I’ve recently switched from A Small Orange, an EIG owned web hosting company that I had been with since 2009. It was easy enough to stay with A Small Orange, but after snooping around forums for recommendatioons I kept seeing SiteGround show up as a contender for affordable shared web hosting.

After looking for negative reviews, I felt fairly comfortable seeing that many of the complaints were petty or written by less than intelligent folk. That’s a pretty good indicator that most of the problems likely exist with the end user, not the service provider. I was able to jump ship fairly easily from A Small Orange, but their cancellation process is still pending 2+ hours after initiation. Could they be running the clock? I wouldn’t be surprised, as I worked a few hellish months at HostGator, another EIG owned web hosting company many years ago. I can’t recommend that to anyone who cares about themselves by the way.

SiteGround has a free, professional file and settings transfer option when you migrate, which I gladly took advantage of. My only complaint about it is it wasn’t clear that the migration hadn’t started when I went through their online wizard. You have to be sure to select the option to do so and decline an upsell along the way to confirm starting the process. So a few hours passed with no transfer being done, but it was no harm, and more my fault than their’s.

My initial impressions of SiteGround’s support is excellent. Professional, fast, and thorough. What else do you need? Their user interface is well designed, if a little plain, but I don’t mind that. I’ll take function over style every time. Access to cPanel is straight-forward and quick, with the migration going over perfectly as expected I had little to do after but check to make sure things are in place.

Try SiteGround out if you’re in need of web hosting! If it ever turns sour or EIG acquires them I’ll be sure stop recommending them. Bye for now.