Complaint Review: Siteground

 I first joined Siteground about 2 years ago after looking to upgrade to a new web hosting company. At first, their customer service was friendly, amazing, and responded quickly. Over time, once they had me lured in, I learned the truth about them. First of all, they are "upgrade happy" - meaning, rather than trying to make suggestions and help you with an issue first, they immediately want to recommend you upgrade. I made did twice with them in less than a year! Of course, they prey on those not as familiar with such a thing to "sucker" into their upgrades that they may or may not need. 

Flash forward to September of 2015 I hired a web developer/programmer to go in and clean up the code of my web site. Well, that's then I discovered just how bad things were from Siteground "helping". I should have known that when you get different answers from different techs it wouldn't be good, but again, I didn't know better and just went with the flow. Since I was pleased with my developers service I went forward with a full site re-design and upgrade which meant also moving to a better and more reliable webhost. My design was a complex one that took months and during the process there were issues with my server on Siteground where the developers would try and work with them to fix the issue. Siteground seriously lacked in response. They will respond within the first 15 minutes, but the next response could be hours or even days later. It's during this time that I discovered Siteground had LIED to me to get me to sign up. I knew the questions to ask when I joined, including about refunds and things of that nature. I was promised the same 30-day refund if I was not happy. Unfortunately, they did NOT mention that my account would not qualify because I joined with the Cloud account - which is not covered in this deal. Also, they never mentioned that they CHARGE YOU $25 if you were to cancel in that 30-day period.

I've experienced a LOT of down time from Siteground during my time with them and each time they claimed it wasn't their fault, yet I have SCREEN SHOTS showing when THEIR site showed THEY are having issues with the SERVER. Somehow that would always get twisted into something that was my fault though according to their techs.I've also experienced being lied to further when tickets were supposedly forwarded to a supervisor, but it literally took HOURS to do so. It shows when a ticket is in progress or has been forwarded. Basically, Siteground just delays and never fixes things like they claim.

Fast forward to more recently. Once I moved over to my new web hosting company, my web developer requested a backup of my database from Siteground. Siteground seems to think they did us a favor by providing this for free, but it literally took them DAYS to get this completed and probably would have been longer if not for me opening a new ticket to check in on them. Here's the real problem though, they provided INCOMPLETE backups as well as CORRUPTED ones. Siteground denies this, but my web developer PROVED to them where he even saw in the coding that the backup was incomplete. Siteground is STILL denying this and basically called my developer a liar. They are also claiming that THEY cleaned up my database coding multiple times. Unfortunately that is NOT true. Siteground did NOTHING of the sort. My programmer, which I paid to do, had to clean up all the coding and basically said it was a nightmare in so many words because of how bad off it was. So if Siteground did "clean up the coding" they must have had someone in there who knew NOTHING. The fact that Siteground has the nerve to LIE really bothers me. If they provided me corrupted backups, then I'm really concerned about times in the past I had them restore my site - did they honestly only make it worse because they're incompetent to even send a completed backup? Before anybody asks why I did not do a backup on my own, Siteground has the backup button DISABLED. That's right. It's turned OFF so you cannot do your own backup and have to PAY them $50 to do it! This is something they do not tell you up front either. You have to dig around to figure it out. Every little thing requires money. Siteground is over priced and has techs with no skills or knowledge.

The point of my rant though is I want to be refunded for all my down time, since I was promised to be online 99.9% of the time and I wasn't. I want to be compensated for all their lies. I want to be compensated for the money that I had to pay extra to my web developer due to Siteground's lack of responding. I mean, my developer did try to talk by phone to them, but they would only allow him to submit a ticket and not deal with him any other way. Same goes with me. Everything had to be done by ticket. Yet for signing up they would talk on the phone for as long as you needed. This hosting company is junk. They are disrespectful. They are dishonest. They are the perfect example of a scammer who wants to cheat people out of hard earned money.

For anyone considering leaving one hosting company to go to Siteground, you will regret it. Siteground will make your last hosting company look perfect. STAY AWAY!