This article is part of my sharing experience about blogging. I am not an expert so I guess this post can be useful to beginners. It is about Siteground hosting. Before talking about it, I want to explain a bit more about my presence online. Since I started this blog in 2018 (1st January) I saw it grow, like I am doing in learning about the internet.
Well, being a blogger is not easy, because there are many tasks to accomplish. Content creation is just a part of the activity. Especially if you are not a professional. Once you have nice articles you need to promote them, otherwise, no one will read them. It’s not just a matter of quality, visibility is the most important element. But while people are starting to visit your blog, other risks come. At this moment you may need Siteground hosting. Let me tell you exactly why.
In the beginning, I saw the number of readers and followers grow, so I understood that my activity was interesting for some people. What was missing? Many things. Why? First of all, I wanted to customize the pages and there were limits with free WordPress plans. Then I needed to track better visitors, to have an overview of what visitors were reading on my website. I added Google Analytics for that. So I discovered some lacks. A very high bounce rate and a huge number of people viewing only the homepage.
Why? Because adding images, files, and more posts, to download the pages was becoming heavy. More time you need to see the contents of a website and higher are the chance you give up. It means losing traffic. Are you facing the same problems I had? The first step to do to improve the performance is to choose a hosting platform. It helps a lot. Why did I choose Siteground hosting?
From free WordPress to Siteground hosting
When I started my blog I decided to do it with WordPress because it is easy to use. Also, it gives a lot of opportunities. In the free version, there are no plugins to install. This was one of the elements that make me decide to move one step forward. I did it in October 2018. Subscribe a plan of Siteground hosting was a good solution to have a domain and to get a lot of features to improve performances.
Searching online and reading the various reviews I made the first selection of platforms. A few of them were different but all of them giving good prices and many tools. It is not necessary to annoy you with all the processes I did. You will have benefit from the main points. So to explain to you my choice of Siteground hosting I am going to focus on problems and solutions.
Problems and needs
- Customize my site making a new “dress” for it.
- Make it faster
- Manage easily PHP file
- Improve my blog to have an impact on search engines
These main points were important to me, because despite the content if you don’t have a fast and well-structured site, no people will read posts. Why? Because they don’t wait for a long time to download the page, they want something good-looking, on search engines the site s at the end of the list.
Why choose Siteground hosting
You are reading this post because before you to subscribe the service you want to get information about it. Online it is easy to read good opinions about it and learn that Siteground is considered one of the best WordPress hostings. Well, here I am not going to tell you what to do, I am sharing my experience to give you all the news about it so then you can decide freely. My Anasa blog is a client of this hosting service, I chose you, and I have some tips and hints.
Keep in mind that this is my personal experience and I can tell you what I did and all the positive and negative things I noticed using the plan in last years.
Let me start with the reason why I selected it among all the services on the market. Don’t worry, I don’t want to ruin my online reputation by recommending something that doesn’t work. So you can be sure that I am telling you about this hosting because I have a positive experience, still after some years. My habit is always to talk about products and services I personally try, as I do for all the places described in my travel posts. It is like when I give tips to my friends. There is no reason to destroy friendship telling them something I don’t know or suggesting a bad experience. Don’t you think so?
This is why I am going to share my real opinion about Siteground, made after a few years of usage. My post isn’t a promotion, but a lived story. It a user’s review. Among the same services you can find on the market, in my opinion, it is the best one. It offers better features, but also it works very well, even concerning the assistance.
Siteground propose personalized hosting plans dedicated to WordPress but also other platforms. It has powered servers to guarantee excellent performances, high levels of security against menaces, experts ready to answer in various languages 24/7 and quickly. This is what we all need to have a website that works properly. And as you know very well, visitors prefer sites with high performances. Speed is part of the features, it is given thanks to the partnership between Siteground and Cloudflare.
If you already have a site with another hosting or you are just using the free version of WordPress or Blogger, don’t worry. Thanks to a free plugin called Siteground Migrator you can easily transfer all the content to the new service and get a free domain. In case you need support, the staff is available to help you. You can reach the experts by phone, email, or chat. I guess these reasons are already enough to understand why you should choose this hosting, but there is something more.
Why I use Siteground hosting
I spent a period managing my blog using the free space offered by WordPress, which is surely cool, but since I got positive feedback from readers and followers, I needed something more. First of all, I wanted my own domain, then I had the necessity of increasing my traffic with excellent performances. Plus, to use affiliate marketing was mandatory to use a self-hosted site with a domain and fast to load. That’s why I started my research among the various possibilities offered by the market.
So I worked in two directions: create a new dress for the site, using a better theme with more functions, and subscribing to a hosting plan. The goal was to increase uptime. So I opted for Siteground. This allowed me to get more traffic, I had two-three times more and I am still growing. This is due not only to my work but especially to the main features given by the hosting service. That’s why I am here to tell you about the positive experience and be sure that this is the common opinion of people who used Siteground hosting.
They count on last-generation servers, frequently updated security protocols, fast support. This aspect is essential, to people like me in particular. I am not an expert, but often I make changes and I update my site. So it may happen to find some troubles or just to have doubts about some technical activities. So I need to solve this by asking who knows what to do. I don’t have to wait, I can have a live chat with them and I can have it in Italian so it is easier.
If you are not an expert like me, well, Siteground hosting gives you the tool that helps you to do all you need to set up your WordPress site or blog. They have the plugin Siteground WordPress Starter made to automatize all the processes. It is already installed into the dashboard of your Siteground area. So you can select the free theme you prefer and click. Everything will be ready in a while. The system will act on your behalf.
The best for WordPress users
Siteground hosting reserves all the advantages of a managed hosting with the flexibility given by a shared plan. WordPress is an excellent platform and that’s why a huge majority of worldwide sites use it, anyway if you want high performances you need a specific hosting plan for the CMS platform. WordPress itself offers managed plans, but they cost a lot and you can’t have much flexibility. That’s why I highly recommend you to opt for an external host.
Your site won’t be slowed down and it will be better indexed on search engines, starting from Google. The monthly fee starts at 5.99 EUR. I know the price in Italy, but you can convert to other currencies. That rate is for the first year, then it grows, but still, it is convenient. Powered servers will give you high results. You will get more visibility on search engines, that’s why you have to consider this solution. Plus on the WordPress official pages, Siteground hosting is one of the most recommended. This means the platform approves the use of that service.
If you don’t have WordPress don’t worry, the performances given by Siteground are excellent even with other platforms like Blogger. Keep in mind that they give you also the chance to install Woocommerce, the best plugin for e-commerce, you will just need to select it from your dashboard, and automatically will be settled. This is helpful if you are going to open an online shop. It can be a good idea also for affiliations if you want to sell products of other companies on your site and get commissions.
Anyway, all the best tools are included in all plans. So you can choose according to the size of your site traffic.
The features of the hosting
What exactly can you obtain from Siteground? To understand the advantages it is good to explore, step by step, all the benefits. You can explore all of them here.
99.9% Uptime
It is not the only one on the market, but other providers, even do good ones, when you get a certain amount of traffic, it is common to have service interruptions. Siteground hosting is going to assure uptime at 99.9%. It looks to be correct in my experience. Plus, it gives a free CDN to make the site fast. If you subscribe to the plan GrowBig you have access to SuperCacher, an excellent tool to speed up 4 times page loading.
Assistance in your language
If your mother tongue isn’t English, don’t worry. You can get support from experts, on any day, in your own language. So it will be easier to explain the problems and understand their tips and instructions to solve them. This is important because there is always something that can happen and you don’t know how to face it.
Most of the hostings are not answering properly or they are at least limited in sharing information about WordPress, plugins, and so on. Usually, they only verify if the server is running correctly. Siteground has also a WordPress specialized staff ready to give you hints about any website problem, even if it is not depending on the server. I experimented more time during these years and they could make checks and finding solutions for me. Keep in mind that on their site there are also tutorials and guides to help you with any need related to the website. They take care of customers and you can ask for support any time you need, the technicians will dedicate you the time you need.
7 different security levels
There are different plans, as I mentioned before, to give you the level you need to manage your site. If you choose an advanced plan you will get more security. Its level grows together with the plan. There will be also automatic updates while you will keep always control of the website. This means that when a new version of WordPress is available, Siteground hosting installs it for you and you will have to do nothing. If you don’t want this service, you can just disable the option and makes it manually. In any case, the decision and the control are up to you. You will be notified 24 hours before the update.
Most of the time if you select WordPress plans there are limits on plugins’ installation because they can present a weakness in the security system. Siteground is different. It monitors the status of each plugin to identify any problem and to implement extra protections on the server to maintain the site safe, avoiding hacker attacks. If you use shared hosting you have a common server with other sites, so if one of them is at risk, yours too. To give proper protection, Siteground isolates the single accounts to guarantee high-level security. You won’t have issues and you don’t need to worry about this type of problem.
High performances
Despite the plan you will subscribe to for your website, the performance will be great. Sitegound hosting will boost your site and will reduce the response time. Visitors will see the page immediately and your bounce rate will dramatically decrease. The provider counts servers in any continent and a big number of countries. So memorizing the cache of any page, the number of requests made by visitors will be reduced. This guarantees speed.
Plus, if you activate the SuperCacher option, which is available for intermediate and advanced plans, you will get maximum performance. It is an exclusive service provided to Siteground clients. You will just need to install the plugin SG CachePress. You will increase the number of simultaneous visits that your site can support and the page load will be so fast.
Site Tools management
Any hosting provider gives you access to cPanel to manage any function of your site. Siteground has a new Site Tool to make easy any activity in managing site, email, registered domain, app, database MySQL, and many other elements. Especially for people like me, with not many technical skills, is simply to use. Everything is clear and also well explained in tutorials and guides made by Siteground experts.
It passed from cPanel to Site Tools to improve data and functionalities to take control of any detail and make your site easy to manage. It is surely the best tool on the market right now. They work to update it and to keep it complete. All the information is given clearly and ordered to give you the support you need.
30 days payment guarantee
Are you still not sure that Siteground hosting is the right service for you? Don’t worry, there is something more that can convince you. It helped me to take the last decision to subscribe. If you are not satisfied, you can get reimbursed after 30 days of usage. It is valid on any plan you choose. You don’t need to explain the reason, but you are allowed to cancel the subscription at any moment. This is a good guarantee, don’t you agree?
Site transfer
Keep in mind that if you have already a website and even a domain, you can just transfer it to Siteground. It is not mandatory to use WordPress, it is valid for any type of site, from any platform. So if you want to be more independent and not continue with free space or if you just want to change provider, you will have an easy and quick solution.
You can migrate the site by yourself just by installing the plugin Siteground Migrator or if you feel uncomfortable doing it, ask technical support to do it for you. They will take care of it in a few hours. Surely you don’t want to lose time and neither data. So this hosting is made for you. Experienced professional ready to help you to transfer all the content of your site means great service, at least for me. But I am sure it will be perfect for you too. No efforts and risks for you.
In case you already have a registered domain, they will give you tips on how to use it with the new system. You will just need to change DNS, name servers, to get high performances and don’t lose any traffic.
Conclusions
So, what do you think? Are you ready to verify if my opinion is correct? Well, I don’t want to convince you to do anything, but just share my experience and information about Siteground hosting. I can say that the service they provide completely satisfied me. I noticed better performance, great support from the staff, and a lot of useful tools to make my blogger life’s easier. I can manage my site just by exploring the Site Tool. There are also statistics about the usage, so I can monitor how my site works according to visitors’ requests. Click here to check all the features.
Siteground will be a perfect ally for you, but to be successful with your blog, you will need a step-by-step guide. Learn how to make a profit with your blog.
If you have questions, I will be happy to answer them, feel free to use the comments space. Share this post if you find it useful.