GreenGeeks Review

Finding a good website hosting provider is equally important for eCommerce site owners, professional bloggers, and amateurs alike. To avoid having your website plagued with ads, spammy links, and downtimes, stay away from free hosting services and apply to a proven one. GreenGeeks is a great option, being an affordable yet fast solution.

This is the most popular eco-friendly hosting provider nowadays. For every amperage of electricity the company uses, it invests three times more via renewable energy. Let’s see how GreenGeeks has gained such a good reputation.

What Is GreenGeeks?

GreenGeeks is an eco-friendly website hosting service established in 2008. It uses renewable energy (solar and wind) to power the servers and perfectly eliminates the carbon footprint.

The company ensures a 99.9% uptime guarantee and has a 30-day refund policy. The solution is catered to both beginners and professionals. And yet, the suggested hosting services are more appropriate for small businesses and individuals rather than enterprise-level businesses. GreenGeeks offers standard Web hosting, along with WP, WooCommerce, Reseller, and VPS hosting packages.

It’s a decent option for those searching for a reliable and environmentally conscious hosting solution.

GreenGeeks Pros

GreekGeeks stands out for its environmental protection commitment and sustainability. However, these are not the only benefits of the service. Other advantages GreekGeeks users are provided with include:

• 300% renewable energy match for carbon-reducing sites;
• Free site transfer carried out by the company’s specialists;
• 99.9% Uptime guarantee;
• Exclusive speed thanks to the use of in-built caching, PHP7, HTTP/2, SSD, etc.;
• Unmetered bandwidth, email accounts, and SSD storage;
• Free domain;
• Website builder with customizable themes.

GreenGeeks Cons

Nevertheless, some features of GreenGeeks might not be worth praising. The important-to-note cons of the hosting solution are as follows:

• Though claimed to be high, the delivered uptime is lower than average;
• Only one restore per month is free;
• No Cloud and Dedicated hosting packages are suggested.

How Expensive Is GreenGeek?

Prices at GreenGeeks start at $2.95/mo for Shared hosting and reach $109.95/mo for VPS hosting. Within this range, there is definitely a best-fit plan for any user’s budget. Let’s see which hosting tier and plan fits your requirements most:

• Web Hosting: Starts at $2.95/mo for the Lite plan. This tier is catered to small sites, blogs, and startups. It’s intended for hosting a single site and covers 50GB storage, 50 email accounts, in-built cashing, and a bunch of freebies via CDN, domain, and SSL. To increase the power of your Shared hosting, you can upgrade to Pro or Premium plans, priced at $4.95/mo and $8.95/mo, respectively.
• WordPress and WooCommerce Hosting: WP Hosting and WooCommerce Hosting have the same plans as Shared hosting. Here, too, the cost varies from $2.95/mo to $8.95/mo for Lite, Pro, and Premium tiers.
• VPS Hosting: Managed VPS hosting tiers are all fast, reliable, and scalable. The entry 2GB plan costs $39.95/mo and provides 2GB RAM, 4 vCPU, 10 TB Transfer, etc. The highest 8GB VPS Hosting plan costs $109.95/mo and involves 8GB RAM, 6 vCPU, 10 TB Transfer, Free Softaculous License, Managed Support, and plenty of other staff.
• Reseller Hosting: If you intend to do business by reselling your hosting, GreenGeeks Reseller plans will serve the purpose well. The entry plan RH-25 is $19.95/mo. It ensures 60 GB SSD storage, 600 GB Transfer, 25 cPanel accounts, as well as free cPanel migrations, and a free SSL certificate. The highest Reseller hosting plan is RH-80, priced at $34.95/mo. It delivers the ultimate power within the hosting type.

All hosting tiers come with a standard 30-day refund. All the prices are for annual subscriptions, while the renewal prices drastically differ from the introductory ones. For instance, the cheapest Shared hosting entry plan, Lite, is priced at $2.95/mo if purchased for a year. And once this term ends, the price goes up to $11.95/mo. Such a significant rise in the price is somewhat disappointing, especially when you draw lines with other hosting providers.

Performance

GreenGeeks claims to deliver an impressive uptime of 99.98% which can lead to only two hours of downtime during a year. It owes its speed to some of the top-of-the-line software and hardware used. The company’s platform is powered by Solid State RAID-10 Storage Arrays, MariaDB, LiteSpeed, HTTP/3, LSCache, PHP7, and a free CDN. And since solid-state drives are palpably faster than standard hard disks, GreenGeeks ensures boosted speed and better performance.

The traffic of a website hosted by GreenGeeks is cashed with an in-house system PowerCacher. Such a system saves pretty much server resources as the queries to the site and the database get reduced.

Furthermore, GreenGeeks supports Cloudflare integration to help users boost their site speed, increase its performance, keep it secure, and save some bandwidth. CDD also serves well as a protection against DDoS attacks.

And finally, what affects the speed and overall performance of a site hosted by GreenGeeks is the demography of the target audience. You see, two of the company’s four data centers are based in Chicago, US, and Montreal, CA. The other two servers are in Amsterdam, Netherlands, and Singapore per one. If most of your website visitors are expected to be from the mentioned regions, your web pages will load much quicker.

On the other hand, visitors from Australia, Africa, or South America, will definitely experience slower page loading.

Security and Protection

GreenGeeks appears average when it comes to security measurements. Although not superb, the basic means are ensured. The company packs all hosting plans with a free SSL certificate with an automatic renewal every three months. Furthermore, automatic app updates for Drupal, WP, and Joomla are available.

GreenGeeks delivers daily backups to keep a user’s data safe. And if any situation leads to site data loss (phishing or malware attacks), you can rest assured there’s a copy saved in the company’s servers to be restored. However, be aware that GreenGeeks offers only one free restoration for a month. Any more than specified will cost an extra $25 per restore. Also, the company doesn’t backup VPS servers.

Other than this, such security measures as stellar protection against spam and proactive server monitoring are ensured. GreenGeeks conducts periodic audits to ensure its security measures are up-to-date and meet industry standards.

Control Panel

GreenGeeks interface is hassle-free and pretty clear. Logging into your account, you can get a listing of all the purchased hosting plans and a support ticket section in your Accounts section in the dashboard. The Manage section allows controlling all your hosting plans and access to the cPanel account. The centralized cPanel provides email hosting service users easy access to multiple settings and features, like auto-responders and email forwarding, as well as install WP and manage domains.

GreenGeeks features a standard cPanel to ensure easy management and organization of the site and email. Although plenty of other website hosts have already incorporated their brand control panels, and cPanel is pretty basic, it’s still highly functional and convenient to use. With cPanel, GreenGeeks users can manage and edit websites and handle the security, databases, email accounts, domains, and files.

Also, extra software, like WP, is installed and managed through the cPanel. You can also find all the available security tools here, check how many available server resources have been already used, etc. So, a GreenGeeks user will find all features and functions within the scope of the chosen hosting package in the cPanel.

Website Building Tools

Even though GreenGeeks offers a seamless WP migration, it has its brand website builder. The latter is a comprehensive tool to help users create fully-functional and professional sites without applying a single line of coding. The site builder provides access to hundreds of premium class templates classified by industry. Most of the suggested templates look professional and attractive. They will definitely serve great in establishing a solid online presence.

Additionally, using the site-building tool, you are provided with multiple design elements and widgets that will help you enhance the brand feel of the site. Note that all templates are mobile-responsive. Accordingly, your website is sure to look equally great on any device.

Overall, the GreenGeeks website builder is a handy and pretty effective tool for creating a website quickly without coding.

Note that the site-building tool becomes available once you pay for the chosen hosting plan. It is not priced separately, yet it isn’t offered for free, either.

Customer and Tech Support

GreenGeeks offers several means of contacting its customers and tech support. Notably, the available support gateways include:

• Live Chat: Accessible 24/7, Live Chat is great for getting assistance right away. It’s available for both GreenGeeks users and visitors.
• Email and Ticket Form: Depending on the subject of your email, you can use one of the three email addresses:
• sales@greengeeks.com (for sales);
• affiliates@greengeeks.com (to contact the affiliate team);
• abuse@greengeeks.com (for reports of abuse).
• Phone Call: Customer support is available daily from 9 AM to 12 AM EST. The company provides two phone numbers, one for local customers (877-326-7483) and one for international calls (+1 310 496-8946).

Note that the average response time for emails and ticket forms is 15 to 20 minutes.

Before contacting the support team, it’s also worth checking the Resources page. Here you can find multiple articles on how to make the most of your GreenGeeks hosting plan and articles-guides on enhancing your online business.

Is GreenGeeks Worth Trying?

GreenGeeks is the best provider available if green hosting is your priority. Other than this, it’s pretty average. The hosting solution is decent as long as you need Shared hosting for your startup or personal site with little traffic. In terms of performance, it does well; the customer support is friendly and responsive; there’s an impressive array of tools and features like one-click WP installation and a full-fledged website builder.

However, the claimed affordable pricing refers only to the first subscription for one or three years. Once the period is over, the renewal prices will strike you unpleasantly. That’s the major downside. Also, users complain about the quality of GreenGeeks VPS hosting. The company’s backup policy leaves room for thoughts. You see, backups are done on random dates, and only one free restore is available monthly.

Considering all this, whether to try GreenGeeks or not is up to you: in all cases, there’s a 30-day money-back guarantee.