About SiteGround
SiteGround was established in August of 2003 in New York, USA by a group of IT professionals. Though the company is relatively new, its customer-sensitive policies have brought it to the forefront of web hosting. SiteGround’s datacenter is located in Houston, Texas where its servers host over 150,000 sites. They also have offices in the United States and Europe.
SiteGround provides not just shared hosting but also Virtual Private Servers and reseller packages. If Joomla is a requisite to your site, you’ll be glad to know that the company has received many distinctions including the ‘Best Joomla Host’ award. Folks at SiteGround accredit their success to “[their] profound technical expertise and unmatched quality of [their] customer care.”
Plans and Features
At $6.95 per month, SiteGround’s yearly hosting plan brings you a very enticing row of features starting with free setup and even a free domain name! You can have unlimited subdomains and parked websites pointing to your site. At a nominal fee, you can also host up to 6 add-on domains on your account.
Storage space clocks in at 750GB and monthly bandwidth at 7.5TB. FTP and email accounts are unlimited along with unlimited MySQL/Postgre databases. A wide range of server-side features are provided by SiteGround including support for PHP, Perl, Python, and Zend Optimizer. In addition, a whole host of free scripts and software are available to you including absolutely free installation of Mambo, Joomla, OSCommerce, phpBB, WordPress, phpNuke, Moodle, Drupal, MediaWiki, and even a line of ready-made CGI scripts.
Hosting Environment
Your account can be administered through the standard version of cPanel that SiteGround provides. From this panel, you can install scripts through Fantastico, manage your files, configure email addresses, restrict access to your site with IP filtering, edit MIME types and Apache handlers, etc. You will also find two of best industry standard database management software readily available viz. phpMyAdmin and phpPgAdmin.
Joomla
Having received the 'Best Joomla Host' award, SiteGround is widely acclaimed for its Joomla-specific features. These include free auto-installation and extensive tutorials for Joomla 1.0.x and 1.5. They also have a frequently updated section of attractive Joomla templates that would probably cost you a fortune elsewhere but just for being a SiteGoround customer, you get them free.
Tech Support
It would be wrong of any reviewer to not mention SiteGround’s excellent support team which is easily one of the most technically sound in the hosting market. You can contact support through one of three ways: email, a 24/7 hotline or live chat. SiteGround has built a reputation for itself for being one of the very few hosting companies in existence that can solve even the biggest of technical issues in minutes!
Conclusion
You’ve got to admit it; for a hosting provider that’s still a fledgling, SiteGround has proven to be a prodigy. Their ultra-cheap pricing and the brilliant host of features that come with it leave very little to be desired. Plus, if you’re going to host a Joomla site, anybody can tell you that SiteGround is a name to be feared whenever Joomla hosting is brought up. Unlike many other one-hit-wonder companies that entice you with just free templates and installation, SiteGround actually backs you with a whole ton of technical knowledge and experience. All said, your Joomla site could be in no better hands than in SiteGround’s.
