Website hosting has been made widely accessible due to the availability of numerous hosting platforms that come with unique features and packages.
Choosing the right hosting service is crucial as it will affect either positively or negatively the success of your project. Among the numerous web hosting platforms are the famous WPX and Siteground.
In case you are curious about which is better than the other, I will be comparing these two great web hosting services on different parameters.
We shall explore their features and the variations therein based on Pricing, Performance, Speed and Bandwidth, Storage space, Customer Support, Ease of use, and hosting capacity.
But to start with, here is a brief about WPX and Siteground hosting services.
WPX
WPX is a web hosting provider founded in 2013 by Terry Kyle and Georgi Petrov. It provides fast, reliable, and secure hosting services with a range of plans catering to different website sizes. WPX has three packages i.e. business, professional, and elite packages.
Siteground
Siteground web hosting company was founded in 2004 in Sofia, Bulgaria by Ivo Tzenova, it has been in the market for over a decade.
Siteground offers a range of hosting solutions that include cloud, shared, and dedicated hosting. It is known for its wonderful customer support, fast performance, and reliable services. Siteground has Startup, GrowBig, and GoGeek hosting packages.
Okay, so now we know who and what the hosting platforms are, but this is not enough especially for decision-making on which hosting service to use.
Here is a list of functions and features of each of these sites to help you compare and contrast, and make your decision.
Also Read: How Can Your Web Page Design Communicate Your Personal Value?
WPx hosting vs Siteground hosting
1. Packages and pricing
The WPX hosting platform offers three packages – Business, Professional, and Elite packages, each with different pricing and features.
The Siteground platform also offers three WordPress hosting packages – Startup, GrowBig, and the Gogeek package, also at different prices.
WPx’s packages are more than 5 times higher than those of Siteground.
WPX Packages
Siteground Packages
2. Hosting capacity (number of websites)
WPX allows you to host up to five (5) websites in their startup package; Business, 15 websites in the second plan – Professional, and 35 websites on the highest plan – Elite.
Siteground on the other hand allows for only one (1) website hosting in their startup package, unlimited websites for the second and third plan – GrowBig and GoGeek.
3. Storage space and bandwidth
WPX offers;
| Business plan | Professional plan | Elite plan |
| 15GB storage 200GB bandwidth1GB RAM per site3PHP Workers per site 1 CPU Core | 30GB storage400GB bandwidth1GB RAM 2 CPU cores 3 PHP workers per site | 60GB storage 1GB RAM per site3PHP workers per site 3 CPU cores |
Siteground Startup package offers 10GB webspace, and 20GB web space on the GrowBig plan and the GoGeek plan comes with 40 GB web space.
4. Speed and performance
This relates to how quickly or fast a web page loads, and it is one of the most crucial features to look out for.
Faster websites have a better impression on user experience and affect conversion rate. The poor performance of a website can drive users away and kill online businesses.
We can compare WPX and Siteground speed performance with the following web speed details:
Time to First Byte measures the responsiveness of the web server. The lower the values the better as it represents a faster initial response.
Siteground has an average of 179.71Ms compared to 161.12Ms by WPX. This shows that WPX hosting is faster in response compared to its counterpart.
First input Delay takes into consideration interactivity between the user’s first interactions with the site to the time when a browser can respond to that interaction.
Siteground has 3Ms compared to WPX’s 2Ms, indicating that WPX is slightly better.
The largest content paint takes into consideration the loading performance. This is the time it takes to display the largest content element to the user.
Siteground indicates 1.9 seconds compared to 2.8 seconds of WPX. Here siteground is faster compared to WPX.
Also Read: How Can Your Web Page Design Communicate Your Personal Value?
Cumulative layout shift measures visual stability, basically quantifying how much a page’s content visually shifts around.
WPX site content moves at 0.2 while Siteground has a slightly lower 0.02. This makes Siteground better in terms of visual stability with much less layout shifting than WPX hosting.
Several previous reviews have put Siteground way below WPX when it comes to speed, but lately, Siteground has been competing favorably with WPX in terms of speed
5. Performance features and uptime
WPX performance features
- WPX hosting has privately built most of its technology from scratch with innovativeness. One of these innovations is the creation of CDN (content delivery network) which is fast and attested to by most users as faster than that of Siteground.
It has over 30 endpoints which are constantly increasing.
- WPX hosting has three locations of data centers i.e. USA, Australia, and UK.
- In terms of hardware, WPX hosting makes use of lite speed servers built to handle hypertext transfer protocol2 with ease. It is equipped with a lite speed cache and OPcache.
This cache delivers built–in page speed and image optimization providing excellent page load speeds without having to invoke PHP.
The use of OPcache significantly improves page speeds up to three times better. This php opcode caching system saves precompiled script bytecode in the lite speed server cache memory, allowing page data to be loaded far more efficiently.
- Finally, WPX hosting utilizes ultra-reliable SSD storage and includes unlimited MYSQL and phpMyadmin access allowing you to create and manage custom databases.
Siteground performance features
- Siteground relies on the Google Cloud platform which is the best-in-class technology that provides low latency and high availability across all hosting sites.
It makes use of ten enterprise-class UPS technology data centers globally. This makes the network uninterrupted.
- Siteground uses CDN2.0 (a highly powerful technology that provides super speed) to increase the website’s speed.
On average, a customer can get up to 20% uptick in loading speed and for some specific global regions, the percentage can even double. This is possible because of Anycast routing and Google network edge locations.
This tech can do this by caching one’s site content and distributing it to each of Siteground’s server sites worldwide.
Whoever visits the site will be served the data from the closest CDN location thereby reducing wait time and lag because it does not need to fetch data from a faraway server.
The CDN also automatically detects and auto-blocks malicious traffic. This saves customers from the struggle with malware.
- Siteground, just like WPX developed its own SuperCacher software that consists of a three-tiered caching setup for database queries and dynamic pages.
NGINX Direct Delivery caches static website content and stores it in the server’s RAM. For non-static-page elements dynamic cache is used to boost TTFB. Memcached, improves dynamic content loading speed and application database connections
- Siteground uses custom MySQL for heavy queries. It allows lots of parallel requests to be processed at the same time drastically reducing slow query numbers by 20 times.
- Siteground provides different hosting types but pays much attention to WordPress sites.
It uses the WordPress Optimizer plugin which is included with all managed WordPress plans. The plugin delivers extra efficiency by allowing one to switch on the https option and set the optimal PHP version for the site.
In addition, a range of image optimization tools such as lazy-loading and minification for CSS and HTML are provided.
Both WPX and Siteground have an excellent uptime – above 99%
6. Customer support
Siteground offers excellent customer support through various mediums; you can get help from the support team by phone or online.
With WPX, support is offered only through online interactions – chat. Their live chat is available 24/7 and you can expect a response in the shortest time, and you get access to email ticketing systems for complex issues.
WPX offers free professional speed optimization done by a support team member of the WPX team to improve speed. Within the same plan, a customer has one free fix should their site go down.
7. Security features
Both WPX and Siteground offer free SSL certificates.
Siteground goes further to have its own WordPress security plugin, in addition to a real-time monitoring system, an Artificial Intelligence anti-bot system, and a custom web application firewall.
In comparison, WPX also offers enterprise-level DDOS protection, daily Malware scans, and regularly updated web application firewalls.
Siteground also provides automated daily backups of customer’s websites, so in case of anything, you will be able to restore your data with just a click on a button.
Similarly, WPX has a backup manager and automated backups stored for 28 days.
Note: Siteground will charge extra for domain privacy while WPX includes WHOIS protection in all its plans. So we can say WPX tops the security charts.
FAQs
What is the main difference between WPX hosting and Siteground?
WPX is exclusively for WordPress, it is a managed WordPress hosting provider. This means that it will work for website developers and designers looking for managed WordPress.
Siteground on the other hand provides hosting for a multitude of needs, although it also offers WordPress-managed hosting.
WPX hosting focuses on speed and performance while Siteground provides exceptional value for money.
WPX or Siteground? Which one is better?
WPX stands out in pretty much all parameters of comparison, it comes out on top. Do you want speed, storage, and performance among other features, you get them at undoubted qualities with WPX.
But if you have a low budget, Siteground is your best option because of its affordable pricing plans.
WPX hosting is best if you want the fastest possible speeds, while Siteground is best in terms of affordability.
What other web hosting platforms are like WPX?
There are several WordPress-managed hosting providers, here are a few you might want to check out
- Iridium Hosting is also a WordPress-managed hosting provider that offers speed and security.
- Cloudways offers simplicity, full optimization for better performance, and flexibility with unlimited websites.
- Kinsta is a cloud platform that offers WordPress hosting among other plans.
- WPEngine offers WordPress hosting, web design and building tools, and eCommerce platforms.
What other web hosting platforms are like Siteground?
Other Web hosting services that can be compared with Siteground include;
- Hostgator has Shared hosting, WordPress hosting, VPS hosting, and Dedicated hosting from which you can make your choice. These all come with various features and at varied prices.
- Dreamhost also offers managed WordPress hosting, VPS, and shared hosting. It guarantees speed, security, and excellent uptime.
- GoDaddy promises fast and secure web hosting, and expert customer support all-time.
Conclusion
While Siteground provides more detail about the technology it uses, WPX consistently performs the best out of the two hosting providers.
All in all, these are both great hosting providers, so, if you need a cheap hosting site then Siteground is the choice but if you need a bit more advanced technology web hosting at a fairly good price WPX is the choice.
Good luck making that choice!