SiteGround changed their plans, and developers/resellers are not happy

bigredseo

HD Community Advisor
Staff member
Earlier this month, SiteGround changed their hosting plans without notice. It's not uncommon to see price changes, but the offerings were changed and it's really pissed off developers.

Essentially their two larger shared plans (GrowBig and GoGeek) were changed from allowing Unlimited domains/accounts to a maximum of 2 and 5 respectively.

For myself, I have 15 designs in progress with clients, and we would normally develop a site on the GoGeek and then transfer the account to the client, which allows them to sign up for whatever plan they want. This has been standard practice for developers over the past couple of years. This appears to be killed off and allows a maximum of active/inactive accounts to be 5.

While this thread is talking more about SiteGround and what they did, the question is, how can you as a hosting company capitalize on it. There's going to be a lot of people leaving SiteGround due to this. $39.99/month puts their plans in mid-range or high-range depending who you talk to, but others in that range don't have such a low restriction for the number of individual accounts on a plan (for cPanel users, think of them as Add-On Domains).

Other higher-end hosting companies like FlyWheel, Cloudways, WPEngine etc have a developer section that allows developers to host multiple accounts, especially during development. I can see a number of people headed in those directions as they cater more to the web design community.

Can you capitalize on their misstep? Is it a misstep?

(This is not a thread to showcase why they're bad, pricing complaints, or why people shouldn't use them, but rather, how you or other hosts may be able to edge into that market and target web designers/developers)
 
Have never really thought much about SiteGround's hosting features, but am I surprised? Not really. After what happened with cPanel, nothing much surprises me anymore. Will developers leave SiteGround for greener pastures? I'm guessing some will.
 
IMPORTANT NOTE:
The changes in their plans only affect NEW or modified accounts. It actually does not affect existing users with accounts there. Those are still grandfathered with the unlimited as that's what was signed up. As of now, that is also true with renewals - they are grandfathered.

I can still see this potentially hurting their attractiveness to web designers and developers while they build out sites.

Ourselves, we use a combination of the plans at SiteGround, VPS servers at another company, and local servers in the office - all depending on the use case.
 
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