SiteGround review for WordPress course and membership sites

What you get on each shared plan

SiteGround sells three shared plans for WordPress: StartUp, GrowBig and GoGeek. Its WordPress hosting page lists intro prices of $2.99, $4.99 and $7.99 a month, each prepaid for 12 months, with regular renewal prices of $17.99, $29.99 and $44.99 a month. The shared hosting feature page adds the details that matter for a course site: storage, a suggested visit range, and which tools each plan includes.

Where SiteGround fits a course site well

For a creator with one site and no server administrator, the useful parts are operational. SiteGround documents automated daily backups kept for 30 days on shared plans, one-click WordPress staging on GrowBig and GoGeek, a free site migration offer, managed PHP version updates, and free email accounts with a shared mailbox storage allowance of up to 10GB taken from plan disk space. That covers the jobs a solo course owner most often neglects: a restore point before a plugin update, a place to test a LearnDash or MemberPress upgrade, and a mailbox at your own domain.

Cost is the other reason, with a caveat. At the regular rate GrowBig is $29.99 a month. Kinsta and WP Engine both list a single-site plan at $35 a month on monthly billing, so SiteGround is not dramatically cheaper after year one. What GrowBig adds is unlimited sites and included email; Kinsta says it does not provide email as part of its hosting plans.

Where logged-in students meet the limits

The visit numbers on SiteGround's feature page come with a condition. SiteGround says they are approximate and assume all your sites are properly using its out-of-the-box caching; it calls them a point of reference rather than a restriction. A course site is the type of site that caching helps least. SiteGround's Speed Optimizer documentation says that by default it does not cache content for logged-in users, so every lesson page, quiz submission and account page a student loads runs PHP and queries the database.

Those uncached requests are what SiteGround's fair-use system watches. Its fair-use knowledge base article, dated 2021, gives red-flag CPU-second thresholds per hour, day and month that rise with the plan, and says that extreme or repeated overuse may lead SiteGround to limit access to the site until you act. The uptime promise in SiteGround's Terms of Service excludes downtime caused when you reach the maximum resource allocation for your plan. The practical risk is a launch day or a cohort deadline, when many students log in within the same hour.

MemberPress adds a specific caution. Its hosting guide says SiteGround has been a good host for MemberPress users but notes that SiteGround shared plans cache pages even without the optimizer plugin installed, and recommends making sure the register, thank-you, mepr, account, unauthorized and login pages are not cached, and disabling Memcached.

Who should choose it, and who should skip it

• Choose GrowBig if: you run one or two WordPress sites, enrollment is in the dozens or low hundreds, students log in spread across the day, and you want staging, backups and email without running a server.
• Choose GoGeek if: you host several client or brand sites, want priority support, or your CPU graph regularly approaches GrowBig's thresholds after caching fixes.
• Skip StartUp for a paid course: no staging, the smallest CPU thresholds in the 2021 fair-use article, and a ~10,000 visit reference point.
• Skip SiteGround shared entirely if: you run live cohorts where hundreds of students start a quiz at once, you rely on long-running imports or reports (SiteGround says shared accounts should optimize scripts that hit the maximum execution time, or move to Cloud), or you need a dedicated resource guarantee in writing.
• Skip it if your budget only works at the intro price. The regular rate applies from the first renewal.

A setup checklist if you choose SiteGround

• Buy GrowBig or higher so staging is available before your first LearnDash or MemberPress update.
• In Speed Optimizer, exclude login, registration, account, checkout and payment-notification URLs from caching, following your membership plugin's documentation.
• Leave the Logged-in Users Cache option off unless you have tested it on staging; SiteGround says it stores a separate cache per user, which grows with membership size.
• Find the CPU Seconds graph (Client Area, Services, Settings, Statistics) in week one and note your baseline before your first launch.
• Put the renewal date and the regular price in your calendar now, 15 days before expiry, which is when SiteGround says 12-month plans auto-renew.
• Keep course video off the web server; host it with a video service so it does not consume disk space or CPU.

Sources & verification

Product details and prices can change. Check the linked provider before buying.

1. SiteGround WordPress hosting plans and prices Accessed 29 Oct 2026
2. SiteGround shared hosting feature comparison Accessed 29 Oct 2026
3. SiteGround tutorial: Speed Optimizer caching settings Accessed 29 Oct 2026
4. SiteGround KB: Fair use of server resources (page dated 12 October 2021) Accessed 29 Oct 2026
5. SiteGround Terms of Service Accessed 29 Oct 2026
6. SiteGround KB: Backup service Accessed 29 Oct 2026
7. SiteGround tutorial: SiteGround Staging Accessed 29 Oct 2026
8. SiteGround KB: Fatal error maximum execution time exceeded Accessed 29 Oct 2026
9. MemberPress docs: What web hosting works best with MemberPress Accessed 29 Oct 2026
10. SiteGround KB: When will I be billed for renewal? Accessed 29 Oct 2026
11. SiteGround KB: What is your refund policy? Accessed 29 Oct 2026
12. Kinsta WordPress hosting pricing Accessed 29 Oct 2026
13. WP Engine plans and pricing Accessed 29 Oct 2026
14. Kinsta docs: Email Accessed 29 Oct 2026