Allen Mark
SiteGround Review: Hosting for Photographers
Flothemes requires a Hosting provider, period. Without it you simply cannot use our product. Since day one, we have worked with literally tens of different hosting providers from clients, globally. Fast forward a few years and logically we have our favorites here:
But there is one that has stood out above the others. Meet SiteGround. It’s hands down our best recommendation for hosting for photographers.
To clarify, this is not a paid endorsement, but a review for our favorite recommended hosting provider based on the following:
1. Support and Customer Service
2. Value
3. Speed and Optimization
4. Features and Updates
5. Reliability
We all care about getting the best value for money, but when it comes to hosting providers sometimes we forget to understand why some are good, and to justify paying a bit more. Yet:
– When we choose a new computer we want a better hard drive.
– When we choose memory cards for our cameras we want the best we can get.
– When we choose internet connection providers we want the fastest speed available.
However with hosting we tend to overlook that part. Good hosting allows for a faster website. Faster websites improve SEO metric performance, and use experience. Period.
We will spare you all of the technical tests as to why SiteGround is great, though you can read about them here.
Learn more about their speed test reviews here.
There are 2 packages which we want to highlight that they offer.
Startup:
The startup plan is ideal for your first site, or if you are switching to wordpress from another provider and will have only one site.
There are some limitations with this package, it offers 10gb of space, not a problem if starting, but if you’ve had an older provider with unlimited space, it’s likely that you’ve put a lot of crap on there and your site is bloated. You can only have 10,000 unique visitors a month, however this limit is well above regular photographers needs. It only allows 1 WordPress installation.
If you do need more space, get an extra 10GB with the GrowBig plan. It also lets you have more than one website.
GrowBig:
The GrowBig plan is the suggested package from Siteground ideal for both new sites and existing sites. You have plenty of storage space with up to 20GB and 25000 unique visitors a month which in our experience is plenty for our clients.
You can also host as many sites as you need with this hosting package, we do not suggest to have too many as they do share hosting and the more sites will mean the sites will be slower than if alone. You get improved caching option, that will help with speeding up your site further, definitely worth the few extra dollars a month. Otherwise the GrowBig plan is ideal for all users.
Some Extra reasons why we love SiteGround
– They make WordPress easy. They have a 1 click install feature in the admin
– They support backups and 1 click restores
– They have a great anti malware track record
– They are consistent. Some providers are good for a period, then not, then good. Siteground has been consistently performed well the last 3 years.
– Their support is extra helpful. While they do not promote it, if asked they will help add WordPress for you.
– They use SSD drives for your hosting
– Free SSL certificate making it easy to add a store to your Flotheme and sell securely.
– They offer Cloudflare CDN (This is huge for faster image loading)
– Lastly, They offer site migration with the Grow Big package which is a huge benefit for many switching hosting providers.
If you are unsure of which hosting provider to start with, we hope that this article shares some reasons why we vote for SiteGround. Simply click here and get started.
Flothemes Team,
Empowering you.
