SiteGround WebHosting Review – UPDATED 2017

Honest SiteGround review after having tried several VPS hosts as well as dozens of regular shared hosting companies.

In about 2010, I moved to VPS and never looked back since I run a dozen serious websites with thousands of hits/day. I was very happy with Linode and never thought to go back to shared hosting.

Why no shared hosting? Because it’s slow, frequent down-times, poor SEO, and actually expensive when you try add every necessary features (dedicated IP, SSL, add-on domains) and still lacks many features like caching, compression, file_upload limits, CURL, etc. Back then, almost all shared hosting was eventually oversold and constantly went down. DreamHost, Lunarpages, 1and1, GoDaddy, ANhosting, Midphase, Bluehost, Hostgator, etc and etc…ALL the EIG companies…all of them had problems no matter how much they tried to promise the 99.9999% uptime.

So why did I take a chance on shared hosting again if I’m happy with my fancy 4-core VPS at Linode?

I needed a smaller server for testing purposes, staging servers, or for smaller sites that hadn’t grown enough to need the strength (and management) of a big server. I provisioned a smaller $10 VPS from Linode and was happy with that for a couple months.

But then it became a pain to manage. Every little thing required an email requests to my sys admin. Creating emails, cron jobs, upgrading PHP, changing php settings, setting up SSL (such a pain!), setting up emails even!

The $10 server was great in terms of speed and functionality but a hassle to manage. Some friends told me they loved SiteGround’s $11.95 GoGeek plan because it was a nice server that wasn’t oversold. I tried it for several months and found it to be exactly as they said. It’s fast, comes with a built-in server-layer cache (which is nice) as you don’t want to set this up yourself. Comes with a cPanel which is nice when you don’t have to pay for it. I did experience ONE DOWNTIME…the server was down maybe 2-3 hours. But other than that, it was rock solid and an absolute joy to use.

So for only $11.95/month…you get a server that’s stronger than a typical VPS, comes with cPanel so you can manage everything easily, easy to set up SSL, comes with tech support (if you even need that), and also helpful features like dedicated IP at reasonable prices.

Are you sold? Sign up for SiteGround using my referral link.