Today with all the competition in the marketplace, choosing a company to host your website can be a confusing decision. Throughout the years we’ve worked with many hosting companies each offering their own set of challenges, from server configuration updates to downtime and customer support. Late last year we discovered SiteGround and have been very pleased with their support and technology.
Why Harlo likes SiteGround:
Hosting Technology
SiteGround is a leader in adopting the most cutting edge and up-to-date technology. This is important because these choices directly affect a website’s speed and performance. Here are the main technological aspects that set SiteGround above other web hosts.
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- Solid-state drives on all hosting plans which provide for a 1000x increase in input/output operations when compared to regular drives.
- NGINX web servers boost web page loading times.
- Supercacher is a caching system custom built by Siteground to further increase website speed. This system really comes into effect when using popular CMS platforms like Wordpress, Joomla, and Drupal but can be used for other systems as well.
- Free CloudFlare CDN integration. A CDN or content delivery network is mandatory if you want your site to perform well for users around the world. CloudFlare is the industry leader in this technology and SiteGround makes it easy to take advantage of their service.
- One of the coolest features that SiteGround offers is HTTP/2 enabled servers. HTTP/2 is the newest network protocol and at the time of writing this article, we were hard-pressed to find another hosting company who even knew what this technology was. In simple terms, the difference between HTTP/1 and HTTP/2 is that HTTP/1 makes the client ask for one resource at a time before serving it and then waiting for the next request while HTTP/2 lets the client ask for everything at once and then serves it all. This is cutting edge web technology and SiteGround is one of the first hosting companies to support it.
- PHP7 and HHVM. PHP7 is the newest version of PHP and boasts many speed benefits. HHVM is a programming compiling technology for SiteGround Cloud accounts which will make PHP run even faster.
- Multiple data centers allow you to choose a location that makes sense for your users. SiteGround data centers feature highly available network connections, redundant electrical systems, and high-end physical security to ensure your data is always available and safe.
- 99.99% hosting uptime. Most hosts claim very high levels of server uptime but in our experience, they almost all fail to deliver. In the past, we’ve definitely noticed the occasional time when one of our sites doesn’t load due to issues with the host. With Siteground, we haven’t seen this issue. They’ve achieved this stability by carefully crafting their hosting solutions using Linux Containers, proactive server monitoring, comprehensive backups, anti-bot AI and secure account isolation.
Support
SiteGround support has been outstanding. Whenever we’ve had an issue or question we’ve been able to get a person on the phone right away. Their live chat and phone support have been great and we’ve never had to hold for more than five minutes before someone is on the line helping us. Many companies advertise 24/7 support but we’ve found ourselves on hold for over an hour waiting for help with other hosting companies. For us, having a technician available to resolve an issue is probably the most important factor in selecting SiteGround as our host of choice. They also have a great library of online resources including tutorials, webinars and setup wizards.
We’ve laid out our main reasons for choosing SiteGround, but there were numerous other features that we love too, including:
- Free site transfer
- Free app installs
- Free email accounts
- Unmetered traffic
- Free SSL Certificates
- cPanel & SSH
- Free website builder
- Free daily backup
- Unlimited MySQL databases
- Free PCI compliance (GoGeek package)
- Wordpress staging (GoGeek package)
We can’t speak highly enough of our experience with SiteGround. If you’d like to learn more or purchase a hosting plan you can check them out here: SiteGround Web Hosting
If you want to know more about our creative digital services feel free to contact us here: winhearts@harlointeractive.com
