When it comes to running a website, having a reliable web hosting company is of the utmost importance. A 2019 study conducted by Portent revealed that the first five seconds of your site’s loading time has the biggest impact, with 0 to 4 seconds found to be the best for conversions. Let’s face it: if your website experiences a lot of downtime, you’re missing out on potential customers and may drive away existing ones.
Among the companies offering web hosting services, SiteGround has gained popularity for its stellar customer service and excellent speed and performance due to its optimised hosting architecture. Whether this is just hype or it’s actually as good as people say it is, we’ll explore in detail below.
What is SiteGround?
SiteGround is a company based in Sofia, Bulgaria.
Since 2004, it’s been slowly but surely carving its name as one of the most reliable web hosting service providers available. Besides regular web hosting, it offers WordPress hosting, WooCommerce hosting, and Cloud based hosting services.
SiteGround has data centres in six countries over four continents, including the UK, the Netherlands, Germany, the USA, Singapore, and Australia. With this network amplified by Cloudflare CDN, loading times are faster for site visitors who are near one of SiteGround’s data centres. So if you are close to one of these locations, Siteground would be an excellent choice for you.
SiteGround’s Features
SiteGround offers a wide range of features that makes it the preferred web hosting service for small businesses. These features include its uptime, response time, customer support, and security.
Uptime vs. Downtime
When a website becomes unavailable, it’s usually because the server is down. This is “downtime”. “Uptime” is the opposite: so basically when your site is up and running.
Of course, the higher the uptime, the better. It’s ideal for a website to always available online. Going offline even just for 30 minutes may cause you to lose potential clients, drive away current ones, and even lower your site’s SEO ranking.
SIteGround hosting prides itself on maintaining a consistent 99.9% uptime rate. This isn’t just fluff. This is based on actual data from their Singapore data centre. In fact, in the past 24 months, it has reported only five outages, significantly lower than many of its competitors.
The best part is that SIteGround refunds part of your monthly if its availability dips below 99.9%. That’s how confident they are about their service.
SiteGround Speed
Since SiteGround uses the latest technologies for its web hosting services, it allows for lightning-fast loading time speeds. Its speed technologies include the use of solid-state drives (SSDs), Cloudflare CDN, NGINX web server technology, Supercacher, PHP 7 scripting language, and HTTP/2-enabled servers. With these, response time can range anywhere from 20 milliseconds to over a second.
Because the company has a data centre in Sydney, SiteGround has been garnering good reviews about its speed in Australia. In fact, when tested in five different locations across the country, SiteGround has consistently delivered an average speed of 300 milliseconds.
Customer Service
SiteGround is well-known for its 24/7 customer support. You can get assistance from its team via phone, chat or e-mail. They offer customer care that’s fast, friendly, and professional. SiteGround purposely overstaffs its customer support team so that there’s always someone available to help you with your technical problems.
SiteGround also offers high-quality tutorials and easy-to-follow guides that can help you with some of your hosting needs.
Server Security, Backup, and Updates
When running a website, especially one that handles sensitive information like online payments, strong server security is mandatory. SiteGround not only constantly updates its software, it also does so automatically for all sites, so you won’t need to worry about hackers seeking to exploit vulnerabilities in older site versions. It also utilises the latest intrusion detection and prevention systems to protect against bots, malware and viruses.
SiteGround’s proactive stance comes in the form of its proprietary systems. These systems allow the company to predict problems and address them ahead of time, standing in contrast to other reactive web hosting companies. To further protect and safeguard your data, SiteGround offers daily backups, which you can upgrade to daily with its premium plans. It also offers free Secured Socket Layer (SSL) to keep the data between your site visitors and your site protected and confidential.
Conclusion
SiteGround matches its great speeds with excellent customer service and security features, making it one of the best website hosting providers in Australia. With its easy interface and one-click install for WordPress sites, it’s also a good contender for the best website hosting for beginners.
SiteGround offers three shared hosting plans:
- Startup at $6.99/month
- Grow Big at $9.99/month
- Go Geek at $14.99/month
With the more sites and HD space the higher you go.
We host our site and many of our client sites using SiteGround and cannot recommend their service highly enough! give us a shout if you have nay questions.
