WPX Hosting vs SiteGround – Here’s The Clear Winner!
Searching for the best and affordable hosting service to host your next WordPress project, and, struggling to choose between WPX Hosting vs SiteGround?
That isn’t an easy choice, indeed! Both the hosting providers have their perks and make it difficult to pick up the right one for you. SiteGround has been ruling the WordPress hosting segment for the last 2 decades. On the other hand, despite being a newcomer, WPX Hosting has proven its worthiness in terms of speed and support.
In this WPX Hosting and SiteGround comparison, along with general comparisons of features and functionalities, I am also going to share the results of stability and performance tests for both the host, to make it easy to select the right host for you.
I will also let you know what I recommend and why.
So, without further ado, let’s get started,
WPX Hosting or SiteGround: Who Wins in 2021?
I have covered the important factors that influence the reliability of a hosting provider in this SiteGround vs WPX hosting comparison. Check out this summary to quickly compare these two hosts,
| WPX Hosting | SiteGround | |
| Background and Popularity | Medium | High |
| Hosting Features | A Lot | A Lot |
| Ease of Use | Good | Good |
| Performance (Speed and Load Impact) | Very Good | Good |
| Server Uptime | Good | Very Good |
| Server Location | 3 | 6 |
| Manual Site Migration | Free | Extra Cost |
| Content Delivery Network | Free Cloud CDN | No |
| Security | Very Good | Very Good |
| Support | Great | Great |
| Price | Medium-High | Medium-Low |
| Overall | WPX’s performance is great. It includes a lot of hosting features like Cloud CDN, Free Malware Removal, Unlimited Site Migration, 30sec Support Response, etc. However, they are a bit more expensive than SiteGround. But, a way cheaper option than their competitors like WPEngine. |
SiteGround is a way better option, as compared to other shared WordPress hosting providers like Bluehost. But, from the performance point of view, WPX hosting outranks SiteGround. SiteGround is also not a cheaper option either, but, they provide an enormous discount for the first billing cycle. |
WPX Hosting vs SiteGround: Background and Popularity
WPX Hosting was founded in the year 2013 by Terry Kyle, an entrepreneur, and dog lover. And the name suggests, it is truly dedicated to the WordPress platform. It’s comparatively a new but promising Managed WordPress hosting provider. Within 8 years of its operation, it has been able to attract many web professionals, especially bloggers.
WPX Hosting has been evolving rapidly by expanding its data centers to three major locations: Chicago, London, and Sydney. Its headquarter is located in Sofia, Bulgaria.
WPX Hosting supports a social and noble cause. It runs an extraordinary project called ‘Every Dog Matters‘, which provides daily food and shelter to over 500 homeless dogs and cats.
On the other hand, SiteGround has been dominating the WordPress hosting community for the last decade. It was founded by Tenko Nikolov along with his two university mates in 2004.
SiteGround is a huge hosting company that employs more than 400 and hosts over 1.8 million domains worldwide.
SiteGround is best known for its server speed and support quality. SiteGround is one of the shared hosting providers that is recommended by WordPress.org along with Bluehost and DreamHost.
I have compared SiteGround hosting with WPX hosting using Google Trends and the result is as below,
Winner: From the above Google Trends popularity comparison, it’s quite clear that SiteGround is way more popular than WPX Hosting.
However, we just can not conclude based on background and popularity. To get a clear result on SiteGround vs WPX Hosting comparison, we need to check and evaluate based on their features and performances.
Hosting Features: Which Host Provides The Best Features?
The overall success of a website not only depends upon the performance but also on some essential features.
While there are many features you should consider, I am going to talk about the essential and most relevant WordPress hosting.
Here I am considering the starter plan for both the hostings while comparing the features of WPX Hosting vs SiteGround,
| Features | WPX Hosting | SiteGround |
|
Storage Winner: It’s a Tie |
10GB | 10GB |
|
No. of Sites Winner: WPX Hosting |
5 | 1 |
|
Bandwidth Winner: WPX Hosting |
100GB Bandwidth, which is sufficient to handle 50,000 Monthly Traffic | Stated as Unlimited, but also stated that perfect for 10,000 Monthly Traffic |
|
Backup Winner: WPX Hosting |
Provides both manual and Automatic Backup options. | Only Automatic Backup option available. |
|
Winner: It’s a Tie |
You can have as many email account as you wish with WPX Hosting. | SiteGround also offers unlimited email accounts to its users. |
|
SSL Certificate Winner: It’s a Tie |
Free with WPX Hosting | Free with SiteGround |
|
Free Domain Winner: It’s a Tie |
No | No |
|
Staging Winner: WPX Hosting |
WPX Hosting provides the ability to create a staging environment with all plans. | Staging is available only on higher plans. |
|
Malware Scanning and Removal Winner: WPX Hosting |
WPX Hosting constantly monitors your sites for malware and removes it automatically if found. | You need to pay an extra $19.80/Year for malware scanning and removal. |
|
Caching Winner: SiteGround |
Their own Cloud CDN takes care of everything related to caching. However, they recommend using W3 Total Cache for better-caching performance. They provide free service to install and configure W3 Total Cache. | SiteGround offers an in-built SuperCacher service that caches your site in three different levels namely NGINX Direct Delivery, Dynamic Caching, and MEMCached to take good care of faster loading. |
|
Money-Back Guarantee Winner: It’s a Tie |
WPX Hosting offers 30 Days Money-Back Guarantee. | SiteGround also offers a 30 Days Money-Back Guarantee. |
Winner: From the above chart, we found that WPX Hosting is more feature-heavy than SiteGround. The only feature that SiteGround outranks WPX is the Caching Technique.
Ease of Use: Which One is Easy to Use?
Both WPX Hosting and SiteGround offer custom dashboards for their clients. I am impressed with both the dashboards interface and usability.
From the appearance point of view, the SiteGround dashboard seems to be more professional, as it has evolved through the long run. On the other hand, the WPX Hosting dashboard looks simple but powerful enough to perform all essential tasks in a matter of few clicks.
You can check both dashboards below,
Winner: Both the dashboards are well designed and easy to use. WPX Hosting provides a minimalistic user interface to its dashboard so that to help users operate everything with ease. On the other hand, the SiteGround dashboard is clean and more organized.
Performance Test: SiteGround vs WPX
The first thing we should consider while choosing a web host is its performance in speed and Load Impact.
Loading Speed Test
The best thing about WPX Hosting is that it has its own cloud CDN. The real benefit of having their own CDN is that they can fully optimize it to work with their own customized technology stack to achieve the best possible page loading speed.
On the other hand, SiteGround uses NGINX as a reverse proxy, Supercacher Technology, Dynamic Caching, MEMCached, and free integration of Cloudflare CDN to optimize the loading speed of websites hosted on their server.
Using Pingdom Website Speed Test tool, I have tested uploading the same content and basic design to both WPX Hosting ‘Business Plan’ and SiteGround ‘StartUp Plan’ and found the results as follows,
| Test Location | WPX Hosting | SiteGround |
| Washington DC – USA | 740 ms | 1.01 s |
| London – UK | 907 ms | 2.51 s |
| Sydney – Australia | 925 ms | 2.38 s |
| Tokyo – Japan | 1.02 s | 2.04 s |
| São Paulo – Brazil | 778 ms | 1.83 s |
| Average Loading Speed | 874 ms | 1.95 s |
Test Results Screenshot:
Winner: From the above results, it is clear that the site’s loading speed hosted on WPX Hosting is way better than that of SiteGround. The average loading speed recorded for WPX Hosting was 874ms and that of SiteGround was 1.95s.
The cloud CDN of WPX Hosting with 21 Edge Locations outranks SiteGround’s robust caching technologies.
Load Impact Test
Sometimes doing only a loading speed test is not enough to determine whether a host performs well or not, especially when the site is a brand new one with little or no traffic. As soon as the traffic load increases, the performance may deteriorate.
Therefore, it is essential to perform the load impact test to evaluate the performance of a host. The Load Impact test has been carried out using the K6 platform where 50 Virtual Users has been sent for a duration of 10 minutes and the result I found is as follows,
Here, the grey line is the number of active users, the blue line is the server response time, and the purple line is the number of requests sent.
Winner: Both WPX Hosting and SiteGround performed well during the load impact test. You can see that the site’s server response time hosted on both the hostings remains almost stable even in peak traffic, i.e. 50 virtual users.
However, it is also noted that the average server response time of WPX Hosting is a little better than SiteGround. 16ms average server response time is undoubtfully an outstanding performance.
Server Uptime: Who Provides Best Uptime Commitment?
Server uptime plays a vital role in determining the reputation and SERP ranking of your website. If your website is being accessed from an organic search during downtime, the browser will throw the ‘non-existence of website’ message, which will certainly affect your ranking on Google or other search engines.
However, nowadays, almost all the hosting providers put special efforts to ensure uptime. Moreover, it is near impossible to guarantee 100% uptime, as it is impossible to predict some unwanted technical issues. The most competitive uptime range is from 99.95% to 99.99%.
WPX Hosting is backed up with a 99.95% Uptime guarantee. Well, it is obviously not the best in the industry, as some of the web hosts offer a 99.99% uptime guarantee. Besides, 99.95% is still in the competitive range.
On the other hand, SiteGround promises to maintain 99.99% uptime, which is regarded as the industry’s best. SiteGround promises guaranteed uptime on an annual basis. And if they fail to do that, you will get compensated with free months of hosting. That’s pretty nice!
Winner: Obviously, SiteGround outranks WPX Hosting here. A 99.99% uptime guarantee is simply exceptional and from my experience, it is beyond that. Most of the SiteGround users including me encountered a 100% Uptime rate. On the other hand, a 99.95% uptime that WPX guarantees can be concluded with 4.5 hours of downtime in a year, which is indeed a mediocre range.
Server Locations: How Many Physical Server Locations They Have?
WPX Hosting has servers in three major locations namely Chicago (United States), London (United Kingdom), and Sydney (Australia).
On the other hand, SiteGround has extended its servers to five major locations namely, Chicago and Lowa (United States), London (United Kingdom), Amsterdam (Netherlands), and Singapore.
Winner: Both the hosting providers have more than one server location, which is great. SiteGround seems to outrank WPX Hosting here with more physical server locations. But, WPX Hosting’s own Cloud CDN eliminates the shortcomings by providing 26 Edge Locations around the world.
Manual Website Migration: WPX vs SiteGround
If you are an existing site owner, migrating your site to a new host might become a headache. Though there are tons of plugins available for WordPress users for that purpose, a manual website migration could be a lifesaver, especially when your site has a lot of content, and you do not have prior experience.
WPX hosting provides unlimited free website migration services, regardless of the number or size of the sites that need to be moved. You just need to open a support ticket stating your hosting account login details and the WordPress admin login details for the site/s you would like to move. The website migration normally takes up to 24 hours.
SiteGround provides free website migration services through an automatic migration process. The process involves the installation of a WordPress plugin called SiteGround Migrator. However, if you want to request for manual transfer, you will need to pay an extra amount of 30USD per site.
Winner: Certainly, WPX Hosting wins here. The free manual site migration service that WPX offers clearly outranks the plugin-based automatic site migration of SiteGround.
Content Delivery Network: Who Has Their Own Cloud CDN
A Content Delivery Network (CDN) improves the performance of your website by caching and serving it from different locations around the world.
WPX Hosting is integrated with its own superfast, and hand-built CDN with 26 edge locations around the world. It is free with all WPX Hosting customers across all plans and it is turned ON by default. It is a major factor behind the superior performance of the sites hosted on WPX Hosting servers.
On the other hand, SiteGround does not has its own CDN. It recommends using Cloudflare CDN to its customers, which can be set up easily through the Site Tools Dashboard. However, to get the best out of Cloudflare, you need to subscribe to a paid plan that starts at $20/Mo.
Winner: When it comes to CDN availability, WPX Hosting wins. Having their own CDN, WPX Hosting is capable of optimizing it according to the server’s need. On the other hand, SiteGround has to rely on a third-party CDN with limited optimization opportunities.
This is one of the major reasons why we obtained better server responses for WPX hosting during the speed test comparison.
Security: Which One is More Secure?
While addressing the essential features of a web host we can not leave behind the need for security measures. This internet world is full of hackers and spammers. To prevent damages and losses from these unfair means, hosting providers should be equipped with top-notch security standards.
WPX Hosting has robust security measures installed to prevent damages and losses from unfair means. Unlike some other hosting providers, WPX Hosting doesn’t charge extra by selling third-party security solutions, such as Sucuri. Instead, WPX Hosting cleans all malware from WPX servers on daily basis.
Additionally, all WPX Hosting customers can also take advantage of free Enterprise DDoS protection from Incapsula. Incapsula normally charges $299 per month for its Business Plan, which includes DDoS Protection, but you can have it free with WPX Hosting.
SiteGround also utilizes top-class security measures to protect you against those unfair tactics. SiteGround shared servers are isolated through a unique isolation mechanism. Even if a hosting account is affected by a vulnerability, it won’t affect the rest of the accounts on the same machine. This makes a shared server as secure as a dedicated server.
In 2017, SiteGround implemented an AI-based platform that claims to block 0.5-2million Brute-Force attacks per hour. Quite impressive! It also provides server-side DDoS protection through several types of tactics including hardware firewall, limiting the number of connections from remote hosts, failed login attempts, etc.
A dedicated plugin called SG-Security will harden your website’s security and prevent common malware, brute force attacks, and other security issues.
Winner: Both the hosting providers are equipped with top-class security standards. However, WPX Hosting is a step ahead of SiteGround, as it cleans all malware from WPX servers daily. On the other hand, SiteGround does not provide free malware scanning and removal service. You need to pay an extra $19.80 per year.
Support and Knowledgebase
It doesn’t matter how good is a hosting’s features and services if the support system fails, everything fails. After all, everyone faces issues at least once. Along with a support system, the knowledge base is also important for quick solving of issues.
WPX hosting has been praised everywhere for its superior customer service. They claim to respond within 30 seconds in their Live Chat option. Although they do not have phone support, the options available are more than enough. Their staff is knowledgeable and always willing to help you.
As well as the support system, WPX Hosting also has an extensive knowledge base where you can find answers to your issues and solve several common problems.
SiteGround support staff is also extremely helpful. They are knowledgeable and provides an incredibly fast response to a complaint and problem. SiteGround offers customer support through phone, live chat, and email tickets. They respond to phone calls and live chats almost instantly, and email tickets are handled within 10 minutes or less.
In addition to the support system, SiteGround also has a large collection of Knowledgebase articles to help users fix problems independently.
Winner: While comparing WPX Hosting vs SiteGround, I found that They provide the best possible support to help customers solve their issues. However, SiteGround’s phone support feature is an added benefit.
Pricing: Who Provides Superior Value for Your Money
While comparing the prices, both hosting have their own benefits. SiteGround provides enormous discounts during the first payment cycle. On the other hand, WPX Hosting customers can be benefitted from 2 Free Months with an annual subscription.
WPX Hosting plans start at $20.83/Mo when paid yearly, which allows you to host 5 websites with 10GB storage capacity. The basic price for that plan is $24.99 if paid monthly. Their Plans are,
- Business Plan – $20.83/Mo (Regular Price: $24.99/Mo)
- Professional Plan – $41.58/Mo (Regular Price: $49.99/Mo)
- Elite Plan – $83.25/Mo (Regular Price: $99.00/Mo)
On the other hand, SiteGround plans start at $4.99/Mo for the first billing cycle, which will allow you to host 1 website with a 10GB storage capacity. The basic price of that plan is $14.99/Mo, which you have to pay during renewal. Their Plans are,
- StartUp Plan – $4.99/Mo (Regular Price: $14.99/Mo)
- GrowBig Plan – $7.99/Mo (Regular Price: $24.99/Mo)
- GrowGeek Plan -$14.99/Mo (Regular Price: $39.99/Mo)
Let’s have a look at their pricing plans,
Winner: Judging between prices is a completely personal perception that is influenced by various factors including financial matters. While comparing the pricing plans, I found,
WPX Hosting’s pricing is slightly higher. However, I believe they offer a better service and performance that you will never regret. Moreover, you will continue to get free 2 Months with a yearly payment throughout your journey with WPX. And, $20.83/Mo for 5 Sites is no doubt a greater deal than $14.99/Mo for just 1 Site, in the case of SiteGround.
On the other hand, SiteGround provides up to a 63% discount for the first year. However, SiteGround is also not a cheap hosting either. You will not get any discount for the rest of the years with SiteGround. And for the basic plan that allows you only 1 Website, you will have to pay $14.99/Mo. A bit expensive for a shared server.
WPX Hosting vs SiteGround: Which one is the Winner?
I would recommend choosing WPX Hosting over SiteGround. After all, WPX Hosting is a completely Managed WordPress Host with higher performance and advanced features. Their own Cloud CDN with 26 Edge Locations around the world is another big reason to consider.
However, if you are on a tight budget and need a heavy discount to start your online venture, you may consider choosing SiteGround with limited performance and mediocre features.
If you are still confused, let me guide you to choose the best one for you,
| Choose WPX Hosting, if |
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| Choose SiteGround, if |
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To learn more about these hosting providers, you may like to check the complete reviews of WPX Hosting and SiteGround
Hope this guide helped you to choose the best fit for your business. If you still have any doubt, leave a comment below, I’ll get back to you soon. If you have used any of these two earlier, let us know your experiences.
