GreenGeeks is one of the only green web hosting companies. Although they are mostly known as a green web hosting company, it doesn’t mean their offerings aren’t as good as other web hosting companies. But is GreenGeeks a good web host for beginners?
GreenGeeks offers high-performance, scalable web hosting services for businesses of all shapes and sizes. They are trusted by thousands of businesses around the world.
BUT is GreenGeeks good for beginners?
Should you host your first website with them?
Are they reliable?
In this article, I will go in-depth about GreenGeeks’ offerings. By the end, you will know beyond the shadow of a doubt whether or not GreenGeeks is a good web hosting choice for your website, blog, or online store.
GreenGeeks Offerings For Beginners
GreenGeeks offers Shared Hosting, Dedicated Servers, VPS Hosting, WordPress Hosting, and Reseller Hosting.
I will only review the three that are relevant for beginners:
Shared Hosting
Shared Hosting is one of the best places to start for beginners.
It allows you to run almost any CMS software on your website. You can choose between Joomla, WordPress, Drupal, and many others.
The best part about Shared Hosting is that it is really affordable:
Pricing starts From $2.95 per month. That’s less than one cup of Starbucks every month.
GreenGeeks Shared Hosting has everything you will need to launch and run a successful website.
Even the cheapest Lite plan has almost everything you will need at the start of your journey. For example, it comes with 50 email accounts.
That means you can create a custom email address on your own domain name. Other web hosts charge you for that.
GreenGeeks invests a lot in making sure your website loads fast. Their servers run on LiteSpeed webserver software, which is much faster than Apache.
They also offer a free CDN service you can enable with just one click. A CDN can cut your website’s loading time in half.
All GreenGeeks plans come with free daily backups. In case of a disaster, you can easily restore your website back to a previous backup.
If you want to run your website on WordPress, you should go with WordPress hosting — reviewed below.
Or you can go with Shared Hosting if you want some extra control over your website, and install WordPress yourself.
Read my tutorial on how to install WordPress on GreenGeeks to learn how.
WordPress Hosting
There isn’t a lot of difference between WordPress Hosting and Shared Hosting.
The biggest difference is that WordPress Hosting comes pre-installed with WordPress.
It also offers some WordPress-specific features such as free WordPress site migration, and automatic updates.
GreenGeeks makes it really easy to install and manage WordPress. It is one of the best web hosts for WordPress sites.
The pricing plans are the same and offer exactly the same features:
If you are a beginner, we highly recommend going with WordPress. The best part about WordPress is how easy it makes to manage your website.
You can learn the ropes in one evening. WordPress gives you a simple dashboard where you can manage your website and its content.
Another great thing about WordPress is how easy it makes adding new features to your website. All you have to do is install a plugin and that’s it!
Want to add an online store to your website? Just install WooCommerce. Want to sell ticked to your events? There’s a plugin for that. Want to collect leads on your website? There’s a plugin for that.
And you don’t even need to pay for most of these plugins. There are thousands of free plugins at your disposal that you can install with just a couple of clicks:
And if you want functionality that isn’t available in any of the free plugins, there are thousands of other premium plugins created by trusted WordPress developers.
VPS Hosting
If you are a beginner, VPS Hosting may not be the best place to start…
VPS Hosting gives you complete access to an isolated slice of a web server. This is great when you want complete control.
But it sucks if you don’t have a lot of experience with web servers. A VPS server is a web developer’s heaven and a beginner’s worst nightmare.
This doesn’t mean that VPS Hosting isn’t useful for small businesses.
As your website starts getting a lot more traffic, you will want to consider VPS servers as they are highly scalable and offer much better performance than most other types of web hosting services.
GreenGeeks’ Managed VPS Hosting may not be the cheapest but packs a lot of power…
… and it is a managed service. That means you can reach out to the GreenGeeks support team whenever you need help with your VPS.
One of the best parts about GreenGeeks’ VPS service is that it comes bundled with cPanel.
cPanel makes managing a server a breeze. It comes with all the tools you need including PHPMyAdmin, a file manager, and much more.
GreenGeeks Features
Free CDN
GreenGeeks offers a free CDN service that you can start using right away.
A CDN delivers content to your visitors from servers that are closest to them. This can cut your website’s load time in half.
Their partner Cloudflare is the one that offers this free service.
Cloudflare is free and is used by thousands of websites around the world. This free service will also protect your website from bots and DDoS attacks.
Performance-optimized Servers
GreenGeeks’ servers use LiteSpeed to serve your website. It is much faster than the more popular Apache web server software.
They have optimized their LiteSpeed servers for WordPress. So, if you run your website on WordPress, you should see a huge boost in performance.
They also use SSD drives instead of Hard Drives, which can be really slow. SSDs work much faster and offer a performance boost to your website.
Green Energy Match
GreenGeeks matches 3 times the amount of energy they use for their servers in renewable energy credits.
But that’s not all, their data centers are also eco-friendly, and are optimized to be efficient. So, if you are team pro-earth, this is the best web host for you.
They also plan a tree for every new web hosting account created on their platform.
Free Domain Name For First Year
If you don’t have a domain name for your website already, you can get one for free when you buy web hosting from GreenGeeks.
They offer a free domain name for the first year of your web hosting plan.
GreenGeeks Pros and Cons For Beginners
Before you buy anything from GreenGeeks, here are some pros and cons to keep in mind:
Pros
- 24/7 Support: GreenGeeks’ support team is available 24/7 to help you.
- Free Email Accounts: All GreenGeeks plans allow you to set up Email Addresses on your own domain name. Other web hosts charge a lot of money for this service.
- Performance-optimized Servers: They use LiteSpeed instead of apache and SSD drives to speed up your website.
- Highly Scalable: GreenGeeks allows unlimited disk space, bandwidth, and websites on their Pro and Premium plans.
- Free CDN Service: A CDN caches your website on edge servers that are spread out around the world, and delivers your website to users from locations closest to them. This can double your website’s speed.
- Free Domain Name: You get a free domain name for the first year.
- Green Hosting: GreenGeeks purchase renewable energy credits for 300% of the amount of energy their servers use. They also plant 1 tree for every new account created.
Cons
- Free Domain Name Only For 1 Year: You have to pay the full price for the domain name from the second year onwards.
- Renewal Prices are Much Higher: You have to pay almost double when you renew your web hosting products. This isn’t just GreenGeeks. This is an industry-wide practice.
If you still aren’t sure about GreenGeeks, read my detailed GreenGeeks hosting review.
If you aren’t sure which plan is best for you, read my review of GreenGeeks pricing plans. It will help you pick the perfect plan for you.
Summary – Is GreenGeeks a Good Web Host For Beginners?
GreenGeeks is hands down one of the best web hosts for beginners.
They offer 24/7 support and make it really easy to launch your first website. Their dashboards are built for beginners and are really easy to use.
The best part about GreenGeeks is that they have a focus on website performance.
That’s why all their servers run on LiteSpeed instead of Apache. And they only use SSD drives to host your website.
These are only some of the things they do to make sure your website loads as fast as it can.
GreenGeeks is better than almost all other web hosts on the market. If you don’t have a website already, you should sign up for GreenGeeks today. As a beginner, you can’t go wrong with them.
