VISIT SITEGROUND
What happened to SiteGround? Best SiteGround alternatives to save money on website hosting
Video Review Hosting
A Comprehensive Review of SiteGround and Alternative Web Hosting Options
There are a ton of people who are extremely upset with SiteGround, and I think it’s for a fair reason. I’m using the Wayback Machine at Archive.org to look at older versions of their pricing page. In 2020, they had a price increase. This is what it costs before that price increase. You can see right here that their cheapest plan was $3.95, and then it went up to $11.95. Now, those are promotional pricing, and here’s what the regular price was: $34.95 all the way down to $11.95 per month for a single website. Last year, they raised the price, and it is now $14.99 up to $39.99. This is the non-promotional price. These initial prices are the discounted promotional prices when you first sign up.
The Price Increase and Its Impact on Existing Customers
Keep in mind that this plan here, the Grow Big, was for unlimited websites, and the Go Geek right here was also for unlimited websites. Then, all of that changed in April of 2021. You can see they didn’t increase the cost of their plans; they just reduced the amount of websites. The Grow Big was unlimited, now it’s limited to two websites, along with the Go Geek plan, same price as well, but now it’s limited to five websites. These changes have really ticked off a lot of their existing customers, and I’m kind of saddened by it as well, because they did this in the midst of the quality of their service decreasing, and that wasn’t really their fault – it was a global pandemic going on, and suddenly, you have three or four times as many people getting websites and building websites because that’s exactly what happened in 2020, when that happened. And it hurt their support response time, the support quality, the ease of access of support, and I think, as well, the speed of the service.
SiteGround’s Improvements and Upgrades
However, to SiteGround’s credit, you should take a look at their blog, and it will tell you all these new things that they’re adding. I mean, they are adding some stuff that you’re not getting with other web hosting providers, and it’s all about speed. So, here’s something as recent as a week ago, optimizing the RAM utilization of MySQL, and there’s just feature after feature – their caching plug-in improvements, you just gotta read through this. The speed of PHP, all this like techie acronyms and all of that. They have been kicking butt and taking names as it relates to making their service better and faster and higher quality. That’s called going upmarket.
The Decision to Make: Sticking with SiteGround or Switching to an Alternative
So, SiteGround, when you’re a customer, got SiteGround service, you thought it was an affordable hosting plan, and it pretty much was, but they’ve gone upmarket. They’ve decided to add more features, more functionality, more performance, but also with a significant price increase. And so, a lot of people are upset, and they’re looking for new homes, and that’s totally justifiable. Now, that SiteGround has gone upmarket and they’re providing a higher quality of service and a higher performance than they’ve offered before, you have a decision to make: do you stick with them, are you happy with them, do the new plan limitations affect you, and if the answer to that question is yes, it does affect you, you might want to look at a new home. However, if you’re happy with the service, by all means, stick around and stick with SiteGround.
SiteGround Alternatives
I wanted to show you a couple of SiteGround alternatives. SiteGround is now like middle-market, so there are some options below it, and there are some options of higher performance at actually less of a cost as well. So, let’s go over those three options in this video.
Hostinger: The Lowest Cost Hosting Option
If you’re totally on a budget and you need the lowest hosting, lowest cost hosting possible, yet still have it be decent in power and performance, you might want to consider Hostinger. I do have a link and a discount code in the video description box if it interests you. This is your lowest cost provider. The benefits of Hostinger are that it’s built on a technology called Lightspeed, and with that means a free caching technology. I’ll put a link to a video that I made a few months back where I went through taking this free performance plug-in, installing it on your website, and increasing your website performance with it, and it’s included for free.
Pricing and Features of Hostinger
Let’s go ahead and take a look at some of the pricing. They’re always having promotions, so they have normal shared hosting pricing and WordPress hosting, and they’re actually separate services, unlike SiteGround. It’s actually the same thing here; they’re different. Your shared hosting is going to be the cheapest of the cheap, I mean, it is so inexpensive – look at this, a single website, $0.99. Now, that’s $0.99 if you choose multi-pay to pay multiple years up front, uh, and it’s still pretty cheap here, $2.99, but like I said, that pricing is for when you’re paying for multiple years. However, if I was to use their service, and I don’t, I would go for their WordPress hosting right here, it’s going to cost you a little bit more, and you can see that single site that was $0.99, now it’s $1.99. So, you might want to choose this if I had to choose the cheapest web hosting that I could find, I would use this, and I would use the WordPress service right here, right here, that you see.
NameHero: A Mid-Range Option
The next step up would be NameHero. NameHero, from a performance standpoint, is very similar to what you’re getting out of SiteGround now with NameHero, it’s using cPanel, and you might be familiar with that if you’ve had a web hosting account before, and it’s also based on Lightspeed, which gives you access to Lightspeed Cache, which is the free caching plug-in that’s going to save you some money. Their pricing is really good if you use the link in the video description, it says right here, you’re going to get up to 70% off. So, it’s down there in the video description as well. And you can see their pricing is a little bit higher, but it’s totally worth it.
Cloudways: A High-Performance Option
If you wanted to get even greater performance gains, yet have dedicated resources, and yet still have it be less expensive than SiteGround, another side benefit of this service right here with Cloudways is it’s month-to-month. You’re not having to pay for multiple years at a time. You’re just paying month-to-month. And they also have a free trial. I have a coupon code down below that I believe gets you 20 or 30 off the first two or three months. The information is down there below, uh, Cloudways, and I’ve got a bunch of websites on Cloudways, and I, I can’t reveal it, but I know some features that they’re coming out with in 2021, and I got to say, once these come out, this is where it’s at. Cloudways is literally where it’s going to be at when you see these features that they’re releasing. This is a different type of hosting, so you get a control panel that is very easy to navigate, you get a ton of specific WordPress-related features that make having a website super easy. The only difference is that it doesn’t have the email hosting included, so it’s just for your website. But it’s dedicated resources, nothing’s going to be able to touch the performance that you’re getting on Cloudways.
Conclusion
I just wanted to show those if you’re in a situation though where you need to choose some alternative to SiteGround. So, I’ll have the links to those setup videos in the video description. There’s also links to get discounts to any of these hosts if you wanted to switch. So, uh, anyways, I hope it works out well for you if you do end up switching or just consider staying SiteGround’s still a fantastic company. Hey, thanks for watching this video, give it a thumbs up, and I’ll see you in the next one.
