GreenGeeks Review (2024) Good for the Planet, But What About Your Website?

Last updated: See Updates

This article has been written and researched by our expert tooltesters through a precise methodology. Learn more about our methodology

Josep Garcia

Josep Garcia

Author

Cai Ellis

Cai Ellis

Researcher

Tooltester is supported by readers like yourself. We may earn an affiliate commission when you purchase through our links, which enables us to offer our research for free.

Best Hosting Provider for Server SpeedWe awarded GreenGeeks our Best Hosting Provider for Server Speed badge for 2023!

With an average page load time of 1.29, our web host speed tests showed GreenGeeks was the fastest of all hosting providers tested.

Fun fact: do you know why Facebook moved its massive data center to Northern Sweden?

That’s because servers run hot, and cooling them down is expensive. Might as well keep them in a cold part of the world.

But more to the point in this GreenGeeks review: maintaining servers uses a ton of energy.

In fact, the Internet is one of the largest polluters in the world. Data centers account for 2% of the world’s CO2 emissions, about the same as the airline industry.

Well, if that’s a concern for you, I’ve got good news because the ‘green’ in GreenGeeks refers to their commitment to providing eco-friendly web hosting.

This is how it works, according to their website:

  • The platform is designed with a maximum use, no waste mindset.
  • For every amperage the company pulls from the grid, it matches it x3 in the form of renewable energy via the Bonneville Environmental Foundation
  • For every hosting account opened, they plant one tree via One Tree Planted.

While a growing number of hosting providers claim to take the problem of energy seriously, (here’s an example from DreamHost), GreenGeeks really puts their ethos front and forward.

But what about other pros and cons, features and alternatives? Let’s put GreenGeeks through the wringer to see how it fares.

Video GreenGeeks review

Check out the GreenGeeks video-review below if you want to see this hosting service in action:

GreenGeeks Review 2022 - Powered by Clean Energy, But Is It All That Powerful?

GreenGeeks Prices

$10.95

Lite

$15.95

Pro

$25.95

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 review pricing discounts

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 web 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-minded

    GreenGeeks is attempting to offset their server’s electricity consumption by using as much renewable energy as possible.

  • Unlimited data bandwidth

    You can host one or multiple sites with complete peace of mind when it comes to visitor numbers and bandwidth.

  • Unlimited data storage

    Your 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 locations

    Three continents to choose from, the US, Canada and Europe.

  • Heavily reduced long-term plans

    It’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.

  • Performance

    GreenGeeks 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.

greengeeks badges

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 had an average loading speed of 1.29 seconds, making it the fastest web host in our test.

Uptime

The uptime we saw in our web host reliability tests is good, but there are providers offering a bit more. It hovered around 99.97%.

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 website 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 hosting backup cpanel feature

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.

greengeeks wordpress caching plugin reciommended

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 99.97%, which isn’t bad at all.

Web Hosts: Uptime

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 9th place in our ranking table for the best uptime. It has performed pretty well over the last three years:

2020 2021 2022
Uptime %
SiteGround 99.97 100 100
WP Engine 99.99 99.99 100
Namecheap 100 100
Kinsta 100 100 100
InMotion 99.73 99.95 100
A2 Hosting 99.99 99.98 99.99
Cloudways 100 100 99.99
HostGator 99.91 99.99 99.98
GreenGeeks 99.98 99.98 99.97
GoDaddy 99.90 99.96 99.95
Hostinger 99.48 99.92 99.95
Bluehost 99.96 99.99 99.95
iPage 98.45 99.85 99.95
Dreamhost 99.99 99.96 99.83
IONOS 99.93 99.71

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 lightning fast, coming first in our web host speed tests:

Web Hosts: Page Load Times

In fact, GreenGeeks has been consistently fast over the last three years:

2020 2021 2022
Page Load Time in Seconds
GreenGeeks 2.39 1.56 1.29
A2 Hosting 3.15 2.01 1.30
GoDaddy 3.40 1.94 1.44
Cloudways 2.32 1.73 1.46
SiteGround 2.14 1.54 1.56
Hostinger 4.19 1.61 1.63
WP Engine 2.21 1.65 1.66
Namecheap 1.60 1.69
Dreamhost 3.28 1.84 1.75
Kinsta 2.98 1.77 1.82
Bluehost 3.07 2.87 2.07
IONOS 1.95 2.32
InMotion 4.36 2.75 2.58
iPage 4.19 2.76 2.60
HostGator 3.77 2.78 2.72

Results in seconds

Our own research shows the importance of loading speed for the success of a website.

And although there are plenty of other things you can do to fix a slow website and make WordPress faster, a fast web host is the bedrock of a speedy website.

So this is a 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.

> Try GreenGeeks risk-free for 30 days or check out our round up of the other best web hosting providers.

Frequently Asked Questions

You can pay via all major credit cards and PayPal. No checks, money orders, wire transfers or Western Union payments.

Yes. Just keep in mind that there is a limit on the amount of files you can keep on your sites, though. It’s a really high number, so mostly a precaution against file-sharing websites.

There is an unconditional 30-day money back guarantee offer.

Yes, if your website hosting drops below a 99.9% rate, GreenGeeks will refund some of your hosting fees.

They’re certainly advertising as such. In practice this is how it works: GreenGeeks tells the Bonneville Environmental Foundation (BEF) how much electricity they use. The foundation calculates how much green energy they’ll need to use to make up for it. GreenGeeks purchases that amount in renewable energy.

So it’s not like their servers use less energy than standard hosting. However, they are certainly committed to making up for what they consume, and using as much green energy as possible.

The authors

Learn more about us

Josep Garcia

Content Manager

Hi there, I am Josep Garcia. Since 2014 I've been testing and writing about website builders and hosting services, and I share all my learnings at Tooltester.com. Today I am not an active staff member anymore, but I do hope you enjoyed this article. And if you have any questions, please leave me a comment below.

Cai Ellis

SEO Manager

Hi! My name is Cai. Over the years, I've used countless hosting providers, built innumerable ecommerce stores and picked up a bit of SEO know-how too. If you've got questions about these or any related subjects, I'll be happy to help!

Learn more about us

We keep our content up to date

13 Dec 2022 - Badge added
8 Jun 2022: Corrected staging provision and added tree planting commitment
25 Now 2021: Video-review added
17 Sep 2021: New performance tests & new rating
19 Mar 2021: New prices
6 Nov 2020: First review

THE BEHIND THE SCENES OF THIS REVIEW

This article has been written and researched following a precise methodology.

Our methodology

Comments