GreenGeeks Review 2019 - Quality, Speed, Price and Comparison
Founded in 2008 by Trey Gardner (who happens to have experience working with several web hosting companies around like iPage, Lunarpages, and Hostpapa), GreenGeeks aims to not only provide stellar web hosting services to website owners like yourself, but do it in an environmentally friendly way too.
Right now, all you need to know is that we’re going to take a look at everything GreenGeeks has to offer (the good and the not so good), so that when it comes time for you to make a decision about web hosting, you have all the facts.
So, let’s into this.
GREENGEEKS FEATURES
They have a solid reputation for providing exceptional web hosting services to website owners of all kinds.
1. ENVIRONMENTALLY FRIENDLY
One of GreenGeeks most standout features is the fact that they’re an environmentally friendly web hosting company. Did you know that by 2020, the Web Hosting industry will surpass the Airline industry in Environmental Pollution!
The moment you land on their website, GreenGeeks jumps right into the fact that your web hosting company should be green.
They then go to explain how they are doing their part to reduce their carbon footprint.
Recognized as an EPA Green Power Partner, they claim to be the most eco-friendly web hosting provider in existence today.
Not sure what that means?
Take a look at what GreenGeeks is doing to help you become an eco-friendly website owner:
- They purchase wind energy credits to compensate for the energy their servers use from the power grid. In fact, they buy 3x the amount of energy their datacenters use. Want to learn more about renewable energy credits? Look here and have all your questions answered.
- They use energy efficient hardware to host site data. Servers are housed in data centers designed to be environmentally friendly
- They replace over 615,000 KWH/year thanks to their eco-conscious, loyal customers
- They provide green certification badges for webmasters to add on to their website, to help spread awareness about their environmentally friendly commitment.
As you can see, being a part of the GreenGeeks team means you too are doing your part to make the world a better place to live in.
Here’s what they have to say about it …
2. LATEST SPEED TECHNOLOGY
The faster your website loads for site visitors, the better. After all, most site visitors will abandon your website if it fails to load within 2 seconds or less. And, while there are plenty of things you can do to optimize the speed and performance of your website on your own, knowing that your web host helps is a major bonus.
Speed is such an important features so I asked them about it …
GreenGeeks invests in all the latest speed technology to ensure your web pages load at lightning fast speeds:
- SSD Hard Drives. Your site’s files and databases are stored in SSD hard drives, which are faster than HDD (Hard Disk Drives).
- Fast Servers. When a site visitor clicks on your website, the web and database servers deliver content up to 50 times faster.
- Built-in Caching. They use customized, built-in caching technology.
- CDN Services. Use the free CDN services, powered by CloudFlare, to cache your content and deliver it fast to site visitors.
- HTTP/2. For faster page loading in-browser, HTTP/2 is used, which improves client-server communication.
- PHP 7. As one of the first to provide PHP 7 support, they make sure you are taking advantage of the latest technologies on your website too.
The speed and performance of your website is paramount to the user experience and your ability to establish yourself as an authority in your industry.
GreenGeeks Load Times
Here is my test of GreenGeeks load times. I created a test website hosted on GreenGeeks (on the EcoSite Starter plan), and I installed WordPress on it using the Twenty Seventeen theme.
Out of the box the site loaded relatively fast, 0.9 seconds, 253kb page size and 15 requests.
Not bad .. but wait it gets better.
GreenGeeks already uses built-in caching so there’s no setting to tweak for that, but there is a way to optimize things further by compressing certain MIME file types.
In your cPanel, find the software section.
In the Optimize Website setting you can optimize the performance of your website by tweaking the way Apache handles requests. Compress the text/html text/plain and text/xml MIME types, and click update setting.
By doing that my test site load times improved considerably, from 0.9 seconds down to 0.6 seconds. That’s an improvement of 0.3 seconds!
To speed things up even more, I went and installed a free WordPress plugin called Autoptimize and I simply enabled the default settings.
That improved the load times even more, as it reduced the total page size to just 242kb and reduced the number of requests down to 10.
All in all, my opinion is that sites hosted on GreenGeeks load pretty fast, and I’ve shown you two simple techniques on how to speed things up even more.
GET STARTED WITH GREENGEEKS HOSTING TODAY!
3. RELIABLE INFRASTRUCTURE
When it comes to web hosting, you need power, speed and security. That’s why GreenGeeks built their entire system using reliable infrastructure powered by 300% clean, renewable energy.
They have 5 datacenters for you to choose from based in Chicago (US), Phoenix (US), Toronto (CA), Montreal (CA), and Amsterdam (NL).
By choosing your datacenter, you make sure your target audience receives your site’s content as quickly as possible.
In addition, you can expect datacenter features such as:
- Dual-city grid power feeds with a battery backup
- Automated transfer switch and on-site diesel generator
- Automatic temperature and climate controls throughout the facility
- 24/7 staff, complete with datacenter technicians and engineers
- Biometric and key card security systems
- FM 200 server-safe fire suppression systems
Not to mention, GreenGeeks has access to most major bandwidth providers and their gear is completely redundant. And of course, the servers are power-efficient.
4. SECURITY AND UPTIME
Knowing that site data is secure is one of the biggest concerns people have when it comes to choosing a web host. That, and knowing that their website will be up and running at all times.
In response to these concerns, they do their best when it comes to uptime and security.
- Hardware & Power Redundancy
- Container-based Technology
- Hosting Account Isolation
- Proactive Server Monitoring
- Real-time Security Scanning
- Automatic App Updates
- Enhanced SPAM Protection
- Nightly Data Backup
To start, they use a container-based approach when it comes to their hosting services. In other words, your resources are contained so that no other website owner can negatively impact yours with a spike in traffic, increased demand for resources, or security breach.
Next, to ensure your site is always up to date, GreenGeeks automatically updates the WordPress, Joomla, or other content management system cores so that your site never becomes vulnerable to security threats. Adding to this, all customers receive nightly backups of their website.
To fight malware and suspicious activity on your website, GreenGeeks gives each customer their own Secured visualization File System (vFS). That way no other account can access yours and cause security issues. Adding to that, if something suspicious is found, it’s immediately isolated to prevent further damage.
In addition, you have the chance to use the built-in spam protection GreenGeeks provides to reduce the number of spam attempts on your website.
Lastly, they monitor their servers so all problems are identified before they affect customers and their websites. This helps maintain their impressive 99.9% uptime.
5. SERVICE GUARANTEES AND CUSTOMER SUPPORT
GreenGeeks offers a number of guarantees to customers.
Check it out:
- 99% uptime guarantee
- 100% satisfaction (and if you’re not, you can activate their 30-day Money Back Guarantee)
- 24/7 email support
- Live telephone and Live Chat support
In an effort to gather some uptime statistics to show you just how serious they are about their uptime guarantee, I reached out to the Live Chat support team and got an instant answer to my initial question.
When the customer service rep could not help me, he immediately directed me to another team member that could, who then answered me via email.
Unfortunately, they do not have the information I requested. So, while they promise websites will have 99.9% uptime, there is no way of actually knowing this to be true without conducting a personal experiment, such as this one performed by Hosting Facts:
While I did received quick support answers, I am a bit disappointed GreenGeeks doesn’t have data to back up their claims. Instead, I am supposed to rely on their written email:
My question: I am wondering if you have your uptime history? I am writing a review and want to mention the 99.9% uptime guarantee. I have found other reviewers that have conducted their own research and tracked GreenGeeks on Pingdom … but I am wondering if you have your own list of monthly uptime percentages.
GreenGeeks answer: GreenGeeks maintains our 99.9% server uptime guarantee each month of the year, by ensuring that we have a dedicated team of server technicians monitoring, updating, and maintaining our systems 24/7, in order to provide such a guarantee. Unfortunately, at this time, we do not have a chart such as the one you have requested available.
I guess you’ll have to be the judge on whether that’s enough for you or not.
GreenGeeks also has an extensive Knowledge Base, easy access to email, live chat, and phone support, and specific website tutorials designed to help you with things like setting up email accounts, working with WordPress, and even setting up an eCommerce shop.
6. ECOMMERCE CAPABLE
All hosting plans come with many eCommerce features, which is great if you run an online shop.
To start, you’ll receive a free Let’s Encrypt Wildcard SSL certificate to reassure customers that their personal and financial information is 100% secure. And if you know anything about SSL certificates, you’ll know that Wildcard ones are great because they can be used for unlimited subdomains of a domain name.
Next, if you need a shopping cart on your eCommerce site, you can install one using the one-click install software.
Lastly, you can rest assured that GreenGeeks servers are PCI compliant, which further secures your site data.
7. EXCLUSIVE WEBSITE BUILDER
With their web hosting, you have access to the built-in GreenGeeks Website Builder to make site creation a breeze.
With this tool, you receive the following features:
- 100’s of pre-designed templates to help you get started
- Mobile-friendly and responsive themes
- Drag & drop technology that requires no coding skills
- SEO optimization
- 24/7 dedicated support
This website builder is easily activated once you sign up for GreenGeeks hosting.
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