Inmotion vs Siteground Hosting
Two same-variety apples, but one tastes better!
In a super-dynamic world of web hosting services, it’s not about who’s the 1st or the best webhosting provider, but who’s able to reinvent or get niched down fast. Today we’re going to take a look at two same-sized web hosting players which are running after the same ball: personal, small businesses or new startups who need a website up and running. This means we’re going to compare them more from the shared/business web hosting offer rather than on an “enterprise” level. This is our Siteground vs Inmotion Hosting comparison: two bootstrapped businesses founded by technology geeks with dedicated and passionate teams around powered by the same philosophy: always in-house, never outsourced.
Value
Unlimited Space + a Sweet Bribe
The 1st package that Inmotionhosting has to offer is tiered at $2.99/month and allows you to have up to 2 websites, but also(and I believe is very important to mention), just 2 MySQL & PostgreSQL Databases.
If you plan to build something like a dev environment for a website, before making it live, you might find it a challenge, being limited by just 2 databases.
Here’s what you get:
- Unlimited Disk Space
- Free SSL & SSH
- Free Wp Website Builder
- Free Domain Registration
- Free Data Backups!
- 90-day Money Back Guarantee
The package is quite friendly and I’m excited to see that includes free data backups and a 90-day money back guarantee policy. Plus, the BoldGrid WordPress website builder is a plugin which you have access to and can be compared to the very popular Elementor or Visual Composer page builders.
Solid Essentials + 99.9% Uptime Guaranteed
Siteground’s first offer is a $3.95/month package and you’re allowed to build just one website. If you’re just getting started, one website is more than enough.
Now, the features that I’m quite excited about are the http/2 support and the free Cloudflare CDN. In other words, if your business is targeting global customers, these two features are going to make your website pretty fast.
Package features:
- 10GB Disk Space
- Unlimited Bandwitdth
- Free SSL & SSH
- Free Domain Registration
- Free Data Backups!
- 30-day Money Back Guarantee
Another thing to keep in mind is that Sitegroud guarantees a 99.9 server uptime, feature which is standard in the InmotionHosting Pro plan only.
Performance
The Essential Combo
Inmotion Hosting offers the right package for the right start: SSD Drives, PHP7, cPanel, Apache Servers. I can tell from experience that it’s not bad at all, but also not very impressive, compared to Siteground(http/2 and an ngnix architecture is just business-class). So, these things will definitely be more than enough for you if you’re just getting started. You could easily compensate with a performant WordPress theme and a series of WordPress plugins for caching and speed optimization.
What I like is that if you go with the Power plan, you’ll get more room for growth in terms of server performance. Statistically speaking, websites running on the 2nd plan will run 2-4 times faster than those hosted on the 1st plan. Just keep that in mind!
USA-only Datacenters
Inmotion Hosting relies on 2 datacenters located in USA only: one on the west-coast and the other one on the east-coast side of the continent.
Well, this means that if you’re serving prospects and clients around the world, or your business is not located in US, your content might arrive with a bit of a delay. Nothing to worry, though, a CDN will fix that in no time. The only downside is that you’ll have to pay for it. Siteground on the other hand, comes packed with such a service right from the start and for free.
Top-notch Server Architecture
When it comes to webhosting performance, people automatically think at speed. Siteground has the right combo to offer a great experience from this point of view.
If you dig a bit into the mind of the Siteground’s founder, Tenko Nikolov, you’ll quickly find out that he’s a technology geek who just loves hardware. For this reason, Siteground’s plus is that all the hardware technology which powers its services is just top-notch.
SSD Drives + Ngnix + CDN + HTTP/2 + PHP7
What does this means? It means your website will have no problems to run as fast as possible.
Plus, they developed a caching mechanism based on NGINX reverse proxy called SuperCacher which speeds up dramatically the serving of the dynamic content of the site. This is an upsell, though, available from the 2nd package, but it’s all worth it.
Datacenters on 3 Continents
There are 5 Siteground datacenters located in US, Europe and Singapore to serve clients worldwide. In other words, you can rely on Siteground even if your business is located in a country like Singapore, Australia or Sweden.
One thing to mention here is that you have to pick your datacenter right from the beginning.
Reliability
InmotionHosting Uptime
There’s a feature called “Pro Level Support“, which according to Inmotionhosting, they guarantee a 99.9% server uptime. Unfortunately, this feature is available only for the Pro plan, so if you go with the Launch or even Power plan, you don’t have the guarantee. This means that the uptime of the service for the Launch plan could be lower than 99.9%.
Inmotion Support
Inmotion prides themselves with an in-house, US-based support team, available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. You could reach out via live chat, phone and email, which is great. The live chat option is what you’ll be using the most, however, from past experience there might be a bit of a waiting time involved, until you get to chat with a support representative. A queue position of 10 means that you might have to wait approx 5-10 minutes.
They also have an extensive knowledge-base and plenty of tutorials for absolutely every problem you might stumble upon.
Siteground Uptime
According to their stats, the Siteground’s server uptime for the past 12 months was 99.996%. That’s quite impressive. Again, because of the geeky roots of the company, Siteground’s custom solutions and hardware helped them achieve these incredible statistics. This is available for any of the shared webhosting plans, including the 1st package.
Siteground Support
One of the things you’ll love about this company is the support. They pride themselves with close-to-no-waiting-time live chat support (which has quite a nice user interface, making things easier to understand and apply) and an within-a-few-minutes email first reply.
Plus, the extensive knowledge-base, webinar series and setup wizards will help you get started and get things fixed in minutes.
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