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.
Would you also tell me the hourly and daily CPU limits on GrowBig plan? I think a thorough comparison helps. Thanks.
Thanks Harsh Agrawal.
This is a useful review.
I am having similar problem and wondering why no one talks about it. The Internet is full of misleading reviews.
Siteground is very good in several ways. Polite support team. Almost no downtime. Very secure. Handy caching and delivery tools from cPanel – like Supercacher, Cloudfare, etc.
So, reviewers can promote Siteground without hiding it’s CPU limitations. Plus, it is their ethical obligation. Well, we have ShoutMeLoud at least.
I have one question though.
Based on your post, it appears your GrowBig plan was allowed 600, 000 CPU executions per month.
However, my GoGeek plan is allowed 800,000 CPU executions per month. Does that make sense? I am puzzled. My plan was supposed to have four times more executions allowed per month. Right?
Oh wow! How can this article be so timely. I just experienced the same bad fate with Siteground the other week and it was a bad week-long experience. My news site went down for 3 times that week and I had to contact their support every time just to lift the limitation so I could do an intensive optimization on my site’s homepage / index.
And just like you, because I have a computer engineering background, was able to do the necessary steps to avoid reaching the limit on my GoGeek account and still I keep nearing the top. And yes, it’s a headache keeping track of your site’s CPU usage. I have 2 hosting accounts with them, the other one is GrowBig plan. And I’ll be prepping my sites for transfer with other hosting services.
I’m considering Kinsta.
Yup, exactly that. One of my articles went viral on Facebook, twice. Each time, they shut it down.
Apparently, they don’t like to host popular sites or sites that are occasionally popular. Every time you get popular, you’re shut down!
Any recommendations for reasonable hosting with good customer service for non-techies?
Hey P,
If you are looking for a shared hosting then I would recommend Bluehost otherwise for managed hosting, you can choose Kinsta.
I got siteground hosting after a lot of recommendation but I just hate it. my blog is down every two days stating CPU abuse. I have a small blog that doesnt get more than 6k-7k visits in a month so I went with the starter plan as this was my first hosting. Big mistake and now I dont know how to rectify it as I am not a techie and unable to understant technical things beyond a point
@Divya
I can relate to your frustration. My immediate advice is to configure Cloudflare for your blog.
I’m on the growbig plan and have done all the things you’ve mentioned and still go above my cpu allocation (just slightly).
Super frustrating and I’m considering moving away rather than upgrading to their gogeek plan. It is just too limited. AWS is now offering VPS solutions so I’ll likely use that. Out of curiosity what’s hostgators cpu max? Can’t seem to find it on their site.
SiteGround uses NGNIX proxy caching and does not use Varnish anymore.
Hi Harsh,
Thanks for this post. I recently migrated my wordpress website to Siteground GrowBig plan from Bluehost. And I did this after a terrible experience with Bluehost.
I did not receive any warning on resource usage from Bluehost and they took down my site abruptly when their server rules detected high load. And Bluehost customer service said just one thing -> Go through the logs and delete files that are causing an issue and then site shall come. That’s all. Else pay up to upgrade the plan. No temporary respite or enabling of my website.
So far my experience with Site ground has been good. Found the customer support very helpful till date.
I came across this post today. And I am trying to optimise my site further to prevent hitting the resource limit. Even before I found your article, I had enabled supercacher plugin (Enabled Level2; Dynamic cache and also Level3:Memcache). Also, I have enabled Cloudfare CDN free version.
I see you have mentioned this point:
“Checked my AWStats using SiteGround cPanel, and blocked leechers and spammy I.P. addresses”
– How do I detect spammy IP address and blocked leechers using AWStats on my cpanel? Any leads for this?
I do have Wordfence plugin enabled to. Would WordFence plugin reduced in preventing some of the bad traffic that eat up the resources?
–
Nishant
HI Harsh,
I am Using Siteground GoGeek Plan..I dont know whether to use Siteground Supercacher or W3 total cache?? I am already using Free Cloudflare and w3 total cache..Can u tell me which to use? Supercacher or W3??Please…
I would use SG CachePress and not use W3 Total Cache on SiteGround.
https://wordpress.org/plugins/sg-cachepress/
That’s the reason I love Hawkhost, they’re never suspend a user. When I got DDOS attact (I believe this is business competitor because I got dozens of terror calls too), my cpu usage stick at 80-100% for 2 months, and they’re not suspend my account.
I’ve several experiences on some of big hosting company, when my cpu jump up to 75%, I got a warning message, and when hit 100%, they’re suspend my account without a warning, and when I asked the support to get my files, they’re never answer my ticked.
I want to try siteground, but honestly I’m a little bit afraid about their limitation, since people rarely talk about it, your article is help me so much.
Thanks a lot.
Hi! Does this CPU matter applies to WordPress sites only? I am thinking of having to host an html based website/s on SiteGround either on GoGeek plan or Entry Level Cloud Hosting and I am expecting this site to have a significant high traffic. Their chat representative stated that HTML sites wont eat up CPU’s usage and recommends the Cloud plan bcoz of any possible high traffic + more CPU resource. I told them of my 2 main concerns. 1) CPU 2) Possible high traffic Any tech geeks here can confirm this?
Harsh, this is fantastic info and thanks for sharing. I’m tired of all the glowing reviews that everyone publishes for different hosts without going into details.
I’m currently with HG baby and website keeps going down sporadically for less than 1000 visitors a day. Now I’m putting together a bunch of websites for a client and evaluating whether to go with another host, since I also need secure sites. All the websites will have WP as the CMS. I’ve spent the better part of 2 days reading through everything I could find, review, chatting with customer reps, sending queries out and what not.
I was almost about to close on SiteGround GrowBig because of some great features and great price.
1. Unlimited websites
2. Free domain
3. Servers around the world / SSD
4. Free CF CDN
4. HTTP/2 support
5. Three level super cacher
6. Wildcard SSL cert + dedicated IP, free for 1 year
7. Allows free Lets Encrypt SSL
But that 25K visitor suitability was really making me worried. Simple maths shows that its 1 visit / 2 mins if I assume traffic all throughout the day. More realistically, if I assume only 12 hours of traffic (India centric sites), then thats provisioning for 1 visit a minute (25000 / 30 days / 12 hours / 60 mins), which is ridiculous. Why do I need to pay for fancy-ass hosting to get that kind of traffic provisioning?
I chatted with their customer support who said that “that number is not a limit at all we have decided to set such numbers just to guide the customers who start hosting for first time which plan will fit their needs. But we will never limit your website or account if you have more visisotrs”… which seems to be totally at odds with this post and comments. Later she said “we will monitor your account 24/7 and if we detect that you need more server resources you will be contacted and we will assist you in upgrading the account”. After pushing for tech info, she said “the simultaneous processes which you refer to are set to 20 for the GrowBig plan , so 20 people can access the website at the same second. he simultaneous connections are from a single IP, this is also the only limitation for IMAP connections and its aim is to prevent security and overload problems”
Subsequently I searched and ended up on this post. You got a warning from them @ 68K PVs. If we assume ever *visit* on avg will produce 4 PVs, thats just 17K visits at which they are limiting people. I think thats way too less and a big big problem. So now I’m back to the drawing board for a host. Sheesh.
ive had my site for a little over a month now, with maybe 10-20 visits per day max per jetpack, daily average is around 5. siteground emailed me my site was offline since i went over the 10k cpu seconds per day limit. i added heartbeat and also setup cronjob per their recs, but dont really understand why im exceeding the cpu allotment when i dont have many visits.
i also attached a screenshot of my aw stats page – https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-U4Blp0n93PM1MzZENiQnJJbGM/view?usp=sharing
i feel as though siteground is trying upsell me to get the higher packages which allow for more cpu seconds, im not sure if i should take their advice, was hoping for some insight here. thank you
@Patrick
Seems like you need to optimize your blog. Do notice the top URL column at the top.
Here are two things you should do:
1) Start using Cloudflare
2) Enable Supercacher if you haven’t. http://sgusers.com/supercacher-siteground/
If you move to SG cloud hosting be aware of their one liner way down the page before signing up…
“Please note that the preinstalled OS and other software, needed for a smoothly managed cloud service, reserve 10GB of storage on your server.”
That means if you take the 20GB starter plan you end up with only 8 GB “storage” or less as the 10Gb is a conservative estimate
Caveat Emptor!
I am hosting my Ease Bedding Blog at Siteground and faced the similar problem about two months ago. I received the warning messages about cpu usage and my site was offline, then after request, they provide me some more CPU.
Since then I am always worried and keep on checking that everything is fine. So I am planning to move to their Grow Big Plan. I hope there I am not going to face this CPU problem and will get some more features.
Thanks.
Same issue with SiteGround. I use more than 800k Script Executions in a month and they shut my site down on July 16th, 2016. It won’t come back online until August 1st. So yeah… finding a new host ASAP. Any suggestions?
GO SITE GROUND ALL THE WAY THERE SUPPORT WILL HELP YOU> The time spent assisting you places great value for money. If you need an upgrade, do it. But in most cases their support will just help you.
I just had that problem today. I am on go geek with siteground. I received the warning messages about cpu usage and did everything they asked to cut back on usage. They assured me they would not limit my site if I went over.
Then this morning my site was taken offline by siteground. To their credit they put it live when I contacted them but only after discussing it at the supervisor level.
We then went back and forth and the end result was they suggested I could add a command that would not allow any bots to get into my site!
Their support is very spotty. It can be both incredibly good but then the next time incredibly bad. Honestly I do not want to change hosts as when things are going well its a great host. But when problems arise thats when they usually drop the ball.
You would think in this competitve hosting envirnment that they would change that usage rule. Their advertising on the go geek plan could not be more misleading. And their statement you get VIP support with the go geek plan could not be accurate when they refer you to pdfs to read to figure it out on your own.
So I am just starting to do reasearch on a new host.
As an update to my above post. Just this morning I received a notice that they were restricting my site as my database size was 1.4gb and their limit under the go geek plan was 1.0 GB. However, I could get a two-day extension to decrease the size of the database.
I then worked for about 5 hours this morning on the database deleting plugins and optimizing the database after reading the articles they sent me.
After 5 hours I sent them an email seeing if I had made any headway. They wrote back saying the notice was in error as 55gb was due to wood fence security cache.
So I wasted 5 hours this morning. I sent them an email asking how that could happen and they have yet to reply and its been going on 5 hours since I sent them the email.
So much for the VIP Go Geek support they promise.
Hey Rick
What was the command that would not allow any bots to get into your site?
Thanks
Stewart
Thank you for your insight!
I signed up with Siteground six months ago and I’ve been having the exact same problem every freaking month. I’m tired of it, even though as you mentioned customer service is great. The limit is ridiculously low and every month, it’s a back and forth of emails to up it, get my website up and running again, etc.
I don’t like the way they pressured me to upgrade either. Now they are pressuring me for cloud service, which is crazy because I don’t get much traffic. The only issue is their low limit.
I gotta say, Godaddy’s customer service generalists might not know much… and it sucks to wait for them on the phone. But I never had this CPU limit issue with GoDaddy! The sites just stayed up. I have a dozen or so low traffic sites on Siteground, apparently getting hit up by spammy bots and brute force hackers. So they are telling me to get WordFence installed, like it’s something I should absolutely have (and I agree now) but the auto install doesn’t work. Reminds me of the time they took my site down, said it was hacked, and suggested they could fix it for a few hundred bucks. Then i said when do the hacked files first appear? They said 3 weeks ago… so I said why don’t we just revert to the backup from the day before the hack happened, and they were like, oh yeah…Don’t get me wrong their customer service guys are great, really go the extra mile. But this CPU limit stuff, been going on for 2 days now, really thinking to tell all my customers to get their own accounts on Flywheel or the like