Searching for the great UK hosting? Let’s clear the site for investigation, then.
This Siteground review goes over one strong contender with a known focus on customer security.
Less of the usual upselling, more user protection.
But having great security doesn’t get you over 2 million active sites under your umbrella. To achieve peak success like that, you also need:
Simplicity- Great Support
- Reliable High-Performance
- Speed
SimplicityA Rock-Solid Foundation
Founded in 2004, in Sofia, Siteground was concocted by a few savvy university students with a passion for web hosting.
It’s still privately owned, as opposed to most huge companies that get bought out by EIG – an uncommon sight in this era of hosting.
Their website lists a great number of positive choice support reviews with an impressive overall 99.7% customer success rate.
Our Verdict
Most Reliable High-Performance Web Host 🧗♀️
PROS
CONS
SiteGround 🇬🇧 UK Review
UK’s Best Web Host in 2023 🥇
You get what you pay for with hosts – especially with the very cheap ones.
Siteground may not be the cheapest hosting company you can find, but it is arguably the most reliable.
Over 2 million website owners can’t all be wrong. For this Siteground UK review, naturally, we looked at more than a fair share of testing results, to determine more.
As you might've guessed by this point, we got nothing but compliments for the way SiteGround handles your hosting needs.
Their uptimes are top-notch, their server speed is superior to many alternatives on the market, and their support team is the best we've encountered.
Combine that with top-of-the-line security and a free website builder you get upon signup and you got yourself a pretty sweet deal.
So, is there anything wrong with SiteGround?
Yes. The renewal price after the first year (or three years) of hosting goes way up. The fair thing to mention is that this is a common practice in the hosting industry and with other providers. However, we still consider SiteGround to be the best UK web hosting solution in 2023 for both individuals and small to medium-sized businesses.
SiteGround Pros & Cons
“Our Verdict” - Why Is It Worth It? ⚖️
Security
“Secure” is a term wildly thrown around in the hosting world.
Not by Siteground though.
Siteground has a proactive approach to security. Their security team develops advanced custom solutions and proactively patches vulnerabilities. Their team provides you with:
- In-house built server monitoring system
- AI-anti bot that can block up to 2M brute-force attacks every day
- 24/7 security admin team
- SiteGround Security plugin which covers all security related areas a site owner may need
Their security-first mindset ensures that your website is always secured and not prone to attacks.
If, within the small chance, your website gets hacked or infected with some malware, SiteGround will automatically notify you to make sure you can mitigate it on time.
Amazing Speed with Customized Architecture
While most other companies use industry-standard underlying architecture – SiteGround goes a further distance.
They’ve developed their underlying architecture to be better than what most other companies are using – making your websites faster and your experience smoother.
They have developed their own unique tools to optimize the performance of their clients' sites to the fullest:
- SuperCacher is a powerful in-house caching solution
- SG Optimiser plugin that provides front-end and media optimization
- Ultrafast PHP that can improve the site loading speed by 30%
Free Website Builder
Siteground hosting comes with Weebly as your website builder. It’s simple, yet it can produce complex designs.
You can also easily install WordPress or purchase their WordPress hosting which comes with it by default.
If you need to knock a quick one out – this is the best web hosting option.
Renewal Prices
While the service is dirt cheap at the start – which you wouldn’t expect for something with this level of quality – it gets more expensive on renewal.
However the high prices are justified by the quality they guarantee and the features they provide which are rivalled only by WPEngine, but at a much lower price.
Good thing is, you can get up to three years on the initial price.
Still, renewal prices can give you a headache if you don’t read them at the time of purchase.
SiteGround Uptime
If Your Website Is Down – You’re Losing Valuable Sales.
If Jeff’s Amazon went down for a minute each day, he’d be losing over £103 million in sales each year.
Mind-boggling, I know.
Uptime is the definition of hosting provider reliability – and also among our favourite tests. Uptime is what keeps your customers (or readers) happy and your website up and running all the time.
And SiteGround has a guarantee they uphold very well. Their Service Level Agreement binds them to compensate you appropriately - you get 1 month free hosting for every 1 percent under 99.00 % uptime per their SLA.
Let’s have a look at a very detailed uptime test, next, in this SiteGround review.
Tests
You can’t determine the uptime of a host by measuring it for 24 hours or a month. Instead, we need to look at a year’s-worth of testing.
Results of 2019 – January to December – clearly show that SiteGround is one of the few premium-tier hosts out there.
They managed a ridiculous 99.99% uptime.
The expanded 12-month view shows that their worst month had an uptime of 99.95%, which still wipes the floor with the all-year averages of lesser providers.
Your viewers will always be served and you’ll keep on racking in that revenue – at any time throughout the year.
Now Jeff would still lose about £62 million in the worst month – but this number is pretty minuscule compared to other companies’ uptime.
SiteGround Speed
The Second-Most Important Conversion Metric
Having confirmed that Siteground’s uptime places it among the top companies – the second most important test is speed.
Any proper Siteground review should measure performance – we looked at exactly that. Even though uptime provides your visitors with the chance to load your page, speed is what decides if they stay on the page.
Google’s research confirms this: as your page goes from 1-second-loading to 5-second-loading your bounce rate will increase by over 90%.
In terms of web hosting, faster is always better. There are three factors we consider:
- Server Response Time
- Website Load Time
- Multi-Visitor Stress Test
Server Response Time
Server response time is the number of milliseconds – from accessing a browser URL – to the server serving you the desired website.
This is important because it is server-side. You can’t improve it.
For this test, we used Bitcatcha – a leading tool for testing server response time.
You can see that Siteground handles this quite nicely – with quick response times from anywhere in the world. Google recommends a response time of under 200ms – and Siteground’s average is 129.8ms.
Website Load Time
The time it takes for a visitor to fully load your website, you need this to be under 3 seconds to be anywhere near good.
This is among the top Google ranking factors (confirmed by Google) – so naturally, we need to include it in this Siteground UK review.
For this test, Pingdom’s powerful website load speed testing tool gets an accurate result. As you can see, this Siteground-hosted website loaded in 1.76 seconds, which places it among the top-speed websites.
Website speed isn’t dependent only on hosting – but Siteground sure makes it easier to make a speedy website.
Multi-Visitor Stress Test
Lastly, but certainly not non-important, we looked at:
- how the hosting handles multiple simultaneous connections to it
- how the response time feels
- and how the load time acts
how the hosting handles multiple simultaneous connections to itYour website will receive a visitor spike at some point in its life – make sure your hosting can handle it. After all, there’s no point to loading quickly if it crashes during the most important time.
For this test, LoadImpact was used to simulate 25 visitors sending requests on the website all at the same time.
The picture above clearly depicts that SIteground isn’t fazed by a visitor spike.
In the end, the website is receiving 25 users, making a total of about 300 requests per second – and Siteground is handling it all too well.
The response times keep a steady and low average of 10ms – depending on the visitor’s location, of course.
SiteGround Pricing
Dirt cheap for the performance.
As you’ve probably concluded, Siteground is packed with features.
Because of that, they can’t low-ball price in the same way as some other providers – neither are they looking to dominate in the quality free web hosting lane.
SG’s lane is top-tier hosting. That said, it's still dirt cheap for all the features it has.
Available Plans
Siteground has a wide array of hosting plans which make it simple and affordable to start out – but easy to upgrade if you need the performance.
Naturally, this Siteground review will also cover their hosting plans.
All plans feature the Site Tools to help you manage your hosting, and come with Siteground SSL – which is issued by Let’s Encrypt – to up your website’s security.
Web Hosting
There are three web hosting plans.
All offer different levels of the same features. The pricing gets higher the more features you get, which is what any profitable company should do.
All the web hosting plans offer:
- Unmetered bandwidth
- Unlimited emails
- Site Tools
- All levels of caching (static, dynamic and memcached)
- Autoupdates of application and plugins
- Automated daily backups and restore
- CDN, SSl, E-mail
- Expert and fast support available 24/7
- 30 days money back guarantee
Here’s what makes a big difference:
- StartUp (£2.99/mo) – 10GB Disk Space, 1 Website, Level 1 Caching; Collaboration tools
- GrowBig (£4.99/mo) – 20GB Disk Space, Unlimited Websites, Ultrafast PHP; Collaboration tools; Backups on demand; Staging
- GoGeek (£7.49/mo) – 40GB Disk Space, Unlimited Websites, All levels of caching and the Ultrafast PHP, Advanced Priority Support, Higher Server Resources, Collaboration tools; Staging + Git; Priority Support; WP_CLI + SSH; White label hosting
WordPress & WooCommerce Hosting
If you’re planning to build your website with WordPress, you should consider SiteGround and go for a top-of-the-food-chain WordPress host 
. As Siteground has been recommended by both WordPress.org and WooCommerce,
These plans are structured and priced the same way as the web hosting plans – with some bonus features.
- Hosted on WordPress-optimized architecture
- A special type of WordPress Cache is provided
- Extra WordPress security features
- WordPress related support
- WP-CLI
- Automated website transfers
- WPStarter toolbox
- WordPress Autoupdates
Siteground is actually officially recommended by the WordPress.org team.
Cloud Hosting
This is where you go if your site is racking in a lot of views – and along with that, high amounts of revenue.
These hosting plans give you a level of resources seen in dedicated servers – but with the ease of use of shared hosting plans.
Built with scalability in mind, you can add CPU cores or RAM at any point in your hosting journey – with the click of a button (or just use the autoscale option).
Siteground’s cloud hosting is fully configurable.
It starts at 4 CPU Cores, 8GB RAM, and 40GB SSD Disk Space – at a price of £60.00/mo. With this plan, you also get dedicated-server-level resources such as:
- SSH
- Dedicated IP
- Private DNS
- Daily Backups
- SFTP
SiteGround Bonus Features
The Star Highlights Reel
This Siteground review wouldn’t do any justice if we didn’t cover some of the bonus features that come with this option.
SiteGround Webmail
Starving for emails to gather more leads? Siteground offers unlimited emails with their quality email hosting plans.
They’re powered by Siteground webmail software which makes it super easy to access your email accounts and keep track of your inbox.
Emails are extremely important for businesses as their communication needs to be professional-grade to maintain a good business image.
Email storage depends on the plan but starts at 2GB – which is more than enough for a few years’ worth of emails.
SiteGround Live Chat
Siteground’s support is amazing. Even though they offer three levels of support:
- Ticket
- Phone
- Live Chat
- Knowledge Base
You’re most likely to take the third option – live chat. This is where Siteground excels. It’s hard to find a bad review about Siteground’s support – in fact, it’s the reason most people stay with them.
The Siteground live chat support offers instantaneous response times – from real people. The support team is trained to help you with the needs of your hosting, from SiteGround cpanel to traffic spike responses.
For example…
If you’re with a WordPress hosting plan – the Siteground live chat quickly assigns you experts on WordPress to help you solve your problems.
You’ll always receive top-notch customer support from their team.
Collaboration Tools
Siteground’s hosting interface comes with features that let you add users with customized access roles and permissions.
This provides your collaborators with custom login to the Site Tools interface and can build or maintain websites for you.
If you’re a web developer – Siteground provides an easy way to transfer sites between Siteground clients. Assuming your client has hosting from Siteground – you can automatically transfer the website to their hosting.
SiteGround FAQs
Covering All the Ground 🚧
Not satisfied with the above Siteground UK review? Here are some more informational answers to questions we thought you’d have.
Is SiteGround Better than Bluehost?
Comparing Siteground to Bluehost – Siteground takes the lead with more features.
Siteground’s servers measure faster than Bluehost’s – comparing at the weakest hosting plans, which is what most people will buy.
Bluehost is missing a lot of the features that Siteground provides – the security additions are extremely important for you.
Aside from Free SSL certificates – which Siteground also provides in addition to the SG Optimiser, the Supercacher and free CDN – Bluehost offers almost nothing in the way of security without paying.
Contrary to that, Siteground monitors your website 24/7 to spot errors or downtime.
Siteground also has a plethora of great features that are unrivalled in the industry, e.g. automated daily backup and restore, the SG Optimiser, the Supercacher, free CDN, WP Starter, etc.
Which Is Better GoDaddy or SiteGround?
GoDaddy is even worse than Bluehost when it comes to security. Their weakest plans don’t even provide Free SSL – let alone other security features.
You might be tempted by the 100GB Disk Space offer – but 10GB or 100GB makes no difference when you’re limited to 1 website.
Where are SiteGround Servers Located?
Siteground has 6 top-of-the-line data centres spread across 4 continents. The precise locations are:
- Council Bluffs, Iowa
- Frankfurt, Germany
- London, England
- Eemshaven, Netherlands
- Singapore
- Sydney, Australia
Having their data centres spread around the world like that makes sure you get quicker server response times no matter where your visitors come from.
The data centres are armed with redundancy and high security to protect you from data loss at any time.
You might not care about this – but Siteground’s data centres are green-friendly. Some are even 100% carbon neutral – meaning all the energy they use is renewable.
On top of this, they’ve got integrated Cloudflare CDN which works to reduce your website’s load time even more.
Is SiteGround Easy to Use?
Siteground has tried and succeeded in making their hosting extremely easy to use. They include many features that make your life easier.
Their top-of-the-line website builder, especially, provides you with the ability to get your website up and running within 30 minutes – assuming you have the content.
Other than that, you’ve got an automated software installer for many web applications like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and phpBB.
To up your security, there’s an automated SSL installer – which installs your Free SSL certificate without any special input from you.
SiteGround vs. BlueHost
Let’s do a direct comparison of Siteground vs BlueHost's most important features. 
Security 
Siteground offers a lot more security tools like system monitoring and proactive problem-solving capabilities.
Speed 
While both companies understand how vital speed is, Siteground has more in-house developed features focused on speed specifically, such as SuperCacher, Ultrafast PHP, SG Optimiser and many more.
Emails 
Bluehost only offers up to 5 email accounts with the weakest plan, with only 100MB of storage. Siteground offers unlimited emails and 2GB storage with its lowest plan.
One thing Bluehost offers is a free domain for 1 year. But this probably shouldn’t be your sole reason for choosing a hosting provider.
(Maybe price would be one, for those with no budget – like a great free VPS plan.)
Conclusion 🔎
Let’s anchor down this review, which went from every high to low.
Every hosting company has pros & cons – but even Siteground’s cons are there to make sure you get the best-performing website hosting.
Overall, there wasn’t much in the way of drawbacks.
This is the sign of an ideal host 
– or as far as is possible. When comparing Siteground’s features to their prices, the plans look dirt cheap.
The security they offer is something you can’t find with other hosting providers – but it can be really critical to your business.
In short: Siteground’s hosting comes packed with features to enable quick-loading websites and highly secure servers.
On top of that, you get the added benefit of having an instant problem-solving support team.
We can conclude that Siteground’s hosting is an amazing option for both personal users and businesses alike 
.
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1 user reviews for SiteGround Review (UK)
Sally Speed : Fast Usability : Easy To Use
Switched to SiteGround from BlueHost
Moved our small business website from BlueHost to SiteGround, the entire process was very easy and we’ve been getting better performance for about 1/3 the price.
SiteGround is great for helping out newbies like me with any issues
