It has since become a leading WordPress hosting service and is recommended to small businesses as a budget-friendly way to access safe and secure services.
After 14 years in the business, GreenGeeks has now hosted over 600,000 websites for over 55,000 customers – and the service continues to grow!
General Information About GreenGeeks
Average Page Load Time: 1.035s Uptime: 99.9% Support: 24/7 support through phone, live chat, and email Apps: WordPress Key Features: Free domain name for your first year, offsets carbon emissions, free SSL certificate. Hosting Types: Shared, VPS, Reseller, WordPress Pricing: Plans start at $2.95 (Regular $10.95)
The Pros Of Using GreenGeeks
The web hosting service market is pretty flooded with a lot of options for businesses big and small, so what does GreenGeeks offer to help set it apart from its competitors?
Here, we are going to dive into the pros of using GreenGeeks and what you can find on offer here where other web hosting services may flounder.
GreenGeeks Is A Green Power Partner
GreenGeeks’ unique selling point is its dedication towards offering an eco-friendly web hosting service which lowers its own carbon footprint, allowing businesses to host websites without making a huge impact on the planet.
Using the internet uses a ton of energy and in order to host websites, data centers consume a lot of energy in order to keep those servers from overheating.
As the internet is now considered to be the fast growing carbon polluting industry, GreenFeeks aim to cut down their carbon footprint to make web hosting a more sustainable industry.
To achieve this goal, GreenGeeks employs a range of methods. They plant a tree for every hosting account provisioned through their services, and purchase three times as many wind energy credits as it uses. This has allowed them to replace over 615,000 kwh per year!
Now, GreenGeeks is considered a Green Power Partner by the EPA, and this is just one of the many environmental awards and recognition GreekGeeks has received for its services.
So, if you are concerned about the environmental impact of your business, GreenGeeks is definitely a web hosting service you should consider signing up to.
Easier Reseller Hosting
While GreenGeeks offers plenty of services to help you run your website, it also offers its customers the ability to purchase and rent out resource packages.
This means that when you opt for the reseller hosting packages, you can bundle the services of GreenGeeks with your business’s own and resell to allow you to generate your own recurring revenue.
This is because every GreenGeeks account comes with important dolls used by developers, such as Git, Brush, Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP), and Secure Shell (SSH) protocol.
So, by using GreenGeeks, it’s now easier for smaller businesses and startups to get into reseller hosting. The technology is scalable so it can grow with you and your business as it takes off – reducing the need to ever leave GreenGeeks.
You will, however, need to opt for the Reseller Hosting plan if you want to access these features.
Amazing Uptime Percentages
Uptime is an incredibly important factor to look at when choosing a web hosting service, as it measures the time during which your website is available to its users.
The whole point of a website is for it to be available 24/7, so everyone should aim to have 100% uptime with their web hosting servers.
GreenGeeks can deliver that with a guaranteed uptime of 99.9% (although some tests did dip the uptime to between 99.5% and 99.7%).
This means that GreenGeeks guarantees its customers an amazing uptime percentage, with 99.9% resulting in almost perfect availability for your website.
Plenty Of Support For New Businesses
A lot of new, small businesses struggle to lift themselves off the ground when it comes to web hosting, but GreenGeeks aims to make it easier for all thanks to their support services.
Not only is there the option to access 24/7 support through email, phone, or live chat, but GreenGeeks also allows its customers to access their help center which contains many other forms of support.
This support comes in the form of how-to guides, webinars, and tutorials to help make web hosting more accessible to all – no matter how small or independent your business is!
This again is another great feature which makes GreenGeeks a good choice for small or medium sized businesses.
GreenGeek Offers Great Security For Your Website
Security is one of the main concerns a lot of people have when hosting and creating their own websites, but GreenGeek also has this area covered with their features.
They also offer automatic updates for content management systems to keep everything on top of the latest security threats. Every night, all of your data is backed up so you will never lose your progress.
As for fighting spam and malware, GreenGeeks uses its own visualization File System (vFS) so no other account can access yours.
If something does pop up, then it will be isolated to prevent any further damage so you can rest assured that your website is safe from security threats.
Websites are also built with built-in spam protection so you only get true visits and clicks on your website.
The Cons Of Using GreenGeeks
Slower Response Times For Busy Websites
Most people would recommend GreenGeeks to small or medium sized businesses which are just starting out and settling into the industry. The reason why?
The site response times.
While GreenGeeks uses plenty of practices like content delivery network (CDN) services and built-in caching to help boost their speed, the servers they use just aren’t great when hosting extremely busy websites.
This means that if your business is quite large and your website sees a lot of traffic, it won’t be able to run as efficiently or perform as well with GreenGeeks.
For smaller and medium sized businesses which see a sizable amount of traffic (but not too much), the servers are capable of loading and processing at impressive speeds.
Test reported an average response time of around 478 milliseconds, and a page load time of around 1.035 seconds.
They even offer services such as FloudFlare to help boost speeds even further, so clearly GreenGeeks is capable of providing fast response times and loading speeds – just not for large businesses and busy websites.
GreenGeeks Are Tricky Fine Print
It’s a given that you should always read the fine print before purchasing or signing up to anything, and this is especially true if you are thinking of signing up for one of GreenGeeks’ hosting plans.
Although GreenGeeks offers super affordable pricing for their web hosting and WordPress hosting plans (see below), these affordable prices are only available if you are willing to sign up to GreenGeeks for a whopping 3 years.
This means if you just want to try out GreenGeeks for a few months to see if it is the right hosting service for you, then you will be forced to pay the regular (and more expensive) prices.
However, GreenGeeks does offer a 30 day money-back guarantee so you can try GreenGeeks for a month to see if it works for you – but again, this comes with strings.
You won’t be refunded for any additional hidden fees such as the domain name registration fee, the setup fees, and any transfer fees you may have to pay.
So, whatever happens, you will be out of pocket and GreenGeeks hides this from their customers in the fine print of their contracts.
No Support For Windows Server Hosting
Although GreenGeeks does offer integration for a range of other hosting services, there are a few noticeable names which are missing.
The big one to note is Windows Server Hosting. This means that if you use cloud servers which are hosted by Microsoft, you won’t be able to integrate GreenGeeks services into your website.
This is a massive blow as a lot of websites use Microsoft Windows so if you really want to try out GreenGeeks, you will be forced to switch and move.
GreenGeeks Pricing And Plans
Here is a quick overview of the plans GreenGeeks has to offer its customers, and how much it will cost you to sign up.
GreenGeeks offers a wide range of plans depending on what type of hosting you plan on needing. As a result, there are four different plans you can choose from.
Check them out below to find their pricing and what each one has to offer in comparison to the next.
The WordPress Hosting pricing plans offer the same special prices, regular prices, storage, emails, and websites as the above plans for web hosting.
However, each plan comes with additional features to help you build and manage your WordPress website with ease.
These additional WordPress features are:
Free WordPress Installation
Free WordPress Migration
Auto WordPress Updates
These features are all available with the lite, pro and premium plans.
VPS Hosting
2GB Plan
4GB Plan
8GB Plan
Price Per Month
$39.95
$59.95
$109.05
SSD Disk Space
50GB
75GB
150GB
vCPU
4
4
6
Ram
2GB
4GB
8GB
cPanel Included?
Yes
Yes
Yes
Reseller Hosting
RH-25 Plan
RH-50 Plan
RH-80 Plan
Special Price
$19.95/month
$24.95/month
$34.95/month
Prepaid or Reg.
$32.99/month
$44.99/month
$67.99/month
SSD Disk Space
60GB
80GB
160GB
Transfer
600GB
800GB
1600GB
No. Of cPanel Accounts
25
50
80
Additional Information
GreenGeeks offers a 30 day money-back guarantee for all of its plans, but taking advantage of this may result in your domain costing you more due to factors such as migration costs and the equipment used.
This is because the 30 day money-back guarantee does not include the setup fee, transfer fees, or domain name registration fees. Once all of these are paid for, you won’t be able to get a refund.
If you want to access the advertised ‘special’ prices, you must commit to a 3 year plan with GreenGeeks.
This means that you will be stuck with this web hosting service and this will limit your mobility if you ever want to switch providers in the near future.
Would We Recommend GreenGeeks?
GreenGeeks is clearly a committed web hosting provider with admirable values. They aim to provide green web hosting and they certainly have achieved that goal.
Plus, their wide range of hosting services make them capable of appealing to a wide range of people.
While we are certainly impressed with GreenGeeks’ performance (from the uptime, to response times, to the affordable prices on offer), we can’t help but feel that GreenGeeks is certainly more suited for certain businesses than others.
For those running small to medium sized businesses, those who are independent entrepreneurs who are running everything themselves and hoping to grow, to bloggers and those wanting to run an efficient personal website – we say go for it!
GreenGeeks will definitely tick all your boxes and more with their amazing performance and wide range of features on offer.
However, your business will eventually outgrow GreenGeeks. Their servers do not handle a lot of traffic well and this can affect your website’s processing speeds, loading speeds, and overall efficiency.
So, whether or not we would recommend GreenGeeks to you all comes down to the kind of business you run and its size. But – there’s no denying that GreenGeeks is still a great web hosting server.
Hello, my name is Matthew Jacobs and I have made a living on various blogs and websites. But, trust me, I haven’t always been able to say that with such confidence.
Hopefully this website can teach others and help you in getting your blog out there, capitalizing on it as much as you can, and can serve as the kind of resource I wish I had had. So, what are you waiting for? Get out there and make a name for yourself!
