SiteGround, who built their business at least in part by providing support that went the extra mile for WordPress installs and hosting, is now cutting WordPress from their support. This comes after extensive support page redesign that makes it a terrible hunt and peck journey to find support channels (remember when those were front and center?) Talk about going in the wrong direction. I guess this seals my migration from this deteriorating brand.
From SiteGround T&C: “If you have a problem with your WordPress site, such as plugin incompatibility, application settings, slow performance (usually due to slow queries or too many plugins), or similar, it is best if you contact a professional developer.”
Answers:
- Yeah completely agree. It’s what made me go with them in the first place – their support was outstanding. Now they’ve completely changed their business model and I guess that is where they want to be but like a lot of website developers you have hosting with a server company to provide you in-depth help and assistance.
- Totally agree with what made Siteground stand out in a crowded market. I could not believe how good their support was when I signed up with them. I told so many people how good they were. In any business it’s important to stand head and shoulders above your competitors and this, they did. I don’t like to paint everyone at Siteground with the same brush, and recently they have attempted to make change for the better, but it seems they want to shift their place in the market heading for a more discerning customer with their increased pricing and shorter deal terms. If this is a survival tactic then I think they should reverse course and provide the outstanding service that caused so many of us to not hesitate recommending them to our customers. They may say it’s unsustainable but how did they manage it in the first place?
- I had to ditch Siteground as well, performance had become mediocre on shared hosting, tried a VPS and had a horrible experience. Support on VPS was iffy at best, learned that the reason they don’t show IOPS on their stats is because they limit/throttle it. Switched to Gridpane on mostly Vultr High-Frequency boxes and am very satisfied, not to mention saving a ton of money over SG VPS.
- Siteground is dead to me too. Prices keep climbing, performance is stagnant at best. I’m moving everything to a Vultr cloud server, using runcloud.io as my server admin app. Really fast; everything works well.
- Not only this, but they’re no longer keeping current with PHP versions either. I have a remote monitor on all of my sites and SG used to be the one of the few hosts that always had the latest PHP version. Now they’re incredibly behind.
- It’s a good move. I’ve never understood why/how Siteground offered such a service anyway. Providing superior performance and security for WP is what they do. What does troubleshooting WordPress plugins have to do with their core service offering?
- It’s a smart move, support backlogs can destroy a company. Easily the most expensive service they carry.
Truth is, of a site owner needs WP specific tech support they should be getting a maintenance package from a company like wpbuffs. - I learned a lot from SiteGround support. I started my wp adventure with them and learned what things like cron and heartbeat were and how they affected my site. Their support was indeed something amazing and I always questioned myself how did my cheap hosting pay for all those support hours.
- My client had a site on siteground. When they moved servers about 6 months ago the ttfb time increased and overall load time was slower. I have now moved the site to Cloudways DO and the support has been excellent.
- You recently noticed this? What you’re mentioning is kind of understood since it’s wordpress related, but this has been going on for a year for much more general stuff.
And if you use their support more than 4 times per month you will be blocked from chat and regular tickets, happened to many - soon more competitors will come out and cover that grey area. Providing complete support with hosting is still an opportunity.
- I was with Siteground for almost a year, fully prepaid, but I never waited for the year to end. Such a disaster. They have lots of hidden t&c’s and took my site down for no good reason. When I asked them what had happened they couldn’t find any evidence of any problem and then the support guy told me he would fix the problem (but there was no problem, he had said before). Then my site crashed completely and it took me several days to get back to a working site again. One week later my move to A2hosting was complete. I have never had any regret (on the contrary!) of leaving Siteground. Such a horrible provider!
- Doesn’t take a genius to see why. People break their websites doing stupid shit and SG was spending a fortune to fix their shit for free. Simple business and they are correct. People should contact a professional. A website isn’t a board game. Just because it’s WordPress, doesn’t mean everyone can do it correctly.
- Good point. The water company’s responsibility is to provider you with clean water 24/7, not to fix your tap and sink.That said, they need to better articulate the level of support they offer with their ‘Managed WordPress Hosting’ plan. And if they are cutting back on the level of support they originally offered, they may be changing the terms folk signed up for.
- That would make sense…except SiteGround sold its service as a WordPress Hosting sanctuary when I signed on five years ago. I don’t “break my websites doing stupid shit.” That’s a glib generalization that doesn’t apply to a lot of people who’ve bought SG’s line of marketing horseshit. I’ve never had any problems with SiteGround, but their pricing structure and abandonment of any support covering the services I originally paid them for means I’ll be looking elsewhere for hosting my four sites.
- “Simple business” would involve treating customers who don’t “do stupid shit” as if they aren’t morons. If a customer abuses support, sure, charge them for it. Overcharge them. Just don’t treat all your users like they’re clueless, especially after signing them on with promises of decent support.
- Based on many of the posts here and other groups, they are clearly losing customers over “not giving a sh*.” How does that work for their profit margins?
- for every customer lost, there are 3 more new customers to take their place.
- That is not how “simple business works” lol. It’s a service company, guess what matters most? People bought into siteground from word of mouth “best web hosting for wordpress”, and they are leaving through word of mouth. So when they lose one customer they lose many more, especially if that customer is vocal. When I left that means 10 clients left with me, not one. Anyways neither your or I should pretend to know their growth. The only evidence I have is the multiple people posting they ar leaving and looking for recommendations. What’s your proof of their 1 to 3 growth? Soon to be a godaddy product .
- So you’re saying that when things go back to normal. Support quality and depth will be increasing? 🙂 Please say its so! As a GoGeek’er i have to say i havent experienced anything premium or faster in speed for chats vs my GrowBig plan, dispite your advertisement, best web hosting on reddit
- SiteGround this is a great response, and is why I continue to have two GoGeek accounts with you guys.
- SiteGround I get the decision, it makes sense on some level. The point of my post was twofold.
1) SiteGround is what it is today, at least in part, due to the stellar WordPress support that you offered for so many years. So that is the identity of the brand. Now you are changing the identity, thus many of the people who were with you for that philosophy and that support will feel disenfranchised.
2) SiteGround support has been deteriorating for quite some time, well before the pandemic. Prices ascended; service declined. The UI changes only exacerbate the feeling of abandonment and a sense of apathy. This gradual decline was tolerated by many because the extended WordPress support was, in theory, still available. Many hoped that the challenges were just growing pains and there would be some type of correction.
The updated terms simply verify that SiteGround is entering a new era and that it no longer serves some of its legacy users. No big deal, there are plenty of alternatives and sometimes a breakup can be good for both parties. It is what it is. - No host should offer free site optimization or plugin code troubleshooting under the guise of technical support”. Server issue, site down, PHP version issues, DNS not resolving, then reach out to tech support.
Plugin or other code error, slow queries, Javascript deferment, those are all developer level issues that your web host should not be expected to fix for you. - In their defense, as someone else who has seen a metric shit ton of increased tickets since COVID popped: most of what gets sent into support is site specific bullsh*.
I would guess that we get at least 500 tickets a day which have nothing to do with us.
My guess is they’re seeing multiple orders of magnitude more than this.
Quality support agents are not cheap. And they get burned out when they’re stuck cleaning toilets all day.
Now, having said all of that… this is a really BALLSY move. I actually respect it quite a bit.
But it’s also reasonable for people to see this as a shit deal. They’ve leveraged their business on SG in the expectation that they’re gonna get support… which is now going bye bye.