First Impression With SiteGround — Web Hosting for Artists

As I’ve mentioned on my social media platforms that I was going to be moving all of my websites to a new host. Well, last week I made the move and so far I haven’t had a regret. To get the better deal I signed up for the entire year, I was a bit worrisome doing that because you never know how the host is going to be, but SiteGround responded faster than any host ever has and helped me with all my questions and felt human during the process. When working with new hosts you often get a feeling of copy and paste messages and long wait times in between each response. SiteGround was under a minute each and they followed many of my questions with a series of responses which even humanized them even more.

Web Hosting for Artists

So these are the guys I’m with. I’m hosting with SiteGround I am still in a money back guarantee trial but I can tell already that I’m not going to need it. I’ve been watching this company for a bit over a year now and I’ve been wanting to give them a try as they feel like they fit my needs as a web host for artists. As my other host let me down just recently during a big migration, I had to give these guys a try. They migrated the sites the other host was a week and a half behind and ignoring my messages, SiteGround had it done in under 6 hours, and that includes waiting for me to get them some login information to my other host. Overall, cut that out and it was done in about 3 hours.

With all the files moved over and databases upgraded it was time to redirect my security and CDN sites and then begin testing. As you can see, my site is HUGE! Images everywhere as it is with many artists sites and their portfolios. My A records and NameServers where now redirected and it was time to test.

Benchmarking and Site Speed

My first test was of course the human test. I loaded up all of my sites and they loaded about four times as fast as my last host. That immediately made me very happy but we had to really put them to the test. I went over to GTMetrix and I got some pretty good A’s and B’s straight across the board. Now, I take GTMetrix with a grain of salt due to how they manage the testing. For example, I use SmushIt on my sites for image compression but since they use a different compression software, it dings me down a point even though my images are compressed. It also claims I don’t have expires headers on my site, but I run all those through Cloudflare and they are set properly so I know the results are a bit skewed.

Overall though, it sure beats the C’s and D’s I was pulling before. I think they will supply strong web hosting for artists. You can jump over to my portfolio to see how quick it’s loading and check out some cool art if you would like.

Would I recommend them to artists and others?

I mean, I’m still very early on in trying them out, but I’ve been convinced enough to give them a try for the year and so far I haven’t regretted it. I would recommend their GoGeek plan if you are going to commit to it. For artists, especially hosting multiple sites with a decent amount of traffic, you are going to want the memory and processors that come from it but ultimately it’s your choice. Shop around, look at the plans, see what others have to say but for me, SiteGround is the host I’ve been looking for. I feel my only next step would be up to fully managed hosting providers with dedicated servers and I’m still quite a ways away from that and even then, I’ll probably see what Siteground holds if they continue to impress me like they have so far.

Have you tried them? Are you also hosting a portfolio? What are your thoughts on these guys? Leave a comment and let me know!

Originally published at adammiconi.com on March 21, 2017.