After moving my own websites to SiteGround a few years ago and encouraging a few clients in the same direction, it has been very disappointing to discover that SiteGround have massively increased their prices on their shared hosting (and possibly other services) in June 2018.
Unfortunately, SiteGround don't show GST inclusive pricing (in contravention of the Australian component pricing laws). Once GST is added, the GrowBig plan actually changes from AU$178.20 (what I paid last year) to AU$329.34 which is a massive 85% price increase.
June 2020 Update: Not satisfied with the massive price increase in 2018, SiteGround have yet again increased their prices. The regular price of the GrowBig plan is now AU$395.87 per year (including GST).
April 2024 Update: The regular price of the GrowBig plan is now AU$527.87 per year (including GST).
This is a separate issue to SiteGround's deceptively low introductory prices (which revert to the full price when plans are renewed after the first year).
As far as I am aware there has been no blog post or other announcement and the first clients usually become aware of the price increase is when they receive their renewal notice four weeks before their hosting expires. This does not leave budget conscious customers much time to find an alternative host and also burdens them with the cost of the move if they choose to go elsewhere.
The official explanation seems to be that many new features have been added and the increase brings them to similar value for money as their competitors. I don't dispute any of this but surely new features could have been added as an option rather than forcing the features and resultant price increase on clients who may not need or use the new features? I suspect SiteGround have done their homework and many clients will grudgingly pay the increased price rather than work out how to move their business elsewhere as this does not seem like a trivial task to most clients (although it is usually fairly easy to do).
The most promising alternative hosting providers with a Singapore or Hong Kong data center option are:
The other option expecially for Australian website owners is to bring the websites home to VentraIP and enable a CDN such as CloudFlare or similar. Speeding up shared hosting plans is possible by installing the free LiteSpeed Cache extension released in May 2018. This improves performance significantly so website visitors across the globe are still able to load web pages quickly even when they are hosted in Australia. For more information see: LiteSpeed Cache for Joomla. The VentraIP "Starter" plan @ AU$120.00/year with LiteSpeed Cache enabled performs as well as, and is less than half the cost of, the SiteGround "Growbig" plan @ AU$329.34/year with Dynamic Cache enabled.
Although SiteGround don't seem to have made any official announcement, they are very quick to answer any complaints on social media including the post I made on the Webilicious Facebook Page (which only has about 100 followers!) and also a post I submitted to the Whirlpool Forums.
Clients who are still hosting their websites with SiteGround should check their renewal dates and plan accordingly.
Renewal notices are sent out 30 days in advance of renewal but credit cards are billed two weeks before the renewal date if you have Autorenew enabled. If you need a little more time to move the website, you can disable Autorenew by logging in to the hosting control panel and going to Billing -> Billing Settings:
Move My Website to a Better Web Hosting Company
Moving a website to a new web host typically takes a couple of hours or around $176 and includes:
- backing up the current website
- finding the most suitable web hosting company for your particular website within your budget
- purchasing a new web hosting plan on your behalf
- restoring the website to the new web host
- updating the domain name to point to the new host
- testing
- forwarding any orphaned emails on the old host to the new host
- optionally moving your domain name to the new service provider
Note that you will be moving to a better web hosting company and for most of my clients this is often a cheaper web hosting company so that the cost of the move is soon recovered.
Contact me to enquire about moving web hosts.