| GreenGeeks standout features | |
| Performance | Extremely fast, reliable, and secure hosting |
| Average load time | 0.028 seconds |
| Average response time | Approximately 3450 ms |
| Free domain | One free domain for the first year |
| SSL | Free SSL certificate from LetsEncrypt.org |
| 1-click WordPress | Included with all hosting packages |
| Support | 24/7 support via phone, email, or live chat |
What Are the Pros and Cons of GreenGeeks?
GreenGeeks is an efficient and affordable solution for small businesses looking for a comprehensive web hosting package. However, it doesn’t provide widespread international support, so it may not be a good choice for multinational corporations across multiple continents. Here are some of the other pros and cons of the service:
Pros of GreenGeeks
- Scalable hosting solutions: GreenGeeks allows users to choose from a wide range of scalable hosting solutions like Shared, WordPress, Virtual Private Server (VPS), and dedicated server packages. Businesses can dynamically change their plans to fit their changing business needs.
- Well-stacked help center: GreenGeeks sports a vast and diverse help center with numerous how-to guides, website tutorials, and webinars for easier employee onboarding.
- Reliable uptime of up to 99.9%: The platform offers an excellent uptime of 99.99%, often considered the industry benchmark.
- Eco-friendly hosting methods: Apart from purchasing three times the wind energy credits that the company consumes, GreenGeeks uses energy-efficient storage and server solutions to reduce its carbon footprint.
- Automatic night backup: All data held in shared, private, or VPS servers are backed up each night and made instantly available to users in case of an emergency.
- 30-day money-back guarantee: GreenGeeks offers an unconditional 30-day money-back guarantee for even the most basic monthly plans.
- Free domain for a year: All users are given a free domain and migration tools for a year. GreenGeeks migration specialists help users switch from their current host to GreenGeeks free of charge.
Cons of GreenGeeks
- No provision for Windows Server Hosting: If you are currently using cloud servers hosted by Microsoft Windows, GreenGeeks won’t be able to integrate its services. These users will be required to switch to GreenGeeks or another supported hosting service.
- Fine print: You must commit to a three-year plan to use the advertised price. While the plan is easily affordable for small businesses, they can only receive these prices if they commit to GreenGeeks for at least three years.
- Pricier VPS and dedicated hosting options: The shared hosting option available on GreenGeeks (perfect for small businesses) is much cheaper than other services, but its VPS and dedicated hosting options are a little pricier owing to the special energy-efficient servers GreenGeeks uses.
- Domain costs more if you avail of the 30-day money back: If you take advantage of the 30 money-back guarantee, your domain name will cost more than most other hosting providers due to the equipment and migration costs.
Hosting Features From GreenGeeks
All of GreenGeeks’ options come with a number of features that make them scalable, efficient, and faster than most other green hosting services available on the internet.
Here are some of the top features that GreenGeeks offers:
- Solid State Drive (SSD) Storage Arrays
- Best speed technologies
- Free site builders
- Customizable GreenGeeks dashboard
- 99.99% uptime
- Free Cloudflare integration (speeds your site loading)
- Free SSL certificate
- Advanced security features
- Tree planted
SSD storage arrays
GreenGeeks offers solid-state SSD RAID 10 storage for all VPS and dedicated hosting plans. It allows for combined disk mirroring and striping, which ensures maximum redundancy, a lower risk of data loss, and much faster page load times.
Best speed technologies
One of GreenGeeks’ core USPs has always been its quick response and load times. GreenGeeks uses several innovative storage and processing technologies to help you cache and load its site data more quickly. All the plans come with the best speed tech like LiteSpeed, LSCache, MariaDB, HTTP/2, PHP7, and free CDN.
GreenGeeks also provides assisted migration with in-house experts to make migrating to its platform quicker and much more efficient.
Free site builders
GreenGeeks partners with Weebly website builder to offer custom site building tools that let you create very attractive websites without having to know any programming. Simply drag and drop various site features where you want them, and the site will look just the way you want it. Weebly offers a number of add-ons and pre-designed templates for faster, more streamlined web designing.
Customizable GreenGeeks dashboard
All shared packages come with the GreenGeeks Dashboard,which can be seen as a customizable central control panel allowing you to create, manage, and edit all your websites. Users can access their GreenGeeks Dashboard by simply entering their login details onto the webpage. The Dashboard allows you to manage everything related to your domain name using emails, renewal periods, and other services availed by you.
99.99% uptime guarantee
All of the hosting packages at GreenGeeks come with a 99.99% uptime guarantee. Your hosting servers will be available to serve traffic at least 99.99% of the time, above the industry standard of 99.9%. An uptime of 99.99% is considered the benchmark for the perfect uptime.
Free Cloudflare integration to speed up your site
Your sites will be automatically configured to use the Cloudflare system, designed to take key files from your website and distribute them across various data centers. When someone tries to load your site, they will pull the largest files from a geographically-close server, so it will load more quickly.
Free SSL certificate
All hosting packages at GreenGeeks come with a free shared SSL certificate from Let’s Encrypt SSL that will provide your site with significant security. It also ensures your site is following best practices regarding security, which Google confirms is important for proper SEO.
Advanced custom security rules
GreenGeeks offers all the standard hosting security features that are considered to be the industry standard. This includes powerful firewalls to prevent unauthorized traffic to your site, monitored internet connectivity, and more. GreenGeeks also allows you to customize your security options by creating:
- IP address blacklists
- Password-protected directories
- Completely customizable private keys and digital certificates
- Word-triggered filters for email accounts
Another upside to GreenGeeks’ security is that it does automated backups every night without the need for any third-party backup service subscriptions.
Trees planted
To support their eco-friendly promise, GreenGeeks commits to planting one tree for each hosting plan. GreenGeeks also purchases carbon offsets of three times as much energy the company has consumed each year.
Uptime and reliability
GreenGeeks’ servers performed exceptionally well in our tests with a perfect uptime of 100%, which is as good as it gets. While the company still advertises an uptime of 99.99% for practical reasons, you can rely on your GreenGeeks website being up virtually all the time.
Site response times
GreenGeeks’ websites have excellent site response times due to various loading and processing speed-enhancing practices like CDN. While the servers might not be built to handle data from extremely busy websites from MNCs, they are more than capable of performing efficiently virtually all the time when it comes to small-to-medium-sized business websites with sizable traffic.
In addition to great servers, GreenGeeks offers CloudFlare services with many of its hosting packages, further speeding things up.
Our testing shows that GreenGeeks has an average page load time of 1.035 s, and an average response time of 478ms, so your site will load very quickly.
Optimized WordPress tools
GreenGeeks also helps its customers by providing a variety of WordPress site-building tools. Customers using these tools can be confident their sites are properly made and configured to be up, stable, and load quickly at all times.
How SSL certificates provide better security
Every GreenGeeks hosting package comes with a free SSL certificate. SSL certificates are encryption protocols used to protect your data from malicious third party interception. They help define a series of actions that your web browser and data servers (cloud-based in most cases) must execute every time there is an exchange of data.
Protection against data erasure
GreenGeeks’ data servers are processed using the “RAID 10” protocol, which is an advancement on the RAID 1 protocol that most other services use. RAID 1 employs simple data mirroring, which duplicates data and uses it as backup storage in the event of a server failure. RAID 10 both mirrors and stripes data to increase data redundancy and hence significantly reduce the risk of data loss.
Striping in RAID is when data is divided into equal parts and stored on different servers. This way, processing is delegated to several servers and is much quicker and safer.
Another great thing about GreenGeeks’ support: the team isn’t there just when something is wrong. It also offers some excellent training, migration help, and informational resources to help you to become an expert in hosting your site. If you have some extra time in your day, we recommend spending it learning more about how to optimize your hosting with GreenGeeks.
GreenGeeks’ live chat is very responsive. Customer support executives are assigned to users almost instantly, and most user problems are solved easily by them. GreenGeek’s support team can be contacted easily even if you aren’t currently a subscriber of its services. However,
The following are just some of the recent product improvements rolled out by GreenGeeks:
- All its servers are now completely RAID-10 SSD-based as opposed to the previous SSD-cache-based setup, which was less secure.
- Since last year, all of GreenGeeks’ servers are PHP 7 enabled by default.
- GreenGeeks periodically updates its virus definition base, which informs both the users and the system about the latest malware threats.
- WordPress support is now available to all users to help them improve site performance.
Compare GreenGeeks Alternatives
GreenGeeks might be among the best choices for small businesses that do not need hefty private servers. But the steep pricing for its VPS and dedicated hosting options makes it unfit for larger businesses who might not want to spend as much. I looked closely at the top alternatives, spent time using its services, and researched each one for hours. My research provides objective information about each company so you can find the best one for you.
See how GreenGeeks compares to other top-tier hosting companies the team here at Digital.com recommends:
Frequently Asked Questions About GreenGeeks
What operating system does GreenGeeks use?
Does GreenGeeks use cPanel?
How Do I Cancel My GreenGeeks Account?
What if I didn’t receive my GreenGeeks login email?
How many customers does GreenGeeks have?
How many eebsites can you host on GreenGeeks?
Is GreenGeeks good for WordPress hosting?
Does my GreenGeeks plan include email hosting?
Will GreenGeeks email still work if my domain registration is expired?
Is it possible to sign up for GreenGeeks without a credit card?
Does GreenGeeks offer forum support?
How I Rated GreenGeeks
I test web hosts based on the following factors:
- Plan value: What plans are available, and do they offer a good value?
- Ease of use: Is the dashboard easy to navigate?
- Support: How fast can you get help when needed, and is support genuinely helpful?
- Features: What features does the host offer, and how do they compare to similar competitors?
- Security: Does the host offer SSL certificates, Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack protection, backup services, and scans for viruses and malware?
- Speed and uptime: Does the provider offer a fast, stable environment for your website? How does it perform in tests, and what kind of servers does the hosting company use?
- Recent improvements: What has the host done lately to update its technology and services?
Learn more about our review methodology.
