SiteGround Cloud Hosting Review
Cloud hosting is one of the most interesting and useful technologies available on the internet for website owners, administrators, designers, and coders. Using cloud hosting your website is actually hosted on multiple servers letting you use more resources as usually. In the case that one of the cloud servers if offline, there are other ones which can make your website to remain online.
With cloud hosting you can get redundant storage, flexibility, a lot of features and the best web hosting service available. You can now modify the software you use as you wish because they are running on multiple servers and there are no limitations like in the shared web hosting. Stability and security are also offered each server having its own security software. Additionally, you can upgrade your cloud hosting plan whenever you want just by adding a new CPU, a new memory or a new disk space.
SiteGround is a web hosting company which offers web services founded in 2004. Nowadays SiteGround manages more than 2000 support tickets, 1000 phone calls, and 2000 messages through the live chat. They also host approximatively 500.000 domains. SiteGround owns multiple data centers on three continents: in Chicago US, in London UK, Amsterdam NL, and Singapore SG. SiteGround has multiple facility aspects such as highly available network, redundant electrical systems and high-end physical security.
One of the most interesting web host services that SiteGround offers is Cloud Hosting. This type of web hosting is scalable, fast and fully managed. Once you purchased the cloud hosting you will also get 24/7 premium support together with other important features such as scalable resources, fast platform, free CDN, periodical backups and managed servers.
Content management systems
You can easily use multiple content management systems and each of them are available with their own features. Some of these CMS are:
- WordPress is one of the most popular content management systems. SiteGround offers WordPress Cloud hosting with one click installer able to start your WordPress site with only one mouse click, auto updates in order to have the newest WordPress version, SuperCacher provided by plugins and settings for Memcache, SSH, and WP-CLI to fully control your WordPress website and much more.
- Magento is one of the most eCommerce content management system used by a lot of online stores and the version provided by SiteGround comes with the unique caching system, one click installation, SSH enables and GIT pre-installation.
- Drupal is another popular content management system offered by SiteGround together with cloud hosting and with Drupal Supercacher which speeds up your Drupal website, once click automatic installer, Drush Pre-installation, and Git integration.
- Joomla is the last platform which comes with cloud hosting at SiteGround, but it also comes with JHackGuard installation, one click installation, SuperCacher installation, auto updates and Git integration.
Why we chose SiteGround
With SuperCacher you can increase website performance several times and reduce the impact of your website onto the server dramatically.
Basic cloud hosting features
All cloud hosting plans include access to WHM and cPanel, but also Apache server, CentOS operating system, Exim Mail server, IP tables firewall, MySQL 5 and PostgreSQL databases, 5 PHP versions, Softaculous auto installer script, 1 dedicated IP, free domain name, free private SSL and SSH access.
Basically, there are 4 different plans:
- Entry which costs around £48 monthly which comes with 1x 3.0GHX CPU, 2GB DDR3 RAM, 20 Disk space storage and 5TB bandwidth.
- Business which costs around £64 monthly and it has included 2x3.0 GHz CPU, 2GB DDR3 RAM, 40GB Disk space storage and 5TB bandwidth.
Business Plus it is a little more expensive costing around £90 and has 3GB DDR3 RAM and 60GB Disk space storage. All the rest of features are the same as in the Business plan
- Enterprise is the most expensive plan. It costs around £112 monthly and comes with a powerful cloud hosting using 4x3.0GHz CPU, 4GB DDR3 RAM, 80GB Disk space storage and 5TB bandwidth.
- Custom is exactly the plan you want for yourself because you can create it from scratch. The minimal resources you can ask for are those from the Entry plan and you can ask for maximum 16 CPU cores, 16GB RAM, and 200GB Disk Storage. In the case you want all resource at maximum, it will cost you around £370 monthly.
All prices are available excluding VAT and all plans offer your 5TB Bandwidth.
How to order a cloud hosting plan
In order to purchase a cloud hosting plan you need to choose the wanted plan and either to register a new domain or to use an existing one which you own. If you want to register a new domain, you can use the domain validator in order to find an available domain and to choose the proper extension.
Additionally, you need to write down your information, password information, payment information and to choose additional services if you need such as Domain Registration which is free in this case, Domain privacy which costs you around £13 yearly, SSL certificate and private DNS which are free for cloud hosting plans, WHMCS which costs around £6 monthly and HackAlert Monitoring costing £13 yearly.
Why we chose SiteGround
SiteGround frequently update server and control panel kernel and all their services, like: apache + PHP, MySQL, Exim, etc. SiteGround does monitor for attacks – both network and hack attempts, spam activity, abnormal resource usage by users and irregularities on a server level.
Comparison between SiteGround’s cloud hosting features and other companies cloud hosting features
If SiteGround offers 5 cloud hosting plans, other websites offer fewer plans such as DreamHost. However, DreamHost offers two major plans: one for the website and one for storage. DreamCompute is used to build web and mobile apps and it also has features such as full root access, API access, custom Linux and much more. The price for DreamCompute starts from £4.5 monthly and it can go up to £96 depending on the required resources. DreamObjects is used to store files. It has features such as user-friendly interface, unlimited inbound transfer and it is scalable. The price starts from £0.025 for each GB per month.
DigitalOcean offers the possibility to use an SSD cloud server in less than one minute by creating an instant account. The company offers reliable and scalable cloud servers with prices between £5 and £80 monthly.
HostGator has a 33% discount for their first cloud hosting plan named Hatchling Cloud. This plan costs £5.95 and comes with one single domain, 2 GB RAM, 2 CPUs and a shared SSL certificate. The recommended plan is Baby cloud which as a 41% discount costing almost £7 per month and having unlimited domains, 4 GB RAM and 4 CPUs. The last plan is the Business Cloud one with a discount of 39% and with 6 GB Memory and 6 CPUs. HostGator comes for the cloud hosting plans with features such as integrated caching, intuitive dashboard and resource management.
Comparison between SiteGround’s cloud hosting and other SiteGround web hosting services
SiteGround offers multiple types of web hosting services, each one with its own features.One of the web hosting services offered by SiteGround, besides the cloud one, is the WordPress hosting services which come with free transfer, free domain name for live, free templates and one-click installation together with high speed, strong security, daily backups, auto updates and much more. You can use the StartUp plan with cost around £4, the GrowBig which costs around £9, GoGeek which costs £15 monthly. All plans have multiple GB storage disks between 10 and 30 and a large bandwidth starting from 10.000 visits to 100.000 visits.
The Joomla hosting is another great web hosting offered by SiteGround having almost the same features as the WordPress one with same prices.
The shared web hosting are also available with the same features and the same prices for SiteGround clients while dedicated servers are having expensive prices starting from £200 to £360. Depending on the plan you want you can either get an Intel Xeon E3 1230 CPU with 3.20GHz, 4CPus, 8 CPU threads, 8MB Cache, 5TB bandwidth and 500 GB HDD, either two Intel Xeon E5 2620 CPU with 2 GHZ CPU and 12 Cores, 24 Threads, and more than 10MB cache. Additionally, for the last package, you will get 2TB HDD. This service is the most expensive one so it is not recommended for simple users like the cloud one.
Why we chose SiteGround
With an average response time of less than 15 minutes on tickets and practically no wait times on chat and phone, you get the best support!
Technical
- 99.9% Uptime Guarantee
- SSD drives for all plans
- Enhanced Performance with NGINX, HTTP/2, PHP7 and free CDN
- User Apps Autoupdates
- Top LXC technology, automated monitoring and daily backup
- Strict firewall security rules
- Free Setup; Transfer
- Unlimited Traffic, Emails, DBs
- Free Daily Backup
- cPanel & SSH Access
- Free CloudFlare CDN
- Best website performance with SuperCacher
- Autoinstaller For Easy Start
- New fast servers with great performance
- Data center in London
- None
Support
- 24/7 Technical Support
- Free Setup; Transfer
- Free Daily Backup
- 24/7 European support line
- SysAdmins to care of your tickets in 10 minutes
- No wait times on chat and phone
- They provide expert application support apart from hosting (WordPress, Joomla, Magento)
- We didn't find any
Pricing
- Flexible plans
- Can be purchased monthly
- 30 Days Money Back
- The renew is a bit expensive
Conclusion
Even if the cloud hosting service from SiteGround may be a little more expensive than the shared one, you should choose it in order to have a cloud backup of your site in case that there are some technical issues. Using the cloud hosting plans, visitors can see on Google and other search engines a saved version of your website even if it is actually offline.
Additionally, SiteGround does not try to trick people by saying that they offer unlimited resources. They are only presenting their plans as they actually are. In comparison with other web hosting companies, SiteGround offers quality, speed, support and low cost regarding cloud web hosting services. You can use the same software with cloud hosting as you wanted to use with other types of web hosting such as Magento, Joomla, PrestaShop, WordPress and so on. You can also get discounts if you pay in advance for multiple months and you can get other free additional resources such as a free domain name.
You can also check the other Top UK web hosting companies, reviews and comparison here.
- Performance (10/10)
- Support (10/10)
- Price (10/10)
- Reliability (10/10)
- User Friendly (10/10)
- 10/10Performance
- 10/10Support
- 10/10Price
- 10/10Reliability
- 10/10User Friendly