Having recently had several less-than-ideal experiences with web hosts, I was eyeing my latest project with some trepidation. Thankfully, this was SiteGround, one of the best web hosting providers. It's a well-established brand known for excellence in customer service and strong hosting performance, even if it comes at a relatively steep price.
SiteGround has been around for more than two decades, thriving in a highly competitive industry that has been slashing web hosting prices. Yet, beyond pricing and performance, a bigger problem is how well customers perceive their journey to launching what is often their first website.
Start the clock 0:00
Signing up
Like with all web hosting reviews and experiences, I do my best to sign up for plans independently. Having been away from SiteGround for a while, I was a little surprised by the error message I saw during sign-up. Apparently, SiteGround has stopped providing services to certain countries. From what I gather, this includes some African countries, India, Malaysia, and Singapore. Service to other regions continues as usual.
Fortunately, I was able to obtain an account from someone and was soon on my way. All I had to do was sign in to a ready-provided account. The plan provided to me was GrowBig, one of SiteGround's WordPress-specific plans, which costs $4.99/mo for new users on a 12-month subscription. Renewal prices are a little steep, though, clocking in at a whopping $29.99/mo once the new user honeymoon period is over.
06:01
Once I logged in with my user credentials, I was guided through one of the smoothest onboarding sessions I'd ever experienced. SiteGround first asked if I wanted to create a new website or migrate an existing site. I decided to start a new website with WordPress, but if you prefer, SiteGround also provides a website builder.
I'm not overly fond of website builders, so I opted for a WordPress installation. My plan was to start a site from scratch and see how far I could get with SiteGround before I either gave up or reached the time limits set for my SiteGround user experience journey.
Naturally, SiteGround didn't miss the opportunity to try some upsells. But at least they weren't pushy about it. I've seen some other hosts get really tricky with their upsells, going so far as to enable some options by default.
If you don't know what you're doing or what you need, I suggest you skip these. If necessary, you can add them later. Remember that each upsell you choose will increase your monthly commitment, so keep it as streamlined as possible at the outset.
Finally, I completed the setup process and reached the final step. I want to highlight this because many hosts omit it during onboarding. SiteGround displays a prominent notice prompting you to point your domain to its nameservers.
If you miss this step, you may need to locate the nameservers. Or if you're really new to web hosting, you might simply be stuck wondering why you can't access your website through your domain name.
15:36
Once the setup process was complete and my domain name configured, I was brought to the default welcome screen. This consisted of a huge welcome banner (which I think is a bit overdone), followed by several prominent links to what SiteGround thinks new users might need.
Yet I wondered why "How to start a new site" was the top option, since I had just completed the WordPress site creation process. What's even stranger is that all the options on the page link to various knowledgebase articles.
It would have been more helpful to start me on a website management screen instead. Or perhaps SiteGround was catering to absolute beginners to web hosting. In any case, at least you have plenty of support if needed.
Ignoring the abundance of options in the main display area, I used the navigation menu at the top of the screen, hoping that the "Websites" link would bring me to my site management panel. And yes, it did.
19:56
The SiteGround website panel is simple and primarily lists all of the sites you can manage in your account. The GrowBig plan from SiteGround allows you to create unlimited websites, provided you stay within your 20 GB storage limit. If you're running small sites and are careful with your uploads, that's sufficient for around 3 websites.
Clicking the "WordPress Admin" option took me to another Wizard that guided me through creating and configuring my WordPress website.
21:40
The WordPress wizard started off by asking me what topic my website would cover. You get some generic options here, such as travel, photography, and restaurants. I decided to be the oddball and chose "Other."
Now, it was time to select a template. The templates SiteGround provides don't appear to be your run-of-the-mill free WordPress templates. Most of the designs looked excellent, and I certainly wouldn't mind starting a new website with one of them. They're extremely polished and give off that "professional" vibe.
In any case, I chose a template for an online plant-selling site because it was minimalist yet refreshing. Once I'd selected my template, the Wizard also recommended a few useful add-ons for my site, such as a contact form, an online shop plugin, and a map. These are then automatically added to the site via plugins.
Finally, the after-site options appear, which help with marketing. These plugins cover analytics, SEO, and subscriber management. Once you've handled this, you can log in to your website and start tweaking it to your liking.
- Read our full SiteGround review for performance metrics and more.
30.43
Honestly, the WordPress admin dashboard looks like any other. This page is the central command system for your website. You can add plugins, configure payment systems, handle your online store inventory, modify the design, and more.
What really impressed me, though, was that the website SiteGround created for me from a template was nearly perfect. It had starter products, everything arranged neatly, and it worked flawlessly. The only oddity was that they omitted the shopping cart from the menu, so I had to add it manually.
By this point, I was half an hour into my SiteGround experience and fairly certain that a full 60 minutes would allow me to complete the site configuration for payments and other minor amendments. Depending on the breadth of your store's inventory, you may need additional time to set it up.
Because of that, I decided to loop back to SiteGround's dashboard to see what else this (so far) impressive host has to offer.
45.02
SiteGround's hosting dashboard is simple, but I got a wide range of customization options for a shared hosting plan. These are neatly grouped into categories to avoid confusion. For example, to manage your site's SSL, go to the security section in the left-hand navigation menu.
While I was here, I also explored the available caching options. SiteGround offers three caching modules: Nginx Direct Delivery, Dynamic Cache, and Memcached. Nginx Direct Delivery caches static assets, including images and certain scripts. Dynamic Cache moves as much content as possible into RAM to speed up your WordPress site. Finally, Memcached is designed to speed up your database, an essential component of WordPress performance.
Another thing to note is SiteGround's CDN feature. Unlike many hosts that tout CDNs but only offer Cloudflare integration, SiteGround has its own CDN. This is available in free and premium tiers. I tested the free tier, and it significantly boosts initial connection speeds.
Last but not least, you have the main customer dashboard. This dashboard provides quick access to SiteGround's Marketplace. This is a collection of other services it offers, neatly arranged into categories for you to browse and pick from.
At this point, I can clearly see the appeal this hosting provider offers to many small business owners. It's a one-stop shop that handles everything you need to run a successful website. For example: marketing and SEO services, domain names, an AI studio for content and design, and more.
60:00
Overall impressions
To me, SiteGround is a case study in an almost-perfect web host. It's certainly fast and has an onboarding process so smooth that it could make the first-class attendants of many airlines blush. For many small businesses, these are properties that are often more crucial than fretting over a few extra dollars in hosting costs per month.
Of course, if you simply want a web host to throw on a small personal blog, that's an entirely different matter, and Hostinger would be a more likely candidate. At the end of the day, you pay for what you get.
At least with SiteGround, you get what you pay for, and that's hard to find today.
- I've also rounded up the best shared hosting providers
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