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Service review: Siteground

You need to find a host for your website. If you are like me and prefer your hosting provider to give you all necessary tools, fast response times, and then basically get out of your way while remaining at the ready to help, you can hardly do better than Siteground.

I moved through my share of hosting providers in the past decade or so and they all offer similar capabilities, bells and whistles, and make similar claims about their uptime and throughput. Superior product and service is nonetheless not easy to find. Siteground delivers both.

There are 3 plans to choose from. StartUp plan gives you all of the essential tools for hosting a single website. GrowBig plan adds a couple of premium features that you may or may not need, but most importantly allows you to have multiple websites hosted together. There is also a GoGeek plan that you are unlikely to need – it adds yet more advanced features that are beyond mainstream needs. In my humble opinion, if you are only hosting a personal blog or gallery, you do not need more than the StartUp plan. If you are running a small business online, you should be ok with GrowBig offering.

The necessary tools come in the form of good ol’ trusted cPanel. I used to have a number of pet peeves with other providers’ versions, from slow response time and occasional timeouts to multiple layers of security for simple features to bespoke implementation that made finding functions harder. None of those are present here. One login gets you to all features in a standard configuration, the responses are lightning-quick, all works like a clock.

There have been zero problems with my website performance or uptime, which is not a claim I could make on my prior hosts. My sample admittedly only covers a few months, but they give me sufficient confidence that I will never have much problems with that.
 

Web Hosting

 
The differentiating factor might be customer support. This is the first time that I’ve met hosting support that is both responsive and useful. You can chat online or you can call, and you can be sure that within a short period of time you will get the answer or the help that you are looking for. I am tech-savvy enough to be mostly self-sufficient, but I still needed a couple of instances of assistance when I was moving my website over. Other people may need more regular support – and Siteground staff is pleasure to work with.
Highly recommended!

Click on any of the links to see the details of the hosting plans.