I switched to Siteground hosting over 2 years ago and I absolutely love them. I have been with 7 other hosting companies, and I can categorically say that Siteground is much, much better. They are not just better, they are at a completely different level to everyone else.
I have 23 active websites in my online business. So my customers and partners always ask me about my hosting company, because I never have any issues and I never complain. So when they start going on about the issues they’re having, slow loading times, terrible support etc, I realize time and time again how lucky I am to be with Siteground.
So in this post I am going to explain why I love Siteground so much, and I hope this can help you decide which hosting is right for you.
Reason 1 – Amazing Customer Service
There is nothing more infuriating than having bad customer service at your hosting company. I have been with Hostgator previously, and my experience with them was horrific (sorry HostGator, but it’s true!). Traumatizing even. I used to submit support tickets and then not hear back for 2 days. Then I had to submit another support ticket to follow up on the existing support ticket. And again no reply for 2 days. It was making me incredibly angry.
And when I tried to use Hostgator chat support, I’d have to wait an awfully long time to get someone to chat to me. And most of the time they asked to submit the ticket anyway so that “the techs can look into it”. It still raises my pulse to think about that experience. When your site is down or not working properly, and you’re losing money and sales, you need someone who will help you instantly.
This is where Siteground really shine. I will talk about it in detail below, but they really are the market leaders in customer service. All issues or questions that I’ve ever had get dealt with pretty much instantly. Their support tickets get solved within 30 minutes and their chat support is instant – you get someone to chat with you within a few seconds.
Reason 2 – Instant Chat Support
Ok so Chat Support at Siteground really is outstanding. When you have any sort of issue, or even a question, you can simply click on Live Chat, and you get someone to talk to instantly, there is no waiting.
And after you start chatting to someone, they don’t just send you off to another area. They actually manage to help you on that chat most of the time.
Here is some data which shows how Siteground compares to 12 other hosting companies and I have provided that below. So from the moment you start chatting to issue resolution average turnaround time is only 5 minutes. This data is provided by Siteground, but I have to say that in my experience it’s spot on.
Chat answer time: Instant
Chat resolution time: 5 minutes
Reason 3 – 30 Minutes Resolution On Tickets
Sometimes you can’t get your issue solved over chat. For example, you might need to provide screenshots, or login details, or a record of something. In those instance you need to send in a ticket.
With most other hosting companies a ticket means days and days of waiting before hearing anything back. Again, my experience with Siteground has been overwhelmingly positive, because every ticket I have sent in over the past 2 years was resolved almost instantly.
Again, here is some info from Siteground, but I can vouch for the accuracy of that information.
Reason 4 – Instant Phone Support
I don’t like to call my hosting provider very often. I have only done it a few times. But there could be people out there who would like to call up instead of chat or tickets.
So I can’t categorically say that phone support is ALWAYS instant, but in the 2 or 3 times that I had to call, they did indeed pick up instantly. Stats from Siteground‘s survey:
Reason 5 – Great Loading Times
As I have mentioned, I have been with 7 other hosting companies, including HostGator, Bluehost, FatCow, Namecheap Hosting, GoDaddy Hosting and a couple of smaller ones. Siteground load times have always been the fastest and I have never experience any unusual slowness of websites.
I haven’t personally done any sort of time loading comparison, I can just say that my HostGator shared hosting sites sometimes took 4-5 seconds to even start loading. With Siteground, it’s always been instant, really fast.
Here are some stats provided by Siteground:
The result at the bottom is with the SuperCacher enabled, which is basically an option you can turn on in your account to enable caching. I don’t personally use it as I find my sites are fast enough without it, and I kind of forgot about it until I starting writing this post
Reason 6 – Proactive Security
I don’t know how to phrase this properly, so the best way to describe it that I can think of is Proactive Security.
Twice in the past year I have been attacked via a DDOS attack, where basically hackers send thousands of bot clicks per minute to your website, causing it to load pages at an incredibly fast rate, and eventually bringing the server down, which results in your website being offline for hours or days at a time.
Siteground, to their credit, proactively identified that for me, and sent me a notification message via email to advise me that was happening, and that they managed to block the DDOS attack. So my attacked sites copped a bit of damage and were down for 10-15 minutes, but were back online after that. All of that happened while I was asleep.
Reason 7 – Free Backups
I didn’t realize how important backups are. I never really had any issues in terms of the info in my sites going corrupt or anything like that.
But in April this year, for one of my software product launches, my developer made a mistake and a lot of campaign information that I had stored on my website got lost. There were about 15 campaigns, with banners, graphics, and lots of other information. It would have taken me days to re-create.
So I went to Siteground support and asked them about backups. I wasn’t sure if they had it or not. Luckily, they provide free daily backups free of charge, all included for all your hosting accounts (30 days backup for Shared and 7 days backup for VPS). I managed to get my information restored, and it was a massive relief.
Reason 8 – Price
I put this at the very bottom, because honestly price isn’t the biggest factor when choosing your hosting provider. The most important things are customer support and website loading speed.
However, Siteground also delivers on price. Their shared hosting starts at just 3.95 / month which is as cheap as any other cheap company out there. Hostgator plans are about the same price.
And even if you could save $0.50 or $1 a month elsewhere, I really don’t recommend choosing the cheapest hosting. You might save $6 or $10 a year by choosing the cheapest host, but you are very likely to regret it when you come across horrible customer service.
And Siteground are not expensive by any means – they are extremely affordable, and still very close to being one of the cheapest companies.
Roundup…
Well, there you go. As you can probably tell, I really love Siteground. And I have no hesitation in recommending them to anyone. They have a selection of plans which can grow with you… I started with a cheap shared hosting plan and now I am running a VPS (Cloud) account because I have so many websites. But it’s totally scalable and you can start out with a standard shared account and then go up when you need to.
Click here to get started with Siteground
What did you think? Have you had any experience with Siteground? Do you have anything to share about YOUR current hosting company? Please leave me a comment, I would love to hear from you.
