This post explains why this provider is the best WordPress hosting company as compared with others on the planet. WordPress as you all know is the most popular blogging platform in the world. (You may also want to read my 2-part posts on What is a Blog?)
The Web Hosting Landscape
The web hosting scene is dominated globally by GoDaddy and EIG (Endurance International Group). Note that I am referring to shared web hosting companies only and not cloud or VPS / dedicated hosting providers like AWS, DigitalOcean etc. (Cloud /VPS/ dedicated hosting is discussed in a separate post)
GoDaddy has the most websites hosted at 19% of the global share of around 1.5 billion websites! GoDaddy dominated the web hosting industry since it has been the leader in domain registration and had an enormous captive customer base. In most cases, GoDaddy is the first website hosting company choice for new websites. You may have seen the TV ads featuring Dhoni (India) and Danica Patrick (USA). They have the infrastructure and the marketing budget. I have used their domain registration service since 2005 and sporadically used web hosting too…but are they the best? Read on…
EIG has control of over 60 web hosting brands which include some of the major players in the hosting business, such as HostGator, BlueHost, BigRock, HostMonster, iPage, JustHost etc. Over the years, EIG acquired these previously independent brands and thus grew their customer base. HostGator and BlueHost account for most of their websites hosted. I have used their website hosting for many of my clients and was generally satisfied with their services. But, again are they the best WordPress hosting company?
Okay, let’s end the suspense here. So, my dear readers, the best WordPress hosting is (drum roll please…) Siteground.
Siteground : The Best WordPress Hosting Company for 2019
I have been on Siteground since 2010, hosting WordPress and Joomla sites for myself and many of my clients. I have seen them grow the number of customers over these years. Siteground offers excellent hosting plans for WordPress (and also other CMS and HTML only websites). They have optimized servers that provide excellent performance, security and a responsive support service – all at affordable pricing.
Siteground is the best WordPress hosting based on 5 critical success factors such as loading speed of websites, security & uptime, support service, pricing and site management tools (in that order).
I explain each of these 5 factors which make Siteground the best WordPress hosting provider (shared)
1. Siteground Speeds Up Your Website / Blog
This is the most important reason for you to choose Siteground. Why? Because, if your website or blog loads faster, it enhances your site visitors’ experience. This drastically improves your ranking in search engine results (SEO), thus getting even more visitors to your website.
Siteground does this by implementing following top-class technologies:
SSD Drives
SSD is short for Solid State Drives. The older hard disk drives (HDD) had mechanical parts like platters, actuator arms etc which move when reading or writing data. Moving parts imposed limit on the speed of the platters and the arm. SSDs on the other hand, have no moving parts – just microchips and circuits like you have in the USB drives. Because of no moving parts, data is read and written much faster. Siteground uses SSDs for all hosting accounts. That’s +1 point.
4 Data Centers in 3 Continents
Siteground has data centers in Chicago (US), London, Amsterdam and Singapore. You can choose the location to host your website that is closest to majority of your site visitors. The geographical distance between the server and visitor reduces, thus reducing the turnaround time of the user requests and reducing the page loading times.
NGINX = Fastest Web Server
Siteground uses NGINX (pronounced engine-X) which is arguably the fastest web server technology. Up until a few years ago, running WordPress on Apache web server was a given, especially on a Linux operating system. Enter NGINX – it can handle very high traffic while using less memory. Thus, NGINX has inherent speed advantage over other web servers. https://serverguy.com/comparison/apache-vs-nginx/ . If you don’t understand this, don’t worry – it just means that Siteground has the latest, optimized technology that loads your website quickly.
SG Optimizer Plugin
This is the secret sauce on Siteground, the best WordPress hosting provider. Siteground has custom developed a plugin called SG Optimizer that speeds up your WordPress website or blog with ease. It is pre-installed on Siteground WordPress installations. You just activate the plugin and ‘flip some switches’ in the admin panel – it’s that easy. This plugin will take care of most caching aspects without you or a developer bothering too much about the technology. This is a huge plus point over other shared hosts where you need to install other caching plugins which require some fiddling around.
PHP7
Siteground has support for PHP7, the latest version of PHP, a server side technology that WordPress and other CMS like Joomla, Drupal etc use. There are many advantages of PHP7 over the previous versions, but the most important ones are enhanced speed and security. Yet another factor for faster loading websites.
HTTP/2
HTTP/2 is the newest network technology, which significantly speeds up (up to 2x) loading of websites in the browser. Siteground is among the first hosts to support it on their servers. Recently, Siteground announced QUIC on their servers. QUIC considerably increases site loading speed when you have poor connectivity. It’s the base for the next generation of Internet protocol i.e. HTTP/3 [ HTTP => HTTP/2 => QUIC => HTTP/3 ]. Siteground is one of the first hosting companies to provide this technology.
Free CDN
CDN (Content Delivery Network) is a network of servers that deliver web pages to users based on their geographic locations. Siteground has partnered with Cloudflare to make your website load faster. When visitors access your website, their CDN delivers the content much faster from the data center closest to them. You can activate it in your account with just a single click!
2. Higher Security and 99.99% Uptime
Better security means you have less maintenance headaches and your website visitors are assured of secure browsing experience. 99.99% uptime translates to the website being down for only 52 minutes in the year. This means more visitors and thus increased earnings. This also enhances your search engine ranking. Few of the features contributing to higher security and 99.99% uptime on Siteground are:
Free SSL
Yes! Siteground empowers you to have a Free SSL certificate from Let’s Encrypt. For those not technically inclined – when your website has SSL enabled, a padlock is displayed next to the website URL / address in the browser. 
The URL also begins with ‘https’ instead of ‘http’. This indicates that the ‘pipeline’ from the website to visitor’s browser is encrypted i.e. users are assured that their interactions with your website is safe.
Anti-bot AI
One of the serious threats is brute-force attacks by malicious botnets (multiple devices running bots or automated programs to perform certain functions). Siteground has developed an AI (Artificial Intelligence) solution that stops millions of brute-force attacks per hour. It not only prevents unauthorized access, but saves your resources and increases your website uptime.
Free Website Backups and Restore
Siteground offers a free backup and restore tool for all websites. This is usually a premium service in other web hosting companies. If your website on Siteground faces some serious issues, just select the last good backup and restore the site with one-click restore button!
Secure Account Isolation
In most shared hosting companies, if one of the website on the server is infected, there is a high chance of others being infected as well. Siteground has ensured all accounts are isolated to ensure that one vulnerable website does not endanger other websites on the server.
Guardian Server Monitoring
This a monitoring system that detects problems in the servers. It prevents and fixes service disruptions by automatically reacting to different situations. It also alerts human engineers when a problem is detected. This guarantees that issues are sorted speedily.
3. Support Service
One of the frequent complaints of web hosting customer is that the support of so-and-so hosting provider sucks! If a website owner has to run around for their legitimate requests, it is quite natural that they will get pissed off. This is reflected in the online reviews of such hosting providers.
Siteground shines brilliantly in that aspect too. Siteground is Sofia, Bulgaria based company with highly skilled engineers who are acknowledged by WordPress and other tech firms globally. In fact, Siteground is recommended by the WordPress people. Moreover, when you write or call their support desk, your issue is sorted politely and timely.
Furthermore, if you need to transfer an existing website, their support service will do it for you in a few hours, and even for free if you have signed up for one of the GrowBig or GoGeek plans.
4. Pricing
Siteground pricing is as per industry standards. But, with the amazing features that you get (high speed, high grade security & uptime, excellent support & tons of features), you are saving your time, money, effort and heart-burns! Now, that is excellent value.
Get more than 65% OFF the regular pricing of the best WordPress hosting at Siteground today!
5. Awesome Website Management Tools
All other web hosting providers will rattle out the same features like free email accounts, databases, one-click application installation. Siteground has all these and provides other tools that takes the load off of managing your website. A few of these are:
Staging
Dynamic websites (like WordPress, Joomla, other eCommerce CMS etc) require updates and changes as requirements change. Since big updates can be dicey, it is advisable to test major change in a safe “sand-box” that will not affect the live website. Siteground has developed a tool that creates a copy of your site on which you can make and test the changes, and then push the changes to your live site in one click. This tool is available on their GrowBig and GoGeek plans.
WordPress Migration Tool
If you don’t want Siteground support to move your website to their servers, then why not use their migration tool which does this easily? Just install the given plugin, follow the instructions and you are done.
Free Auto-update
Your WordPress site is auto-updated – that way your site is secure and you don’t have to bother about managing the updates.
Now, that you are convinced that Siteground is indeed the best WordPress hosting provider, let me help you with how to get on Siteground for building that amazing website or blog of yours.
3 Steps to Your Amazing Website / Blog on Siteground
Step 1 : Choose a Hosting Plan
Click here to get more than 65% discount on Siteground’s hosting plans. (Opens in new tab / window). Once the page opens, select one of the plans to go ahead. StartUp plan is good for 1 website, GrowBig and GoGeek are for multiple websites. You can of course upgrade as your website / business grows. Tip: Go for multiple years to lock in the 65% discount. Click on “GET PLAN” button (for your required plan)
Step 2: Choose Your Domain
If you want to register a new domain name, select “Register a New Domain” or else select “I already have a domain” – enter the domain name in the given field e.g. how2freelance.com
Click on “PROCEED” button
Step 3: Review and Finish
On this page, you will enter your details like name, email, credit card etc (it is secured with SSL). Another important information is that you can change the data center location where your website is hosted. By default, it will select the location nearest to you (e.g. Singapore for customers in Asia, Chicago for US clients etc). You can also ask for free website transfer and other services here. Of course, you can also request / add or delete these service from the intuitive admin panel Siteground has.
Once you enter the details and select the required boxes, click on “PAY NOW” and you are done! Your website will be setup in minutes and you will receive email notification to that effect. Tip: Save the email and the login details in someplace safe.
That’s it! Thank you for reading this post on the best WordPress hosting provider – Siteground. I hope I have been able to make your decision easier. Now, go to Siteground and get that 65% discount.
If there are any other questions or features you want me to include, do let me know in the comments below.
And yes, please do share this post on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc for the benefit of your friends. I will really appreciate your help.
P.S. If you are not that technically savvy and need a website or blog to be built easily, then I have written about Wix, the World’s best website creator tool that gets your website ready in minutes.