Siteground Managed Hosting

SiteGround Managed Web Hosting Review 2017

In this review, we’ll take a look at SiteGround’s cloud hosting plans. SiteGround’s cloud hosting plans offer extra power for high-traffic websites. But if your site isn’t very high traffic yet, you might want to check out our review of SiteGround’s shared hosting instead.

Originally founded in 2004, SiteGround is one of the biggest independent (that is, non-EIG) hosts out there. We think that’s a big plus because EIG doesn’t have a great reputation nowadays.

Keep reading to learn more about all of the features you get with SiteGround’s cloud hosting plans.

Overview of SiteGround Cloud Hosting Features

When you go with one of SiteGround’s cloud hosting plans, here’s what you can expect:

• Scalable resources to handle traffic spikes
• Fully managed servers
• Linux containers and SSD storage
• Daily backups
• Built-in caching
• Special support for WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, and Magento
• 24/7/365 support via phone, chat, and ticket
• Lots more!

It’s an impressive feature list for sure. But how about the real-world performance? That’s what we’ll dig into in the next section.

SiteGround Cloud Hosting Performance – Real Testing Data

SiteGround’s cloud hosting is a big jump up in price. Does the performance increase justify that added cost? Unfortunately, we don’t think so. At least not according to our testing data.

The Time to First Byte for our test site on SiteGround’s cloud hosting was actually slower than SiteGround’s shared hosting. Our test server responded in 0.84 seconds, which is very slow considering how expensive the plan is.

Average page load time for SiteGround’s cloud hosting was a bit better, clocking in at 2.01 seconds for our test site. However, this speed is still slower than more affordable managed WordPress hosts like Flywheel and WP Engine.

As with their shared hosting plans, SiteGround’s cloud hosting does at least offer rock solid uptime. Our test site experienced 99.99% uptime.

Overall, despite a massive increase in price between SiteGround’s shared plans and their cloud plans, we didn’t really notice much increase in performance. That to say, we were a little disappointed in SiteGround’s cloud hosting considering its much higher price point.

SiteGround Data Center Locations

You need to consider a host’s data center locations because they can have an effect on how your site performs for your target audience. Closer is always better!

SiteGround offers plenty of data center locations on all of their plans, including their cloud hosting. For cloud hosting, you can choose between four different data centers on three different continents.

Plus, you’ve got a built-in CDN for even better performance!

SiteGround Hosting Technology

SiteGround does a great job staying on top of the latest hosting technologies. That means you’ll get:

• SSD storage
• PHP 7 and HTTP2
• Auto-scalable resources
• Built-in CDNs
• SSH and WP-CLI

On this front, SiteGround is definitely one of the leaders.

SiteGround Support and Knowledge Base

SiteGround has some of the best support in the industry. This assessment is backed up by both our personal experience as well as their high support ratings from others.

They also have a huge knowledge base with ~1,800 articles if you like to solve your own problems.

SiteGround Cloud Hosting Plans and Pricing

Starting at $80 per month, SiteGround’s cloud hosting plans are definitely in a different price tier than their shared plans. They offer four different plans to choose from.

Their Entry plan, which is the one that we tested, has 2 CPU cores, 4GB memory, 40GB SSD storage, and 5TB data transfer starting at $80 per month.

Their Business plan ups that to 3 CPU cores, 6GB memory, 60GB SSD storage, and 5 TB data transfer starting at $120 per month.

Other tiers offer similar increases (see picture below for exact information).

Should You Choose SiteGround Cloud Hosting?

While we’re big fans of SiteGround’s shared hosting plans, when it comes to SiteGround’s cloud hosting plans, we see little reason to recommend them. For the price SiteGround charges, you’d be better off going with a higher performing premium option like Kinsta or Liquid Web.

Overall, YES to SiteGround’s shared hosting, NO to SiteGround’s cloud hosting (because there are better options at that price point).