Siteground.com – best hosting company of 2014!

I had been hosting with eApps.com for years, but as great as the company was in the beginning, support over the years deteriorated to such an extent that even with dedicated hosting I worried about technical glitches as their support system has become non-existent. Tickets would take days to answer and their live-chat is really pointless as in the past year I have never been able to manage to get hold of anyone within 30 minutes.

My recent switch to Siteground.com was a result of my virtual server crashing due to the huge amount of traffic I received over xmas due to my Playstation Network MTU DDOS workaround fix and for me it is really not acceptable to pay over 40USD per month for hosting and not have access to a support engineer.

Thankfully I had my DNS hosted with Cloudflare, so it was relatively easy to switch to any hosting provider such as SiteGround. The price for hosting is competitive:

The customer support with SiteGround is absolutely fantastic. During my outage with eApps (in essence I had to block all traffic via Cloudflare to keep the eApps dedicated server up) and once I signed up with Siteground, their technical staff migrated my WordPress installation from eApps to my new server. The whole migration which also included copying and reconfiguring MySQL database took a mere 90 minutes and once changing the DNS A-record on Cloudflare my blog was up and running).

SiteGround’s live-chat and ticketing system is super impressive. Over the last week I needed to get in touch with support a number of times and at every instance, my chat request was answered within seconds and all staff is super-friendly and knowledgeable.

The account overview page shows all the basic summary information and provides quick access to all relevant functions including managing domains and services:

The cPanel is impressive and covers Domain management, Auto installers, Site improvement tools, WordPress tools:

To be honest, most of the cPanel tools – such as mail (I use Google Apps), file management or MySQL database access I hardly ever use.

I like the backup functionality and although I use Google Analytics for visitor stats, it is valuable to have Awstats and Webalizer out of the box.

Based on my current experience I strongly recommend SiteGround to anyone looking for a new hosting provider and I do hope that SiteGround keeps up the great customer service.