SiteGround is a popular web host and like most hosts, claims to be the best. Personally, I have used it for several years and have all my most important sites on it. It’s great… for any kind of project.

For other at all.

Let’s take a closer look.

The main advantages of SiteGround

While SiteGround has a number of nooks and crannies to watch out for (we’ll discuss in a minute) it also has a lot of advantages, reasons why I’m still with it.

Here are the main ones:

1. Staging sites

Staging site copy is one of the biggest advantages of SiteGround. It allows you to develop a site on its copy, so you don’t have to worry about real visitors seeing the development. Once you are happy with the changes you simply push the changes to the production domain and the existing version is overwritten by the version you created.

How to create staging on SiteGround?

First, you go the WordPress > Staging > Create route and create a copy that you name.

After the copy is created, you can visit the resulting url in our case, for example staging5.vojtechbruk.cz make any changes there, test what you need and once you are happy with the result, just click “Full Deploy” in SiteGround.

And the current page will be replaced with the version you created on staging.

2. Clear administration

UI administration is probably not why you would buy hosting. However, I have experienced a number of hostings, and I rate the intuitiveness and ease of use of SiteGround as a plus.

However, this is a advantage especially if you spend any more time in hosting, which the majority of site owners will not.

Within the administration, e-mails are definitely worth mentioning, as they are clear, easy to create (mailboxes) and you can easily set up any redirection for them.

3. File manager in admin

Siteground also offers the classic FTP, however, if you have no experience with FTP and for example a plugin crashes your site (so that it doesn’t load), you can deactivate the plugin on the site with the _ prefix or delete it altogether thanks to the file manager.

You can also easily delete the cache folder manually.

It’s not a big deal. Rather, it is another (at least for me) nice addition.

4. Simple SSL

Generating an SSL certificate on click is one of the standards of hosting environments. SiteGround also offers this option, plus it will let you enable a secure version for a given site:

So even if you don’t want to replace the url in the database (do it anyway), you can easily ensure that there are no insecure pages on your site, which has benefits for visitors (it won’t deter them) and for SEO.

5. Caching a CDN

Although I use CDN, I haven’t noticed any big improvements with its use, so I won’t go into too much detail about it.

Much more interesting to me is the server caching that SiteGround offers in three versions:

The downside is that sometimes you will have to go to the hosting to clear the cache in order for changes to be reflected on the site, but in general caching is very nice and I can definitely recommend it.Fast PHP

SiteGround also offers something called Ultrafast PHP. If you’re interested in testing if Ultrafast is really faster than regular in any way, let me know, I’ll test it. I didn’t feel any extra change.

In SiteGround you can also easily change PHP version on click, which is unfortunately not standard and is a very nice thing.

6. Temporary domains

Another advantage of SiteGround is that you can easily create a dev domain on which you can develop your new site, and although it will be seen by the people you send the link to (an advantage over local solutions) you don’t have to buy a domain or worry about the site being found by someone who doesn’t have one.

The domain has the format nazevuctu.sg-host.com and behaves just like a classic domain.

Once you’re done, you can simply migrate the site.

7. Backup System

SiteGround provides an automated backup system, with backups being made daily and historically kept in backups for the last month.You can also manually create a backup at any time at the click of a button.

8. GREAT support

SiteGround has excellent support. It is slightly hidden and takes a while to click through, but once you are there, you will find that the support is really great.

**They answer quickly, are tech-savvy, and always go the *********extra mile, to help you solve your problem.

I have experienced support on a number of hosting sites and I can definitely say that SiteGround has the best of them.

So these would be the main benefits and features of this hosting. However, nothing is black and white and since I pride myself on transparency and making content useful, let’s also look at the disadvantages of SiteGround and what to watch out for.

Main disadvantages and what to watch out for

1. Limits of inodes

A so-called inode is a record on the server disk that carries various information about a given file or folder (such as its size, owner, location…), where inode is neither the file’s data nor its name.

In other words, the more files you have on the site (plugins, media, articles…) the more inodes you have on the server.

**And SiteGround has a quota of inodes on ***********, which is fairly easy to exceed when actively used.

This is important to keep in mind.

Because even if you choose a plan that has 20GB of web space and unlimited pages, you can easily run into hosting limits just because of inodes.

As it happened to me for example:

The amount of inodes can of course (like everything) be optimized. However, unless you’re a more advanced creator, there’s probably not much you can do with them, and the only way to solve the problem is

• increase the plan (expensive)
• delete some of the sites you have hosted (annoying)

My personal solution is that I have client, important sites on SiteGround, and I have dozens of my projects on a Hetzner leased server, which, while it doesn’t carry the user-friendliness of SiteGround, is worth 10% of the price…

2. High license renewals and price escalation

SiteGround is cheap… However, only for the first year, then the price will increase rapidly (4 times) and it is good to take this into account.

SiteGround doesn’t hide the price from you, however, in their marketing massage, it’s pretty easy to overlook this fact.

So keep this in mind and consider from the start what the long term price is not the initial, welcome price.

3. Support is great, but hiding

If you’re a new SiteGround user, this may frustrate you. Don’t get discouraged.

Even if it doesn’t look like it, SiteGround has (really) live chat 24/7 and the chat will be happy to help you.

However, you will first have to click through a series of annoying signposts, questions, etc.

I list this as a downside here because although I understand that SiteGround wants people to use the knowledge base and articles as much as possible (not overload support), for me they have gone a bit too far in SiteGround and I rate it as really unfortunate from a user perspective.

Especially considering how much SiteGround costs…

Word in conclusion

If I were to rate SiteGround, even with the universally positive experience, I would give it a nice 4/5.

However, it depends tremendously on what you expect from hosting, how tech savvy you are, and what your budget is.

Personally, I find SiteGround suitable for small and medium commercial sites that are managed by people with less and medium technical knowledge.

So, for example, for sites on builders (like Elementor or Bricks), I find SiteGround optimal.

However, let me know in the comments what hosting do you use? Are you satisfied? And have you ever considered SiteGround?