There are 113 hosting user reviews for
SiteGround Hosting
Average Jury Ratings & Reviews of
SiteGround Hosting
4.2/5
4.0/5
3.7/5
3.8/5
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Date Submitted :
June 25th, 2009
Length of time hosted by this company :
1 - 3 years
Overall Rating :
5 out of 5
Reliability :
5 out of 5
Support :
5 out of 5
Pricing :
5 out of 5
Verdict :
As a disabled person here in NZ, I found SiteGround to be everything they claimed to be. They are Excellent!
Their support team have always responded in a very timely manner, not that I had the need to contact them very often.
Their servers have only been down once while I have been with them and during that time they kept me fully informed/updated as to the progress being made in getting them back online.
SiteGround? Yes, in my opinion they are the best in all respects and should be considered if you are seeking a reasonable priced hosting provider.
I would go with Site ground at all
they charge you for everything
instill 3rd party template
Charge you if you want ask question one day I wanted know how to park a domain and the rep said they have to charge me $50 to send me link this is not joke its true
they no help at all
When I mess up my message board or blog (because I don't know what I'm doing), tech support literally fixes the problems within minutes after I post a ticket. It's such a relief to have my mistakes fixed that quickly when I know people are trying to get onto my sites that I mess up.
They are supposed to be Drupal specialists yet weeks after the latest release of Drupal their Fantastico isn't even up-to-date! What the hell? Now I have to wait hours and hours for their slow tech support to address this. In fact, it's another entire day wasted due to Siteground...
This is only one of several negative experiences I've had there.
This is the best so far, they help you very fast with any problem, I Am so happy we have siteground, I am still learning and they are great, thank you site ground!
Siteground cancelled our hosting and e-mail access because we had a database on our site which was using more CPU resources than they were happy with. They sent one warning e-mail to our web developer with the subject line "High Server resource consumption by your account" when he was away and he didn't see it, and a week later they switched the account off including all e-mail access. Now they are offering to reactivate it to my IP address only to give me a chance to fix the problem, subject to me paying a $50.00 'reactivation fee', and now they still refuse to activate it because my credit card transaction (which I made about an hour ago) is 'still processing'. Meanwhile our whole company has no e-mail and the website is down. I would avoid this company completely - if you want reliable hosting, pay a little bit more for a company like www.mosso.com
I've had websites for the last 10 years, and have used Siteground for the last two years on one site, and 1 year on another, and am very happy with the service. Compared to others I've used before they're cheaper, offer many, many more services on basic packages (including a WYSIWYG page editor - so you can do emergency edits to HTML anywhere in the world, without any special software). The one-button installation of things like Wordpress, Joomla, Moodle etc. is brilliant for people like me who have limited skills, but know what they want.
I had one problem a few months ago that was something to do with a database error on their servers, and it was fixed within hours, and courteously.
I am a customer in SiteGround since 2007 and I can say that SiteGround rocks!!! :) The customer support is awesome and they answer all my questions in a minute. I have experienced downtime only 1 time during this period and I was notified immediately that the system administrators know about it and it was fixed in a minute Again!
These guys are awesome!!! I recommend them with both of my hands!
This company started off fine for me, but after a year the server downtime and hangups of all sorts got unacceptable. I typed in the word "siteground" in the google search engine, and one of the first listings was "siteground sucks" with lots of pages. So my curiosity on this matter got to me, and after reading about many peoples problems with this hosting company, I saw that it is the truth. I hope they clean up their act and charge more money for better service (instead of offering cheap hosting for poor service).
If you want a reliable hosting company, check out u2-web.com . I went with them after my troubling experiences, and now my website is actually being delivered to the web the way it should be! Fast, on target.
Right now I get kicked back to the login screen whenever I try to do anything. Since you have to be logged in to access technical support, I can't even notify them of the problem. I can't do anything with the website, or get help. This is unacceptable. No one who actually NEEDS a website can tolerate this situation.
I could not be more pleased with Siteground than I am. In my personal experience they are PERFECT!
Their support team has never taken more than twenty minutes to respond with solutions to my difficulties and they are always right on the nose.
But don't let their low prices fool you: beind the low cost of setting up and running sites with SiteGround is a well-oiled machine that hums along wihtout fuss, and the company is staffed by experts who understand what a tyro such as I am needs to be told to get back on the tracks again.
As a former customer service manager for a large company I have no hesitation in recommending SiteGround to all who want a risk free, trouble free, and worry free ISP/Web Host.
I have found them to be the best host for support, advice, and pricing out of several hosts I have used this year. I started by transferring a very popular hobby-site to them and now I have also entrusted my business web site and e-commerce site to them.
It helps to have Siteground for a Joomla template, although many of the tutorials are incomplete. The Help Desk is not speedy and complete. I always didn't get the response or solution on the first request, but eventually got the problem solved. There's no phone help. So far, I like it. It's ok.
Have been with siteground for just over 12 months without any problems untill i added a second site..had problems and the siteground staff worked hard to solve it to my satisfaction..it took them 24 hours and i was very pleased with the outcome,would recomend anyone to host their site with siteground..have tried several web hosting companys but non beat Siteground.
I have been with them for more than three years and have had very few problems, and the problems I have had have been put right really fast, sometimes in less than 5 minutes. I am very pleased with the site and the service.
Service is non existent at this hosting provider. My site has been down for days and I can\'t put a ticket in because their automated \"help\" desk keeps running me in a loop. There is no place to make a direct service request.
Horrible nightmare. I had no web traffic on their servers other than my IMAP email. They shut down my email without warning, claiming it exceeded the storage limit (200MB) and thus it was overloading their system (!). I had to beg them to unlock the email account so I could reduce my storage (meanwhile I lost all access to very important personal documents). The answer I got amounted to kidnap and ransom. They would refuse to unlock the account, and further: \"I am afraid that the only option in your case is to request backup creation for your mail/ folder and your e-mail messages will be archived for you. Please note that since the backup creation service is considered as an Exclusive service and is performed by our System Administrators, you will be charged the appropriate one-time fee, depending on the type of the backup creation requested and the actual time required for the backup procedure to be completed.\" (Avoid the Tech Support person \'Kiril I\' at all cost).
At some later time, another tech support person unlocked the account so I could offload my mail. The lesson is you are completely at the mercy of these guys, who arbirarly do anything they want to your account. RUN AWAY FROM THESE GUYS.
SiteGround Customer Support is the best Help Desk I know. The application upgrade service migrated my old Mediawiki spanish site (with ISO-Latin1 chars) to the last version (UTF-8 chars).
3-4 years ago they were the best shared hosting. It is unbelievable how they destroyed their selves.
In the past when you meet with a problem, you just go and open a ticket, and they respond you less than 10minutes. (which was excellent) 2 years before they selected to hide ticket button to somehwere else in their knowledge base (but if you were lucky enough to find the ticket button, their response were still quick) Nowadays even you find that ticket button that takes \"too\" much time to recieve a respond from them.
In their server some major apache modules doesnt supported (didnt installed by default) which you need them to run a cms with a healty/speeder way.
Nowadays they found a new toy for a dedicated server = intel atom 330
(please do an ebay search, for intel atom 330 you will got me :)) )
and they sent me an email that i consume too much cpu resources, and i should pass to dedicated one. that was not true that i consume much cpu than expected.... lots of things to tell.. but i want to end here.
all i can say: if you gonna put your family photos, cvs etc.. it is good with easy understandable cpanel. but if you are thinking for a cms or forum. all i can say STAY AWAY!!
This is a straight-forward, easy to use service company. Tech support is quick and reliable.
The only bad thing is that their mail servers go down once in a while... and it seems to be just when I\'m expecting something important. Other than that, I\'m very happy.
Tec\' Support is great, truly speedy response from them with any problems I\'ve had due to my inabilities, not their faults with site. Highly recommended Great tutorials on everything about building a site with them!
I am a Joomla-for-Dummies kind of person. Part of why I chose Siteground to host my website is that they offer extensive, elegantly-written and free tutorials. I joined Siteground hosting service two days\' ago, had a bunch of questions as a newbie, and Siteground\'s customer service via email has been great. I give Siteground 5 stars.
Another reason why I joined Siteground is because they specialize in Joomla sites and even though my local ISP tried hard to answer Joomla-related questions (they let their Joomla \"expert\" get hired by another ISP), their turnaround time for Joomla-related questions was a week. The people at my local ISP were well-meaning but don\'t see Joomla as important and therefore don\'t have anyone on staff who really knows Joomla (they had to do a lot of homework to answer fairly rudimentary questions). I need my web hoster to know more about Joomla than I—and way faster than a week.
I am a woman in my 50s, got turned onto content management systems by accident (settling on Joomla), and don\'t need to babysit my web hoster. I\'m the one who needs handholding—I need a web hoster who has customer service staff on-call who know what the heck I\'m talking about with Joomla questions. For people used to static websites, Joomla has a high learning-curve and is rather scary—the stuff you have to know BEFORE installing Joomla is mind-boggling.
I need a web hoster for Joomla-dummies—I think I found it in Siteground. And that\'s a good thing! If Joomla is ever going to filter down to non-techies, there will be more Joomla-dummies out there like me. With Siteground, my sense is that they have been on the Joomla path BEFORE me, and as such, they can \"light the way.\"
Siteground\'s prices are reasonable. I can only speak for the first 48 hours, but thus far, I\'m glad I switched.
This is the worst hosting provider I've ever had. Their uptime claims, their claims of unlimited bandwith and space are all flat-out lies.
I have a website that gets less than 500 visits a day and they claim that I have too many visits for the shared servers because they want me to subscribe to a $99 per month hosting plan.
Their tech support is THE WORST. They close tickets immediately after they are answered regardless of whether they solve the problem or not. They consistently refer you to their "help" and "support" pages which are beyond useless.
I am changing hosts when my contract with them expires. I am sick to death of them. I've lost more repeat readers and ad revenue than they are worth.
I picked this host because they seemed to have everything I needed in an affordable package. Now I have had two problems, 1 was a botched install and for a minimal fee the tech team had fixed my problem in under 20 minutes. Most recently, it appeared that someone had messed with my config files for wordpress and the tech team helped me out in less than 10 minutes. I cannot speak more highly of this internet hosting service.
This used to be a good, reliable host, but no longer. I have been with them for over 4 years and the service has gone downhill as the prices went up. Stay Away!
To our surprise, response from Siteground is so quick, detailed answers are returned from their unique Helpdesk only minutes after we posted the questions. The tutorials are helpful. It's a great service.
It's a good sense to be supported and discuss with someone else far away on the other side of the internet.
These guys are wonderful, if you don't mind waiting for messages to get through. They offer no phone support - it's all via "helpdesk" email. They appear to be based in Bulgaria. All of this contributes to their very low costs, and very high level of hard work and dedication on their part.
We have had a number of complications - switching from a shared server to a dedicated server, adding and redirecting domains, a disk crash on the eve of a big announcement... In every case SiteGround.com had our back.
Unless you're the type who needs constant reassurance and voice contact, I highly, highly recommend them.
I have been with Hostway for about 10 years and recently needed a PHP web host so I decided to give SiteGround a try. I was absolutely stunned at the speed of the support team at SiteGround. They absolutely are without question the best support team on the planet. Not only are they quick to assist with script installation and set up the servers at SiteGround are the fastest I have ever experienced.
Wow, I am totally a SiteGround convert. I will be moving all my websites over to SiteGround.
Sincerely,
Joey Champion
Producer
MasterWorks Animation & Film Group
I'm a customer of siteground for almost a year. I never encountered installation issues since I hosted my 2 domains.. Until I encountered a weird issues in one of my module for my 3rd domain account. I crawled their support helpdesk database looking for the solutions, but I gave up due to urgency of the problem and shoot an email to them.. I didn't expected that their response and resolution was too fast.. It's less than 5 minutes then my modules are working properly.. - this is great!! I really appreciate, now I realized that moving my hosting to siteground was a clever decision...
I asked them to change the CNAME for a subdomain I had recently created and got them to change it to my blog which was hosted remotely. They did this superfast, literally I asked them just before I went bed, when I woke up it was done! Fantastic service.
I registered a domain with SiteGround about a year ago mainly to set up a more reliable system for email than my ISP (Charter.net). Alas, SiteGround's service is worse than Charter's, mainly due to their policy of blocking IP's listed by SpamHaus.org. I DON'T spam, but SpamHaus intermittently lists random Charter IP's that they determine to be dynamic. The effect is to suddenly lose my outbound mail until I can convince Charter to release my IP. In the interim, the only work-around is to use SiteGround's cumbersome Webmail system.
Good server up-time, quick but useless email tech responses, unreliable mail-server access, sloppy billing, and they don't refund setup fees if you decide to go elsewhere.
In the past, I have had 99% uptime as they quoted on their site, the only downtime was either caused by other companies, or upgrades - even with the upgrades it was once just to get me on a brand new server.
Their customer support is never canned (scripted) so you feel a sense of customization with it, along with the professionalism and respect you as a customer deserve.
I will be keeping as a customer with siteground for years to come!
After struggling with horrible companies such as 1and1, I moved to siteground and since then I haven't even considered moving to another host. Every year I renew my hosting without any cocerns or worries! Have recommended 2 - 3 others as well.
I've been using siteground for a year now, I'm very satisfied with the fast and accurate technical help, ease of use and wide service offer. I'm actually in the works of transfering all my websites to this company.
At the beginning I was very happy: domain activation at once, customer support replies in a short time, chat service.
After one month of hosting, I leave for a 3 weeks trip (and I have no internet connection). Well, when I connect I find out that they suspended my account because I did not reply to an email: they had to verify credit card ownership (the onwer has my name and my surname!).
They wanted me to renew, but they refused to restore my site as I left it, they tried to cheat telling I had my data if I renew my hosting, when I asked the operator to send an email to assure it, he changed version saying data could be lost (because 7 days were passed), and fee was only about hosting, not backup.
I refused to pay, and I had to pay 15$ to transfer my domain (registered under my name at whois) to another mantainer.
Totally unsatisfied, do not trust them, expecially in chat: they only want to sell!
I find Siteground to be incredibly frustrating. I have exceeded their bandwidth limits on several occasions. Each time they have shut my site down without warning! This is insane. If you have a site that gets traffic and needs to be online I encourage you to find a different ISP.
Support is very unprofessional. 100% email-based. No phone support. Support tickets closed at the moment siteground responds. Irrelevant response from siteground report. Have to submit a new ticket to revisit old unresolved problems. Siteground support treats all support inquiries as new - no tracking of recurring problems.
Domains with email hosted by siteground often have problems with corporate domains rejecting email from siteground mail servers.
Siteground mail servers are not rfc compliant. ie. siteground mail server greeting is '220-********************' rather than '220-ns1.siteground118.com'.
The latter is the publicly registered name for siteground's mail server which is what it shou;d use. Notice that even the name is that of a name server - not a mail server.
siteground mail servers often blacklisted.
The biggest gripe is that site ground makes WAYYYY too much money to not offer phone support to its customers. They offer no means for admins of other domains to contact siteground support staff. You must be a siteground paying subscriber to have any contact with support via their web site.
Ok - if your a hobbiest or toying around - but definitely not for anything mission critical.
What can I say? Siteground is incredibly cheap, their support is amazing. I send in an email and it's usually answered within hours. This is a great cheap host for personal or small business'. I would recommend it to anybody.
I recommend SiteGround to anyone. The turn-around time for Support Tickets are exceptional. Am having a time of my life! However, PostgreSQL support services take longer (~30 min longer) to get sorted.
Excellent and fast service, excellent stuff for open source project like Jomla, Mambo, etc. and good prices and tutorial for all level´s knowlage people.
Every month siteground put out an e-mail with the text that they have added more space to the account 200GB! 300GB! and now 500GB! But..... you can't use it. The maximum of media files allowed (pictures, video, etc) is 5 GB. What is the use of the 500GB? for word documents? Yeah, whatever.
I was very satisfied, till this happened. Now I just want to go at the end of my contract period.
Do not believe these good reviews about SiteGround. I have an account with them and their support is the worst. Constant Server Errors. It is impossible to get any kind of personal help. Support techs place ticket in closed state without resolving issues. Incompetent technical support, irrelevant answers and "we hope it will get better." Forward tickets between departments endlessly. Don't be fooled by the live chat or phone support. It's only for sales prospects, the moment you sign up it's all over. SiteGround is a nightmare. Can't wait till my contract with them is over. So I can finally be set free from this torture.
Siteground is completely misleading about their service - they say they offer 500GB of storage which is complete rot - they said they would cancel my account because I had too many backup files, I deleted these and they still deleted my account. After many attempts to contact them and threatening legal action they gave me ftp access to download my files and I then read on my ticket the reason for closing the account, more the 5GB of image files. Of course if I paid $50 they would turn me back on, I've had this site mostly unchanged for a year - this is just a money making exercise.
These guys were able to get me up and running in minutes at 3:30a. Theyve always answered me ASAP and were able to set up my webmail account through Horde in a snap, which noone else has been able to do! They also have speedy cutomers service and live web chat and are truly available 247/365!
Then I wanted to move my old files to theres they wanted to charge me $50+ to do that, THEY CHARGE YOU FOR EVERY LITTLE THING..... Besides that I loved them.
I will not say that everything always runs smoothly on Siteground. They do have problems sometimes and every know and then their first solution is not the best possible. But up till now always when I contact support the reaction time is awesome and the way these people are willing to work with/for you is amazing. Their claim that their support is the fastest in the world might well be true.
Good host, but recently it has become a little bit more difficult to contact support. On the whole however can be reccommended. Their pricing policy however favor those you have just one domain. You have to pay 30 dollars extra per year for each addon and you can find much better deals elsewhere...
Website content transfer, domain name transfer, DNS pointing, effortless because of the professional help that was truthful, factual, swift and accurate, plus done in a very friendly way! Thank you SiteGround for the super package to top it all off!
The best advice I can give regarding this site and their sales people is to GET IT IN WRITING. After my debacle with Servage, I started searching around for a great database host. SiteGround touts themselves as just that. The sales rep I e-chatted with promised that my site which uses a Wiki and a Forum through a MySQL database would have no problem with SiteGrounds shared server package.
I have to admit that the first couple of months weren't bad. Although users would get random error pages and the logs were looking for files in the wrong folders, things were relatively stable and passably fast. Unfortunately, SiteGround decided to upgrade their server's software and must not have done their homework as they had to issue a canned response to all of the "Server Down" tickets that basically said the update was incompatible with their hardware. For over a week, I was told that it would be about a month of enduring constant errors and inaccessibility before we'd be back to normal.
As for the support team, well, they're really bad. When you open a ticket, they respond within minutes, but they IMMEDIATELY close the ticket whether their solution actually solves the problem or not. I realize they do this in order to keep their stats in good shape, but those numbers (like the 99.9% uptime stats) are completely inflated. Don't believe them. The techs also suffer from "blame the customer first disease." In addition to going back on what my sales rep guaranteed (they eventually told me after the "upgrade" that my needs were beyond the shared service's abilities), they kept pitching that I use one of their site designers at $50/hr to fix my woes.
I considered staying with them to get a VPS for convenience reasons, but there prices are WAY out of line there (as much as 3x's what you'll find elsewhere). Even considering the inconvenience they caused, the best offer they had was over $80/month for fewer features than the competition.
Worked with siteground recently for work with one of our client websites. This client was using siteground because of their inexpensive oscommerce hosting. However you get what you pay for.
The experiences the client has had and we had working for him were horrible! Some of the issues included:
1. Various common server & php variables / modules turned off, that are NEEDED for more advanced functionality of oscommerce. How can a company CLAIM to be the best oscommerce hosting company, and not even have common items turned on like apache rewriting, cURL, OpenSSL, GD Library, etc.???!
2. Programming Support: They CLAIM they offer programming support for their oscommerce cart, or your own, yet out of the 3 times the client contacted them before coming back to us to ask for help, they NEVER got anything resolved and wanted to charge him for everything!
3. Customer Support: Their customer support is a TOTAL joke for several reason:
a. The main phone number they had listed on their site, did not go to their company...but was an 800 phone number for SEARS & ROBUCKS! I found a second phone number, called them and informed them of this and they did not CARE or ever changed that number. I verified calling that number 3 times as well!!
b. When I called tech support successfully, I was on hold for over 20 minutes total of a 30 minute phone call...and they indicated to me that the client had submitted 16 trouble tickets recently...which "exceeded his FREE support for this year. Any further tech support will be chargeable".
c. It sounded like there was only 3 techs working out of someones basement, as my entire conversation I was having difficulty hearing her over the other two techs talking behind her.
d. Half of the technical questions I asked regarding server setup, etc. the woman was COMPLETELY clueless on (things like SEND mail.."what is that?").
I have NEVER dealt with a more incapable, incompetent hosting company for a client EVER!
Their prices are the best, but I urge to everyone to keep in mind you get what you pay for.
Siteground's uptime is outstanding and the host places emphasis on systems administration. The add-ons work a high percentage of the time. That being said, the best maintained system goes astray, but when this happens, Siteground places responsibility squarely on the customer. Customer support is only by ticket, which is answered promptly within minutes, but is very basic, and invariably tells you that whatever is going wrong is your fault. There is so much emphasis on customer service responding quickly, that getting rid of the customer, even closing tickets before resolution, is usually what happens after you are referred to a knowledge base which doesn't solve the problem. I only need Suport when there is a server problem which Siteground never admits. Recently Siteground instituted a no-customer support until you run automated scripts which is time-consuming and frustrating. I have noticed that when problems occur, it is usualy on the weekends where the support person responds even more basically. There is only one support person at a time. Server load has become heavy recently, close to 4.
The have grown too fast and there customer service is now terrible! The say they give now 250mb of disk space. Thats a lie. You have only about 10gb space and they total files types sizes to 5gb in total. 5 gb zip files max, 5gb image fiels max etc.
There help and support desk seems to be all scripts now instead of real people and there prices have gone up too!!
Its very difficlut to speak to a real person or get a none (already made auto reply)
Stay clear, dont go by these other reviews, im sure its sitegrounds staff half of the 5/5 reviews!
Excellent Web Hosting service.
Best thing about them is the Instant activation ans their tech support.
The chat feature enables me to clear all my queries and doubts.
They have a brialliantly designed KNOWLEDGE BASE where one can find almost anything! And if not there still is the tol free call support and ticketing system.
At best I would say that to start with things were just OK. As time progressed it went down hill. I believe this host is now seriously over selling and this is the root of the problems.
Problems with downloads from my site and frequent time outs for my customers. I believe the servers themselves are stable, but they now have too greater customer to server ratio. They just can't sustain acceptable performance with disk and bandwidth quotas they are offering.
Support tickets were responded to promptly and courteously, however the answers were mainly platitudes and my issues were never fully resolved.
I also feel cheated because you only get 7 support tickets before you have to start paying for these tickets. No where did I see mention of this limit before signing up for the account.
I have now switched to PolurNet and so far (two months) no problems what so ever.
Why? They don't clarify, provide or support their services as advertised. Not even simple things. Moving 3 sites from there as soon as possible. The Sales people were great, but the "services" and "help desk" are NOT recommended.
I've been with Siteground for over a year now and have never been so blown away by the support from a hosting company as I have been with these fine people.
Yep, the odd support issue does raise it's ugly head but that's the nature of the internet, what counts is how well and how quickly hosting problems are resolved. Siteground excel at this!
Their rates are really affordable and you really should take a look at them if you want to create a site or transfer from an old host!
This host SUCKS! Try hosting an online store or a busy site on this host and then rethink your position on them. At first I didn't think my sites would be too busy - 6 months later they were booming, and siteground couldn't support it. I had a store on their servers and I CONTINUALLY got duplicate orders and lost orders.
Also my sites kept going down - I had more downtime than uptime. Every night I checked around 10pm (the BUSIEST time for my site) and I could never get to it - not from home, not from school, and not from work.
Also do you really think you'll get 40GB of space to do whatever? They restrict your space usage. You can only have 5GB of archived files (.rar, .zip, etc) and another 5 gigs of pictures. The rest can ONLY be filled with text files! What the h*ll is that?? For those who don't know, the store I had was a digital store - you could purchase stuff and it would be ready for download immediately. I have well over 8GB of .zip files full of digital content, and SiteGround suspended me while I cut back on the content. Had to knock it down to less than 5GB to have it reinstated. There goes almost 50% of my profit!
SiteGround, in a nutshell, sucks. Do not host with these guys if you want a serious host. For mom&pop websites about their children, sure this is great, but if you want to do ANYTHING that will get more than 10 visits a day.. you're better off elsewhere.
I don't care what you're paying. wouldn't matter if hosting were FREE! To have a site at SITEGROUND is heaven. 24x7 support in sub minute time. they stick with you until it is resolved. None of this, "we'll call you tomorrow crap". helpful, friendly, very professional. Tutorials that you'd pay for anywhere else. And they'll work with you if you have special needs. I've been with all the "top" hosting facilities and I can tell you that SITEGROUND has SAVED me more time and thus more money than they ever cost. This is not a FREE site. It pays you to use them. You gain hours if not days that would otherwise be spent screwing around with support in Mongolia or West China. these guys are great.
Siteground is one of the best deals on the web. Aside from HostMonser, there are very few who beat it. 40G storage space, unlimited FTP, email, SQL, PostgresSQL, cPanel, etc. It is a long list of features that alone makes your website do more.
The ONLY downside is the email reliability. Email used to be solid for me, but lately it has not been able to connect 100% of the time. This happened after they migrated my site over to another server (which they did not inform me of until I had to put in a ticket). Still, email is up and tunning most of the time, but for heavy users this could be a problem.
For users looking to host multiple domains on one account, SG is not the cheapest. HM is better.
Pricing is unbelievable. I needed a site to post recorded lectures for fellow classmates and my own podcast. They have a plethora of software to choose from and free assistance in developing a webpage. I haven't had single problem yet. They were quick to answer my technical question. I highly recommend their services.
I have had my account with Siteground for just a few weeks, but have been incredibly impressed with their customer service so far.
I just screwed something up when I was making changes to osCommerce and couldn't access my site. I posted a ticket with siteground and they had my site back up and running successfully after solving my screw up in LESS THAN 15 MINUTES.
Excellent customer service so far and a very fast, reliable server!
Siteground do offer a good range of features, and from first impressions may appear good on bandwidth and disc space. However, read the small print, as they do not actually provide everything they offer, for expample, disc space is supposedly 40GB but if you have a site over 5GB you may be suspended, as having too much (5GB is the size you are allowed for most file types)
Siteground shared servers are overloaded, since their growth in 2006 they have failed to keep up on hardware - and so websites and email suffer from regular outages. Certainly not the worst host out there, but beware of the sales talk from them as it is not necessarily true.
The bottom line - if you need reliability and high disc space /bandwidth, use a provider that fdoes not limit you as much as Siteground does
I asked for a trial account . . . the sales rep told me to "sign up for 30 days and if not happy get a refund". However, when I tried to get that refund, I was told that the Terms of Service state that I cannot get a refund. Hmmm, interesting way to obtain a sale. Just pretend that they don't have a 30-day guarantee and you'll be closer to the truth.
If you don't mind having your host company loose all your website files when they transfer to new servers, SiteGround is your company. A couple of weeks ago I got a message from them saying that they were upgrading servers. On Friday the servers went down, on Saturday they were still down, on Sunday they sent a letter saying "Oops, we lost your site files". Fortunately they managed to save the databases, and it only took us two days of work to reestablish the site. I cannot think of something worse than losing your website after months of work, if happened not to be backed up. But the fact that this company does not take care to backup or have safe practices with redundant storage is a major drawback.
Additionally, once the site was up one day we could not have ftp access or accees to the CPanel. No amount of technical support solved it, only moving to a new host!
Beware!!
Apart low pricing policies of SiteGround, fastness of the servers and the sercice practically up 24/7/365, i would like to remark professionality, friendly way and the fastly solving of problems/deals (2/3 minutes) from their support staff.
They really make every possible effort.
When i subscribed with them an hosting plan, registering of my domain was free and everything was up in a couple of hours (they even phoned me too from the USA about some details).
I'm surely going to renew my subscribtion with them: it's a "gold" service.
very very pleased - tech support is briliant - i´m in spain but had a question this morning - i got a reply back in 5 minutes even though it was registered at 5.40am their time
Siteground is the best hosting company we have used in the eight years we have operated our site and created sites for clients. The service is to date impeccable, with customer service and tech support giving really swift service. There is bascially nothing you can ask them that they will not find a way to do in the fastest possible time. We always get updates from Siteground about new and improved services they offer to current clients, and we feel as if they actually give a hoot about the customer.
SiteGround has removed Backup Restore option from Fantastico in Control Panel. Now when you ask for backup or restore of your web site or database or just a single file, SiteGround support team ask you to pay 30$ for each request.
I recently moved my website - http://www.traderstime.com - to Site Ground and have had nothing but great smooth sailing so far. Also, their support is the best!
I have been monitoring SiteGround for over a year, now. I have reviewed statistics and reviews as my website is very important for me and I do not want any problems with the host. Despite, they have experienced downtimes and have clients that are complaining, this is one of the best hosts I have ever seen. The tech support is great and the response time is incomparable.
My experience with hosting companies is more than worse. I have been with Ipowerweb, Lunarpages, and BlueHost. Unfortunately, no other host, but SiteGround, made my website up and running. SiteGround treats its clients with great care and maybe for this reason they have grown that much for such a short period. They already host 35 000 websites and are up since 2003. This is just another fact that shows how awesome SiteGround are!!!
ok. where do i start. my current site is running at siteground. at the begining, siteground ruled the earth. lately, their support has gone down hill really fast. they moved meover to their $89 a month as my joomla has grown quite a bit. considering the price i am paying, i wonder why these guys don't have 1800 24/7 support. all of their competitors do. anyhow, i currently cannot get into their billing system to pay my account. for some reason, i do not have access to their ticket support system to notify them of the problem. i would like to pay my account to get everything on track. as it stands, i cannot work with a hosting that can't support me when a crisis like this happens. as being from canada, my only voice contact is their pre-sales department which means i need to pay on my own dime. i don't have time to be dicked around like this as many hours have been wasted thus far. my problem has not been resolved.
as it stands, i am fed up with these guys and will be trying out host gator as per my research. they look good and will even transfer my entire joomla codebase and mysql data over no problems at no extra costs. they also have 800 24/7 which is a now a must for me. if you want to talk to a pompous crappy hosting company that will hang up on you on your dime, siteground is your place. good luck with them but i would not use them. sorry.
This would have to be the worst webhost ever in the history of webhosts. Basically they can not provide what they say they can.
They claim to have Outstanding Technical support, sorry but we have yet to experience and technical support, let alone outstanding, having to wait over 48 hours for a simple problem that should take 15 minutes to fix.
They claim to have 24/7 Top Customer care, again we did not see this as there was never anyone available on there 24/7 Chatline, and if there wasm they could not help you or answer your question.
15 minute response time? Yes there was a response, your ticket was forwarded to someone else and you had to wait over 48 hours for a reply and the reply had nothing to do with the problem.
They claim to be based in the USA, well, we have proof that they are not, they are actually run their business out of Bulgaria, why do we know this? We insisted on a full refund of all monies paid to them because of all the issues we had with them, they insisted we open up a PayPal account which we refused to do, this went on for over a week that we open up a PayPal Account as this is the only way we can get a refund. After much back and forward of emails they said they would pay us through Western Union if we paid the fees, again we refused unless they paid the fees. Eventually we got our refund and through Western Union, and it came from Bulgaria, not the USA.
Our advise would be to stay well away from Sitegroud.
I was amazed at sitegrounds service when first signing up, it was very very good. I know little about servers and hosting so a friend did it for me and was also really happy with the service given, pre sales was great, after sale was fantastic – but then I never really asked for something that technical to be done.
More than not the service is good, they are helpful and try hard to please the customer. But as the business has grown they have become sloppy and unhelpful and this is showing more and more. I have never experience a problem on siteground which the help desk couldn't fix. Lately in the last few months, little issues have begun to niggle at me. But I stupidly ignored them. I moved two more sites over to their hosting (four in total) and two of those sites now have problems with email and with the asp contact forms. Another of the sites when moved had the files moved to the incorrect place so nothing would show online. I didn't think it mattered because I thought, customer service will help so I shall go place a ticket.
Well, the ticket system has now changed and they do not answer within 15 mins and that’s if you can find a ticket to post. They expect the customer to use the knowledge base and when I questioned this, they said that it’s better for the customer.
I asked why they still have the info about the 15 mins response time on their website, surley that has to do with the old service not the new service. There is no response time when using a knowledge base. They ignored me, took two days to tell me that they would upgrade me for free to asp.net (with a hope that the forms would work again – which they didn’t) but that it wasn't there problem re the asp contact form not working and that I should pay to have it copied into php. I was then instructed to read their terms and conditions – which obviously frees them of their responsibilities and sloppy workmanship leaving errors on my sites.
They closed the ticket.
I told them I want to make a complaint, but I can see that there is no complaint procedure on the site at all. So I'm guessing, after paying out all the money to have the sites transferred and my domain names moved there, I will now have to pay to move them away. I won’t be treated in that manner, there is too much choice out there these days to put up with sloppy companies, when growth sets in they leave the customer well behind. All I want is good customer service when I pay money. I don't care how much I pay as long as the service is good and customers concerns are listened to. But when I get 'closed' on a ticket when the issue hasn’t even been resolved, they have taken my money and run with it, my back will be up and I will make it my business to find out the names of the directors and where they are based. I know siteground is popular, rightly so if it delivers what it says it does on the tin and it did once certainly do just that.
But somehow, I believe that as siteground grows, the service will become more and more shoddy and it will leave more customers unhappy with the service. This is yet to be seen but I fear that this is only the beginning!
When I first started with SG they were great and I recommended them to a lot of people. My first sign of trouble came when a friend had a few hundred megs of videos online that she had created herself. They shut her down without notice for 'copyright infringement'. She shot, edited and compiled the video footage, hence she owned the copyright. They wouldn't listen and didn't care - I think they didn't like the bandwidth being used even though she used less then 10% of the advertised bandwidth. They didn't even have the decency to refund the rest of her year's hosting. She filed a claim with her credit card company for service not rendered and she got her money back - and they got a nice juicy chargeback :)
Then another of my sites started going down about every other day. I'd open a ticket and they'd say it works fine. But it wasn't. I'd reopen ticket over and over and finally they'd come up with some excuse and fix the server. This happened for about 3 or 4 months until they finally escalated the tickets to someone that apparently had a brain. He changed my private ip and lo and behold everything was fine after all that time.
They are heavily overloading their servers with sites which is why they'll kick anyone using even a remote amount of bandwidth or server resources. They make up some lame excuse and send you on your way packing. Happened to two people I know and almost to me on one site though I fought my way out of it. If you use SG and they try to pull crap like this, stick to your guns and hold them to their TOS.
I guess SG is fine for a low volume hobby site, but I really really really would not suggest using them for any site where you derive income - it will cost you more in the end!
Siteground is a great low-cost provider. They have unbelievably good support. Real, knowledgeable people who provide quick and accurate answers. They respond to site outages quickly. I have a had a couple of problems with site outages but nothing recently and nothing for a very long time. They helped me set up MediaWiki and have auto-installers for many open source CMS and other tools. Highly recommneded for anyone who wants an inexpensive, easy to user hosting provider.
For complete details and a trouble ticket history, see:
www.sitegroundsucks.com
Summary: SG was great our first year. Then, about May of 2006, they went to the depths of unreliability - 17 trouble tickets since then (could have been 19, but the last two we didn't even file.) We have basically abandoned that domain name and the SG host - don't plan to renew when our pre-paid time is up.
Most of the time the "first-line" tech support is canned and "It isn't on our end, must be your computer". When you finally complain often enough - at $12 a TICKET after the first 7 per year. Our problems were devesating to our business - Ebay and PayPal emails lost and deleted without a word to us (SpamCop Filtered). Took a little less than a week to convince them it was really happening. Then an error in their "Spam Cop correction code" - that caused another day's delay and lost emails. Server HD crash and down for 24+ hrs. The problems went on and on until the last email outage when we regiestered a new domanin name with HostMonster.com and migrated our site. All has been working wonderful with the new HM site. If you want complete details and proof of what we say, see the www.sitegroundsucks.com site - Yes, it was so bad that we registered that domain name and posted the details to try to get these guys to wise up. One bright note. We did eventually find one great SG employee that seems to be part time, 3 days a week. He really cares and goes beyond the call of duty to try to find the problems, but how much can one fellow do part-time with what I am sure are other responsibilities. Check it out... Mike
Compared to our previous hosting company, Siteground was like a breath of fresh air. They are already set up and ready for Joomla and similar applications, and the customer support has always been prompt and helpful. The only thing we don't like is the limited number of service tickets allowed but to be honest we hardly have any problems anyway. We have not noticed any downtime or email issues and they are always sending message about new and upgraded features they add to the standard packages.
We would recommend Siteground to anyone who asks. (Compare this to our Powweb review)
I've been hosting with this company for a long time. At the beginning they service was very godo for the money: fast ticket responce, good (if oversold) account features.
From then on as they grew things went downhill. They kept boosting the apparent bandwidth/HDD space limits, while putting clauses in their Terms of Service where they take those features back. For example they currently state you can host 40GB on their account, but their ToS claims you can't have more than 5GB of "multimedia". In a conversation with their team it turned out mostly everything containing a piece of image or sound is multimedia, including archives, except I guess plain text files.
Their reliability is poor. Their don't keep their servers in a RAID setup which will ensure they have a good drive mirror in case of a drive failure. I've had about 2 days downtime when the server my account was on, crashed. They backup once a week which for a dynamic site is heavily insufficient.
Their support went downhill too. They still reply within 15 minutes of inquiry but it's no a problem resolution it's usually a template answer or something like "ok we're working on the issue". To resolve the actual issues hours may pass, or days.
They no longer offer free support as well. 5-6 months ago they introduced a new system where you have 7 free tickets per year, and free "site down" tickets. What constitutes a site down is not clearly written down and they occasionally convert tickets reporting emergent issues to the paid tickets.
They responces are polite, but not helpful, they often will treat you as an ignorant and talk their way out of real problems with template answers like "we're striving for best customer satisfaction".
One morning I woke up to see my sites down, I checked my mail, no messages. Some of them were down, some displaying empty directory listing and some displaying "account is disabled" message.
I went and posted a "site down" ticket, to which I first got reply I got banned for hosting more than 5 GB of multimedia. I have 10 GB arcihve on their site which is not multimedia. Upon clarifying this they saijd they are "sorry" and apparently my sites went down as they moved them (without notification) to another server and I need to update my DNS for all my domains.
When I asked why was I notified, they said they are "sorry" again and the e-mail bounced (the e-mail server is again hsoted there). When I asked why their own e-mail bounced off their own e-mail server I was ignored.
I updated the DNS of some of my domains which were most critical to me and confirmed that I see the proper IP/DNS on my site (it propagated to me).
I then noticed the account was not moved properly at all: the e-mails didn't recognize their passwords (had to reset the password of each e-mail), half my files were in the wrong location, some of them having duplicates, some of them older (from a backup?) and the other half was missing. I of course panicked, and having already more than a day unplanned downtime I started asking what the hell is going on.
The reply was "the files couldn't be moved, but we can give you access to download them". On a consumer connection it'd take me a week to download and upload such amount of content and so I asked them to just erase the copy on the server and try to move it again, properly this time.
I got reply that I'm being rude, my account was suspended and they told me to stop posting tickets until someone from upper management looks into the issue. I want to clarify I didn't insult them, but in the panick I used few curse words to describe the state my account was in. That's in no way reason to suspend someone's account.
Another day of downtime, and no responce. I posted another ticket when I described my situation and asked why noone is working on my situation and noone replying to my tickets. I got another "sorry" reply and that someone would personally take care of the situation.
Few hours later I got several "is it ok" now replies to which I had to answer negatively explaining where my files are still missing and what else is wrong.
At that point my account was suspended again and I was told I breached their ToS and my account is canceled. When asked where I breached their ToS, they pasted a section where it basically said "SiteGround has rights to determine whether a client has breached their ToS and terminate their account". And that was it. I was given three days to get the pieces of my content that survived, and my account was shut down.
My verdict is this: if you want a cheap $5/mo hsoting where to put some family photos to show to friends, it's as good as any other shared hosting. But if you have dynamic content and wanna host serious content there, run like hell in the opposite direction.
Siteground were OK until they upgraded their server last month. They didn't bother to check on the websites after the upgrade and their server was incompatible with joomla so our site went down. It was down for about 2 weeks before we noticed (away on holiday), we had ask them to fix the problem. They restored the website but not to the original state before the server upgrade, it is missing our logo (it has the joomla logo instead) and missing lots of links at the top and bottom that had got our google rating up. We have posted 4 support tickets so far but they just oscilate the state of our website to down or missing information and havent managed to restore it back to how it was, they then close the ticket. Very frustrating, they respond quickly to the tickets but I dont think they have the technical knowlege to sort it out. Apart from this they have been fine as hosts, except they dont give you much help for free- they want to charge you $20 for everything joomla related, which is understandable I suppose.
Great host, but research problems with SpamCop before signing up. SpamCop apparently will "blacklist" all of the email from any ISP that sends out spam. That means that email from gmail, hotmail, etc. will sometimes be completely blocked.
If you can tolerate clients and friends getting "email blocked" messages, than SiteGround is the best. If you depend upon email getting through, find another host.
The backup function at Control Panel is disabled intentionally. You cannot get a backup of your site if your site is hosted on SiteGround server. If you want to get a backup of your site, you have to pay $24.95 for the support and they will do it for you. This is quite expensive for such a simple operation.
Well at first this hosting service looks great, the support is fast but only if you have a basic problem if your problem is not basic expect a "not hosting related" or a "we cant solve your problem" response, the support is limited to 7 tikets after this you need to BUY more tikets at 12 usd each, not so good.
The host service itself its good untill you get 2,000+ visitors a day, then is when they start telling you that you use a lot of resources and you need to move to guess what... a 89 usd a MONTH vps service wich instead of having the 500 gb transfer it haves a 150 gb transfer limit, if you dont move to a vps server they will trethen you to a permanent page suspension.
So to end the review, if you need a cheap host, and your website is justfor showing a few friends this host will do, now if you are planning to host a popular page there then run like the pest!.
I am very satisfied with sitegroud services.Not only is their uptime
99.9% they really have good back end team who are always ready to address my problems.
The good part is the support team will always put customer interest first before committing to any changes or finalising my issues that i
forward to them.
i'd never heard of Siteground before, but luckily i stumbled upon it in a web search for the best mambo/joomla hosting provider. but it's not only a mambo host, its an all around, full of available scripts, 99.9% uptime, fast servers host.
if you are into mambo, installation is done clicking 1 button. done! they also have a tutorial page for those who are new to it (like me). and if you aren't into those scripts, you have more than 20 other scripts that are installed with a click of a button as well. phpnuke, joomla, drupal, oscommerce, zencart, osticket, coppermine, and literally dozens more are installed with a click of a button. its so easy i feel like scripting my whole site! i would take 2 minutes to do so.
the best feature, besides the comparatively cheap price (as of today, 5usd a month for 12gb with domain included), and the myriad scripts installed with 1 button, is the customer's relations they have. by far, i have never been so happy with the customer's support in my life. on my previous hosting provider, i had to wait 1 or 2 days to get an answer, and i still had to reply to the answer and that took 1 or 2 more days. this is no joke, and im sure a lot of us have or had the same problem before.
siteground is different. there is a live online chat line. i've never waited more than 1 minute to chat with a fully capable operator that knew how to answer every question i had.
they have a ticket system too, for rapid answering of problems and questions. i've asked a lot of questions, the average resolution time of my problems is 4 minutes.
they also helped me transfer over 2gb of information from one of my past hosting providers to the siteground servers. they did all the work for me and for free!
congratulations to siteground for the excellent CRM. i have now transfered all my hosting to siteground and i am very happy and proud. recommended 100%.
SiteGround's server has too many websites on it, so when your website has about 600 unique visitors a day, they will close you down..if you don't beleive me, visit their forum..
also the customer service is good but i reckon that this site is good for hobbies..if u decide to make a website for urself and maybe for 20 visitors a week then this is a good choice, but if u doing something with more than 300 visitors a day, then dont think about choosing SiteGround.
The first half a year i was excited by SiteGround, but since a few month there seems be a restriction on support. I don't have the feeling that I need much of support.I am convinced my problems were real problems. But now for technical support you can contact the support for several times a month or year. If you reach the limit you can not even contact the support. It feels not right.
NOw i am a bit disappointed.
this site is very responsive when help is needed. The almost alway respond within minutes and if something will take longer they let you know upfront and stick to their promises. Highly recommended.
Siteground is an amzing company. I transfered 9 accounts and one of them had errors. They worked on it till it was fixed. I am a webdesigner and have had many host over the years, none of them stood behind what they said. Siteground does.
the only people who deliver much more than what they promise. i chose siteground after months of research and comparative study, and it's one of the most winning choices i have ever made.
I would recommend the people working at SiteGround to everybody who want to run a website without any worries!
The service of SiteGround.com is FAST and EXCELLENT.
Also very human. I did not feel a "number" but I felt like having a pleasant human contact.
I am so lucky I found this company. Thank you guys at SiteGround!
I work and leave in Austria. My host is in the States. The Communication is excellent and I´m very happy with the support and services they offer. If your business is the INTERNET you need a secure and Trust place.
Ive been with several hosting company's and siteground by far is the best out there.. customer support is out of this world.. they have all the latest and greatest of everything.. Highly recommended!! A+++
Excellent value for money. $5/month for good web hosting with plenty of bandwidth, may e-mail accounts, many extras (at no charge), and the best Technical Support I've come across - extremely responsive and very helpful.
I am satisfied the the service of Siteground. They keep improving their services, and the size of disk space and bandwith transfer rate.
About three months ago, I had some problems with my databases: they got blocked. But this only happened two or three times. Lately, I had not suffered that problem.
Site Ground deserve to be in the top listing of hosting providers. The are supporting the customer (me) very well and listen to my wishes. The price and their products are great.
It's only a pitty that i can not access Site Ground-control panel at my work, because of security reasons.
If there was a way to tip for the service I've gotten from SiteGround customer service reps, I'd be paying for sure.
SiteGround plan is more than I can wish - free domain, great price, and lots of space and traffic. And that is just a tiny piece of the value I am getting.
This is the 2nd time they've helped me restore my site, if not for them, I'd have lost all the info. Excellent work, friendly service, and skilled workers. Thanks a ton.
