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

SiteGround is good… if you’re comparing them to Bluehost/GoDaddy.

But when you compare them to ChemiCloud (faster LiteSpeed severs) or Rocket.net’s <100ms global TTFB, SiteGround starts looking a lot like Bluehost. Wait… you haven’t heard of these?

That’s because SiteGround controls many popular Facebook groups and removes bad reviews/posts mentioning other hosts. They also threaten people who write bad reviews. What you’re left with are fake reviews from Facebook admins, affiliates, and paid partnerships. That’s why you don’t hear about the 2M SiteGround domains that got deindexed from Google. Or their TTFB issues. Or how the SiteGround Optimizer plugin does a poor job with web vitals. Just look at the migration results from ex-SiteGround clients who moved to ChemiCloud and Rocket.net.

This isn’t just about performance. SiteGround went from customer-first to “bottom line first.” That’s why they discontinued free Cloudflare, cPanel, and started charging $30/site migrations and a $14.99/mo CDN. Quality of support went down, yet they now charge up to 7.5x renewals after 1 year. This isn’t just me complaining… you can look at the bad feedback on Hristo’s AMA.

But hey, if you want to pay $25/mo+ for shared hosting or $100/mo+ for cloud hosting, it’s your money. I’ve referred about 3,000 people to them. Now I’m targeting 3,000 thank you letters from people who I helped avoid SiteGround because they thought all their glowing reviews were real.

 

1. Poor Specs

Notes:

• NVMe SSDs are faster than SATA SSDs.
• MariaDB is more powerful than MySQL.
• LiteSpeed’s PHP is faster than FastCGI.
• LiteSpeed Cache is faster than SG Optimizer/WP Rocket.
• Redis is more powerful than Memcached, especially Redis Pro.

	SiteGround GrowBig	NameHero Turbo WordPress	ChemiCloud WordPress Turbo	Cloudways Vultr HF (2GB)	Rocket.net Starter Plan
Type	Shared	Shared	Shared	Cloud	Private cloud
Server	Apache + Nginx	LiteSpeed	LiteSpeed	Apache + Nginx	Apache + Nginx
Cores/RAM	Not listed	3 cores/3GB	3 cores/3GB – scalable to 6/6	1 core/2GB	32 cores/128GB
Storage	20GB SATA	Unlimited* NVMe	40GB NVMe – 10/11 locations	64GB NVMe	10GB NVMe
Object cache	Memcached	Redis	Redis	Redis Pro	Redis/Redis Pro
PHP processor	FastCGI	LiteSpeed	LiteSpeed	FPM	LiteSpeed
Resource limits	CPU limits + suspensions	Efficient with LiteSpeed	Efficient with LiteSpeed	No PHP worker limit	No PHP worker limit
Database	MySQL	MariaDB	MariaDB	MariaDB	MariaDB
CDN	SiteGround CDN ($14.99/mo)	QUIC.cloud ($.02-.08/GB)	QUIC.cloud ($.02-.08/GB)	$5/mo Cloudflare Enterprise	Free Cloudflare Enterprise
CDN locations	176	84	84	310	310
Full page caching	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
Smart routing	Anycast	Anycast	Anycast	Argo/Tiered Cache	Argo/Tiered Cache
Optimize images	Very limited	QUIC	QUIC	Mirage/Polish	Mirage/Polish
DNS	Blocked by Google for 4 days	Use QUIC’s DNS	Use QUIC’s DNS	DNS Made Easy (use Cloudflare)	Cloudflare
Cache plugin	SG Optimizer	LiteSpeed Cache	LiteSpeed Cache	Use FlyingPress	Use FlyingPress
Data centers	10	1 (US)	11	44	Served from Cloudflare edge
Bandwidth or monthly visits	100k	50k	Unlimited*	2TB	50GB + 250k
Control panel	Site Tools	cPanel	cPanel	Complex	Easy to learn
Email storage	10GB	Unlimited	Unlimited	x	x
Major incidents	TTFB, DNS, CPU issues (denies it)	2011 node outage	None	None	None
Support	C	B	A	C	A
Migrations	$30/site	1 free	10-200 free	1 free + $25/site	Unlimited free
TrustPilot rating	4.8/5	4.7/5	5/5	4.5/5	4.9/5
Monthly price	$3.99 (1 year)	$8.98 (3 years)	$5.99 (3 years)	$26 (monthly)	$25 (1 year)
Renewals	$24.99/mo (1 year)	$19.95/mo (1 year)	$19.95/mo (1 year)	$26/mo	$25/mo
Price for 3 years	$659.64	$323.19	$215.64	$936	$900

 
 

2. SiteGround Optimizer Does A Poor Job With Web Vitals

It also has ongoing compatibility issues.

	SG Optimizer	WP Rocket	FlyingPress	LiteSpeed Cache
Server-side caching	✓	x	x	✓
Object cache integration	✓	x	x	✓
Delay JavaScript	x	✓	✓	✓
Remove unused CSS	x	Inline	Separate file	Separate file
Critical CSS	x	✓	✓	✓
Preload critical images	x	x	✓	x
Exclude above the fold images	By class/type	By URL/class	Automatic	Automatic
Lazy load background images	x	Inline HTML	lazy-bg class	x
Add missing image dimensions	x	✓	✓	✓
Lazy load iframes	x	✓	✓	✓
YouTube iframe preview image	x	✓	✓	✓
Self-host YouTube placeholder	x	x	✓	x
Host fonts locally	x	x	✓	✓
Font-display: swap	x	✓	✓	✓
Preload links	x	✓	✓	✓
Bloat removal (beyond Heartbeat)	x	x	✓ (details)	x
Lazy render HTML elements	x	x	✓	✓
Guest Mode	x	x	x	✓
Advanced cache control	x	x	x	✓
Gravatar cache	x	x	x	✓
Limit post revisions	Delete all	Delete all	Keep some	Keep some
CDN image optimization	x	x	✓	✓
CDN image resizing for mobile	x	x	x	✓
Documented APO compatibility	x	x	✓	x
Documentation	Not detailed	Good	Not detailed	Good
New features	Infrequent	Infrequent	Frequent	Frequent
Facebook group	Join	Join	Join	Join
CDN price	$14.99/mo	$8.99/mo	$.03/GB	$.02-.08/GB
Plugin price	Free	$59/year	$60/year	Free
Renewal price	Free	$59/year	$42/year	Free
	View tutorial	View tutorial	View tutorial	View tutorial

 
This is why you have to use FlyingPress, Perfmatters, or WP Rocket with SiteGround Optimizer to get better results. The closest thing to an “ideal setup” would be using SiteGround Optimizer for dynamic caching + Memcached, then another optimization plugin for most everything else.

LCP Issues

If you view the 4 parts of LCP, you’ll see why many SiteGround users have LCP issues. Their plugin can’t preload viewport images or remove unused CSS, SiteGround has a history of TTFB issues (40% of LCP), and their free CDN can’t cache dynamic content or resize images on mobile.

 

3. CDN Is Inferior To Cloudflare APO

Even after version 2.0, SiteGround’s CDN is an inferior product to APO. However, they discontinued Cloudflare in hopes of paying SiteGround $14.99/mo instead of $5/mo for APO.

Cloudflare’s network has 100+ more data centers (285 instead of 176 on Google Cloud), 192 Tbps transfer speeds, a plethora of features, over 3,000 employees, and decades of experience with high performance/reliability on cdnperf.com. This is what you get with SiteGround’s CDN:

There are already complaints and you have to use SiteGround’s unreliable DNS to use the CDN.

 

4. CPU Limits Suspend Your Account Until You Upgrade

If you’ve been with SiteGround long enough, you’ve probably run into CPU limits.

It certainly appears something is fishy considering countless people who originally had CPU limits on SiteGround moved away and they were fixed instantly (including myself). You can find SiteGround’s CPU limits on their hosting page when you hover over the “server resources” tab.

Most hosts throttle your bandwidth which makes your site slow and can cause 503 errors. But on SiteGround, you have to upgrade (to add resources) or they will send you an email warning and eventually take down your website. You can wait it out, try to fix it, upgrade plans, or leave.

• Wait it out – your website will continue to be down until your CPU seconds are reset.
• Fix it – follow my guide on reducing CPU, but there’s no guarantee you can actually fix it and SiteGround will never blame it on their own service. They’ll probably tell you it’s an issue with caching, scripts, bots, cron jobs, or plugins. Make sure you check error logs too.
• Upgrade – upgrading to GrowBig/GoGeek may fix it, but never upgrade to SiteGround’s cloud hosting. It’s been seen time and time again that people who upgrade to their cloud hosting still face CPU issues. When you get warnings on GoGeek, it’s 100% time to move.
• Leave – Vultr HF, LiteSpeed, and Rocket.net are all great options to reduce CPU. Vultr HF and Rocket.net use NVMe storage (and only about 10% of traffic actually hits your origin on Rocket who offloads most of it to Cloudflare). LiteSpeed is more efficient than Apache and NGINX. Many hosts use Redis which uses memory more efficiently than Memcached.

 

5. Their Cloud Hosting Isn’t Worth $100/mo

I’ve used it.

It’s overpriced, slow, and doesn’t fix CPU limits. I even added more cores/RAM and was still getting CPU issues (plus my site wasn’t crazy fast after doing it). There are better cloud hosts especially when you compare their technology and number of cores/RAM you get for the price. If you’re getting CPU limits on SiteGround’s GoGeek plan, do not upgrade to their cloud hosting.

 

6. Google Blocked SiteGround’s DNS For 4 Days

Below is SiteGround’s response when their DNS was blocked from Googlebot for 4 days.

In classic SiteGround fashion, they claimed no responsibility by saying “there is no blocking on our end.” But then 2 days later, they came out with a fix. SiteGround never advised customers to move to an external DNS. Many websites dropped in rankings or even disappeared from Google completely, resulting in a lot of lost time/money for customers. Feel free to look it up on Twitter. And to use SiteGround’s new CDN, you have to use their DNS. Is that a risk you’re willing to take?

 

7. History Of TTFB Issues

Backlinko’s 2019 TTFB test showed SiteGround had the slowest TTFB of all hosts tested.

When SiteGround moved to Google Cloud, they originally used one of Google’s lowest tier machine families (N1). Yet on their blog, they said “using [Google’s] service will result in high speed for our clients’ websites.” Another false claim since their TTFB actually got much slower.

SiteGround later moved to N2 in 2020 and is still using this machine family to date. While N2 is an improvement, it’s still a “balanced” machine family and isn’t as fast as the C2 machine family used on Kinsta and Elementor’s Cloud websites (although I don’t recommend those either for other reasons). SiteGround will deny their TTFB is slow, but independent people say otherwise:

 

8. Controls Facebook Groups And Makes Legal Threats

The WordPress Hosting, WordPress Speed Up, WP Beginner, and WP Rocket Users Facebook Groups are all run by SiteGround’s employees or brand ambassadors. Hristo is even an admin for the WordPress Speed Up group. This is the only reason SiteGround is promoted everywhere.

You’ll also see admins banning people and removing comments when other hosts are recommended, or if you speak negatively about SiteGround. They order other hosting companies to “disclose your relationship” yet the same admins pretend to be “SiteGround customers” by recommending them everywhere and acting like support agents, all while not disclosing their own relationship. Please, join the WP Speed Matters Facebook group instead.

 

9. Renewals Are 6-7x After 1 Year

In the old days, you got the cheaper intro price for 3 years, plus they included a free migration.

They raised prices twice (once in 2018 and in 2020). Now you only get the intro price for 1 year and migrations cost $30. Prices got higher and the value of their service dropped significantly.

Upon renewal, monthly pricing increases from $6.99 to $14.99 (StartUp), $9.99 to $24.99 (GrowBig), and $14.99 to $39.99 (GoGeek). Yearly, that’s $179.88, $299.98, and $539.98. So if you’re on SiteGround’s hosting now, expect a large bill once your renewal prices come into play.

If you can’t read it, it says:

Here was my bill for their cloud hosting after upgrading from CPU limits:

 

10. Harder To Move Away From Site Tools

Whether you like Site Tools or not, some hosts will charge you to move from it.

It was released weeks after cPanel increased prices and there were many complaints of bugs and missing features. It also didn’t roll out to some clients until over a year later.  SiteGround is quick to replace something when they increase prices – but expect you to stay when they do it.

 

11. Declined Support

I laughed when I noticed SiteGround’s support was some of their top Autocomplete results because they’ve made it overly difficult to find. Can’t even find their phone # on their website.

SiteGround’s support has gotten worse because:

• It’s more difficult to reach.
• Unwillingness to help fix CPU limit issues.
• They added a long “scope of support” disclaimer.
• They previously disabled live chat for people who use it too much.
• They cut off entire countries from support when they were busy running sales.

 

12. Attempted To Limit # Of Websites

In another attempt to increase their bottom line, SiteGround limited the number of websites you can host on each plan. This backfired and made a lot of people leave them. Although they eventually reversed this, it’s just another sneaky thing they tried to get customers to pay more.

 

13. Removed Service In Unprofitable Countries

SiteGround suspended accounts from India, New Zealand, Singapore, Philippines, etc.

This hurt a lot of affiliates – it was sad seeing so many members of the Bloggers Passion Facebook Group (mostly Indians) hurting financially after SiteGround canceled their affiliate accounts. Even if you don’t do affiliate marketing, consider how it affected other people’s lives.

 

14. Unsanctioned Migration To Google Cloud

A while back, SiteGround moved customers to Google Cloud without warning.

Many people were hesitant to host their websites with one of the biggest data harvesting companies in the world. But SiteGround pulled out their excuses on how they follow GDPR, their information is still protected, blah blah blah. The bottom line is they didn’t give a warning (or an option) not to use Google Cloud. This isn’t what they signed up for, but there’s no choice.

 

15. 4 LiteSpeed/Cloud Hosts That Are Better Than SiteGround

ChemiCloud – faster LiteSpeed hosting, faster NVMe storage, and a perfect 5/5 star TrustPilot rating with several reviews of people who either moved or were about to purchase SiteGround. No need to buy a premium cache plugin since you’ll use the free LiteSpeed Cache which does a better job with web vitals. QUIC.cloud’s CDN is also faster (and often cheaper) than SiteGround which you can configure using my tutorial. And you’re much less likely to have to upgrade from CPU limits since LiteSpeed is more efficient and they don’t have strict limits. It’s cheaper, faster, and scalable since you can add CPU cores/RAM using their Turbo+ Boost add-on if traffic grows. NameHero is very similar but they cost more and only use NVMe storage in their US data center. Hostinger/GreekGeeks have many scam reports if you look at their TrustPilot reviews or Reddit.

 
Scala’s Entry WP Cloud plan – a more powerful shared/hybrid LiteSpeed hosting plan with no limits on CPU cores/RAM, dedicated resources, isolated environment, and a server firewall. You still get NVMe storage (but only in their US data center) and Redis. Also has a near perfect 4.9/5 rating on TrustPilot with people who moved from SiteGround. Unlike ChemiCloud/NameHero, Scala uses a custom built SPanel which uses less resources with more functionality than cPanel.

Cloudways – similar to Rocket.net between cloud hosting, NVMe, MariaDB, Cloudflare Enterprise, and they use Redis Object Cache Pro. However, their Cloudflare Enterprise costs $5/mo and doesn’t have APO, they use PHP-FPM instead of LiteSpeed’s faster PHP, support is worse, and they were acquired by DigitalOcean who raised prices. Still faster than SiteGround (including SG’s cloud hosting) and I was using the Vultr High Frequency plan before Rocket.net.

 
Rocket.net – if the fastest hosting means fastest TTFB, Rocket.net averages <100ms globally. And with TTFB affecting 4/6 user metrics in PSI, this can lead to a huge improvement in core web vitals as people have seen a 500% faster TTFB (and 200% – 450% faster LCP). The reason Rocket.net is faster is because both their hosting + free Cloudflare Enterprise have better specs + features compared to SiteGround, Kinsta, Cloudways, and 100ms is also 4x faster than WPX. If you have an international audience or WooCommerce site, you’re not going to beat Rocket.net’s performance. Their hosting is easy, it’s $1 your 1st month, and they have awesome support with all 5/5 TrustPilot reviews + unlimited free migrations. This is why I use & recommend Rocket.net.

SiteGround has more reviews, but most of them are coming from Bluehost, GoDaddy, and HostGator. You won’t find 1 review of someone who switched to SiteGround from ChemiCloud, Scala, or Rocket.net if you search SiteGround’s 11,000+ reviews (which are solicited by support).

 

Bye SiteGround

I’d probably be close to $1 million if I still recommended them.

I was getting $150/sale with SiteGround. As of writing this, I get $50/sale with ChemiCloud. The difference is people are happy with them since you’ll only see 1 sale got declined. If changing recommendations means less money, so be it. That’s why my blog got popular in the 1st place.

 

What’s Your Experience With Them?

If SiteGround works for you, by all means keep using them. But even if their service was good, there’s no way I would support a company who acts like the police, makes a mess, then covers up their tracks with misinformation. The hosting/affiliate marketing space is bad enough as it is.

Cheers to the truth,
Tom

 

Does SiteGround have a slow TTFB?

There have been numerous complaints about SiteGround's slow TTFB in Facebook groups, but many of these posts are deleted since many FB groups are moderated by SiteGround.

Why are SiteGround's prices so high?

SiteGround increased prices twice, once in 2018 and once in 2020. They have also made several changes to cut costs and increase their bottom line, such as disabling live chat and moving priority support to GoGeek. SiteGround is simply trying to increase their profits.

How do I fix CPU usage limits on SiteGround?

Disable WordPress heartbeat, block bad bots, looks for slow queries and error logs, configure a solid cache plugin, offload resources to CDNs, and be careful when using WooCommerce and slow page builders on shared hosting. However, many times you can't fix CPU usage on SiteGround and they tell you to upgrade while holding your site hostage.

What happened to SiteGround's good support?

SiteGround hid their support in the dashboard and added a long scope of work disclaimer to reduce the level of support compared to what they used to offer.

Is SiteGround a good choice in 2023?

My opinion is no. The company is going downhill and the amount of complaints about them in Facebook Groups has increased. They call their changes improvements, but independent forums say otherwise.