SiteGround Cloud Hosting Review
This SiteGround Cloud Hosting Review was originally written back in 2015 and has been updated in 2020 to give you a more clear picture about their cloud hosting services.
Siteground is one of the premier web hosting companies that has significantly evolved over the years to become a market leader when it comes to CMS specific web hosting. It specializes in WordPress, Joomla and other major content management systems like Magento hosting as its server are ideally configured to hosting any type of website that may be built on top of these content management systems. It now hosts more than 350,000 domains and is one of the major competitive hosting companies in the market. Its award-winning support along with quality services has gained numerous accolades and its fans have stuck to its services from the very first day.
It offers all kinds of web hosting plans including virtual private servers that are specially designed to host high performance oriented websites. The Cloud Hosting servers are morphed into cloud-based auto scaling architectures that can easily grow as per user requirement and resource consumption. Without any unnecessary additional configurations, the users can easily run high resource consuming custom application on top of Siteground Cloud Hosting servers and configure it as per their application requirements.
As per the discussion on Quora, people believe that Siteground cloud hosting is geared for advanced technical users and it is not for a novice. Although we don’t much believe in this.
Let’s dive deeper into each of the features provided with the hosting plans to explore the ideal option for your requirements.
SiteGround Cloud Hosting Plans and Pricing
To compete in a tough market, hosting companies often target their customers with numerous types of enticing pricing plans and features structured competitively. Therefore, they are more likely to provide low-cost plans with stripped-down plans that don’t support most features. However, some dedicated hosting companies invest in a world class scalable architecture that cannot be offered at cheap prices. With automated fail support and numerous other technological advancements hardly found in competing organizations, they tend to provide the best-structured plans at the best available prices. Siteground also focuses on providing the best plans combined with the best server architectures and the ability to create custom server configurations ideal for unique requirements. Apart from the standard plans, users can also customize their own plans that they think would be ideal for their custom application requirements. The standard plans offered by the company are as follows:
- Entry: The starting plan is priced at $60/month and comes with a 3.0Ghz one core processor along with 2Gb DDR3 RAM and 20GB storage space along with 5TB bandwidth. The configuration is ideal for most types of custom application or even high resource consuming applications. You can modify the server configuration as per your requirements and also build on top of it to serve your ideal application stack. It is primarily used by custom application developers to test out their custom apps that need a containerized custom server with a specific server configuration to run effectively.
- Business: Ideal for growing application and more resource intensive websites, this plan is priced at $80/month. It comes with a two core 3.0Ghz processor with 2GB DDR3 Ram along with 40GB disk storage and 5TB bandwidth. You can always customize the plan depending on your application requirements. The high scalability environment also comes with more processor resources and allows you to customize the server as per your application dependencies.
- Business Plus: Priced at $100/month, this plan comes with a two core processor with 3.0Ghz CPU along with 3GB DDR3 Ram and 60GB hard disk storage. As with other plans, you get 5TB bandwidth allocation that can always be upgraded to higher bandwidth usage depending on your application requirements. It is ideal for high resource-consuming web applications and websites that get a consistent visitor rate of around a 100,000 visitors on daily basis. The storage is also enough for most media hosting websites and publishing websites like online magazines, etc.
- Enterprise: A more powerful and resource intensive web server focused on running enterprise applications and is as powerful as the dedicated servers. Priced at $140/month, it comes with 4 core processors with 3.0Ghz. It also has a 4GB DDR3 RAM along with an 80GB hard disk space and 5TB bandwidth. You can run nearly all kinds of server intensive applications including high resource consuming processor intensive applications like video processing or even hardcore gaming servers. This is ideal for any task and is ideal for running multiple corporate and resource intensive websites.
SiteGround Cloud Hosting Features and Add-ons
The cloud hosting plans are configured for enhanced speed along with super scalability that can help any application to grow and expand as per their consumer growth. This is ideal for all kinds of web applications and even API-based resources, therefore, allowing its customers to build on top of the server platforms without worrying about any functional or resource constraints. As the servers are configured for specific content management systems, the features provided by the company are also modeled according to the requirements of the CMS enthusiasts.
The servers already have inbuilt applications and one click installers for WordPress, Magento, Drupal and Joomla. These are the four of the most deployed open source content management systems that power more than 90% of all websites on the web. The servers are structurally configured to handle all kinds of web traffic and performance load and excel in nearly all benchmarks. The one click installers along with auto updates and content delivery networks make the application deployment extremely reliable thereby allowing users to run very powerful blogs, corporate websites or even e-commerce stores on their virtual private servers.
All Cloud Hosting servers are fully managed by the company to help you in reducing maintenance costs and server configuration. All you have to do is start deploying your application on top of the servers without having to build from the core server installation and configuration. All updates and upgrades are managed by Siteground and thus your won’t have to worry about having or upgrading your system to the latest configurations along with stability. The excellent support team also helps you along every time you run into any kind of problem and is, therefore, one of the best support teams among all web hosting companies. Along with that, the servers also provide free daily backups of your data and CDNs from numerous locations to speed up content delivery.
SiteGround Cloud Hosting Performance and Reliability
The performance of the servers is subject to the type of applications run on it. Siteground provides the best configuration of hardware and application dependencies that help you run any type of application with relative ease on the servers. However, if you are deploying any custom application then the performance of the server may either outperform or fail in circumstances depending on the type of application you deploy. For an ideal environment, Siteground provides excellent services for all kinds of web hosting and custom application development.
If you want to deploy a website, you can easily handle as many customers you like due to its auto scalable resources. If you want to deploy a custom application that accesses data on the server through API’s then you can always handle as many API requests as you like depending the type of data being transferred. Therefore, we compare the performance of the servers on the below parameters so that users can easily decide the viability of their application.
SiteGround Cloud Hosting Page Speed
One of the most crucial factors for all kinds of web hosting companies and the most essential for all kinds of websites is the Page Speed. Although the servers are configured to provide optimum page speed to its customers, numerous other server configurations interfere with the deployment to reduce the performance too much lower levels. However, Siteground has remained popular for a long period for its excellent page speed metrics calculated over a long period. You can easily run major applications including WordPress and Magento installations that take up high resources but still serve at high page speeds that are unlikely found in most web hosting companies.
It fares much better than Godaddy and Hostgator and competed with the likes of WpEngine and PageLy in terms of page speed and optimization. You can further increase the loading speed with the help of content delivery networks and server side apache configurations to compress and deliver web pages. Data transferred through the API’s, however, are not affected by the page speed metrics. If you are running an e-commerce website
SiteGround Cloud Hosting Serve Uptime and Downtime
Maintaining server uptime is a huge challenge for any small or large web hosting company. Therefore, only a few of the top web hosting companies are able to effectively maintain proper server uptime with consistent performance. Due to scalable architecture, some of the top web hosting companies are easily able to scale their servers to accommodate data from existing configurations while running maintenance tasks against them. Siteground has one of the largest server clusters that are configured to run any kind of web application on top of them. Therefore, there are a number of high resources consuming web applications hosted by numerous customers that often tend to reduce server performance.
Maintenance tasks have to be run periodically to clean up existing caches and to keep the servers running perfectly. Siteground does this by moving existing data storage to be served from other locations while the systems on the base are being maintained. This reduces switching time and completely negates the downtime of the servers. Once the maintenance tasks have been run, the configurations are set to default options as earlier. Thus Siteground has maintained a continuous server uptime of more than 99.97% over the last 6-month period which is quite a feat considering the numerous factors that could disrupt server uptime.
User Experience and Customer Service
The central dashboard plays a huge part in determining user experience and therefore its proper design is highly essential to run highly functional applications. It allows users to easily control the server architecture and the applications hosted on top of it. Monitoring and analytics are also an integral part of the control panel. However, the existing control panel solutions sometimes fall short when it comes to maintaining high performance virtual private servers. Thus most companies modify the existing CPanel or Softaculous to suit their own requirements. Siteground also has a modified version of the server applications that help you maintain and control nearly all aspects of the web server. It has turned the UI and has built all necessary features into the dashboard for easy control. Its UI is definitely better than 90% of the web hosting companies in the market today.
As Siteground is a specialized web hosting company that focus on customers who only like to have a high powered web application and e-commerce websites that can easily run on specially optimized hardware, it expects the customer support team to face equally challenging situations when it comes to server deployment and application hosting. This it has some of the people in its customer support team who can easily help you during all stages of your web server configuration and deployment. You can reach their customer services through any of the available web, phone or live chat methods and get support for all kinds of server related queries. As the Cloud Hosting plans are hosted on managed web servers, the customer support team automatically fixes any server side problems before you even notice them. Moreover, you can always seek their help for problems relating to any custom application configurations.
Some Real Customer Reviews
Regarding SiteGround…I am speechless…I can’t find the words to express myself. AMAZING…The support team are unique. I was on a live chat for almost a half day, until 6 o’clock in the morning, I spoke to more than 5-6 persons and they were all excellent, polite and patient. I really appreciate. All day today I was talking to my friends about the new company I found and bought a plan to start building a website. I am very very satisfied. I could write one million words about you but I dont have the time now 🙂 You are the best and I will advertise you as long as I am alive!!!!
Paris Klerides
I am that impressed with the after sales care! I want to say thank you so much, I did not know what I was doing! one of your reps rang me about 2-3 hours after I brought my package from you, I am so impressed with your after sales help! I give you 10 out of ten stars, even though I was going through the vids, to help me brush up on a few things. Peter was so helpful I told him I am going to tell everyone I know about this hosting company.
Keep up the wonderful work! and Peter was so helpful I was amazed, your service at SiteGround is fabulous. Thank you so much.
Holly Gee
Conclusion
I was hosting some of the most powerful and heavy resource consuming application on Siteground as I already knew that its servers were one of the top configurations available on the web. I never faced any problems during the two years that my application ran on their servers. The customer support was excellent and they also helped you configure and install common applications that you may need for your websites. They also have highly experienced developers who can help you solve any high-end problems if you happen to face during deployment.
Moreover, due to the high scalability of the server architectures, my application never faced any resource constraints. I was automatically pushed to higher plans with better resources when the existing resources were depleted. One of the best features is their highly configured web applications like WordPress, magneto, Drupal and Joomla that were ideal for running any kind of web application built on top of them. I would highly recommend Siteground as it offers features and services comparable to the best in the industry like PageLy and WpEngine.