Avoid Siteground at all cost

I have have some good and bad experiences with Siteground as well. In their defense, they offer a nice proposition and they have fast customer support. As manuj_78 points out, this doesn't always solve your problems.

I have gone through a similar process where a standard Drupal 5.1 install wouldn't work reliably. After repeatedly bugging them with various support tickets, they had found the 'problem' and 'fixed' it. Apparently, it had something to do with the .htaccess file that comes with the standard Drupal install. Even after the 'fix', the problem persisted. After a week or so, they quietly (no e-mail, just online in the server status area) announced that due to problems with the server, they would migrate all websites soon. Fortunately for me, the migration worked out well and the website is finally working and now is actually quite fast. Check for yourself at:

http://www.connectinternational.nl/

What irritates me about the Siteground service is that you cannot monitor server performance properly. They guarantee 99.9% server uptime, but there is no monitoring service available for the customer. Also, when your website is down, the webmaster does not get notified by e-mail. Only if you are logged into the customer support area, you can check whether the server is working properly. You can see whether the server is online at this exact moment, but not whether it was online 10 minutes ago or at any other time.

In short, there is no visible quality assurance system in place that backs up their claim of 99.9% uptime.

well..what can i do..cld u write to the senior management in siteground..and get them to do something on ur case....
drupal has many users..and our opinions count..so why dont u tell siteground..that u will spread a lot of bad opinions if they dont help u.
try this ..all the best

I had an amazingly similar problem with Siteground. I had just renewed for another year and I received an email from them telling me they had noticed problems with my server and they were going to move it to a faster newer server. As far as I was concerned everything was working great and remarkably fast, with all 3 domains I host there. They performed the move and notified me it went well. In less than 2 days after the move, first time I toggled off one module, and kaboom. Instant database corruption. The site did work, but I lost almost all control over it. Modules appeared to be installed but wouldn't show up. Some functionality was just gone, and files were missing. I posted a support ticket and they offered to restore the site (at a cost). I backed up the site and tried an upgrade to 5.1 That didn't work so I put back the broken website and let them do the restore. Then they couldn't find a backup. After two full days they produced two backups. One which was less than 2 days old and broken, and another that was 8 months old. They charged me to reinstall a broken database. I just gave up at that point and did a fresh install of 5.1 in another directory, configured it, and started moving content piece by piece to the new site. Eventually I swapped directorires and 5.1 was live. Once again it's running multi-site with 3 domains, but it seems to take much longer to produce a page. It's not near as fast as it once was. I have since created backup scripts that worked for months, now all of a sudden they are producing syntax errors. Perhaps they don't like users backing up their data themselves... I've tried their backups. I prefer my own now.

Well, I'm a client for over 1 year now at siteground.com and I can not really find myself in these stories... OK, if something is wrong I know how to find the problem myself and if I need assistance I know exactly what to write in a ticket. Then I sometimes get an somehow-off-topic helpdesk reply but after insisting they probably forward the problem to a senior and most of the times my problem gets solved after 1-2hours.

I also had the server upgrades for my 2 accounts and 5 domains seperately a few months ago and I only had a minor problem with the php4 to php5 upgrade... But that's something I had on my dev-homeserver too.

From what I can see, siteground keeps it's server pretty up to date with the latest software and I have had php problems due to the use of deprecated functions and variables too... But that's something that happens/ed on my development servers too and with other service providers.

After all I'm still happy with siteground and I can't complain about the price/service.

There's only 1 thing I really don't like. They promote 250GB hosting but in the 'Terms of Use' there's a big restriction on file-types and diskspace available. Let's say 5GB for multimedia, 5GB for compressed/archive files, 5GB for database dumps and 5GB for executables... Leaves 230GB for text files. Does anybody know a software project (source code) that's bigger than 150MB?? (watch MB instead of GB!!) My openoffice.org gentoo build package is 127MB... Too me that 250GB is much more a marketing strategy that nobody can really have. I'm still far away from these limitations but if one of my planned portals gets very active and users really use the multimedia galleries then I think I can hit that 5GB multimedia limitation fast. I hope they use a fair-usage on that!

Trogie

I also noticed that I begin to have prob after prob with my site. Will say that their customer service in terms of responsibleness was amongst the best that I experienced.

I started with base service, but then www.siteground.com determined that our site was just too heavy and was causing probs, so they recommmend an upgrade to a Virtual Private server which cost us more money. Even after the move, I discovered the probs continued so in the end, just to many probs, happening to often, so in the quiteness of the night, I packed up and got out.

***In the process of moving our domain name, I also discovered to my horror that anytime that you go through a host company, who also acts as a domain reseller, who as part of their service registers your domain with guys such as enon, then the registrar of a domain is actually the owner of of that domain name --- it is the registrar who has the rights to lock or unlock a domain -- a locked domain can not be moved to another location without the registrar first unlocking it. ---- I am almost certain that alot of unsuspecting website owners do not know this --- I certainly did not.
I do not believe that this is in the spirit that alot of website owners utilized these services provided by host companies whom they offer/sale it as a time of one stop shop convenience. You know, host with us and we will set up and register your domain.

Think about it!-- the owner of a domain really is a type of owner of a site (your site). If you spend time building your site brand and the content is identified with that domain, they are actually accruing value which is not rightfully theirs. It is best to always register your domain directly with a register service such as enon or network solution rather let your hosting company do it.

When I called enon about the issue, the lady agreed that in fact this was the case, but suggested that I did not understand business very well. Thus, attempting to justify the practice -- the host company are in fact a type of vender for the domain registration services so they look at it as a business arrangement, but this practice is deceptive to the core. Why? because if any site owner knew that they were making such a compromise, they would just register their domain directly with a registration service themselves and maintain "direct" management of their domain name.

Well after raising holy hell and threatening to reaveal my discovery to the world, they released(unlocked) my domain and returned "direct" access management authority to me, as it was originally intended and as it should have been. I moved on, but I suspect that many are currently in a similar situation.

Just a heads up! hope it helps someone!!!!!!

Just wanted to say thanks to all the commenters ... I was just about to open a Sitegrounds account when I decided to check the Drupal forums, and I'm very glad I did.

I personally am not a Siteground customer, but the vast majority of my clients are. For the sake of diversity in opinion and in reports of user experience, I should say that I have set up several sites successfully on Siteground in the last several months and can report you that it has been about the most pain-free experience I have had with any web host aside from IX-Webhosting. Everything has for me worked perfectly the first time -- file system defaults, clean URLs, URL redirects, etc. Perhaps it depends on the plan you get. Anyway, I am not defending the company -- as I said, I am not a customer. But if ease of use and functionality is important to you, I do not see how you can get a better deal for the money. I have never used their customer service, so I cannot offer any opinions about that.

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http://www.bwv810.com/

I am a writer and researcher. In my spare time I build websites with Drupal.
Je peux communiquer en français. / Я могу связывать на русском языке.

I'm not impressed with SiteGround. It took me over 30 minutes to find a way to submit a support ticket and ended up using the "site down" option because all the other options looped me back to their KnowledgeBase which I had previously searched. The system is clearly designed to prevent ticket submissions. Once the ticket was received they did respond very quickly but should I have to endure their frustrating ticket system if another problem arises?

Again, not impressed.

1: They are in Costa Rica... only Costa Rica laws apply. See their TOS
2: The TOS is a "catch 22" The terms are so vague (The terms "excessive" and "wasteful" are defined by our experience) they can call anything abuse. If you "abuse" you're gone. Being "to popular" is abuse...so we close your account and keep your money. Oh, you are popular, try our $120 a month plan.
3: They are in Costa Rica.. if you pay, your CC will charge you a surcharge for payments out of the country. So their prices are not really accurate !
4: You can pay up to two years in advance... see #1, #2, #3...

I was with them for 4 years.
So they have my money, I can't do anything with them as, they have my money.
July 2011.

I wish I had read through the community's sharing on webhosting services.
Unfortunately, I didn't and am now stuck with Siteground - they fooled me on the "Special Offer" of $4.95 for a year - and I ended up paying $33+ when the card was charged - by "automatically" adding unwanted add-ons.

Then I found their php timeout makes it near impossible to have any (other than a bare install) Drupal site work, let alone one with CiviCRM installed.

The worst part is I was again suckered into "upgrading" for better bandwidth/CPU only to find nothing changed on their php and essential settings!

To finish it off, their "Support" is worse than noobs and attitudes suck.

I agree: Avoid Siteground at all costs!

I can't stand to see everyone bashmouth Siteground about stupid problems that can be easily resolved by doing a little research on Google. I've been with Siteground for 4 years now and I have quite a few hosting and domain accounts for clients of mine that I do web design and development for, I have add-on slots, ssl certificates, dedicated ip addresses, and more with them and all because in my opinion they have the best service around! There's always someone available to chat with quickly via their website chat window, you can call in and talk to someone about your issues and if you fill out a support ticket they respond in minutes, literally! I've grown so much as far as learning about how hosting accounts work, the features I've been using and so forth and I've also learned that they don't just feed all answers to you on a silver spoon. If your asking about a question that can easily be solved by doing some research or an issue that petains to the design and functionality of your website from code on your end, of course they're not going to slave for you like do some of your own work and research. Use that thing in your head called a brain and maybe you'll learn something new, its always more rewarding to do something yourself then to have someone else do it for you and I find siteground will push you politely sometimes to figure some issues out yourself so you will know how to fix the problem if you run into the same issue in the future. And they always let u know that their there for guidance if you need it. Just a great company and their prices are right too. I'm literally so sick of seeing people complain and whine about their issues like little babies because someone isn't spoon feeding them. People like that need to grow up. I don't use drupal, personally I prefer to learn and implement code from scratch for websites I create but I do know, from doing a little research, that drupal and other open source whatever they are companies like wordpress and joomla, have huge communities of people all sharing problems and solutions all over the web, in forums, blogs, google, so I wouldn't pin certain problems you're experiencing on siteground without first searching for answers from the open source community. I have not run into a small problem (lack of knowledge on my part) that siteground hasn't been able to answer or help me figure out the solution for it. Someone mentioned that siteground switched their websites to brand new top of the line servers free of charge for better performance and less risk for malware attacks, and the person decided that was grounds to make siteground look bad... Ok..