Rocket.net Vs SiteGround: Data Says Rocket.net is Better!

Rocket.net and SiteGround are two excellent hosting services in the industry. We’ve tested both the hosts for more than a year and brought you a series of performance data to compare.

Rocket.net Vs SiteGround

Rocket.net is a Cloudflare-powered WordPress hosting service that offers agencies and customers optimized and reliable WordPress hosting solutions. The service is straightforward to use, with no configurations required by the users.

SiteGround is one of the most popular hosting services, and the service has been around since 2004. SiteGround hosting runs on Google Cloud and comes with easy website management.

Rocket Vs. SiteGround: Performance

1. Rocket hosting has better TTFB than SiteGround

In the last 12 months, Rocket.net recorded an average TTFB of 279 ms; SiteGround recorded an average of 409 ms. There is no comparsion here as Rocket.net wins by a big margin.

2. Rocket hosting offers 100% uptime

Uptime is another crucial factor in determining the performance of a hosting service. No matter how fast your servers, the uptime should be equally good.

Rocket site recorded a 100% uptime; the SiteGround site had 43 outages with 1 hour and 3 minutes of downtime. SiteGround average uptime of 99.99%.

Again, Rocket hosting makes the winner here.

3. Rocket hosting is a clear winner in load testing

In this load test, I sent 500 concurrent client load to both the Rocket and SiteGround test sites. Rocket.net handled the load in just 19 ms, SiteGround took 173 ms to handle the same load.

4. Rocket has better Global TTFB

Global TTFB is our latest test method to determine the severs global speed. If your site gets traffic globally, then this data is for you.

Our data says, Rocket scored an average global TTFB of 227 ms; wheras SiteGround scored 890 ms in the same time. This proves Rocket.net is 4x faster than SiteGround.

5. Rocket offers a better Core Web Vitals Score

Sites need better Core Web Vitals to deliver a better user experience. This is why search engines like Google have been putting a lot of emphasis on Core Web Vitals metrics like Largest Contentful Paint for quite some time now.

As I tested the Core Web Vitals of my Rocket site and my SiteGround site, my Rocket site had

• a ‘Largest Contentful Paint’ of 0.775 s,
• a ‘Total Blocking Time’ of 0 s, and
• a ‘Cumulative Layout Shift’ of 0.

My SiteGround website reflected

• a ‘Largest Content Paint’ of 0.876 s,
• a ‘Total Blocking Time’ of 0 ms, and
• a ‘Cumulative Layout Shift’ of 0.

If we compare, Rocket seems to have better Core Web Vitals than SiteGround.

Rocket Vs. SiteGround: Features

1. Data Center Locations

Knowing the Datacenter locations of a hosting service is crucial since hosting a site from the closest data center locations to your target audience can drastically improve your site’s performance.

Rocket has as many as 15 data center locations worldwide, which offers customers an excellent choice.

SiteGround has 6 data center locations across Europe, the USA, and Asia, which should not be a problem if you find your desired data center among these 6 locations. However, going by the number of data center locations, Rocket has a leading edge over SiteGround.

2. Control Panel

Rocket comes with a custom WordPress control panel that offers the convenience of managing everything from a single place. This may include development, launching, staging, and optimization. The control panel allows you to access data center locations, SSO to WP-Admin, robust reporting, and collaboration tools.

SiteGround also has a custom control panel created out of modifying the cPanel. The control panel comes with a much cleaner interface than the traditional cPanel and has all the features you would find in a cPanel. However, the tools and options are presented in a much more organized manner.

3. CDN

CDNs are extensively used these days and can drastically improve content delivery speed. Rocket provides customers with Enterprise Cloudflare CDN for free on all plans. With that, sites benefit from a blazing-fast speed backed by advanced features such as Brotli file compression, Image Optimization, Tiered Caching, Agro Smart Routing, and the closest server.

SiteGround started offering its own CDN solution and ditched its decade-long partnership with Cloudflare. Since their CDN pricing is higher ($14.99/month/site), I haven’t tested the performance. You can get more details about their CDN here.

4. Backups

Rocket has an automated daily backup feature wherein backup sites are taken every night and saved in the Rocket server. This is done as a part of disaster recovery. However, users can also restore a backup as per their requirements. The company offers a 14 days backup retention on their plans, although one can take on-demand backups anytime.

Another cool thing about Rocket’s backup system is that the host allows on-demand backup on all plans. SiteGround offers free automated daily backups on all plans, and the host saves 30 recent backups. Users can restore any of the 30 backups at any point without any hassle.

5. Staging

Rocket has the Staging free on all plans, and creating a staging site in Rocket is a pretty simple process. After you finish experimenting with the changes, you can quickly deploy the final changes to your live site.

In SiteGound, the Staging feature is not free on the StartUp plan and is only available on the following higher plans. However, SiteGroud keeps the process pretty convenient for the users. Apart from that, the host also offers Git integration with staging.

6. Security

Rocket has excellent security features, including WordPress Website Firewall, Hack & Malware Removal, Automated WP Core, Plugin, and Theme Updates.

SiteGround security system is characterized by a custom web application firewall, AI Anti-Bot System, Let’s Encrypt SSL Certificate, and Linux containers.

Hence, it wouldn’t be wrong to say that Rocket and SiteGround have highly reliable security systems.

7. Support

Rocket has a decent support team of highly proficient WordPress experts from the USA. The support team remarkably assists the customers through 24×7 live chat, phone, and email.

SiteGround is used to offer great support, but they made it difficult to contact their customer support. Sounds crazy, right? Yes, to reduce the chat & ticket volumes made it difficult for users to chat with a customer support agent. Finding the chat support button will take a minimum of 6 clicks. Many users are complaining, but the company didn’t make any changes to the portal until now.

Pricing

Rocket.net plans start at $30/month. Rocket offers all its free features on all its plans, including Cloudflare Enterprise CDN.

SiteGround does deep discounting on your first invoice. However, their renewal charges are among the highest in the industry. You’ll be surprised to see their startup plan costs $3.99/mo. But it renews at $14.99/mo. Likewise, all the plans have high renewal charges.

Unlike Rocket, SiteGround limits its features based on the plan. You need to choose their $10.69/mo. GoGeek plan (renews at $39.90/mo.) uses all their features. You need to pay $14.99/month/site for CDN. Overall, I’m not happy with the pricing model of SiteGround.

Conclusion

I am sure you have thoroughly enjoyed reading this post, and I have put my best efforts into presenting you with the most transparent picture of the two services. Now, you should have no difficulty understanding how the two services work. As per my testing and review, Rocket has a leading edge over SiteGround in many places.

However, SiteGround is also a reliable hosting service and has largely proved it over the years.