GreenGeeks Review: Is It Right for Your Site?

GreenGeeks’ Uptime

No provider can offer a 100% uptime guarantee, but you’ll ideally want to aim for an uptime somewhere between 99.97% and 99.99%. Hundredths of a second might not seem like a lot, but actually, even upgrading from 99.95% uptime to 99.96% uptime means about one hour less downtime per year.

GreenGeeks’ Data Centers

All of GreenGeeks’ servers are housed inside climate controlled data centers with generators, fire suppression systems, and water detection systems, which means your website’s data is well protected from unexpected physical threats.

However, four of GreenGeeks’ five data centers are located in North America (the fifth is in Amsterdam). This is a reliable situation for people based in North America and Western Europe, but if the majority of your website visitors are located elsewhere, then your server response time could be slightly slower for them.

What GreenGeeks lacks in server location, it makes up for with free CDN integration. Every GreekGeeks hosting plan includes a one-click integration with a free Content Delivery Network (CDN), which allows pages to load faster via a more geographically distributed network of proxy servers.

Types of Hosting

GreenGeeks offers four different types of hosting: shared, WordPress, VPS, and reseller.

Features

In our research, GreenGeeks scored a perfect 5/5 for features. Every GreenGeeks hosting plan (regardless of hosting type!) includes:

• 300% match with renewable energy: Every GreenGeeks plan is eco-friendly.
• Drag-and-drop website builder: All the basic functionalities of a website builder, including hundreds of customizable templates to choose from.
• Unlimited email accounts: Create an unlimited amount of email addresses in the format example@yourdomain.com.
• Unlimited MySQL databases: Create as many databases on one plan as you like.
• cPanel control panel: Easily manage and organize your website and email.

Each different hosting type (shared, VPS, etc.) comes with a few different pricing plans to choose from, so we’ve compared the cheapest plan for each type below:

GreenGeeks Pricing vs Competitor Pricing

GreenGeeks earned a 4.3/5 in the “value for money” category of our research. It’s not as value-packed as Bluehost, but it does rank above key competitors like A2 Hosting and HostGator.

But you might be wondering why GreenGeeks ranks above A2 Hosting, despite GreenGeeks’ slightly higher prices. That’s because cheapest doesn’t always mean best value, so we’ve worked hard to make sure our value calculations reflect the quality and features you get for each price (and GreenGeeks has a lot of great features).

GreenGeeks’ data centers aren’t as geographically spread out as they could be, which means website visitors who are further away from GreenGeeks’ data centers in Canada, the USA, and the Netherlands will experience slightly longer load times. The good news is, GreenGeeks’ free CDN integration feature is an easy fix to the problem of server locations.

Plus, GreenGeeks uses an optimized LiteSpeed web server to ensure fast page loading times, without eating into memory or CPU.

In short, speed isn’t really an issue for GreenGeeks.

GreenGeeks’ Virtual Security

GreenGeeks plans come with:

• A free SSL certificate via Let’s Encrypt, with automatic (free) renewal every 90 days
• Automatic app updates for software such as WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla

GreenGeeks also offers free nightly backups to keep your data safe – but customers don’t actually get access to the backups. And if you need GreenGeeks to recover files for you, you get one free restoration per month. Any more than that will cost you $25 per restore. GreenGeeks does not back up VPS servers. 

Like most hosting providers, GreenGeeks provides basic spam protection and proactive server monitoring to help prevent attacks and detect malware, which is a great start. But if you’re handling payment cards or other sensitive information through your website, you’ll want to invest in some more advanced security measures. You can upgrade from the basic Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate to a Premium AlphaSSL Wildcard SSL Certificate, which costs $99.95/year and provides a 256-bit encryption.

GreenGeeks’ Physical Security

GreenGeeks prides itself on its data centers, which are not only green, but also well protected. There are five data centers in total, located in Chicago, Phoenix, Montreal, Toronto, and Amsterdam. Each one is staffed 24/7 by technicians and engineers, and they are all equipped with a biometric and key card security system.

GreenGeeks’ security measures are definitely up to standard – but if security is a top priority for you, then you might want to look into A2 Hosting, whose in-house Perpetual Security Initiative sets it apart from the crowd.

This section explains the process of setting up a new website with GreenGeeks. If you already have a hosted website that you want to transfer to GreenGeeks, then feel free to skip ahead to our section on the switching process.

Signing Up

Signing up for a GreenGeeks account is quick and easy. You can search for the domain name you want or link an existing one, and from there, you’ll enter your preferred plan and payment details to get started.

One note on the signup process: don’t be confused by the wording on the checkout pages. You’ll probably see a green button that says “Good job, you’ve saved $X.XX” – all this really means is you’ve chosen to pay for 1-3 years up front, since the monthly cost gets lower the more time you’re willing to commit to in advance.

Basically, you’re not saving any more money than you already knew about!

Ease of Use

Once you’ve signed up for a GreenGeeks hosting account, you’ll receive a welcome email that will give you access to your own cPanel control panel. cPanel is a widely used management platform among hosting providers, and it’s a pretty clean and intuitive platform.

Your GreenGeeks cPanel dashboard also comes with the auto-installation tool Softaculous, which means you can install a CMS like WordPress in just one click. To access it, enter your cPanel and scroll down to “Softaculous apps installer”. From there, you can choose the software that you want to install – all it takes is literally one click!

GreenGeeks offers a free website transfer service for anyone wanting to switch an existing website over from a different hosting provider.

A lot of hosting providers offer paid transfer services, or let you transfer a site manually for free – which can get pretty technical. GreenGeeks’ free transfer service handles all of the complicated parts for you.

You’ll be eligible for the transfer service once you’ve signed up for a GreenGeeks account. Then you’ll just have to log in and submit a migration request. The only action you’ll need to take is to change the DNS on your domain name to GreenGeeks’ servers (for help with that, see step nine of this guide to manual website transfering).

The switching process can take as little as one hour to as long as 48 hours, but once you’ve changed your DNS settings, you can leave all the work to GreenGeeks.

During our research, we found that GreenGeeks struggles in the help and support category – in fact, it only scored a 1.3/5, the second-lowest performance out of the 14 providers we analyzed. But what’s the reason for the low score?

GreenGeeks actually has decent support services – but compared to other top hosting providers, you won’t enjoy the same level of instant help. For example, GreenGeeks offers 24/7 live chat. But HostGator (our top scorer for help and support) offers 24/7 live chat and phone support, meaning you can always speak directly to an agent if you want to. GreenGeeks just doesn’t offer the same level of accessibility.

Here’s what GreenGeeks’ support does offer:

• 24/7 live chat
• Phone support from 9AM – 12AM EST
• Email support with an approx. 15-20 minute wait time

If you’re not too fussed about 24/7 phone support, then you’ll be fine with what GreenGeeks already has to offer. Debby, a current GreenGeeks customer, had this to say about her experience with the support team:

“I have been extremely pleased with the customer support I get from GreenGeeks. They don’t just try to get you off the line (or off chat, which is my preferred way of contacting them). They answer your questions, and send you instructions that are easy to follow.”

It’s worth noting that, like most hosting providers, GreenGeeks also offers an extensive knowledge base full of articles and tutorials that you can search through whenever you like!

GreenGeeks is primarily a hosting provider, and you can’t really make use of any additional services unless you’re already signed up to a GreenGeeks account. However, once you do have an account, there are three convenient services to think about.

Domain Registration

The first (and the most useful) service is domain registration. Once you have a hosting account, GreenGeeks will act as a domain name registrar that lets you purchase a domain name right from your GreenGeeks account (and don’t forget, you’ll also get a free domain name for the first year of your hosting plan).

Make sure to do some research on the cost of a domain name, so that you won’t be surprised when it comes time to buy! You typically won’t be paying more than $10-20/year for a domain name, but it’s always worth investigating.

WHOIS Privacy

When you register a domain name, your contact information is listed in the WHOIS database, which is a publicly accessible record of domain name owners. In order to hide your contact information, you’ll have to purchase WHOIS privacy from GreenGeeks for an extra $9.95/year.

Website Builder

This last add-on is free with a GreenGeeks hosting plan. GreenGeeks offers an optional, drag-and-drop website builder with hundreds of templates to choose from.

The builder is convenient, because you can get a hosted site up and running without any design skill at all – but since GreenGeeks is primarily a hosting provider, its website builder is more like an afterthought than a fully fledged tool (with GreenGeeks, you’re better off using a CMS like WordPress). However, if you’re interested, you can learn more from our ranking of the top 10 website builders on the market.

If green hosting is a priority for you, GreenGeeks is the best provider available – its 300% renewable energy match is something you can feel really good about!

While GreenGeeks is great, it’s not the best fit for everyone. If you’re more interested in customer support, then you might want to consider HostGator instead. And if security is your top priority, then it’s worth learning more about A2 Hosting.

So, what are our final thoughts? We think stellar features, free website migration, and a high uptime guarantee all push GreenGeeks to the front of the pack. In fact, it’s up there as a major competitor with Bluehost, which is our number one-ranked hosting provider overall.