GreenGeeks Hosting Review: How to Get Started with GreenGeeks

Our Verdict: Outstanding Option for Eco-Friendly Hosting

GreenGeeks is appreciative of environmentally friendly web hosting by offsetting 300 percent of the emissions from the electricity they use. They also have a large section of budget-friendly hosting plans, including WordPress optimization plans.

When you use our special GreenGeeks discount links and our promo code (applied automatically), you will get 70% off your monthly hosting fee.

GreenGeeks scores more than 4.5 out of 5 stars across all our reviews with over 350 actual customers and has excellent uptime and page load speeds.

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Overview of GreenGeeks

GreenGeeks was formed in 2006 with a focus on high-performance, low-cost, and environmentally friendly web hosting.

Since then, it has expanded to host more than 500,000 websites and support more than 40,000 customers while making a name for itself as an industry-leading green hosting provider.

Whether you are beginner and experienced website owners, GreenGeek’s website and hosting services cater to you. It’s a good fit if you’re looking to start your site and scale easily with a single host.

GreenGeeks Hosting Types

GreenGeeks is a great option if you’re looking to start your site and quickly grow up with a single host.

Its core product is a beginner shared hosting plan, but this can grow into a customizable hosting platform that’s ideal for your website.

On the upper end of that, you’ll find dedicated WordPress hosting as well as higher-end options such as VPS plans and dedicated server plans.

GreenGeeks aims to explore itself apart by providing exceptionally flexible hosting, open beginner hosting packages, and strong WordPress hosting plans.

Additional Features

All these plans come with backup and security features and the option to select your own data center. Plus, did we discuss the dedication to eco-friendliness?

Green Hosting‘s

GreenGeek’s commitment to sustainability surpasses the promise of most other green hosts.

They stand out with a commitment of 300 percent to renewable energy, making it the cleanest hosting platform on the market as far as we can consider.

It helps to make up for the rest of the hosting industry, which is much more resource-intensive than most people realize. It’s easy to ignore the environmental and energy reserves needed to host websites.

Greener Doesn’t Imply Weaker

Ironically, the hosting industry ranks up with sectors like air travel when it comes to energy consumption. Seeing this huge discrepancy is what prompted Trey Gardner, CEO, to start GreenGeeks.

GreenGeeks is an EPA Green Power Partner aiming to deliver strong green, eco-friendly operations without compromising performance and quality. GreenGeek’s core focus is on high technology performance.

GreenGeek’s carbon footprint is zero, but it also negates the use of electricity from two other businesses of the same size.

GreenGeeks: A Leader In Green Hosting

Founded in California. Global Presence.

• 45000+ Customers
• 500000+ Websites Hosted
• 615000+ KWH/Year Replaced
• 13 Years in Business

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GreenGeeks illustrates its contribution to sustainability.

Efficient Infrastructure

Beyond the substantial procurement of wind energy credits to mitigate the server facilities’ energy consumption, they are also extremely energy-efficient and up to the highest energy efficiency standards.

GreekGeeks is leading the charge for green web hosting and hopefully aims to hold a precedent for the rest of the industry.

Greengeeks Shared Hosting

If you’re just starting online, the last thing you need to do is spend time overseeing all the technical aspects of bringing your site online.

Shared hosting is the best place to launch your web efforts.

Greengeeks Shared Plan

When it comes to shared hosting, you can select three plans, all of which provide unlimited bandwidth, storage, and email accounts.

They even offer the free domain name for the first year (but read below about why you do not want to take one).

All shared hosting plans provide a decent set of programming resources such as PHP, Perl, Python, SSH, Git, and more.

Also, all plans come with a free SSL certificate from Let’s Encrypt.

Greengeeks Cloudflare CDN

These plans also provide advanced features such as an integrated Cloudflare CDN. The Content Delivery Network is a series of servers worldwide that deliver the web pages to site visitors who are close to them.

Imagine that your data center is in New York City. A visitor to the Beijing website does see a delay if all content is sent from the data center. With a CDN, the data center is directly replicated so that the content can be accessed easily by a server near Beijing.

GreenGeeks makes it simple to set up a Cloudflare CDN. Just tap a few buttons in your control panel, and you’re set up.

Lite Shared Hosting Plan

The affordable option is Lite for just $2.49/mo if you sign up for the long term.

It delivers standard performance that we have found to be appropriate for a WordPress site. PowerCacher, the proprietary caching technology of GreenGeeks, is used to help with performance.

The only major drawback is that you can host only one website. But that’s expected to be perfect for those starting.

Pro Shared Hosting Plan

Pro is the next step up. It includes all that the Starter Plan offers plus a stronger server infrastructure, that GreenGeeks believes delivers twice the Lite Plan’s performance.

With this plan, you can still host unlimited domains.

GreenGeeks offers three shared hosting plans.

Greengeeks Premium Shared Hosting

Premium is a top-most shared hosting plan. It is four times the efficiency of the Lite plan.

While the other plans provide a basic SSL certificate, Premium comes with an AlphaSSL Wildcard SSL certificate. It has a lot of advantages. It’s a 100 percent stable browser and comes with a $10,000 warranty.

This plan is also compatible with the PCI. Both the premium SSL certificate and PCI compliance can add to the different fee plans, but those who require it (e.g., to begin an e-commerce site) are better served with the Premium plan.

Features

With the basic shared hosting plan, you seem to have all the benefits you’ve come to expect from your host:

Moreover, you have an option to register a free domain name with GreenGeeks upon the creation of your account.

What Makes GreenGeek’s Shared Hosting Stand Out?

About the over-the-top green commitment, GreenGeeks thrives in the following:

Website Speed

Hosting plans offer a 30-day money-back guarantee.

The value of speed on your website can not be underestimated.

Many studies show that if your site loads in longer than 2 seconds, you’re losing readers and customers.

It is because the general public is increasing the use of top-of-the-line websites and check-out experiences. They’re getting annoyed with sites that are loading slower than those top performers.

Google recommends that you load your site in no more than 2-3 seconds. Speed is also a ranking factor for the search engine, although a minor one. If it takes longer, Google can restrict or slow down your site’s crawling, which is a horrible thing for you.

Speed Stack

GreenGeeks provides  speed “stack” — a geeky term meaning “set of technologies.”

It contains the following:

Security

GreenGeeks provide a range of tools to make your site secure. It includes the following:

Think of the above as a quarantine to protect your website(s).

GreenGeeks Datacenter Options

GreenGeeks now has four state-of-the-art data centers. For more info, see Datacenters below.

GreenGeeks allows users with shared hosting plans to select which data center they can host. It is a very unexpected bonus.

Scale Up

GreenGeeks enables users to scale up their shared hosting by offering better performance in higher-level plans.

As your site grows, your traffic levels got an increase, and you’re asking more from your host to start realizing how beneficial it is.

For example, rather than choosing a basic dedicated server or having to upgrade to a VPS, you can upgrade to a higher shared plan or add the computing resources you need, such as additional RAM, CPU, or other features.

These make it easy for beginners to run their sites in customized and powerful server environments.

Higher Level Hosting

Of course, other hosting plans can also upgrad to VPS hosting, dedicated server packages, or even reseller packages.

But you don’t have to do that if you wouldn’t want to take on the extra tasks like running your server and maintaining your environment secure.

GreenGeeks VPS Plans

Here’s a glance at GreenGeek’s VPS plans. There are three plans in there. For ease, I’m only going to include detail on the top and bottom plans:

GreenGeeks Dedicated Server Plans

GreenGeeks is now providing four dedicated hosting plans. Here’s a breakdown of their top and bottom plans:

WordPress Hosting

So, you know that you want to use WordPress as the backbone for your new website. Good, WordPress is awesome.

But, if you’re looking to improve your site’s performance and make your life a lot simpler, you’re going to want to use WordPress hosting.

GreenGeek’s hosting plans use modern speed technologies.

GreenGeeks is offering three WordPress plans, using shared hosting. It means you’re sharing real estate servers with other WordPress sites.

But, in almost all situations, this configuration is going to be more than enough.

Managed WordPress Hosting

This plan is for “managed” WordPress hosting — meaning that all the technical parts of having your server set up are done for you, including:

• WordPress Migration
• You get free domain name registration or domain name transfer
• The WordPress Core will update automatically
• Security scans of the site are taken care of
• Your site will secure from brute force and attacks by DDoS
• Your site is isolated from other sites on a shared server, increasing to the level of protection.
• You have access to 24/7 US-based support.

Simply put, your site will be stable, run in an optimized WordPress environment, and will be online when you need it most (all the time).

GreenGeeks is providing a variety of WordPress tools.

Other Specific Content Management System

GreenGeeks provides customized plans tailored to users of the Joomla and Drupal CMSs. So if WordPress isn’t right for you, you’re shielded by GreenGeeks.

cPanel

As most beginner-friendly hosts, cPanel is supreme. If you’ve used a shared hosting platform in the past, you might have come across cPanel, or at least become aware of its existence.

A view of the GreenGeeks cPanel dashboard

The GreenGeeks cPanel is packed with all the features you may be familiar with

 those features.

Also, several customizations make it much easier to set up your site and add additional features. Furthermore, cPanel is very intuitive and structured.

CPanel is worth exploring because it has many hidden gems that will help you create and develop your website.

GreenGeeks CPanel Features

Some of the additional features you can find in the GreenGeeks Control Panel are as follows:

Nightly automatic backups are included with all shared hosting plans.

Typical to cPanel, you can find all the apps you need by exploring the control panel or using the search bar to save time.

Statistics and Account Management

You can also find your website stats on the left that display your current CPU, storage use, and other account information.

You’ll be able to handle all other requests on the account management screen, such as:

Backups

When left to your own devices, how much will you backup your website?

I’m sure you’d like to think that you’d be careful in backing up your account, just in case anything bad happens.

No matter how good the thoughts are, it’s usually something that isn’t achieved consistently. That’s why getting nightly automatic backups is such a terrific function, particularly for simple shared hosting plans.

There are a couple of starter hosts that add backups to their list of features, but as a whole, it’s still rare and certainly worth highlighting.

Perhaps more unusual is the fact that GreenGeeks provides free restores. The first one in a calendar month is included in all plans. It’s $25 per restore after that.

Performance

For the last year, we’ve been tracking our server. The findings are shown in the following table.

Uptime

GreenGeeks have performed very well most of the year. But in October — specifically, October 17 through the 21st — they had issues. During that time, there were 111 outages for a total of 172 minutes.

Most of the outages were very brief — just a minute or two. The longest outage was only four minutes.

GreenGeeks offers U.S.-based support and assistance 24/7

The good news is that the data looks fantastic after this time. Whatever the issue was, it was solved by GreenGeeks.

None of these figures are impressive. They are, however, very fair and competitive with other hosts.

Uptime Guarantee

GreenGeeks has an uptime guarantee of 99.9 percent. As for most of the hosting industry’s promises, there are several unique features attached to it.

The cases in which GreenGeeks may not guarantee uptime are only common sense and include:

This uptime guarantee is also strong enough to find its way through the terms and conditions, which means that they take their uptime seriously.

Still, there’s no mention of whether you’re getting a refund or credit from an account if the site goes down as some hosts do. But, judging by the uptime numbers, this is never going to be a matter anyway.

Speed

The GreenGeek server provided an excellent overall page load speeds. The 12-month average was only 305 ms. However, these experiments have been carried out on a static website. This year, we updated our demo accounts to run WordPress.

As a result, the speeds have risen significantly to a still-reasonable 750 ms. Results suggest that this could be due to computing capacity provided that a higher level plan sees page load times much quicker.

Additional Features

GreenGeeks plans several extra features that are more than fluffy stuff.

Security Features

The security features are robust. Servers monitor 24/7 and have a built-in firewall that protects against DDoS, brute force attacks, and other cyber threats.

Plus, you can do stuff like use the Spam Assassin Email protection, and even encrypt your directories with a password.

Site Builder

If this is your very first site and you want to get it online as soon as possible, you might want to use the SitePad free website builder software.

This builder has hundreds of different mobile-friendly themes that you can customize to your taste with a drag-and-drop builder.

Site Migration

Finally, if you have an existing site that you want to migrate over, the GreenGeeks team help you do this free of cost, without any downtime.

The support team can move from cPanel, Plesk, Helm, and other control panels. And if you have multiple sites under a single control panel, GreenGeeks can migrate all of them (assuming your plan supports numerous websites).

Datacenters

GreenGeeks has four data centers located in:

All the data centers provide a high level of security and redundancy. It includes the following:

Recent Datacenter Upgrades

GreenGeeks has also recently upgraded their data center servers because of this, its server drives are of special interest. They’ve been updated to SSD Raid Storage Arrays.

This update is system-wide, ensuring that SSD Raid Storage Arrays would also support customers on a shared hosting package.

GreenGeeks data centers have advanced security features.

Datacenter Choice

For most shared hosts, you’re stuck with whatever data center you want.

These may mean that your site’s files are located in Seattle, Washington, while much of the traffic on your site is from Paris, France. Not a good thing to increase your site’s performance and page loading speed.

The GreenGeeks site lists the specifics of their data centers.

But GreenGeeks does give you the option of the four data center locations listed above.

When selecting a data center, make sure you pick the nearest location to where the traffic on your website is coming from, not where you are located.

GreenGeeks Overview

Here is an overview of GreenGreeks that you can use to equate it to other hosting provider companies.

Specialties

Migration Policy

Customers can offer a free migration website with a new hosting account.

Support Material Quality

Nice. Materials are also broad — their videos, articles, knowledgebase, and web tutorials cover a wide variety of topics.

Control Panel

cPanel

Available  Datacenter

Four data centers are located across North America and Europe.

Money-back Guarantee

30-day money-back guarantee.

Price for Lowest Plan

$2.95 a month.

Backup policy

Free nightly backups and one free monthly restore included in the shared hosting package.

Site builder is Included?

A free site builder is included.

Compliant with PCI?

Compliance with the PCI is included in the Premium Plans, but those on other plans will need to buy an add-on.

Pros and Cons

Let’s dig a bit further into these cons.

Term of Contract

Like most bargain web hosts, you need to sign up for a long contract to get the lowest plan prices.

In this case, the number is three years. If you opt for a shorter term, the rate will increase. But even with the rate rise, it’s not super high, but it’s still more than three times the low starter rate.

It’s not a deal-breaker, but getting more fair and up-front pricing could go a long way.

This pricing style is an industry-standard practice, but it’s always good to see hosting companies do away with this pattern in favor of transparency.

Guarantee of Stipulations

GreenGeeks hosting all plans are offering a 30-day money-back guarantee. Although, like all promises, there are provisions that come along with it.

It’s not as long as some other hosts give 60-day or even 90-day money-back guarantees, but getting 30 days should be enough time for you to test the service and see if it’s right for your website.

GreenGeeks Domain Registration

However, if you plan to register a domain name with GreekGeeks, you will get any refund for a domain registration fee.

Plus, the domain registration fees are very high, so you might not end up having too much refund anyway.

The best course of action is to use this host for hosting purposes only and use a different domain name registrar. That way, if you want to cancel within a 30-day window, you will get a refund in full.

High Domain Registration Price

If you proceed with the registration of domains, Greengeek annual price is very high.

Now, their focus is not on becoming a domain name registrar, so that makes sense. However, when concentrating on offering novice hosting, you have to presume that there is a fair chance that your users may want to pick up a domain name from you as well.

But high pricing is likely to cause users to go elsewhere for their domains.

They will add an extra step in having your site set up, but it’s best to look elsewhere for your domain to prevent any problems with refunding or paying high prices, as we mentioned earlier.

Customer Support Services

You can get customer service through live chat, email, or phone.

GreenGeeks provides 100 % customer satisfaction.

I’m not quite sure what that entails, and it sounds more like a marketing buzzword than anything else, but GreenGeeks does provide a wide variety of helpful methods.

You can also effortlessly reach to GreenGeeks customer support through live chat, email, or phone.

For example, you can get customer support through live chat, email, or phone. Phone support is only accessible during working hours, but live chat is available 24/7.

Resources for Self-help

If you’re the type who wants to figure out technical problems on your own, then there’s a broad knowledge base and a tutorial section to help you work through any issues.

If you’re looking to grow your site and learn more about online marketing, SEO, security, and more, then reading your blog is certainly a worthwhile investment.

GreenGeek’s Alternatives

If you’re not going with GreenGeeks, there are other related hosts that you may find appealing. They all deliver outstanding performance and come with many bonuses like SSL licenses, SSD drives, unmetered bandwidth, and more.

SiteGround

SiteGround is at the top of the list. Like GreenGeeks, you can find unlimited shared hosting plans, top-notch support, and multiple data centers. If your target audience is in Asia, SiteGround has a data center where GreenGeeks is limited to North America and Europe.

SiteGround stands out in specific when it comes to customer support. And they can help with more than just issues, like setting up your site for the best performance.

InMotion Hosting

InMotion Hosting is also another green hosting company. The shared hosting plan starter is similar to GreenGeeks.

They have the advantage of enabling you to host two websites on their lowest-level package. However, be cautious that InMotion Hosting only has data centers in the USA.

Bluehost

If the price is your main concern, then Bluehost is a good choice. GreenGeeks provides more unlimited options, but in most ways, website owners may not note the difference.

In terms of efficiency, Bluehost and GreenGeeks are about the same, with Bluehost being a little more stable and GreenGeeks a little quicker.

Is GreenGeeks Right for You?

If you’re worried about your environmental effects, GreenGeeks is a great pick because of its 300 percent green commitment.

But even if you only want a good and affordable hosting, GreenGeeks is worth investigating.

They provide secure servers, top-notch security controls, automatic backups, simple server maintenance, various support options, and even the ability to use dedicated WordPress hosting.

Check out GreenGeeks.com right now.

Frequently Asked Questions About GreenGeeks Hosting

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