SiteGround is a terrific web hosting provider with decades of experience. It has a formidable track record of providing top hosting services to its clientele worldwide. Therefore, one might think, are there alternatives that are better than SiteGround?
Well, the answer is yes and no. Yes, because some web hosts are better than SiteGround in some areas. No, because it is not easy to find an alternative to SiteGround that is outrightly better.
Have you been disappointed with SiteGround or are you just looking to see if there are better alternatives before making a decision? By reading this article, you will find answers to your questions.
Best Alternatives to SiteGround for 2024:
- Hostinger
- InMotion Hosting
- A2 Hosting
- DreamHost
- Bluehost
Reasons to Consider SiteGround Alternatives
During our in-depth tests of SiteGround services, we made some rather disappointing discoveries about the host. Here are some of the reasons you should go for an alternative web host for your website or online application project.
High Renewal Prices
One of the major setbacks SiteGround has is high renewal prices. Many web hosts give discounts on their hosting packages for the initial subscription term and only increase it by a fraction of its original value for renewals.
However, on SiteGround, the renewal prices are unreasonable. For example, the StartUp package, which costs only $3 per month for the initial subscription year, is almost $15 per month for renewal. This renewal price is 4 times more expensive than the initial subscription fee and can be a problem to pay on a tight budget.
SiteGround offers no discount for all its packages upon renewal, making it a less desirable option for low-budget hosting.
Terrible Long-term Deals
Another disappointing discovery we made about the web host was its terrible approach to long-term deals. Normally, the hosting package discounts are higher as the subscription period or length increases. Although the prices of some slightly increase to limit the loss on the side of the host for the elongated duration of the subscription, they still have a significant discount.
SiteGround does not offer discounts for long-term subscriptions at all. The only initial subscription period with a discount is the 12-month deal. The 36-month deal, on the other hand, goes for the actual price without any discount. Because the renewals are also the actual prices of the packages with no discount, it has terrible pricing flexibility. This kills its affordability.
Many SiteGround alternatives have higher pricing flexibility and better offers for long-term deals.
Limited Free Migration Service
You may consider purchasing a plan from an alternative web host to SiteGround because of its migration service.
While many hosting providers like Hostinger offer free migration services for an unlimited number of websites, SiteGround only provides this service for a limited time. This grace period is always when you have just recently purchased your hosting account. Afterward, you must pay about $30 per site for the migration service.
Additionally, the waiting period window for the migration process to complete is wide as it takes up to 5 business days, while most web hosts require a maximum of only 48 hours. Thus it is not suitable as an emergency migration solution.
The host is not great for moving your site for free without getting your hands dirty. Although, it has a quite straightforward migration process that even beginners can follow to move their site from any host. It has a free migration plugin that you can use, but it works only for WordPress sites.
Highly-priced Server Migration
It has many data centers and gives customers the choice of a preferred server location to give their visitors the best speed and performance possible. However, if you ever need to change your data center to another location closer to your audience, SiteGround does not have you covered.
This is because you have to pay a fee of $30 for the server migration, which you must pay each time you wish to move your website to another data center. This is quite pricey and unnecessary since a few SiteGround alternatives will do this for free! Thus it is not the ideal host if you would need a server migration in the future.
Unfavorable Storage Space Offerings
Another weakness this host has is its storage space offering. It offers too little space on pre-packed packages like shared and WP hosting. For example, the storage space on its most expensive WP package is 40 GB SSD. Only 40 GB of storage for that price is not very encouraging.
This storage space is not favorable for a media-heavy site unless you want to rely on a third-party service to host your media. It will, however, increase the cost of running your business this way.
Therefore, to get the best value for your money in terms of storage space, considering an alternative to SiteGround with a better offer is more advisable.
Limited Hosting Types
The last reason SiteGround might not be the ideal host for your business is that it does not have some hosting types. For example, VPS and dedicated server hosting types are not a part of its services.
As a result, if you need these particular services while you are already on a less powerful server, it is impossible to have an easy transition. Though it has a quite scalable cloud hosting service which is very expensive, it can’t replace the need for dedicated servers.
3 Best Alternatives to SiteGround
At this point, we are already familiar with a few weaknesses of the web host. Now, let’s discuss some SiteGround alternatives and the areas where they perform better.
1. Hostinger
Hostinger is the first choice if you ever need an alternative web host to replace SiteGround. It is a great host and delivers better services than SiteGround in many areas.
One of the strengths of Hostinger is affordability. Hostinger is extremely cheap despite offering so many amazing features worth a lot of money free, while competitors charge heavily for them. It has the best deals for beginners and businesses on tight budgets.
Furthermore, it uses competitive performance technologies to give your website the best loading speed and performance possible. Hostinger uses extremely fast LiteSpeed servers, NVMe storage, HTTP/3 protocol, and dedicated IP addresses to give your server the utmost power to handle your site. You may even get dedicated resources on some hosting types like Cloud. This way, even if you receive a lot of traffic, your website still loads very fast and helps you grow in SEO performance and revenue.
Additionally, it has many data centers worldwide that allow you to host your site closer to your audience so they can enjoy a fast-loading website. You can as well change your data center location whenever you wish to.
Another strength of this web host is security. Hostinger has a great security approach and gives most of these features for free on its packages. It gives protection against many cyberattacks like DDoS, brute force, hacks & malware, etc. In addition, it has firewalls set to prevent unauthorized access to sensitive parts of your site or server and free SSL certificates for data encryption.
Furthermore, managing your site with Hostinger is straightforward and beginner-friendly. The web host has a proprietary control panel called hPanel. This control panel is more intuitive than the traditional cPanel you may be familiar with and has more features. Its interface is cleaner and more appealing. All you need to manage each site on your hosting account is easily accessible.
Moreover, Hostinger also has a terrific 24/7 swift and multi-lingual customer support team and a Knowledge Base with very educative information and tutorials. These are only a few reasons Hostinger is a great SiteGround alternative.
Hostinger Features
Here is an exclusive list of the features that make Hostinger the best alternative to SiteGround:
- The introductory price is as low as $2 per month
- Shared, Managed WordPress, Cloud, VPS, & Minecraft hosting types
- Free and unlimited professional site migration
- Free domain name for the first year & unlimited free email hosting
- Unlimited bandwidth and databases
- Improved and intuitive control panel (hPanel)
- Automated backups and staging websites
- Top-notch performance features (LiteSpeed servers, LSCWP, NVMe SSD)
- Security features (brute force and DDoS protection, firewalls, malware scanner & SSL)
- 24/7 fast & competent live chat support
- 30-day money-back guarantee
Why We Consider Hostinger a Better Alternative to SiteGround
We established earlier that there are some areas where SiteGround performs poorly. Here are a few of those areas where Hostinger is better:
More Affordable Renewal Prices
Hostinger is better than SiteGround in terms of renewal prices. While its competitor charges the full prices of their hosting packages after the initial subscription period, Hostinger renewals are discounted prices of their actual value. Though the renewals are mostly a bit higher than the introductory prices, they are quite affordable.
For instance, the Single Web Hosting plan costs about $2 per month for the first 48-month subscription period and renews at only about $4 monthly afterward. The normal monthly price for this package is almost $10 per month. Thus, you will enjoy a 60% discount yearly on this package with no time limit or hidden charges.
In comparison to SiteGround, which offers a 0% discount despite its high price on renewals, Hostinger is a better alternative to save your money.
Better Deals on Long-term subscriptions
When it comes to getting the best deals on long-term subscriptions, Hostinger is the better option.
Unlike SiteGround, which gives discounts on only the 12-month deal, Hostinger gives discounts on multiple subscription periods. The higher the subscription period, the better the discounts on both the introductory and renewal prices.
For example, on the Premium plan, there is a 70% discount on the 12-month deal, 77% on the 24-month deal, and 80% on the 48-month subscription. Even though the renewal prices are higher, this progression in the percentage discount proportional to the subscription length also applies to them.
Therefore, the web host is the superior option to get better deals from a longer subscription period. You can even use a promo code at Hostinger to get an extra 10% discount.
Greater Performance Technologies
Hostinger uses better performance technologies as well. It uses LiteSpeed servers, while SiteGround uses Nginx. LiteSpeed servers are better than Nginx servers because they can handle more traffic using fewer resources. Thus they are better if you wish to maintain a fast website loading speed at all times for a high-traffic project or website.
It also uses NVMe SSD to store your files with a better read and write speed that increases your site loading speed, leading to great SEO performance.
The effect of the difference in the servers used can be seen in the stress tests we conducted for the two web hosts. We sent 1000 visitors to our test website within one minute to know how the server behaves during peak hours. We recorded an average response time of 143 ms for SiteGround, while the Hostinger server had an average response time of 47 ms. You can check our Hostinger review for more details.
Therefore, Hostinger is a better alternative to SiteGround for a high-traffic website if you want to maintain high performance.
Free Site & Server Location Migration Services
Another important reason we recommend Hostinger as one of the best SiteGround alternatives is its free migration service.
Hostinger has a free site migration service that professionals handle. This service runs concurrently for free as long as you have a hosting account or plan and you can migrate unlimited websites. Thus, unlike SiteGround, which has a time-limited free website migration service, it is preferable. You will save $30 per site you transfer to Hostinger instead of SiteGround if you don’t use WordPress. Nonetheless, if you use want to transfer a WP site to SiteGround, it is more straightforward than it is with Hostinger. SiteGround has a free automated WP Migrator plugin that you can use to move unlimited sites. See how to migrate your site to SiteGround for free in our in-depth tutorial.
At the same time, you can move your server to a different location once for free every month. This is helpful if you target different locations every few months to give visitors the best website loading speed. It saves you the $30 per data center location change that SiteGround charges.
Access to a Free No-Code Website Builder and WP AI Tools
Another reason why Hostinger is a good alternative to SiteGround is that it provides a no-code beginner-friendly website builder for free. The Hostinger Website Builder is an intuitive tool that a beginner can use to create just any type of site in minutes. It has free templates and AI tools that make designing and managing your site quite easy. This builder is included in Hostinger’s shared, WP, and cloud hosting packages for free with no further upgrade needed. This is unlike SiteGround which provides access to Weebly but then requires an upgrade to enjoy the tool.
Moreso, Hostinger has AI tools such as ChatGPT that allow you to create content on your WordPress website automatically upon installation.
Summary of What Makes Hostinger the Best Alternative to SiteGround
Here is a list of Hostinger’s main strengths:
- Better long-term deals and renewal prices
- Can withstand higher traffic
- More free site migrations
- Free data center location change
- More affordable
- Better for beginners
- Hostinger Website Builder
If you’re interested, we recently published a SiteGround vs Hostinger duel, comparing the two hosts in depth.
2. InMotion Hosting
InMotion Hosting is another SiteGround alternative that delivers competitive services. It offers shared, managed WordPress, reseller, VPS, and dedicated hosting services at affordable prices.
InMotion Hosting uses UltraStack technology to create an extremely optimized hosting environment to host your site. This configuration, together with Redis caching, Memcached, and NVMe SSD storage, gives your website a 40 times faster loading speed.
In addition, you don’t have to worry about receiving too many visitors because the hosting plans come with unlimited bandwidth. Therefore, your site can grow freely without resource restrictions limiting its potential.
Discover InMotion Hosting Plans
Moreover, it is a very secure web host. It gives free SSL certificates and has an automated backup feature. It has several security features like anti-DDoS attacks, firewalls, and hack & malware protection.
Its customer support is very fast and available 24/7 as well. InMotion has a Knowledge Base that is educative and well-illustrated. Beginners can learn a lot about hosting a website from it.
InMotion Hosting Features
Here are some of the features that make InMotion Hosting an eligible alternative to SiteGround:
- Starts as low as $3 per month
- Shared, Managed WP, Reseller, VPS, and Dedicated hosting types
- Free domain registration for the first year, unmetered bandwidth, and unlimited databases
- UltraStack performance & great security features
- Free SSL certificates, website builder, and email hosting
- One-click installer & staging websites
- Free website migrations with an automated plugin
- 24/7 customer support
- Free advertising credits & 90-day money-back guarantee
- Multiple data centers
Reasons InMotion Hosting is a Great SiteGround Alternative
Here are some of the areas InMotion Hosting might be better than SiteGround:
It is More Affordable
InMotion Hosting has cheaper hosting packages.
The first shared package offered by InMotion Hosting, Core, costs less than $3 per month for a 3-year subscription and renews for almost $9 monthly afterward. This package has 100 GB SSD storage, can host 2 websites, and has unlimited bandwidth. Compared with SiteGround’s StartUp, which costs $3 monthly initially, renews at almost $15 per month with 10 GB SSD and the ability to host only one site, it is clearly the better option.
Furthermore, InMotion has better long-term deals than SiteGround. While the latest offers no long-term deal discount aside from the 12-month subscription, InMotion gives competitive discounts on its hosting packages for both, depending on the length of the plan.
A 1-year plan usually has the least discount rate while a 3-year plan has the highest rate. There is also a discount on the renewal prices, which increases in direct proportion with the length of the plan.
As a result, regarding affordability and pricing flexibility, InMotion is a great alternative to SiteGround.
InMotion Has Greater Storage Space Offering
Another area where this web host is better is its storage offering. Remember that the highest storage space on SiteGround shared and WordPress hosting packages is 40 GB SSD. At InMotion Hosting, the lowest storage space available on the shared packages is 100 GB SSD.
On the higher shared packages, you will have access to unlimited NVMe SSD storage. This satisfies your site’s excessive storage needs if it is media-heavy and eliminates the need to use a third-party cloud service to host your files due to low storage space.
Another observation to chip in here is that InMotion uses the more powerful NVMe SSD storage and still offers more space. So, undoubtedly, it is a better choice for a media-heavy site with great performance in mind.
InMotion Uses cPanel Control Panel
If you have a website project that needs the features of the cPanel, InMotion Hosting is the SiteGround alternative you need to consider.
Unless you are on the managed WordPress plan that uses InMotion Central as its control panel, you will get access to cPanel to manage your site.
Summary of How Better InMotion Hosting is Compared With SiteGround
Here is a short list of how InMotion Hosting makes a better SiteGround alternative:
- Better storage offering
- More affordable
- Highly flexible pricing
- Cheaper renewal prices
- Lengthier money-back guarantee
- More hosting types for easy transition
3. A2 Hosting
A2 is one the best web hosting companies of 2024 and it is an affordable web host. This is why it is one of the best SiteGround alternatives.
Some of the technologies that A2 uses are LiteSpeed web servers, NVMe SSD storage, and several server-level caching technologies. These allow it to create a super lightweight hosting environment for sites, so they outperform the competition.
Furthermore, A2 uses commercial-grade security. It uses proprietary and third-party services to protect against DDoS attacks, brute-force login attempts, bot traffic, and malware injections.
In addition, it has firewalls set up to prevent unauthorized access to some parts of your site that can make it vulnerable to attacks. You will also enjoy free staging and automated backups with a one-click restore button.
A2 Hosting has a great customer support team. The agents are available 24/7 and are very competent according to our experience. They will resolve any website issue you present to them in minutes.
A2 Hosting Features
Here are some of the features that present A2 Hosting as a good alternative host to SiteGround:
- Costs less than $3 per month for an initial subscription
- Shared, Managed WP, VPS, Reseller, & Dedicated/cPanel hosting types
- Free unlimited email hosting
- Website staging and a free site builder
- Free unlimited site transfer
- Multiple data centers and choice of server location
- Commercial-grade security setup (firewalls, brute-force protection, anti-DDoS attacks, virus scanner, etc.)
- Great performance technologies
- Free CDNs
- 24/7 customer support
Why We Consider A2 Hosting a Great SiteGround Alternative
Here are some of the reasons to choose A2 Hosting over SiteGround:
A2 Hosting Uses Greater Performance Technologies
A2 Hosting uses better performance technologies than SiteGround. It uses LiteSpeed servers which are better than SiteGround Nginx for speed and performance on its Turbo hosting packages. Therefore, your site will have a better loading speed on A2 Hosting.
This was confirmed during our full review of A2 Hosting. The fully loaded site speed we got for our test website hosted on SiteGround was 731 ms. We hosted the same website on A2 Hosting under similar conditions and recorded a fully loaded time of 418 ms. This shows that A2 Hosting servers are almost 2 times faster than SiteGround servers.
A2 uses the faster NVMe SSD storage and provides two free web optimization plugins (A2 Optimized & LiteSpeed Cache for WordPress (LSCWP) plugins). While the latter works for only WP sites, the former is compatible with more than 5 CMS. You can use these plugins to optimize your site more to get even better loading speed and performance for great SEO success and traffic.
So when the question boils down to which of the two hosts is better for hosting a fast-loading website, grab yourself an A2 Hosting account.
A2 Hosting Has Better Storage Offering
This web host provides more storage space compared to its competitor. The lowest storage space you can get on A2 Hosting is 50 GB NVMe SSD on the managed WordPress starter package. The lowest space offering on A2 shared hosting starter package is 100 GB SSD. Higher packages on both hosting types come with unlimited storage space and are quite affordable.
As a result, A2 Hosting is one of the best SiteGround alternatives that will serve you better on storage space if you run a media-heavy website.
Why Choose A2 Hosting as an Alternative to SiteGround?
Here is an inclusive list of how A2 Hosting performs better than SiteGround:
- Better performance technologies
- Faster site loading speed
- Better storage offering
- More hosting types
- Slightly for affordable
Conclusion: What is the Best Alternative to SiteGround?
There are some web hosts that are better than SiteGround in one way or the other. However, the best SiteGround alternative for 2024 is Hostinger.
This web host is more affordable, has better pricing flexibility, offers more hosting types, has an easy account management tool, and offers an overall better value for money. You can purchase one of its shared hosting packages to get started.
InMotion and A2 are reliable companies that provide good services. They are affordable and offer great performances, but cannot compete with Hostinger.
