Studies 
Studies
Our studies cover a range of trending topics and deliver original, reliable data you can't get anywhere else on the web.
By: Alexandra Anderson
Editor: Lillian Castro
Reviewer: Cristian Lopez
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★★★★★
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.
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★★★★★
It's hard to imagine something intangible, like a website, contributing to climate change. In fact, with millions of servers and thousands of datacenters drawing massive amounts of electricity, the web hosting industry is on pace to surpass air travel as one of the world's worst polluters. With that in mind, CEO Trey Gardner — an avid surfer, hiker, and skier, in addition to helping build seven other hosting companies — established GreenGeeks in 2008 to leave a positive energy footprint. The company purchases wind energy credits to restore more than three times the energy that the company consumes. The honorable quest is impressive enough, but GreenGeeks provides superb hosting packages that stand on their own. Powered by modern SSD storage and name-brand hardware, the company has grown to serve more than 55,000 customers and host more than 600,000 websites in 15 years of business. After putting the company's shared, VPS, and dedicated services through the wringer, in addition to testing the managed WordPress and site builder options, we were impressed by the multitude of tech-savvy features that ensure hosting happiness for both first-time site owners and experienced developers. We're suckers for SSD storage, and GreenGeeks up the ante with RAID-10 configurations and nightly backups. Around-the-clock knowledgeable support, coupled with free migrations and rapid provisioning, makes growing through the VPS and dedicated hosting ranks a breeze.
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★★★★★
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.
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★★★★★
Perfect for small business owners, bloggers, or web developers, GreenGeeks offers an impressive blend of features that appeal to all types of site owners. More experienced customers will appreciate the unlimited domain names, SSD RAID-10 storage, and unmetered data transfers, along with nightly backups and built-in caching programs. First-timers, however, will enjoy the free website builder, marketing and SEO tools, and hands-free migration service. Additionally, GreenGeeks offers an array of components at prices very competitive with other top hosts relying on SSD-powered infrastructure. Plans powered by newer, more-performant solid-state drives tend to be a few dollars per month more expensive than the most affordable hosting plans that utilize traditional hard-disk drives. Instead of simply touting the SSD upgrade, however, GreenGeeks includes a comprehensive suite of services that combine cutting-edge technology with sheer usability. Customers can manage their GreenGeeks hosting account using the company's intuitive and recently updated online interface, which provides simple paths to requesting domain or site transfers, registering a domain, or changing billing information. From there, users can access hosting resources using the most recent version of cPanel, the industry's leading control panel. Backed by the industry's standard 99.9% uptime guarantee, 24/7/365 responsive support, and 30-day money-back guarantee, GreenGeeks hosting plans are a worthwhile hosting investment long before the environmental benefits kick in.
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★★★★★
The free site migrations offered by GreenGeeks makes sticking with the company a worthwhile venture as your website or application grows to new levels of hosting. The company's elastic platform allows for easy resource upgrades to make sure your growth is supported. All of the GreenGeeks dedicated server hosting plans come with five IP addresses, up to 10TB of data transfer, and server-grade Intel processors. DDR3 memory ranges from 2GB to 16GB across the four dedicated hosting options. Disk space ranges from 500GB to 1TB, which is pretty standard for the industry. Interestingly, however, dedicated servers are the only GreenGeeks hosting plans that don't include SSDs. The strange decision, coupled with the lack of upfront information about features, add-ons, and support, gives us pause when considering GreenGeeks for dedicated hosting. The company's prices outpace many mainstream competitors, placing them among luxury boutique hosts, without clear justification. The company's excellent offerings in the shared and VPS tiers give us confidence in the dedicated servers, but we'd recommend some more research instead of blindly signing up for service. GreenGeeks connects hosting infrastructure with Gigabit speeds, using Juniper and Cisco for network switching and routing. Customers can choose in which of the company's four datacenters their data is provisioned: Chicago, Phoenix, Toronto, or Amsterdam. In addition to the name-brand and energy-efficient hardware, GreenGeeks houses its equipment in datacenters designed to be environmentally friendly.
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★★★★★
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.
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★★★★★
Geared for rapidly growing businesses and enterprise-level companies, GreenGeeks VPS plans provide the computing resources and scalability required to support and adapt to your growing traffic. Virtual servers are deployed in less than 60 seconds, and we appreciate the included cPanel and WHM licenses, root access, and site migration. The GreenGeeks storage capacity range of 50GB to 150GB is on the lower end of the spectrum, especially given the company's relatively high prices, but GreenGeeks goes above and beyond with the combination of super-speedy SSDs and RAID-10 configurations that provide added redundancy and performance boosts. GreenGeeks VPS containers come with ConfigServer Security and Firewall, along with Login Failure Daemon and added protection from ModSecurity and well-tailored Apache configurations. The company backs up customers' files every night and stores backups for 48 hours. Unlike many hosts that tout free backups, GreenGeeks will restore a site for free once a month. Additional restorations, if needed, are very reasonably priced. Reseller plans are fully loaded with the impressive GreenGeeks features, including site transfers and a free website builder, that you can pass along to your customers. The 100% white-label platform allows for a custom logo and private nameservers. VPS and reseller customers will receive a free eNom domain reseller account, and resellers enjoy unlimited cPanel accounts along with a free ClientExec license to automate customer invoicing, support, and provisioning.
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★★★★★
#2 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.
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★★★★★
The GreenGeeks comprehensive suite of added features resonates particularly well with the company's managed WordPress hosting plan. Modeled after the GreenGeeks shared hosting package, the managed WordPress services will resonate with a wide cross-section of the ultra-popular content management system's enthusiasts. Effectively hosting WordPress can be challenging for lower-tier hosting providers, but GreenGeeks has both the technical know-how and high-powered infrastructure to optimize the experience for both customers and their site visitors. In addition to the unlimited storage and data transfers, the company's SSD RAID-10 storage configurations are perfect for hosting the resource-heavy CMS. GreenGeeks utilizes the one-click Softaculous installer for WordPress, but plans come pre-installed with Git and WP-CLI. Customers have SSH access to their hosting account and can select which version of PHP to use. On the security front, GreenGeeks isolates each managed WordPress hosting account and automatically updates WordPress core files. The company actively scans for vulnerabilities and blocks attacks, even including built-in DDoS protection. GreenGeeks maximizes WordPress performance with server-grade, name-brand hardware, and optimized HTTP and MySQL. Customers can add the Cloudflare CDN with just one click while they sit back and enjoy server-side software and hardware caching to accelerate page loads.
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★★★★★
#7 out of 8 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.
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★★★★★
Shared hosting customers can easily request access to the GreenGeeks website builder through the account management portal. Our site builder installation was ready to go within 40 minutes, and we appreciated the clear instructions on how to get started. Users can choose from among 16 responsive templates or hundreds of free and premium options. We have a soft spot for site builders that let users switch to a different template without losing content, like the GreenGeeks platform does, but we wish the themes were easier to sift through when looking for a particular feature or design conducive to a particular industry or project. The drag-and-drop interface will seem very familiar and comfortable to customers. While intuitive enough for the earliest of beginners, the GreenGeeks site builder also enables more experienced developers to adjust and tweak the HTML and CSS code. In addition to the standard color adjustments, image uploads, and navigation settings that come with most website builders, customers can add functionality through the use of widgets that cover a variety of tasks, such as embedding forms, YouTube videos, and maps. Adding an ecommerce component seems easy, until clicking on the button to upgrade redirects you to the GreenGeeks homepage. When you're ready to go live, the site builder will let you preview your designs on desktop and mobile. All in all, GreenGeeks offers a solid, if not exciting, site builder option — great for beginners, perhaps a little clunky for developers.
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