SiteGround Review: 6 Main Reasons Why We Use It

by Aliko Sunawang

Last updated on March 30, 2023

Choosing the right web hosting is a crucial step to start a website. With so many options out there, it’s a bit challenging to choose the best web hosting for your website. In reality, many site owners have to be a web hosting hopper to find a web hosting provider with the best performance. We once on that state before eventually we use SiteGround.

We started this website (WP Pagebuilders) in October 2019. At first, we used a shared hosting plan with a storage capacity of 5GB from our previous provider. The specs of the plan said that it could handle unlimited monthly traffic. In our mind, it also means unlimited daily traffic until one day, we gained a bunch of visitors from a Facebook campaign we ran and turned out, the server couldn’t handle it.

That was the first issue. Another issue we experienced with our previous hosting provider was regarding the performance of the website administration. Every time we wanted to install a new plugin, it could take minutes for the WordPress dashboard to load. The same issue also happened to the Elementor editor.

Server configuration is another issue why we gave up with our previous hosting provider. They disabled some crucial PHP functions required by WordPress, including the send_mail function which is used for mail delivery.

So, why we decided to switch to SiteGround?

With all of the issues we described above, it would be surprising if we don’t make a plan to move away. But where to?.

Some criteria for our next destination were:

Speed/performance (especially for site administration)
The ability to reach technical support via live chat
Scalability (we need it just in case our site grows)

To be honest, SiteGround was not our priority at first. We planned to move to Kinsta as Kinsta is powered by Google Cloud. Sadly, the hosting plans offered by Kinsta didn’t meet our needs. We needed a managed WordPress hosting plan that could host 3 to 5 websites at less than $30 per month. The cheapest plan offered by Kinsta ($30 per month) only allowed us to install one website.

After making some research, we stumbled on this blog post written by Syed Balkhi, the founder of WPBeginner. On the blog post, Syed explained why he moved WPBeginner to SiteGround. From Syed, we knew that SiteGround is now also powered by Google Cloud Platform, same as Kinsta. In short, we officially moved to SiteGround in May 2020.

Here are 6 main reasons why we eventually decided to move to SiteGround.

1. SiteGound uses Google Cloud Platform

Knowing that SiteGround is now using Google Cloud Platform is huge news for us. As we mentioned earlier, we planned to switch to Kinsta at first before eventually chose SiteGround with Google Cloud being our main reason. Google Cloud has an excellent reputation in the webmaster and app developer community thanks to its top-notch cloud infrastructure.

Started from January 1, 2020, all of the new SiteGround customers get hosted to the Google Cloud. So, if you order a hosting plan on SiteGround after that date, your website will be hosted on Google Cloud regardless of the plan you use. Even if you order the StartUp WordPress hosting plan (the cheapest WordPress hosting plan from SiteGround).

2. SiteGround is recommended by WordPress.org and Elementor

As you can see on the footer section of this website. We use WordPress+Elementor to create this website. WordPress is the most popular content management system that powers about 34% of existing websites on this planet. In the CMS market share alone, WordPress takes a portion of about 60% (source: Kinsta). In the context of market share, WordPress is like Google Chrome on the web browser and Windows 10 on the desktop operating system.

Knowing the fact that the WordPress.org team and Elementor team recommend SiteGround is another temptation that leads us to make a switch.

According to the Elementor team, SiteGround is one of the web hosting providers that have high compatibility with its platform. When you install WordPress using SiteGround’s installer, you will also be recommended to install the Elementor plugin.

3. SiteGound offers managed WordPress hosting plans

As we mentioned earlier, we originally planned to order a managed WordPress hosting plan on Kinsta. Since the specs offered by Kinsta didn’t meet our requirements, we made new research and found SiteGround.

The managed WordPress hosting plans offered by SiteGround actually not much different from Kinsta’s. However, there were some details that made us eventually decided to choose SiteGround.

By the way, what is managed WordPress hosting?

Simply put, a managed WordPress hosting is a hosting service where all technical aspects related to WordPress are managed by a hosting provider. The aspects include:

Security
WordPress updates
Speed/performance
Daily backups
Scalability

All of those aspects are available on the managed WordPress hosting of SiteGround.

Managed WordPress hosting is great for bloggers like us. While all technical aspects related to our site’s performance are managed by our hosting provider (SiteGround in this case), we can focus on writing the content.

4. Better performance for WordPress administration

As we stated, one of the issues we faced with our previous hosting provider was regarding the site administration. Often times, we were made frustrated when opening the plugin manager on the WordPress dashboard.

How could we know SiteGround has better performance while we haven’t used it before?

On a WPBeginner blog post we mentioned earlier, Syed explained that there was about 72% to 100% improvements on the WordPress dashboard load time on his site. After ordering a plan and done migrating our site, we tested it ourselves and yes, we felt significant enough load time improvement on the WordPress dashboard. Here is the screenshot of the WordPress dashboard load time with the cache is disabled.

Note: The internet speed may also affect the load time.

5. Easy to scale up

Every business is planned to grow. So is our business. In the context of the website, you will need higher resources following the growth of the number of visitors. On SiteGround, you can easily upgrade your current hosting plan to the higher plan according to your needs.

6. Live chat technical support

The ability to reach the technical support team via live chat was one of the priorities when we planned to make a migration from our previous hosting provider. This would allow us to solve every technical issue more quickly rather than other methods such as the ticketing system. This option is offered by SiteGround.

SiteGround Review

So far, everything has gone well with SiteGround hosting. Our website — back-end and front-end — is faster to load than before. With a managed WordPress hosting plan we subscribed to, we don’t need to be a hassle about the site performance as it is handled by the SiteGround team. SiteGround will automatically update WordPress on our website every time a new version is available. It also makes daily backups of our site. If we want, we can also make a manual backup.

The pricing plans offered by SiteGround — especially the managed WordPress hosting plans — also make sense for us. The specs on each plan are clear enough, including how many visitors a plan can handle within a month. Each plan also comes with crucial features like free SSL (Let’s Encrypt) and free CDN (Cloudflare).

Another worth-mentioning feature offered by is the control panel. Unlike most hosting providers that commonly offer cPanel, SiteGround offers its own control panel. The SiteGround control panel is simpler, lighter, and easier to use.