GreenGeeks Web Hosting Review
We may receive a commission for purchases made through the links on our site. This helps us keep the site going.
Overall Rating
Cheapest Plan
USD $2.95/mo (down from $9.95)
GreenGeeks is our all-time favourite host for Canada, the combination of affordable prices, unlimited disk space, a 30-day money back guarantee, and their industry leading eco-friendly systems make them a no-brainer!
We generally look at the following 4 aspects of a web host to determine its overall quality: Ease of use, Speed (on a global level), Support, and Uptime. GreenGeeks has them all perfected!
Reasons to choose GreenGeeks
Let’s start with what we consider the best features of GreenGeeks, those that immediately give them the edge over the competition. For the majority of people looking for a decent web host, the following quick summary is enough to convince them that GreenGeeks is the one to go with.
- Servers in Canada: This is one of the main reasons why most Canadians choose GreenGeeks, they actually have a data center in Canada, making your site speedy and fast-loading. Though they do have servers all over the world if you feel the need to go global.
- 24/7 support: Super helpful, and that’s via phone, chat, and tickets, the choice is yours.
- Built-in Scalability: Is your site suddenly growing faster than expected? No problem, GreenGeeks can adjust your required resources on the fly, keeping everything running smoothly.
- 30-day money back guarantee: Not happy for any reason? No problem, you have nothing to lose.
- Super Green: For every amperage they pull from the grid, they invest 3 times that in the form of renewable energy, so your website will be carbon-reducing! How cool is that!
It’s truly a no-brainer. As for costs, they have 3 hosting plans, their most affordable plan starts at only USD $2.95/mo (temporary discount down from $9.95)!
The Review: 300% Green Web Hosting Powered by Renewable Energy.
Intro and Short History of GreenGeeks
Greengeeks was started back in 2006 by Trey Gardner, a nature lover and avid hiker, surfer, and skier. He wanted to create a web hosting company with a positive energy footprint. He decided that his web hosting company would use their profits to purchase wind energy credits, restoring three times the energy that Greengeeks consumes. A company with an environmental focus in today’s day and age isn’t that surprising, but considering Greengeeks was introduced in the early 2000s, it’s pretty impressive.
With that being said, Greengeeks’ core focus is not on sustainability at the sacrifice of quality and performance of their technology. They remain dedicated to quality tech performance as their number one priority, while still engaged as an EPA Green Power Partner. They are also dedicated to helping their users find online success, with dedicated guidance and an uncompromising commitment. Since their start, they’ve grown to host more than 300,000 sites and 35,000 users to earn their spot as one of the leading hosting providers with a green twist.
Pricing
Perfectly in line with most other hosting companies but add in a list of features that you would usually have to pay for… for free with GreenGeeks.
Pros
Greengeeks targets their hosting services to beginner and intermediate web owners. It’s pretty hard to find a legit bad review for GreenGeeks, and with good reason!
While their main product is a beginner plan, they also have different levels and plans once a user gets comfortable. A beginner plan can expand into a customized plan built to fit your needs, with VPS, dedicated WordPress and dedicated server options. The quality of their dedicated server (and their other options, too) is remarkably high-performing, backed by some of the top processors out there.
Greengeeks sets themselves apart from the masses of beginner hosting products by offering a very scalable product that can start as a beginner and work its way towards WordPress hosting or something else.
Even with the impressive quality of the product, what remains impressive is their commitment to being green. Their 300% renewable energy commitment positions them above and beyond the rest in this category — they hold their spot as the cleanest web hosting option out there. Not only are they negating their own carbon footprint, but also making progress in reducing the footprint of other companies! Essentially, two other similar-sized web hosting companies that are not practicing sustainability are being taken care of by Greengeeks.
Even for the person who doesn’t care much about the environmental impacts of hosting or the environment in general, Greengeeks still stands out among other Canadian web hosting sites and hosting sites in general with their quality and their service.
As a beginner site owner, you don’t want to have to worry about small details and technical issues that could bog you down and distract from the real stuff like getting your content out there. The learning curve on things like configuring settings of the server is pretty steep, even though it may not seem that out of reach for beginners. Greengeeks’ simplification of this kind of stuff makes life easier for everyone and makes building websites a breeze.
Features
Greengeeks stands out in three main areas:
- Speed
- Security and reliability
- Datacenter locations
The speed Greengeeks offers cannot be overemphasized. In 2018, speed is everything. The longer your site takes to load, the more visitors you will lose (as it stands, it’s about 1/10th of visitors you’ll lose for every second your site is still loading). Attention span and patience are at an all-time low, so having a fast site is irreplaceable.
Greengeeks offers a few cool techy features directly related to the security and reliability of your site, including file-scanning in real-time, proactive server monitoring which can see problems and act on them before they arise, threat analysis, vFs that’s extremely secure, and hosting account isolation.
Their data centers are in 5 locations: Chicago, Montreal, Phoenix, Amsterdam, and Toronto. This means that Greengeeks also works very well for anywhere in Europe, whether it’s the UK, France, Spain, or even Germany. And with servers in the US as well, you can even expect decent performance in places like Brazil as well.
And even Greengeeks’ basic shared host plan comes with quite a list of features:
- Unlimited bandwidth
- Unlimited resources for the server
- Unlimited domains on one singular account
- Cloudflare CDN
- Accessible SEO and marketing tools
They even offer a free domain name when creating your account.
Conclusion
Congratulations if you’ve read this far, our analytics tell us most people hit the first sign up link on the page :). You can’t really go wrong with GreenGeeks at the moment, definitely if you’re looking to target Canada or the US.