SiteGround is the host I actually pay for now

Two hundred sixteen dollars. That's the yearly hosting bill for Sal's plumbing site, and I paid it without blinking. Last winter his old host reset his DNS on a Sunday and killed his office email for two days. The new bill is six times the teaser rate and I'd still make the trade again tomorrow.

Sal's site moved to SiteGround in March. I pay the bill on my card, he squares up with me quarterly, same as always. Long story short: the intro price is bait, the renewal price is the real price, and the real price is still worth it for a business that answers its phone.

This is the host I ended up on after the Bluehost mess. I'll be honest about the money up front, because the money is the whole story with these guys.

What it costs

Three WordPress plans, all prepaid by the year. StartUp is $2.99 a month for your first term, then renews at $17.99. GrowBig is $4.99, then $29.99. GoGeek is $7.99, then $44.99. Read that again, because it's the part their ads bury. A $36 first year becomes $215.88 in year two.

What knocks that down: the free stuff is real. Domain free the first year. SSL, CDN, and daily backups, free, with the backups stored in a different data center than your site. Free email. Free migrations. A 30-day money-back window if you change your mind.

Storage is the squeeze. StartUp gets 10GB, GrowBig 50GB, GoGeek 100GB. Ten gigabytes is nothing if you're storing video. For a plumber's site with compressed photos, it's plenty. Sal's whole site, images included, lives in about 2GB.

I put Sal on StartUp and left him there. One website, unlimited traffic. That's his business exactly.

The move, which I did not do myself

Their team offers a free manual migration, so I asked for it in their chat at 10pm on a Tuesday. A person answered in under two minutes. They ran the move overnight with their migrator plugin, and the site never went dark. I woke up, clicked around, and everything was where I left it.

That support thread is why people stay. Chat and phone, 24 hours a day, staffed by actual technicians. They publish a 98% satisfaction number and a 4.9 Trustpilot score. Trust their own stats with a grain of salt, but Sal's ticket was fast, competent, and free.

Speed is the other selling point. SiteGround publishes tests showing sites moving from big-name hosts and dropping their load times by half or more. Their numbers, their test setup, so weigh it accordingly. What I can say first hand: Sal's homepage got visibly quicker and the change cost me an hour of work I didn't have to do.

The test bench version

GrowBig and up include one-click staging, and staging is the feature nobody explains. It's a private copy of your site. You change the copy first, and when it works, you push it live.

In the shop we called this bench testing. A control board came off a furnace, you wired it on the bench, fed it power, and proved the spark before you bolted it into somebody's basement. You never found out a part was dead after it was on the wall. Staging is that bench, for websites. On cheaper hosts you test on the customer's wall and pray.

What bites

The renewal math bites, and I've said so twice now. Plan for the second-year price on day one or pick a different host. The 10GB floor bites if you outgrow a brochure site. And the intro rate only comes with the 12-month prepay, so the first bill lands all at once. Sal's was $35.88. That part's painless. The next one won't be, and I already marked it on the calendar.

If you host a dozen client sites like I do, GoGeek's priority support and staging might pull you up a tier. I haven't paid it yet. I might.

What to do Monday

Open your hosting account tonight and find next year's renewal price, not this year's. If you can't find that number in five minutes, count that as a fact about your host. Write the number down with the date it hits your card.