As if this is actually news to anyone, one of the number one choices that have to be made when hosting a website is where to actually host the site. And there’s no shortage of hosts from which to choose.
For beginners, it’s easy to look for cheap hosting, for more advanced users, it’s easy to look at managed hosting, dedicated hosting, VPS hosting, and for some businesses, it’s even best to look for reseller hosting.
Regardless where you fall, hosting is one of the most critical components that comes with running your own website – especially as it starts to grow beyond a basic blog and/or a basic site.
Over the years, I’ve experienced a number of different hosts – some great, some not so great – and I’ve usually blogged about a number of them. But as this site has continued to grow and as Pressware has continued to grow as well as head into a different direction, I opted to change hosts sometime ago.
By no means was this an easy decision: migrations are a pain, support matters – especially when people are frequently accessing your site, being able to easily develop and deploy projects for a host matters, and so on and so forth.
So after much research, deliberation, and basically listing out all of the things I wanted out of a host, I ended up moving to SiteGround.
SiteGround For WordPress Hosting
For the past few weeks, I’ve had the pleasure of working with a number of people working at SiteGround and have even had the opportunity to chat with them directly via Skype and phone as we talked through what options were available for my hosting needs.
I’ve rarely, if ever, had the opportunity to do that with any other hosts.
Performance
I tend to be the type who uses only what he needs as he needs it and then upgrades the services as it calls for it. For now, I’m using the GoGeek plan which is described as follows:
If you have a really heavily-visited or resource-intensive website then the GoGeek plan is your best option. The GoGeek plan offers a completely different and more geeky server infrastructure with more powerful machines and fewer users. Additionally this plan is great for average-sized e-commerce websites because it can accommodate a much larger product line and also includes server PCI compliance!
It’s definitely affordable, offers exactly what I need – for now – and is easy to manage from within the control panel. The performance of the site is great, as well.
Is there room for improvement? Sure, but that comes at my own personal resource level – the architecture of the site, if you will – not necessarily that of the host.
I’ve been more than pleased with the speed and performance since migrating to the site.
Speaking of which, if you deal with large sites or web applications and/or prefer some type of Linux-based dedicated hosting, that option is available, as well.
Migrations
Speaking of migrations, I was able to have this done in less than 24-hours using the SiteGround team. For those looking to move to SiteGround, the company offers free migrations, as well.
Personally, I’m used to going down the usual process of:
- Extracting the database
- Download the `wp-content/themes` and `wp-content/plugins` directories
- Downloading an XML dump of the site (just in case)
- Then importing and uploading all of the above to the new host
It’s a tedious process. But with SiteGround, I opened and ticket and in a few hours, the entire process was done. All I had to do was update my nameservers.
Even better, the migration didn’t cost a thing.
Support
As previously mentioned, I’ve had the pleasure of talking with people both through the forms of tickets and via cell phone in order to talk through some of the specifics of my needs with SiteGround.
As I was looking at moving to this particular host, I had a dedicated person that I was able to email, Skype, and chat with via the phone as we walked through everything that was needed to get the site all setup.
Features
Of course, one thing that all developers care most about is features (and I’m not different). If I’m going to move to a new host, then I want to make sure that everything that I need out of my host is available.
This includes the basics such as S/FTP access but also the options of shell access, SSL certificates, database management, email forwarding (and other email related tasks, and more). SiteGround delivers.
On top of that, the server comes with Git pre-installed, WP-CLI enabled, a built-in caching mechanism, and a staging environment for us to use when working with our own projects or with our own clients.
Committed To WordPress
Finally, one of the things that I respect the most about SiteGround is this:
We believe in giving back to the WordPress community – we have a dedicated full time employee working on the WordPress core, help organize different WordCamps and also sponsor, attend and speak at WordCamps around the world spreading the WordPress spirit wherever we go.
There are few hosts that are offering that. Perhaps it will change in the future, perhaps not, but the fact that SiteGround is one of the first hosts to market to offer the features that they do along with having dedicated resource to the core platform itself makes me happy to have my site hosted there.
So with all of that said, and after all of the hosts that I’ve tried over the past several years, I’m stoked to be partnered up with SiteGround.
If you have any questions about my personal hosting experience, please feel free to shoot me an email – I’m happy to answer any and all questions.
