SiteGround has been a sturdy hosting when I switched from Bluehost back in the day.
I found their support to be excellent, having a high command of English, patient and polite.
However, there are some limitations to SiteGround you should be aware of if you’re considering signing up with them.
SiteGround’s hosting plan page says you can host unlimited websites, unmetered traffic, and unlimited databases on GrowBig or GoGeek plan.
Sounds super generous, right?
Well, actually there are some limitations they are not telling you there.
Unlimited Databases, Limited Database Size
Although you can create and keep as many databases as you want, SiteGround will start showing you a warning if you an individual database file size becomes too large.
One of my databases went over 2 GB in file size, and I started to get message like above. Unfortunately it didn’t state exactly how small the database file should be.
You could technically go through the said database to check and remove the tables that are no longer in use (e.g. tables that are generated by plugins that you no longer use) in order to reduce the database file size.
This practice may help improving the site’s performance, but there’s a risk of deleting the wrong tables and have unintended outcome. For an average WordPress user, I recommend that the use a database optimization plugin to clean up the database, and have an experienced developer to go through the actual MYSQL database and remove the unnecessary tables to further optimize the database if needed.
Inode Usage
You can create and host unlimited websites on SiteGround, right? Yes. You can create as many subdomains, added domains, and link them to the hosted website files and make them accessible.
However, there’s a limit on the number of files you can host on your disk space.
This is separate from the disk space usage. SiteGround’s GoGeek plan gives you 40 GB of storage space, but in addition, you’ll have a limited number of individal files and folders you can host.
SiteGround calls these individal files and folders inode.
Here you’ll see that the maximum inodes I can host is 60,000. So I can create as many websites as I want as long as the combined total of files and folders required to host those sites does not exceed 60,000.
So if you keep creating websites, eventually you’ll hit this inode limit.
I used to create a lot of test websites for development and tinkering, so I hit the inode limit pretty quickly. My solution was to simply delete some of them.
Unless you run dozens and dozens of huge websites, you shouldn’t run into this problem. However, be aware and if you have to, upgrade your plan to SiteGround’s cloud hosting or enterprise solutions to better serve your needs.
Comments are closed.