Sustainability has been gaining momentum for several years now, and more people than ever are looking at how they can do more for the environment. Can a web hosting company be “green” and still provide outstanding service? Let’s take a look at GreenGeeks Web Hosting and find out.
GreenGeeks was founded in 2008, by Trey Gardner. He worked at several hosting companies before he decided to start his own.
GreenGeeks has grown steadily and now runs over 300,000 on its servers.
WHAT MAKES GREENGEEKS WEB HOSTING DIFFERENT?
The main thing that differentiates GreenGeeks Web Hosting from other hosting companies is their commitment to offset used energy with 300% wind credits in order to reduce their carbon footprint.
That’s an impressive achievement but there are several important things to consider when choosing a WebHost. So, how does GreenGeeks stack up?
Well, according to their website, they:
• Run at 99.9% Uptime
• Have 100% Customer Satisfaction
GENERAL INFORMATION
SPEED:
445MS (Measured from February 2018 to January 2020 on average)
UPTIME:
99.98% (Measured from February 2018 to January 2020 on average)
SUPPORT:
24/7 Live Chat
APPS:
WordPress, Joomla, PrestaShop, and WHMCS
FEATURES:
Unlimited Bandwidth
Unlimited Storage
Unlimited email accounts
Free Domain (renewal fees apply after the first year)
Backups
Free SSL Certificate
PLANS:
Shared
Reseller
WordPress
SITE TRANSFER:
Available for a single site
PRICING:
Starting at $2.95 per month with renewals at $9.95 per month
We’ll examine their service in more depth as we go over their metrics, customer service, products, pricing in our pros and cons sections.
THE PROS OF GREENGEEKS WEB HOSTING
There’s a lot to like about GreenGeeks Web Hosting including their uptime, support, and commitment to the environment.
1. Uptime
GreenGeeks boasts about their guaranteed 99.90% uptime. Do they deliver? Absolutely!
In fact, during the period from February 2018 to January 2020, they only clocked 4 hours of downtime! That’s phenomenal.
The last thing you need is for your website to be inaccessible, especially during a launch or sale. With their impressive uptime, you won’t have to worry about losing customers.
2. Above Average Loading Times
Their page loading times during the one-year period of 2019 thru 2020, was 445ms. That puts them among the fastest hosting companies.
And page loading times are so important because it’s one of the factors that Google takes into consideration when ranking your site.
It’s also critical to avoid losing visitors! Online users are increasingly impatient. If a website takes too long to load, they’ll often click-away.
3. Good Support and Prompt Answers
As far as customer support, they’ve got you covered there too. GreenGeeks offers 24/7 customer support via live chat, phone, and email.
And, if your preference is the self-help approach, they offer an impressive knowledgebase with articles covering a variety of topics from sales questions, hosting plans, billing questions, etc. They even include video tutorials.
4. Free Website Migration and Domain
If you decide to get a new domain name through GreenGeeks, they’ll provide it for free for as long as you’re a customer. There is one caveat, and we’ll cover it in the “Cons” section.
If your website is hosted at a different company, they’ll help you transfer your site to their services at no cost.
5. Environmentally Sustainable
GreenGeeks is green. They will purchase enough wind energy credits to cover the energy used by their servers to power your website.
You’ll find a certificate on their site which certifies that they are recognized as a Green Power Partner with the United States Environmental Agency.
6. 30-Day Money-back Guarantee
GreenGeeks offers a “no questions asked” refund policy on most of their hosting plans. We’ll cover it in more detail in the “Cons” section.
7. Regular Backups
Sometimes you or your webmaster makes a mistake, and your website goes, “Poof!”. Or someone may hack into your site and cause damage.
GreenGeeks provides free backup every night, so you can access your data if something happens. In addition, they offer real-time security scanning, automatic brute force detection, Spam Assassin protection, and SSL secure server, and allows you to be able to password-protect your directories.
8. Several Server Locations
GreenGeeks has data centers in Chicago and Phoenix in the United States, Montreal, Canada, and Amsterdam in the Netherlands.
Why is this important? If you pick a server geographically closer to you, you’ll experience faster load speeds.
GreenGeeks Web Hosting is also committed to keeping their servers up to date as follows:
- They will never oversell capacity
- Gigabit Connectivity
- By using name-brand server parts
- Automatic climate control and temperature at their facilities, including using humidity sensors
- Using the latest generation energy-efficient Intel Xeon processors
- Having a minimum of 64 GB DDR3 ECC-Registered memory
- Biometric and key card security systems with mantraps and a rack-level locking mechanism
- SAS 70 Type certified (audit reports can be provided upon request)
- Staffed 24/7 Single Hop data center engineers and technicians which are monitored remotely
- No desktop hardware
- Solid State Drive SSD Acceleration
- Dual-city grid power feeds, plus battery backup that includes an automatic transfer switch and a diesel generator on-site
- BGP4 Gigabit connectivity to several Fiber GigE Tier 1 Backbones
- FM 200 server -safe fire suppression system with the early pre-fire detection system
This all ensures that your data is stored on high-quality servers that are state of the art.
9. Free CDN
Whether you know it or not, you interact with a Content Delivery System (CDN) virtually every time you browse the internet.
A CDN allows users to cache content and use the servers closest to the website during delivery. Both these things ensure that surfing your site is much faster for your visitors.
GreenGeeks offers this service to its customers and it’s powered by Cloudflare.
THE CONS OF GREENGEEKS WEB HOSTING
Everything sounds great, right? Fast load speed, amazing uptime, and a wide variety of features and benefits. So, what’s the downside? Well, there are a few things to consider before you decide to sign up with Green Geeks.
1. Confusing Pricing Structure
Unfortunately, there’s a common pricing strategy that is used by the hosting industry. It entails advertising a very low monthly price (in this case, it’s $2.99), which sounds too good to be true.
Which it is, because, upon closer examination, you’ll see that you have to pay for 3 years in advance to receive that price. If you decide to pay monthly, it’ll cost you $9.95.
2. Strings Attached Refund Policy
GreenGeeks offers a free domain name when you sign up. This will normally cost you anywhere from $2.99 to 11.99 per year
However, if you decide to request a refund, you’ll be charged $24.95 for the domain name registration.
WORDPRESS HOSTING
In addition, they offer WordPress specific hosting. This plan is similar to its shared hosting plan with features that are enhanced for the WordPress platform. These include:
- Unlimited SSD Web Space and Data Transfer
- Free 1-Click WordPress Install
- Free WordPress Enhanced Security
- WP-CLL, SHH, Git, Custom PHPini
- Free Let’s Encrypt Wild Card SSL
- Free WordPress Migration
- 24/7 WordPress Expert Support
MANAGED VPS HOSTING
RESELLER HOSTING
FEATURES ON ALL PLANS
- Free Domain
- Easy Sign up process
- Money-back guarantee
- Payment via credit card or PayPal
- Control Panel: cPanel
- 1-click installation tool to easily install popular apps and CMSs
HIDDEN FEES AND CLAUSES
Your account cannot use more than 100% of 1 CPU core and/or 1 GB memory, or 20 concurrent connections, or 75,000 files, or you will risk account suspension.
If an invoice is not paid within 4 days, your account will be suspended, and you will be required to pay a $15 reactivations fee to have your account back online.
THE VERDICT
GreenGeeks Web Hosting provides good uptime, fast loading speeds, and responsive customer support. They’re also committed to the mission of being a sustainable company.
So, they’re worth taking a look at. Just keep in mind that their lowest advertised rate is only available with a long-term, prepaid commitment and that their free domain goes away if you cancel the service.