GreenGeeks Hosting Review

This GreenGeeks review is from our real hosting experience with GreenGeeks, based on their eco-friendly, reliable, secure and affordable green web hosting service.

GreenGeeks was founded in 2006 in Santa Monica, CA, US. Many people might not hear about this brand before 2009, but now it has been topping the list of almost all the web hosting review sites and widely been awarded as the best green web hosting service provider over the web.

With the 10 years’ development and growth, GreenGeeks now has 2 colocated data centers with Singlehop in both US and Canada, serving approximately 80,000 customers mainly from the US, Canada, Europe, Australia and India.

Overall

GreenGeeks is the best green company well-known for their 300% green energy-driven services and recommended by the eco-protect people over the world. As a conclusion of the rating, it’s highly recommended by our editors based on their green reputation, features, speed, reliability, customer service and price.

GreenGeeks is an Eco-friendly Hosting Option

As Internet usage is growing very fast, approximately 500% by each year, over the world, the total cost on the power to support facilities was 3 billion USD in the US and 7 billion USD worldwide in 2011.

It’s estimated, if internet usage keeps growing so fast the web hosting industry will soon be one of the largest pollution and carbon output sources.

More and more people have become aware of environmental protection and finding green web hosting options is another way to do this.

GreenGeeks, one of the best green web hosts, powers their web hosting infrastructure completely by wind energy. In the case that they use 1 time the amount of energy that is pulled from the power grid, they will purchase 300% wind energy credits to put back into the grid.

This is how the green web hosting service contributes to our world.

By leveraging wind-power, GreenGeeks reduces the emitting carbon by 2 thousand tons every year.

Prices

GreenGeeks makes pricing easy. All the plans apply to billing circles, which means the longer the cheaper. Therefore, our editors highly recommend customers going with its 3-year subscription, getting the best price and the biggest saving.

Regularly, GreenGeeks prices its shared hosting at $2.49/mo, $4.95/mo, and $8.95/mo depending on the package.

Refund Policy

GreenGeeks provides customers with a 30-day money-back guarantee, which allows customers to make a risk-free and worry-free purchase. After all, if you direct your cancellation requests within the initial 30 days, you can get all of your money back

GreenGeeks has a group of responsive support staff who can deal with cancellation requests effectively and efficiently.

Features

Taken as a whole, GreenGeeks includes its hosting plans with fairly rich features. The company allows unlimited disk space (Raid-10 SSD powered), hosted websites, bandwidth, email accounts, MySQL databases, and so on. In this case, users are able to focus on their online business without worrying that they will outgrow these server resources in a fast manner.

GreenGeeks also supports nearly all the latest cutting-edge PHP-based technologies.

In addition, there are some highlighted features that users can enjoy with GreenGeenks.

• A life-time free domain name
• Free drag-and-drop site builder & free starter site for setting up a website quickly and easily
• Secure IMAP/POP email accounts
• SSH access to the hosting account via command line
• Free nightly backups, free site migration, and free marketing & SEO tools

Scripts Compatibility

GreenGeeks achieves 100% compatibility for all the popular scripts including WordPress, Joomla and Drupal by offering the following features. It’s all one of the best Drupal hosting recommended by communities.

• The latest and most secure version of Apache – the most commonly used webserver
• PHP 5.3.x and MySQL 5.0 to fully support different scripts
• A common app installation requires 64 MB of PHP memory, but GreenGeeks sets the PHP memory_limit at 256 MB by default
• PHP runs as suPHP to ensure the most secure hosting environment

Moreover, GreenGeeks offers a 1-click script installer, with which even a newbie who only has the most basic computer knowledge can install and run the software without any hassle.

The control panel included in GreenGeeks hosting package is cPanel, featuring an intuitive and graphical-based user interface to help customers manage their websites easily.

GreenGeeks Benefits

• 300% Wind Energy: GreenGeeks claims that all of its servers are 30% wind-powered. How is this possible? In fact, the company purchases wind energy credits, replacing 3 times the amount of energy used by its servers; thus, if the company pulls 1X of power from the grid it purchases enough wind energy credits to put back into the grid 3X of power.
• Free Starter Site: This is a fantastic service provided for customers, especially for new starters or some businessman. The company is going to set up the websites on behalf of its customers, along with register free domains, create personalized e-mail accounts, and submit the websites to search engines.
• Free Site Migration: One of the most annoying tasks is transferring the websites to a new web host. With GreenGeeks, however, the customers only need to sign up for a new account, and then submit a migration request from the Account Manager. Once the Site Migration team receives any request, they will handle everything related to website transfer.
• Customer Service: GreenGeeks understands that technical support is an essential part to increase customer satisfaction. Therefore, the company focuses heavily in this area, making sure to provide professional technicians to assist its customers. All of its technical support staff are US based and are available 24/7/365 via hotline, e-mail, and live chat.
• Upgradability: GreenGeeks offers four types of hosting solutions, including shared, VPS, reseller, and dedicated hosting. In other words, customers can easily upgrade their servers to a more powerful package without worry about websites outgrowing the capacity of the hosting plan.

Performance

GreenGeeks offers one of the fastest hosting services. It invests hundreds of thousands USD every year to keep their web hosting infrastructure up-to-date. Their 2 colocated data centers from Singlehop in the US and Canada utilize 4 separate fiber lines from 3 network providers with direct access to the Internet and the on-demand network capacity exceeding 6,000 MBits.

Moreover, the company adopts some other advanced measures to improve its hosting performance. It integrates both software and hardware on the server-side with built-in PHP caching for accelerating page loads. Also, it frequently tweaks Apache web servers and MySQL databases in order to grant users the fastest hosting experience.

Our editors had done the performance comparison for the same WordPress site with the same content hosted with GreenGeeks and Godaddy. As a result, GreenGeeks is 109% faster than the well-known domain registrar GoDaddy, as the following performance comparison result chart.

Reliability

GreenGeeks network is routed by the top of the line Juniper edge routers and aggregated through Cisco and Juniper switches. As a high quality web hosting partner, the network is connected directly to most major internet bandwidth providers, which have been selected based on routes to compliment. The network gear is completely redundant all the way down to the uplinks that link up GreenGeeks cabinets, and to the providers that they have selected, along with the entry-points into the facility.

As the servers and network infrastructure upgrading frequently, GreenGeeks keeps investing for the upgrade yearly. When you sign up with them, you can be sure to be provisioned on to servers with the following specifications:

• Energy efficient Intel Quad Core Xeon processors
• 24 GB DDR3 ECC-Registered Memory
• 1000Mpbs connection to the Switches.
• BGP4 Gigabit connectivity to multiple Fiber GigE Tier 1 Backbones.
• RAID-10 Storage Arrays for maximum performance & redundancy

With the continuous investment, the GreenGeeks web hosting uptime is more than 99.9% consistently. This was truly proven by our editors in the past 15 months’ hosting experience.

Technical Support

GreenGeeks offers fantastic North American based technical support that is available 24 hour a day, and 7 days a week. All the support staff are experienced in this industry for at least 3 years, and have deep knowledge about hosting. Therefore, once customers need any technical help, they can contact these representatives via phone, live chat, e-mail, , FAQ section, and other channels.

• Email support – Whenever you encounter some unexpected problems, you can log into the account manager to submit a support request via email. GreenGeeks experts will try to provide you with the fastest assistance within 15 to 20 minutes.
• Phone support – With GreenGeeks toll-free hotline, one of the most efficient support channels, you are able to speak directly to a hosting specialist to address your issues and get solutions. Note that the phone support is available from 9AM to 12AM (EST) on weekdays and 9AM to 8PM (EST) on weekends.
• Live chat – This support channel is available 24×7. For any questions, you can launch a live chat with one of GreenGeek’s support representatives to get desired answers in a convenient and fast manner.
• Knowledgebase & Video tutorials – GreenGeeks provides hundreds of helpful articles and video tutorials, with which you can learn almost all the common aspects about hosting and many more.
• Blog & Social media – If you want to interact with peer users over the web, GreenGeeks will get you covered. Besides maintaining a well-formed blog, the company also supports multiple social media like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and LinkedIn.

Conclusion – GreenGeeks is Highly Recommended

As eco-friendly energy is more expensive, GreenGeeks green web hosting is not that cost-effective compared with BlueHost or HostMonster, but if you’re environmentally aware and are looking for an eco-friendly web hosting service, GreenGeeks is your best choice.