Siteground is no longer available in India. Read on to know WHY??
Mainly because of 2 reasons SG have stopped operations in India:
- Poor performance indicators
- Regulatory and tax complexities
Unfortunately, as per Siteground, due to a combination of poor performance indicators and the growing regulatory complexities in some regions including India, it has become ineffective to continue doing business there.
1. Poor performance indicators
Siteground closely monitors KPIs such as an accounts’ lifetime span, account value, and renewal rates, which determine the ROIs from their services in a particular region.
Unfortunately, the latest analysis indicates that overall, the sales coming from India have deteriorating KPIs, including among others alarmingly low renewal rates, higher cancellation rate, and short life span of the accounts.
2. Regulatory and tax complexities
Another negative trend that Siteground has been monitoring in India and several others is the heavier regulations and growing tax complexities that impose an additional financial and bureaucratic burden on them.
All these factors impose a growing financial risk for them and they can no longer guarantee the sustainability of the hosting services in the long run.
That is why they have taken the hard decision to discontinue operations in India and several others.
Looking for the best WordPress hosting in India in 2024?
Well, look no more. Siteground is sure one of the best web hosting service providers in India. And I am not just saying, it is the best I have used for my WordPress blogs and websites that are targeted to India.
Read this Siteground India review and decide for yourself.
However, if you’re looking for a budget-friendly hosting provider then read these reviews instead: A2 Hosting India Review or Bluehost Review.
Anyways, below I have also shared a list of the best WordPress hosting providers in India for a blogger:
The Best WordPress Hosting in India:
- A2hosting – Another company that accepts payment in INR, and has servers in Asia; that makes them a very good choice for an Indian blogger. I have been using their services, and trust me it is very good. Checkout A2hosting Plans
- Bluehost – This is one of the WordPress recommended web hosting providers. I haven’t personally tried them yet, but I have heard great reviews about them. Checkout Bluehost Plans
- Hostgator – Very good for new bloggers. If you’re looking for cheap WordPress hosting in India then look no further. it is affordable, you get unlimited disk space, they have servers in India, and charges are comparatively less and the best thing is you can pay in INR. Checkout Hostgator Plans
- Inmotion Hosting – A little expensive for a newbie. But their services are great. So, if you can shake your budget a little higher then you can surely go with this one. I had bought Inmotion Hosting for a client, and I haven’t got any complaints ever. Checkout InMotion Plans
- Dreamhost – Another WordPress recommended hosting. One of my niche sites is hosted on this hosting. So, my personal recommendation after Siteground, go for it without thinking much. Checkout Dreamhost Plans
- Siteground – SG used to be my first recommendation, even WordPress itself recommends it, along with Bluehost and Dreamhost. With their dedicated WordPress hosting and amazing support, it’s a great pick for anyone. The only reason I don’t recommend it anymore that’s coz it’s very costly now for a newbie. Checkout Siteground Plans
- WPengine – this one is a high-end hosting provider which comes with Genesis Framework & 35+ StudioPress Themes. Their services are top-notch. But not recommended for small sites. This is great for a heavy site, maybe an eCommerce site. However, on the second thought, if you have a big budget just go for it, you won’t regret it. Checkout WPengine Plans
Depending on your budget you can pick any of those web hostings, they all are good to my knowledge. But If you want my personal recommendation, then go with A2hosting. This blog is hosted on A2hosting itself; so I am not just saying.
And if you’re a beginner, very tight in budget, you can try any of these hostings as well Bluehost, Hostgator, DreamHost, or Inmotion Hosting; they are comparatively cheaper than the Siteground and WPengine.
Okay, now check out the best WordPress hosting plans in India that I recommend from each of the service providers; if you find them expensive then check out their other (starter) plans by visiting the links below.
If you still can’t decide, Instagram me @bloggingventure. I will surely help you out.
Now that you have seen the other hosting providers in India, let’s look at the best-recommended hosting:
Siteground India Review 2024
So, you’re planning to start a WordPress blog or website?
Maybe it’s a blog you want to start or maybe you run a service in your city and now want to take it to the world by using the internet, increase your reach to everyone out there.
But do you know what the basic needs for starting it are?
The first step in starting an online presence is finding a suitable domain name and reliable hosting. A domain is the address of your online website and hosting is a place where all of your data stores and then deliver to your readers or customers.
Finding a domain name is very easy, goto to Namecheap.com, type in the domain name you want to register; if it is available then just follow the on-screen instructions and buy it. That’s it. You don’t need to know anything more.
But while buying hosting, there are a lot of factors that you have to keep in mind. You also have to know about the type of hostings like shared, VPS, Dedicated, cloud, etc.
So, if you’re from India (or anywhere else in the world) and looking for the best WordPress hosting provider for your blog or website then this post is for you.
There are so many hosting providers you will find out there. But not all are good. There are a few dominating the whole website hosting industry for a reason; Performance !!
I hosted my first site on Bigrock.com. After experiencing it, I would never recommend that to anyone.
I have used many of the local hosts as well; mainly for the clients at my job. But never had a good experience with any of those.
Last year when I started this blog I had hosted it on Godaddy.com. I didn’t get what I was expecting.
That’s why after reading so many reviews I decided to move to Siteground. Fast forward to 7 months from then, I am in love with their services.
The best decision ever made. It’s giving me exactly the kind of performance and support I was expecting and needed.
Anyways, today I am going to review by far the best WordPress hosting provider that I have used in my career.
It’s none other than SiteGround. And in this review, I will provide all the required information you want while choosing the right WordPress host.
Well, SiteGround is one of the most famous web hosting companies. SiteGround is known for its always uptime servers, fastest loading time, and 24/7 customer support.
No wonder why WordPress itself officially recommends SiteGround Hosting.
I don’t just say for no reason it’s the best WordPress host for your upcoming project. SiteGround has almost everything that you want from a web host.
Before moving to its features, let’s talk a little about SiteGround.
A brief About Siteground India
SiteGround is a Bulgarian-based hosting company which was founded in 2004 has employed more than 400+ employees.
It has so far hosted almost 800,000 domains worldwide on their servers.
SiteGround has its offices situated in 6 places in Bulgaria, but it has served globally, including India, and has data centers in three continents across Europe, United States, and Asia.
SiteGround provides different types of hosting services such as Shared, Cloud, Dedicated, WordPress, and even reseller hosting. So, you can buy the hosting as per your needs.
Okay, let’s move to the pros and cons of this hosting, and after that, We will talk about if it is worth investing?
Pros and Cons of SiteGround WordPress Hosting India-
Like every other hosting, SiteGround also has some plus and minuses, and today I am going to introduce you to every single one of them.
Let’s start with the pros first.
Pros of SiteGround Hostings-
Uptime-
SiteGround Hosting promises that its servers are 99.79% uptime while many reviews say that it is much better than that. Last year, its hosting had only nine outages, and, it was resolved very quickly as well.
Also, SiteGround doesn’t use any readymade software as they have created their own which checks its hosting every 0.5 seconds.
honingbird.com uptime status since hosting:
uptime status recorded by Siteground 
uptime status recorded by Uptimerobot.com
Speed –
When someone tries to visit your website, it goes to your host and asks for the files. Now it’s your web host’s duty how fast it sends that files to your viewers.
The thing that works here is the Time to First Byte. It means that what is the quickest time that server takes to send its first byte.
In my test SiteGround performs well for this. The Fastest Time to First Bytes(TTFB) was just 0.390 seconds while accessed honingbird.com from India.
Apart from that, it offers a SuperCacher technology made by SiteGround itself which adds several layers of caching which helps in loading sites faster.
The great part of SiteGround is, it is the only hosting provider that is currently providing this service for shared hostings.
24/7 Top-Notch Customer Support-
Customer support is the thing where SiteGround pays so much attention. It is the reason why they have hired more than 230 people for customer support only.
They offer 24/7 phone, ticket-based, and live chat support. Also, they usually manage more than 1500+ tickets, 800+ phone calls, and 2000+ live chat support daily.
After creating a ticket, in just 15-20 seconds their knowledgeable customer support will connect with you and assist almost every possible question.
Unlike other companies, Siteground doesn’t have any wait time, your calls get picked up right away.
One of the recent incidents that made me love Siteground even more:
I was trying a new plugin, and accidentally I flushed all the cache. Next thing I know my whole site was broken. And unfortunately, I didn’t have any backups.
I deleted the plugin, deactivated all the plugins and reactivated one by one, disabled Cloudflare, and literally tried everything I could. But no luck.
For a moment, I thought I have lost my website and I would have to recreate the whole site again.
My last hope was the Siteground’s support, I initiated a live chat and after trying for one hour the guy on the other side finally brought my site back to normal.
In such situations, an excellent support system is the best thing money can get you; especially, if you’re not technically strong.
High-Performance WordPress Hosting-
Since WordPress is one of the most used content management systems for bloggers, SiteGround has added all the required features for WordPress CMS.
SiteGround has all of the features integrated into its well-managed hosting. That can be the term of speed, optimization, security, customer support, or almost anything that you want.
The great part of SiteGround hosting is they have moved their infrastructure to Google Cloud, which is supported by their own built caching tool SG Optimizer, Cloudflare CDN, and other software that checks their servers regularly to give the best performance at your side.
If I know anything about Google Cloud, is that they are fast, some might say superfast.
With Google Cloud, Siteground is now able to processor all server queries with 40% faster speed. Script executions on all plans have become even more efficient and this results in faster website load and less resource usage for all customers.
Siteground regularly checks for vulnerability and the security of your WordPress site. That’s why they make daily backups of your site for free, so if you face any issue, you can restore that backup and instantly make your site live again.
Free SSL Certificates-
As you know Google is very strict about its user’s security, that is why it is very important to run your site on HTTPS.
So, an SSL certificate is definitely one of the must-have features in any WordPress or Shared hosting.
And here, SiteGround offers a free SSL certificate from LetsEncrypt. Almost every new user will receive it pre-installed. You just have to enable it from the settings, and that’s it.
Free Site Migration Tool for Existing websites-
Siteground used to provide one free professional site migration done by their experts for each GrowBig and GoGeek hosting plan purchased.
But as of May 20, 2024, all manual migrations have become a paid service of $30USD per site.
Although, in place of the paid service they have now introduced a free automated WordPress transfer tool, called WordPress Migrator. It is available on all plans for free.
I know transferring a site sounds a little bit risky because with a single mistake, you will drop your rankings from SERPs. But with SiteGround, you don’t need to worry at all.
The site migration plugin is very simple to use, and it is being successfully used by hundreds of their customers to move their WordPress sites to SiteGround with just a few clicks.
If you still find it difficult to use the tool, just raise a ticket with their customer support and their smart support team will help you transfer the site.
Free CDN:
Siteground has partnered with Cloudflare to provide a free Content Delivery Network (CDN) service to its customers. A CDN helps speed up your blog’s load time for visitors from different geographical locations.
The most important tasks of a CDN are it speeds up the delivery of the pages or posts of your blog, caches the content, auto-minifies images, exploits RailGun to speed up uncacheable dynamic content, blocks malicious traffic, and even reduces SPAM.
And the most basic way a CDN can help you is – it stores a cached version of your blog/site on many of its servers all across the world. So, whenever a reader visits your blog from anywhere in the world, the CDN loads the site from the closest server to the reader.
For example, if a user tries to access your blog from let’s say, the US, what the CDN will do is it will show the user a fresh cached version of your blog from the US itself, given they have servers in the US. which will tremendously increase the load time of your blog.
The Cloudflare CDN network has 152 locations and is growing.
So, it’s a no-brainer to use a CDN. But it usually costs a lot to signup for a CDN separately and also you’ll need some technical understanding of the tool.
With Siteground you can minimize both, the price and technical hassles.
Free Security Add-On-
SiteGround offers some free security add-ons for their customers. Some of them are IP Address Blocklists, Leech protects, SpamAssassin, SpamExpert, and Hotlink Protection.
Almost every plan offered by SiteGround comes with free LetsEncrypt SSL included. Also, you can add HackAlert monitoring which checks if your site has been hacked or compromised.
Although The HackAlert is not free it charges around $1 per month but it’s worth the buck.
Easy E-commerce Installation-
If you are buying hosting for your e-commerce business, then SiteGround can be the perfect choice for you. Installing e-commerce software is a little bit difficult for those who don’t have enough knowledge of it.
But SiteGround offers you more than 18 e-commerce applications and that too with just one click install feature. Isn’t that sound great?
Also, they provide servers in many locations, free CDN, and advanced caching solutions, and for security purposes, their client accounts are isolated by a custom solution.
This means even if, let’s hypothetically presume, one of your sites gets hacked despite Siteground’s strict security; your other sites will still be secured. 😉
Transparent Pricing-
The plans for SiteGround are not very cheap, but if we talk about its features, investing in SiteGround worths every penny.
The plans of SiteGround start at just $6.99 and vary according to your need. Investing in a good hosting like SiteGround makes total sense because you can make $$$ from its cheapest plans itself.
30 Days Money Back Guarantee-
Like other hosting companies, SiteGround doesn’t offer any free trial, but they offer a 30-day money-back guarantee.
So you can test their services, and if you like them you can keep on using them or else, you can simply raise your hand and get your money back.
But, you have to follow a few conditions before applying for your money back. Below I have mentioned a few of them, but I will suggest you visit their website to find the full detailed conditions.
- You must have to post a service termination request through the User Area of your hosting.
- Initial orders for the hosting services are going to cover only within thirty days from the day you have started your plan.
- The renewal orders will not cover the money-back policy.
- If you bought a domain from SiteGround, you can’t apply for the amount of domain or the WhoIs protection. This refund policy is only applicable for hostings.
- If you bought any dedicated or cloud hosting service or any paid support, then you can’t apply for money back. Also, other third-party services will not be covered by the money-back guarantee.
- Your Reseller packages will only be covered if you will cancel the whole hosting package. This guarantee does not apply to the termination of a single account in a reseller package, either.
So, those were some of the terms and conditions that you have to consider before buying hosting from SiteGround or before applying for their money-back policies.
PHP7 Supports-
If you are a blogger, then you must have to know that WordPress needs MYSQL and PHP to run blogs. But many of the web hostings are still using PHP 5.6 whereas PHP 7.1 is the latest one.
If you upgrade from PHP 5.6 to PHP 7.1, you can boost your website performance by almost double. You can upgrade it in SiteGround using its free plugin, SG Optimiser.
Global Oriented-
The last professional advantage with SiteGround is they contain their global orientation.
SiteGround is mainly based in Bulgaria, but they have their clients worldwide. Also, they accept almost all international currencies such as USD, AUD, GBP, EUR, etc. Also, they have multiple toll-free lines for their customer support with no wait time.
Cons of SiteGround Hosting
Like any other web hosting company, SiteGround also has its downsides too. So, here are the cons that I have faced while using SiteGround Hosting.
Overall pricing-
If you compare SiteGround with other hostings, you will see that it is a little bit costly. Well, I am not talking about its introductory prices.
I am talking about its renewal prices, as it costs around $24.99 per month for the Startup plan (a Hosting plan offered by SiteGround) which is limited to 10000 visitors/month and supports only a single domain.
Although, you can still get a discount by initiating a support call and ask the team for a discount on your renewal.
The intro price is pretty impressive, but the renewal is a little bit costly compared to other hosting companies out there.
I know that you are paying for the quality, but still in my opinion, if you consider other reputed hosting providers like A2Hosting or Bluehost, SiteGround is obviously costly.
Plan Limitations-
If you look at their plans, you will consider the fact that their plans are not managed properly. for instance, if you look at its StartUp plan, you’ll see that they are providing 10GB of Storage and 10000 visits per month; which is not managed well.
If you are a newbie blogger, probably a 5 GB web space would be enough, given you use fewer images and compress them properly, but you need a server that can handle around 30-50k visitors per month.
And on the other hand, if you have a media-rich blog then it is not that good as you might need more web space to store images, audios, and probably videos.
However, the good thing about SG hosting is the number of visits per month can be increased by enabling the SuperCacher that comes with the higher Siteground plans.
According to Siteground, with the SuperCacher enabled, the server can handle up to 230000 visits per month. Which is huge at this price.
I know that no host can provide you with unlimited web space or unlimited bandwidth, but they can manage it according to the needs of the customers.
That’s a downside I believe Siteground needs to work on. Otherwise, it’s always my first recommendation.
Setup fee for Monthly Billing-
If you are thinking to choose the billing cycle to be monthly, then there is a setup fee that you have to pay. This setup fee starts from $14.95 depending on the plan you pick.
But if you buy their hosting for a long period, like for a year then you don’t need to pay the setup fee. Which is in any case recommended.
And besides, you get the one-month money-back guarantee; so if you’re not happy with their services you can leave within 30 days.
So, my point is, I recommend you to buy its annual plan and if you don’t like it, simply raise for money return. But make sure that you have read the terms and conditions of their 30 days return policy carefully.
Again, going for a long period is anytime a good idea. 😉
SiteGround Hosting Plans, Pricing, and Other Facts
SiteGround offers many types of web hosting such as dedicated servers, shared hostings (WordPress hosting), cloud web hosting, and reseller hostings.
Since I have only used shared hosting or the so-called WordPress hosting, I am going to talk about those plans only.
Before we go any farther, here’s a thing – Siteground doesn’t support Indian Rupee (INR). So, you will have to pay them in USD; which is not an issue nowadays.
However, that could be an issue if you don’t have a credit card or international payments enabled debit card.
No worries I have a solution too.
Sign up for a FREE zero balance Kotak 811 bank account. It hardly takes 5 minutes to open an account with the bank, you just need an Aadhar Card and a Pan Card in your name.
Just download the app from the Google play store or Apple app store and sign up with your details.
Once signed up, you will get a virtual debit card instantly which could be used to purchase not only Siteground hosting but anything you wish to buy online (including Facebook ads).
SiteGround offers three different types of Shared or WordPress hosting plans.
Let me get you through all of those:
You can also check out the detailed comparison of Siteground Plans Here >>
StartUp Plan-
It is the first, and the cheapest plan of SiteGround shared hosting which costs around $14.99 per month. Good for beginners but before you make any decision check out the other plans as well.
Although for the first time, you can get it for the introductory price, which is around $6.99 per month.
You might still manage to get a 20% bargain on your renewals if you talk to the support team.
This plan comes with 10GB of web space and it’s perfect to start a blog or website with around 10,000 visitors per month.
Apart from that, It comes with all the basic features included such as 24/7 customer support, Free LetsEncrypt SSL, Unlimited Emails and Database, Free CDN, Free Daily Backups, and Free Site Migration Tool.
GrowBig Plan –
The GrowBig plan comes with 20 GB of web space and can easily handle more than 25000 visitors per month.
It is good for a single more heavily trafficked website or multiple average-size websites.
The great thing about this plan is that in addition to the essential features you get a few premium features that the StartUp plan lacks.
The pricing is $9.99 for new customers while for renewal, you will be charged $24.99 per month. Just like the above plan you can get a 20% to 30% discount by getting in touch with the support team.
Also, the SuperCacher comes in three layers which means the loading time of a website will be faster than most websites on the internet. Apart from that, the other features are the same as StartUp plans.
GoGeek Plans-
If you’re planning to host a high-trafficked or resource-intensive website or average-sized e-commerce website then this is the plan for you.
Also if you’re planning to sell hosting to your clients, you can use this plan from Siteground which comes with white label rights.
GoGeek plans cost $14.99 per month for new users while the renewal will charge $39.99 per month. Again, you can get a 20% to 30% discount by initiating a chat with the support team.
This plan also comes with unlimited domain hosts. This plan provides 40 GB of web space and can easily manage more than 1,00,000 visits per month.
The plan comes with almost the same packed-up services listed above in the other hosting plans, plus few more productive features.
So, those were the shared hosting plans offered by SiteGround, and they are good though.
My Recommendation: Go with the GrowBig or GoGeek plan, especially if you’re planning multiple sites & thinking long term.
Why?
Siteground Startup vs Grow Big and GoGeek
Opportunity to host multiple websites – the StartUp plan allows you to host only one website, whereas if you’re interested in hosting more than one website under the same account, the higher hosting platforms would be a better choice.
SuperCacher – Only level 1 cache available with the Startup Plan – this is an in-house tool developed by Siteground that manages to trigger the website speed several times, and also increase the Google ranking and helps you with the SEO optimization. With the Growbig or GoGeek plan, you get the level 3 SuperCacher.
Priority Support – even though Siteground has an amazing response time on each channel – Phone, Live Chat, Ticketing System, their GrowBig and GoGeek clients are handled with a priority which might be something you should consider before making the buying decision.
So, my best suggestion is, buy any of the higher plans and buy them for at least 2 or 3 years (at the same rate as the first year).
Now, if you’re still confused between Siteground and the other popular hosts out there then let me ease some pain for you.
So, which hosting provider should you pick?
As you know that SiteGround is not the o
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