GreenGeeks Review 2024

Edited by Michael Levanduski

Updated


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GreenGeeks is arguably the best green web hosting web service available on the market. Its lightning-fast servers, quick response times, and 24/7 support make it an excellent choice for small to midsize projects.

Who should choose GreenGeeks? GreenGeeks is a good choice for local small businesses, entrepreneurs, small to midsize e-commerce businesses, and personal websites. Really, it’s a great option for socially-conscious businesses who have the environment engrained in their values.

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Hostinger

The easiest option

Starts at $2.49 per month

  • Fail-proof setup
  • Great for beginners
  • Free AI tools

Bluehost

For new WordPress sites

Starts at $2.95 per month

  • Guided onboarding
  • Recommended by WordPress
  • 24/7 support

HostGator

Best security and scalability

Starts at $3.75 per month

  • All types of hosting
  • Enhanced security tools
  • Affordable as you grow

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.

See how we review hosting providers.

Plans & Pricing

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  • Shared–$2.95 per month
  • WordPress–$2.95 per month
  • VPS–$39.95 per month
  • Reseller–$19.95 per month
  • Dedicated–$169 per month

Features

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  • SSD Storage Arrays
  • Best speed technologies
  • Free site builders
  • Customizable dashboard
  • 99.99% uptime
  • Free Cloudflare integration
  • Advanced security features
  • Tree planted

Performance & Uptime

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  • 99.99% uptime guarantee
  • 100% uptime in our tests
  • Four worldwide data centers
  • Average load time: 1.035 s
  • Average response time: 478ms

Security

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  • Malware monitoring
  • Free SSL certificates
  • RAID 10 protocol

Support

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GreenGeeks’ highly-qualified technical support team can solve any problem you face. The support teams are available 24/7 and are very responsive. GreenGeeks also offers trained migration teams. All things considered, GreenGeeks provides excellent support to all users.

  • Live chat
  • Phone
  • Email
  • Help center

Improvements

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GreenGeeks is continuously working on updating and improving its services, starting with a constant effort to keep its hosting servers up to date but extending far beyond that.

Plans and Pricing

GreenGeeks offers a range of hosting services–it offers just about every type of hosting you could ever need, from shared all the way up to entire dedicated servers.

Shared–start at $2.95 per month

  • Good for: brand new websites and beginners

WordPress–starts at $2.95 per month

  • Good for: building new WordPress websites

VPS–starts at $39.95 per month

  • Good for: websites that have outgrown shared hosting plans

Reseller–starts at $19.95 per month

  • Good for: businesses that want to resell hosting packages

Dedicated–starts at $169 per month

  • Good for: developers and experienced users with advanced needs

All of GreenGeeks shared plans include a free SSL certificate, domain name for one year, nightly backup, CDN, and more. Plus, GreenGeeks plants a tree for each plan and puts 300% of the energy used back into the grid.

Features

The company provides you with more than what you can normally expect from similar hosting providers. Apart from their several performance boosting tools, GreenGeeks also offers top-class security features with all of their plans. Even the most basic hosting plan on GreenGeeks comes with a free SSL certificate.

SSD storage arrays

GreenGeeks offers solid-state SSD RAID 10 storage for all VPS and dedicated hosting plans. It allows for combined disk mirroring and striping, which ensures maximum redundancy, a lower risk of data loss, and much faster page load times.

What is RAID 10?

RAID 10 or 1+0 is a storage configuration that employs four disks to store a given batch of data. It requires a minimum of four disks and stripes data across mirrored pairs. As long as one disk in each mirrored pair is functional, data can be retrieved.

One of GreenGeeks’ core USPs has always been its quick response and load times. GreenGeeks uses several innovative storage and processing technologies to help you cache and load its site data more quickly. All the plans come with the best speed tech like LiteSpeed, LSCache, MariaDB, HTTP/2, PHP7, and free CDN.

GreenGeeks also provides assisted migration with in-house experts to make migrating to its platform quicker and much more efficient.

Free site builders

GreenGeeks partners with Weebly website builder to offer custom site building tools that let you create very attractive websites without having to know any programming. Simply drag and drop various site features where you want them, and the site will look just the way you want it. Weebly offers a number of add-ons and pre-designed templates for faster, more streamlined web designing.

Customizable GreenGeeks dashboard

All shared packages come with the GreenGeeks Dashboard, which can be seen as a customizable central control panel allowing you to create, manage, and edit all your websites. Users can access their GreenGeeks Dashboard by simply entering their login details onto the webpage. The Dashboard allows you to manage everything related to your domain name using emails, renewal periods, and other services availed by you.

The dashboard you get with GreenGeeks shared hosting plans

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.

Performance and Uptime

With a 99.99% uptime guarantee, websites that run on GreenGeeks’ servers fare exceptionally well on performance and reliability parameters. However, GreenGeeks has just four worldwide data centers in Chicago, Montreal, Amsterdam, and Singapore.

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.

GreenGeeks performance scores. YSlow score: 88. West coast load time: 1.11s east coast load time: 0.96s. Average load time: 1.035s. GreenGeeks uptime: 100%

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.

Security

GreenGeeks maintains an in-house malware definition base which is constantly updated and monitored to keep both the customers and the system informed on the different ways their websites can get infested. However, GreenGeeks’ free SSL certificates and customizable advanced security features are enough to protect against most threats.

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.

Support

Another great thing about GreenGeeks’ support: the team isn’t there just when something is wrong. It also offers some excellent training, migration help, and informational resources to help you to become an expert in hosting your site. If you have some extra time in your day, we recommend spending it learning more about how to optimize your hosting with GreenGeeks.

GreenGeeks’ live chat is very responsive. Customer support executives are assigned to users almost instantly, and most user problems are solved easily by them. GreenGeeks’ support team can be contacted easily even if you aren’t currently a subscriber of its services.

Recent Improvements

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.

Hosting Comany

Pricing + Basic Plan Features

GreenGeeks logo

GreenGeeks
You are here.

Starts at $2.95 per month

  • 1 website
  • 50 GB of storage
  • Free SSL and domain
  • Complimentary CDN
  • Nightly backups
  • Unmetered transfer

Starts at $2.95 per month

  • 1 website
  • 10 GB of storage
  • Custom WordPress themes
  • Domain for the first year
  • Free SSL and CDN

Consider Bluehost if: You’re building a brand new WordPress site or you’re an absolute beginner.

Starts at $2.99 per month

  • 1 website
  • 10GB storage
  • Unlimited bandwidth
  • Free SSL certificate
  • Free email

Consider SiteGround if: You don’t mind paying more for better customer service.

Starts at $2.29 per month

  • 2 websites
  • 100 GB SSD storage
  • Unlimited bandwidth
  • 10 free email addresses
  • Free SSL certificate

Consider InMotion if: You want to host two sites for the price of one.

Starts at $2.59 per month

  • 1 website
  • SSD storage
  • Unlimited traffic
  • Free domain
  • Free SSL certificate

Consider DreamHost if: You value privacy and security more than anything else.

What You Need to Know

What operating system does GreenGeeks use?

GreenGeeks is a Unix/Linux hosting provider. It does not provide support for Windows.

Does GreenGeeks use cPanel?

Yes, GreenGeeks uses cPanel. You can use it by navigating to the ‘cPanel login’ option.

How do I cancel my GreenGeeks account?

To cancel your GreenGeeks, you must complete a cancellation request form. A confirmation email will then be sent to your registered email ID. The cancellation will only be processed after you reply to the email confirming that you’d like to cancel your subscription. Once that’s done, your subscription is canceled within seven business days.

What if I didn’t receive my GreenGeeks login email?

GreenGeeks recommend searching for your junk and spam folders as some of the URLs that the team sends to users for confirmation/review may be classified as spam. If you still can’t locate your request emails, you can contact GreenGeeks’ sales department for manual help.

How many customers does GreenGeeks have?

GreenGeeks is trusted by over 55,000 customers worldwide who host 600,000+ websites on it.

How many websites can you host on GreenGeeks?

It depends on the plan you choose. The entry-level plan supports one website but the rest are unlimited.

Is GreenGeeks good for WordPress hosting?

Yes, GreenGeeks is an excellent choice for hosting WordPress websites. It offers integration with both WordPress and WooCommerce to help provide WordPress users with one-click logins and seamless site integration.

Does my GreenGeeks plan include email hosting?

Yes, every GreenGeeks plan includes email hosting. All plans except for Lite50 (which allows for 50 email accounts) can host unlimited email accounts.

Will GreenGeeks email still work if my domain registration is expired?

No, your custom email account will expire with your domain name.

Is it possible to sign up for GreenGeeks without a credit card?

No. While PayPal can be used to renew payments and buy subsequent products, your initial purchase with GreenGeeks will have to be made via a credit or debit card.

Does GreenGeeks offer forum support?

No, GreenGeeks does not offer forum support. Instead, it offers an online Help Center with a searchable knowledge base and FAQs.

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.

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