GreenGeeks Review: How Does the Green Company Stack Up?

GreenGeeks Review - Quick Summary

When shopping around for web hosting providers, it’s easy to get an idea if the company is a good fit for you by reviewing the key features offered. From there, you can choose to dive deeper into the services, statistics, plans and more. Check out the following key features of GreenGeeks to see if they fit your needs.

The uptime of web hosting companies should be one of the most important considerations for potential clients. Uptime refers to the amount of time that your website is online and accessible.

As web hosting is dependent on hardware and software, there may be times when issues arise with such technologies - loss of power happens, hardware malfunctions and unexpected behavior may occur.

By reviewing the uptime of any given company over the past year or more, you can see how often issues arise. On GreenGeeks website, a 99 percent uptime is advertised and the uptime tests hold up that claim.

The lowest score reported by Pingdom over the past year was 99.82 percent. If you go back further than a year, you will start to see some lower scores with a couple of bad months. For example, December of 2020 shows a score of 49.63 percent.

A score below 50 percent is uncharacteristically low for any web hosting company. We can only hope there is a good explanation for such a low uptime score!

With impressive scores over the past 12 months, you should feel confident that GreenGeeks provides a reliable service to its clients.

Have you ever visited a website, clicked on a page and felt like you had to wait for ages for it to load even though you have a strong internet connection? We have too, and we can confidently say that it makes us not want to return to that website.

If you’re a website owner whose website loads slowly, site visitors will not be inclined to return. Even a few seconds of loading is enough time to convince website visitors to leave your site and find a competitor’s website.

While website load speeds come down to many things, a big factor is a web hosting company, and for that reason it’s crucial to check out a web hosting company’s average page loading time.

In this category, GreenGeeks shines. Using Pingdom once again, the past 12 months of tests show an average response time of around 500ms. The highest score posted in the past 12 months was 553 ms in August, 2021.

Having a reliable speed in the range of half of a second is something GreenGeeks can be proud of. Additionally, it’s an important feature that customers should see as a strong point for the company.

Virtually all web hosting providers offer multiple types of hosting and several tiers of services. They typically offer a basic, cheap web hosting plan, an intermediate plan and a premium plan that’s tailored more towards businesses and websites with high traffic.

The most common types of services are web and WordPress hosting, VPS hosting and reseller hosting. Some companies, like GreenGeeks, may offer specific eCommerce hosting as well.

​​​​​​​GreenGeeks offers all of these types of hosting, and within each category, they offer different levels. Check out the various hosting plans and their features below.

For both general web hosting and WordPress hosting, you have three plans: Lite, Pro and Premium, which each start at $2.95, $5.95 and $10.95, respectively. The Lite Plan comes with all the basic features like one website, 50GB of web space, 50 email accounts, free CDN, free SSL certificate, built-in caching, nightly backups, a free domain name for a year and a 30-day guarantee.

If you upgrade to one of the other two tiers, you receive unlimited web space, unlimited email accounts, unlimited websites and other advanced features such as on-demand backups. The Premium tier takes it one level higher and adds object caching, free dedicated IP and free AlphaSSL.

VPS hosting is tailored towards clients who need more services than a standard web host account provides. With the lowest tier, you’ll get 4 vCPU, 2GB of ram, 50GB SSD space, cPanel dashboard, 10 TB of transfer data, free website transfer and GreenGeeks managed support for $39.95 per month.

When you choose to upgrade, you can get up to 8GB of ram, 6 vCPU and 150GB of SSD space.

Reseller hosting is offered to people who want to start their own hosting business.

Tiers are categorized by how many cPanel accounts are provided in each. GreenGeeks offers plans of 25, 50 and 80 accounts. For each plan, you get a free SSL certificate, free cPanel migrations and GreenGeeks managed support.

The tiers start with 60GB of space and 600GB of transfer, and they increase to 80GB of space and 800 GB of transfer and 160GB of space and 1600GB of transfer.

GreenGeeks takes pride in its data centers and server hardware. Each data center utilizes climate control, fire suppression systems, water detection systems, generators and more to ensure that clients’ data is well-protected. What’s more, each center is staffed 24/7 by technicians, engineers and security staff.

All the company’s servers, regardless of the customer’s plan, use Intel Xeon processors and have a minimum of 128GB DDR3 ECC-registered memory. Plus, all servers have RAID-10 SSD storage arrays and BGP4 gigabit connectivity.

When you set up an account with GreenGeeks, you can choose where you want your website hosted. The company has three data centers to choose from in the following locations:

• Chicago, U.S.A.
• Montreal, Canada
• Amsterdam, Netherlands

Besides what was mentioned about the physical security of your data in the data centers, GreenGeeks takes your website security seriously as well. The company uses a 24/7 monitoring system that employs custom security rules. The system used is designed to stop DDoS attacks and brute-force hacking.

On top of the built-in security system, GreenGreeks’ plans come with SSL certificates. Depending on the plan, you may also get advanced security features designed for enterprise-level applications. What’s more, each customer can secure their data by using password-protected directories.

One of the worst things that can happen to a hosted website is losing the data whether from some sort of hack or server crash. GreenGeeks eliminates those possibilities by conducting free recovery backups every night. Each hosting plan comes with one free site restoration per month.

If you’ve ever had an issue with a product you pay for and have not been able to get in touch with customer support, you know how important it is to choose your subscription services better the next time.

Too often, web hosting customers complain that they can’t contact their provider to fix a critical error leaving their website users wondering why the website is down.

Luckily, with GreenGeeks that doesn’t happen. GreenGeeks provides three channels of contact to support its customers. It has a phone line open during the hours of 9 a.m. to 12 a.m. EST Monday through Friday and 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. EST on the weekends.

There is also a live chat available 24/7 and an email account that is consistently monitored. GreenGreeks claims that customers will receive an email reply within 20 minutes.

Beyond contacting GreenGeeks for support, it also has a Help Center with various resources and FAQs. The company also offers various How-To articles that can help clients learn how to start a blog, online store, or a web hosting business.

GreenGeeks Canada is not any other web hosting company - it has a unique business model that allows it to stand out from its competitors which brings up the first pro. This web hosting company offers an environmentally friendly option for people who want to host a website but are concerned about the energy it uses.

GreenGeeks commits itself to replace the energy it produces three times over with wind power credits. On average, GreenGeeks replaces 615000+ kWh per year!

Beyond the eco-friendly business model, GreenGeeks offers clients a 100 percent guarantee for 30 days. If you’re not happy with your GreenGeeks subscription, you can receive a refund with no questions asked. What’s more, you will remain the owner of the domain.

Another unique aspect of GreenGeeks that is certainly a pro is the management team. GreenGeeks is run by Trey Gardner and Kaumil Patel. The two of them combine for over 40 years of experience in the web hosting industry. It’s safe to say that GreenGeeks’ clients are in good hands.

The main downfall of GreenGeeks is the pricing. On the website, the company has advertised a seemingly low fee of $2.95 per month.

However, upon further inspection, you’ll see that you will pay $2.95 per month if you sign up for a three-year hosting plan. If you want to pay annually, you’ll pay $4.95 per month, and if you choose a more flexible monthly plan, you will pay $10.95 per month.

The bottom line of the GreenGeeks review is that it is a great option for anyone in need of web hosting. The company offers several types of hosting for all kinds of customers including startup businesses, content creators, eCommerce store owners and more. In each plan, customers get great features like free CDN and SSL, a free domain name and more.

On top of the features, GreenGeeks has impressive scores in uptime and speed and it has a great customer support team to go along with its already user-friendly system.

What’s more, GreenGeeks has done an excellent job finding a niche that serves its clients well. For the people who are concerned about their environmental impact, GreenGeeks is the best choice available. And, as cannot be forgotten, the company offers a 30-day money-back guarantee if you’re unhappy with the services.