GreenGeeks Prices

Premium

Let’s first look at how much it costs per month to host your website on GreenGeeks. The first option is for shared hosting (the one most website owners need). You’ll also find that they offer WordPress web hosting. As far as I could tell, there is absolutely no difference between the WordPress and the shared hosting option.

As always, we’ll only be mentioning the regular price, which is what you pay after a first year at a discounted price. The first 12 months can be 50 – 70% cheaper.

FEATURE	ECOSITE LITE	ECOSITE PRO	ECOSITE PREMIUM
Websites	1	Unlimited	Unlimited
Web space	50 GB	Unlimited	Unlimited
Monthly data transfer	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited
Email accounts	50	Unlimited	Unlimited
Emails per hour	100	300	500
Inodes	150,000	300,000	500,000
Domain name	Free for 1 year (around $14 a year thereafter)	Free for 1 year (around $14 a year thereafter)	Free for 1 year (around $14 a year thereafter)
Databases	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited
CPU Cores	2	3	4
Physical memory (RAM)	1GB	2GB	3GB
Free SSL	Yes	Yes	Yes
Price (after renewal)	$10.95 / month	$15.95 / month	$25.95 / month
More information	GreenGeeks.com

You can purchase the plans for 12, 24 or 36 months. There is a significant discount for the longer terms, as you can see below:

GreenGeeks also offers VPS hosting, which comes with better performance, but a lot of limits depending on the plan you choose.

FEATURE	2GB PLAN	4GB PLAN	8GB PLAN
RAM (yes it’s what gives the name to each pan)	2GB	4GB	8GB
vCPU	4	4	6
SSD Disk Space	50GB	75GB	150GB
Monthly data transfer	10TB	10TB	10TB
Free SSL	Yes	Yes	Yes
Price	$39.95 / month	$59.95 / month	$109.95 / month

Finally, I should also mention that GreenGeeks has a few add-ons you can purchase to expand your hosting capabilities. These include:

• Dedicated IP address: $48 per year
• Premium AlphaSSL Wildcard: to secure SSL on multiple subdomains all at once.
• WHMCS license: useful for resellers who want to bill hosting to their clients (note that GreenGeeks does offer a reselling option).

Last but not least, you’ll have to pay $25 for every backup restore, if you do it more than once per month (the first one is free).

What can you expect from each GreenGeeks plan?

As you can see in the above table, there’s a lot of unlimited stuff with their shared hosting and WordPress plans. That includes:

• Unlimited bandwidth (or data transfer, which means the same thing)
• Unlimited disk storage
• Unlimited databases
• Unlimited email accounts
• Free SSL

The key limits to keep an eye on are maybe the number of inodes, which is another way of saying the number of files on your site. It’s a very large number, mostly there to ensure you don’t abuse GreenGeeks’ generosity by hosting a file sharing website.

GreenGeeks Pros & Cons

•  Pros
•  Cons

Pros

• Green-mindedGreenGeeks is attempting to offset their server’s electricity consumption by using as much renewable energy as possible.
• Unlimited data bandwidthYou can host one or multiple sites with complete peace of mind when it comes to visitor numbers and bandwidth.
• Unlimited data storageYour site can be as large as you like, so good for video, high-res photos and ecommerce with loads of products. Just keep an eye on the number of files. Hosting more than 150,000 could void your plan’s contract.
• Server locationsThree continents to choose from, the US, Canada and Europe.
• Heavily reduced long-term plansIt’s not unusual to pay less for 24 or 36 month plans, but GreenGeeks is slashing their monthly prices by up to 70% for long-term users.
• PerformanceGreenGeeks was one of the fastest providers tested, and the uptime rates are excellent.

When to use GreenGeeks hosting?

I’d say GreenGeeks is best for website owners with green goals in mind. You can even show one of their green badges, to highlight on your site.

The generous bandwidth and storage is advantageous for those who own multiple sites. As far as the performance to price ratio goes, it’s good, and becomes more acceptable when you buy a long term contract of 24 or 36 months.

When not to use GreenGeeks hosting?

Anyone managing a team should consider that inviting others to join the account isn’t possible, and the lack of developer-friendly features could be a big no-no for certain businesses.

GreenGeeks specifications

EASE OF USE

GreenGeeks’ panel is intuitive and well organised. They integrate cPanel, a visual tool to manage hosting services. It’s easy enough to use, but I prefer more modern-looking panels like the ones offered by SiteGround, DreamHost or Kinsta.

Sadly, there doesn’t seem to be a way to create additional users for team management on the same account. This is very useful if you work with clients or have a large team with several members that need access to the hosting admin panel.

DOMAIN NAMES

You are entitled to a free domain name the first year, after that you’ll need to pay for it. A .com domain name renews at $13.95 per year, but prices can vary wildly.

EMAIL RATING

It’s possible to create unlimited email accounts and there doesn’t seem to be any limitation on how much storage they can use.

DATABASES

Fortunately, with GreenGeeks there isn’t a limitation on how many databases you can have. I wasn’t able to hit or find a database size limitation, so in theory, they can be as big as you need.

APPLICATIONS

GreenGeeks comes with Softaculous, a cPanel visual interface that will allow you to install dozens of apps and CMS like WordPress, PrestaShop, Drupal, Joomla or Magento.

Be aware that the Lite plan will only allow 1 website to be installed, the other packages come with unlimited site installs.

WEBSPACE LIMIT

GreenGeeks website says that all their plans come with unlimited storage, which is true. However, they do limit the number of files your account will be able to host to 150,000 files for the Lite plan, 300,000 for the Pro and 500,000 for the higher tier.*

MONTHLY DATA TRANSFER LIMIT

GreenGeeks doesn’t meter the bandwidth you get.

FTP ACCOUNTS AND SECURE FTP

Create as many FTP accounts as you need. SFTP (Secure FTP) and SSH access are also allowed.

SERVER LOCATION

You can choose to host your site in a datacenter in three key locations: the US, Canada or Europe.

SECURITY FEATURES

With GreenGeeks you can enable SSL encryption for free. The latest PHP and MySQL versions are also valid, which would make your site more secure when you use them.

GreenGeeks also isolates accounts, so if somehow one site is infected with malicious code, it won’t spread to all your other sites.

SERVER SPEED

Excellent, according to our tests. GreenGeeks ranked number 2, with an average of 1.56 seconds loading speed.

UPTIME

The uptime we saw in our tests is good, but there are providers offering a bit more. It hovered around 99.98%.

BACKUPS

They only offer a backup of the last 24-hours and you can have 1 restore a month for free. After that, the fee is $25 for every time you request a backup restore.

You can manually backup the site yourself, but there are two caveats. Firstly, you have to do it through the clunky cPanel feature, which I don’t love using. Second, if your account is larger than 10GB, each manual backup request will cost you $5.

CDN

There is no included CDN. However, you can easily integrate Cloudflare with GreenGeeks’ dedicated cPanel feature.

Note that Cloudflare can be free or purchased depending on the plan you need.

SERVER FEATURES

It comes with the latest PHP (5,7 and 8) and MySQL versions. They use HTTP/2. Perl and Python are also supported. Its system is optimized to integrate with LiteSpeed and LSCache caching system.

REFUNDS AND GUARANTEES

There is a 30-day money back policy.

For uptime, GreenGeeks guarantees that your site will be running at least 99.9% of the time. If it drops below that rate, you’ll get some money towards your next monthly payment.

ASSISTANCE AND SUPPORT

You can reach GreenGeeks support via chat, phone and email. Please be aware that phone support is only available during EST office hours (Monday to Sunday from 9 AM to 12 AM). The support section has a lot of useful tutorials.

OVERALL RATING

4.3

GreenGeeks offers decent performance to price ratio, as long as you don’t need advanced features like team management.

The big selling point is the fact that GreenGeeks is more committed to renewable energy than other hosting providers.

* Limiting files instead of size is pretty common practice with these “unlimited” hosts: it’s mostly a precaution to stop people from building file sharing websites.

GreenGeeks Backups

Backups and restore are one of the areas I start considering a lot more these days when it comes to choosing a web host. A Sod’s law states: if something wrong can happen, it probably will, and at the worst possible times. This happened to us, and please learn from our mistakes when I say you should backup as often as possible.

GreenGeeks cPanel Backup Feature

Anyways, this is how it works with GreenGeeks. Option 1 is to use the cPanel backup tool. I’s a bit clunky and manual but by no means too difficult to do:

• Login and click on the appropriate site’s cPanel button
• Click Backup in the Files section
• Click Home Directory under Download a Home Director
• You can also download a database instead, or a full Zipped account backup, which is what you’ll need to keep on your local drives.

A couple of important things to note:

• If your account is larger than 10GB in size, the whole cPanel backup option will be disabled. You’ll have to pay $5 per backup.
• cPanel backups saved to your home directory will be deleted automatically after 48 hours, so it’s better to download the ZIP file locally.
• The first monthly restore is free. After that, each restore costs $25. Note that it’s not unusual to restore at least a couple of times if there’s an issue (e.g. you chose the wrong backup to restore).

Option number two is to download files manually using an FTP program. If you use a CMS like WordPress or Drupal that also means you’ll need to backup databases. I always find that a big pain to do, and also slow. Which is why a better backup tool would have been useful.

GreenGeeks and WordPress

Although GreenGeeks has a special section on their website for WordPress hosting, I couldn’t find a difference between these plans and the share hosting ones.

In any case, here’s what you get for both if you want to install the world’s most popular CMS.

• Easy installation: it’s not 1-click, but they use an install app called Softaculous, which simplifies the process for you. Maybe 4 or 5 steps, which you can read about here.
• LiteSpeed Cache plugin: it’s a caching plugin that will make WordPress run faster on your site when properly configured. Be aware this is not GreenGeek’s own solution, but just a generic plugin they recommend.

LiteSpeed Cache Settings

To be honest, I feel like all the WordPress-optimized stuff is mostly there for marketing purposes. If you are really serious about WordPress experts (and you have the budget for it), I’d consider other options like Kinsta or WP Engine.

SiteGround is also a great option if you need something a bit more affordable. Or there are several other cheap WordPress hosting providers worth considering.

Testing GreenGeeks’ hosting

Uptime tests

As mentioned above, GreenGeeks offers a 99.9% uptime guarantee. In our independent tests, which we ran for a few months, we saw it went down to 99.98%, which isn’t bad at all.

In any case, if the rate were to drop below 99.90%, you’d get some money back towards your next monthly payment.

For reference, this puts GreenGeeks in 6th place in our ranking table for the best uptime.

PROVIDER	2019 UPTIME	2020 UPTIME	2021 UPTIME	STARTS AT
Kinsta	No data	100%	100%	$35/month
Cloudways	No data	100%	100%	$10/month
SiteGround	99.98%	99.97%	100%	$14.99/month
Namecheap	No data	No data	100%	$2.40/month
WP Engine	No data	99.99%	99.99%	$25/month
Bluehost	99.98%	99.96%	99.99%	$9.99/month
HostGator	99.94%	99.91%	99.99%	$8.95/month
A2 Hosting	99.93%	99.99%	99.98%	$8.99/month
GreenGeeks	No data	99.98%	99.98%	$10.95/month
DreamHost	100%	99.99%	99.96%	$6.99/month
GoDaddy	99.97%	99.9%	99.96%	$8.99/month
InMotion	99.97%	99.73%	99.95%	$13.99/month
IONOS – Uptime test 2 months	No data	No data	99.93%	$4/month
Hostinger	99.62%	99.48%	99.92%	$5.99/month
iPage	99.66%	98.45%	99.85%	$8.99/month

To monitor uptime I use StatusCake, a tool that checks each website every 5 minutes.

Is GreenGeeks fast?

In terms of page loading speed, GreenGeeks was also in the mid-range of hosting providers we tested, ranking at number #2.

PROVIDER	GTMETRIX	PINGDOM	WEBPAGE TEST	PAGESPEED INSIGHTS	TOTAL
SiteGround	0.71	0.71	1.78	2.94	1.54
GreenGeeks	0.81	1.49	1.79	2.2	1.56
Namecheap	0.99	1.40	1.92	2.08	1.6
Hostinger	0.97	2.07	1.77	1.62	1.61
WP Engine	1	1.99	1.46	2.2	1.65
Cloudways	0.80	1.39	1.89	2.84	1.73
Kinsta	0.78	2.18	2.17	1.98	1.77
DreamHost	1.16	1.72	2.56	1.92	1.84
GoDaddy	1.14	2.27	2.23	2.1	1.94
IONOS	1.21	2.08	1.74	2.78	1.95
A2 Hosting	0.96	1.40	3.78	1.9	2.01
InMotion	2.02	2.86	2.61	3.52	2.75
iPage	1.76	2.82	2.73	3.74	2.76
HostGator	2.4	5.21	1.87	1.65	2.78
Bluehost	1.74	4.5	2.42	2.82	2.87

Results in seconds

As you can see, an average 1.56 seconds isn’t bad at all, and in fact, they were very close to winning the thing! Our own research shows the importance of loading speed for the success of a website, so this is definite plus point!

Final GreenGeeks Review Comments

GreenGeeks is certainly the provider we’ve tested that’s the most committed to protecting the environment. It’s an admirable choice, and businesses with a green goal will certainly be pleased to hear that they can host a website with a low carbon footprint.

On top of that, its performance is excellent!

But there are nevertheless a few downsides to consider. The lack of advanced options like team management features can be a dealbreaker for professional business owners. The limited backup features may be not enough for most.

And if you need a top-performing host, other (and more expensive) solutions like SiteGround, Kinsta or WP Engine could be considered.

There are also a number of cheaper web hosting providers out there. For example, at renewal DreamHost is more affordable and offers similar performance levels.