SiteGround WordPress Hosting Review (2016)

SiteGround participated for the fourth year in a row in WordPress Hosting Performance Benchmarks. They had four plans entered into the following ranges: <$25/month, $25-50/m, $51-100/month, and $201-500/m.

SiteGound is one of the largest and most popular companies in the web hosting space. They are big sponsors of WordPress as well. They've gone strongly after the WordPress market by building some very high performance tools to allow their normal shared hosting customers get high end WordPress performance from their plans with a custom module called SuperCacher. Last year they earned the honorable mention for a pretty good performance, but just outside of the top tier.

SiteGround also has the honor of being the highest rated shared hosting company on Review Signal with 72% positive rating, which is 14% higher than the next highest rated shared hosting company and based on over 3,600 reviews.

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Performance Review

LoadStorm Results

SiteGround's two shared hosting plans (<25, 25-50) did fantastic with only 1 error between the two of them. The cloud (51-100) did excellent as well with minimal errors. Unfortunately, the dedicated server didn't fare as well, ultimately struggling with the enormous LoadStorm test which sent 5000 users at it. Please note each pricing tier after the $25-50/month had an increased number of users sent at it, which is why you see more requests for the $51-100 and $201-500 brackets.

The first three plans were in the top tier performance wise, only the dedicated ($201-500) server didn't make it.

Blitz Results

The Blitz test is designed to make sure that static assets (which should be served from cache) are being handled properly and can scale to very heavy big spikes in traffic. The first thing I need to note is that I accidentally sent 1000 more users than I should have against the SiteGround cloud (51-100) plan and it performed flawlessly with zero errors and a 2ms response time spread which was only beaten by the dedicated server's incredible 1ms spread. The shared plans had little latency spikes, but considering the shared nature of these plans, they still delivered every request very quickly and had minimal error/timeouts. Every plan performed in the top tier here.

Uptime

Nothing to see here, SiteGround had near or actually perfect uptime ratings. 99.97%+ on every plan including three out four registering 100% on at least one monitor.

WebPageTest / WPPerformanceTester

I mention these because they are in the full testing but I won't bother putting them here. No company had any significant issue with either and it's not worth writing about. If you're very interested in seeing the geographical response times on WPT or what the raw computing power test of WPPerformanceTester measured, read the full results.

Conclusion

SiteGround earned an honorable mention last year. This year they stepped up big and earned three Top Tier WordPress Hosting Performance awards in the $<25/month, $25-50/month and $51-100/month tiers. The dedicated server struggled with an absolutely enormous 5000 logged in user LoadStorm test, but that may be the hardest test based on the fact only 2/8 companies earned top tier honors and 1 honorable mention, the fewest of any price bracket.

Combined with their outstanding customer reviews which has them at the top of the shared hosting category, SiteGround is an excellent choice for WordPress hosting both in performance and customer satisfaction.

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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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