Full disclosure, right at the top: the SiteGround links in this article are referral links. If you sign up through one, SiteGround thanks me with a few months of free hosting — it costs you nothing and changes your price not one cent. I want to be clear that I recommended SiteGround for years before I ever had a referral link, and I would keep recommending them for free. The link just means the recommendation occasionally buys me a thank-you.

“Where should we host?” is one of the first questions every new client asks, and I am lucky to have a boring answer: for nearly every non-profit and small organization I work with, I recommend SiteGround’s managed WordPress hosting. Exclusively. Here is the honest why — including the part about pricing that most recommendations skip.

Why SiteGround, specifically

• It stays up and it stays fast. Their WordPress hosting is genuinely managed — server-level caching, free SSL certificates, automatic WordPress updates if you want them. My clients’ sites simply do not go down often enough for me to have stories about it.
• Daily backups, kept for you. SiteGround keeps daily automatic backups you can restore yourself in a few clicks. Regular readers know how I feel about backups: an untested backup is a hope with a file name. These ones restore.
• A dashboard a human can use. Their Site Tools panel is the least intimidating hosting dashboard I have put in front of a non-technical client. For organizations where “the tech person” is whoever volunteered last, that matters more than any benchmark.
• Support that answers. Real chat support, quickly, from people who can actually fix things. I have tested this at inconvenient hours so you do not have to.

The part I care about most: you own it, I just hold a key

This is the reason SiteGround fits how I work. The hosting account is yours — your name, your billing, your property. SiteGround then lets you grant me delegated access to your site’s controls, so I can do care-plan work — updates, backups, fixes — without ever owning your website. You can see what I can see, and you can revoke my key any time with a click.

Compare that to the arrangement I regularly rescue people from: the designer owns the hosting, bills a mystery markup for it, and when the relationship ends the organization discovers it does not own its own website. That will never happen to my clients, structurally, because of how this is set up. No lock-in is not a slogan; it is an account configuration.

The honest pricing (this is where recommendations usually go quiet)

For a single website, SiteGround’s StartUp plan is what most of my clients need. As of this writing:

• First year: about $2.99/month (billed annually — roughly $36 for the year).
• After that: it renews at $17.99/month on a yearly term — roughly $216/year. Longer renewal terms bring it down somewhat; month-to-month costs more.

Yes, the renewal jump is real, and I would rather you hear it from me now than from an invoice in a year. Budget for the renewal price, treat the first year as a pleasant discount, and it is still — in my honest judgment — fair money for what it does. A reliable, backed-up, supported home for your organization’s website costs less per month than the coffee at your board meeting.

Getting set up (or moved)

If you are starting fresh, sign up directly with SiteGround, keep the account in your organization’s name, and grant me access afterward — I will help with every step of that, including the granting. If you are moving from another host, migration is part of what a care plan covers: I move the site, test everything, and nothing goes dark in between.

And if you just want a second opinion on the hosting you already have — send me the details. If your current host is serving you well, I will happily tell you to stay put. The recommendation is free either way; it always has been.

One more time, because transparency is the whole brand: links above are referral links. SiteGround gives me a few free months of hosting when someone signs up through them — a thank-you I appreciate, for a recommendation I would make anyway.