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

Plan Name Plan Monthly Price Plan Visitors Allowed Plan Disk Space Plan Bandwidth
Plan Sites Allowed
GrowBig $14.95 Suitable for ~ 25,000 Visits Monthly 20GB Unmetered Unlimited
GoGeek $29.95 Suitable for ~ 100,000 Visits Monthly 30GB Unmetered Unlimited
Enterprise $4,800 Unlimited $1 per 1GB for distrbuted storage + shared file system 10TB Custom

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

Total Requests Total Errors Peak RPS Average RPS Peak Response Time(ms) Average Response Time (ms) Total Data Transferred (GB) Peak Throughput (MB/s)
Average Throughput (MB/s)
<25 316,826 14 242.02 176.01 5,361 445 21.18 16.98 11.76
25-50 317,462 16 245.1 176.37 4,569 404 21.23 17.25 11.79
Enterprise 1,443,091 15 1,151.40 801.72 15,086 209 105.15 84.68 58.42

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

Requests Errors Data Transferred (GB) Peak Average Load Time (Seconds) Peak Average Bandwidth (Mbps)
Peak Average Requests/Sec
<25 318163 4 16.97 0.556 264 605
25-50 316927 0 16.89 0.531 280 642
Enterprise 1627518 7 87.96 0.618 1370 3100

Sources: <2525-50, 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

UptimeRobot StatusCake
<25 99.99 99.99
25-50 99 98.94
Enterprise 99.96 100

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

PHP Bench WP Bench
<25 10.49 1157.407407
25-50 10.44 890.4719501
Enterprise 10.457 196.6181675

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.

<25 25-50 Enterprise
Dulles 0.432 0.508 0.812
Denver 1.489 1.358 1.342
LA 0.909 0.894 1.06
London 0.937 1.082 0.998
Frankfurt 1.087 1.235 0.999
Rose Hill, Mauritius 1.945 2.108 2.636
Singapore 2.088 2.564 1.908
Mumbai 1.957 2.329 2.109
Japan 1.617 1.769 1.394
Sydney 1.781 2.126 1.588
Brazil 1.392 1.565 1.187

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.

Web Hosting

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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.





One thought on “SiteGround Review (2018)

  1. avatarkokul

    This is a great post and cuts through the mess of information on page speed out there for thrive theme users. Thank you. Even though this is exactly what I am doing. It”s going to cut the time you spend trying to work out how to get good page speed. I just wanted to throw my experience of using Siteground (Grow Big) and WPX hosting in the UK. I test on gtmetrix (london) and pingdom (stockholm). Siteground started out fast, but over the year I”ve been with them the speed has dropped steadily by about 3 seconds. Starting out at 2 and dropping to about 5 on average with GT metrix. Pingdom 1.5 to 4 seconds. When I switched over to WPX everything became simpler. I consistently get 1.7/1.5 seconds with GTmetrix and 800ms with pingdom. Even without cloudflare. The main difference being Siteground is shared hosting and WPX is dedicated. Siteground support staff also varied in their response. One time, I spent 7 days complaining that my website was down and they kept telling me it wasn”t, until a senior person realised that a server had broken. He was honest at least. But it was a disappointing experience.

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