Editor’s note: I forgot to correctly establish the timeline, and some people wondered about that. I should mention that I moved my website(s) away from them as early as November 2020, before their most recent price hike went into effect.
In the previous version of this blog, this blog had a “Recommendations” section. Although there’s tons of tools I enjoy using daily, there was only one entry. That entry was one for Siteground, a hosting company. As you may notice from the past tense, that’s no longer the case. And I made a deliberate choice to no longer recommend Siteground.
When I initially signed up for Siteground, I was a bit cautious. A lot of people in the Joomla community were recommending their hosting. Since I was looking for a new host, I followed the crowd and signed up.
One thing I didn’t like back then is that the Year One price for a Siteground package is vastly different from the price you’ll pay later on. It’s still a practice I strongly disagree with. Yet they’re still doing it many years later. And that’s the first reason to no longer recommend them: I still don’t like shady tactics.
Which brings me straight to the second point: pricing. Over the years, Siteground kept increasing their pricing year after year. If I’m not mistaking, the price I would pay now has doubled over the price I paid when I originally signed up. For an identical product. Nobody in their right mind should accept such a price hike from a hosting company, especially if their performance isn’t $350 per year good. That’s the price they’re currently charging (in euros), for what is basically shared hosting.
For that money, you’d expect a lot of amazing features. But that’s just not the case. When using Siteground, there aren’t any features you can’t find at another hosting company. In fact, you could look at WordPress Managed hosting for the same price. “Real” managed hosting, not the product Siteground tries to sell to you as “Managed hosting”. Which, believe it or not, is the same product as their website hosting. And their Magento hosting. All this “specialized” hosting stuff is basically one an the same shared hosting package.
What do you get for that money? Hosting that started to behave more and more wacky over the years. A “custom” control panel which isn’t very good. Features that you can find at any other hosting company. But at least you’re guaranteed that they’re hosting your site on the best servers… actually, no. Siteground has moved all hosting to the Google Cloud. Which doesn’t have to be a bad thing. But it’s a weird move for a “hosting company” to not host anything themselves and depend entirely on another party. But hey, you do you, Siteground.
All in all, Siteground is definitely not worth the money that they are charging people. People are right to complain. Me, I just packed up my stuff and left for another hosting company.
So here’s what I did
Since I personally wouldn’t use Siteground anymore, I don’t want to recommend it to people anymore. That means the recommendation had to go. But I had to go one step further and cut into my bottom line. I also stopped promoting their hosting through affiliate links.
This was a very hard thing to do, because Siteground affiliate marketing is very lucrative. They pay out a very high sum per sale that is made through your links. This is why a lot of bloggers are still recommending Siteground. It’s not because they think Siteground offers a great product. They might not even be hosting on Siteground themselves because they’re economically smarter that that. Nah, the real reason a lot of people are still recommending Siteground is because of that $40-$50 payout per person that they get to sign up for Siteground.
I could have kept pimping their links, but I made a concious decision to stop doing it because I believe in promoting products that I believe myself. Of course, it’s easy for me to make that choice, because to be fair I stopped using their links when I left their platform. But still, it’s the idea that counts, right? 😉