Among the major web hosting providers, SiteGround has been gaining space over the past few years, at the expense of others like Hostgator and Bluehost. If you view a chart of the search trends, you can see that it’s been steadily increasing its share. Which is surprising, because SiteGround isn’t cheap. Its prices are in the same broad range as that of its competitors, but definitely at the higher end.
This doesn’t mean that SiteGround doesn’t have discounts. The highest SiteGround coupon for 70% off gives you massive savings on the GrowBig plan. The others like StartUp and GoGeek give you 67% off instead – still higher than what many other hosting providers offer.
The catch however, is that these discounts are only valid for your first billing cycle. And here is where the higher value SiteGround coupons can actually be counterproductive. I myself have been at the receiving end of “bill shock” when my billing cycle first expired and was charged the full amount for hosting.
When looked at from this point of view, SiteGround is around twice as expensive as other hosting providers. Here are the prices of basic shared hosting after the discounts for the top three web hosting providers, including SiteGround.
You can see that SiteGround is close to double of what Hostgator charges. And it’s a healthy bit more expensive than Bluehost as well. So despite the excellent discount coupons, SiteGround isn’t as cheap as it looks at first glance.
So what’s the cause of this premium pricing? What does SiteGround offer that the other web hosts don’t? Here are three reasons why SiteGround is more expensive than the competition.
In our infographic on the 5 types of web hosting services, you can see a neat distinction between shared hosting and VPS. SiteGround however, blurs this distinction when it comes to its shared hosting. This happens for two reasons. First, SiteGround places very clear limits on all its shared hosting plans. There are strict upper limits on the usage of the following resources:
As a result, the resources below these limits are guaranteed. Other web hosts don’t do this with shared hosting. They’re very nebulous about what you can do and what you can’t. They kind of assume that most people won’t use a lot of resources and suspend the accounts of those who do.
SiteGround’s resource allocation is much more in line with a VPS plan, instead of ordinary shared hosting. In addition, they use something called “Hive” technology to segregate their shared hosting accounts. This makes their plans a lot more powerful than shared hosting has any right to be.
It’s particularly visible with their “GoGeek” plan which is more like “lite” VPS hosting. SiteGround itself refers to it as “semi-dedicated” hosting! So in summary, their shared hosting comes closer to VPS, than anything else. Keep that in mind when searching for a SiteGround coupon!
In a very enlightening post on the costs of web hosting, Kinsta demonstrated that customer support is the single biggest expense in traditional web hosting. Most hosts try and make up for this by volume, and by cutting the quality of support.
SiteGround on the other hand, takes its customer support very seriously. They regularly promote their employees on Facebook, and their technicians are a lot more experienced compared to all the other web hosts that I’ve had experience with.
Their GoGeek plan immediately gets access to their highest levels of technical care – which is amazing for shared hosting. Even if all the other points were invalid, the customer support of SiteGround is itself sufficient justification for their higher prices.
Normally when you purchase web hosting, you might find it necessary to pay extra for additional services like:
SiteGround offers these services free as part of their regular shared hosting bundles. Some of them like dynamic server caching really take off only with GrowBig, and not StartUp however. But they recently expanded the scope of their backup and restore service to include even the basic StartUp plans.
When you consider the monthly costs of these services, you will easily end up spending more on them, than what you save with cheaper web hosting. Its simple math. It’s also worth mentioning that SiteGround has Railgun integration with Cloudflare, unlike other web hosts like Hostgator that don’t have it.
It’s another matter that I’m skeptical about the overall benefits of Railgun, but there you have it! In conclusion, it’s true that SiteGround isn’t cheap. Despite having coupons with high discounts, they’re around twice as expensive as regular hosting. But this higher price is justified when you consider the three factors above. Is it for everyone? No. But do you get your money’s worth? Yes!
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