WordPress Hosting Guide Chapter 2: Why I Always Go With The Managed WordPress Hosting Plans From Siteground

In one of the other guides, I told you that it wouldn’t be genuine of me to say that Siteground was straight-up the best hosting provider and that you should all be using it. Whenever you see a site like this, it is often people with their affiliate links. That’s not bad in and of itself, but I think we can all agree that they’re more after the money from the link than you getting a good hosting platform. So in the second chapter of this extremely popular guide (writing this for this site gets big, lol), I will let you know why I always choose one of the Managed WordPress Hosting plans from Siteground (both for my projects and my client’s), not that you should choose it.

Back then, I just didn’t know jack

I started working in web design at around 2015, but mostly that was for clients who already had a website and all they needed me was to change some things here and there, install and set up plugins, stuff like that. It was in 2017 that I just went through the process of registering a domain name and choosing a hosting provider to create my own website – F4Freelance.com, which doesn’t exist anymore. That time, I chose Bluehost, installed WordPress and went to town with it. Looking back on it, the website was painfully slow. Even though it wasn’t measured with Pingdom or GTMetrix, trying to see the posts I’d published took forever. There were also all these other options in my hosting dashboard that I just simply didn’t know what they were for. Luckily, that website never really took off.

Fast forward until now, and thanks to the work I’ve done with several digital agencies in both the US and Australia, I’ve gotten so much better at hosting. I have had clients with GoDaddy, Hostgator, WPEngine, Bluehost, Siteground, Pagely, and others. All of these experiences have left me with one conclusion:

If you’re just starting out, Siteground is amazing.

Here are just some reasons for why I always with the Managed WordPress Hosting option from Siteground:

Great partnerships that make WP easier

There is a reason why everywhere you go online, people recommend the Siteground + OceanWP + Elementor combo. A while now, Siteground and OceanWP partnered to make the WordPress process simpler and friendlier. Having thousands and thousands of themes and plugins can really make it overwhelming and it can take time from you to publish your site. With these two working together, you don’t have to worry about that anymore.

Plus, the OceanWP guys are partnered with Elementor and on top of the templates found on the Elementor library and the ones you can find here, they also have ready made sites from you to choose on.

*Note: OceanWP is a great theme, I’ve used it for years. But now that I’ve started to use Hello Elementor, the results are just simply better. So, if you’re a more advanced Elementor user, I’d recommend you to go with the Hello Elementor.

If that wasn’t enough, they’re also partnered with Cloudflare, the CDN you’ve most likely heard about that can take your website’s performance and security to the next level. So, a popular well-performing theme with probably the best page builder out there, plus a booster in performance and security, what more could you want?

Their support is up all the time and get this, they actually solve issues!

Listen (I’ve always found this weird because I’m not talking, but I digress), websites are always going to have issues. That’s pretty much a guarantee, especially when you have plugins and themes that need to be constantly updated. So, like I covered on the first chapter of this guide, having a good support that can respond to your queries on a timely manner is key to choosing a good hosting provider.

I can speak for myself and on behalf of my client’s who have used Siteground, they’re great on this. One of the most recent problems I had was when I was building a website for one of my clients and Elementor just wouldn’t open. I was able to click the “Edit With Elementor” button, but it didn’t go beyond that, which basically means that I was getting the white screen of death. Trying to figuring it all out on my own like the stubborn guy that I am, I tested all of the possible solutions to no avail, until their live chat solved it for me in like 5 minutes. There was this option ticked on that was making server incompatible with Elementor.

I’ve seen stories on Facebook groups about people and GoDaddy or Bluehost who have spent hours and hours without answer from any of the customer support methods. I couldn’t imagine how mad would I be for the time lost with not being able to do anything on Elementor if the same would have happened with either of those two hosting providers.

Super Fast Loading

Speed right now is much more of a factor for your website’s conversion rates than before. Everyone is trying to offer the fastest delivery, the fastest process, everything just simply gotta be fast. With websites, is the same, people want to see the information they’ve clicked on fast. One of the things that impacts on the speed of your website is your host, something that is talked extensively in this speed optimization guide.

I changed one of my client’s websites from GoDaddy’s Managed WordPress Hosting plan to the Siteground Managed WordPress Hosting’s GrowBig plan and the loading time was cut in more than half, from like 4.1 seconds to 1.5. It still isn’t optimal, but it is fast enough that you don’t feel like your ketchup pours faster.

Websites I have hosted on their Managed WordPress Hosting plans have never been down *knocks on wood*

For me, reliability is essential. So, knowing that my websites are always going to be up is pretty important. I mean, just having a website down for a day can affect all the SEO work you’ve been doing and it can diminish your website’s quality in the eyes of your users and customers.

Like I said – and I’m toying dangerously with this – none of the websites I have hosted on Siteground’s GrowBig plan from their Managed WordPress Hosting option have been down, and there are some of my clients that have done amazing ad campaigns to those websites, bringing an immense amount of traffic.

Gotta have some room for files

When you use Elementor, especially in the way I vouch for here, storage matters. Because whenever you install either a standalone page template or full website template, you’re installing all media files of that template. And then you’ve got to think about the files you’re going to upload when you start doing blog posts.

The good thing about Siteground’s packages in this regard is that, even the most basic WordPress plan which is the StartUp, gives you 10GB of storage, more than enough for people starting out.

That’s it for this WordPress Hosting Guide. I hope you’ve had a good time reading both chapters and that by now, you already know how and which hosting provider to choose for your next web project.