Shared hosting is back!
I bought into SiteGround as a total skeptic. I weaned myself off of shared hosting 8 years ago. But I came back because I heard great things and figured it was a lot easier to have a nice $12/month shared hosting plan with cPanel, staging, SSL, and all the little goodies than to manage my own micro-VPS at that price point. The speed, uptime, and support have been fantastic. I’m enjoying shared hosting again thanks to siteground and happy for the 10 months I’ve been with them.
Great speed, uptime, convenience, and support!
For those wondering, I have the GoGeek plan with the dedicated IP add-on. Very happy with how everything has been run. They truly are a solid and reliable webhost.
AUG 2018 UPDATE – new issues with SiteGround (if you care):
- They now have strict resource limits that are easy to go over for bloated sites.
- Their renewal fees are a lot…$12/month plan becomes $35/month on renewal.
- Some people say their quality of support has dropped, I haven’t found this to be true.
- I mainly feel they are still a quality low-tier hosting company but have raised their prices to the point of being unattractive.
AUG 2020 UPDATE – new stack, new support limits
- SiteGround has a brand new stack and moved to a major cloud distribution network instead of (what I assume) running their own datacenters. They say it makes everything 40% faster but I haven’t personally seen that to be the case.
- There are also complaints online about people saying it’s slower than before. Hmmm. One thing for sure, I’m in direct contact with a higher-up at SiteGround who wanted me to review their new stack. And I’m pretty confident he wouldn’t reach out to me unless he felt confident that I would review them positively. (And we all know how brutal I can be.)
- The new webhosting interface is ok for me. Some people hate that it’s not totally cPanel and cPanel guides no longer help. But it’s really been ok for me. Still clean and easy enough for me to figure things without using documentation.
- They officially no longer do general WordPress support. While many people are unhappy with that, I sympathize with them as a webhost and developer. There are far too many clients who don’t know basic website concepts and it isn’t the webhost’s job to teach you. Just like how you shouldn’t be called your local car dealership to teach you how to drive.
Checkout SiteGround webhosting plans!
Agree 100%. The good side is that their resource limits led to me learning about Cloudflare, proper removal of plugins that bloated my databases, and, best of all, led me to the encyclopedia of best practices you created here at WPJohnny. Thanks, Johnny!!!!!
Define “general” WordPress support. They offer WordPress hosting, so they should have tech support for that.
SiteGround…my own personal opinion…they’re kind of scummy. I signed up with them when I first started blogging. I knew the hosting price would significantly increase after my first year introductory price period, so I disabled the auto-renewal option.
The following month, there was a large charge (can’t remember exact price) on my credit card statement from SiteGround. Somehow (human intervention or programmatic) the auto-renewal option was re-enabled. For this experience and their high prices, I wouldn’t consider going back to them.