Always demanding more and more features, James Capell suddenly wonders whether he’s willing to shell out for them!
IN BRIEF
SiteGround is great for speed and reliability, and is good value for money if these are your priorities. Storage comes up a little short compared with other hosts for the same money. A strong contender for those looking for fast loading times all around the globe.
Now 20 years old, SiteGround is one of the world’s largest independently owned hosting companies. It started off with a handful of staff and has grown to have 500 employees and data centres across six continents used by over 3,000,000 domains. Its products are split between web hosting and cloud hosting, with reseller and email marketing plans.
We’re looking at the web hosting, which comes in three tiers: StartUp, GrowBig and GoGeek. The lowest plan, StartUp, supports one website, 10GB of web space, 10,000 monthly visits, a free domain, free SSL, daily backups, free CDN, free email and more. For new signups this costs £2.99 per month for 12 months, then renews at £13.99 per month. GrowBig (£4.99 per month) is essentially the same but supports unlimited websites and 100,000 monthly visits with faster PHP, while GoGeek bumps the monthly visits to 400,000 and costs initially £6.99 per month.
There’s a Migrator plugin that provides an easy way to import your WordPress site from another host. The AutoUpdate system keeps your WordPress installation and plugins up to date, and experts will appreciate WP-CLI, a command-line tool that allows automation of many common WordPress management tasks.
Uptime.com accessed our site every five minutes over 14 days, recording any failures and how quickly the server responds. SiteGround had no fails, giving it a perfect 100% uptime. Average response time was 0.207 seconds, the fastest in our last 15 tests.
GTmetrix measures load speed by grabbing a test page on our site, and measuring how long it takes to display the main content, known as Largest Contentful Paint, or LCP. SiteGround’s LCP was fractionally below average at 0.735 seconds, ninth fastest in our last 15 tests. But that’s not far behind the top providers, and an acceptable time overall.
K6 goes beyond an individual load time by unleashing 20 simultaneous visitors and watching to see what happens. Our site managed an average of 14 requests per second, with a peak of 20. Again, that’s fractionally behind the competition, but not enough that you’re likely to notice.
Getting started with a web host can be intimidating, but SiteGround does a fair job of helping out. Log in to its Control
