It’s true that SiteGround provides hosting solutions for businesses of all sizes. But when it comes to the most important pain points online businesses face, how does it fare against the competition?
We’ve rated SiteGround’s web hosting packages for four of the most important metrics to business owners: overall security, uptime guarantee, loading time, and customer service.
SiteGround has one of the most impressive security measures we’ve seen in website hosting. The company’s talented DevOps team has been pioneering advanced web hosting security solutions for more than a decade. Back in 2008, the team developed what is still one of today’s best security isolations for shared hosting accounts. In plain English, this means that no account on any shared server can affect the data of another account on the same server.
SiteGround also implemented its own Linux Containers (LXC) technology, which is extremely efficient and stable, ensuring your site stays up and running during unexpected traffic spikes. SiteGround’s DevOps team even wrote multiple patches for the core Linux Kernal, which are now in the official code of the Linux Kernal itself. Talk about impressive.
On top of this, SiteGround employs its own proactive server monitoring. Server monitoring checks your server status and makes repairs in real time—or before the problem even impacts your server performance. SiteGround’s server monitoring is extremely lightweight, meaning it can check the servers’ statuses more frequently than standard monitoring systems allow.
SiteGround’s anti-bot AI protects your site from malicious attacks by botnets. In fact, across all of its servers, SiteGround’s AI solutions actively intercept between 500,000 and 2 million of these malicious attacks every hour.1 With protection like that, you can rest easy knowing your website will stay up and running so your customers don’t miss out.
Working together, these systems allow SiteGround to securely provide a 99.99% uptime guarantee annually. That means your website won’t go offline for more than one hour across an entire calendar year. That’s more uptime than most hosting providers guarantee.
With SiteGround’s impressive technology stack, some of the fastest hardware meets the latest software. Combined with the service’s innovative network architecture, SiteGround is uniquely capable of ensuring your website loads as quickly as possible.
In our performance benchmarking tests, many of SiteGround’s servers performed very well. However, the initial metrics from SiteGround’s managed WordPress hosting package weren’t as fast as other hosting providers, such as WP Engine and Kinsta. Because of these less-than-desirable performance results, we gave SiteGround a three out of five rating.
Now, this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t purchase a SiteGround managed WordPress hosting account. But if loading speed is the most important hosting factor to you, then you may want to hire an expert to help optimize the performance of your WordPress website.
It’s true: SiteGround provides customer support by both phone and live chat 24/7. However, to receive priority treatment from the support team with no hold times, you’ll need to purchase one of SiteGround’s more expensive hosting packages.
In our experience, the average time spent waiting for SiteGround customer support agents was less than five minutes. However, we found that entry-level accounts received significantly slower customer support than accounts on more expensive plans. That’s why we’ve given SiteGround’s customer service a four out of five rating.