SiteGround Australia Reviews 2022: Real Uptime Records + Australia Website Speed Test

SiteGround doesn’t need an introduction. This Bulgaria based web hosting company is now known all over the world. They are servicing more than 1.6 million domains worldwide.

They primarily offer web hosting services. You can get from normal Shared hosting to Cloud and Enterprise hosting services from SiteGround. For a normal website, it is better to go with one of the shared hosting plans.

Founded in 2004, they have come a long way. Now, they are one of the most popular web host provider companies in the world. If you are from Australia and thinking to get any of their web host plans for your website then you are in for a treat.

In this article, we will answer your question. We will let you know whether you should go with SiteGround or not if you are from Australia. So, without dilly-dallying, let’s jump right in.

SiteGround Australia Hosting Review & Using SiteGround in Australia

First of all, let’s talk about the Data Centers of SiteGround.

SiteGround Data Centers:

The effect of the location of the Data Centers:

The loading speed of your website depends highly on the location and the quality of the data centers of your web host provider. The idea is simple. You have to host your website as close as possible to your visitors. For instance, if the majority of the visitors to your website come from the United States then you should host your site in the United States for better performance.

Only then, your site visitors from the US will experience faster page loads. But, on the other hand, the visitors from Asia won’t be able to get the similar speed as the visitors from the US. That means the closer the data center to your visitors the better the speed.

Location of the Data Centers of SiteGround:

SiteGround has data centers all over the world. To be precise, they have 4 different data centers on three continents. The location of the data centers is in Chicago (US), Amsterdam (Netherlands), London (United Kingdom), and Singapore (SG) respectively. Yes, they don’t have data centers in the African continent. However, the data center on Chicago (US) covers that area.

So, for the Australian users, you can be happy to know that if you want to get the best performance out of your website then SiteGround’s Singapore data center is there for you.

Quality of the Data Centers of SiteGround:

The uptime and stability of your website also depend on the infrastructure of the data centers. They offer SSD based web hosting on all of their hosting plans.

To tackle any type of downtime SiteGround has a lot of backup facilities. They have a redundant electrical system which means they get power from multiple power feeds. But, accidents happen.

So, if the power feeds fail anytime there are backups available like their own power generators, and also enterprise-class UPS technology. So, you can be sure that your website hosted on SiteGround will have 99% uptime almost every time. We will talk more about this later.

But, prior to that, let’s do some experiments.

We will run two different tests to demonstrate the usability of SiteGround web host for our Australian readers. First, we will run a speed test of the SiteGround web host server. To run the speed test, we will use our website as an example.

And, we should mention that our website is hosted on SiteGround. The location of the data center of this website ReviewPlan.com is in Chicago, US. So, if we conduct the experiment from Australia which is very far from the data center, it is inevitable that the speed will be far less. On the contrary, if we conduct the speed test from anywhere in the US then we believe we will be able to see the best example.

Before we run the first test. We will tell you how this test works and what to expect from it.

How does speed test work?

We will use ‘Pingdom’ to perform this test. ‘Pingdom’ is a site where you can test the loading speed of your website for free. You can test it from different locations of the world. They use the Google Chrome browser to conduct the tests. So, the results easily match with real-user experience.

What to expect from the test result?

After the test is done, you will be presented with the result. You will see some detailed information about your website like Performance grade, Load time, Page Size, Requests, Faster than and the location from where the test was conducted.

The ‘Performance Grade’ is the indicator of ‘Google’s page Speed Performance’ grade. It depends on the loading speed of your website. To get a good grade, your goal of the loading speed of our website should be around 2 seconds. It is not bad even if your website loading speed is more than 2 seconds. But, try to keep it under 4 seconds to get good enough ‘Performance Grade’.

To put it simply, the lower the loading time is the better. And, another thing you have to consider is the location of the data center of your website and the location of the visitor. So, if your site is hosted in the US, it is normal that a visitor from Australia will not have faster-loading speed because of the distance between them.

Plus, we need to mention that the page speed depends not only on your hosting provider. It also depends on the contents of your site, the device, the browser and network the visitors are using.

Now, you know how this works. So, let’s go conduct the first experiment.

Experiment 1: Website Speed Test:

First, we will test from Melbourne, Australia as this article is exclusively for our readers of Australia. Then we will again test from the United States as this website ReviewPlan.com is hosted in the US. Now, let’s go.

Test from Australia:

The test is being performed from Melbourne, Australia.

The Result:

Here is the result:

Performance Grade:

You can see that ‘Pingdom’ gave ‘B’ as the performance grade. It is not that bad.

Load Time:

The ‘Load Time’ is 2.63 seconds which is faster than almost 58% of the tested websites on ‘Pingdom’. For a website which is hosted very far away from Melbourne, Australia, this loading time is awesome.

Test from the United States:

As our website is hosted in the United States, we will now conduct the speed test from the US.

The Results:

Here is the result:

Performance Grade:

Now, you can clearly see that the performance grade is improved to ‘A’. To be honest, this is really great.

Load Time:

You can see that the website didn’t even need a second to load. It took only 951 ms and it is faster than whooping 90% of the tested websites on ‘Pingdom’.

Here, we have shown the example of the speed test of our website from different parts of the world. And, you can also see that the speed varies depending on the location it was taken from.

Experiment 2: Server speed Checker:

At this point, let’s run another experiment. This is known as the ‘Server speed test’. You can do that by going to bitcatcha.com. This test is conducted by pinging the web host of a website from 8 different locations around the world.

What to expect from this test?

After the test is completed, you will be presented with 8 different response times for your website. The locations are US (W), US (E), London, Singapore, Sao Paulo, Bangalore, Sydney, and Japan.

If your web host provider has a strong infrastructure, good quality hardware and network on their data centers then you will see a better result. Unless you will be disappointed. Because ‘Server response time’ is the base of your website’s loading speed.

Generally, Google recommends the average server response rate to be 200 ms. In this case, the less the better. So, if we get B+ or above this grade then we are OK.

So, let’s see what it means for our website ReviewPlan.com hosted in SiteGround’s Chicago data center.

The Result:

Performance Grade:

You can see that our website scored ‘A+’ (B+ is enough) and they are literally saying that our website hosting server is exceptionally quick. Awesome! Isn’t it?

The lowest response time was from Japan which is only 3 ms. Then we can see that the US comes next in the line with 9 ms and 27 ms respectively. Only Bangalore has response rate (314) more than the average recommendation that is 200 ms.

Response time from Sydney, Australia:

As we have written this article especially for our readers from Australia, we are obligated to show you the performance from Australia. So, in the screenshot above, you can see that the response time from Sydney, Australia is below the average response time recommended by Google which is 188 ms. That’s perfect.

The takeaways from the experiments:

It is clear that the SiteGround web host is one of the best options for hosting your website from Australia. In spite of the location of the data center of our website (Chicago, US), you have seen that the test results were great even from locations far from Chicago, US.

Now, if you receive the majority of the visitors from Australia on your website, don’t worry. Because you can host your website on the data center located in Singapore. SiteGround recommends this data center for website owners of Australia as it is closer to Australia. However, if your visitors are international then you can choose other data centers too.

What more you can do to increase the speed of your website?

Sucuri CDN

To increase the loading speed of this website, we also use CDN. CDN or Content Delivery Network are used to serve contents to visitors all over the world using distributed servers. We use ‘Sucuri’ as the CDN.

They have their data centers in 11 different locations all over the world. Among them, Sydney (Australia) is one of them. Long story short, if you use this CDN service then your web pages will be optimized, cached and stored on all of their data centers. So, whenever a visitor visits a site from anywhere in the world, then Sucuri will deliver the content from the nearest data center possible to the visitor.

As you know that this website is hosted in Chicago, let’s say, a visitor comes from Australia to visit this site. Ultimately, the loading speed will be affected by the distance between the server and the visitor. However, as we use ‘Sucuri’, this will deliver the content from their data center which is situated in Sydney, Australia (as it will be the closest to the visitor in this case).

I think it’s the time to spill the beans that it is one of the main reasons why this website ReviewPlan.com is performing well for Australian visitors even though it’s hosted in Chicago, US.

Sucuri also has other useful features like website backup, website protection, website monitoring etc. Let’s see what they are all about.

Sucuri Backup:

If you haven’t taken backup of your website then you must act quickly. It is possible that anytime your website might get damaged. If you don’t have a backup of your site then you are doomed. Fortunately, Sucuri also offers a backup feature for the website owners. You can set it up once and the tool will automatically take back up periodically. You can also take manual backup if you insist.

Sucuri Firewall:

If you want to protect your website from hackers and bots then Sucuri has a solution for you. They have a firewall tool which can be used against Brute Force attacks, DDoS attacks and also to protect your site from malware and hackers with ease.

Overall, we have to conclude by saying that Sucuri has a lot of useful features which can come in handy for the website owners.

Website Uptime:

Do you know what should be the highest priority when choosing a web host provider?

The uptime of that web host provider should be your primary concern. Because if your website is down most of the time then it doesn’t matter whether your site has good speed or not.

And, in this case, SiteGround blows the competition out of the water. Actually, we have got the taste first hand. As mentioned before, this site is hosted on SiteGround, we consistently monitor the uptime of our website. And, we have been amazed by the performance of SiteGround. The screenshot below is the uptime stats for this website ReviewPlan.com.

You can see that every month the uptime percentage was above 99%. And, most of the time it was at 100% which is worth mentioning too. That’s why we are very much satisfied with SiteGround.

SiteGround Support:

Customer support is another crucial factor in choosing a web host provider. If you are a beginner and just starting out then you will be needing consistent help. And, sometimes, even if you are an experienced customer you might need support from their side.

Again, SiteGround is way ahead of their peers in case of customer support. It does not matter where you live or what your time zone is. You can contact them 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. You can contact them using three methods such as:

• Live Chat: For instant messaging
• Tickets and: Get a reply within 10 minutes
• By direct Phone: Instant chat

And, most of the time, you will get a reply instantly. And, they will be with you until the problem is solved on your side.

Conclusion: Why you should go with SiteGround if you are from Australia?

Let’s cut through the crap here. First of all, let’s ask you a question. Which will you prefer between a local and an internationally acclaimed web host provider?

I know the answer would be the latter. Now, there are a lot of internationally recognized web hosts available out there. But, no one comes close to ‘SiteGround’ if you are from Australia.

Why?

One of the best reasons is because of the location of their data centers. On top of that, you can literally choose your preferred data center prior to setting up your webs hosts. Even you can move your website (which is already set up) from a data center to another of your choice. So, if you get most of your visitors from your country (Australia) then choose the Singapore data center to host your website. Believe it or not, you will be glad that you did.

Conversely, you can choose other data centers in case you receive most of your visitors from other parts of the world.

Another strong reason would be their customer support. If you are inexperienced and don’t have enough knowledge about setting up a website. You can rely on their top-notch customer support.

And, last but not the least, SiteGround is officially recommended by WordPress, Joomla and Drupal. This is actually a big indication of their reputation in web hosting business.

So without a doubt, from our firsthand experience with SiteGround, we would highly recommend SiteGround for our Australian readers.