In this post, I’m going to talk about my recent change of hosting provider and the impact it has had. Honestly, I hadn’t expected there to be one, so I have been left surprised by the impact it has had.
Why move hosting provider?
While in hindsight this is very obvious, it was something that I hadn’t thought about properly previously. Prior to moving my websites to SiteGround, I had a few different websites with different hosting providers. This is obviously a sub-ideal arrangement as it duplicates costs between them. With moving all my sites to the same hosting provider I was able to decrease the amount of money I was paying for each website as the cost of hosting was split between the sites. Always a good thing!
Why SiteGround?
I have to admit, when setting up SatalKeto.com originally, I hadn’t gone out of my way to find the best hosting provider. I had just chosen a well-known hosting provider and never went back to review if it was the best option. It was an approach I had taken for other websites too, which looking back is rather foolish.
Towards the end of last year, I started looking at setting up a new website. When looking for a hosting provider for that website I came across a lot of good reviews for SiteGround and thought I would give them a try. Obviously, how little the website would cost was a factor, so I won’t talk about, but some of the other reasons I chose it were:
- Automatic updates for WordPress and Joomla;
- Promises of great support (more on that later);
- Ability to easily connect your website to Cloudflare Content Delivery Network;
- Daily backups; and
- HTTP/2 Enabled Servers.
Introducing Free SSL
Since I originally joined SiteGround, they have started providing free SSL on ALL accounts. This is enabled by default for all new website. For existing websites, they have made it incredibly simple to switch on.
SiteGround talk about how they’ve joined up with Let’s Encrypt to allow all users to run their websites through HTTPS here.
SiteGround Support
One thing that has really pleasantly surprised me is how good SiteGround‘s support has been. They have been able to quickly and easily resolve the standard sort of questions that you would get with hosting. In addition, they have been able to help with very specific WordPress/Joomla issues and resolve them for me.
As far as timeliness, while I haven’t tried asking them questions at weird and wonderful hours, SiteGround‘s support have always answered within 20 minutes. The longer instances have been where they have already resolved my issue for me and are just writing to confirm it’s sorted! Now that’s service I can get used to.
Impact of changing hosting provider
Having moved this website over to SiteGround 6 days ago and the number of weekly visits has DOUBLED its normal number. This is without having added new content or having advertised the website at all.
Realistically I would predominantly put this down to the addition of HTTPS to the entire website. Google have previously said whether a website uses HTTPS is taken into consideration for rankings (blog post here). It may seem unfair to attribute the increase in visitors to SiteGround because I implemented HTTPS but I wouldn’t have implemented it if SiteGround hadn’t made it free and so simple to implement.
While it is perhaps a little more subjective, I have also felt that the website has been more responsive since the move. Unfortunately, I failed to take the necessary measurements to definitely state that this is true.
Summing Up
Overall I’ve found SiteGround to be a great option for when you want to get a simple WordPress or Joomla up and running. SiteGround have made it ridiculously simple to get your site running over HTTPS while keeping it up to date.
If you’re looking to start a new website or like me want to consolidate your websites into one hosting provider, I’d strongly suggest giving them a look.
