GreenGeeks Review (2024) Good for the Planet, But What About Your Website?

GreenGeeks Prices

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 web 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

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

* 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.

GreenGeeks Backups

Backups and restore are one of the areas I start considering a lot more these days when it comes to choosing a web host. A Sod’s law states: if something wrong can happen, it probably will, and at the worst possible times. This happened to us, and please learn from our mistakes when I say you should backup as often as possible.

GreenGeeks cPanel Backup Feature

Anyways, this is how it works with GreenGeeks. Option 1 is to use the cPanel backup tool. I’s a bit clunky and manual but by no means too difficult to do:

• Login and click on the appropriate site’s cPanel button
• Click Backup in the Files section
• Click Home Directory under Download a Home Director
• You can also download a database instead, or a full Zipped account backup, which is what you’ll need to keep on your local drives.

A couple of important things to note:

• If your account is larger than 10GB in size, the whole cPanel backup option will be disabled. You’ll have to pay $5 per backup.
• cPanel backups saved to your home directory will be deleted automatically after 48 hours, so it’s better to download the ZIP file locally.
• The first monthly restore is free. After that, each restore costs $25. Note that it’s not unusual to restore at least a couple of times if there’s an issue (e.g. you chose the wrong backup to restore).

Option number two is to download files manually using an FTP program. If you use a CMS like WordPress or Drupal that also means you’ll need to backup databases. I always find that a big pain to do, and also slow. Which is why a better backup tool would have been useful.

GreenGeeks and WordPress

Although GreenGeeks has a special section on their website for WordPress hosting, I couldn’t find a difference between these plans and the share hosting ones.

In any case, here’s what you get for both if you want to install the world’s most popular CMS.

• Easy installation: it’s not 1-click, but they use an install app called Softaculous, which simplifies the process for you. Maybe 4 or 5 steps, which you can read about here.
• LiteSpeed Cache plugin: it’s a caching plugin that will make WordPress run faster on your site when properly configured. Be aware this is not GreenGeek’s own solution, but just a generic plugin they recommend.

LiteSpeed Cache Settings

To be honest, I feel like all the WordPress-optimized stuff is mostly there for marketing purposes. If you are really serious about WordPress experts (and you have the budget for it), I’d consider other options like Kinsta or WP Engine.

SiteGround is also a great option if you need something a bit more affordable. Or there are several other cheap WordPress hosting providers worth considering.

Testing GreenGeeks’ hosting

Uptime tests

As mentioned above, GreenGeeks offers a 99.9% uptime guarantee. In our independent tests, which we ran for a few months, we saw it went down to 99.97%, which isn’t bad at all.

In any case, if the rate were to drop below 99.90%, you’d get some money back towards your next monthly payment.

For reference, this puts GreenGeeks in 9th place in our ranking table for the best uptime. It has performed pretty well over the last three years:

To monitor uptime I use StatusCake, a tool that checks each website every 5 minutes.

Is GreenGeeks fast?

In terms of page loading speed, GreenGeeks was lightning fast, coming first in our web host speed tests:

In fact, GreenGeeks has been consistently fast over the last three years:

Results in seconds

Our own research shows the importance of loading speed for the success of a website.

And although there are plenty of other things you can do to fix a slow website and make WordPress faster, a fast web host is the bedrock of a speedy website.

So this is a definite plus point!

Final GreenGeeks Review Comments

GreenGeeks is certainly the provider we’ve tested that’s the most committed to protecting the environment. It’s an admirable choice, and businesses with a green goal will certainly be pleased to hear that they can host a website with a low carbon footprint.

On top of that, its performance is excellent!

But there are nevertheless a few downsides to consider. The lack of advanced options like team management features can be a dealbreaker for professional business owners. The limited backup features may be not enough for most.

And if you need a top-performing host, other (and more expensive) solutions like SiteGround, Kinsta or WP Engine could be considered.

There are also a number of cheaper web hosting providers out there. For example, at renewal DreamHost is more affordable and offers similar performance levels.

> Try GreenGeeks risk-free for 30 days or check out our round up of the other best web hosting providers.