SiteGround

Every shared and WordPress plan shows its renewal price under the intro price. StartUp is $2.99/mo and renews at $17.99/mo, prepaid for 12 months. The plan pages don't say whether tax is included, but the terms say listed fees exclude taxes. Cloud plans show one monthly price, from $100/mo, billed monthly, with no separate intro price.

The terms on siteground.com name SG Hosting Inc., which trades as SiteGround, at 901 N. Pitt St Suite 325, Alexandria, Virginia, USA. The About page says SiteGround started in 2004 and is a group of companies registered in the USA, UK, Spain, Cyprus and Bulgaria. The terms on the EU regional site name SiteGround Spain S.L. in Madrid instead. We didn't see a company registration number on the pages we read.

The terms promise 99.9% network uptime per year, with one free month of hosting if uptime drops below that. Uptime is measured from SiteGround's own records. A help article says maintenance notices are posted on the Client Area home page, which you see after logging in. We tried status.siteground.com, but our scan couldn't open it, so we couldn't check for a public incident history.

Support is offered 24/7 by live chat, phone and tickets, with chat named as the main channel. The support page says most tickets get a response within minutes. It doesn't give wait times for chat or phone. Phone numbers are shown after you log in, not on the public page. An AI assistant also answers questions inside the dashboard.

Shared hosting has a 30-day money-back period and cloud hosting has 14 days. Domains, SSL certificates, paid support and third-party services are not refunded. Cancelling a renewal within 30 days of payment gets a refund, minus the first month if the new term has started. Services renew automatically and are charged 15 days before expiry, or 5 days for cloud and monthly plans. You cancel in the Client Area, not by chat or email. After the money-back period, the FAQ says refunds are "usually prorated or unavailable", which the terms don't mention, so we couldn't tell when a later refund applies.

All plans get daily backups. Shared plans keep up to 30 daily copies and cloud plans keep 7. GrowBig and up add 5 on-demand backups. You can restore files, databases or email accounts yourself in Site Tools, and we didn't see a charge for that. Downloading a ready-made backup needs the paid Premium Backup add-on, whose price we didn't see. Restoring a site that was already deleted is described as a paid restore.

Every plan includes a free SSL certificate. Your account supports two-step login with an authenticator app, with SMS as a backup. The WordPress page lists a web application firewall and AI bot protection. For malware scanning, the help article calls Site Scanner a paid extra, while the FAQ says it is free on every plan. We couldn't tell which applies.

A help article names 11 data centre cities, including Eemshaven, Frankfurt, London, Madrid and Paris in Europe. They run on Google Cloud, and you choose a location when you set up. Daily backups are stored in a different data centre from the site. A data processing agreement with EU standard contractual clauses is published, and it takes effect when you accept it.

Storage is on the plan cards: 10, 50 and 100 GB. A fair-use help article gives CPU-time limits, file limits and 768 MB of memory per process, but we didn't see CPU cores or total memory for the shared plans. Traffic is listed as unlimited, and the FAQ on the hosting page gives rough visit numbers instead, from about 10,000 to 400,000+ a month. Cloud plans list cores, memory, storage and transfer, from 4 cores and 8 GB of memory.

On any plan you can download your files from the File Manager and export databases with phpMyAdmin. A one-click backup download needs the paid Premium Backup add-on. To move a domain away, you turn off the registrar lock and get the transfer code in the Client Area. We didn't see a fee for moving a domain away. After an account ends, files are deleted, and a copy is kept for up to 60 days on shared plans.