SiteGround Hosting in India, Prices and Alternatives

SiteGround raised its India pricing and a lot of bloggers left. What the plans cost now, how support and speed actually hold up, and the five alternatives worth moving to.

Siteground Hosting Quick Intro

Siteground Hosting runs shared and managed WordPress hosting on Google Cloud, worldwide. It built its name on premium hosting at a fair price, then raised prices to protect service quality, and plenty of regular bloggers in India and elsewhere moved to other hosts. Keep in mind that you are paying for managed cloud hosting, and by that standard the prices are not too high.

This review is written for Indian bloggers, and it covers the best SiteGround alternatives in India too.

->Read my full SiteGround review

Siteground Pricing Change in India

SiteGround changed its prices worldwide, not only in India. The new prices are in the image below. They added no new features and still raised prices by $4/*Month, which is the main reason people in India go looking for alternatives. To be fair, no other host matches SiteGround on server quality, support and uptime.

The StartUp plan went from $3.95 to $6.99, a $3/*Month jump. GrowBig went from $5.95/*month to $9.99/*Month, up $4/*month, and GoGeek now costs $15/*month.

Siteground Old Prices in India

Siteground Old Prices in India

Sitegound New Prices in India

Siteground New Prices In India

Is the new price of Siteground Reliable in India?

My opinion of SiteGround changed when the new prices landed. It is no longer a sensible pick for a first website or a new blogger, and if you can pay that much, you have several other options at the same price.

Some SiteGround customers also had trouble with technical support after the COVID-19 pandemic, which I put down to lockdowns. What I still like is their site management dashboard and tools.

Payment Method for Siteground In India

SiteGround offers no local payment methods in India, so no UPI, no RuPay card and no wallets like Paytm. You need a card enabled for cross border payments. PayPal is the official alternative, but PayPal charges a card too, so you are back to needing a cross border card.

Support Quality of Siteground in India

I love SiteGround's support team. They will not leave you alone with a problem, whether it is your hosting or something else on your website. The only snag is for people who are not fluent in English and struggle to explain the issue.

They offer chat, ticket, email and phone support, though phone support is not available to you if you live in India.

Siteground Hosting Plans in India

Startup Plan

The SiteGround StartUp plan suits a very light website with 200 to 400 visitors a day. That is not a hard limit, just the traffic the plan is sized for. It runs on cloud servers, so going over it will not take your site down. You get daily backups and the other premium tools for 6.99$ per month.

GrowBig Plan

GrowBig is SiteGround's bestseller, with more server resources and better tuning. It is sized for 25000 visits a month, again not a hard limit. You get everything in StartUp plus on demand backups and Memcached for faster dynamic content. This is the plan I recommend, at 9.99$ per month, if speed is the goal.

GoGeek Plan

GoGeek is built for agencies and web developers. It adds reseller features with a white label dashboard, so you can build client sites and hand each client a hosting account without SiteGround branding. It costs 14.99$ per month and includes everything in GrowBig plus Staging + Git, Add Collaborators, White-label Clients, Highest Tier of Resources, Priority Support.

Siteground Hosting Speed, Uptime and Server Response Quality in India

If your visitors are almost all Indian, I would not buy SiteGround, because they will not feel the benefit of the cloud servers. For Indian visitors, SiteGround sites load at a middling speed, neither fast nor slow, and a CDN helps a little. Paying premium prices for benefits your readers never see is a poor trade. If you target a worldwide audience, SiteGround is a good choice.

If your audience is in India, you have better options. Here are the best SiteGround alternatives in India.

Top 5 Best alternative of Siteground Hosting in India

Choosing an alternative depends on what each blogger or developer needs. My picks below are based on the tools and features almost every blogger and developer uses.

In some context you may need a different thing in hosting than others. For example, I rarely need technical support, and I would rather have a host that offers premium CDN and caching. Many new bloggers need the support more.

So these are my best SiteGround alternatives in India, ranked on overall rating and quality.

1. Bluehost India

bluehost

Bluehost has a worldwide reputation for performance. It is not better than SiteGround, but it is the best SiteGround alternative in India on performance, pricing and features.

One difference to note: Bluehost runs on SSD servers, while SiteGround runs on cloud servers.

Check Bluehost Offers

2. A2 Hosting

250x90 A2hosting

A2 Hosting has built its reputation fast, and premium hosting and support are the reason. That makes it the second best SiteGround alternative after the price rise. A2 Hosting uses SSD servers for performance. For the price of 1 year of SiteGround GrowBig, you can get A2 Hosting Turbo for 3 years, though as I said, the two use different hosting technology.

Check A2Hosting Offers

3. Hostgator India

HostGator

HostGator has offered different types of hosting at reasonable prices for a long time. Its servers are good quality, uptime is excellent and pricing is predictable, which is what makes HostGator the third best SiteGround alternative in India.

Check Hostgator Offer

4. Hostinger India

In India, Hostinger have their starting plan from ₹59/*Month, but I would skip the intro plan. It is not bad, it just has fewer resources and hosts only one WordPress site.

Hostinger

Hostinger is my first choice when someone needs hosting for India. It is very reliable, and its LiteSpeed servers give it an edge in server side caching and resource management.

Get Hostinger NOW

5. Dreamhost Hosting

DreamHost is one of the hosts officially recommended by WordPress. It offers premium servers and performance, with managed tools to run your website from one place. I recommend DreamHost as one of the best SiteGround alternatives in India after the price rise.

Final Words

Every host prices for its own audience, quality and technology. SiteGround raised its prices for the same reason, and nobody else offers managed cloud hosting at that price, so on its own terms SiteGround is unbeatable. If your budget does not stretch that far, pick one of the alternatives above.

My verdict on SiteGround hosting in India

4.2 out of 5 ★★★★☆

The technology is not in question, SiteGround runs Google Cloud on every plan. The price is. After the increases it stopped being the obvious pick for Indian bloggers on a budget.

What works

  • Google Cloud infrastructure on every plan including the entry tier
  • Managed WordPress tooling in a single dashboard
  • Support quality is the reason most people stay

What does not

  • Prices rose sharply and no longer suit budget Indian bloggers
  • Renewal pricing sits far above the intro rate
  • Cheaper hosts match it for a basic blog
  1. Is Bluehost India better than Siteground in India?

    No. Bluehost does not use the same technology as SiteGround.

  2. Best Alternative of Siteground in India

    At SiteGround's new prices, it is hard for budget bloggers to justify. The top 3 SiteGround alternatives in India are Bluehost, HostGator and Hostinger.

  3. Most Recommended Hosting of 2020?

    The world is moving to cloud servers, so most people recommend cloud hosting. That is why SiteGround and Cloudways were at the top in 2020.

  4. Best Budget Hosting in India?

    For Indian bloggers, go with Bluehost, HostGator or Hostinger.

  5. Which Technolgy is used by siteground?

    SiteGround runs all of its plans on Google Cloud servers.

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Rahul Singh
Rahul Singh

I'm a WordPress developer and performance engineer. I have been working with WordPress since 2017 and have shipped more than 700 WordPress and WooCommerce projects. Most of my time goes into Core Web Vitals, block based development, database and backend optimisation, caching and server tuning, and I write here about what actually holds up in production. You can check my professional background on LinkedIn, and the client work behind it, with its public review record, on Fiverr.

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