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Visit www.siteground.com |
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Siteground General Information |
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Siteground is providing Linux website hosting services, has been founded in 2004 and now it's six years in business.
siteground.com avarage uptime is 99.994% (rank #903 on our directory) with total 85428 succesulf and 5 failed checks,
monitored since 2006-01-30. Similar companies with 99.994% uptime are and dollar-hosting.org.
Search for "siteground.com" on 3 biggest search engines returns average of 61500 results so company name popularity rank is #96.
There have been 58 positive votes for Siteground and 59 negative.
And overall company rank on our directory is #570 (similar companies are 2unet.com and hostroute.com)
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Web Hosting Packages |
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Super Package (Type: Linux) - 500 GB space, 5000 GB bandwidth for $5.95/mo
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Some techical data about siteground.com |
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IP: 174.133.166.190 - siteground.com
IP Location: Everyones Internet Inc
Blacklist Status: Clear
Nameserver: NS1.SITEGROUND.NET
Registrar: ENOM, INC.
Server Type: Apache
Website Title: SiteGround - the experts in Mambo and Joomla hosting services, $5.00/month, 12000MB space, 500GB traffic, osCommerce hosting, Zen cart hosting, PHPbb hosting, PostNuke hosting, Mediawiki hosting, Flash hosting, Dreamweaver hosting, FrontPage hosting
Description: SiteGround specializes in Mambo hosting services, installation of Mambo modules; Joomla hosting, Joomla addons: SMF, Virtuemart; Mediawiki, phpBB, osCommerce, Zen Cart, PostNuke, and more. Hosting for Dreamweaver, Flash, FrontPage and Adobe GoLive
Back to "S" directory |
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| Mike, 01st 2010f September, 2010 |
| Siteground sucks ! |
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| Mahouny, 01st 2010f September, 2010 |
Firs of all thank you for this blog.
So bad I didn't found it before I ordered a domain name with siteground.com .I bought one year hosting plan on 16th septebmer, 2009.
My experience was absolutely horrible, my site was hacked many times via server side (shared hosting) Site where down many many times for long period of time, because overloaded server (nor my website) Support is truly awful...
On the beginning of the August 2010 I've informed siteground support that I want move my site to the other hosting provider, because of all those problems.
They answered that it's ok...
When it comes to the end of one month, they charged me $107.40.And now they wont refund me ! They say, that I haven't told them "clearly enough" if I will really move from them, or I just planing to do so...
Now I will ask my bank for the charge-back.
Everybody who's planning to purchase hosting with siteground, STAY AWY FROM THEM !!! Siteground SUCKS ! |
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| Mahouny, 01st 2010f September, 2010 |
Firs of all thank you for this blog.
So bad I didn't found it before I ordered a domain name with siteground.com .I bought one year hosting plan on 16th septebmer, 2009.
My experience was absolutely horrible, my site was hacked many times via server side (shared hosting) Site where down many many times for long period of time, because overloaded server (nor my website) Support is truly awful...
On the beginning of the August 2010 I've informed siteground support that I want move my site to the other hosting provider, because of all those problems.
They answered that it's ok...
When it comes to the end of one month, they charged me $107.40.And now they wont refund me ! They say, that I haven't told them "clearly enough" if I will really move from them, or I just planing to do so...
Now I will ask my bank for the charge-back.
Everybody who's planning to purchase hosting with siteground, STAY AWY FROM THEM !!! Siteground SUCKS ! |
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| Avoid SiteGround, 25th 2010f August, 2010 |
SiteGround are totally insecure. I have just managed to convince them after two weeks of complaining that they are the reason that the phishing links were uploaded to my site hosted by them.
The reason is simple. SiteGround send out your login password in the clear and that means anyone with access to intermediate mail servers (and i have proof from them that their blacklists are not up to date) can get access to your account.
And from this information the hackers were able to launch phishing attacks and log into my email account.
Avoid this company like the plague. |
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| Avoid SiteGround, 25th 2010f August, 2010 |
SiteGround are totally insecure. I have just managed to convince them after two weeks of complaining that they are the reason that the phishing links were uploaded to my site hosted by them.
The reason is simple. SiteGround send out your login password in the clear and that means anyone with access to intermediate mail servers (and i have proof from them that their blacklists are not up to date) can get access to your account.
And from this information the hackers were able to launch phishing attacks and log into my email account.
Avoid this company like the plague. |
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| Jimmy, 11th 2010f August, 2010 |
| STAY THE HELL AWAY FROM THOSE CROOKS! Siteground's brand new scam: they say their "sitebuilder" partner -the free service- is violating copyright laws, so they don't do business anymore with it, and now they ask me to pay for the "Wizard" instead! |
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| Greg B., 08th 2010f July, 2010 |
Just switched from Hostgator to Siteground. Their response and the transfer of the website were really fast. I can't even imagine going back to Hostgator. They suck!
If you are looking for a good support, go straight to these guys. |
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| Brian, 02nd 2010f June, 2010 |
Don't ever do business with this extortion ring. I opened a hosting account a few months ago, things working just fine for months. Then all of a sudden I get an email saying I have copyright infringing material on their server.
First of all I'm completely floored that any host is busy snooping on me. Second they only gave me 48 hours and I was away the entire weekend. So basically before I even had a chance to log in they closed my account and demanded $50 for reactivation.
So I emailed them back stating the issue and to ask for a clarification of what files were in violation, since they never named specific files. I typically use my web hosts to store personal media files for easy remote access. Keep in mind that these are not public files! Either way they didn't seem to care if they were fair use or if I was away for a holiday weekend.
After multiple emails they won't budge and won't answer or address any of my issues which are as follows:
1. Why is siteground snooping around in my personal files and what right do they have to do that?
2. Which files were infringing and how did you come to that conclusion?
These people are scumbags and deserve to be thrown in jail for running an extortion ring. |
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| Tom, 26th 2010f April, 2010 |
| Terrible company. Stay away or you will be sorry! |
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| Tom Stewart, 26th 2010f April, 2010 |
| Don't give them your CC number, they will charge you even if you don't want to renew and there is no way to remove your cc number. Their tech support is terrible. |
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| Tom Stewart, 26th 2010f April, 2010 |
| Siteground is a bunch of crooks. There support is non-existant. All they want is your money and don't give them your CC number, there is NO way to remove it once they have it. What does that tell you? They charged me for another year when they knew I didn't want to renew. |
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| JP Robillard, 13th 2010f March, 2010 |
| horrible! stay away! |
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| JP Robillard, 13th 2010f March, 2010 |
Try to change your DNS settings to point to another host.... IMPOSSIBLE with Siteground. Site ground would not allow these settings "resolver1.opendns.com" and "resolver2.opendns.com" or Microsoft's Office Live "NS1.officelive.com" or "NS2.officelive.com". They want you to host it there so basically they force it by blocking those settings. All I can do now is transfer my domains to GoDaddy or somewhere else.
As a reseller, what I pay is more than what my customers would pay if they get it straight from Siteground's website. After complaining about their practices, they say that's how they do it (in Europe). This stupid company based in Luxembourg is a total scam. Stay way from them. I've started my process of moving all my reseller business away from them. |
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| Elsa, 04th 2010f February, 2010 |
| Very reliable host. I have always received response from the support in up to 10 minutes. They upgraded my Wordpress without losing any data or damaging the plugins. I am very grateful! |
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| Val, 28th 2010f January, 2010 |
| Excellent support, very short response time, solved the problem although it was down to me. Just great! |
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| Fabio, 21st 2010f January, 2010 |
| I can´t understand. I have been using siteground for 2 years. Excellent service. All my technical tickets was reply in a few minutes and the 35 web pages I have works 100%... them I recommended 100%. |
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| dsummars, 23rd 2009f December, 2009 |
We definitely would not recommend Siteground.com to anyone, except psuedo masochists who love pain and misery.
Siteground suspended our website, and then corrupted it, rendering it useless. So, we moved to another webhosting service.
Here's our last message to Siteground.com:
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I now want to thank Siteground for the following:
(01) On 12-DEC-2009:03:13am, Siteground.com complained of high CPU usage (which we never received E-Mails about).
(02) On 19-DEC-2009:12-19 08:29am, Siteground.com suspended our website.
(03) On 20-DEC-2009, I was refused access to make remedies.
(04) On 20-DEC-2009, when access was allowed for one IP address, the system was corrupted and unusable, and a full restore from backup was useless, and Moodle was not restored either.
(05) On 23-DEC-2009:04:05am, Siteground.com suspended our account AGAIN, modified the .htaccess file again to block ALL IP addresses (making any potential remedies impossible again), and claimed that Moodle is using too much CPU. However, there is no Moodle installed.
(06) On 23-DEC-2009:09:00am, We deleted everything (after backing all of it up first to another webhost), we deleted all MySQL databases, and we deleted all Moodle related files, etc. We deleted EVERYTHING.
Are you happy now?
Now it's not too hard to understand why Siteground.com's webhost ratings have fallen so drastically to 96th place:
http://www.vistainter.com/reviews/S/siteground.com/
On the other hand, if losing customers is Siteground.com's objective, Siteground.com is doing a wonderful job. In that case, keep up the good work!
Again, Thanks a bunch. |
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| DaleE, 28th 2009f October, 2009 |
| A year after parting ways with Shiteground, I'm still angry. Typically, when I receive really lousy service from a company, I chalk it up to experience and move on. Not so here. I feel wounded and wronged. I'm still particularly incensed by the way they tried very, very hard to discourage me from actually communicating with a representative. They do this by simply not providing an email address or telephone number for support, which means you have to choose from a menu of not-quite-exactly-the-same problems and then read unhelpful FAQs. This company deserves to go out of business, and I will gladly continue to do my small part to hasten this outcome. Do not give this horrible company your business. |
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| mgunawat, 29th 2009f September, 2009 |
| AVOID SITEGROUND!!!!!! They suck!!!!! I've got two websites that were hosted on siteground and they were injected by malware link. They told me that their server is secure, bla bla bla.. however sometimes this thing happens and worst is they ask me to pay $50 per site to get the links removed, with no guarantee they will not come back.. if I want a guarantee, I have to pay $150!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Seriously???!!!!?? Bullshit!!! I hope people get to read this and never use siteground again.... |
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| xmen, 24th 2009f August, 2009 |
http://rapid share.com/files/262466352/X-M3n.0rigins.W0lv3rin3.DVDRip.XviD-JUAMNJi.part1.rar
http://rapid share.com/files/262509866/X-M3n.0rigins.W0lv3rin3.DVDRip.XviD-JUAMNJi.part2.rar
http://rapid share.com/files/262494943/X-M3n.0rigins.W0lv3rin3.DVDRip.XviD-JUAMNJi.part3.rar
http://rapid share.com/files/262521234/X-M3n.0rigins.W0lv3rin3.DVDRip.XviD-JUAMNJi.part4.rar
http://rapid share.com/files/262508676/X-M3n.0rigins.W0lv3rin3.DVDRip.XviD-JUAMNJi.part5.rar
http://rapid share.com/files/262529547/X-M3n.0rigins.W0lv3rin3.DVDRip.XviD-JUAMNJi.part6.rar
http://rapid share.com/files/262516070/X-M3n.0rigins.W0lv3rin3.DVDRip.XviD-JUAMNJi.part7.rar
http://rapid share.com/files/262532609/X-M3n.0rigins.W0lv3rin3.DVDRip.XviD-JUAMNJi.part8.rar |
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| somename, 14th 2009f July, 2009 |
the worst web hosting service I've ever got
the problem is that they are being advertised by phpBB!! |
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| Art, 20th 2009f June, 2009 |
| SiteGround is absolutely the worst! Have had them a year now, will NOT renew. E-mail this morning is DOWN again for the umpteenth time. Service is totally non-existent. Try filing a ticket - again response is they are already aware?!?!? Then FIX it. Try calling, they might call you back the next day with someone who knows nothing about your ticket and cannot help, other then to say everything is working fine with them. If you need e-mail service, do NOT use sitegroundless. |
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| Tommy M, 18th 2009f June, 2009 |
Absolute worst customer service around. Completely non-existent. Ticketing process is long. If you want to talk to someone (anyone) you have to join their sales chat. I canceled my VPS with them (totally overpriced, outsourced to PowerVPS, no tech support for higher paying customers). After I canceled my VPS, they suspended my account so I can not file a ticket. Additionally, they were my registrar for two domain names. I had to change the DNS settings for one of them, but they HID the domain names from me. Only after arguing with them through Sales chat did they finally realize it is probably against ICANN protocol to not allow a domain owner to edit the DNS settings/administrative fields.
Always be ware of companies that are eager to get your business but not eager to keep it. |
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| Micah Mitchell, 06th 2009f March, 2009 |
I actually like SiteGround, I've heard a bunch of horror stories here but it's the only host who's been able to properly run my Joomla Site with JoomSuite Installed.
Big thumbs up from me |
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| James, 23rd 2009f February, 2009 |
this is a bad company
they charged me $ 50 to hire there team to put a logo on my site and one time someone who worked at siteground wanted charged me $49 to just tell me how to Instill Joomla what is this company doing with the money buying 6 pack |
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| SITEGROUND SUCKS, 27th 2009f January, 2009 |
| worst company ever... you might as well give them $80 and have someone kick you in the @ss, its about the same |
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| derek, 27th 2009f January, 2009 |
| couldnt agree more...siteground is the worst |
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| clhmedia, 27th 2009f January, 2009 |
james, you work for siteground i know you.
tim, just wait - they dont screw with you till 6 months in
pablo is junk from the company
SITEGROUND TOTALLY SUCKS- DONT BE THESE LAME EMAILS SAYING THEIR FAST AND DEPENDABLE - ITS TOTAL B.S.
if you are planning on making a website thats public dont bother using siteground... they are by far the worst for evil stipulations. i was with them for almost 2 years and gave up and ran to ixwebhosting
whatever you do... dont get a mambership from siteground!!!!!
i warn you now because it will save you stress in the future |
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| Art, 10th 2009f January, 2009 |
| Site Ground has been a nightmare. E-mail service has been vegas-style for over a week - chances of getting e-mails delivered less than craps. On-line support is a joke - ticket says it's still "working", message says "waiting for customer response" yet doesn't take response. This has been worst customer service response this decade. |
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| Frank, 04th 2009f January, 2009 |
I have been with Siteground for over two years. The most impressive part of their service is the speed with which they answer any help desk problems - helpful, knowledgeable and fast.
Keep up the good work. |
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| Jeremiah, 17th 2008f December, 2008 |
In November of 2008 I got the same "your site is over CPU time". I'd never heard of a CPU restriction and tried to resolve it by killing everything but the generic forum board. This is after hosting with them since the beginning, moving to a reseller account and purchasing "credits" for the extension of my websites.
They hit me with the VPN account and I said no, might as well go with a full server. There are enough projects I haven't done because it's not a full server to merit this, and I figured the VPN resources would quickly be consumed and they'd bump me anyway, pain all over again.
Going to the new server has been painful- not only did they split my account and try to charge me to move everything, but refused to give me credit for my reseller accounts or even the unused credit.
They seem wholly unconcerned that the reseller accounts are pointless since I have AN ENTIRE SERVER I'm paying for and can set up webpages ad infinitum.
Getting my site back was priority #1 as they had suspended it for CPU usage, which is really nasty- gun to the head anyone?
I stayed and upgraded mainly from the stellar service I'd received in the past- siteground was always my hosting secret.
However with my server completely out for hours and configuration errors, no explainations or excuses when things go wrong (I'm a techie and they outright lie sometimes) I am now looking for another solution.
I think they've gone down the crapper- just read the comments from oldest (2006) to newest and you can see a decline in their postive ratings. |
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| David, 01st 2008f December, 2008 |
After being with SiteGround for over 3 years, I can say 100% without a doubt STAY AWAY FROM THIS HOSTING PROVIDER.
1.) Email is down pretty consistently. It is down at least 10% of the time.
2.) They advertise 750 gigs of storage. When I signed up, it was only 40 gigs. At 40 gigs, you could post as many support tickets as much as you needed and they were fast to resolve the issue. By the time they got to 500 gigs of storage, they buried the links to the ticket support system as deep within the endless pages of generic support, intern written psychobabble as they could. It was nearly impossible to get any kind of support if you have an issue. No phone, no ticket, no email.
Also, they went from the "you can use your 40 gigs of storage however you want, as long as you don't go over" policy to "5gigs of multimedia, that is any pic or file that isn't an HTML file. Really, you can host as many HTML and TXT files as you would like. We mean it counts as part of your 750 gigs, but really it doesn't. You can use your 750 gigs however you need, but not really. Look, lets just cut to the chase (siteground customer service rep pulls out a gun) NOW HAND ME YOUR WALLET AND NO ONE GETS HURT!!!!"
Really, they suck |
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| todor, 28th 2008f November, 2008 |
simply let me tell my situation:
they told me my forum consumes too much cpu usage etc, they wanted me to upgrade to a dedicated host, otherwise they said, they can give my site's backup..i moved to another host. gues what? my forum eats 0.1/100 of cpu,ram etc..i know this because i can see it my new host's cpanel...STAY AWAY FROM THEMM
if you dont mind, i will copy/paste my review for them (i tried to submit my review to at least 10 hosting review sites..only published in 1 of them!!!)
here is the copy/paste:
if you gonna host a simple blog it is good, otherwise you will start to ask yourself where this mysql has going away. i heartly advise to stay away from them! 3-4 years before they were one of the best. This is the story of how a company can destroy theirself. if you open a ticket robots (messages) will reply you, dont expect a reply for a few days. their cpanel is at stoneage. they may suspend your site for high usage of traffic/cpu and would request from you to upgrade a dedicated host (which is normal) but search intel atom 330 in ebay and see what will you pay 179 dolar per month (it is a mobile, even not desktop tech computer, has nothing to do with server technology, and you can buy one for 80 dolar) cpanel is at stoneage, most of the apache modules that are defaultly available in other hosts are missing..my site suspended for high computer usage, and they wanted from me to upgrade to dedicated otherwise they said they can give me mysite's backup, i opened a ticket that i will solve this problem and i moved mysite to another host. currently i see that my site use 0.1cpu 0/100ram 2 processes from cpanel (you cant see that in their cpanel) i strongly felt that i am fooled. all i can say stay away!
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if i could save only "1" person from them, this will be my success!! |
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| Scamed by Siteground, 11th 2008f November, 2008 |
| Avoid them at all costs. I lost my money and all my data. They are crooks. You have been warned. |
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| William, 11th 2008f October, 2008 |
| Really bad service and hosting. Avoid it!!!! |
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| Joe, 19th 2008f July, 2008 |
DO NOTE USE SITEGROUND. Had a very bad experience with Siteground. Their terms of service are very restrictive and you cannot actually use the bandwidth, email or disk space you buy. See more info here www.siteground-sucks.com.
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| GW Bush, 28th 2008f March, 2008 |
| avoid them. They oversell features and then dont deliver |
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| shoud, 28th 2008f January, 2008 |
| for this "Web Hosting Reviews and Ratings", I think vistainter.com have to put a warning: All the reviews is according to the poster, customer have to in their mind that, there may be got really's cases and also there is a ... ( Beside black and white, there is many color also in this world.... ) |
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| siteground sucks, 16th 2007f November, 2007 |
read more about experiences hosting with siteground at....
http://www.ladishes.com/sgscybercrooks
(copy and paste into your web browser)
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| Linn, 02nd 2007f July, 2007 |
| Website has gone down several times in several months. Email works, then doesn't work. I can't recommend this company. The tech people don't seem to know what they're doing. |
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| Bill, 12th 2007f June, 2007 |
Avoid siteground!
This is my second year with this host. During the first year everything worked fine, but just about after renewing my account, they changed my server's (shared) IP. Since then, numerous problems emerged! SENDMAIL stopped working. OK, they fixed it, but after that my site is almost constantly down, unavailable (503). They informed me that they had to limit my site's shared resources since one particular script "overloaded" server. Also, they suggested purchase of VPS account.
During the first year my site had significantly more traffic (and no changes were made to "problematic" script) and now they're trying to get me to pay more because of "growing needs of my website"??? I am afraid that this is just a scam...
Nice way of thanking for customer loyalty! |
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| chris, 15th 2007f May, 2007 |
| I used them for a bit and then decided to go to providerwebhosting.org because they were giving away free domain names. I may keep my account here as well though |
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| Animora, 03rd 2007f May, 2007 |
| Have been with company for couple of months. Am leaving. Horrible customer support. Technicians are not able to resolve any problems. Every questions gets answered with an "unfortunately" that is outside our scope or pay extra. |
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| ian, 09th 2006f December, 2006 |
| as with many hosts there's good and bad. However, siteground do have (during 2006) more outages than would be acceptable for my commercial site - and I suspect other users. Their disc space is actually limited to about 5GB , not the full 40GB stated in headline figure, so be careful. |
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| Kamal AOUDA, 09th 2006f December, 2006 |
Same thing for me. I've got two of my websites hosted with siteground. I've never experienced any noticeable downtime or latency. It works fine and the company delivers a great value for the price. They are very generous in terms of bandwidth and hard drive space. Plenty of popular OS products can be installed in a blink of an eye through their Fantastico script. The Cpanel interface allows you to have a lot of control over your website inner parameters without contacting the support team. It’s definitely the best package out there for small to medium size community website.
I transferred my account from Brinkster to Siteground two years ago. Brinkers are the most incompetent and arrogant guys I’ve never dealt with. Stay away from them.
Kamal AOUDA
http://www.kamalaouda.com
http://www.ecommercedev.net
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| real customer, 27th 2006f November, 2006 |
I noticed a good review of customer's experience of siteground as a web host is available from the following web url...
www.sitegroundsucks.com
just type that into your web browser to see a full report. (sorry, no click to open from here) |
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| Roger, 26th 2006f November, 2006 |
Simply an appalling host. Main problems are server uptime (very bad) and lack of support (poor customer service)
Their headline webspace sounds good, but in reality its not really there. |
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| mike, 14th 2006f November, 2006 |
I can only assume that the positive reviews are from employees, or people running small, infrequently viewed sites.
I signed up for service and crashed when I reached 1% of bandwidth and 1% of diskspace (this are real numbers, not estimates) and they stated that I am using too much of the server resources. I have mostly text and a few pictures - no streaming anything, and probably about 500 visitors a day.
I thought I had done something wrong, and posted to Joomla.org, and within minutes had people emailing me with the same problem with the same host... coincidence, I think not.
Generously, Siteground offered to upgrade my service to a VPS for $80/month. Maybe if I was on some kind of drug I would consider this, but I think I'll pass for now. I'm not interested in buying shares of Enron either.
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| b, 19th 2006f October, 2006 |
I have been monitoring SiteGround for over a year, now. I have reviewed statistics and reviews as my website is very important for me and I do not want any problems with the host. Despite, they have experienced downtimes and have clients that are complaining, this is one of the best hosts I have ever seen. The tech support is great and the response time is incomparable.
My experience with hosting companies is more than worse. I have been with Ipowerweb, Lunarpages, and BlueHost. Unfortunately, no other host, but SiteGround, made my website up and running. SiteGround treats its clients with great care and maybe for this reason they have grown that much for such a short period. They already host 35 000 websites and are up since 2003. This is just another fact that shows how awesome SiteGround are!!! |
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| Stan V., 08th 2006f September, 2006 |
I've been hosting with this company for a long time. At the beginning their service was very good for the money: fast ticket response, good (if oversold) account features.
From then on, as they grew, things went downhill. They kept boosting their apparent bandwidth/HDD space limits, while putting clauses in their Terms of Service where they take those features back. For example, they currently state you can host 40GB on their account, but their ToS claims you can't have more than 5GB of "multimedia". In a conversation with their team it turned out mostly everything containing a piece of image or sound is multimedia, including archives containing multimedia, except I guess plain text files.
Their reliability is poor. They don't keep their servers in a RAID setup which will ensure they have a good drive mirror in case of a drive failure. I've had about 2 days downtime when the server my account was on, crashed. They backup once a week which for a dynamic site is heavily insufficient.
Their support went downhill too. They still reply within 15 minutes of inquiry but it’s rarely a problem resolution, instead it's usually a template answer or something like "ok we're working on the issue". To resolve the actual issues, lots of hours may pass.
They no longer offer free support as well. 5-6 months ago they introduced a new system where you have 7 free tickets per year, and free "site down" tickets. What constitutes a site down is not clearly written down and they occasionally convert tickets reporting emergent issues to the paid tickets. They advertise live chat and phone support, but those will immediately hang on you if you are an existing customer (pre-sales only).
Their responses are polite, but repetetive and frequently not helpful; they often will treat you as an ignorant and talk their way out of real problems with template answers like "we're striving for best customer satisfaction". You'll hear that a lot when they screw up, the irony of which is simply unbelieveable.
One morning I woke up to see my sites down, I checked my mail, no messages. Some of them were down, some displaying empty directory listing and some displaying "account is disabled" message.
I went and posted a "site down" ticket, to which I first got reply I got banned for hosting more than 5 GB of multimedia. I have 10 GB archive on their site which is not multimedia. Upon clarifying this they said they are "sorry" and apparently I was not banned, but my sites went down as they moved them (without notification) to another server and I need to update my DNS for all my domains.
When I asked why was I not notified, they said they are "sorry" again and the e-mail bounced (the e-mail server is again hosted there). When I asked: why their own e-mail bounced off their own e-mail server, I was ignored.
I also had issues with their SpamCop protection which was letting around 20-30 spam mails a day in my inbox, and occasionally blocked legitimate mails without notification. When I found that I asked them to not filter my e-mails in any way, after which I didn't notice increase in spam activity (goes to show how much SpamCop works).
I updated the DNS of some of my domains which were most critical to me and confirmed that I see the proper IP/DNS on my site (it propagated to me).
I then noticed the account was not moved properly at all: the e-mails didn't recognize their passwords (had to reset the password of each e-mail), half my files were in the wrong location, some of them having duplicates, some of them older (from a backup?) and the other half were missing. I also started getting duplicates of old e-mail and missing messages from people who e-mailed me the last few days.
I, of course, panicked, and having already more than a day unplanned downtime I started asking what the hell is going on.
The reply was "the files couldn't be moved, but we can give you access to download them". On a consumer connection it'd take me a week to download, verify, repair and re-upload such amount of content and so I asked them to just erase the copy on the server and try to move it again from a backup, properly this time.
I got reply that I'm being rude, my account was suspended and they told me to stop posting tickets until someone from upper management looks into the issue. I want to clarify I didn't insult them, but in the panic I used few curse words to describe the sorry state my account was in. Being "rude" is in no way a reason to suspend someone's account.
Another day of downtime, and no response. I posted another ticket where I described my situation and asked why noone is working on my issues and noone replying to my tickets. I gave them a run by their own ToS and gave a listing of my site's contents explaining how I host neither illegal content or breach their terms in any other way, so to end up with my sites suspended.
I got another "sorry" reply and that someone would personally take care of the situation.
Few hours later and after few internal redirects of the ticket between their departments, I got several "is it ok now" replies to which I had to answer negatively explaining where my files are still missing and what else is wrong in my CPanel, mail server and so on. After one point I was just ignored and the account was left in whatever state it was in.
I asked why was my account moved and I got the usual "we upgrade our hardware all the time since we strive for best customer satisfaction". My answer was that I, as a customer, am not satisified with random 3 day downtime periods and said I just want my account fixed and not moved for the rest of the time I have paid to be their client (8 months..), so I can gradually transition my sites to another provider.
At that point my account was suspended again and I was told I breached their ToS and my account is canceled. When asked where I breached their ToS, they pasted a section where it basically said "SiteGround reserves the right to determine whether a client has breached their ToS and terminate their account at any time". And that was it. I was given three days to get the pieces of my content that survived, and my account was shut down.
My mistake was I revealed I don't plan to renew my account after the remaining 8 months I paid for, expire. Keep this in mind when you have to deal with rogue hosting providers.
They were simply not interested in providing service to me and trying to fix my account further, since I paid a full year ahead and they wouldn't get more money from me after that either way.
My verdict is this:
If you want a cheap $5/mo hosting where to put some family photos to show to friends, no need for stability or staff that cares if your account goes down, it's as good as any other shared hosting. Of course you can find a similar service for even less than $5 out there.
But if you have dynamic content and want to host serious sites or have e-mails you rely on, run like hell in the opposite direction. |
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| pablo, 14th 2006f March, 2006 |
i'd never heard of Siteground before, but luckily i stumbled upon it in a web search for the best mambo/joomla hosting provider. but it's not only a mambo host, its an all around, full of available scripts, 99.9% uptime, fast servers host.
if you are into mambo, installation is done clicking 1 button. done! they also have a tutorial page for those who are new to it (like me). and if you aren't into those scripts, you have more than 20 other scripts that are installed with a click of a button as well. phpnuke, joomla, drupal, oscommerce, zencart, osticket, coppermine, and literally dozens more are installed with a click of a button. its so easy i feel like scripting my whole site! i would take 2 minutes to do so.
the best feature, besides the comparatively cheap price (as of today, 5usd a month for 12gb with domain included), and the myriad scripts installed with 1 button, is the customer's relations they have. by far, i have never been so happy with the customer's support in my life. on my previous hosting provider, i had to wait 1 or 2 days to get an answer, and i still had to reply to the answer and that took 1 or 2 more days. this is no joke, and im sure a lot of us have or had the same problem before.
siteground is different. there is a live online chat line. i've never waited more than 1 minute to chat with a fully capable operator that knew how to answer every question i had.
they have a ticket system too, for rapid answering of problems and questions. i've asked a lot of questions, the average resolution time of my problems is 4 minutes.
they also helped me transfer over 2gb of information from one of my past hosting providers to the siteground servers. they did all the work for me and for free!
congratulations to siteground for the excellent CRM. i have now transfered all my hosting to siteground and i am very happy and proud. recommended 100%. |
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| Tim, 27th 2006f February, 2006 |
| I have had my pages hosted by Site Ground for about 3 months now. I have had no problems and when I have had questions they have always replied within 24 hours by email or phone. I use the MySQL db and it has been performing very reliable. |
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| James Croft, 26th 2006f February, 2006 |
| Been with the company for a couple of years - never had complains with the server speed - they use 3.2 dual xeons servers...also the support is great, my Mambo site was up and running within a couple of minutes. Also the price and the features are unbeatable. great host |
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