The recent SiteGround price increase has been a real blow to me because I really liked the cPanel packages they had on offer. They were great value, with a strong set of features and helpful customer service. None of this has changed, except the price.
When Did The SiteGround Pricing Increase?
The SiteGround price increase was introduced on the 17th of June 2020 and to honest, it has really made me think twice about using their services. I still love the hosting service they offer, but to double the pricing and offer the same service with no extras just left a bit of bitter taste to be honest.
How Much Did The Pricing Change?
I am looking specifically at the standard hosting packages here, the others have been affected but these are the core packages they offer. They are split up into 3 different packages called StartUp, GrowBig, and GoGeek. The pricing comes in two tiers, the ’special’ and ‘regular’ price. Special is only available when you first signup and then the regular price is what you pay on the renewal dates.
StartUp Hosting Plan
The StartUp plan has gone from £2.95 a month special price and £8.95 a month regular price to £5.99 a month special price and £11.99 a month regular price. Now the regular price has only gone up by around £3 a month, so about £36 a year. That doesn’t seem like a lot but when the StartUp plan was £2.95 a month you could get a whole year for £35.40. So the price increase is actually more than the original hosting plan used to cost on the special opening rate annually. Quite a significant rise when you think about it like that.
GrowBig Hosting Plan
The GrowBig special pricing has gone up from £4.95 to £8.99, so roughly £4 a month which works out to an extra £48 a year. Again, a pretty significant rise when you could previously get it at £59.40 for the first year. Once you come to renew the regular price has risen from £14.95 to £19.99. So a £5 increase from there on, adding another £60 a year to your hosting costs.
GoGeek Hosting Plan
The GoGeek special price has risen from £8.95 on the special price to £12.99, a £4 increase working out to around £48 a year. The regular price has moved from £24.95 to £29.99 a month, a £5 a month increase working out to £60 a year.
These may seem fairly trivial costs, but when you are working on a tight budget every penny counts.
Would I still use SiteGround hosting?
The GrowBig plan used to be one of my go-to hosting plans for certain types of smaller projects.
I would still recommend SiteGround from a customer service and reliability standpoint but I just hold out hope that they do some better special offer pricing. I would still definitely use them over the likes of Godaddy and Fasthosts.
Best value hosting alternative
I have found myself going back to the likes of Bluehost and their Plus and Choice Plus packages. They offer unlimited domains, storage and bandwidth plus all the usual cPanel features you would expect like Let’s Encrypt SSL. I personally like that you get very good offers for longer contracts as well. There are obviously tons of great value hosting services out there but this package from BlueHost is the closest like for like hosting I can find. Please feel free to leave any hosting better deals in the comments.
Other hosting options
For my clients that insist on taking on the server-side of their website, I like to recommend Flywheel or WPEngine. Flywheel and WPEngine make spinning up new WordPress sites simple and include easy options to add SSL certificates and switch on incredibly powerful caching tools.
For people with a bit more technical experience, Cloudways can be a really good option, it allows you to spin up highly scalable virtual instances for your websites. It uses services from AWS and Digital Ocean but pulls them into a simple unified dashboard with some great preset server instances.
I would highly recommend exploring the option of VPS hosting if you are looking to sell anything online or are anticipating driving high volumes of traffic to your website. I cover the topic briefly in this article.
Please note: Some of the links in this post are affiliated, you will pay no extra money for the product but I get a small commission from the sale. These small commissions allow me to keep writing articles.
