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Brad Smith

Hosting Reviewer

Site5 is not a newcomer in the hosting industry, being around over 20 years, since 1998.

Priding oneself on being developer-centric sounds nice on promotional materials. Does this niche offer make any difference? How does it affect what they do – or more importantly, don’t – offer?

We’re going to help you decide.

Quick Look at Site5

Our Verdict: 4/5 | Reading Time: ~15min | Our Overall Ranking: #15

Site5 logo
Site5 was founded in 1998 and is one of the oldest hosting providers in the industry. They pride themselves on being a niche service built for designers and developers, offering shared, reseller, and managed VPS hosting services.

We have been a paying customer with Site5 since 2015 (source) and have been monitoring their performance(source) (uptime and page loading speed) since then. Over the past half a year, they delivered an average uptime of 99.99% and a speed of 571 ms. Our Review Process.

In this Site5 review, we will take a closer look at the features they have to offer, give an overview of their performance statistics, pricing, and find out if they can provide the high-quality website hosting service that you need.

Ready? Let’s start.

Table of Contents (show)

Don’t have time to read the whole review? Skip to Our Verdict.

About Site5

Site5 was founded in 1998 by Rod Armstrong and Matt Lightner. Today it is owned by Ben Welch-Bolen and they are located in California, USA. Not only do they offer shared hosting but also a reseller and fully managed VPS hosting.

Currently, Site5 only has data centers only in the US.

Site5 hosting review

In 2015 Site5 was sold to Endurance International Group (EIG), which also owns many other hosting industry giants like HostGator and Bluehost.

Site5 Features Overview

Let’s have a closer look at Site5’s most important features.

Storage and Bandwidth

All Site5 hosting plans come with unlimited storage and bandwidth. This is something that many other hosts also do and it has become an industry standard.

But what does it mean exactly?

Site5 has not specified any limitations for packages supporting unlimited disk space or data transfer. Meaning, that you are not billed based on how much disk space or bandwidth you consume. However, even though these resources are not infinite, they should have everything necessary to build an online presence and according to Site5, 99.95% of customers will have more than enough disk space and bandwidth to meet their needs.

Security

Unfortunately, an SSL Certificate which is one of the most important features to have from a host is not included in Site5’s shared hosting plans. You’d have to pay $39.95 for a one-year PositiveSSL Certificate.

Want a Wildcard SSL Certificate?

In this case, be ready to pay $149.00/year.

Site5 SSL Certificate pricing

An SSL certificate is something that many other hosts include for free even in their cheapest hosting plans.

The good news is, however, that Site5 includes backups in all of their shared hosting plans. Moreover, they also do nightly backups, so you can be sure that your website data is safe.

Site Migration

Site5 also offers free website migrations or transfers if your site is currently hosted somewhere else. Many other web hosts do this too.

What’s different is that they’ll migrate up to 25 (!) cPanel accounts for you (and up to 10 non-cPanel ones) – still free!

A generous offer to take care of an otherwise time-consuming process.

Money-Back Guarantee

Site5 offers a great 45-day money-back guarantee.

However, their VPS hosting plans come with a shorter, 15-day money-back guarantee.

The great news is that there aren’t any conditions with these refunds. They promise to respond to your request within six hours (or they’ll credit your account extra for the delay).

Ease of Use

Site5 offers a cPanel where you can manage every aspect of your website from one central location.

Although Site5 was “built for designers and developers,” the cPanel has everything you’ll need to maintain a site.

Site5 cPanel

You’ll be able to access video tutorials, email accounts, mailing lists, add-on domains, web statistics, and more.

By offering a cPanel, Site5 has really made it easy to customize your site, data, and content just the way that you want it whenever you like.

You can access the control panel from the client area, your domain, or from the server.

Site5 has an entire article on their site in the knowledge base that tells users how to access the cPanel from all three locations.

Customer Support

Site5 has several two customer support options: live chat and email.

We always test out the live chat option when we review the hosts and Site5 was no exception.

Their support staff connected with us in just a few seconds and answered questions quickly and accurately (although, we had to repeat ourselves from time to time to get the reply that we were looking for).

site5 live chatBesides the live chat and email option, Site5 also offers a vast knowledge base that covers over 500 articles in more than 70 categories.

Site5 knowledge base

Site5 Performance Stats

Now let’s have a look at Site5’s performance data.

Uptime

Stable uptime and fast speed are the two most important factors to consider when choosing a web host. If your website is constantly going offline, your business will eventually lose a lot of traffic and in the end profit. It’s good to aim for a host that can deliver uptime above 99.91%.

So how good or bad is Site5’s uptime?

Over the last 6 months, Site5 delivered an average of 99.99% uptime with 24 minutes of downtime. They delivered 100% uptime almost every month besides January when the uptime was 99.95%.

Site5 last 6 months uptime and speed data
Site5 last 6 months average uptime (monitoring since 2015) | See stats

In general, you can trust Site5 to keep your website up and running.

Page Load Speed

People don’t put up with slow sites. Just a few extra seconds in page loading times can cause your page abandonment to increase by 38%. With most of those heading over to a competitor’s site instead.

For example, for an eCommerce site that is making $100,000 a day, a one-second page delay can potentially cost $2.5 million in lost sales every year. Needless to say, speed is important!

Site5 last 6 months speed data
Site5 last 6 months average speed (monitoring since 2015) | See stats

We tested Site5’s site speed, and they delivered a solid average of 571 ms over the last 6 months. Moreover, they’re getting faster every month.

Site5 Pricing and Plans

Site5 has three shared hosting plan options to choose from:

HostBasic PlanHostPro PlanHostPro + Turbo Plan
Pricing$9.17/month$14.45/month$18.41/month
Websites1UnlimitedUnlimited
BandwidthUnmeteredUnmeteredUnmetered
StorageUnmeteredUnmeteredUnmetered
Email AccountsUnlimitedUnlimitedUnlimited

With Site5’s HostBasic Plan, you get:

  • One website
  • Unlimited bandwidth
  • Unlimited storage
  • Unlimited accounts

Here’s an example of Site5’s billing for HostBasic Plan:

Site5 billing historyStarting from HostPro Plan, you will get unlimited websites. Moreover, all the shared hosting plans come with a 99.9% uptime guarantee, site migrations, 1-click installs, and more. A free domain name is not included and it would have to be purchased for $12/year.

There are also some other types of plans, including:

As you can see Site 5 isn’t the cheapest host on the market. Their starting price starts at $9.17 a month, which’s nine times more than our cheapest host Hostinger. Moreover, you have to commit for a full two years and pay upfront in order to get that price. Otherwise, you’re looking at $11.81 for twelve months.

The good news is that Site5 has fixed prices, meaning there are no renewal costs after the initial sign-up period.

Site5 Pros and Cons

Here are the pros and cons we found while reviewing Site5.

ProsCons
Solid uptime (99.99%)Expensive pricing
Decent speed (571 ms)Free domain is not included
Free site transfersSSL Certificate costs extra
45-day money-back guaranteeData centers are located only in the US
Good customer support

Our Verdict

Here’s our review summary.

Our Rating:

Our Verdict: 4.0

SPEED: 571 ms (January 2024 to June 2024)
UPTIME: 99.99% (January 2024 to June 2024)
SUPPORT:24/7 Live Chat, Email, Knowledge Base
APPS:WordPress, PrestaShop, Joomla, and Magento
FEATURES:Unmetered Bandwidth and Storage, Daily Backups, Email Accounts, 99.9% Uptime Guarantee, 45-Day Money-Back Guarantee
HOSTING PLANS:Shared, Reseller, and Managed VPS
SITE TRANSFER:Free
PRICING: Starting at $9.17/mo (biannually)

We kind of recommend Site5.

Site5 has a lot of perks going on for them – they have delivered solid uptime results, and fast speed, and their customer service is also good. Not to mention all the handy features that they include in their shared hosting plans.

However, there are significant drawbacks to look out for – expensive pricing, no free domain name, and an SSL Certificate will cost you extra.

So, in case of money is not an issue for you, we recommend you try out Site5, but there are definitely other cheaper hosts with the same uptime and faster page loading times that you might want to take a look at.

Best alternatives for Site5:

Further reading: The 10 Best Web Hosting Services (In 2024)

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Here are some of the most frequently asked questions about Site5.

100 user reviews for Site5

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    Bryan V

    3 — March 29, 2021

    Not good for WordPress

    Site5 is not a good hosting platform for WordPress. It lacks the basic server requirements. It always times out when you upload a large image. Constant timeouts when you update a plugin. It’s just terrible if compared to other hosting providers I used, like Siteground.

    If you just host plain HTML websites and you have a lot of images or files that you need to store, Site5 might be a great option as it has unlimited storage and inodes.

    Jeremy B

    1 — February 17, 2021

    Site5 is TERRIBLE

    Site5 may not be THE worst. But they are a strong contender.

    They mislead about their services at best but more accurately stated would be they lie.

    Example:
    They highlight the use of CPanel to manage your site, but cripple it to ensure you need to purchase SSL support from them.

    Site5 decided to disable that capability so they can charge to issue certificates for $150 a year.

    They will allow you to get free certificates but they disabled the ability to upload them to your own site to configure them for you.

    Brockney C

    5 — June 13, 2020

    Excellent

    I have personally found Site5 to be excellent.

    Website speed is good, backstage is good and customer service is outstanding.

    I began this with very little knowledge. Live chat is extremely quick to access and they will help with anything.

    I have returned from a serious head injury and needed a complete and utter reminder of where all of the files are actually stored.

    This took just a few minutes to give them all of the security details and get a very straightforward yet thorough response.

    Linda

    1 — March 8, 2020

    Don’t Waste Your Time

    I was a Site5 customer for a few years. The last year or so has been terrible, I see other reviewers have had this same problem: literally hundreds of emails bounced, regularly, from aol, yahoo, and gmail. In addition, people emailing me from those addresses would sometimes get bounce back messages when I had actually gotten their emails. I reported this problem countless times, and would always get the same lame explanation. I also repeatedly asked to speak to someone from Site5 ( I communicated with them through their online support ticket function) and was completely ignored.

    Save your time and money – look elsewhere.

    GT

    2 — January 29, 2020

    Not as good as they once were

    I’ve been using Site5 for a long time. Rarely a problem until last year. I’ve been having problems with being able to send emails to clients who use Yahoo. I contacted Support again this morning (lost count how many times in the last 12 months). The support person told me the issue had been happening for the last few days. Not true and I told her so. Either she wasn’t aware or she was lying. I got my bill from them this morning for another 2 years of service. I’m going to start looking elsewhere. I’m really disappointed in them. They used to be really good.

    Holly

    1 — December 11, 2019

    Just DON’T. Save your frustration.

    I’ve been using Site5 for a few years now. When I first began using their services there was phone support, but quickly after I signed on with them that service was removed. Quite disappointing. When I ran into problems, I would hop into the online chat, which is the ONLY way to communicate with them. When their customer service didn’t know how to handle my questions they would start a ticket, which would then take days to actually solve my issue, all the while my site was down. This game of waiting for responses happened on more than one occasion.

    I finally decided enough was enough, and decided to switch to another hosting service. Site5 customer service told me that my money would be refunded, which was in writing on an online chat. The next day I cancelled my hosting service with them. I went into the online chat again to make sure that it all went through and a Site5 representative told me that I wouldn’t be getting a refund. I showed the proof of the chat I had with the other Site5 representative, but Site5 still wouldn’t honor it. Super frustrating.

    Not a very honest or honorable company, and customer service isn’t their main concern. I’m with SiteGround right now and the customer service has been awesome, and their website interface is way BETTER than Site5.

    GJM

    1 — September 4, 2019

    Total Email Nightmare

    Site5 is a nightmare. Their web interface for account management is highly confusing, burying all the key destinations into hidden corners. But worst of all is the email. Site5 is blacklisted by many email hosts, including Yahoo, AOL, and Verizon. Your email will bounce and fail if you try to send to those addresses, and Site5 will tell you that they will fix the problem. And then years later, after the problem is never fixed, they will tell you they are still working on the problem. At other times, Site5 hosted email will back up for 12-24 hours, and you won’t receive your email until much later all in a batch dump. They will also telI you that WebMail is accessible, but not without an enormous workaround. I once contacted Site5 to see which credit card they had on file for me: they couldn’t even tell me what card they were auto-charging each year for services. Absolutely shambolic. Do. Not. Use. Site5. I left after 5 years. I should have left after 5 months.

    Peter

    1 — August 30, 2019

    Poor technical support

    I have been a customer for many years, and my sites have been moved each time a new company bought out the older one. When site5 bought hostexcellence, I lost functionality on one of my sites. I discovered this was due to a Perl module not being installed. They have cPanel so I located and tried to install, but the install failed due a misconfigured build environment. I have been going back and forth with them for a month now and they cannot grasp what I am telling them. The latest was them asking me how I could tell I am getting a 500 error. Really? Just before that they said they had fixed the problem, but all they did was to completely break the site by making the permissions of ALL of my scripts non-execute. It will be a big job but I am going to be forced to move every one of my sites from them.

    Jiri R

    2 — August 5, 2019

    Cool, but HTTPS/SSL is painful

    Site5 is good and recently their uptime is ok as well. Only once you start looking into HTTPS/SSL, you discover you don’t want to be hosted by them. You can’t install any other certificate than theirs, which is 40 USD per year per domain. There are ways to do this free, but Site5 deliberately blocks that. And HTTPS is a must these days.

    Moore

    1 — July 12, 2019

    Not worth it

    Not worth it anymore.

    Been their client for 6 years. Started moving my clients to a2hosting (Amsterdam) since last October 2018. Will move my remaining accounts as soon as the current invoice reaches an end.

    Reasons? Malware attacks on some websites (although I try to keep everything updated and use verified and premium plugins/themes – WordPress).

    Strange memory dumps would haunt some websites, spamming hundreds of core.### files. Strangely, as soon as i got those websites in a different provider, the issue stopped.

    On one account, which had different websites and clients, the inodes exceeded 400K for the past years. Site5 suddenly reminds me that the limit is 150k and suspended my account. Please be aware, they will not notify you as soon as you reach 150k, they will notify, eventually, 4 years later when the number is so damn high you have no other choice other than to move those clients to a different provider.

    Personally, i strongly recommend a2hosting right now.

    SHaymer

    1 — June 24, 2019

    Terrible Customer Service

    I’ve been a customer for OVER 10 years. Yes, really. Since the buyout, the services have declined considerably. The only support offered is through a chat window. The service using the chat is extremely slow and I’m definitely not working with “expert” developers. Even when I painstakingly list out my problem and suggest solutions, they are completely at a loss. They go out of their way to belittle and ignore a legitimate customer request. I’ve lost features that I once had with no explanation. Like the ability to have multiple users login to their domains. Also, The email spam filter no longer works. Every single time I have purchased a new domain, the site doesn’t work until I contact support. This is a pretty clear indication that some manual work is being done to process even a small requests. So, I’m leaving. Thanks to this article, I’m definitely not going to try HostGator if they’re owned by the same company.

    Daniel X

    1 — June 12, 2019

    Be very careful – 45 days refund only

    Long time client of Site5 before the sale to a chinese holding company – which moved the servers to the cheapest platform in the world and replaced the previous competent sysadmins with the cheapest call center employees in India.

    I decided I had enough of the ridiculously poor service, and so proceeded to move my many hosted sites to a better, local provider. A few clients couldn’t move right away, and so my move period went past the 45 days during which Site5 refund payment.

    I now find myself out of pocket for some 300$, which they want me to use – in the bad service they give, no thanks – and they refuse to refund me. I am sharing this information as a warning. Avoid this once-good hosting provider, they no longer give good service.

    Abby

    1 — April 21, 2019

    Worst. Host. Ever.

    I rely on my website to let customers book me. And over and over, Site5 loses their orders. Orders land in neither my inbox, nor in the customer’s. This problem recurs regularly. Site5 claims that the problem must be on my end. I tell them over and over, my file code never changed. It just stopped working. So the trouble is on the Site5 end. If I put the files on another host that I use, the files work fine. The pattern is always the same. Site 5 at first will not believe me. It takes them days or weeks to admit that the issue is indeed on their end and to fix it. Worse yet, this problem keeps recurring. This is hurting my business.

    Linda

    2 — March 21, 2019

    Used to be good, but…

    Well, Site5 used to be fantastic. My website is relatively static, so it was really the email that I was interested in. One thing I will say – their reps respond very quickly. BUT…I have had a continuing problem of emails bouncing back from aol, gmail and yahoo. This has literally happened at least seven times in the last month or so. Each time, it appears fixed for a while, and then reverts to bouncing. I can’t have this since I depend on email for business. They suggested other options for me – which would be way more expensive – but I think I will just switch providers.

    LB

    1 — January 14, 2019

    Suddenly an expensive downhill ride

    I’ve been with Site5 for over 7yrs and when I say the service was great, I am not kidding. It was great. I can’t recall a downtime, or any issues I had or any of my clients had that weren’t taken care of within minutes of chatting with someone. The support people I did chat with knew what they were doing. Please note I’m not a mega webmaster or sell hosting, I run my own sites and stores, offer free non-profit hosting for locals. I’ve been doing design work for over 17rs, but I’m a ‘normal’ hosting user, my expectations are what they should be. The past 5-6 months, wow. The service has dropped, the rates have gone up and now they bill 2 weeks before the bills are due. The new admin panel is chaos, I asked to be charged the advertised rate, not the rate they were charging me, they denied it. I started hopping through those hoops of the cancellation circus today. Already set up a new hosting account elsewhere, half the price. ps just read all other reviews and see they merged with another hosting service. Bad move site5!

    Robert F

    1 — November 13, 2018

    Avoid Could Be Costly

    Like many I was using IX Webhosting without issues…. then the sale to Site5 and things went downhill fast. My website that Site5 hosted was less important to me than dependable email service and that is where Site5 fell short. Of all the email addy’s I use I have 2 email addresses that I use for income, one for a vacation rental, another for contracting work. I wish I had detected it sooner but It became apparent to me my emails sent weren’t being delivered. Once this became known to me I would send out test emails and many weren’t delivered to their destinations. I wouldn’t even receive an error notice that the email didn’t arrive at it’s destination. Site5 support was responsive but after 4 or 5 attempts at fixing my email problem the problem still wasn’t corrected so I informed Site5(not sure they even received my response)not to bother, I am moving to another host. Hard to say how much money this has cost me in lost contracting work and in rentals but I would avoid Site5 at all costs.

    Mad D

    1 — November 8, 2018

    DO NOT USE THEM

    I was with Site5 for years. Then when they were sold several years ago they went to complete crap. I have moved all my and client sites (several hundred of them). One client still has their hosting there. I’m trying to get them an SSL certificate. There is no way to automatically do this. I go to chat….they have a brand new chat which doesn’t work. I’ve tried 6 times using three browsers, none work. It’s non-functional. They have a note that they no longer have phone support (I didn’t know they ever did). When I go to submit a support ticket, it says they only use chat now. Yes, the chat that doesn’t work. So I find an email address on the site and send them an email. I get an auto-response that says they no longer respond to emails, to use their chat. You remember, the one that doesn’t work. (As a bonus, there’s a link on the bottom of the email for their Knowledgebase. It takes you to a totally empty one that either is old or not used yet.)

    So there is absolutely no way to get a hold of them and purchase an SSL certificate. I will be migrating the client away regardless of the time left on their plan.

    Until a couple of years ago they were GREAT. Their support people were the best. Now…judge for yourself. They’re worthless if there’s no way to reach their support people.

    Jerry E

    1 — October 9, 2018

    Unethical Financial Obligation

    The migration from IX Webhosting to Site5 was a disaster.

    My email accounts were all intermittently down, and Site5 support claimed the problem was at my end. I have since gone with Interserver.net and the emails all work perfectly.

    I have clients who use a web browser to access FTP files. Site5 support told me that they had no way to do that, forcing my clients to acquire and learn FTP programs.

    Since I was an unwilling participant in the transfer to Site5 I am entitled to a refund of the balance I paid IX Webhosting for a three-year plan. I’ve requested the refund but I have no way to force them to give it to me.

    T P

    1 — October 4, 2018

    Tim Northwest

    Nothing but horrible experiences. No phone number or email to contact make correspondence very difficult. You have to sign in to get help. We were forcefully migrated by IXWebHost closing and had no credentials or email notifications. When we finally got in, the help desk repeated this pattern:

    1. What seems to be the problem?
    2. Let me check that and get back to you in 3-5 minutes.
    3. Ok. Are you still there?
    4. Goodbye

    And then you have to start the whole process over. Be sure to go into lockdown so you don’t miss the 5-second window you have to respond between step 3 and 4.

    Side note: They say mailing address is Texas but other areas say Colorado. Looking for a new host now.

    Brockney C

    5 — September 28, 2018

    All Good

    My experience with Site5 has been pretty decent.

    I began designing websites without absolutely no formal training and a bit of publishing experience on one Joomla site (without any training)

    I have learned to build WordPress and Joomla sites from a complete beginner, have encountered many issues (most of which were self-imposed) and ALWAYS received excellent support with the Live Chat facility no matter what time of day or night it was (quite often to begin with as well!)

    My package is $14.95 a month which for what I receive is good in my opinion.

    cPanel, WHM, and Webmail are absolutely easy to navigate and totally reliable, and once again I had no training or experience of this.

    No downtime and a very efficient backend interface. I have recently been learning SEO and working with Google Analytics and the only issues I found were self-imposed.

    I gave them a rating of 90/100 and the only reason it isn’t 100 is because I cannot actually compare them with any competitors. However, I am happily staying with Site5 – if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!

    All good and many thanks