Why SiteGround Hosting?

I know my way around.

I currently manage dozens of live sites with SiteGround, and my history with them goes back many years. What this means for you is that I can get things done for you fast. I don’t have to read the manual. Problems don’t remain unsolved for long. I’ve probably already enabled and implemented every feature your site will need on one or more of my existing SiteGround sites.

SiteGround does one thing: Web hosting

SiteGround doesn’t do domain registration. SiteGround doesn’t do email as a standalone service. (They do provide domain-based email, and that service has been flawless for me.)  SiteGround does Web hosting, with an emphasis on WordPress Web hosting.

SiteGround isn’t a swiss-army-knife service (and this is a good thing) like many that started out as domain registrars and then branched out.

Superior Performance and Security Features

Performance and security should be on the top of your list of concerns, and SiteGround’s server technology and customizable performance and security options have earned it a place as one of only three hosting vendors featured on the WordPress Web site.

Superior Customer Support

Yes, problems will arise.

SiteGround’s 24/7 technical support (via phone, chat, and tickets) is unmatched by any hosting provider I’ve used since I started using Web hosts in 1994. (I’d give you the list, but then you’d know how old I am.)

1-Click WordPress Staging

After initial launch, we can clone the live site to a staging site where future changes can be prototyped and tested. When you like the changes on the staging site, we can update the live site with the click of a button. No more “Under Construction” or “Pardon us while we perform maintenance” pages while your live site is down.

Site Migration

This is pretty huge. SiteGround developed a plugin that allows you to migrate a WordPress site from almost any other hosting service over to SiteGround. The last migration I performed using this plugin took 97 seconds.

For some complex sites for which the site migration plugin won’t work, SiteGround’s tech support team will perform a manual migration for about the cost of a Starbucks gift card and within an hour or two.

Seamless Collaboration

If you host your site on SiteGround, you can add your Web builder (if he/she also has a SiteGround account) as a Collaborator. This from the SiteGround Web site:

Why is this good?

The alternative — which is not good — is to share your account login with your Web builder. When you do that…

• You’re compromising security, no matter how much trust you have in your Web builder. It’s as bad as, if not worse than, sharing your “Admin” login to your WordPress dashboard.
• Your Web builder will have access to your billing details and (if you’re using SiteGround’s email services) email accounts. No bueno.
• When your Web builder submits support requests, correspondence goes to you, not the Web Builder, potentially prolonging the time it takes to resolve problems.

Easy-Weasy Backup/Restore

SiteGround automatically creates and stores a full-site complete backup every 24 hours, and you are able to create manual backups and store up to 5 of them at a time. (If/when you create a 6th manual backup, it replaces the oldest one, and so on.) Even if you use a WordPress backup plugin (I use BackupBuddy on virtually every site), the SiteGround backup/restore process is so easy and quick that I don’t have to rely on anything else.

Recently, a hiccup (or something) occurred when I was performing a simple edit to one of the pages on a client’s site, and the WordPress database got corrupted. Multiple pages got messed up. There was no easy way to determine which pages were affected — let alone resurrect them. And alhough my most recent BackupBuddy full backup was only a few days old, restoring from that would have lost me many hours of work.

Using the most recent SiteGround backup, I was able to restore the site without losing any work — except for the trivial changes that had triggered the corruption.

(Full disclosure: Until this incident, I hadn’t paid any attention to SiteGround’s backup/restore feature. Since then, I run a SiteGround backup before every significant change.)