GreenGeeks Review

GreenGeeks is a web hosting company that was founded in 2008 with a focus on providing eco-friendly hosting services. The company offers a range of hosting plans that cater to the needs of different users, including shared hosting, VPS hosting, and dedicated hosting. 

GreenGeeks prides itself on providing fast and reliable hosting services with exceptional customer support, all while using energy-efficient infrastructure to minimize the environmental impact of its operations. With its commitment to sustainability and high-performance hosting services, GreenGeeks has gained a reputation for being one of the most trusted and innovative hosting providers in the industry.

In this review, we’ll take a closer look at GreenGeeks’ hosting plans, features, and performance, to help you decide if it’s the right hosting provider for your needs.

Overview

GreenGeeks is a web hosting provider that offers environmentally-friendly hosting solutions for individuals and businesses. Founded in 2008, the company provides shared, VPS, and dedicated hosting plans that are powered by renewable energy sources such as wind power. 

GreenGeeks also offers a variety of features and tools, such as unlimited bandwidth, free SSL certificates, and a user-friendly control panel. With its focus on providing eco-friendly and affordable hosting solutions, GreenGeeks has become a popular choice for website owners who want to reduce their carbon footprint while still enjoying reliable and high-performance hosting. 

In this review, we’ll take a closer look at GreenGeeks’ hosting plans, features, and performance, to help you decide if it’s the right hosting provider for your website or online business.

Customer Support

GreenGeeks is a web hosting company that provides a range of hosting solutions, including shared hosting, VPS hosting, and dedicated servers. Along with their hosting services, GreenGeeks offers a variety of customer support options to help their clients get the most out of their hosting experience.

One of the key customer support options from GreenGeeks is their 24/7/365 support team. This team of experienced technical experts is always available to assist with any hosting-related issues or questions that clients may have. They can provide support via live chat, email, or phone, depending on the client’s preference.

GreenGeeks also provides a comprehensive knowledge base on their website. This knowledge base includes a wealth of information on hosting-related topics, including how to manage your hosting account, troubleshoot common issues, and configure your website. Clients can use the knowledge base to find answers to their questions or to learn more about the hosting services that GreenGeeks provides.

In addition to their live support and knowledge base, GreenGeeks provides a range of tools and resources to help clients manage their hosting services. For example, their control panel provides easy access to server settings, application management tools, and other important details about your hosting service. They also offer a variety of integrations with popular applications like WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal.

Overall, GreenGeeks provides a comprehensive set of customer support options for their hosting clients. Whether you need help resolving technical issues or simply want to learn more about the hosting services they provide, the GreenGeeks support team and their online resources are always available to help.

Plans & Pricing

Hetzner is a web hosting provider based in Germany that offers a range of hosting services including shared hosting, VPS hosting, cloud hosting, and dedicated hosting. They focus on providing reliable and affordable hosting solutions with a variety of features and resources. In this article, we will provide an overview of the plans, products, and pricing available at Hetzner. For more detailed information, please visit their official website at https://www.hetzner.com/.

Hetzner offers various hosting plans with different features and resources. They have different pricing tiers based on the amount of resources and features you need.

Here is a breakdown of the available plans and their pricing:

Shared Hosting

Shared hosting is an affordable and easy-to-use hosting solution for small websites.

VPS Hosting

VPS hosting is a scalable hosting solution that allows you to have more control over your hosting environment.

Cloud Hosting

Cloud hosting is a hosting solution where your website is hosted on multiple servers for improved performance and scalability.

Dedicated Hosting

Dedicated hosting is a hosting solution where you have access to an entire server dedicated to your website.

Ratings

• Overall Score: 92/100
• Reliability: 86/100
• Usability: 80/100
• Customer Support: 100/100
• Features: 80/100

Highlights

• SSD Storage Arrays
• Best Speed Technologies
• Built-in Scalability
• Advanced Security

GreenGeeks Walkthrough

Trey Gardner created GreenGeeks in 2007. Based in Los Angeles, California, the company now runs over 600,000 websites and provides a green hosting platform. GreenGeeks’ web hosting eco-friendly approach distinguishes its services in the competitive web hosting industry.

In addition, its promise to counteract consumed energy with 300 percent wind credits sets a high standard for other web hosts wishing to become green or minimize their environmental footprint.

The web hosting industry consumes a significant quantity of energy and has a considerable effect on the environment. GreenGeeks intends to compensate for this by purchasing wind energy credits. They buy three times as much power as they consume.

They are also a Green Power partner with the EPA. GreenGeeks is an attractive prospect because of its low price, dependable server performance, competitiveness, and sustainable efforts. Wanting to know if Greengeks Hosting is the fit for you? Read on to find out!

Getting Started With Greengeeks

To start, head to the GreenGeeks website. 

As their brand suggests, you will be greeted with a very green, environmental-ish homepage. Here, you will see their lowest hosting offers. However, if you want to go for a specific hosting package, you can look at the Menu tab located on the upper part of the homepage. 

When you scroll down, you can also see a variety of the web hosting services they offer. Shared Web Hosting – a cPanel shared hosting. 

WordPress Hosting – An optimized managed WordPress Hosting 

VPS Hosting – A managed VPS Hosting 

Dedicated Hosting – A high-performance dedicated server hosting

Reseller Hosting – Start a web hosting business using your brand with reseller hosting without the hassle of dealing with structural issues. 

As always, for this GreenGeeks review, we’ll go for the cheapest plan- Lite Shared Web Hosting Plan, priced at $2.49 a month. This hosting plan lets you host one website, provides 50GB webspace, unlimited transfers, 50 Email Accounts, Free SSL Certificate, free domain name for 1st Year, free nightly backup, free CDN, managed WordPress, built-in Caching, and unlimited databases. Once you have decided which hosting package you’re going for, click the ‘Get Started’ button. 

Clicking this button will immediately redirect you to the page where you set up a domain name. If you wish to use an existing domain, you can simply put it here as well.  

The next step will be setting up your account information. Here, you need to provide your email, full name, address, and phone number. 

Below the account information details would be the Package Information. Here, you have options on which billing cycle you want – monthly, annually, biennially, or triennially. In simpler words, monthly, yearly, two years, or three years would be your options. You can also purchase essential add-ons on this tab. 

The last step would be the payment information tab. Here, you have no other option but to pay using your Credit Card. 

After clicking Create Account, you should receive a welcome email from GreenGeeks containing the login credentials to access your GreenGeeks Account Manager. And you’re good to go!

Using and Managing Your Website on GreenGeeks

This is what your account dashboard looks like. Here, you have access to the main menu tab, which you can find on the left side of your dashboard, where you can configure several areas of your account. This is also where you can manage and access GreenGeeks’ control panel.

GreenGeeks Control Panel

What exactly is cPanel?

cPanel is a Linux-based graphical user interface (GUI) that serves as a control panel for website and server administration. You can use cPanel to generate sites, control domains, manage online files, establish email accounts, and perform other things. 

Numerous web hosting companies include cPanel as part of their hosting plan. For their main web hosting control panel, GreenGeeks uses cPanel. The Fantastico and Softaculous script installers are bundled with cPanel. 

You can use these programs to establish standard third-party blogging software and content management systems like WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla.

Emails

Email Accounts

This tool allows you to create and manage email accounts for your website. In this section, you may create email addresses, set up your mail client, change passwords, and quickly access your webmail. 

You can manage email through your GreenGeeks account in two ways: through the account management page and cPanel. 

This will display a list of all the accounts you’ve established. This is where you’ll go in the future should you need to make changes or remove email addresses.

File Management

File Manager

You can use an FTP tool to deal with the files on your GreenGeeks account, but if you want a web-based option, there is a File Manager integrated into cPanel. Log in to GreenGeeks and navigate to cPanel by clicking the “cPanel Login” button in the “Quick Server Login” section.

Under the Files section of cPanel, you can access the file manager. 

Once you log in to the File Manager, you will be at your account’s home directory. The majority of your website’s files are stored in the “public_html” folder, and often times you will be working with such files.

Backups

Backups are accessible in cPanel for any account with less than 10 GB of storage. Here, you may use cPanel’s Backup interface to keep track of your files, databases, filters, and forwarders.

Note: Backups saved to your home directory will be removed automatically after 48 hours. You should download your backup to your local computer as soon as possible after creating it.

Backups in cPanel are restricted for accounts larger than 10 GB in capacity. You can also request that GreenGeeks create a full cPanel backup. GreenGeeks charges a $5 fee per cPanel for backup services.

Disk Usage

cPanel Disk Usage is a quick and easy way to track your accounts’ remaining and used disk space. This feature analyzes your drive and displays a graphical overview of its consumption. It shows how much disk space is used by directories but not how much space is used by individual files.

Disk space is used to store files. This amount remains constant whether there are ten or tens of thousands of visits. When assessing the disk space used by your account, you must go outside the “public_html” directory, which contains your uploaded website files.

Assuming you connect to your account via FTP and move one level up from “public_html,” you’ll be in your home directory, where you would see that there are a lot of items eating up too much space. Application configuration files, logs, and mails all adds up.

Your databases do not reside in your home directory; however, their disk space usage contributes to the overall storage usage.

FTP Accounts

An FTP account is intended to manage and upload files to your site. Once you subscribe for hosting, establish a cPanel, make an addon domain or subdomain, or activate anonymous FTP, it is generated automatically in cPanel. As a result, you already have an FTP account in your cPanel by default.

Domains

In the Domains tab of cPanel, you may add new domains to your account, set up parked domains, create subdomains, configure redirects, and much more. You should first have a domain established and linked to your server before you can customize cPanel. Otherwise, simply adding it to cPanel will have no effect.

Adding an extra domain in cPanel is straightforward; however, the procedures can be frightening the first time. In general, you’ll have to register the new domain, link it to the appropriate nameservers, and then add the domain to cPanel so it can be detected.

Databases

MySQL Databases

MySQL is an open and accessible database management system that employs Structured Query Language (SQL), the most commonly used language for creating, storing, and processing information in the database.

MySQL is well-known for its speed, dependability, and versatility, and it’s been commonly used for web-based operations since the 1990s. MySQL is frequently used in tandem with PHP, a popular open-sourced overall programming language.

This tool makes it easy to create new MySQL databases and manage existing ones. If you’re making a PHP-based program or any other application that uses a database, you’ll need to set up a database and a user to access it.

Metrics

cPanel includes a bandwidth use summary that shows how much bandwidth your website has used. It does not provide a real-time view of bandwidth usage. The statistics are taken from server logs and reviewed regularly. It is vital for your business and marketing to keep records of different statistics for your website. You can check various data, track mistakes, and monitor bandwidth usage in the Metrics section. In the usual course of operating a website, you won’t always be able to tell when traffic is increasing or decreasing.

For example, your webpage or a section on your website may be connected to a popular site, momentarily boosting your bandwidth usage. Suppose you begin receiving a notification for excessive bandwidth use but are unsure why; you can look at the statistics to see if a specific day or period had unusually high traffic.

This can help you figure out where the usage came from. Correspondingly, you can also use statistics to determine whether a promotional effort was effective if you know when your promotion was active.

Security

Keeping your website secure is one of the most important things you can do. You can use the resources in this category to limit SSH access, ban IP addresses, and inhibit the hotlinking of your images. This is also where you can manage the security certificates for your website. 

In addition, if you want an SSL certificate issued by a company other than GreenGeeks, you must first generate a KEY and a CSR. The CSR is then provided to the SSL certificate issuer in order to obtain your SSL certificate.

Software

You can broaden your website’s functionalities by going to the software category. Your GreenGeeks hosting account provides the ability to run a variety of PHP versions. The most recent stable version, known as the “native” version, will be chosen by default and will be already active. As a result, if you want to use the native version, you shouldn’t need to make any of the changes described. By default, you can only pick one version of PHP for your account. Contact support if you need to run multiple versions of PHP under one cPanel.

Advanced

This section comprises activities that are not frequently practiced but are helpful for customization options. Cron Jobs enables you to automate specific commands or scripts on your server in order to accomplish repetitive work invariably.

For example, a Cron Job can be set to run in 15-minute or hourly incremental steps, on a specific day of the week or month, or any combination of such.

Preferences

The Preferences section allows users to customize various aspects of cPanel to their liking. Change your account settings, select a language to view the cPanel interface in, select a style to customize the cPanel interface’s appearance, store contact information for your cPanel account and set your contact preferences, update your account’s password, and manage your cPanel account’s subaccount are the things you can customize in this section.

GreenGeeks Website Builder

Novices will be relieved to learn that GreenGeeks provides a free website builder that is both simple to use and powerful. There are hundreds of highly configurable layouts in large numbers of categories from which to choose.

There are also mobile-friendly themes available, as well as SEO tools that will permit your website to be easily indexed by Google Search.

Softaculous Apps Installer

You can efficiently and simply get started with WordPress and other applications by using the Softaculous one-click installer, which is located in GreenGeeks’ cPanel area.

Softaculous is a script library that automatically installs commercial and open-source web-based applications on a website. Softaculous scripts are run from the administration area of a website control panel, commonly through an interface tool such as cPanel.

WordPress Themes

After you’ve installed WordPress using the Softaculous Apps Installer, you can now set up the appearance of your website. There are over 3,000+ free themes available for use with WordPress, and there are additional paid selections available and customizations accessible if you want to take it a step further.

To install a Theme on your website, go to the Appearance tab, then Themes, and lastly, Add New. You should now be able to see many different styles from which to choose, so skim through and see if there is anything you like. You can also get more choices by using the tabs across the top, or if you have something particular in mind, use the search themes box on the top right to search.

GreenGeeks Customer Support

GreenGeeks offers live chat and email support tickets 24 hours a day, seven days a week. They also provide phone support from 9 am to 12 am EST, Monday through Sunday. WordPress efficient support professionals can assist managed WordPress hosting customers set up their sites or address any WordPress-specific concerns.

Most GreenGeeks customer reviews praise their excellent customer support team. They have a name for responding fast to requests and giving competent assistance regardless of the difficulty. Let’s put that to the test, shall we? To reach their customer support, click the Contact Us button located on the lower left part of the GreenGeeks homepage. 

We tested their live chat feature to see how prompt they were in answering our queries. Like any other live chat support, you will be asked about your area of concern, name, and email address. After you’ve filled this out, click ‘Start the Chat.’ 

I’ve waited for three minutes to be connected with an agent. It’s not as instant, in my opinion, since they indicated that I’m number 1 in the queue, so I would be expecting to be conversing with the support representative in a matter of seconds. But if you’re not in a rush, a 3-minute wait time is okay.

The customer support agent answered my question directly and concisely; plus, he sent me a link to their domain pricing so that way I could see their lowest prices. I would commend their customer support, and the conversation was really light and friendly. Plus, what I like about it is that he did not upsell me anything.

A thumbs up! Additionally, GreenGeeks does have a large knowledge base where customers can look for solutions to their issues. 

This is a terrific benefit if you like self-help than contacting a customer service agent, like me! GreenGeeks offers a wide range of blog categories and subcategories, such as sales questions, general hosting, billing issues, video tutorials, and far more. If you can’t seem to find the answer from the areas mentioned above, you can also use the search feature.

Buyer’s Guide For GreenGeeks

GreenGeeks offers a variety of hosting services for businesses of all sizes. They provide basic shared hosting, reseller hosting, virtual private server hosting, and dedicated server hosting.

They also offer a free website migration service as an add-on, allowing you to simply transition from your current hosting provider. GreenGeeks web hosting plans include Cloudflare CDN, scalable CPU, eCommerce support, ample storage space, a website builder with templates, unmetered data transfer, and other features.

GreenGeeks provides a 30-day, no-questions-asked money-back guarantee. This implies that you can terminate your account for any reason within the first 30 days of signing up and receive a full refund of your hosting payments.

Plans and Pricing

Shared Web Hosting plans start at $2.49/month. 

GreenGeeks offers a small but adequate selection of Shared Hosting plans. However, please check the fine print since there are some costing considerations to be aware of. The cheapest introductory pricing of $2.95 (Lite) does necessitate a three-year subscription, which is somewhat expensive.

If you prefer a 12-month commitment, the price rises to $4.95. If you elect to pay for a year in advance (rather than three), the cost of their Lite plan rises to $4.95/mo. It’s not a big deal, but the $24 rise in yearly fees is worth noting. WordPress Hosting plans start at $2.49/month. 

GreenGeeks also offers WordPress-optimized plans, including one-click WordPress installation and automatic upgrades, for the exact costs and functionality as their basic shared hosting plans. WP-CLI, SFTP, SSH access, Git, phpMyAdmin, a staging setting, and the choice for different PHP versions are all included in all of GreenGeek’s WordPress Hosting plans.

It provides advanced WordPress development that makes use of SSD, the newest version of PHP, HTTP/2, and gives you access to various data centers around the world, including LiteSpeed WebServer, and features the LS Cache Plugin, which makes your WordPress website load very fast. VPS Hosting plans start at $39.95/month. 

VPS hosting is the best option if you need full access to the server or more power over computing resources. With this, you have complete control over the amount of disk space, RAM, and bandwidth available to you. GreenGeeks has three managed VPS hosting options to choose from.

The cheapest plan comes with 2 GB RAM, 4 vCPU, and 50 GB SSD storage, although the most expensive package comes with 8 GB RAM, 6 vCPU, and 150 GB SSD storage. Dedicated Hosting plans start at $169/month. 

There are four dedicated server plans to choose from. This site host’s dedicated servers all have 5 IP addresses as well as a monthly data transfer bandwidth of 10TB. Disk space and memory vary by plan; however, GreenGeeks offers a dedicated server with 2-16GB RAM and 500GB-1TB storage. Reseller Hosting plans start at $19.95/month. 

GreenGeeks offers Reseller Hosting if you wish to start your web hosting service. You can take advantage of the most recent speed advancements, such as Solid State Drive RAID-10 Storage Arrays, PHP7, Caching, CDN, and several others.

You can lease server resources to other site owners and start your own small-scale web hosting company with a reseller account from this web host. Under your reseller hosting package, you will have access to WHM and will be able to create separate cPanel accounts.

Server Speed and Uptime

Another critical thing to consider when selecting a host is its server speed, as it is estimated that a site’s bounce probability will go up by 32% if it takes one to three seconds to load. Simply put, the greater the time for your site to load, the more probable it is that users will exit. That is just one example of how speed might damage your site.

According to Websitesetup.org’s performance test, their test site loaded in 477ms on average – faster than the average server speed in the web hosting market! Furthermore, uptime is among the most important elements to consider when selecting a web host. 

Excellent uptime not only indicates a web host’s dependability, but it also has a direct impact on your site’s guest experience and traffic sources, which could also possibly imply lost revenues for your company.

During the 12-month testing period, the test site of websitesetup.org had an average uptime of 99.95 percent. As a result of these outcomes, GreenGeeks hosting has proven to be a reliable host.

Security and Backups

All GreenGeeks server is monitored 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and employs firewall controls to prevent security breaches, as well as brute force and DDoS protection against security vulnerabilities.

You can restrict questionable IP addresses with VPS hosting packages. GreenGeeks also provides a free Spam Assassin tool for email account safety. You may guard your data by using password-protected files, SSL site encryption which you can get at an additional expense, and keeping all programs installed on your server up-to-date.

Things go wrong from time to time. And by terrible, we meant that your site occasionally collapses. This could be self-inflicted, or it might be the result of someone with evil intent attempting to sneak their way through.

Every night, GreenGeeks performs recovery backups. This solution is provided for free on all shared, VPS, and reseller hosting services. Users are entitled to one free restoration each month; however, any subsequent restorations will impose a fee.

Features of GreenGeeks

• Free domain
• Unlimited bandwidth
• Unlimited disk space
• Unlimited websites – applicable for mid to top-tier plans only
• Unlimited email accounts
• 30-day money-back guarantee
• SSD storage with nightly backups
• Free site migrations
• Free website builder
• Green hosting – an eco-friendly web hosting company!
• One-click WordPress installation
• Softaculous Apps Installer
• DDoS Protection
• SSL website encryption – not for free
• Linux-based hosting solutions

Pros

• 24/7 customer support
• 30-day money-back guarantee
• 99.99 percent uptime guarantee
• Robust web hosting service
• EPA Green Power Partner – this hosting provider tries to lessen their carbon footprints!
• Fast server loading speed
• Reasonably priced hosting plans
• Includes all the essential tools and features to start a web hosting
• GreenGeeks web hosting doesn’t overcrowd their shared servers – this is to ensure that you maximize your website’s performance
• Free SSL Certificate

Cons

• Availability of phone support is not 24/7 – if you need an issue to be addressed as quickly as possible, then you only have the option to talk to their live chat support.
• Refunds are only for the plan; add-ons and other additional purchases like domains are non-refundable.
• You have to pay a setup fee if you opted for a monthly billing cycle
• Windows server hosting is not provided

Final Thoughts

GreenGeeks is a wonderful hosting option for those who are just getting started. However, you might have to upgrade to a high-performance plan or switch to a managed WordPress hosting provider if your overall traffic exceeds a certain threshold.

Whether or not you should go with GreenGeeks is ultimately determined by your budget and hosting requirements, as well as how this company compares to the competitors. Overall, GreenGeeks is an appealing option due to its low price, dependable server performance, competition, and environmental efforts. 

We hope this GreenGeeks Hosting review has been useful in your search for a web hosting provider!