you want 2 or 3 years, the monthly intro price goes up dramatically.

    I’m interested in switching over to Digital Ocean and would love more info on how to do it. I have hundreds of site at the moment being hosted on multiple GoGeek accounts (One year at a time).

    Reply

    • What’s rude is disabling live chat then not admitting it. If they took responsibility and vowed to make improvements it would be one thing, but they’re just doing whatever they want with no regard for their customers.

      DigitalOcean has been great. I would start by reaching out to Mustassam, the Cloudways community manager. They have a migrator plugin as well. Maybe move a couple sites over and test the difference. I would be grateful if you used my aff link or promo code OMM25. Either way, Performance is great there it’s much better all around than SiteGround.

      Reply

80. been with them for 11years until now i decide to move…..they only accept either paypal or specific credit card as payment method…..in 2020…..and they suspend your account, block you the rights to access your data for download….when you are in the process of paying but payment error due to limited payment options…..who treats an 11year old customer like that?
    renewals too EXPENSIVE in 2020. limited storage in this age of computing. google drive gives 15GB storage for FREEEEEEE. starter plan only allows 1 website and 10GB storage in 2020 lol. good tech support but how often do i use them?, GoGEEK pack is $25USD a month for just 20GB storage and 25,000 monthly site visits…FREE SSL lol…let’s encrypt is free so why add it to your plan as if its special…unlimited DATABASE…until you see you are allowed only 500MB in total…UNLIMITED WEBSITES but you have a limit of site visits per month on your account

    after 11years, I am not interested anymore. especially how they are not considering the impact convid-19 pandemic has on businesses and will cancel your account for late renewal as a an 11 years old customer. my cell phone provider gave all of us 2GB to stay online during the lock down……big bank were flexible on mortgages worth 2000$ a month and you cancel an account over $25 for an 11 years customer……lol

    Reply

    • Wow, yeah something has gone terribly wrong with them and they really don’t care about their current customers anymore. It’s a shame how they used to be great but had this major shift in their company.

      Reply

      • yes its a big shame….they forgot hosting is becoming common and more common, the more cheaper it gets. I got pissed and cancelled my service 4hrs after i paid almost $400.00 CAD for the 2nd package….got a refund and left a 1 month subscription. I was expecting a full refund since their package states 30 days money back. one guy said I have to be charged for 1 month since the service has already started. I cancelled it 4hrs after I paid to renew. almost $60 CAD a month for only 20GB storage and UNLIMITED WEBSITES…..i have my server with 12GB RAM and 1TB storage at home and i was paying for something too little to call less……my renewal was a total of $299USD…a hosting company in canada charges about $134 CAD annually for 100GB storage and up 5 websites…too much better then siteground so SCEW THEM!!

        Reply

    • Hello,

      We are sorry to hear our hosting plans no longer meet your needs. Unlike specific storage providers like Google for example, our service includes a more comprehensive list of items with the main purpose of providing hosting for active websites and not a storage service. There are many additional tools and functionalities, such as the integration of the Let’s Encrypt SSL that adds value to our product because they facilitate webmasters and take away lots of manual tasks off their head. For experienced users, installing and renewing a Let’s Encrypt certificate may not be a big deal, but for many of our clients having that automatical, one-click, installation is a huge convenience.
      As for the number of databases, you can create as many databases as needed, as long as they are not exceeding the maximum database size limit specified in your current plan details. In general, maintaining large databases is not recommended for optimal website functioning so we have set certain quotas based on “averages” across our servers. The database size limit of 500MB is available on our StartUp plans designed for small to medium-sizes websites, but higher plans get higher quotas. Overall, these quotas such as the others that control the shared server resource usage aim to guarantee a fair distribution of these resources among all accounts hosted on the server.
      
      We completely understand the unfortunate situation worldwide, and the way small businesses have been affected by the lockdown. That is why, when you contacted us for assistance at the end of your renewal term and explained you were unable to cover the renewal for the upcoming year, our operator assisted you with extending the hosting for free for three weeks. As no payment was received at the new expiration date, the hosting account expired. Generally, the file content of the cancelled hosting accounts is not accessible due to the account status. Still, our Support operators were able to assist with a custom agreement based on your personal needs and preferences – by offering a renewal term for one month after collecting the monthly fee so you could get access to your files. We are sorry that we did not manage to accommodate your needs after all.

      Reply
      • • well…GOOGLE DRIVE offers 15GB FREEEE……hard drives are now cheaper than cheap……..Host up to 5 websites
        • 2x performance
        • Up to 5 subdomains
        • 100 GB disk space
        • 100 email addresses
        • Unmetered bandwidth*
        • Free LetsEncrypt SSL certificates
        • Free hosting migration
        • Choose your server location
        • 30 day money back guarantee
        • 99.9% uptime guaranteed

        all that for $13 Canadian. $13×12=$370 SITEGROUND

        Reply

      • dont even bother to jump in here SG

        Reply

    • Nice to see Im not the only loser customer from Siteground; couldnt even get Cloudflare settings right or in good working order… tech’s are far fetched from the realities of general users – they need to take a break; clearly overworked and have no experience in the simple things … anyone need a web developer job? my website is screwed. Thanks Siteground for wasting my time; literally hours on end.

      Reply

81. You took a right decision and leave siteground, We also start using Cloudways due to their flexible price and good speed.

    Reply

    • So much better.

      Reply

      • Great article Tom, but what about site security? How is Cloudways in comparison there?

        Reply

        • I’m not a security expert so take it with a grain of salt, but I haven’t seen any complaints about their security in Facebook Groups and I think it’s good: https://www.cloudways.com/en/managed-security.php

          Reply

82. It really takes courage to go against something as big as Siteground :) I was really skeptical about purchasing because so much positive review with no negative review is as bad as full of negatives. You my man, are a Legend!

    Reply

    • Trying to stay honest! Even if it means less commissions for me.

      Reply

      • Really Appreciate that!

        Reply

83. Hi Tom, Im considering to move or not to move. Honestly I know I need a web dev but cant afford. Im on GrowBig SG, have SG optimiser plugin, have purchased SG – CFlare premium plan in order to 1. serve webP compression 2.Speed up. I have also changed URL to www. Well, after a week & countless hours, being bounced around bw SG, CF, My theme; Elegant Themes Divi & Wordpress checking that all boxes are ticked, they have all passed the buck to the other saying that at their end all looks ok. I loved one response in CF support where they said they dont offer a CDN (oookkkk sorry; I dont have an IT degree; I meant reversed proxy (I think)) Anyways; I have full confirmation that ALL images are being served optimised; HIT, Score 200 BUT a MISS on x-proxy everytime even after 3 progressive GT Metrix. I read so many people having this issue – EVERY support thread ends with no solution. Hristov has ended a few of them.. Am I heading down a path of complete fail? Should I just accept F score on scaled images in GT Metrix??! and be happy that my site is at least ‘live’?

    Reply

    • Hey Suz,

      My girlfriend would love your Rose Gold section.

      I checked your GTmetrix report and browsed the site a bit. First things I noticed – TTFB is 2.7s. That’s typical of SiteGround (very slow). Hristo always says how there are many factors of TTFB outside of hosting, but it is the main factor by far. Second, you probably don’t need to pay for Cloudflare Premium (for WebP, you can use a plugin). Third, Divi is also very slow as well. It comes down to your hosting theme.

      Cloudways DigitalOcean and WP Rocket is a much faster setup. Obviously I’m an affiliate for them but only because this setup is way faster. And if you’re on budget, Cloudways has a free trail, promo code OMM25 saves you money as well, and you can get 10% off WP Rocket by signing for their email list (aff link if you don’t mind using it, if not, no biggie).

      Changing your theme would will be a bigger hassle but I would also do this eventually. For now, at least test your site on another host to see the difference.

      Reply

      • Thank you Tom; I honestly have little time on my hands to change over; Im also afraid this is all a little too big of a project for me; however when I can; I will make the move, I appreciate your reply. Can I ask, which plugin would you recommend me to set up whilst using SG Optimiser and Divi Theme? And if your in Australia; I can take care of your sweetheart, thats not a problem ;) feel free to email; please put in description line ‘Tom Dupuis – SG blog”.

        Reply

84. I am one of the 3,000 – we should have a Netflix show!

    Seriously, I loved Siteground and can’t believe how far and fast they fell. The final straw for me is them forcing WP updates on us. I never update WP as soon as the new version comes out, I wait until plugins have released their updates so everything is compatible, but SG auto-updates if you like it or not. You can push it out to 72 hours but that is still too soon. That, in addition to the CPU overages, bad support, ditching CPanel. When a company forces that many changes on you, head for the hills!

    I’m going AWS Lightsail for everything now and started recommending it to friends and colleagues.

    Reply

    • Ha! There should least be at a documentary of the wild wild hosting industry. So many changes recently. I’ll have to give Lightsail a try!

      Reply

85. SiteGround sucks! I’ve used they’re plan Managed Wordpress Grow Big Plan, and guess what? The Avada theme doesn’t work with it:)) You need more resources for it.When I’ve contacted the support they’re told me that I need a VPS or to upgrade the plan, and believe me they’re not friendly at all. Siteground invests a lot in Affiliate marketing and that’s why you’ll find everywhere “honest review”, but the truth is they aren’t good at all!

    Reply

86. AMEN. I have used Siteground for years, and recommended them as well. In last two years, I’ve had exact same resource issues, did the exact same upgrades, and the last year has been a nightmare of downtime and bad support. I am desperately searching for better service at a better price.

    Reply

    • Lots of people moving away! Many people to Cloudways, some to A2.

      Reply

87. Hi Tom,

    Awesome content, my man! I already spent hours following your suggestions.

    Do you think you can leave a review comparing WPX Wordpress hosting to Siteground? No one does it quite like you!
    From the little I can find, WPX seems to be a relatively new but supreme host from Bulgaria which isn’t very well known and as a non-expert in this field it’s difficult to determine if they’re actually better than Siteground speed-wise as they claim.

    Cheers,
    Stan

    Reply

88. Last year when SiteGround passed on an enormous price increase for no improvement in service or performance, I began migrating my business (and 40 websites) out. I closed four GoGeek accounts altogether and combined two more onto a single bottom tear shared account. With the capitulation to the monopolist Google, more of the same is forthcoming. (Have you noticed how Google simply abandons products that people have come to depend on?) For now, my business is hosted on a well-regarded VPS, but we are already building up a bare-metal alternative for they day when private equity or a monopoly do that to my new provider. My goal is to collect rent, not pay it.

    Reply

89. Thanks for this excellent tutorial and very detailed review on Siteground!

    Reply

90. Dear Tom,

    Until a few weeks ago I did not know there was a difference between wordpress.com and wordpress.org, even though I have had 2 blogs for 9 years. Unbelievable, right! Well, better late than never.

    When I found out, I naturally chose to go with wordpress.org and have all the freedom I never knew was possible for someone who does not have any knowledge about programming or coding.

    So I have been taking some courses on how to make my own Wordpress website. Both instructors recommended Bluehost, as well as some other experts from articles on the net, though the latter also mentioned Siteground but did not bother to explain why its prices are more expensive and what the user gets in return.

    Anyway, the point is that I was going to go with Bluehost for hosting but one of the instructors gave a link to your website and praised your material. I started reading some of it and was so impressed that I bookmarked it. I came across the present article on the next day and, when shown the overwhelming evidence and facts, it was a no brainer for me to choose Siteground. Finding out that Bluehost is part of a corporation, I would never choose a corporation over a regular company.

    Just wanted to thank you for everything as well as to tell you that I will use your affiliate link tomorrow to buy 3 years of GrowBig Wordpress hosting. :)

    Your thorough articles and tutorials are blowing me away. I am so overwhelmed with information and new things that it will take time to learn and apply what I can. Your manner and style of writing will certainly be of immense help to me.

    Reply

    • Hey Alex,

      Really appreciate that and that’s awesome you’re getting so much out of the tutorials. There’s definitely a lot of information out there and it seems like every “how to start a blog” tutorial promotes Bluehost even though it’s not the best option. SiteGround is one of the better shared hosting options, but their renewal prices are a little steep.

      An ideal situation is to buy 3 years of SiteGround to get the promo price, then once the renewal price comes around, take a look at Cloudways (cloud hosting). If your traffic grows, you will need a more powerful server anyway (eg. cloud hosting instead of shared). But when you’re just starting, SiteGround is a good option and that’s 3 years of solid hosting. Most companies like SiteGround and Cloudways will migrate you for free, so switching hosts is really not a big deal.

      Anyway, glad you got so much out of this. Let me know if you have any questions and I really appreciate you using my links.

      Reply

91. Wow. Now that’s how you do a hosting review. Nice work. What is your opinion of SiteGround now that they got rid of cPanel?

    I’ve been a diehard fan of SiteGround for the past couple years and moved well over 50 sites to them. They were a “perfect” hosting company as they were fast, secure, and still provided the convenience of cPanel.

    Now with cPanel gone I’m really miffed and this once “perfect” hosting company isn’t so perfect anymore. I’m cautiously sticking with them for now to see how their own cPanel replacement works but I’m curious what you think of this change?

    Travis

    Reply

92. This is the best way to review any hosting

    Reply

93. I really liked the article. I am currently using bluehost. I have a few contents on my site. What do I need to tell siteground to make the migration less painful ?

    Reply

    • Once you open a support ticket you will see a “website transfer” option where you will provide them with your Bluehost/domain details. If you’re using SSL, email, CDN (eg. Cloudflare), or anything else that else that is enabled through your hosting, you can let them know.

      Reply

94. Hi!

    A huge thank you for all of your hard work you’ve put into this website. Absolutely incredible. We have officially switched to Siteground’s “Grow Big” plan and it’s sped up our websites!

    One important question we have and we feel like you could answer this. If we manage two separate websites from one account through Siteground versus two separate accounts will this affect SEO? I was reading about parked domains versus subdomains and SEO. If you could enlighten us it would be greatly appreciated. We may be confusing terminology.

    It would save a lot of money to host my partners website as well as my own through one siteground account.

    Thanks in advance!

    Mitch & Justine

    Reply

    • Any shared hosting plan comes with a limited amount of resources. If 1 GrowBig account can handle those websites without exceeding CPU limits than you’re ok. But if you check your cPanel and see lots of CPU being consumed, you need more resources which means (first, optimize your site), then if needed, either upgrade to GoGeek or use different accounts for each. But hopefully you won’t need to.

      On both websites, make sure you follow that guide to reduce CPU usage. Both websites should using SG Optimizer (or another cache plugin), Cloudflare, etc.

      Reply

95. Hi Tom

    I just found your site last week and enjoyed digesting and implementing your tips on the WordPress SEO Tutorial. I explored your site and enjoyed this article also.

    I have been using Siteground for about 4 years myself on a few sites. Love it! I didn’t realise that I hadn’t activated cloudflare until I read your review. My pingdom results went below 1sec after I did that, it was about 1.6 previously.

    I’m a firm believer in keeping up to date with blogging strategies and tools. You need to keep learning and making tweaks, not just publish content without thought.

    Great article. I am a new fan.

    Reply

96. SiteGround monitors and filters your outgoing email!

    Here is a big reason to NOT use SiteGround. I operate a website, EDtreatment.info, which deals with erectile dysfunction. I often send email to advisors and partners dealing with the subject of ED. Apparently, SiteGround considers my normal business correspondence to be spam, and has repeatedly blocked outgoing email.

    I am paying for business hosting – not for someone to be monitoring my business email. This is ridiculously intrusive, and simply unacceptable for a business-grade hosting service.

    Reply

97. Hi Tom.

    So if I understand well, no needs to setup WP super cache or WP Rocket when you have a Gogeek plan with Supercacher turned on ?

    Thanks a lot.

    Reply

98. I always take into account things such as security and performance. I’m eager to keep my site up to date to avoid any security holes and problems associated with outdated modules. I was surprised to see how rare it is to find PHP 7.2 used by WordPress users. Seems like all the providers you have mentioned offer little storage 30 GB seems like not enough for email databases and websites, especially if you have a lot of content and exchange a lot of files through email. Its odd that they count their software as part of the customers storage. Right now I get access to a full 50 GB of storage in my packet at dhosting.com it only counts the exact space my files use. I also get constant updates to my PHP environment, get once click CloudFlare set up free SSL with no limits for file transfer, email or websites.

    Reply

99. bad business practice, big time, not just saying that
    wish i wasn’t writing a negative review

    site never got migrated over, a html css only site, no database
    no javascript, no ecommerce

    linux notes site type blog

    domain name never got transferred, too much encouragement to purchase
    additional products and they use the 3rd party scenario to try to get
    out of a refund, which isn’t gonna work especially when cloudflare
    sends ya an email stating an account was never set up by siteground
    nor was anything ever billed, simply coz it never happened,
    nor did the site ever go live

    so Martin states to me via chat that he can’t refund 15 bucks for cloudflare
    product that never got created or set up by site ground, and i have the actual
    email from cloudflare support, have filed a complaint with bbb and will dispute
    any monies not refunded from my creditcard, last but not least, my banks’s security
    was goin off, and that should have warned me on this, i’m more mad at myself than
    siteground tbh, coz i have never had an issue with my credit card online
    ever, anywhere, and had more than enough funds in it, so it was siteground triggering
    my bank’s security

    my address, name, email was listed up on my site with Pennsylvania’s incorporation paperwork

    my bank is about 3 blocks down from my office

    so to position yourself to tell a customer you can’t refund 15 dollars when it never
    even went through says it all, and that was done by Martin from siteground

    Reply

100. Great post. Yes, SiteGround is a Great option to consider and by far the best thing I ever bought with my money. Reliability, Speed and the quality of support are spectacular.

     Reply

101. Hi Tom,

     Great tutorials – many thanks!
     I have one question. I’m running Siteground and have their SG Optimizer installed. This means that they are running Cloudflare. I also have MaxCDN.

     You say that if I am using Cloudflare, I shouldn’t click the minify checkbox in the W3 Total Cache general settings. However, I am also using MaxCDN, so should I check the box or not?

     Thanks!
     Craig

     Reply

     • Cloudflare and W3TC both attempt to minify, so only use 1. As long as your minify scores in GTmetrix Page Speed are good when using Cloudflare, it’s working and you can leave it “not selected” in W3TC.

       Reply

102. You have great tutorials on your site. I also went with Siteground based on the great reviews. I have one question: I’m considering adding screenshots to my site but I’m not sure if is legal. Are you allowed to take screenshots from other sites and publish them on your site? Thanks

     Reply

     • I think so but honestly not 100%. But if it’s used to promote them, I don’t see why they would have a problem. They want you to do that.

       Reply

103. Hi, have been following many of your advise and they are all great. The only thing that i have a problem is with my server response time, i am at siteground with a gogeek plan. In one of your article you mention that if we get bad server response time it would be to change provider if we have this.

     Reply

     • Are you running any high CPU plugins or requests? Sorry for the late response.

       Reply

104. Thank’s Tom for the link to the group. We get quite a lot of new members this way.

     We’re going to be running a comprehensive survey this year that will be looking at the different tiers of hosting, developer/devops needs, speed, happiness and so on. Which will be marketed inside the group, and beyond, I’ll drop you a note at the time.

     Also, we have started doing AMA’s every Friday at 7pm CET (10am PST) with different hosting, security and software companies.

     Lastly, have you checked out SWIFT Performance plugin for WordPress? it’s the new kid on the block and blowing away the other caching/optimization plugins.

     Reply

     • Hey Andrew,

       Appreciate you dropping by! Yes please let me know about the next survey – would love to see the results and weigh in.

       I noticed I missed the AMA this Friday but heard great things. Will definitely be on board for the next one as long as my schedule permits. Are there recordings of in case I can’t attend?

       I need to check out SWIFT. I keep seeing posts about it in the WordPress Speed Group. Curious if it will give me better results than WP Rocket but I’ll test it out for sure.

       Reply

105. Hello Tom,
     I am a fan of you. This blog is an inspiration to me in affiliate marketing.I follow the same approach like you did here. I already have made a comment on this post. But I read this post again today, I found that ( here #22. How To Tell If Your Hosting Is Slow ) I think there is a typo mistake. The symbol used for ‘less than’ seems to be confused/mistaken. It should be like this “” (Update: Google recommends a response time of <200ms.). Sorry, I had no time to contact you by email, so just commenting here., hope you don't mind. Please feel free to delete this comment.

     Reply

     • Updated, thank you Harish :)

       I need to fix that on a lot of articles. Awesome to hear you’re motivated about the affiliate marketing. So much better than doing client work – keep at it and let me know if I can help!

       Reply

106. Peak enough price for renewal. By the way, is there scalable cloud based or just traditional shared hosting?

     Reply

     • Yes it can be expensive. What do you mean by scalable? You can use their autoscale feature to provide more resources when needed, and you can add more CPU/RAM/SSD at anytime for an extra $10 more/month each.

       Reply

107. Thanks for this excellent tutorial and very detailed review on Siteground! I host one of my Siteground, but will move others also.

     Reply

108. Great post. Yes, SiteGround is a Great option to consider and by far the best thing I ever bought with my money. Reliability, Speed and the quality of support are spectacular. I was thrilled by looking at my page speed performance when I moved to SiteGround.

     Reply

109. Recently, I moved few of my clients’ sites to SiteGround mainly thanks to your raving praise. From the very beginning, I’ve had tons of issues with their CPU limits. Typically, my sites have 60 plugins installed and some WP Cron activities going on. E.g. one of my clients is using WebinarIgnition (WordPress plugin to host webinars streamed on Google on Air on a website). This requires sending emails to users when they register, reminder emails etc. Woocommerce sends all sorts of invoices, notifications etc., and I don’t want to disable them. One of the sites on it’s own Geek account isn’t even launched but I have to disable WP Cron and Heartbeat so they stop disabling my site due to CPU overload :(

     The problem with SiteGround is they say I’ve got too many plugins, too many Cron jobs and I need to reduce them. I can’t tell clients to cut on their functionality after they kind of ‘upgraded’ their hosting from shared HostGator (where no one ever complained, although page load speed wasn’t great). I can’t run Woocommerce and advanced marketing tactics without Cron. I’m close to giving up asking for a refund. Tom, any advice?

     Reply

     • I would check AWstats to see what’s causing high CPU. You can also try using WP Disable, blocking/limiting bots using Wordfence rate limiting rules, uploading this spammy bot list to your .htaccess, cleaning your database frequently, and offloading resources to Cloudflare/MaxCDN. Also turn off unnecessary plugins settings you’re not using especially those that may cause high CPU (eg. Wordfence’s live traffic report) and make sure you’re using PHP7 using their SG Optimizer plugin and caching your site.

       For websites with resource-hungry plugins/large databases it’s going to be a trade-off – slow load times on a plan with “unlimited bandwidth” or CPU throttling and it’s really preference… but a client can’t expect fast load times/no CPU throttling if they have a resource-hungry site on shared hosting. Every hosting company has some sort of throttling to preventing sites from consuming too much CPU otherwise higher plans wouldn’t exist.

       As an alternative you may also work with a developer experienced with speed optimization/CPU (on freelancer I use 2 guys name bdkamol and i333).

       Hope this helps – keep me updated.

       Reply

     • Save yourself the headache don’t use siteground. They disabled my site also due to high traffic, they call it ddos attack while it is not

       Reply

110. This is the best way to review any hosting, I love this review.

     Reply

111. For client sites, when optimizing, what plans do you suggest? $80/mo seems a little steep for a client

     Reply

     • Generally GrowBig is the best value since it’s only $2/month more to host unlimited sites and includes priority support/more server resources. If it’s a site with more traffic or runs more plugins that consume a decent amount of resources, GoGeek is good. Their cloud hosting is definitely nice and is scalable since you can add more CPU/RAM/SSD space, but ya it’s $80/month. Maybe try GrowBig or GoGeek first depending on the site.

       Reply

112. Oh My God!

     I became a fan of your blog after reading your blog. I accidentally visit your blog while searching for siteground review in Google.

     Your writing skill is awesome. I have read lots of review articles on various blogs.

     But no one has writing skill like you.

     Can I share your screenshot (which you use in this article) and “GIVE YOU BACKLINK” via Image Source caption?

     PLEASE REPLY… …And thanks again for this awesome article…

     Reply

     • Go ahead :) but I would wait a day or two… I’m in the middle of updating this review with a lot more screenshots. But yes, use away! Glad you like it!

       Reply

       • Could you please give me some affiliate marketing tips which you are using to increase your affiliate sales?

         Thanks in Advance!

         Reply

         • I’m in the middle of writing a tutorial for that but I do have a list of WordPress affiliate programs if that’s what you’re doing: https://onlinemediamasters.com/wordpress-affiliate-marketing-programs/

           This question does require a full tutorial, but I’d say the most important thing is to only select the best companies to be an affiliate for. This makes it easier to find social proof that they are actually the best. For example, there are loads of happy SiteGround customers when I searched Facebook and Twitter (using Advanced Twitter Search) so finding social proof is literally not a problem. Don’t sell your soul for high commission affiliate programs – WP Engine’s is more profitable but I believe SiteGround is the better company, and I laid out plenty of evidence that (I think) supports that :)

           Reply

113. Hello Tom,
     I like your Siteground Review and detail information on the Subject.

     Basically I love siteground and my Blog Ease Bedding Dot Com is hosted on Siteground GoGeek Account.

     I moved from their smaller plans to GoGeek and quite satisfied about my hosting plan and host itself.

     Thanks.

     Reply

     • Glad you like them Jaswinder :) ya GoGeek is definitely solid especially since it used to be $14.95/mo. Wish I could pay that instead of the $80/mo for cloud.

       Reply

114. Tom, great article. I certainly didn’t absorb the entirity, but I agree that Siteground is the best. It runs my dev clones faster than on VSP’s and clouds.

     Now I see you admit that you have a cloud plan. Are you as enthusiastic about that plan as you are about the astounding GoGeek plan?

     Would you choose a nearly-as-good company with just regular VPS’s? That’s what I am hoping to find, but the only good hosting company, over 15 years, I can be excited about it Siteground

     Reply

     • Hey Luke,

       I honestly wish I could go back to GoGeek especially since they lowered the price… the server resources, staging, support, etc were awesome for the price. My site just requires too many resources. Still realllly like cloud it’s just a little pricey for me to love it. $80/month ain’t cheap but that’s just what cloud hosting runs.

       I would go with SiteGround GoGeek over another company’s VPS but that’s just me… I’m obviously loyal to SiteGround but like we both can agree… for good reasons :)

       Reply

115. Yeah it is really a good web hosting site and the support is very good.The given issues is clear in less period and is vwery useful for everyone

     Reply

116. Hello Tom,

     Thanks for the great tutorial. I am thinking of moving to Siteground and I see you mentioned that their own cache is not up to the mark. Would you suggest using their cache and WPRocket both or any one of them. Do you by any chance have the config for the Siteground’s own cache?

     Thanks in advance!

     Reply

     • Hi Pravilz,

       I don’t have a config file for their SG CachePress plugin… I recommend WP Rocket instead and have a tutorial which does have a pre-configured zip file. I got better results using WP Rocket and it was rated the #1 cache plugin in a popular Facebook poll (shown on that tutorial). I use the SiteGround Cloudflare MaxCDN WP Rocket combo and it’s definitely solid. MaxCDN isn’t completely necessary at $90/year but does help.

       Anytime! Let me know if you have other questions.

       Reply

117. Thank you for this awesome post, all of your guides/tutorials are just amazing! :)

     I have a question for you, what cache plugin do you recommend, I joined Siteground and their support recommend their own tool SuperCacher, in this post you recommend W3, but in another post you say that WPRocket is the best…

     Reply

     • Hey Kalle,

       Thank you! I found some cache plugins work better on some sites but generally I recommend WP Rocket first. I wrote the W3 Total Cache tutorial because I know a lot of people still use it and for many, they’re still happy with it.

       Reply