Last year, Srikanth posted a review of SiteGround, and after hearing great recommendations from other users, I purchased their GrowBig plan using this SiteGround discount coupon.
A few months ago I moved a few of my sites away from Hostgator to SiteGround, as my Hostgator subscription was expiring. It has now been more than three months since I began using SiteGround as the hosting service for five of my small WordPress sites. This period of use has given me enough time to experience the pros and cons of SiteGround hosting.
SiteGround offers an in-house caching mechanism called SuperCacher, which makes your WordPress blog load blazingly fast. SuperCacher technology offers caching at three levels:
- Varnish Static Cache
- Varnish Dynamic Cache
- Memcache
These caching mechanisms are impressive and make SiteGround hosting stand out.
Apart from this, SiteGround also offers:
- Free SSL Certificate
- PHP 7.x support
- SSD Hard drive
Despite the excellent hosting quality offered by SiteGround, this one limitation could make you rethink the possibility of purchasing a hosting package from them.
CPU seconds per account – SiteGround’s biggest limitation
If you are running a medium traffic WordPress site, or any other site that is dynamic, you may or may not face issues based on SiteGround’s constraints. If you consider purchasing a hosting package from SiteGround and investigate their plans, you will notice that their plans are suitable for X number of visitors.
Here is a screenshot of all of the shared hosting plans offered by SiteGround:
- StartUp: Suitable for ~10,000 visits monthly
- GrowBig: Suitable for ~ 25,000 visits monthly
- GoGeek: Suitable for ~ 100,000 visits monthly
SiteGround states that the suggested number of visitors does not impose an upper limit, and should not be seen as a limitation. This is partially true, as SiteGround does not use a per-visit calculation to determine your hosting usage. But, they do use CPU seconds to calculate the usage.
What is a CPU cycle on SiteGround Hosting?
According to the official SiteGround knowledge base:
A simple example of an execution is when a visitor opens your website, and your index PHP file is loaded. This counts as one execution. The more visitors your website has, the more executions it will generate. Please note that this is valid only for dynamically generated content. If you open a picture or an HTML page, a new execution will not be generated on the server. Executions are counted for the following scripting languages – PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby, etc.
Because 21% of the websites in the world are powered by WordPress which uses PHP, every single visit for WordPress users means one CPY cycle. So relating this to “Suitable for X visits monthly” does impose a limitation on WordPress users, i.e., 21% of all websites in the world.
My sites went offline on SiteGround
I mentioned earlier that I have five WordPress sites running on SiteGround. Following are the monthly traffic stats for all five blogs:
- CallingAllGeeks: 61K page views last month
- WPFreeSetup: 3K page views Last month
- WPHostingDiscount: 3.5K page views last month
- Other two sites: Approximately 1K page views last month
In total, my SiteGround hosting account GrowBig, which is suitable for 25K visits/monthly, received about 68K page views. Note: All the sites are running on WordPress CMS. For the last two months at the end of my billing cycle, I have gotten a CPU usage warning email from SiteGround.
Here is the first email that I received when my hosting used 90% of my allotted CPU Usage:
In the following 48 hours, I received another email saying the following: “Important: Web Services on callingallgeeks.org is limited due to overage!”
Dear Harsh Agrawal,
We would like to inform you that your account callingallgeeks.org exceeded the monthly allowed number of CPU seconds per account, and your web service is limited for the calendar month. The limit will be removed automatically at 00:10 a.m. CDT on the first day of the next calendar month and service will be fully restored.
In short, my websites were temporarily suspended until the start of the next calendar month.
SiteGround customer support to the rescue:
If something similar were to happen for you as a SiteGround customer, do not lose heart, as SiteGround’s customer support is excellent. In my case, I pinged the SiteGround customer support and informed them of the issue, and they gladly added 20K extra CPU seconds to my account. My sites were up after a few hours of downtime, which is somewhat comforting.
Additional steps to reduce the CPU cycle:
SiteGround has this resource page that shows how to reduce the CPU executions on your hosting account. Here are a few things that I did to lower the CPU cycle:
- Added Cloudflare CDN
- Enabled SuperCacher (Guide)
- Checked my AWStats using SiteGround cPanel, and blocked leechers and spammy I.P. addresses
Because of my engineering background, it was relatively easy for me to get all of this accomplished. At the same time, it caused me to ask myself the question, “Should I recommend SiteGround to new bloggers?”
An experienced blogger can take action to optimize his or her WordPress and hosting services, but this is not something everyone is capable of doing. Moreover, SiteGround’s CPU seconds usage limit is far too low. Because we live in a world where a site can go viral anytime, SiteGround’s CPU seconds usage is a very significant limitation which every user should be aware of before purchasing hosting from SiteGround.
As an end user, I love SiteGround because of the technology enhancements they are running.
SuperCacher is a great technology, especially for blogs or websites running on WordPress CMS. They have also recently introduced HHVM technology for their cloud hosting, and they seem to be one of the more progressive hosting companies around. At the same time, their CPU seconds usage is so significant a limitation as to render SiteGround a service that is not recommended for any growing blog or website.
Until the time when SiteGround reconsiders their CPU usage limits to the extent that they at least impose an acceptable level, I suggest that you buy hosting from SiteGround alternative sites such as Bluehost or A2Hosting. (Both of these hosting services have higher CPU cycle usage limits.)
I will be updating the ShoutMeLoud recommended WordPress hosting page to reflect the necessary changes.
Let me know if you have ever faced similar issues to mine when using SiteGround’s hosting services. Would you recommend SiteGround’s shared hosting to other users? Use the comments section below to tell us why or why not.
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I am going through this as we speak. I wish I found your review out of the countless positive reviews I read before deciding to switch over from hostgator. It seems like it won’t get better and I will have to make the hard decision again to move to another hosting. I am running a business not a blog so every second my site is down I am losing money. It is so frustrating! I am not an engineer so I am SOL when trying to figure this stuff out.
@Krystal
I can understand your pain & I also wish if all the reviews share this important info too. What hosting are you planning to move? Do share your experience & insights.
100% right. SIteground is great in all..but this cpu politic can ruin your biz. After 10 monts using it in several sites (happy) the drama come after i start to have some traffic (just 1k,daily).
The AFFILIATE philosoohy ruins internet too: thoiusands of people recomending SIteground but hidding this MAIN f…ng problem
Thank you Harsh. I am trying to follow all the steps that you took to reduce the CPU cycle on your website. I have activated SiteGround SuperCacher. I have a question – do I need to disable my previous cache plugin – W3 total cache?
Hey,
You should disable W3 total cache.
Thanks for a great post, I wish we’d read it before! Our site has been down overnight as the CPU limit was reached first at 11pm when we tried to fix it and again at 2am when we were asleep.
The thing that is really frustrating is that we only switched our site to the siteground servers and within 6 hours, we reached the limit and they took down the site. There was no warning beforehand.
It seems that the problem is googlebots crawling the site (over 100,000 hits and 14gb of usage). We suspect that that is a one off thing – it’s because it’s effectively a new site and so there are about 1,000 posts to crawl.
We followed the instructions from the help desk, tried to restrict the googlebot (which it seems you can no longer do), and they put removed the restrictions. However, 2 hours later the same problem and so it has been down all night.
I totally understand that siteground need to protect the rest of their customers, but so far the help desk instructions have been far from helpful, and nothing about their tone appreciates that they have just taken our website down without offering any constructive help.
There is a huge difference between overuse caused by lots of people going to your site, and overuse caused by automated bots who are crawling your site… So now we are stuck between siteground and google, neither of which we can control.
How do I do what you said and limit the spammers using th awstats feature?
I have gotten the CPU overages multiples times now with SiteGround. I’m on their GoGeek Plan.. they shut down my site (for about the 3rd time now) until I either optimize the site to reduce these or upgrade to their Cloud Hosting. They said it was because too many spammy bots were hitting my site so we blocked all search engines but the main ones and installed Wordfence. My site also load very fast as I do speed optimization as a service. Yet, it happened again. So I either need to hire my developer to reduce executions or migrate to a new hosting company. That’s been my experience.
Update: I learned a ton about AWstats and what was causing my high CPU and was able to fix it. Guess I was just frustrated with it happening to me :/
It really hurts when your sites are down due to such limitation imposed by hosting.
In my case I am using Siteground’s GoGeek plan for my few sites and never faced a problem in last 2 years. What I additionally like is their superfast support response which is awesome. I think rather than switching to another hosting, you could try GoGeek or even their cloud hosting.
Btw one thing I see that you change hosting sometimes. Does it hurt SEO or ranking in any way when you change the hosting? Would love to know your feedback on this. Thanks.
@Stephan
So far I have never seen traffic drop by changing hosting. When I moved my blog from a slow hosting to fast one I have seen a considerable amount of improvement in traffic & page views/session. I believe speed played a major role as it gives a good user-experience.
We have been with Siteground on the GoGeek (the largest shared package) for a year. We did not have really any problem until last weekend whereas they emailed us that we reached the quota and shut us down.
The problem was that they’ve notified us via email at 10PM on Friday evening and they closed it down an hour later. We have been driving Adwords and other paid traffic to our website which was all a waste. We did not check our emails during the weekend, we’ve lost not just what we paid for ads but also we got no leads. Thousands of dollars.
When you contact them, they are nice and understanding, but it won’t solve our problem and won’t pay our money back. We are not a large retailer, only a nationwide company with less than 1000 traffic/day but with a high amount of page views. They confirmed that most of our traffic is legitimate but they advised to limit Google bots crawling us. I refuse to do that. We can block the bots but that’s a SEO disaster!
Siteground in my opinion is a casual hosting for people with personal websites that can afford being down a day or two. If you cannot afford that, you must avoid! I do not recommend them for businesses with normal traffic, especially if you drive paid traffic to your website.
Harsh,
Great site, and great posting and replies. Kudos to you! I just spoke to a support rep as I was planning to take the “Grow big” plan ($ 7.95/Month). What was appealing was that they incorporate the CDN in their shared plans and their customer service is par excellence. To give some insight, I am having a matchmaking/dating website built for Indians that uses the features of some sites like Shaadi.com + has a persona quiz to match my users.
My questions:
1. The Grow big plan has 20 GB space – would that be sufficient for a site like mine?
2. The rep I spoke to,said that the CPU speed was MBPS, I hope I got that right – and he said that that was sufficient speed for “most websites”
I would appreciate any feedback or comments on the above or answers from you or other visitors to your site.
Thanks in advance for your inputs.
@Skyrider
20 Gb is a good limit but the only thing which may be an issue with a growing site like yours is the allowed CPU cycle. You can always use free Cloudflare as CDN & to filter out spam traffic. I suggest you to grab Power plan from InmotionHosting. Their offering is pretty good & they are in the market since 2002.
Hi, I have a problem with cpu usage in siteground, i have cloudflare, wp rocket and supercacher but my cpu usage is so high with only 800 visits for day. This is the screen of execution of the site:
http://postimg.org/image/tivcj4ivj/
100% agree with you. I was with Hostgator India. No much issues. After reading great reviews about Siteground I moved to Siteground. Even though my site is under testing, I started getting bots attack and Siteground warning every other day for CPU usage limit. Finally site went down fully, two days before the month end. Even after the first day of the next month, the site was not up. I was told the CPU limit will be reset at 12.01am of the last day of the month. But the limit was removed only after making the request. As I am not an IT guy.
I have few questions here:
1.Where I was with Hostgator India, the Alexa ranking was around 300,000, but after moving to Siteground (Singapore), it shoot up to 600,000.
2. With Hostgator, I never had bots attack, but in Siteground, too many
3. I didn’t see any speed improvement (Hostgator-Baby; Siteground-Startup)
On the positive note, as you mentioned, Siteground’s customer support is extremely good.
@Anand
1) This could happen only when your traffic went down. As you mentioned your site was down, that justifies Alexa ranking drop.
2) For the speed improvement you need to have Supercacher enabled. Since Supercacher is not enabled on Startup plan, you can’t take advantage of it. You need to have minimum of Growbig plan to use Supercacher.
For bots, I would recommend you to configure Cloudflare. It has free plan, which is good enough to stop bot & DDOS attack.
Thanks for your quick reply.
Yes, you are right, I am considering to upgrade to Growbig to take advantage of Supercasher.
For bots and to speed up, I was told by the support team to configure Cloudflare. Even after Cloudflare configuration, the speed never increased and the bots attack never reduced.
Later the support team suggested to insert the following rules in .htaccess:
https://github.com/bluedragonz/bad-bot-blocker/blob/master/.htaccess
Then only I could control the bots. By that time, I already exceeded the CPU limit.
Did I miss anything in the cloudflare configuration?
As you said, SiteGround limitation can be harmful for beginners, who are not aware this restriction. But according to my perception, SiteGround is the only company, who providing supercache service for free which can boost your WordPress speed. Conversely, Space usage can be the biggest issue for SiteGround customers. Because a normal website can easily eat up 2-3GB initially and it will be grow with the passage of time. So, it is a good practice to move your website to other Hosting providers like HostGator and Bluehost because they have much space than SiteGround. Eventually, @Harsh thanks you for this inspirational guidance. 🙂
@Siraj
You are right about SuperCacher. It’s indeed a great technology & in shared hosting space, Siteground offers such thing. ( Godaddy is another hosting company which offers inbuilt cache system).
As a hosting company, I really like Siteground. I hope they increase their limit on CPU usage, and it will easily become favorite hosting for bloggers at any level.
These unlimited hosting packages are always lucrative. Though they have hidden CPU usage limits. I had used HostGator, whose support was awesome that time, but now its kind of worst. Heavy traffic sites do not work very well with Apache based web servers. LightSpeed web servers can handle way more traffic without hurting the CPU that much. Big hosting companies are still playing around with apache web server software, they should consider switching to LightSpeed Web Server Technology.
@Hasan
Lightspeed on HHVM can handle great deal of traffic & especially they are great for WordPress based sites, as WordPress is a memory hogging software. It would be game changer, if we get this technology at the shared hosting price. Right now many companies are offering such solution, but they charge a premium price on that. Which is not possible for a blogger who is just starting out.
Fascinating Harsh. This bot and blocking situation is totally new to me. I heard about it just recently. Something to keep in mind as you choose a hosting company while generating more and more traffic through your blog.
Ryan
Hello Harsh,
Wow… too much of a painful limit!
Since the numbers look somewhat higher and as you said any post(s) or blog(s) can go viral in short amount of time, this CUP seconds thing can just destroy the overall struggle of bloggers.
And such claims of “unlimited”, it looks like a false alarm given the fact that not everything is unlimited especially in the case of technology. So the better companies have to clear up their limitations to general people, the best the people know in advance as to what to expect and what to do if hit with similar issues.
So, after reading your this post, I kind of question myself as to ever move to SiteGround in future or not if in need of switching the host.
Thank you for putting up this information, I am so happy to share it!
~ Adeel Sami
Adeel,
Yep SG slammed us with a 900% price increase because of this CPU overage thing. We are done with them.
I do have a very good experience siteground customer service, it is best for wordpress blogs, site loading speed is really good, as you have mentioned that visits limit is biggest thing that we need to worry about
I was thinking to promote SiteGround.. But after going through this article, I am feeling little doubtful to promote it.
Having a good hosting for our online business is one of the most crucial decisions, but it hurts when they don’t fulful the requirements.
Harsh, I have seen that you keep swithicng various web hosts almost after every 4-5 months.
Have you tried dedicvated hosting from any good hosting provider?
I was at your stage 6-7 months back when I switched to many hosts. But now I am happy with my host as it’s giving me good results.:)
Thanks for sharing your experience with us.
@Kulwant
Siteground is a good hosting to promote, but one need to keep this limitation in mind.
You are right about me changing hosting, I do that as I love to explore new hosting & latest technology. The only way to explore is by using it yourself.
I have used private VPS but never used dedicated hosting. Right now I’m using Kinsta, and blown away by their performance. They are using HHVM technology, which is latest in thing in WordPress hosting. Thanks for dropping by & for your comments.
Everything has a limit. Like you have discussed about the biggest limitations of Siteground Hosting. SiteGround has this resource page that shows how to reduce the CPU executions on your hosting account. An experienced blogger can take action to optimize his or her WordPress and hosting services, but this is not something everyone is capable of doing. You have discussed some most informative information so that you can solve any problems concerning of limitations.
Harsh, We have Aha!NOW hosted on SiteGround for the last about six months, and we definitely feel that it is better than our previous web hosts, Hostgator. However, it depends a lot on the type of your site the hosting plan you choose.
We are on the GoGeek plan and we enjoy the premium features – our site does not get blocked even if the CPU resources run high. Of course, we have to take preventive and precautionary measures as and when required and fight the spam too, but my view is that the CPU usage limits of SiteGround and more than what we used to get in the Baby plan at HostGator.
We learnt that the best way to avoid getting restriction on your account or have your site down is to proactively track the traffic of your sites keep blocking the IPs that overly use your CPU resources. Aha!NOW too is on WordPress and it is highly dynamic in nature due to its active community running on BuddyPress and BBPress, yet we find that Siteground is able to handle us better than HostGator, which was good till our site had less traffic and was not very dynamic.
I agree with all the suggestions you have made to maintain your hosting and I’d suggest the new bloggers to make their decision based on the evaluation of their site and its requirements. Thanks and I hope this helps.
Awesome post. I will ask my hosting company about a couple of things u mentioned…
By the way… I host with Site5.com since 2009 (more than 20 sites) with excellent cus service 24/7/365 and they have more than 10 different server locations round the world.
Once more million thanks for this juicy information Harsh!
Teo