SiteGround Review (2018)

SiteGround participated for the fifth time in our WordPress Hosting Performance Benchmarks (2018). This review is based off the results of that test. Last year SiteGround competed in four price tiers and earned 3 Top Tier awards.  This year SiteGround competed in the <$25, $25-50, and Enterprise tier.

SiteGround is one of the oldest competitors in our benchmarks and have for years now topped our reviews based on what people say on social media leading the shared category by a whopping 13% over the next highest competitor at the time of writing (Sep 2018).

The Products

Enterprise was a custom setup: 8 servers - 2 load balancers, 4 application nodes (PHP workers) and two MySQL database servers. Every server had 16GB of RAM. The total RAM for the whole solution was 128GB RAM.

Performance Review

Load Storm

Sources: <25, 25-50, Enterprise

The Load Storm test is designed to simulate real users coming to the site, logging in and browsing the site bursting some of the caching mechanisms typically found on managed WordPress hosts.

SiteGround aced the LoadStorm tests having minimal errors across every price tier. The enterprise configuration really shined here and makes it clear the value of all the redundancy and scalabliity where it had half the average response time and handled 1.43 million requests without issue.

Load Impact

Sources: <25, 25-50, Enterprise

The Load Impact test makes sure static caching is effective so that if a page gets a lot of traffic the site will keep responding without issue.

SiteGround again aced the Load Impact tests. Nearly no errors on <25 and Enterprise and zero on the 25-50 test.

Uptime

The <25 and Enterprise didn't have any uptime issues. Unfortunately the 25-50 plan ran into some issues. SiteGround issued a statement about the issue:

"The recorded downtime for the SiteGround GoGeek hosting plan during the test was not a result of actual server availability issues. The uptime is below 99.9% because during performance testing an automatic limitation system temporarily kicked in, in a way that prevented the uptime test to be properly executed. SiteGround confirmed that this particular limitation system should not have been active on the tested accounts and is currently not active on any of their production servers."

WebPageTest / WPPerformanceTester

The WPPerformanceTester results were average. The distributed nature of the Enterprise shows quite clearly how having redundant and scalable systems can reduce thoroughput on the WP Bench (MySQL) when you run multiple and separate database servers.

Nothing special to say here, it performed as expected.

Conclusion

SiteGround had excellent load testing performances. Load Storm and Load Impact results were great across the board. The <25 plan also had the second fewest errors cumulatively in its price tier. The 25-50 plan looked solid except there was an uptime issue which disqualified it from earning top tier status. SiteGround's Enterprise offering was a new entry in the tier. They made quite a splash with an 8 server configuration which handled our heaviest load tests without batting an eye. It's nice to see SiteGround offering great performance at an entry level price point and being able to scale that performance up to an Enterprise grade solution.

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Kevin Ohashi

Founder at Review Signal

Kevin Ohashi is the geek-in-charge at Review Signal. He is passionate about making data meaningful for consumers. Kevin is based in Washington, DC.

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