siteground wordpress hostingIn this Siteground web hosting review, we detail our own experience with Siteground. As you know, to have your own website, that you own (as opposed to free websites like Weebly), you need to have hosting.

When we first started we used Hostgator (WordPress websites), it was the cheapest and at the time reviews weren’t too bad. As time went on and we added more websites to the Hostgator package (reseller) did we start to see the flaws, the 2 major ones being:

  • downtime
  • slow

Speaking to support did no good, in fact, it was abysmal, sometimes taking 2 weeks to respond (if at all). When they did respond “all was fine on their end”.

We knew moving 20 odd sites was going to be a major task hence our reluctance to get started, but start we did!

This article is about our own experience with Siteground, from the choosing, moving through to the service and support.

Moving from Hostgator to Siteground

The first thing I did was contact live support at Siteground and explained we had a number of WordPress websites to move and was the “Grow Big” package sufficient for our needs. The sales rep was very helpful and explained things clearly.

They would move one Cpanel as part of the package, with no downtime. They could offer a moving service for a fee for the rest of the sites. He did point out that in live chat, there was also technical support if we wanted to move the rest of the sites ourselves.

Of course, this is what sales reps are paid to do so my next step was to look for authentic reviews. I’m in a few Internet Marketing Facebook groups and everyone who talked about Siteground had nothing bad to say, it came highly recommended!

Basic Packages

There are 3 packages in their basic website hosting:

Siteground Web Hosting Review

 

We were paying Hostgator $19.95 a month so right away there is a saving.

I (Kathy) connected to Siteground live chat and the CSR stayed online and talked me through the correct steps for signing up, paying for and then choosing their free transfer service.

The transfer took less than 8hrs with no downtime, it was all seamless!

SO FAR SO GOOD!

Of course, that was using their service, I still had the rest of the websites to move!

I decided to use Backup Buddy for this process. There was a ton of documentation online and I was hoping live chat would be as good if I got stuck.
Using Backup Buddy, you need to create your own databases within the Cpanel so this was the first place I got stuck.

Siteground live chat good jobBack to Siteground live chat….. The CSR walked me through the steps, stayed online while I went through the process, then checked to see if I’d done it correctly. It was much easier than I thought and once I’d done 1, the rest were easy.

Was I impressed or what?!

 

 

I went through moving the rest of the sites and it all went pretty smoothly. One glitch I had was some odd code appearing at the top of the website page. Again the live chat guy explained it was a plugin and how to fix it. This wasn’t really within their remit, it wasn’t a hosting problem, but they helped anyway!

Siteground Web Hosting Review

You’ll have guessed by now that I’ve been pretty impressed with the support via Siteground’s live chat! The CSR’s were all knowledgeable and I never had to wait longer than 2 mns to be connected.

That’s all good and well, but what about the actual service?

  • 1 year in and there has been NO downtime.
  • The sites are all loading faster.
  • Support has been excellent.
  • Free daily backups.
  • FREE SSL – Vital to have this now.

Finally

Included in the hosting is a plugin called SG CachePress, Siteground’s own cache plugin. You also get the light version of Cloudflare. This has gone some way into speeding up the sites and works better than W3 cache plugin. (I’ve had quite a few compatibility issues with that plugin).

Free SSL certificates with Let’s Encrypt. Again, the live chat support helped me to install these.

What more can I say? All in all, so far, Siteground has provided excellent hosting and excellent support, such a big change after using Hostgator. I’m happy and can highly recommend Siteground based on my own experience!

You can check out all of Sitegrounds excellent features here.

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