Why You Should Change Web Hosting

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I know It is hard to change web hosting
What if you found that you choose wrong hosting

In this post, I will discuss my experience with Siteground
Where I currently host this website before that
I was using Hostgator

please I want you to understand that
I am not against Hostgator and any other web hostings
but read it carefully and you should conclude
Why you should change your web hosting to Siteground

Starting with WordPress first
I’ve been using WordPress since 2009
As the only platform for building websites and
Being with Hostgator since 2011 as shown below
I was paying on a monthly basis before
I switched to an annual payment in 2015)

I chose Hostgator because it was really booming at that time and
Everyone recommended them
Anyway when I decided to build this website
I noticed a significant slowness in speed so
I checked all the plans and I found that
They have plans for WordPress hosting so
I chatted with billing resource in July

They told me that it is too late to switch as
I passed the 45 days for making any changes
This means if I switch I will pay the full annual amount again

In order to design a future of positive change, we must first become expert at changing our minds. (Jacque Fresco) Click To Tweet

I used to pay 143.4$/year (11.95$/month) for the website hosting and they have a different plans called WordPress hosting which is a little bit more (I really don’t remember the price) but I have to admit that I did not try it to judge the speed with the WordPress hosting plan, may be it is matching Siteground or even better
Anyway the best things I was able to do at that time is to optimize my WordPress site by using Cloudflare by creating free account on their website, it enhanced my page load speed somehow and I also started reading about how to use W3 Total Cache to achieve maximum optimization also I installed WP Sweep plugin to optimize WordPress database

Why I changed my web hosting account

I always recommend on my blog the best tools/services and while reading few posts for bloggers saying that Siteground is currently the best when it comes to web hosting of WordPress sites,  I started to search online for lot of reviews and I came to technical ones which proves that Siteground is sitting on top in terms of page load speed and because I was planning to upgrade my hosting plan with Hostgator to achieve better results but due to their prices, I decided to wait for my renewal on end of April

But suddenly I knew about Google Page speed test (link opens in new windows) and immediately I tested on my blog, I was shocked with the score of 57 as Low so I went to chat with their online tool and the agent there she was very fair and she told me that she is not technical and she is part of the sales team but she promised better result than 57 if I switch to them and she recommended GrowBig after knowing that I have few sites

I checked their prices and to my wonder I found that I will pay 71.4$ for one year (5.95$ monthly), I immediately found myself going for their web hosting GrowBig plan and I started the transfer process

The technical team took around 2 hours to transfer everything to my new web hosting after I provided them with my Hostgator credentials and when my blog was ready, I went right away to check again the Google page speed, I found that I jumped to 69 as medium and the technical team comforted me that this number I can still boost higher than that but how?

I realized later that they have Cloudflare built in under their cPanel with a click of a button you will be able to connect to Cloudflare without doing any work so right away I tested that on another website which belongs to my brother in law and I found that it was immediately connected

Now when I clicked on my website to connect it to Cloudflare, I got an error message that my website email is already in use as with Hostgator hosting  I had to do my Cloudflare connectivity manually from within their website so I logged on to my Cloudflare account and I disconnected my blog and I connected it again from within their cPanel

When I went again to Cloudflare, I found that both websites are there; by the way you don’t need to connect to Cloudflare site again as all the settings you can control from your cPanel under your account

Also Siteground provides you with their internal Caching system similar to Cloudflare which is called SuperCacher and they have a WordPress plugin to control it from within your WordPress admin area

One added asset with their hosting is the backup tool to restore any files or folders; I think they keep 30 days where you can specify the day(s) to restore its data

Why you need fast Google page speed

I am not a fan of SEO and I don’t try to optimize any of my pages for SEO but at least I follow the basic SEO concepts like making sure that the title exists twice in my post, I apply this whatever my post is 2000, 4000, or more words and yes SEO will come to you somehow by finding that you get traffic from long tail keywords you did not plan for and having said that I don’t want to lose this extra  traffic as Google indicated in their algorithm that part of their algorithm to rank pages is by detecting the page speed and since I am not taking any SEO practice into consideration I will not ignore the Google page speed factor

The best preparation for tomorrow is doing your best today. (H. Jackson Brown, Jr.) Click To Tweet

Also forget about SEO, I always browse many websites from my cell phone using my data plan so I really care about the page load speed as I switch to another activity if the website I am loading takes longer than normal (I am willing to wait 8 to 10 seconds)

Screenshot below is testing Google page speed with Hostgator hosting

While this screenshot below when I switched to Siteground, notice there is a little bit of increase but consider that I did not know about the builtin feature of Cloudflare and SuperCacher (it is going to be discussed below)

How much I had to pay to switch my web hosting

I paid 71.4$ and I consider it a very good deal as the team there is really expert and they know how to really deal with technical problems professionally

The best way to reach them is by calling a technician over the phone usually the wait time is around 2 – 3 minutes, I don’t recommend to leave your number for a call back as they called me after 2 hours and I spoke to them about it and they said that due to the high call volume sometimes they call back when it is a little bit quite so I would rather stay on the phone

Next channel is opening a ticket, I opened a ticket with them when I was transferring my WordPress sites, they replied within 90 minutes but I highly recommend it when you need technical how to guide as they are expert in providing documentation for you to follow

Last channel in my opinion is the chat as most agents there are sales and billing, maybe I am wrong and they have technical agents but I said that because my 2 chat sessions were with sales

What are the current Siteground plans

They have 3 plans, StartUp plan which is good for one website and 10,000 monthly visit for 3.95$ so I recommend it because when you start you will always start with one website and no traffic, followed by the GrowBig (my current plan) which is good for multiple websites and 25,000 monthly visit and finally GoGeek  also multiple websites and 100,000 monthly visit

Final thoughts of why I changed my hosting plan

Believe me when I tell you that it was not an easy decision especially I have long post on WordPress website setup process  where I describe how to install WordPress on  Hostgator in step by step details, I had to completely change web hosting to Siteground and few other posts where I recommended Hostgator

Screenshot below is the original post where I had to delete it and lose any social media links which I pasted earlier and to create a new post to recommend Siteground

I knew it was easy to keep everything as is especially I see many bloggers promote Hostgator and they really have thousands of visitors coming to their websites but if I want readers to believe me in what I recommend as a good experience then I have to take whatever it takes to keep the integrity of my blog

Finally before taking any action, I hope you have a reason to change web hosting and choose the right one for you, now please share it with your friends using social media to the left hand side or bottom (mobile)