SiteGround http://joomlahosting.co/media/reviews/photos/thumbnail/300x200s/f1/dd/a2/siteground-logo-300-50-1360194022.jpg

*** Update April 2013 ***
We went through the sign up process again for a new site. It was just as easy as before if not a little easier. Since our first test site we have been running one of our newer websites on SiteGround which is getting around 30-40 pageviews a day. The site has around 100 pages on it with a bunch of new content using Joomla and K2. With all of our performance plugins and CDN we are getting around .7 page load time (this does not include images) for the past 2 months or so. In the past month we have had 99.98% uptime. Speed has not been an issue, and everything seems to be running smooth. Check back soon for more updates!
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Sign up:
Signing up with SiteGround was quick and painless. The registration is a single page. Once finished, we were ready to set up our new website.

Post sign up, we received our account information via Email. They called to ensure we had a good transaction and asked if they could assist any further.

Since we already had a domain registered somewhere else, we were able to point the DNS servers to the SiteGround. We have done this hundreds of times, but not everyone has. If you need help, call tech support and they will walk you through it.

Installing Joomla:
After setting up the account and logging into the site we navigated through cPanel to set up Joomla. We created the databases using MySQL Databases and installed Joomla using the File Manager.

If you are not technically inclined you can use Softaculous. It is a one-click installer program that installs applications like Joomla for you.

Running Joomla:
We set up our Joomla site right away and immediately logged in and started playing around. Joomla pages loaded fast and it was plenty responsive to keep us productively moving through the backend. The front end performs just as well.

Some caveats of using SiteGround are certainly the access to free templates. They are created by premium template designers like JoomlaShine.

Control Panel:
Using SiteGround's control panel (cPanel) is easy because it is an industry standard. It comes with all of the standard features like PHP, Databases and domain managers. If you're not used to it, don't worry, you will get used to it and it's worth knowing your way around.

Speed & Uptime:
Our website hosted at SiteGround couldn't be better. We published around 10,000 words on the front of the default Joomla template for the test. We then added the domain to our Pingdom account to monitor the speed and uptime. After 6 moths, it has remained very steady.

At it's slowest it was around 800ms and at it's fastest around 300ms. The average response time (speed) of the site was 532ms.

Uptime was very stable. It was 99.97% over the entire 6 Months.

Our experience with how the site has been hosted in terms of speed and uptime has been great. No complaints here. We will continue to see if the performance stays at a high level.

Support:
Support is exactly how it should be. You call and they answer. We called in with a test question to see if they could answer it. the question was, "how can I uninstall Joomla?" The technician gave us one of several answers we were expecting in a timely manner without asking us to hold or sending us to another technician. A+ in our book.

Conclusion
SiteGround has a fast, reliable and affordable service with plenty to offer. After our website test and experience with technical support we can say that we will continue to host some of our sites with them.

To us their best feature is their performance. The site handles very well for a shared server plan. Using Joomla (and other CMS's) works like a charm.

Their worst feature is their cluttered help desk. It has A LOT of information which is hard to sort through. It's not terrible, but if you plan to do a lot of troubleshooting check out the help desk and see what you think.

Overall we are comfortable recommending SiteGround to people looking for a good web host. They did a good job for us, so they will do one for you as well.

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