These days WordPress websites are continuing to boom, and the need for high quality services such as managed WordPress hosting are on the rise among website owners of all kinds.
Though many companies claim to be the top dog when it comes to providing security, support, and speed to its customers, the truth is many fail to make good on their promises. And for the unknowing WordPress site owner, this can result in wasted time and money, let alone frustration.
Today we will look at SiteGround, one of the leaders in WordPress hosting, to see what services they provide website owners and ways they do make good on all of their hosting service promises.
A Little Behind the Scenes
In 2004 some college buddies got together in their college dorm room and decided to start a business dedicated to providing web hosting services called SiteGround.
Coming a long way from those handful of employees, SiteGround is now the proud employer of 280 website experts that tend to some 450,000 domains. Featured as one of WordPress.org’s recommended hosting providers, SiteGround does more than just manage web domains.
Let’s look at why 2015 revealed SiteGround as a real contender for the number one spot in managed WordPress hosting:
- Bigger and Better. SiteGround effectively doubled their client base, grew their team 2x, opened 3 new offices, went local in Spain, and opened a London datacenter.
- More Secure. Creating 43 kernel patches in one year, conducting 2 million WordPress updates, adding 855 security firewalls, and stepping up to PHP 5.5, SiteGround website protection increased.
- Faster Than Ever. Didn’t think it could be done? Well, SiteGround did it. Building a cloud and shared hosting platform, rebuilding the exclusive SuperCacher plugin, developing a new storage area for backups, and making PHP7, HTTP2, and HHVM available on all servers, websites using SiteGround load with a speed like never before.
- Bumped Up Involvement. Over 100 events were attended, a PHP geared conference was started, and 10,000 stylish SiteGround socks were given away, all in the name of SiteGround.
- Customer Satisfaction Doesn’t Lie. Based on a client satisfaction survey of SiteGround’s 2015 performance, it was determined that over 1 million queries were answered and at a satisfaction rate of 95% and above.
Needless to say, SiteGround has made some huge strides and it looks like they don’t intend on stopping any time soon. Let’s continue to find out why SiteGround had so much success and why customers remain so satisfied.
SiteGround’s Main Features
SiteGround has a solid foundation of essential hosting features that all customers get to take advantage of:
- 3-click setup of hosting services.
- Drag & Drop website creator with free downloadable themes.
- Free domain name.
- Daily backups.
- One free website migration.
- 99.99% uptime – last year, last month, tomorrow, always.
- Friendly UI for managing your domain, billing, and support tickets.
- Integrated cPanel.
- WordPress staging ability.
- Pre-installed Git.
- 34-location content delivery network (CDN).
- Unlimited traffic, emails, and databases.
- 24/7 technical support.
- 30-day money back guarantee.
Efficient Datacenters
SiteGround offers datacenters in Chicago, Amsterdam, Singapore, and London. This way you can choose the one geographically closest to you so you get the best website speed possible.
All of SiteGround’s datacenters offer website owners:
- Excellent network connectivity.
- High level electricity redundancy.
- Well-guarded server facilities.
- Dedicated Server Operations teams working to make servers even better.
- On-site replacement parts for all server models.
- Spare servers on-hand installed, plugged, and ready to go.
Top-Notch Security
With SiteGround’s managed hosting services your website will always be secure. The WordPress Core and all of your website’s themes and plugins will always be automatically updated. Updates apply to the hardware of all hosting servers as well.
Your website will also be backed up daily and stored offsite so restoration of your website can happen quickly and with ease. You will also enjoy efficient spam protection, monitoring against hacks and data loss, and more.
Since SiteGround knows how important your website’s security is to you, they have gone above and beyond when it comes to their security measures. Beyond that of site backups and malware protection, SiteGround has enacted what they called isolation technology.
This mechanism protects entire servers from falling victim to one vulnerable server account by isolating them all from each other. In effect, this approach makes SiteGround’s “shared hosting environment as secure as the much more expensive dedicated solutions”.
Great Support
Another key element of a great hosting provider is the level of customer support the company provides. SiteGround again goes above and beyond the norm when it comes to their support system. Let’s take a look:
- Help with all hosting-related issues and all other web-related issues.
- 24/7 access with instant connection via phone and live chat, with a 10 minute response time for the ticketing system.
- Overstaffed shifts so all customers have access to support at any time.
- Regular employee evaluations for overall speed and performance.
- Personal profile access in HelpDesk and Livechat for that added personal touch.
- Exhaustive documentation: Tutorials, Knowledge Base, Webinars, and Setup Wizard
Speed, Speed, and More Speed
The last element to any superior managed hosting provider would have to be website performance and speed. SiteGround provides an exclusive caching plugin, called SuperCacher, as a premium feature for some plans. This plugin increases the number of hits your website can handle and boosts website loading speed dramatically. It also allows you to enable one of four caching options for the ultimate in website speed:
Static Cache
This option caches your static resources such as images, CSS, and JavaScript files into the server’s RAM to be delivered when a site visitor accesses your website. Significantly faster than fetching from your server’s hard drive every time, this option also increases the number of times your website can be hit at any given moment. The static cache is flushed every 24 hours. You also have the option to flush the cache yourself.
Dynamic Cache
One step up from static caching, the dynamic caching option stores entire pages of your website in the server’s RAM for retrieval once accessed on your website. Since the HTML output created by the PHP code is only loaded only one time by the first visitor, your website will render super-fast every time as the entire cached page will be retrieved and delivered in one piece.
Memcache
This third option caches the results from the database queries into the RAM by speeding up database calls, API calls, and page rendering by storing data and objects in the server’s RAM. This way the number of times a database is queried is lowered and your website displays faster for visitors.
Google PageSpeed
This caching technology, used in tandem with the SuperCacher plugin, helps to combine and minify JavaScript and CSS files, inline small resources, optimize images by removing unused meta-data, resize images, and re-encode images to be served in the most efficient format. It is important to note that it cannot be used with either the static or dynamic caching options.
SiteGround Hosting Plans
“Web hosting is our craft.” That is the motto behind SiteGround’s managed hosting plans. Not wanting website owners to pay for features they don’t use, SiteGround offers three hosting plans with varied features so you can achieve the managed hosting you desire.
- StartUp Plan. Great for those just starting out, the StartUp Plan goes for $3.95/month, includes one website, 10GB of web space, and ~10,000 monthly visitors.
- GrowBig Plan. For websites that are gaining traction, the GrowBig Plan goes for $7.95/month, includes multiple websites, 20GB of web space, and ~25,000 monthly visitors. It also comes with premium features such as: priority support, SuperCacher plugin, 1 year free SSL certificate, and 30 backup copies of your website.
- GoGeek Plan. Perfect for websites that are established with a lot of daily traffic, the GoGeek Plan goes for $14.95/month, includes multiple websites, 30GB of web space, and ~100,000 monthly visitors. It also comes with the premium features the GrowBig Plan comes with as well as: less accounts on the server, free PCI compliance, WordPress and Joomla staging, and pre-installed Git.
Final Thoughts
Security. Support. Speed.
That is what SiteGround has to offer website owners of all sizes.
Managed WordPress hosting providers are found everywhere across the web. With claims of being the best it can be hard to discern between what is truth and what is just plain false advertisement. As you can see from above SiteGround holds their own when it comes to claiming they are the best. They offer an affordable pricing tier so the services you need are available and those you don’t are not paid for.
If you are looking for a quality managed hosting provider and feel lost as to who is the best in the business, check out SiteGround and what they can offer you. With the dedication they put into their hosting services you can rest assured your website will be protected, your questions will be answered, and your website will deliver.
Have you tried SiteGround for your WordPress managed hosting needs? How did you feel their security, support, and speed ranked in terms of excellence? I would love to hear all about it in the comments below!
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