Hostwinds vs. SiteGround (2024)

Alexandra Anderson

By: Alexandra Anderson

Alexandra Anderson

Alexandra Anderson, Contributing Expert

Alexandra is a web marketer, Agile Product Owner, and die-hard wordsmith who's contributed to HostingAdvice, InMotion Hosting, HostGator, and other prominent hosting and technology blogs, as well as Forbes. She has a master's degree in information technology from Virginia Tech and more than 10 years of experience building websites, advising on web and mobile app design, and crafting content that engages and converts. Her primary subject matter expertise spans WordPress, UX design, Agile project management, and, of course, web hosting.

Lillian Castro

Editor: Lillian Castro

Lillian Castro

Lillian Castro, Senior Editor

Lillian brings more than 30 years of editing and journalism experience to our team. She has written and edited for major news organizations, including The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the New York Times, and she previously served as an adjunct instructor at the University of Florida. Today, she edits HostingAdvice content for clarity, accuracy, and reader engagement.

Cristian Lopez

Reviewer: Cristian Lopez

Cristian Lopez

Cristian Lopez, Contributing Expert

Cristian Lopez uses his Business Marketing background from the University of Illinois at Chicago to create comfortable environments for customers, clients, and colleagues to share their thoughts and ideas openly. From interviewing tech leaders to conducting UX market research projects, Cristian knows the importance of storytelling — a key variable for innovation and inspiration. His goal at HostingAdvice is to wow readers on the ever-evolving nature of the tech industry and bring his audience the most reliable and exciting content on all things hosting.

Laura Bernheim Alexandra Anderson Hosting Expert
“We tested SiteGround & Hostwinds — The winner is SiteGround!”

Prepare to be amazed — we’re talking about the best of the best in this host comparison. SiteGround and Hostwinds are two favorites at HostingAdvice.com for their modern hardware that serves the full range of shared, VPS, and dedicated server customers. SiteGround stands out for its custom-tailored WordPress hosting, but Hostwinds’ VPS and dedicated server plans offer some of the best uptime rates we’ve seen. Read on to learn more about what each company brings to the table.

Overall Rating
5.0/5.0 ★★★★★
Visit SiteGround »
Overall Rating
5.0/5.0 ★★★★★
Visit Hostwinds »

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Overall Hosting Comparison

Best Overall Rating

★★★★★ 5.0/5.0

With an impressive breadth of overall hosting services offered, SiteGround is a leading innovator in the hosting space — from custom software solutions to premier customer support.

The company offers the full range of web hosting features, including a free in-house SiteGround CDN, Site Tools with SSH access, and unlimited MySQL databases and bandwidth — not to mention prize-worthy customer support.

CEO Tenko Nikolov and CTO Ivo Tzenov, SiteGround Co-Founders, gave us the inside scoop on SiteGround's features and took us through the solutions they've engineered to enhance the user experience.

Customer service has long been the company's claim to fame, behind custom solutions built to make the hosting experience as stress-free as possible. SiteGround engineered an in-house chat software that allows users to select and rate thoroughly vetted customer service agents with whom they've worked previously.

The company wrote its own ticketing system, as well, which comprises an algorithm designed to select appropriate technical support representatives for specific tasks.

The end result is instant replies to phone calls and chats, and 10-minute responses to email tickets, all of which contributes to a 99.7% customer satisfaction rate.

For shared hosting, SiteGround conceived a one-of-a-kind server isolation system that prevents vulnerable servers from taking down entire networks.

In place of VPS hosting, the company built its own cloud container platform, featuring thousands of containers and top-notch scalability and security.

All SiteGround hosting service users benefit from a unique downtime prevention mechanism, which has helped SiteGround develop a reputation for stellar uptime rates: 99.996% annually and 99.999% monthly.

  • FREE site transfer or new site setup
  • FREE daily backups, CDN, email, and SSL
  • 24/7 expert support with no wait on phone or chat
  • Recommended by WordPress as a top host
  • Ideal for business email hosting
  • Get started on SiteGround now.
Money Back Guarantee
30 days
Disk Space
10 GB SSD - 40 GB SSD
Domain Name
FREE (1 Year)

Best Overall Rating

★★★★★ 4.8/5.0

Promising enterprise-grade hosting solutions for prices that appeal to small and medium businesses, Hostwinds delivers the full range of operating systems and server configurations to help customers build and grow an online presence.

With hosting plans covering niches like vBulletin and Minecraft, Hostwinds attracts a customer base as mixed as the server configurations.

After frustrating web hosting experiences of his own, CEO Peter Holden set out to prove that providers didn't need to choose among powerful infrastructure, responsive support, and cost-effective prices. As a 20-year-old, he launched Hostwinds in 2010 to accomplish all three objectives.

Now, the fast-growing company offers the full range of services while guaranteeing complete satisfaction.

We'll put the magnifying glass to the company's shared, cloud, VPS, and dedicated server options later, but we wanted to give a quick shoutout to Hostwinds for its top-notch reseller and white-label plans.

The traditional reseller route operates as you'd expect, with the added perks of being able to set your own prices and capitalizing on Hostwinds's robust product line. For the less tech-savvy reseller or those wanting to offer multiple hosting options to clients, Hostwinds makes its full spectrum of services available under your branding.

The company streamlines deployment and sets up WHMCS for billing management and payment processing. We already appreciate the company's high-powered hardware, so we're naturally supportive of easy-to-configure plans that help customers spread the love.

  • 500% faster speeds via SSDs
  • LiteSpeed web server performance
  • FREE dedicated IP address
  • 99.999% uptime guarantee
  • Datacenters in Dallas and Seattle
  • Get started on Hostwinds now.
Money Back Guarantee
3 days
Disk Space
Unlimited SSD
Domain Name
New or Transfer

Cheap Hosting Comparison

Cheap Rating

★★★★★ 4.9/5.0

#4 out of 10 in Cheap Hosting reviews

Providing hosting with the perfect balance of technological innovation and superior customer support, SiteGround offers a range of affordable hosting services to meet your needs.

In addition to the expected cheap web hosting perks — a free website builder and unlimited bandwidth — the company specializes in custom-built tools to deliver strong and positive user experiences.

Although SiteGround prices itself on the high-end of the shared hosting spectrum, the upgraded SSD-powered infrastructure and additional perks make its service well worth the investment. In addition to included SSL certificate, daily backups, and a content delivery network, SiteGround delivers a top-notch blend of speed and security.

SiteGround developed its own ticketing system and custom chat software, allowing you to chat with trusted and capable representatives with whom you've had success in the past.

The software takes in about 1,500 chats on any given day. The website itself receives about 1 million visitors per month, with users coming for both tutorials and knowledgebase articles written and updated by the tech support team.

Once a month, SiteGround tests competitors' and its own support levels with dummy accounts, measuring response times, attitude, and effectiveness. If a competitor is doing something well, SiteGround's team takes note and tries to improve its own services.

  • FREE website transfer service to get started
  • 99.9% uptime guarantee and unlimited traffic
  • User-friendly WordPress installation
  • 24/7 support featuring custom systems
  • 4 caching options plus staging and Git
  • Get started on SiteGround now.
Money Back Guarantee
30 days
Disk Space
10 GB SSD - 40 GB SSD
Domain Name
FREE (1 Year)

Cheap Rating

★★★★ 4.3/5.0

A recurring theme in the Hostwinds product lineup, the company offers multiple configurations to ensure every customer's needs are perfectly met.

Between the SSDs and LiteSpeed web servers, Hostwinds ekes out 500% faster performance compared with typical shared hosting plans. Combined with the bevy of unlimited features (bandwidth, disk space, subdomains, email accounts, databases, and FTP accounts), we love how Hostwinds matches superior services with affordability.

For hosting customers looking to take a small step up without committing to the management requirements and time investment of a virtual private server, Hostwinds offers business hosting plans with an even more souped-up approach to performance.

Virus and malware scans are upped to once per week, instead of monthly for regular shared hosting.

We appreciate that Hostwinds began including a free domain registration with its shared hosting plans, and recognize that the company's 60-day money-back guarantee is twice as long as most others in the space.

Add in the Weebly site builder and instant setup, and the full spectrum of site owners will be well served with Hostwinds.

  • Unlimited SSD storage, databases, and email
  • FREE site migration with cPanel and Softaculous
  • Instant upgrades without downtime
  • FREE around-the-clock monitoring
  • Automatic nightly backups available
  • Get started on Hostwinds now.
Money Back Guarantee
3 days
Disk Space
Unlimited SSD
Domain Name
New or Transfer

Dedicated Hosting Comparison

Dedicated Rating

N/A

SiteGround does not currently offer this type of hosting. We would not recommend choosing this host for this hosting category.

Dedicated Rating

★★★★ 4.2/5.0

#8 out of 8 in Dedicated Hosting reviews

At the highest end of the hosting spectrum, it can sometimes be challenging to discern which servers reign supreme. Providers naturally put their finest hardware and most luxurious features at the forefront when it comes to attracting customers for high-price dedicated hosting.

Hostwinds, however, somehow manages to eke out ahead of the rest on the strength of the company's incredible range of configurations.

For starters, customers can choose from among 15 Windows or Linux operating systems and equip servers with up to 3TB of hard-disk drive storage per bay (the maximum number of drives is four).

Alternatively, servers can be equipped with up to 1TB of solid-state drives per hard drive bay. RAM scales from 8GB to 128GB, outpacing even the most luxury hosts at seemingly every turn. From there, users can select to use up to 128 IP addresses.

Although inbound bandwidth is free and unlimited, outbound transfers can scale between 10TB to 200TB and more. Depending how many hard drives you opt to deploy, you can configure five different RAID backup options for free.

All told, customers can easily configure servers that cost upward of $1,000 per month — but the performance will undoubtedly be worthwhile.

Hostwinds servers somehow always seem to ring up a few dollars per month cheaper than competitors and come with a superb 99.999% uptime guarantee.

Our only tentative reservation is trusting a smaller, newer company with such a business-critical task at such a large scale. We have absolutely zero evidence to support our fears, just feel the need to mention the company doesn't have the tried-and-true legacy of some other well-known brands.

If the premium hardware and slight savings are worth the tiny gamble, however, we expect large companies will enjoy the payoff.

  • Highly configurable servers with a choice between Windows or Linux
  • Fully managed support and nightly backups
  • SAS Type II and Tier 4 datacenters
  • 99.999% uptime guarantee and DDoS protection
  • 1-hour hardware replacement
  • Get started on Hostwinds now.
Money Back Guarantee
3 days
Disk Space
120 GB SSD - 12 TB HDD
Domain Name
New or Transfer

VPS Hosting Comparison

VPS Rating

★★★★ 4.2/5.0

When it comes to VPS hosting, SiteGround does things a little differently. Instead of managing a typical virtual private server network, the company created its very own cloud platform built from the ground up.

Although the services are similar to a VPS, with shell access included, it's much more scalable. The hefty price tag certainly jumps out at potential customers, however, making SiteGround's cloud product a major investment.

The company's top-tier infrastructure and customer support certainly back up the cost, but the platform may not be the right step for first-time VPS customers looking to take a small step beyond shared hosting.

That said, SiteGround's managed cloud hosting includes thousands of containers and is much faster than most products you'll find on the market.

A single cloud instance can be provisioned, up, and running in seconds. The container platform behind the cloud hosting isn't the only in-house technology the company has up its hosting sleeve.

Instead of using third-party programs, SiteGround developers write almost all of the platform's software themselves. Among SiteGround's many custom solutions is a unique server isolation system that shields servers from falling victim to the vulnerability of single, corrupted accounts.

SiteGround was the first to develop such a mechanism. The company also created its own backup system, which runs daily backups in about an hour; a downtime prevention mechanism that has yielded stellar uptime rates; and its proprietary SuperCacher, which offers four caching options for optimum load times.

With each custom innovation that SiteGround has engineered, customers have reported being pleasantly surprised by how much the technology simplifies their hosting experience.

SiteGround's cloud hosting service is no different.

The company offers all the hit features they're known for, plus the added scalability and security that surpasses most VPS hosting providers. If you're ready to move beyond shared hosting, and want to do so with a king of customer service and tech solutions, look no further than SiteGround's cloud hosting.

  • Fully managed cloud hosting with ultra-fast performance and scalability
  • FREE SiteGround CDN and daily backups
  • SuperCacher, Git, and 1-click CMS installs
  • Site Tools, SSH access, and private DNS setup
  • Dedicated IP address and iptables firewall
  • Get started on SiteGround now.
Money Back Guarantee
14 days
Disk Space
40 GB SSD - 160 GB SSD
Domain Name
New or Transfer

VPS Rating

★★★★★ 4.8/5.0

Does any hosting provider have more virtual private server packages than Hostwinds? The company offers 10 configurations — and that's just for managed Linux server partitions.

Hostwinds provides 10 additional plans each for managed Windows VPS and unmanaged varieties of both operating systems.

Virtual servers range from 1 CPU core, 1GB of RAM, and 30GB of storage all the way to 16 cores, 96GB of RAM, and 750GB of storage. Customers can pay roughly $5 per month — or more than $250.

Around-the-clock monitoring of the company's network and devices ensure reliability, but Hostwinds promises a five-minute response to incidents and hardware replacements within an hour. For those wanting even more flexibility and scalability, Hostwinds offers cloud hosting billed by the hour or month.

Create an instance, select your operating system and infrastructure, and enjoy the company's fully managed support. Customers can deploy block or object storage volumes and rely on the company's strict firewall to protect it all.

Add in the company's stellar 99.999% uptime guarantee, high-powered solid-state drives, and the guaranteed 1Gbps port, and customers will be hard-pressed to find a more flexible, performant, and affordable VPS or cloud service.

  • Managed or unmanaged, in Windows or Linux
  • Cloud hosting with hourly or monthly billing
  • Instant upgrades without downtime
  • FREE around-the-clock monitoring
  • Automatic nightly backups available
  • Get started on Hostwinds now.
Money Back Guarantee
3 days
Disk Space
30 GB SSD - 750 GB SSD
Domain Name
New or Transfer

WordPress Hosting Comparison

WordPress Rating

★★★★★ 4.9/5.0

#4 out of 9 in WordPress Hosting reviews

Want a hassle-free, WordPress-optimized hosting service? SiteGround has thought of everything you need to get your site up and running.

Starting with the essentials, users get free email accounts, site transfer, SiteGround CDN, and the Site Tools control panel. Then the company makes it simple for you to start rolling out content by offering an easy, automated WordPress installation and a unique and powerful WordPress Starter program that walks site owners through site setup.

The custom tool helps customers choose from professionally designed themes and add key functionalities likee a contact form, online store, portfolio, or other content. Selections are automatically installed on the site, delivering a fully-functional website in minutes — without any tech expertise required.

SiteGround's WordPress hosting also features automatic updates to the core and plugins, with built-in, multi-layer WordPress caching built-in, as well. Users can easily test and deploy changes to their site with single-click staging, and Git is available for version control.

SiteGround's unique downtime prevention software monitors servers' statuses in real-time and resolves more than 90% of server issues instantly and automatically.

Many competitors can take an average of five to 20 minutes to detect an issue, plus up to 20 minutes to react and resolve the exploit.

From in-house solutions on the technical side to warm and unwavering support from a customer service angle, SiteGround has crafted a complete package for any hosting need.

For WordPress-specific hosting, the company offers popular perks you wouldn't get with other shared hosting providers. Get started with all of the awesome freebies and prepare to be blown away by SiteGround's commitment to building hosting solutions intended to make your WordPress experience easier than ever.

  • WordPress performance optimizations
  • FREE migration plugin or automated installation
  • Pre-installed Git, 3 caching levels, and FREE CDN
  • FREE WP setup wizard, staging, and auto-updates
  • Fast, 24/7 support via custom chat system
  • Get started on SiteGround now.
Money Back Guarantee
30 days
Disk Space
10 GB SSD - 40 GB SSD
Domain Name
FREE (1 Year)

WordPress Rating

N/A

Hostwinds does not currently offer this type of hosting. We would not recommend choosing this host for this hosting category.

Site Builder Hosting Comparison

Website Builder Rating

★★★★ 4.4/5.0

#6 out of 9 in Website Builder Hosting reviews

Do you know you need to build a website but don't know where to begin? Well, SiteGround will give you not one, but two extremely popular and user-friendly options to create the online presence of your dream.

Plus, customers start off with unlimited email accounts, site traffic, and database storage options — all for free.

Whether you're transferring a domain or want a relatively hands-off experience starting your very first site, you'll find helpful support at every turn.

SiteGround hosting includes easy installations for your choice of content management system, including WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, and Magento. The company's WordPress experts will even migrate your site for you — a seamless transition with zero downtime — or first-timers can benefit from their in-house setup wizard.

Alternatively, SiteGround gives each customer access to the ultra-popular Weebly drag-and-drop site builder and hundreds of professional templates.

Once you're up and running, custom ticketing and chat systems have been engineered and implemented to provide you with pleasant and tech-savvy customer support 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.

SiteGround also conducts daily site backups, using an in-house system that can run backups in about an hour, compared to rival technologies that can take up to half a day to operate.

Whether you're a hosting newbie or a site-building savant, you can trust SiteGround to provide you with a hosting and website-building combo that is simple to manage and pleasant to troubleshoot.

  • FREE Weebly site builder or WordPress setup
  • Worry-free, automated webiste migrations
  • User-friendly Site Tools interface and staging area
  • Custom ticket and chat systems for 24/7 support
  • SuperCacher with static and dynamic caching
  • Get started on SiteGround now.
Money Back Guarantee
30 days
Disk Space
10 GB SSD - 40 GB SSD
Domain Name
FREE (1 Year)

Website Builder Rating

N/A

Hostwinds does not currently offer this type of hosting. We would not recommend choosing this host for this hosting category.

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SiteGround vs. Hostwinds - Our Conclusion

Laura Bernheim Alexandra Anderson Hosting Expert
“We tested SiteGround & Hostwinds — The winner is SiteGround!”

We’ve named our winner in this comparison, but the web host you ultimately choose will depend on your budget and needs. While these plans are both reasonably affordable, you’ll pay more over time for SiteGround’s hosting plans. Hostwinds may be a bit of a gamble for dedicated server customers, but their commitment to customer support instills our confidence in this provider. We’re sure you’re in good hands with either web host.

Overall Rating
5.0/5.0 ★★★★★
Visit SiteGround »
Overall Rating
4.8/5.0 ★★★★★
Visit Hostwinds »

About The Author

Alexandra Anderson’s interest in website administration was sparked in her teens, priming her for a fast-paced career in managing, building, and contributing to online brands, including HostingAdvice, Forbes, and the blogs of prominent hosting providers. She brings firsthand experience reviewing web hosts, perfecting website design, optimizing content, and walking site owners through the steps that add up to a successful online presence. With a master's degree in information technology from Virginia Tech, she combines her extensive writing experience and technical understanding to unpack some of the most complex topics that daunt novice website owners, as well as the subjects that excite veteran technologists within the HostingAdvice readership.
Laura Bernheim