hey everyone what's up it's andy and today i am here with an in-depth review of the web hosting
platform siteground and first i want to touch on what is web hosting exactly and why websites need
it so what is web hosting well whenever you build a website it has to live somewhere right now i
know the internet can sometimes just seem like a magical place where everything floats around
but in reality everything has to exist and live somewhere so all websites are built on a hosting
platform these platforms provide the servers for the website to live on like the physical servers
or cloud hosting that maintain and store all the information and structure of your website now
they also keep load times short and help your site accommodate high volume traffic basically
provides a place for your website too and a good web hosting service will help your site
run well which will in turn improve a site's performance in seo and that brings me to siteguard
is it a good web hosting service well let's get into it so first what does siteground offer well
siteground offers users both shared hosting and cloud hosting shared hosting which involves
multiple sites sharing a physical server are best for small and medium-sized businesses like
like blogs or you know small online stores whereas cloud hosting on the other hand offers users
virtual servers that can handle large volumes of traffic so it's best for a large online store like
or news sites or web-based applications the shared hosting starts at like 399 a month while the cloud
hosting plans start at a hundred dollars a month so we can see that these two options are targeting
very different groups based on their pricing scale alone now i will say that uh their shared
plan starts at 3.99 a month but depending on what add-ons you want i mean it could go up to 10.69 a
month if you don't have any discounts so for that reason i've included a link with a coupon code
in the description below to save you some some additional money uh so that you can get in and
start designing now all of that said their shared options provide some incredible features that make
sure you're getting a top of the line service so let's talk about what those features are
so all of their plans offer free ssl certificates which are the important part of web security
plans also come with email accounts automatic daily backups unlimited bandwidth and
built-in caching which which can help your site run even better over time so no matter
what plan you get you'll have the basics for a strong site and so under the shared hosting
site guard has three plans there is the startup the grow big and go geek i just love these names
and the startup plan is the most affordable option and it's meant for either blogs portfolios or or
small businesses that are building their online presence includes one website 10 gigabytes of
storage and can accommodate 10 000 monthly visits so when i say small it's even a little bit bigger
than that and so the next tier plan is the grow big plan which is 669 a month and a great plan
for for a business it can host unlimited sites and offers 20 gigabytes of storage and can accommodate
visitors a month which is huge if you think about it plus you get on-demand backups and a few other
handy features now i will say this plan might not work if you're an agency or a freelancer
developing sites for clients since 20 gigabytes probably won't accommodate that volume of websites
now of course their top tier plan is the go geek plan which hits at the 1069 a month which i
had mentioned earlier and honestly it delivers i mean go geek comes with unlimited websites 40
gigabytes of storage and the site can host are you ready 400 000 visitors a month plus
users get what's called a white label hosting panel and this feature allows you to host your
clients website on your site ground uh account then at the same time clients would get their
own control panels so if you're a small agency or a freelancer working with website development then
this plan looks great for your needs so basically to summarize siteground has shared hosting plans
to accommodate anything from a personal cooking blog to a professional website developer at price
points that make sense for what each plan offers though from a business side some folks may notice
that that plans jump from the shared plan at ten dollars a month to the cloud hosting plans at up
at a hundred dollars a month with no real middle ground now now typically most web hosting services
will offer a kind of middle ground known as as vps or dedicated hosting but siteground has decided to
steer clear of this middle option so basically scaling from a small business to a medium business
comes with a steep price tag and that won't affect a lot of people but if you're
right on the cusp of jumping from a smaller business to a larger one then it's something for
you to consider but you know you can always try it out and see what you think after all siteground
has a solid refund policy if you decide that it's not right for you for um for shared hosting then
you can get a full 30-day money-back guarantee and for cloud hosting you get a 14-day money-back
guarantee so yeah all in all siteground offers really good value for money plus the tools and
features that they include are significantly more than what other shared hosting providers offer
plus no matter what your site will be incredibly fast actually siteground speed test is just
flat out impressive so let's talk about speed so google's benchmark average for loading the biggest
part of a web page like a a video or or photos is 2.5 seconds and well siteground tests for the same
benchmark came in at just 311 milliseconds and while an average user might not notice whether
something takes a half a second or one second to load it makes a difference for search engines
rankings so siteground really delivers top-notch speed and will help your site run better than
its competitors plus and this is what really sets siteground apart they also offer something called
the cloud flare content delivery network this may sound pretty complicated but basically it creates
a copy of your website to host on different servers around the world so that you can reach
global audiences even faster and on top of speed siteground offers a lot of functionality under
every plan for example it's incredibly easy to integrate with wordpress site with siteground
from installation to site design and they also have woocommerce which is a great e-commerce
integration for any business so you can easily set up an online store and then you can also add
collaborators to your site which is a fantastic for your business if you have multiple employees
they can all access what they need to access and on top of that it gets even better siteground
is one of the few providers to include a web staging tool for their starred hosting basically
it's a testing environment to make sure that you get things right before you go live this is
this is fantastic when you're building a website and you want to test it and you want to
go through all the features and the pages and and copy without pushing it live this is huge so
i really really love this option and it's pretty unique to siteground now it may have some awesome
features but the big question for most users is is siteground easy to use well the short answer is
yes and the long answer is absolutely yes but but in all seriousness siteground does a great
job of making their platform really easy to use i mean their platform was designed well
and is perfectly suited for beginners so if you just want to jump in there you can jump in there
it's intuitive and they also develop their own in-house control panel their new panel which
they switched to in about 2020 is modern and functional and everything just makes sense
for example their main menu is really easy to navigate and you can also customize it and pin
the tools that you use most often right to the main screen which i love and so the next question
i want to go through is sitegrounds performance now i already talked about its speed which is
fantastic i also want to mention that siteground has an average uptime of 99.99
and they have an uptime guarantee of 99.9 so you can rest easy knowing that your site
will experience minimal downtime now the next big question is really important is siteground secure
and again the short answer is yes in addition to offering free ssl certificates siteground provides
a real-time monitoring system so it's literally checking your server status every .5 seconds
plus siteground has a custom firewall to protect their sites along with the ai anti-bot system and
security plug-in to protect users from malware and siteground provides daily automatic backup so
if something does happen to your site you can restore everything with the click of a button
including emails and files and databases all of that one click now i will say that siteground's
domain privacy costs extra uh while a lot of domain registers don't charge for domain
privacy but even with that added cost i'm pretty impressed by siteground's security system and
all right so siteground is easy to use fast and secure but let's say you need some help
how's their customer support so overall siteground's customer support does really well
they have live chat phone support and a 24 7 help desk for those late night programming sessions
they've also won a couple of stevie awards for customer service which is awesome the
only thing i would say is that siteground tries to direct users to their help widgets
and tutorial so it can be a bit tricky to get an actual person to to chat with so you can't just
open a live chat and ask a question you have to go through the ticketing system which can
be a bit of a time-consuming thing now when i did talk to someone they were incredibly helpful but i
but i wasn't crazy about how long it took to talk to an actual person that said their documentation
section is is really helpful i mean uh there's a lot of great information in there so unless you
have a weird issue you may not even need to really talk to someone in person so i've covered pricing
plan options features speed ease of use security and support what are my overall thoughts well on
one hand siteground is super fast with great security and is really easy to use
on the other hand there's no mid-tier scalability option and their customer support can can take a
minute to get a live person to chat with but you know overall siteground is really
excellent web hosting service it excels in every major department especially performance
ease of use security i would say it's a great option for a freelancer or
small agencies and at business sites who are looking for a leg up over their competition
if you're looking for a small personal site siteground may not be the cheapest option
but if you can afford spending a few extra dollars per month it's one of the best hosting options
available and just a reminder that i'll include a coupon link in the description below to save you
some additional money so if you decide to give siteground a try feel free to take advantage of
that if you'd like so all that said what do you think have you used siteground do you love it or
hate it or do you use another web host let me know in the comment section below and as always if you
found this helpful please leave a thumbs up and as always that makes my day and if you're a new
subscriber thanks for tuning in be sure to let me know what topics you'd like me to talk about next
thanks for watching and i'm excited to hear what you think in the comments