SiteGround Magento Hosting: Pros & Cons [2020 Reviews]

SiteGround is no-doubt, one of the most well-known hosting providers with affordable price and amazing support. There’re many people running their websites from personal blogs to E-commerce business on SiteGround. When searching for review about SiteGround for running Magento 2 website, there will be many questions in your mind such as “is SiteGround good enough to run Magento 2 website?” “Do they provide good customer support?”, “What plan is recommended to run Magento 2 website?” and many more questions…

In this review you will find all the answers, we will explain in detail the reasons why SiteGround is mentioned in our guide about choosing the best Magento 2 hosting.

About SiteGround

SiteGround is a reputed hosting brand that was established in 2004. SiteGround has 4 datacenter in Chicago, USA – London, UK – Amsterdam, Netherlands and Singapore.

• Homepage: https://www.siteground.com
• Number of customers: SiteGround currently serving more than 1.900.000 websites globally
  

SiteGround has a user-friendly user dashboard, you can access Cpanel or do anything with invoice and other stuff with your hosting account easily. Let’s take a look at SiteGround’s user dashboard;

Pricing & Feature

SiteGround offer customers 3 plans:

• StartUp: $3.95/month for the first invoice, then $11.95.mo. Recommended for a website with ~10.000 visits. 10GB SSD space, 1 website & unlimited bandwidth.
• GrowBig: $5.95/month for the first invoice, then $19.95.mo. Recommended for a website with ~25.000 visits. 20GB SSD space, Unlimited website & unlimited bandwidth.
• GoGeek: $11.95/month for the first invoice, then $34.95.mo. Recommended for a website with ~100.000 visits. 30GB SSD space, Unlimited website & unlimited bandwidth.

About Magento 2 features, there’re some limitations for Startup and GrowBig plan. First, there’s no SG-Git for easy Magento repo creation feature on Startup & GrowBig plan. This feature is very important for deploying stagging Magento 2 website. All plans come with Free Magento Installation (using Softaculous), Advanced security and Magento related support.

Also, Startup and GrowBig plan have no PCI Compliant servers, this is an important feature if your Magento 2 store has integrated payment gateways like Visa, CreditCard. It helps prevent credit card fraud and other security threats and vulnerabilities.

For Startup plan and GoGeek, if you want to restore a backup of your website, you will need to do it yourself. Restore support is provided in GoGeek plan.

All plans have Supercacher, an exclusive caching solution developed by SiteGround. With Supercacher enabled, we can see 30% improvement of website load speed.

So which plan is best for running Magento 2 website? The answer is Growbig plan and GoGeek plan. Why we do not recommend Startup plan? We have tested many times running Magento 2 store on Startup plan and it usually outage when the number of users and products increase. Startup plan lacks of ram and processor power to handle multiple actions at the same time.

We recommend using Growbig plan for Magento 2 stores with less than 500 products and GoGeek plan for stores with less than 2000 products

Hosting performance for Magento 2 website

We have done a lot of experiment for testing Magento 2 website’s performance running on SiteGround hosting (GrowBig plan) and here are the results:

Server Load and Stress: This test shows how SiteGround’s hosting handles an increased number of users and actions on a Magento 2 website at the same time.

As you can see from the chart, SiteGround has stable load time from the beginning till the end of the test. Loadtime stands at 600ms and remain steadily until the number of concurent users reached 100. This test proves that SiteGround can be a perfect choice for you if you are looking for a fast and stable hosting.

Latency: This test shows how fast a packet of data travel from SiteGround’s hosting to specific destinations woldwide. We tested with SiteGround US datacenter.

This factor is very crucial as it tells you how fast a file can be loaded from a specific location. Overall, SiteGround has very low latency to all countries worldwide. You can rest assured to host your website at SiteGround to serve global customers.

Load Speed

We tested load speed of a default installation of Magento 2 website (no optimization) hosted on Siteground using Pingdom, a trusted tool for testing website load speed and here is the result

The website scored 83 Grade with a default Magento 2 installation and loadtime is 600ms.

Uptime

We use Uptime robot to monitor uptime of SiteGround and SiteGround’s uptime has been 99% all the time and we rarely see website outage. There was 5 mins downtime in Octorber because of a maintenance from me.

Customer service & Support

What makes SiteGround stand out from competitors is their Customer Service and Support. You will see people give good feedback on SiteGround’s support everywhere. There slogan is “Hosting crafted with care” tells you how customer support is important to SiteGround.

SiteGround offers 3 methods of support: Ticket system, Livechat & Phone

For common issues like pre-sales, payment you can ask for support via livechat to get instant answers. Normally, you just need to wait about 10 sec to 30 secs to get served by a SiteGround agent.

For complicated issues, it’s recommended to send inquiries via Ticket system so that you can follow the process of solving issues. Normally, it take around 20 minutes to get reply for common hosting issues and 1 hour for Magento 2 related issues.

For urgent issue like website outage, website hack, you can use phone call to ask for instant support.

Although SiteGround has very quick support, GrowBig and GoGeek clients’s requests are handled with priority.

Pros & Cons

SiteGround is a trusted brand that you can always choose to host your website. Below are their pros and cons we sumarize from the reviews.

Pros:

• Affordable price for the first invoice
• Strong caching solution: Supercacher
• PCI Compliant server for Magento 2 payment
• Exellent support for Magento 2 related issues and hosting issue
• High uptime: almost 100%
• Fast load and stable hosting

Cons:

• High renewal price: when you choose to renew your hosting, be cautious of renewal fee as the price will increase from the 2nd year.
• Limited feature on Startup and Growbig plan: For Magento 2 website, the recommended plan is GoGeek, or at least, Growbig.
• Limited hosting storage, not recommend for website with lots of images.

Conclusion: Is SiteGround the Right Choice for hosting Magento 2 website?

The answer is YES. If you are looking for a good hosting to start with your new Magento 2 website, then SiteGround is the right choice. From our detailed reviews about SiteGround, you can see that SiteGround care a lot about their customers, they have outstanding support for both hosting issues and Magento 2 issues.

There will be a lot of problems when running a website in Magento 2, and if you don’t have enough experience or budget to hire Magento 2 developer to care your site, then SiteGround is the perfect choice.

When your website grows up with more traffic and products, we recommend using a VPS to host your site rather than a hosting. Read our VPS reviews here.

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