GreenGeeks Host

GreenGeeks Prices

Premium

Let’s first look at how much it costs per month to host your website on GreenGeeks. The first option is for shared hosting (the one most website owners need). You’ll also find that they offer WordPress web hosting. As far as I could tell, there is absolutely no difference between the WordPress and the shared hosting option.

As always, we’ll only be mentioning the regular price, which is what you pay after a first year at a discounted price. The first 12 months can be 50 – 70% cheaper.

You can purchase the plans for 12, 24 or 36 months. There is a significant discount for the longer terms, as you can see below:

GreenGeeks also offers VPS hosting, which comes with better performance, but a lot of limits depending on the plan you choose.

Finally, I should also mention that GreenGeeks has a few add-ons you can purchase to expand your hosting capabilities. These include:

• Dedicated IP address: $48 per year
• Premium AlphaSSL Wildcard: to secure SSL on multiple subdomains all at once.
• WHMCS license: useful for resellers who want to bill hosting to their clients (note that GreenGeeks does offer a reselling option).

Last but not least, you’ll have to pay $25 for every backup restore, if you do it more than once per month (the first one is free).

What can you expect from each GreenGeeks plan?

As you can see in the above table, there’s a lot of unlimited stuff with their shared hosting and WordPress plans. That includes:

• Unlimited bandwidth (or data transfer, which means the same thing)
• Unlimited disk storage
• Unlimited databases
• Unlimited email accounts
• Free SSL

The key limits to keep an eye on are maybe the number of inodes, which is another way of saying the number of files on your site. It’s a very large number, mostly there to ensure you don’t abuse GreenGeeks’ generosity by hosting a file sharing website.

GreenGeeks Pros & Cons

•  Pros
•  Cons

Pros

• Green-mindedGreenGeeks is attempting to offset their server’s electricity consumption by using as much renewable energy as possible.
• Unlimited data bandwidthYou can host one or multiple sites with complete peace of mind when it comes to visitor numbers and bandwidth.
• Unlimited data storageYour site can be as large as you like, so good for video, high-res photos and ecommerce with loads of products. Just keep an eye on the number of files. Hosting more than 150,000 could void your plan’s contract.
• Server locationsThree continents to choose from, the US, Canada and Europe.
• Heavily reduced long-term plansIt’s not unusual to pay less for 24 or 36 month plans, but GreenGeeks is slashing their monthly prices by up to 70% for long-term users.
• PerformanceGreenGeeks was one of the fastest providers tested, and the uptime rates are excellent.

When to use GreenGeeks hosting?

I’d say GreenGeeks is best for website owners with green goals in mind. You can even show one of their green badges, to highlight on your site.

The generous bandwidth and storage is advantageous for those who own multiple sites. As far as the performance to price ratio goes, it’s good, and becomes more acceptable when you buy a long term contract of 24 or 36 months.

When not to use GreenGeeks hosting?

Anyone managing a team should consider that inviting others to join the account isn’t possible, and the lack of developer-friendly features could be a big no-no for certain businesses.

GreenGeeks specifications

EASE OF USE

GreenGeeks’ panel is intuitive and well organised. They integrate cPanel, a visual tool to manage hosting services. It’s easy enough to use, but I prefer more modern-looking panels like the ones offered by SiteGround, DreamHost or Kinsta.

Sadly, there doesn’t seem to be a way to create additional users for team management on the same account. This is very useful if you work with clients or have a large team with several members that need access to the hosting admin panel.

DOMAIN NAMES

You are entitled to a free domain name the first year, after that you’ll need to pay for it. A .com domain name renews at $13.95 per year, but prices can vary wildly.

EMAIL RATING

It’s possible to create unlimited email accounts and there doesn’t seem to be any limitation on how much storage they can use.

DATABASES

Fortunately, with GreenGeeks there isn’t a limitation on how many databases you can have. I wasn’t able to hit or find a database size limitation, so in theory, they can be as big as you need.

APPLICATIONS

GreenGeeks comes with Softaculous, a cPanel visual interface that will allow you to install dozens of apps and CMS like WordPress, PrestaShop, Drupal, Joomla or Magento.

Be aware that the Lite plan will only allow 1 website to be installed, the other packages come with unlimited site installs.

WEBSPACE LIMIT

GreenGeeks website says that all their plans come with unlimited storage, which is true. However, they do limit the number of files your account will be able to host to 150,000 files for the Lite plan, 300,000 for the Pro and 500,000 for the higher tier.*

MONTHLY DATA TRANSFER LIMIT

GreenGeeks doesn’t meter the bandwidth you get.

FTP ACCOUNTS AND SECURE FTP

Create as many FTP accounts as you need. SFTP (Secure FTP) and SSH access are also allowed.

SERVER LOCATION

You can choose to host your site in a datacenter in three key locations: the US, Canada or Europe.

SECURITY FEATURES

With GreenGeeks you can enable SSL encryption for free. The latest PHP and MySQL versions are also valid, which would make your site more secure when you use them.

GreenGeeks also isolates accounts, so if somehow one site is infected with malicious code, it won’t spread to all your other sites.

SERVER SPEED

Excellent, according to our tests. GreenGeeks ranked number 2, with an average of 1.56 seconds loading speed.

UPTIME

The uptime we saw in our tests is good, but there are providers offering a bit more. It hovered around 99.98%.

BACKUPS

They only offer a backup of the last 24-hours and you can have 1 restore a month for free. After that, the fee is $25 for every time you request a backup restore.

You can manually backup the site yourself, but there are two caveats. Firstly, you have to do it through the clunky cPanel feature, which I don’t love using. Second, if your account is larger than 10GB, each manual backup request will cost you $5.

CDN

There is no included CDN. However, you can easily integrate Cloudflare with GreenGeeks’ dedicated cPanel feature.

Note that Cloudflare can be free or purchased depending on the plan you need.

SERVER FEATURES

It comes with the latest PHP (5,7 and 8) and MySQL versions. They use HTTP/2. Perl and Python are also supported. Its system is optimized to integrate with LiteSpeed and LSCache caching system.

REFUNDS AND GUARANTEES

There is a 30-day money back policy.

For uptime, GreenGeeks guarantees that your site will be running at least 99.9% of the time. If it drops below that rate, you’ll get some money towards your next monthly payment.

ASSISTANCE AND SUPPORT

You can reach GreenGeeks support via chat, phone and email. Please be aware that phone support is only available during EST office hours (Monday to Sunday from 9 AM to 12 AM). The support section has a lot of useful tutorials.

OVERALL RATING

GreenGeeks offers decent performance to price ratio, as long as you don’t need advanced features like team management.

The big selling point is the fact that GreenGeeks is more committed to renewable energy than other hosting providers.

* Limiting files instead of size is pretty common practice with these “unlimited” hosts: it’s mostly a precaution to stop people from building file sharing websites.