Why I Put Every Client on SiteGround

Disclosure first: the SiteGround links in this article are referral links. If you sign up through one, SiteGround gives me a few months of free hosting. It costs you nothing and doesn’t change your price. I recommended SiteGround for years before I had a referral link and would keep recommending them without one.

“Where should we host?” is one of the first questions every new client asks. For nearly every non-profit and small organization I work with, the answer is SiteGround’s managed WordPress hosting. This is why, including the part about pricing that most recommendations leave out.

Why SiteGround

• It stays up and it stays fast. Their WordPress hosting includes server-level caching, free SSL certificates, and automatic WordPress updates if you want them. My clients’ sites don’t go down often enough for me to have stories about it.
• Daily backups you can restore yourself. SiteGround keeps daily automatic backups and restoring one takes a few clicks. An untested backup is a hope with a file name. These restore.
• A dashboard a non-technical person can use. Their Site Tools panel is the least intimidating hosting dashboard I’ve put in front of a client. For organizations where the tech person is whoever volunteered last, that matters more than any benchmark.
• Support that answers. Chat support, quickly, from people who can fix things. I’ve tested this at inconvenient hours.

You own it, I hold a key

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

Compare that with the arrangement I regularly untangle for new clients: the designer owns the hosting, bills a markup for it, and when the relationship ends the organization discovers it doesn’t own its own website. That can’t happen to my clients, because of how the account is set up. No lock-in is how the account is set up.

The pricing, including the renewal

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

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

The renewal jump is real, and I’d 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 discount, and it’s still fair money for what it does.

Getting set up or moved

If you’re starting fresh, sign up directly with SiteGround, keep the account in your organization’s name, and grant me access afterward. I’ll help with every step. If you’re 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.

If you want a second opinion on the hosting you already have, send me the details. If your current host is serving you well, I’ll tell you to stay put. The recommendation is free either way.

Once more: the links above are referral links. SiteGround gives me a few free months of hosting when someone signs up through them, for a recommendation I’d make anyway.