SiteGround GrowBig Shared Hosting Plan Review

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SiteGround has three different tiers in their shared hosting plans, and GrowBig is the mid tier plan among these three. SiteGround has always been a reasonably priced shared hosting provider for people, and the flexibility in plan pricing and their hardware configuration have gotten people interested into SiteGround web hosting services lately. For people who are planning to move into a higher category web hosting service from the lowest tier hosting plan of any company; the GrowBig plan can offer them with the level of ease and convenience they require.

siteground gogeek plan comparison

Features of GrowBig

The GrowBig hosting plan from SiteGround is the mid-tier hosting plan from the company. This plan comes for a standardized pricing value of $14.95 per month without any discount, but the good news is SiteGround offers plenty of discounts throughout the year through their official websites. And if you are coming from an affiliate link, chances are you have a coupon code which would get you few more miles for an even lesser amount.

However, currently SiteGround is offers 33% off on their GrowBig plan if you use SiteGround coupon codes, and the monthly payment for this plan is $9.95/month.

For this pricing, the customers gets unlimited bandwidth per month, though the overall setup allows for around 25,000 monthly visits at ease, smoothly. The hard drive space is 20 GB. Multiple domains can be hosted in GrowBig plan, however they all need to fit within the 20 GB data allocation.

GrowBig offers a pretty good amount of essential features required for hosting a website –

  • Free website builder for the ease of new website owners.
  • Domain registration is free; for multiple domains.
  • Wizard based app installers are available and they are free.
  • Apart from unlimited bandwidth and MySQL database, there are plenty of free email accounts as well.
  • If you are moving in from another host, you can do so using the 1-click wizard tool.
  • SiteGround backs up their customers data automatically and instant restoration is available in case anything goes wrong.
  • cPanel and SSH as CMS are available. SiteGround has included CloudFlare CDN as a standard free options as well.

Premium Features

Despite being a low price mid-tier plan, SiteGround offers a good range of premium features as well; mentioned below.

  • For technical support, GrowBig customers get priority over the lower-priced hosting plans.
  • The speed remains consistently high, because of the SuperCacher feature that caches the pages of the websites hosted under GrowBig plan.
  • A free SSL certificate would be provided for the first year, highly useful for e-commerce based websites; etc.

Why GrowBig?

There are many companies providing shared web hosting plans, probably in a lesser price as well. Why should people purchase GrowBig and not the rest?

Because GrowBig offers some great advantages that the others don’t. Getting a website hosted and alive is fastest on SiteGround, thanks to the embedded tools. Also, for migrants from one hosting to SiteGround, the ecosystem is the friendliest here. SiteGround offers another plan called GoGeek, learn more about SiteGround GoGeek plan here.Not to talk about, the superior uptime of 99.996% throughout the last 365 days, and excellent Joomla and WordPress support to get a superior head start makes SiteGround special.

Conclusion

With all such features, payment of $9.95/month shouldn’t be an issue. If it is, grab a discount code from affiliates for even better cost management.

HostGator Vs. WP Engine Hosting Comparison Review

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For every webmaster no matter new or skilled – a web hosting space is the first requirement to host a website. There are plenty of inexpensive web hosting solutions on the web, most of them are shared servers. For moderate amount of traffic and medium-functionality website, shared website hosting is just about fine. HostGator is a very popular company for providing shared web hosting service, they offer other options as well. WP Engine is comparatively less heard of, yet the service they provide start from a lower price point and on overall assessment, the services didn’t seem to vary much from HostGator.

Hostgator-vs-wp-engine-compare

Web Hosting Plans & Pricing

HostGator offers three basic plans. The lowest monthly cost for HostGator plans is $5.21/month with the 25% discount offered through hosting coupons. This price tag applies to the initial plan from HostGator named Hatchling. For the latter two plans named Baby and Business, the pricing is $7.46/month and $11.21/month respectively. All these plans offers unlimited bandwidth. One domain registration is free for the hatchling plan, while it’s unlimited for the other two. All plans offer shared SSL certificate. One-click installation of plugins are available through the cPanel.

On the other hand, WP Engine offers four shared web hosting plans. WP Engine Web Hosting plan starts from $29/month, which is higher than the Hatchling plan from HostGator. The initial plan is named Beginner; the rest three are Basic, Standard and Advanced. You can get 3 months free if you use wp engine coupon code 2016 while buying it. The pricing for these three plans are $29/month, $99/month and $249/month respectively. Unlike HostGator, WP Engine has opted for mentioning the exact data and bandwidth limit they offer for each user per month. For the Beginner plan the HDD space is only 5 GB, bandwidth 50 GB. This goes up to 150 GB HDD space and 1500 GB bandwidth per month in the Advanced plan.

Usability

Both web hosting companies offer an easy to use interface and the market winning control panel for web hosting servers – cPanel. HostGator offers one-click app and plugin installations through cPanel, and WP Engine names their app store Softaculous from where the users can get an app and install straight from cPanel.

Performance

Theoretically, both companies offer a near perfect uptime of around 99.9%. In reality, the uptime didn’t reach 99.9% but wasn’t lagging much behind the figure either. Only few occasional stuttering while loading pages were noticed, pages load little slow when the traffic gets high but on average the performance is pretty good.

Money Back Guarantee

If the service doesn’t look as appealing as they did on their website promotions, a user may proceed with service cancellation. However, WP Engine doesn’t offer any money refund option. For HostGator, within 45 day timeline full money refund would be applicable. The refund is 100% of the initial payment – hence the service is almost full free for tryouts for the first 45 days.

Customer Support

Both companies provide a great experience on customer support. The agents were helpful in both companies, customer service could be asked through email, tickets, hotline or live chat.

Conclusion

For better pricing, WP Engine might be perfect. HostGator earns more reputation and they have higher online promotions as well, also they offer a great deal on money refund. Making a decision should be easy.

What are the Boundaries for a Web Hosting Support?

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Web Hosting Support

Web hosting services are the base element of a website, all the files of a website resides on the web hosting server. Apart from storing the website files, a web host also provides following features like – custom website design, email clients, FTP server, multiple domain names, extra bandwidth support, unlimited disk storage support etc. All these different forms of services are combined in order to provide a flawless web hosting service. That’s a complicated setup, can go wrong any time. When things are going out of order the customers are supposed seek help of the web hosting support. But the web hosting support people are also bound to provide support within a boundary. Not everything regarding your website is a problem that they are supposed to solve.

Web Hosting Support

So what are the boundaries for a web hosting support?

The Initial Communication – Support Ticket

A support ticket is the confirmation slip for the acknowledgement of some problem. When you launch a support ticket; that means you are seeking the support team’s help regarding some matter. The support ticket will contain the time of lodging the complaint, nature or your problem and estimated time the customer support might need to get back to you. Modern day customer support tickets are automated, the automated script redirects the ticket directly to the concerned support department.

The support ticket can clearly indicate what boundary the support team is supposed to maintain. If there’s a drop down list of problem category and your problem doesn’t fit into any of those, then maybe you are not at liberty to ask for help in the support window. Or, maybe you have failed to assume the actual problem.

List of Common Services & User Agreement

Few common services are provided by all the web hosting companies. For example – maintenance of accounts, financial activities, hardware related troubles, domain and bandwidth management etc. are directly under the service category. If anything goes wrong in the provider’s end – they are bound to provide you support and alternate backup plans for prolonged troubleshooting times.

However, things that goes wrong in your end like wrong coding and scripting, third party plugin error, security breach due to your nuisance or content corruption, data loss due to the user’s fault etc. – in such cases the provider may provide you suggestions, but the support team is not bound to resolve the problems for you.

For the detailed policy regarding customer support, read the user agreement before signing up with a company.

Hardware Malfunction May not be Covered

Many web hosting providers don’t provide any data coverage or insurance if the data stored on their hosting server is lost due to hardware malfunction in their end. That is an understandable business policy. But if you require added protection in your data storage, then look for a company that covers all liabilities under their customer support policy.

Get Discount on Signing up for Hosting Providers

Most web hosting companies spread hosting coupons on their affiliate websites in order to attract more customers. If you are unsure about the customer support boundaries of a specific company, you may consider having a test run with the company using such coupons.

Conclusion

For transparency between the user and the company, the best policy is to read the user agreement thoroughly. Existing user feedbacks can also provide the necessary visualization about a hosting company’s support boundaries.

Web Hosting Providers Can Enhance SEO

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Enhance Seo

Modern day webmastering takes a lot of patience and duty to be done. SEO is one old school but yet most effective technique of making a website available to its respective class of visitors. Despite the website’s target customers and perspective of making money; SEO is a must in the to-do list. The ultimate goal of most websites is to reach people through search engines; if SEO doesn’t exist then the goal becomes obsolete.

Enhance Seo

Web hosting providers’ goal is to provide the hosting space for a website, but they can be really helpful guiding a webmaster through their SEO requirements as well.

SEO in the Drift

To get how search engine optimization works, it’s pretty much important to study the search engine technology thoroughly and keep updated with the updates Google release in a regular interval. Basically, the search engines look for keywords and phrases when they make a search in its most basic form, later on complex stuff like the page rank and website quality comes. Web hosting providers can help pull up the page rank to a higher position by providing higher bandwidth, faster page loading, better management of content-heavy websites and more secured environment for every visitor to all the websites.

Why is it very important to stay in the first page, or at least in the first 3 pages of the search results? Because an average user of Google won’t go beyond the first page to look for a website; 3 pages at most in highly desperate cases. Results after page 3 are mostly useless and they just show up for the sake of showing up. If the hosting provider doesn’t do their job properly in the first place, then every other objective of SEO goes out of order.

Page Loading Speed

According to the latest updates in Google’s Page Speed Algorithm, it is highly important how fast a webpage loads. Bandwidth is an important factor and there are other aspects like faster CPU, dedicated IP and faster data storage drives that contribute to fast loading of a website. For better optimization, Google Page Speed tool may be used. When Google ranks a webpage in their search result pages, they check such factors very thoroughly. A poorly hosted website will never make it to the first page even if there are very high quality contents.

Advanced Web Optimization Tools

Not just the loading speed but the other optimization factors also count. Content-heavy websites are more prone to crashing. On the other hand, websites on shared hosting often share one IP address which leads to diluted page ranking, or a crashed website. All of these make a website look very bad to Google’s judgmental criterions.

For efficient management of all these factors, there are third party monitoring tools that could be installed on in web hosting server. Web hosting servers can enhance SEO by allowing installation for such tools.

To-Do: Pick out the Best Hosting Provider

If SEO and website rank matter, despite the cost choose an outstanding web hosting provider. Speaking of pricing, initial months could be discounted using hosting coupons and they are easily available all across the cyberspace. If SEO doesn’t matter to you, just host a website on any hosting server and take a chill pill.

Conclusion

SEO has become old, yet it never runs out of order. The technique only adapts to all the latest crucial updates Google throws at the webmasters,it’sthe webmasters who must abide by the rules in order to survive.

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