GreenGeeks Review 2023: Expert Rated 4.3/5

GreenGeeks Pros and Cons

GreenGeeks is an efficient and affordable solution for small businesses looking for a comprehensive web hosting package. However, it doesn’t provide widespread international support, so it may not be a good choice for multinational corporations across multiple continents.

What we like about GreenGeeks

• Scalable hosting solutions: GreenGeeks allows users to choose from a wide range of scalable hosting solutions like Shared, WordPress, Virtual Private Server (VPS), and dedicated server packages. Businesses can dynamically change their plans to fit their changing business needs.
• Well-stacked help center: GreenGeeks sports a vast and diverse help center with numerous how-to guides, website tutorials, and webinars for easier employee onboarding.
• Reliable uptime of up to 99.9%: The platform offers an excellent uptime of 99.99%, often considered the industry benchmark.
• Eco-friendly hosting methods: Apart from purchasing three times the wind energy credits that the company consumes, GreenGeeks uses energy-efficient storage and server solutions to reduce its carbon footprint.
• Automatic night backup: All data held in shared, private, or VPS servers are backed up each night and made instantly available to users in case of an emergency.
• 30-day money-back guarantee: GreenGeeks offers an unconditional 30-day money-back guarantee for even the most basic monthly plans.
• Free domain for a year: All users are given a free domain and migration tools for a year. GreenGeeks migration specialists help users switch from their current host to GreenGeeks free of charge.

What fell flat

• No provision for Windows Server Hosting: If you are currently using cloud servers hosted by Microsoft Windows, GreenGeeks won’t be able to integrate its services. These users will be required to switch to GreenGeeks or another supported hosting service.
• Fine print: You must commit to a three-year plan to use the advertised price. While the plan is easily affordable for small businesses, they can only receive these prices if they commit to GreenGeeks for at least three years.
• Pricier VPS and dedicated hosting options: The shared hosting option available on GreenGeeks (perfect for small businesses) is much cheaper than other services, but its VPS and dedicated hosting options are a little pricier owing to the special energy-efficient servers GreenGeeks uses.
• Domain costs more if you avail of the 30-day money back: If you take advantage of the 30 money-back guarantee, your domain name will cost more than most other hosting providers due to the equipment and migration costs.

Digital.com’s Editorial Review

GreenGeeks has excellent overall user ratings, competitive pricing, extensive customer support, and quick response times. Overall, the service is very reliable and ideal for small businesses.

99.99% uptime guarantee

All of the hosting packages at GreenGeeks come with a 99.99% uptime guarantee. Your hosting servers will be available to serve traffic at least 99.99% of the time, above the industry standard of 99.9%. An uptime of 99.99% is considered the benchmark for the perfect uptime.

Free Cloudflare integration to speed up your site

Your sites will be automatically configured to use the Cloudflare system, designed to take key files from your website and distribute them across various data centers. When someone tries to load your site, they will pull the largest files from a geographically-close server, so it will load more quickly.

Free SSL certificate

All hosting packages at GreenGeeks come with a free shared SSL certificate from Let’s Encrypt SSL that will provide your site with significant security. It also ensures your site is following best practices regarding security, which Google confirms is important for proper SEO.

Advanced custom security rules

GreenGeeks offers all the standard hosting security features that are considered to be the industry standard. This includes powerful firewalls to prevent unauthorized traffic to your site, monitored internet connectivity, and more. GreenGeeks also allows you to customize your security options by creating:

• IP address blacklists
• Password-protected directories
• Completely customizable private keys and digital certificates
• Word-triggered filters for email accounts

Another upside to GreenGeeks’ security is that it does automated backups every night without the need for any third-party backup service subscriptions.

Trees planted

To support their eco-friendly promise, GreenGeeks commits to planting one tree for each hosting plan. GreenGeeks also purchases carbon offsets of three times as much energy the company has consumed each year.

Uptime and reliability

GreenGeeks’ servers performed exceptionally well in our tests with a perfect uptime of 100%, which is as good as it gets. While the company still advertises an uptime of 99.99% for practical reasons, you can rely on your GreenGeeks website being up virtually all the time.

Site response times

GreenGeeks’ websites have excellent site response times due to various loading and processing speed-enhancing practices like CDN. While the servers might not be built to handle data from extremely busy websites from MNCs, they are more than capable of performing efficiently virtually all the time when it comes to small-to-medium-sized business websites with sizable traffic.

In addition to great servers, GreenGeeks offers CloudFlare services with many of its hosting packages, further speeding things up.

Our testing shows that GreenGeeks has an average page load time of 1.035 s, and an average response time of 478ms, so your site will load very quickly.

Optimized WordPress tools

GreenGeeks also helps its customers by providing a variety of WordPress site-building tools. Customers using these tools can be confident their sites are properly made and configured to be up, stable, and load quickly at all times.

How SSL certificates provide better security

Every GreenGeeks hosting package comes with a free SSL certificate. SSL certificates are encryption protocols used to protect your data from malicious third party interception. They help define a series of actions that your web browser and data servers (cloud-based in most cases) must execute every time there is an exchange of data.

Protection against data erasure

GreenGeeks’ data servers are processed using the “RAID 10” protocol, which is an advancement on the RAID 1 protocol that most other services use. RAID 1 employs simple data mirroring, which duplicates data and uses it as backup storage in the event of a server failure. RAID 10 both mirrors and stripes data to increase data redundancy and hence significantly reduce the risk of data loss.

Striping in RAID is when data is divided into equal parts and stored on different servers. This way, processing is delegated to several servers and is much quicker and safer.

The following are just some of the recent product improvements rolled out by GreenGeeks:

• All its servers are now completely RAID-10 SSD-based as opposed to the previous SSD-cache-based setup, which was less secure.
• Since last year, all of GreenGeeks’ servers are PHP 7 enabled by default.
• GreenGeeks periodically updates its virus definition base, which informs both the users and the system about the latest malware threats.
• WordPress support is now available to all users to help them improve site performance.

Compare GreenGeeks Alternatives

GreenGeeks might be among the best choices for small businesses that do not need hefty private servers. But the steep pricing for its VPS and dedicated hosting options makes it unfit for larger businesses who might not want to spend as much.

Check out all of our favorite hosting providers or compare GreenGeeks to its closest competitors below.

How We Reviewed GreenGeeks

I test web hosts based on the following factors:

• Plan value: What plans are available, and do they offer a good value?
• Ease of use: Is the dashboard easy to navigate?
• Support: How fast can you get help when needed, and is support genuinely helpful?
• Features: What features does the host offer, and how do they compare to similar competitors?
• Security: Does the host offer SSL certificates, Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack protection, backup services, and scans for viruses and malware?
• Speed and uptime: Does the provider offer a fast, stable environment for your website? How does it perform in tests, and what kind of servers does the hosting company use?
• Recent improvements: What has the host done lately to update its technology and services?

Learn more about our review methodology.