Finding a reliable hosting provider is often difficult. There are so many choices available out there, and it primarily depends on the kind of web hosting you require. Do you want cloud hosting, or do you want a dedicated host? Or, are you looking for a cheaper option, such as shared hosting?
GreenGeeks is a hosting provider that was founded in 2009 by Trey Gardner. The company has data centers in the United States (Chicago, Phoenix), the Netherlands (Amsterdam), and Canada (Toronto, Montreal), and currently hosts more than 300,000 websites.
Trey founded GreenGeeks when he realized just how much energy was being used by web hosting providers around the year. Shocked at the results, he decided to start GreenGeeks, a 100% eco-friendly hosting solution that fully neutralizes its carbon footprint,, but they even offer wind energy credits to offset energy usage.
But, is it good? In this GreenGeeks review, we’ll talk about pricing, performance, features, and everything else about GreenGeeks, and see whether this hosting provider is as good as they claim.
GreenGeeks Review: What Sets It Apart?
If you’re looking for decent ecommerce hosting at an affordable price, GreenGeeks may meet your needs. They offer hosting in four broad categories, including SSD hosting, WordPress hosting, VPS hosting, and reseller hosting.
If you want decent ecommerce hosting, this is a fairly nominal choice. With prices starting from as little as $2.95 per month, GreenGeeks is offering considerable value for the money you pay. They currently offer:
- WordPress hosting
- WooCommerce hosting
- Drupal hosting
- Joomla hosting
- cPanel hosting
- CMS hosting
- Magento hosting
- PrestaShop hosting
- OpenCart hosting
But, what sets GreenGeeks web hosting apart from others isn’t their tech stack or infrastructure. It’s the fact that this is one of the true eco-friendly web hosting options out there.
Now, in the paragraphs below, we’re going to talk about some of the best features that we like about GreenGeeks, and what sets them apart from the competition. Here’s our full GreenGeeks hosting review.
1-Click WordPress/WooCommerce Installation with LiteSpeed’s LS Cache
Instead of having to go through the trouble of using a FTP client to install WordPress on your site, GreenGeeks’ dedicated WordPress hosting lets you install WordPress or WooCommerce with a single click.
That’s not all; the WordPress install is automatically optimized, and the platform gives you LiteSpeed’s LS Cache for WordPress plugin, which greatly improves the performance of your WP website.
You also get a free WordPress migration, and a free domain name (for the first year) or transfer when you purchase WordPress hosting through GreenGeeks.
Fast Speeds and a Reliable Tech Stack
One of the main reasons why GreenGeeks has become such a popular choice amongst users is because they have an incredibly reliable tech stack.
For starters, they optimize their servers using LiteSpeed and MariaDB, and also use LiteSpeed’s caching technology to serve applications faster. There’s a free CDN (Cloudflare) that lets you cache and deliver content quicker to your audiences.
With the help of the Cloudflare CDN, you can reduce content-loading times and ensure that your website loads up fast. In our GreenGeeks review, we were pleasantly surprised that this is available free with your hosting account.
Their servers are all HTTP/3 enabled, which results in faster page loads. And, amongst other hosting services, GreenGeeks was one of the first to adopt PHP 7, which greatly improves execution speeds.
Includes Wildcard SSL, Robust Security, And On-Demand Backups
Security is obviously a key concern for many ecommerce store owners looking to purchase new hosting. Among the many GreenGeeks offers that the company markets, one of them is the Wildcard SSL Certificate.
They offer the premium version with their Premium plan, especially if you choose their WooCommerce hosting. Or, if you choose their conventional hosting plan, you’ll get the free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate, thus making your website HTTPs compatible.
More importantly, GreenGeeks backs up websites daily on all plans. If you decide to purchase their Pro or Premium plan, not only do you get greater bandwidth, but you also get access to on-demand backups.
GreenGeeks uses proactive monitoring and kernel level file tracking to identify any changes to files and scan them quickly for malware signatures. They rely on a secure vFS framework to isolate changed files to prevent major issues.
True Environmentally Friendly Hosting
The company claims to put back 300% the power that they consume in the form of renewable energy. The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recognizes GreenGeeks as a Green Power Partner because of their dedication to green energy.
The company works with Bonneville Environmental Foundation to determine their energy consumption, and then use that figure to calculate the energy they feed back into the grid.
We have to say that their dedication to transparency is excellent, and a welcome change from the excessive marketing gimmicks that other hosting providers use. They also plant trees every time a user purchases one of their plans.
Value Added Features and Control Panel
When you sign up for a GreenGeeks account, you’ll get access to cPanel (GreenGeeks doesn’t have its own dedicated control panel). Now, while some people are fine with cPanel, many others think that it’s tedious and difficult to manage.
If you’re one of them, this might be a deal-breaker for you. Other hosting providers, like SiteGround or Kinsta, have their own dedicated control panels, and it’s incredibly easy to manage your websites with a dedicated control panel.
While the jury is still out on cPanel, it works fairly well with GreenGeeks’ array of server technologies. As such, you won’t really have to worry about any security vulnerabilities or other issues.
Other value-added features with GreenGeeks include:
- Built-in caching
- Base package (Lite plan) offers 50 email accounts
- Staging environment (available with Softaculous)
- Free nightly backups
- Free CDN
- Free SSL
- Unmetered transfers
- Unlimited databases (uses MySQL)
- Dedicated IP address also available
- Unlimited disk space (web space) with Pro or Premium plans
- Free website migration
Weebly Website Builder Available
There’s an add-on for the Weebly Website Builder available with GreenGeeks as well. This is a drag-and-drop website builder that comes with hundreds of customizable templates, allowing you to quickly and efficiently create a new website.
The good thing about using their website builder is that your websites are SEO friendly, and are mobile and ecommerce ready. This is great for non-technical users who want to create an ecommerce store and aren’t big geeks about front-end development.
State-of-the-Art Server Specs
If you’re looking for high quality energy-efficient hosting for your ecommerce store, GreenGeeks is as good a choice as any. All their servers meet the following minimum specifications:
- Intel Xeon processors with minimum 128 GB DDR3 memory
- RAID-10 SSD Storage Arrays
- BGP4 Gigabit connectivity to multiple Fiber GigE Tier 1 Backbones
- No desktop hardware
GreenGeeks Review: Pricing and Plans
GreenGeeks pricing plans can be broadly categorized into two groups: VPS hosting and everything else. In the latter, you have options including CMS WordPress, WooCommerce, Drupal, Joomla, and several other apps..
They’re all priced the same, so we’ll be taking a look at their WooCommerce hosting packages, since launching an ecommerce store with WooCommerce is perhaps the shortest path you can take to set up an ecommerce store with GreenGeeks.
GreenGeeks offers the following three pricing plans:
- Lite: The Lite plan costs $10.95/month, but it’s available at a special price of $2.95/month. This is the entry-level plan, and is great for a single website. You get their 300% green energy match guarantee, free WooCommerce install, a free SSL certificate, free CDN and backups, and a lot more.
- Pro: The Pro plan is the most popular choice at GreenGeeks, and is great for small business owners. It generally costs $15.95/month, but you can get it at $5.95/month right now. This gives you unlimited websites, transfers, a faster response time, free domain registration for the first year, and more.
- Premium: The Premium hosting costs $25.95/month, but you can get it at $10.95/month right now. If you want the best web performance and the lowest downtime, go for this option.
As you can see, the shared hosting plans cost the same as other providers, like Bluehost or Hostgator. So, if you want to choose an eco-friendly web hosting company that offers a 99.9% uptime guarantee without costing anything extra, GreenGeeks.com is a great choice.
They also offer a 30-day money back guarantee, so you can try out GreenGeeks first before making a decision. Unfortunately, there’s no free trial option available.
VPS Hosting
VPS hosting is generally suitable for larger ecommerce stores that want more power than a traditional hosting account offers. If you want dedicated server resources, this is the way to go.
GreenGeeks offers fully managed VPS hosting with cPanel/WHM installed and configured right out of the box. You also get advanced features like PHP updates, free migration, and firewall protection.
All VPS hosting accounts are provisioned with CentOS 7 operating systems and a dedicated IP. Security includes DDoS protection and real-time monitoring.
GreenGeeks Review: What About Support?
Support is a major factor that you need to consider when looking to purchase new hosting from any provider. We’re happy to report that GreenGeeks excels in this department.
For starters, they offer 24/7 expert support, with a team of trained professionals available to offer support when you need it. Technical support is available even with their most basic hosting package, which is definitely a plus point.
Support is available directly via telephone, through live chat, and via an email ticketing solution. While email tickets and live chat are available round-the-clock, phone support is available during specific hours.
And, more importantly, GreenGeeks has a phenomenal knowledge base that’s regularly updated with new tutorials. In most of the cases, you won’t have to directly approach them at all; the dedicated guides and tutorials will do the trick.
Efficient Phone Support
While a majority of hosting providers generally offer live chat or email ticketing options, GreenGeeks offers phone support even for their most basic package, which definitely deserves a special mention.
If you are facing any kind of difficulty, whether during migration or for setting up cPanel or any other thing, you can simply get in touch with one of their trained professionals.
The cherry on top is the fact that phone support is available between 9 AM and 12 AM EST, all seven days of the week. This means you can call them at any time from 9 AM to 12 AM, and you’ll get a response.
This is great for customers in other time zones who need to get in touch with an expert too.
Further reading 📚
Is GreenGeeks The Right Hosting Provider For Your Ecommerce Store?
GreenGeeks has a lot going for it, and it’s definitely a great choice if you’re serious about playing your role in helping the environment.
It makes website migrations simple, and offers a variety of advantages at a very low price point. More importantly, you also get dedicated support options.
But, while it offers WooCommerce hosting packages, these are not cloud servers. As a result, you should know about the constraints in performance. It also uses cPanel, which, as mentioned above, has its pros and cons.
Here’s what you should consider before you choose GreenGeeks for your ecommerce venture:
- Go with GreenGeeks if you want affordable, eco-friendly hosting.
- GreenGeeks is great if you want to start a small store, and eventually scale up.
- It’s also ideal for users who are new to the hosting space, and want to learn the basics using cPanel to manage their web space.
- We really like GreenGeeks because of the value for money that it offers, especially when compared with other options.
- It’s one of the only choices available if you want a hosting provider that goes above and beyond to help the environment.
We’d love to hear more from you about our GreenGeeks review. If you have any questions or thoughts, especially if you’ve used GreenGeeks in the past or are still using it, we’d love to hear what you like and dislike about it!
Comments 0 Responses