GreenGeeks Review: Top Host or Green Gimmick? [2024]

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Decent Web Hosting with Fast, Helpful Support and a Commitment to the Environment

GreenGeeks offers competitive shared hosting pricing, and while comparing plans I found good choices for hosting either single or multiple sites. They offer an adequate set of features without much in the way of exclusive perks aside from the ecological selling points, but these will suit most customers looking for a basic hosting plan.

Fortunately, GreenGeeks genuinely excels at customer support. I consistently got live chat responses in as little as a minute. Phone support was also fast, with knowledgeable and helpful agents. Rounding out the options are email support, ticket support, and a robust knowledge base.

In addition to excellent support, a free domain name and nightly backups come standard with all shared plans. The site is also smartly designed and easy to use, with a simple sign-up process (except for an awkward user verification process I’ll touch on later). GreenGeeks’ shared hosting might not be that impressive, but it is highly approachable and easy to use.

The VPS hosting plans are somewhat less competitively priced, although they do include GreenGeeks’ managed support. The feature set is a little bit lacking aside from the 10 TB of data transfer, however.

With affordable rates, good performance, and a user-friendly platform, I found GreenGeeks to be a solid all-around choice. However, it’s GreenGeeks’ industry-leading environmental commitment that blows away the competition: it purchases 3 times the amount of carbon credits than the energy it uses to provide hosting services, and it has a partnership with One Tree Planted to plant one tree for each hosting plan that it provisions on its servers.

Basic Feature Lineup With a Few Bright Spots

GreenGeeks’ plans come with all of the essential features such as domain names, SSL, and email. I found GreenGeeks’ features to be more or less serviceable, but there are a few interesting additions.  Besides GreenGeeks’ environmental policies, you also get some of the best web server technology in the business.

Plentiful Unlimited Resources With Higher-Tier Shared Plans

All of GreenGeeks’ plans offer unmetered data transfer, so as long as you’re operating with reasonable limits, you get unlimited bandwidth to serve your growing visitor base. And once you upgrade from the entry-level plan, you also get unlimited storage and email accounts, as well as the capacity to host an unlimited number of websites.

GreenGeeks’ free CDN offer would have been one of the few standout features here. However, I found out through an inquiry with support that GreenGeeks has actually discontinued its free CDN, despite continuing to advertise it. That leaves just a few other added-value features – but they are good ones, like the nightly backups included with every plan.

LiteSpeed Server for Optimized WordPress Performance

A major performance-related feature is the LiteSpeed web server available with all GreenGeeks plans. This server software is superior to the standard Apache that most providers use, and it runs in conjunction with the LiteSpeed Cache plugin to give WordPress sites a big speed boost.

The caching is especially significant, as it presents your site visitors with static versions of your web pages instead of having to connect to the database and reload the content every time. It automatically updates these cached versions of your pages when you add or edit content.

WordPress Repair Tool

The WordPress Repair Tool is one of GreenGeeks’ unique features. It can automatically resolve a range of possible WordPress performance and security issues by checking and restoring core files, optimizing the database, and more.

This toolkit is integrated into your customer account, and is supplemented with GreenGeeks’ top-notch technical support when required. In-house developed tools are often better suited to work with a host’s particular server configuration, as you don’t have to worry about configuring it yourself like you would with a third-party plugin, for example.

Industry-Leading Environmental Policies

Web hosting uses a lot of power and only a few players in the industry offer carbon-neutral services, with a pledge to 100% offsets in renewables. Next to GreenGeeks’ pledge to a 300% offset in renewables, other hosts’ environmentalist efforts are no competition. As a bonus, the host also plants a tree with each plan purchased.

GreenGeeks Features at a Glance

GreenGeeks is Easy to Work With, Except for One Thing…

For the most part, I found hosting a site with GreenGeeks to be a quick and simple process. Its user interface is well-designed and intuitive, and I only needed a few minutes to purchase a plan and set up my account.

However, I was frustrated by GreenGeeks’ fraud detection system. I had to wait for the company’s call center to open the next day before I could arrange to use the services I’d already paid for. Once your site is up and running, though, it’s all standard cPanel. There will be a slight learning curve if you’ve never used it before, but otherwise, it’ll be familiar.

Creating a New Account with GreenGeeks

After selecting the “Get Started” button with any GreenGeeks plan, you’ll go to a screen to input the domain name you want and proceed to payment. Besides payment by card, you can also use PayPal. With that done, your site will either be verified automatically or it’ll be flagged, at which point you have to call support.

The verification system flagged my site, and as it was past hours for the GreenGeeks call center I had to wait for the next day. Thankfully, the wait time for the call was only a few minutes and the representative quickly approved my site.

Connecting a Domain Name and Installing WordPress

If the domain name you want is available, it’ll be registered automatically during the sign-up process. Or, you can set up your domain name with a few clicks from the Domain drop-down menu.

Then, all I had to do to install WordPress was go to the hosting menu, select Manage on my site, and choose the one-click installation option.

Intuitive Interface

The GreenGeeks dashboard is laid out in a straightforward, logical collection of drop-down menus. From the home screen, you can reach any feature or setting in just a few clicks. While exploring the menus, I found essentially everything where I expected it to be and had an easy time adjusting to the new interface.

Adjustable Spam Detection

One unadvertised feature that I appreciated was the adjustable spam detector. Depending on how strongly you want the system to flag emails for spam, you can set it from 1 (minimal screening) to 5 (maximum screening). While the higher settings may turn up more false positives, I liked this email regulation tool for its simplicity and accessibility.

Free WordPress Migrations

If you’re not well-versed in site migrations, they can be tricky to do correctly. However, GreenGeeks’ team will handle WordPress migrations on request. It’s entirely free and eliminates a significant hurdle for web hosting novices who are looking to move a site to GreenGeeks from another host.

Solid Technical Performance

I wanted to be sure that my performance testing was accurate, so I loaded a professional site onto my GreenGeeks hosting plan. My site included images, text, complex code for interactive elements – everything you’d expect from a real promotional site. From there, I used GTmetrix to test speed, UptimeRobot to test reliability, and Sucuri Load Time Tester for worldwide performance.

Following our testing criteria, I conducted these tests out of the box, only using GreenGeeks’ built-in optimizations such as LiteSpeed Cache. At its best, GreenGeeks’ performance was excellent, and my reliability tests indicated that downtime was nonexistent. Performance varied slightly at peak traffic times, but almost never to an extent that would drive away visitors.

GreenGeeks has North American and European data centers, and you should choose the one closest to your target audience to optimize speed. That being said, if most of your audience is in the US, any US data center should do.

GTmetrix

After setting up my site, I used GTmetrix to track local performance metrics on an hourly basis for more than a week. The GreenGeeks data center and GTmetrix location were both in the continental US.

Looking at the Fully Loaded Time, you can see that the test page loaded completely in 1.2 seconds. While this might not be the amazing second-or-less loading time some providers deliver, it’s still very good performance for the price.

Each point on the graph above shows the average performance of eight tests across a given day. The majority of tests show complete loading in under 2 seconds, which is an acceptable result for times of peak traffic.

Sucuri Load Time Tester

Whereas GTmetrix tests performance from a single location, Sucuri Load Time Tester compares loading speeds across a range of worldwide locations.

Overall, the results were surprisingly good. Don’t let the red highlights fool you; even across the Atlantic, loading times in locations like the UK and France didn’t exceed 2 seconds. The 2.24-second loading time in Japan is within acceptable bounds as well.

GreenGeeks only started to do poorly in especially far-off locations, such as Singapore and Australia. The load times got close to 3 seconds, and it wouldn’t surprise me to see load times cross that threshold during periods of high traffic. The lack of a built-in CDN becomes a concern here if you’re trying to reach these locations, but you can always sign up for a third-party service like Cloudflare.

UptimeRobot

I conducted one final test with UptimeRobot, which focuses on reliability. For nearly two weeks, I monitored my GreenGeeks site for reliability. At the end of the testing, I was impressed by the result.

UptimeRobot didn’t record a single instance of downtime over 280 hours. If you do encounter downtime of more than 0.1%, you’re entitled to proportionate compensation in service credits. Downtime of 1% during a month would equal 1% of the monthly value of your plan, for instance. It’s not a very generous compensation package, but GreenGeeks’ reliability means you should never need it.

Quick, Friendly Support on Multiple Channels

GreenGeeks offers just about every type of support you might ask for. There’s 24/7/365 live chat, as well as ticket, email, and phone options. What impressed me the most is that no matter when I used live chat, I always connected to a representative in about a minute. It never took longer than 10 minutes to find the answer I was looking for, and usually took much less.

As I mentioned earlier, I also used phone support when setting up my account. In all, I only have good things to say about calling GreenGeeks’ support team. The wait time was short, the representative was friendly and helpful, and was able to resolve my issue quickly. However, I should note that the phone support is unavailable from 12 AM to 9 AM each day.

I also decided to test the email support with a simple question about optimizing the site. As you can see, I got a same-day response redirecting me to the knowledge base. While the representative might not have written out a response from scratch, the blog post provided several useful ways to improve performance.

On that note, the knowledge base is full of helpful, well-written posts. While I didn’t see any video tutorials, demonstrative screenshots with clear text instructions are standard. I was more than satisfied with the detail and quality of the content in GreenGeeks’ knowledge base.

Affordable, Functional Web Hosting

While GreenGeeks lists web hosting and WordPress hosting separately on its home page, these are in fact the same. The three available plans are Lite, Pro, and Premium. Lite has resource limitations, but it’s suitable for hosting one site. The Pro plan offers the best value, as it’s only a bit more expensive and comes with unlimited storage, email, and site capacity.

But besides GreenGeeks’ shared hosting (and WordPress hosting, which is the same service), there are also VPS options. The managed VPS plans offer a competent balance of price and features, with one standout feature being a 10 TB transfer limit. There were no lower-priced unmanaged VPS options.

You can pay on a monthly, annual, biennial, or triennial basis, but GreenGeeks really wants you to start with an annual plan. I say this because the two and three-year plans don’t come with any discount, and the monthly plan has a setup fee. In comparison, paying annually eliminates the hidden fee and gives you a hefty discount.

At the end of my testing, I attempted to take advantage of the money-back guarantee. To start, I sent an email to GreenGeeks’ support asking for a refund. I received one email respectfully asking if they could help resolve any issues I’d experienced. When I reiterated that I wanted the refund, they agreed and I had the funds back in my account within three days.