{"id":27052,"date":"2017-10-30T16:36:30","date_gmt":"2017-10-30T20:36:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.therockysafari.com\/?page_id=27052"},"modified":"2021-05-31T12:08:58","modified_gmt":"2021-05-31T16:08:58","slug":"switched-hosting-bluehost-siteground","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.therockysafari.com\/switched-hosting-bluehost-siteground\/","title":{"rendered":"Why I Switched My Hosting From Bluehost to Siteground"},"content":{"rendered":"
As you may or may not know, The Rocky Safari started off long ago as a free blog on WordPress.com. As my blog began to grow and gain popularity, I made the decision to migrate over to self-hosting<\/a> for a whole slew of benefits that come along with having full ownership over your own website. It made the most sense and I sure am glad I did it since my blog now generates revenue. I knew it was a necessary step if I ever wanted to take my blog to the next level.<\/p>\n Bluehost initially pulled me in with their amazing entry-level pricing. I was able to sign up for a 3 year hosting plan for just $1.95\/month! How could I refuse such a terrific deal with one of the biggest brand names in the industry? We all know Bluehost<\/a>!<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Soon after signing up, I realized my website was S-L-O-W. Like, super duper slow. My WordPress dashboard was almost rendered unusable after finding out it would require a good five minutes to process ANY button I clicked even in the backend. What a pain!\u00a0Bluehost tech support (some of the greatest people on the planet) helped me upgrade from Basic shared web hosting<\/a> to Bluehost shared Business Pro<\/a>. I paid the difference to upgrade and quickly experienced just how much of a difference it made. My website was SIGNIFICANTLY zippier. Pages loaded quicker. Images pulled faster. My website was finally acceptable.<\/p>\n But acceptable does not equal great.<\/p>\n About a year later, in late-2017, I began to re-evaluate the state of my current hosting plan. I began to think about how my images weren’t loading as quickly as I would have liked them to. I noticed the delay after clicking on pages in my menu. I reminisced over the speed my website used to possess when it ran on WordPress.com’s optimized servers. Feeling disappointed, I picked up the phone and called Bluehost’s sales department. After discussing everything I wanted from my website, they had three recommendations for me.<\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n A. Upgrade to Bluehost Cloud Business Pro Hosting<\/p>\n B. Pay for WP Live Pro – a Mojo Marketplace service that will help me optimize my website.<\/p>\n C. Upgrade to Bluehost Dedicated WordPress Hosting.<\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n While Bluehost’s optimized WordPress hosting sounded nice, the least expensive plan began at $40.00\/month which was a bit steep for me at this stage in the game. I started thinking more about doing the Bluehost CLOUD Business Pro along with the WP Live Pro service. The downside with all of that? Well, WordPress Live Pro is $150\/month for starters. In addition, while it sounds like a very helpful service, they still only provide you with guidance. It is up to you to optimize your website yourself.<\/p>\n That was when I started looking elsewhere.<\/p>\n I called InMotion Hosting and they left me totally unimpressed. After that, I heard a few good things about Siteground<\/a> so I gave them a call.<\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n Siteground completely blew me away! Instead of standard HDD hosting, Siteground offers higher-end SSD hosting on all of their plans.\u00a0To experiment, I signed up for an account with Siteground and they performed a full FREE cPanel migration along with extra backend optimizations like multi-level caching, reduction of image file sizes, global CDN support, and an upgrade to PHP7 all at no extra cost to me. I have to admit I am quite happy with the overall performance of my blog now. The version of my site they worked on is currently live. I no longer get messages during speed tests about the server response time being too slow. It seems to be in very good working order.<\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n Although I did love Bluehost’s customer service reps (and always will) I do enjoy having such fast response times from Siteground. Calls are answered within 60 seconds and e-tickets are responded to within 10 minutes or less, on average. They have fixed several things for me making website optimization a piece of cake.<\/p>\n For that, I can’t thank Siteground enough.<\/p>\n