I recently made the move to Siteground and after reading this article I hope you move your website to Siteground today! After all the issues I had with Bluehost, I was nervous to try something else without knowing more. PART ONE of TWO PARTS.
But Bluehost has such good reviews?
Bluehost as you have probably seen has a very good rating. Little did I know how terrible of a hosting company it was. The reason why they have such a good rating is money. Bluehost will pay other bloggers money for every person that signs up through them. However, I learned more companies do this including Siteground. Bluehost pays the highest commission as a result it is recommended the most. Typically they will pay double what other companies have to offer.
Which frankly I find is a horrible way to do business. I would never recommend something that I did not like as I would want to build relationships rather than break them. To me it’s just bad business. This article is based only on my honest opinion and I am not receiving any compensation. If you want to double the speed of your website without making any changes then you need to move to Siteground today!
Why Did I Choose to Move My Website to Siteground?
I bought into the hype and used Bluehost for 6 months. So what made me move? I noticed after about 3 months I was having issues all the time with speed. It just kept getting worse and I did not know why. Finally, I reached my limit when the server kept crashing for more than 3 days in a row. I put in several support tickets asking for help as a result just really upset me more. I received several different answers to why it was down. As someone who has been in IT for a long time and worked with several other hosting companies, I knew when it did not make any sense. The first time they had said it was due to urgent maintenance issue and could not give me an estimated time. Which okay I understand these types of issues can occur.
I waited till the following day before I tried checking the status. I decided to open a chat. The chat froze several times leading to having to start the whole process over again. So I called. The technician had told me I pointed my website to https without installing the SSL certificate. I was surprised by this issue. This was the first thing I did. They put me on a brief hold and came back on the line to tell me the issue had been fixed. I tested my website and it seemed to load without an issue. However, I wanted to be sure and refreshed the screen a few times. And can you guess what happened? Yes, it crashed.
The Start of the End with Bluehost
The agent then decided to tell me again they fixed my issue. I said no please refresh your page and you will see it is down. They promptly said they did and have no problem with getting on my site. As well as I would need to prove the website was down. Well how do I prove my website is not working? They had told me it must be my WIFI causing it. So I quickly cleared the cache and cookies and tried again. Same result. I then tried incognito the same result. I flushed the DNS and still same result.
The technician kept to her previous answer that it was my WIFI. Which of course really was upsetting me. I finally disconnected my phone from the WIFI and cleared everything out. I took a screenshot of my phone having the same result and uploaded to the files on the backend of my server. Now you can’t tell me it was my WIFI. This started the senior technicians to get involved. Which over the next few days only made it worse.
I spent hours on the phone and chat getting the runaround. When they started to blame me that’s when I decided to find a new host. I was worried about my previous experience and did not know what to believe in when looking for a new host. While I was researching new ways to improve website speed, Siteground just kept coming up. So I took a leap and decided it couldn’t hurt to try and I am extremely happy I did. Within 24 hours it was up and running and my score went from an F to a B on GTmetrixs without making any changes.
Why is Siteground Different?
Unlike Bluehost Siteground has multiple servers across the world. That way if one goes down another server will pick up the slack. Siteground also comes with a free CDN. A CDN allows images to be loaded from another destination. As a result it immediately helps your speed not holding the images against you. Siteground has an excellent amount of free tools to assist with speed and more. Bluehost has a CDN however it does not work well with an SSL. Siteground is also one of the most affordable hosting platforms that are excellent in speed.
Other Hosts to Consider
- DreamHost. 118.4 ms response time on global average
- Kingsta 179.5 ms response time on global average
- GreenGeeks 118.6 ms response time on global average
How to Move Your Website to Siteground
Follow along to a video on how to move your website to Siteground. This is part of 2 parts on how I moved to Siteground and doubled my speed overnight.
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