GreenGeeks Web Hosting Review

Founded in 2008, GreenGeeks is one of the most reliable, accessible, safest, and affordable web hosting solution providers. The company has data servers in the United States, Canada, and Amsterdam. With management having 40 years of experience in the hosting industry, GreenGeeks prides itself as one of the greenest web hosting solutions.

Despite being relatively new in the hyper-crowded web hosting industry, GreenGeeks is doing well. Hosting over 600,000 websites, it has over 55,000 clients worldwide. According to Trey Gardener, the company’s CEO, GreenGeeks uses the best-of-breed servers and the most up-to-date software programs to provide its clients with green energy web hosting.

Being an eco-friendly web hosting solution, know that GreenGeeks plants a tree for every hosting account they earn on their platform to reduce carbon footprints.

So, what exciting and notable features does GreenGeeks offer? Here are a few:

• 300% Green Energy Match

For starters, the internet is the leading carbon-emitting industry in the world, with data server centers that produce carbon equivalent to the airline industry. Fortunately, GreenGeeks, one of the Green Power Partners, contributes positively to a greener and better environment.

GreenGeeks web hosting works with the Bonneville Environmental Foundation to calculate their energy consumption and carbon footprint. The web hosting solution then purchases Bonneville Environmental Foundation Renewal Energy Credits (RECs) 3 times their yearly energy consumption.

Moreover, according to its website, the company is committed to planting a tree for every new account on its platform. So, hosting your website on GreenGeeks gives you the fastest, easiest, and most remarkable uptime hosting and makes you feel good about contributing to a better environment. What’s more, GreenGeeks allows its clients to use eco-friendly tags on their websites and inspire others.

• Lightning Fast Servers

All the websites on GreenGeeks are hosted on the LiteSpeed servers to provide the fastest speed. The service is a practical feature for caching websites in real-time while simultaneously optimizing other features, like CSS codes. It allows websites to gain a faster loading time, so the visitors don’t have to wait.

And being a GreenGeeks client, I tested my e-commerce website’s load time, and the results were terrific. It takes about 1.29 seconds to load a page with high-resolution images and videos. GreenGeeks web hosting claims their load time is 50 times lower than their competitors like Apache.

• Remarkable 99.98% Uptime

Uptime is one of the most crucial factors of an excellent web hosting server. The term uptime refers to the time your website is available to your audience. While having 100% uptime is great, necessary server maintenance and repairs are the biggest hurdles to achieving this feat.

However, with GreenGeeks web hosting, they guarantee to give their clients up to 99.98% uptime. Considering the web hosting industry standards, GreenGeeks is an ideal option on the market. Their multiple data centers, many of which are located in locations with cooler temperatures, are one of the reasons GreenGeeks offers excellent uptime.

Furthermore, all their data centers are armed with a dual-power grid, on-site diesel generators, and battery backup, contributing to keeping a server uptime.

• Up-to-Date Security System

Knowing that your website is safe and sound is one of the biggest concerns for site owners when choosing the right web hosting solution. In response and to satisfy such concerns, GreenGeeks has done a pretty good job. Here’s what they use to keep your website safe:

• Hardware and Power Redundancy
• Hosting Account Isolation
• Container-Based Technology
• Real-Time Security Scanning
• Proactive Server Monitoring
• Enhanced SPAM Protection
• Automatic App Updates
• Nightly Data Backup

Firstly, GreenGeeks uses a container-based technology for web hosting. Simply put, they contain your resources to eliminate the risk of adverse impacts like a spike in traffic and security breaches on your website. Secondly, GreenGeeks offers a remarkable 99.98% uptime and top-notch security because they use Joomla, WordPress, and other latest content management systems to keep your website up to date.

For instance, GreenGeeks offers their customers a Secured visualization File System (vFS) to eliminate the risk of suspicious activity and Malware on your website. It helps website owners to prevent unauthorized access to their websites.

Moreover, GreenGeeks web hosting also has a built-in spam protection system to prevent spam attempts. Lastly, GreenGeeks’ proactive server monitoring helps their servers to identify and isolate problems before they can affect a website.

• eCommerce Capabilities

All the hosting plans of GreenGeeks, including shared hosting, are armed with e-commerce features, allowing users to run an online shop. For starters, they offer a free Let’s Encrypt Wildcard SSL certificate to assure clients that their information is 100% secure and safe. Those who know about SSL certificates probably know that Wildcard SSL certificates are excellent, as you can use them for unlimited subdomains under a domain name.

Secondly, if you want to establish an e-commerce store, you can install it by clicking their installation software. In addition, GreenGeeks also ensures that their servers are PCI compliant, which further helps keep your data and financial information safe.

• Shared Hosting Plan

Keep in mind that the original price of the GreenGeeks shared hosting plan is $9.95/ month. However, if you sign up and pay three years in advance, you will only shell out you $2.95/month for this plan.

In the past, webmasters were happy with a cheap, yet impeccable uptime hosting solution. They were satisfied with their plans and cPanel on a server. However, nowadays shared hosting industry has changed considerably, and now customers want a remarkable uptime, smooth workflow, and easy scalability wrapped in an affordable package.

That’s where GreenGeeks web hosting comes into play. Considering that 99.9% of clients want an optimized starter plan, GreenGeeks introduced their Ecosite Starter hosting plan that people can quickly sign up for from their website.

Moreover, rather than offering a pricey plan with a plethora of extra features that an average user knows nothing about, GreenGeeks smartly cuts the fat and brings their users an enhanced hosting experience. Being one of the most reliable hosting platforms, GreenGeeks encourages its clients to emphasize establishing, managing, and growing their websites without experiencing complex technology measures.

Furthermore, GreenGeeks’ scalable hosting feature is a new addition that allows users to inject computing resources like CPU, RAM, and I/O, eliminating the need for a Virtual Private Server.

Signing up for a shared hosting plan on GreenGeeks, you will be provided with the following features:

• Easy to use cPanel dashboard.
• Unlimited sub and parked domains.
• Unlimited MySQL databases.
• Scalable resources.
• Free CDN integration.
• PowerCacher caching.
• Option to select your data center server.
• Perl and Python support.
• Let’s Encrypt Wildcard certificate.
• Free SSH and FTP accounts.

In addition, they also offer free domain setup, drag and drop builder, and site migration.

• Easy Reseller Hosting

On top of running in-house web hosting services, GreenGeeks web hosting allows its clients to sign up for a reseller hosting plan. This enables users to purchase and then rent out their packages to businesses. Users can take advantage of advanced technologies like RAID-10, Solid State Drive, PHP7, caching, etc., and make recurring revenue.

GreenGeeks web hosting may be a perfect solution for small to medium-sized businesses. They could be searching for services that offer a meaningful measure of affordability, server efficiency, and faster loading speeds:

Small Businesses and Website Owners: GreenGeeks web hosting is an affordable and ideal hosting solution for small businesses that want to grow. They can use shared servers to establish e-commerce websites without purchasing pricey packages.

• Entrepreneurs: The reseller hosting plan is perfect for entrepreneurs. Their easily scalable solutions and easy migration encourage entrepreneurs to kick-start their businesses.
• Personal Website Owners: Hosting a personal website with GreenGeeks will give you an efficient, fast, affordable, and smooth experience.
• Eco-Friendly Minds: If your business is all about caring for the environment, GreenGeeks should be your ultimate choice.

Although GreenGeeks is an excellent web hosting solution and doing a fantastic job, it still needs some improvement.

• GreenGeeks Tricky Refund Policy

GreenGeeks web hosting offers a 30-day money-back guarantee policy, so your users can get a full refund if unsatisfied. However, they do not refund setup fees, domain registration, or transfer fees. Although keeping the domain registration fee is justifiable, as you will keep the domain when you leave, deducting the setup or transfer fee is not reasonable.

• Limited Recovery Backup

GreenGeeks web hosting has a “free nightly back” on its lite plan, whereas shared hosting plans offer “on-demand backups.” However, it is disappointing that they do not provide disaster recovery backups on VPS and dedicated servers.

On top of that, they also offer a one-time free monthly backup for which a user needs to raise a support ticket. Beyond one monthly backup, they charge $25 per backup. Further, they don’t assure that these backups can restore a website from a specified period.

• Misleading Price Plans

There is no doubt that GreenGeeks is famous for offering cheap or affordable web hosting. However, it is a bitter fact that cheap hosting is not always available from top-ranked hosting providers – you get what you pay for. At first, it would be that GreenGeeks provides affordable web hosting, which technically it does.

However, upon further investigation, I discovered that their enticingly low-priced $2.95/month plan is only for those who sign up for three years of hosting at that price. It means if you sign up for one year, the cost would be $5.95 per month. Similarly, if you are a new user and opt for a monthly payment, you will end up paying $9.95/per month.

Now, let’s compare GreenGeeks with other top web hosting providers:

• GreenGeeks vs. Bluehost

In a nutshell, GreenGeeks is way better than Bluehost regarding eco-friendliness, the option to choose your data center, and security features. But, as with other web hosting services, it depends on your specific needs.

In contrast, Bluehost is also an excellent web hosting provider with many outstanding features. For instance, you can get Bluehost web hosting for Windows and Linux. In addition, Bluehost is also a WP recommend host, meaning if you have a WordPress site, you may want to go with Bluehost.

However, during my testing, I discovered that GreenGeeks offers way faster server response than Bluehost. In addition, GreenGeeks also beat web hosting providers like HostGator, SiteGround, GoDaddy, and InMotion.

Furthermore, the pricing of the two is almost the same, but Bluehost wins the race when it comes to VPS and dedicated servers.

• GreenGeeks vs. SiteGround

SiteGround is one of the biggest names in the web hosting industry and a favorite among designers. While SiteGround is famous for its streamlined control panel and agency-oriented features, GreenGeeks tops the list for better performance and excellent customer support.

Moreover, while both these web hosting allows you to have one website, GreenGeeks wins the race when it comes to data transfer and storage space. SiteGround limits users to 10GB and allows about 10,000 monthly visits. In addition, GreenGeeks is also a better option for managed VPS plans and comes with 4vCPUs, 50GB, 2GB RAM, and 10TB transfers. In contrast, SiteGround’s entry plan comes at double the price of what GreenGeeks cost and includes 3vCPUs, 6GB RAM, 40GB storage, and 5TB transfers.

• GreenGeeks vs. HostGator

HostGator is another popular web hosting provider. Both GreenGeeks and HostGator offer Shared, VPS, and Dedicated hosting. While these two web hosting providers have so much in common, GreenGeeks wins the race when it comes to comprehensive hosting. It includes unlimited bandwidth and space and can host unlimited domains.

In contrast, HostGator offers three different shared hostings. You can choose the higher and more expensive levels to enjoy the same features. In addition, GreenGeeks customer support is also more efficient than HostGator. GreenGeeks and HostGator practice green web hosting, which is excellent for eco-conscious webmasters.