GreenGeeks Web Hosting Review (2023)

If you’re reading reviews of popular web hosts, odds are you’re looking to commit to a web hosting service.

Kudos to you for doing your research!

Thoroughly researching as many hosting services as possible is a wise decision — once you commit, switching over can be expensive and difficult.

I’ve spent the last decade as a web designer (and even longer as a tech enthusiast) so I’m intimately familiar with the ins and outs of web hosting.

And now, I’m using that background knowledge to bring you a comprehensive GreenGeeks review, updated for 2023.

Let’s get into it!

What is GreenGeeks Hosting Service?

GreenGeeks was created over 14 years ago to provide powerful web hosting while protecting the environment.

This meeting point between web hosting and eco-friendliness is still relatively unique, and GreenGeeks remains a leading face in the industry.

GreenGeeks’s web hosting services are primarily oriented towards small businesses and individuals through shared and WordPress hosting.

However, they also offer VPS plans that can accommodate larger businesses.

However, based on our investigation, we at Tweak Your Biz believe their strong suit to be their smaller-scale hosting services.

Despite GreenGeeks approaching the hosting industry with a cutting-edge mission, their team offers four decades of collaborative experience in the hosting world.

Their founder, Trey Gardner, has even helped to build popular hosting companies like Hostpapa and iPage.

The combined experience of their team allows them to offer hosting services, as well as customer support, blog posts, and webinars to help you teach yourself about web hosting.

We can see that GreenGeeks offers considerable hosting experience, but what about the “green” part of their mission?

They promise a “positive energy footprint” by replacing 3x the amount of energy your site uses with wind power credits.

They boast 615,000+ kWh/year replaced by fulfilling this promise over 600,000 hosted websites.

This is a serious flex considering the tremendous amounts of energy that web hosting takes.

I’m talking millions of servers, stacked and running all day, every day. Blasted with air to make sure they don’t overheat.

Interestingly enough, GreenGeeks primarily keeps data centers in cooler-temperature locations to store their servers more efficiently.

They also pledge to plant one tree for each account they host, so that’s pretty sweet.

If you’re like me and interested in value-driven companies, GreenGeeks is a compelling hosting provider on principles alone.

GreenGeeks has even been recognized as a Green Power Partner by the United States Environmental Protection Agency.

Their efforts are legitimately making a difference in keeping the Internet’s carbon footprint as small as possible.

We know their mission is great, but we’re mainly here to talk about their solutions.

How did they perform in our tests as a web host?

GreenGeeks General Review

To start this GreenGeeks web hosting review, I’m going to cover some basic bullet points for an at-a-glance analysis of the company.

Keep in mind — the GreenGeeks services I’ll be discussing in this article have been thoroughly tested by not only me but a group of other tech experts on the Tweak Your Biz Team.

Some of these testing methods included:

• Free trial/demo engagement + notes
• Independent lab testing
• Personal experience
• Third-party review research

This article has been thoroughly crafted with both research and experience.

We at Tweak Your Biz hope to provide you with confidence that these opinions are well-grounded.

So, here’s what we thought of the greenest hosting company on the market!

Performance — 8/10

• Average email hosting functionality, no mobile-responsive management
• Managed features like automatic updates, free SSL certificate installation, and security monitoring
• Unlimited websites and unlimited bandwidth on affordable plans
• Impressive speed compared to other hosting providers
• Consistent uptime for small-scale websites
• VPS hosting proved the least reliable of all of their hosting solutions

Speed — 9.5/10

• Choice of data center with locations in Chicago, Montreal, Amsterdam, and Singapore
• Unlimited SSD storage with conscious use policies
• Around 1 second loading time on average and 1 second response time
• Speed proved consistent

Uptime — 7.5/10

• Uptime is reportedly lower than the average 99.99%, but we didn’t experience any downtime during our tests
• Potential issues presented to high-traffic sites

Customer Service — 7.5/10

• 30-day warranty
• 24/7/365 support promised over chat
• Phone support is not 24/7 and can have long wait times
• Solid knowledge base on site

Ease of Use — 9/10

• Domain transfers can be complicated
• Extremely simple interface
• Easy and intuitive setup
• management functionality — automatic updates and SSL activation

Variety of Hosting Options

• Shared hosting
• WordPress hosting
• VPS hosting
• Reseller hosting
• WooCommerce hosting

Pros

• Solid mission backed by facts
• Very simple to use
• Excellent speeds
• Affordable prices
• Unlimited space and traffic
• Free domain transfers and affordable registration

Cons

• Slightly lower-than-average uptime
• Tech support isn’t always reliable

GreenGeeks Web Hosting Provider Review

Web Hosting (Shared Hosting)

Shared Hosting Plans & Pricing

Plan Features

• Free SSL
• Intuitive cPanel
• 1-click installations for over 100 app add-ons
• Daily automatic backups
• data center selection
• 24/7 data center monitoring
• Network security from DDos and AI protection
• Personalized emails with your domain name
• Free domain registration for first year
• Unlimited sites on Pro and Premium plans

SSL Included & Activated?

SSL is included and will be automatically activated by the GreenGeeks team after purchase.

Our Take

GreenGeeks shared hosting is a stellar choice when it comes to budget, performance, and conscience.

Keep in mind — these plans are ideal for small businesses or single sites.

They’ll be running on shared servers, so even though GreenGeeks boasts unlimited bandwidth, space, and sites, there are always limitations with shared hosting.

However, with managed features like automatic updates/backups, a free CDN, GreenGeeks’s fast speeds, and a tree planted, you can’t beat this price.

The Tweak Your Biz team found their shared hosting plans to be essentially flawless.

You should have no problem using them for your small-scale website.

WordPress Hosting

WordPress Hosting Plans & Pricing

Plan Features

• 1-click WP installation
• Automatic optimizations to ensure excellent site performance
• Increase speed with LiteSpeed’sLS Cache plugin for WordPress
• Automatic updates (optional)
• Daily backups + on-demand backups on Pro and Premium plans
• Free domain for one year
• Free WP site migration
• Quick Launch Onboarding Wizard to quickly get your site set up

SSL Included & Activated?

SSL is included with any plan. Activation occurs automatically after plan purchase.

Our Take

GreenGeeks WordPress hosting is a serious steal considering the management benefits you’ll be receiving.

Most hosting providers offer daily backups and automatic updates, but GreenGeeks adds to the slew of features with optimized WordPress hosting.

This means that they’re constantly monitoring their servers and tools to ensure solid WordPress support.

Their WordPress plans are also extra developer-friendly with access to SSH, Git, WP-CLI, SFTP, phpMyAdmin, free staging, and variations on PHP versions.

The company also employs quite a few WordPress experts that can help handle the developer side of things if you aren’t as familiar.

We actually found the speeds on their WordPress hosting plan to be even faster than shared hosting, due to the LiteSpeed plugin.

Make sure to adopt their caching plugin to ensure your site can handle stress from larger amounts of traffic.

WooCommerce Hosting

WooCommerce Hosting Plans and Pricing

Plan Features

• 1-click WooCommerce installations
• Automatic updates, backups, and built-in caching
• Free domain name for first year
• Advanced security specialized for WooCommerce
• Dedicated IP address with option to keep your domain name
• Easy upgrades
• Stable uptime promised

SSL Included & Activated?

WooCommerce hosting plans at GreenGeeks come with a Wildcard SSL certificate.

This adds an extra layer of protection to your storefront.

The SSL is included and will be activated after purchase.

Our Take

GreenGeeks offers a pretty standard WooCommerce hosting plan.

They offer benefits like added security protection, but nothing mind-blowing.

If you’re committed to their eco-friendly promise and want to stick with their company, you shouldn’t experience any problems hosting your online storefront with their WooCommerce plan.

By the way — while you follow through on opting for GreenGeeks, check out this article on other ways you can promote environmental friendliness in the workplace.

Their prices are also pretty convincing.

However, if you want an extremely robust hosting plan for a large storefront, we’d recommend a hosting provider like Kinsta that’s built for large-scale businesses.

VPS Hosting

VPS Hosting Plans and Pricing

Plan Features

• Fully managed with expert tech support
• Access to multiple data centers
• 24/7 active monitoring
• Free cPanel migrations for existing VPS
• Advanced security with DDoS protection
• Dedicated IP
• RAID-10 SSD storage
• Intex Xeon processors
• 99.9% uptime
• AlmaLinuz 8 64-bit operating system
• At least 4 vCPU on any plan

Our Take

GreenGeeks VPS plans are insanely cheap for any VPS hosting, especially with their managed features.

This is a solid option if you want access to your server configuration — however, if you’re running a small site, we’d still recommend you just stick to shared hosting.

Even though GreenGeeks’s hosting service does offer automatic site monitoring and management, shared hosting tends to be simpler and covers all the bases a small site should need.

GreenGeeks Going Green Review

The environment is important to all of us, so if that’s a priority for you or your organization, GreenGeeks ought to be at the top of your list.

But what exactly does “green hosting” mean and can GreenGeeks back up their assertions?

Or have they just latched onto an industry catchphrase to stand out from competitors?

The answer is: GreenGeeks is legit.

Their data centers are in colder-climate locations so they don’t require maximum amounts of energy to keep their servers cool.

Furthermore, they purchase wind credits to offset 3x the amount of energy used by the websites they host.

Finally, they plant a tree for every account created with their web hosting services.

It seems to us — not just because they boast it on their website — that GreenGeeks is the world’s most environmentally conscious hosting company.

Moreover, they have been acknowledged by the Environmental Protection Agency as an EPA Green Power Partner – further proving that this is not just another hollow claim.

If you choose to host with GreenGeeks, you can opt to add a Green Website Tag to your site to show that you’re part of an environmentally-friendly movement towards greener web hosting.

The Internet uses up a huge amount of energy, so we commend GreenGeeks for making pledges and sticking to them.

Alternatives to GreenGeeks

HostGator

GreenGeeks hosting offers a comprehensive experience, combining scalable computing resources with proactive server monitoring.

Similarly, HostGator’s services are rooted in impressive features and balanced performance.

Not only do each of these web hosting providers offer quality web hosting services at competitive prices, but they also provide excellent customer support and affordable prices.

Both HostGator and GreenGeeks are known for their affordable hosting prices.

GreenGeeks takes the value even further by offering fully-managed features like site monitoring and automatic updates.

HostGator offers the advantage of a Business plan, though, which makes it better for accommodating large-scale sites than GreenGeeks.

A2 Hosting

A2 Hosting and GreenGeeks are pretty similar in terms of their choice of hosting solutions, speeds, and uptime.

A2 Hosting offers slightly more reliable uptime than GreenGeeks, which is an advantage to larger companies.

However, GreenGeeks offers site management in all of their hosting plans — something that A2 Hosting simply doesn’t.

GreenGeeks also beats A2 Hosting in terms of value by offering unlimited storage, sites, and bandwidth in their second-cheapest plan — which is more affordable than A2’s equivalent.

An advantage of A2 hosting is its inexpensive renewal fees.

However, you may find GreenGeeks more worthwhile even still due to their managed features.

Bluehost

Bluehost is known for its wide variety of hosting types and affordable prices.

To be straightforward, they beat GreenGeeks in both of these realms.

Not to mention that Bluehost offers more reliable customer support than nearly any other hosting provider, including GreenGeeks.

GreenGeeks offers the advantages of being better for the environment and offering better management features in their plans.

We ultimately choose GreenGeeks for beginner site owners because Bluehost doesn’t perform automatic backups.

Nevertheless, these are both excellent options.

Luckily, the decision between the two can easily come down to practical matters like payment preference: at Bluehost, you must commit to at least a year, while GreenGeeks offers month-to-month payment.

The Bottom Line

We’ve reached the end of our GreenGeeks review: what did we learn?

GreenGeeks is easily the most environmentally friendly of all the top web hosting companies on the market.

There’s no doubt about that.

However, during our testing, we realized they may offer the most consistent management features of any hosting platform we’ve tested at TYB.

GreenGeeks even made our list for the best web hosting of 2023.

They’re truly a unique and reliable hosting service provider, especially if you run a small website and yearn for a hands-off approach.

If that’s the case, we couldn’t recommend GreenGeeks enough.

However, if you run a larger site and don’t mind needing some tech experience, we’d recommend alternatives like Kinsta or Cloudways for your hosting needs.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this review and find yourself one step closer to the web hosting plan of your dreams.

Do you have any questions about GreenGeeks? Let us know in the comments below!

GreenGeeks FAQ