GreenGeeks Hosting Review: Renewal Prices Spikes? (2025)

Ease of Use

I would rate the overall ease of use at 3.7 out of 5.

Here’s why:

• GreenGeeks features a user interface that, while somewhat basic, is described as snappy and straightforward.
• A potential drawback of GreenGeeks is its reliance on cPanel for setting up and managing websites.
• While GreenGeeks does not provide many one-click features, it compensates with an effective tabbed interface.

GreenGeeks provides a balanced experience that could be very appealing to some users.

At the same time, it might be less ideal for others, especially those looking for more automated and less interactive hosting management systems.

User Interface

For GreenGeeks, we already have a test hosting account with them — I may not be able to show everything, but I can show you how it looks now. 🙂

When setting up the first time, the client area is easy to understand and you can easily get to where you need to go.

There’s not a lot in the dashboard though aside from the hosting accounts you have, so I’ll go straight to the hosting management page:

Well, it looks a little basic compared to newer hosts, but it definitely beats NameHero and A2 Hosting which both have a “classic” look.

👉 Related: NameHero Hosting Review: Are the High Costs Worth It?

From the hosting page, you can:

• Check the stats like disk space, bandwidth, etc.
• Gateway to different features for that hosting (email, site, security, etc.)
• Activate features in 2 clicks like go to staging, auto-updates, etc.

The only caveat here that I see is that GreenGeeks doesn’t seem to be a fan of one-click buttons so most of their pages look a little empty.

The advantage of this is the speed since even if the page is empty, all the other features are stored in different tabs on the same page.

For example, you can quickly go to the staging feature since it’s only a tab away:

In short, I’m having a hard time determining if the ease of use is efficient or not since even if they don’t have 1-click buttons, all the other features are tabbed. 😕

But it’s definitely a good experience.

Hosting Setup

Unfortunately, the setup is even more similar to NameHero and A2 Hosting in the way that you have to use the cPanel.

GreenGeeks currently supports three methods of creating a new website:

• SitePad
• Site Publisher
• Weebly

The in-house option is SitePad:

For those who like Weebly, you need to request an activation first by opening a ticket in GreenGeeks and they will provision a free version.

Like in A2 Hosting, the Site Publisher is also available in the cPanel, and it’s actually what most people use to create websites using cPanel.

👉 Related: A2 Hosting Review: Is the cPanel Integration Enough?

Anyway, SitePad is also easy to use and seems to require the usual steps of choosing a theme and then entering the details of the website.

At the very least, it looks more modern than the default Site Publisher app in the cPanel (though I don’t think what publisher you use really matters).

Features

For the overall features, I rate GreenGeeks a 4.3 out of 5.

Here’s why:

• GreenGeeks offers a robust set of features, especially in email management and security.
• While they offer easy WordPress installations and a staging area without needing to go through cPanel, some essential tasks still require familiarity with cPanel.
• GreenGeeks is commendable for its environmental commitment, matching 300% of the energy used with renewable energy credits.

GreenGeeks’ rich set of features tailored towards both performance and environmental sustainability makes it an excellent choice.

It’s particularly fitting for users who value an eco-friendly approach and have some degree of technical know-how in managing their hosting environment.

⚠️ Note: If you’re looking for what each hosting plan brings to the table, you can find them in the pricing section of this review as what I’ll be talking about here are hosting features.

Here are some notable features of GreenGeeks:

1. Email experience

GreenGeeks includes a full email experience in any of its web hosting plans, unlike other hosts that offer it as an add-on.

Once you open the email menu in the client area, you will see the different things you can do:

From the email options, you can:

• Create and manage accounts
• Mange forwarders and autoresponders
• Add filters
• Configure the email deliverability
• Configure spam protection

It’s a full experience since you can create your own personalized email address and then manage it from forwarders to access.

2. Security

For security, there’s also a lot that GreenGeeks offers aside from the usual domain and hosting protection.

My favorite is the AutoSSL feature, including the 1-click checker that automatically enables or disables the SSL certificate.

Besides that, GreenGeeks has two more features here:

• Protected URLs
• Blocked IPs

The first one allows you to create password-protected URLs and the second one allows you to easily block an IP/domain or range IP (this one is really helpful).

3. Extra features

GreenGeeks wouldn’t be what it is without its green energy match, where they commit to matching the usage by 300% in the form of renewable energy (+tree).

But besides that, they still have a lot to offer, like the easy WordPress installation that doesn’t require you to go to the cPanel.

This is quite helpful for non-managed hosting services like what GreenGeeks offers.

Another feature is the staging area (I already showed a screenshot of this earlier) which lets you create a staging environment quite easily.

Those who are used to managed hosting would also love this feature:

Basically, updating stuff is a headache in non-managed hosting since you have to manually check for updates.

But this auto-update feature in GreenGeeks will allow you to automatically update WordPress core, plugins, and themes. 🙂

Reliability

My rating here is a solid 4.3 out of 5.

Here’s why:

• GreenGeeks demonstrates excellent reliability with an uptime of 99.97% over the past year, which is among the highest scores compared to other hosting providers.
• A significant drawback of GreenGeeks is the absence of a public status page.
• On the one hand, GreenGeeks communicates with its users via email about upcoming maintenance, which is a good practice for keeping users informed.

GreenGeeks offers a highly reliable hosting service with impressive uptime statistics, which is essential for any website.

However, the lack of a status page somewhat hampers the user experience during service interruptions, despite good communication practices.

Performance

For the performance, I keep an eye out for 20 or so web hosting services using Pingdom (these hosts are the ones that Darrel uses in his videos).

In terms of uptime, GreenGeeks was up 99.97% of the time for the past year — and it got a downtime of only 2 hours.

⚠️ Note: For the hosting plans, we usually get the cheapest one from each web hosting service. Well, if their lowest plans suck, we can’t expect much from their more expensive options, right? We also use the same Elementor template kit and plugins.

That’s one of the highest scores I’ve seen from a host for over a year! If this isn’t a green flag for a host, then I don’t know what is. 😅

Anyway, For the page speed, GreenGeeks had an average load time of 2.31 seconds and got a 77/100 performance grade from Pingdom.

Now let’s compare GreenGeeks’s performance with the “current” results from other well-known web hosting providers (6 months):

Web Host	Uptime	Downtime	Performance	Load Time
GreenGeeks	99.97 %	2 hours	77/100	2.31 seconds
Kinsta	>99.99%	24 minutes	77/100	1.38 seconds
Hostinger	99.96 %	3 hours	77/100	1.87 seconds
Bluehost	99.71 %	1 day	75/100	6.65 seconds
Siteground	99.99 %	1 hour	76/100	1.75 seconds

Here are some observations:

• From the table above, it’s easy to see that GreenGeeks is doing quite well in terms of uptime and downtime, with only Kinsta and SiteGround being the better hosts.
• The load time is a little surprising in how slow it seems to be compared with other well-known hosts.
• On the other hand, it’s also showing a high-performance grade, which reflects how fast the test site feels.

The test results may show that GreenGeeks is a little below Kinsta and Siteground in terms of performance.

But honestly?

It doesn’t feel like that in real life as GreenGeeks is one of those hosts where you feel secure, on par with high-ranking hosts like those I mentioned earlier.

Updates and Maintenance

But how about updates and maintenance?

Not sure how you feel about this, but GreenGeeks doesn’t have the usual status page that other hosts have (I’ve even scoured their website for it).

On the bright side though, they will send an email if they need to perform maintenance on your server:

They also have the “latest” web server error logs that you can open in the client area under the “statistics” tab.

Personally, despite these two features, I feel that it isn’t enough.

That’s because every time my website is down, I check first whether the server is down or if there’s any maintenance — and I can’t do that without a status page. 😞

Support

I would rate their overall support at 4.5 out of 5.

Here’s why:

• GreenGeeks excels in providing fast and effective communication options.
• While GreenGeeks offers phone support, which is a significant advantage, it is limited to the hours between 9 AM and 12 AM EST.
• They provide a robust knowledge base, which is supplemented by an active blog that includes tutorials beyond using their products.

GreenGeeks offers a high level of support with quick response times and multiple ways to contact their support team.

Their extensive self-help resources also add value, though the hours for phone support could be expanded to improve accessibility for all users.

Customer Service

For customer support, GreenGeeks has a specific menu on it in the client area’s left panel.

They support:

• Migration request
• Knowledge base
• Tutorials (their blog)

You can check the support item in the left panel:

Their ticketing system seems to be doing fine.

Darrel had previous tickets with GreenGeeks and I noticed that they do reply within 5-10 minutes, which is fast!

Like this one:

You can also see that they also have my favorite customer support option, which is the live chat.

It seems that you can use this feature to talk about sales, billing, and support topics with real-live support personnel.

I also want to mention that they have phone numbers listed on their website (and the availability of their phone support). 🙂

Knowledge Base

GreenGeeks has a knowledge base with a lot of articles grouped into different categories.

Here’s what the home page looks like:

The articles are grouped into categories such as:

• Getting started
• Managing your account
• Reseller hosting
• VPS hosting
• Website builders

From there, you can directly click on the article you want to read, or open the category as a different page and browse your pages.

GreenGeeks also has a search engine that will show you live search results and point you to the right, relevant articles.

As for how the KB articles look, here’s an example:

For the quality, it’s easy to see from the screenshot above that the content is direct to the point and well-written, and has annotated images.

By the way, GreenGeeks also has a blog that contains tutorials outside the domain of their using their products (like how to use certain plugins or build websites).

Pricing

For the pricing, I would give it a 3.7 out of 5 rating.

Here’s why:

• GreenGeeks offers competitively low introductory prices across their hosting plans, including WordPress, VPS, and reseller hosting.
• The primary downside to GreenGeeks’ pricing strategy is the substantial increase in costs at the time of renewal.
• They provide good value for the money, particularly with the performance and eco-friendly aspects of their hosting services.

While GreenGeeks offers competitive initial pricing and transparent communication about renewal rates:

The potential cost increase after the introductory period could impact customer satisfaction and retention.

1. WordPress Hosting

GreenGeeks has different products, and some overlap, like their WordPress hosting, web hosting, and WooCommerce hosting.

Since even their prices are similar, I’ll focus on their WordPress hosting plans:

• Lite (from $2.95/month)
• Pro (from $4.95/month)
• Premium (from $8.95/month)

Here’s a quick summary of these packages:

One look and I could tell right away that the lite plan is only a strategy to pull people into the pro plan (which they claim is the most popular).

There’s almost no reason to settle with the lite plan that only supports one website, has a standard performance, 50 GB web space, and 50 email accounts.

What I like though about how GreenGeeks price their products is that they’re transparent on the regular or renewal price of the packages.

⛔ Warning: As with any other host, you need to watch out for the renewal price. For example, here at GreenGeeks, the regular/renewal price is x4 the introductory price.

2. VPS Hosting

GreenGeeks also offers managed virtual private server hosting.

They also have three plans here:

• 2 GB (from $39.95/month)
• 4 GB (from $59.95/month)
• 8 GB (from $109.95/month)

Here’s a quick summary of what these plans include:

Similar to WordPress hosting, the middle plan seems to have the best value for its price.

If you need more firepower though, the 8 GB has twice the features from the 4 GB plan and only costs around 180% of the 4 GB plan.

The pricing also seems to be similar to the prices from other web hosting companies that offer VPS hosting.

3. Reseller Hosting

If you want to resell hosting services to other people, preferably your clients, GreenGeeks has some of the most affordable prices.

They have three plans here as well:

• RH-25 (from $19.95/month)
• RH-50 (from $24.95/month)
• RH-80 (from $34.95/month)

Here’s a quick summary of what you would get:

You can see how the barrier to entry here is low.

For a meager $19.95/month, you can already host 25 cPanel accounts with an accumulated 60 GB SSD disk space.

You also need to watch out for the renewal prices though especially with higher plans as they “almost” x2 the introductory prices.

Money Back Guarantee/Refund

Does GreenGeeks offer a money-back guarantee?

Fortunately, yes, they offer an “unconditional” 30 day money-back guarantee, including the reason that you’re unsatisfied with their hosting.

They included refunds in their terms of service:

The short of it is that refunds are available within the first 30 days of your account activation.

Naturally, they won’t refund you for any add-ons like domain names, SSL certificates, CDN, and other things you may have purchased from them.

They also advise the users who want to request a refund to be responsible for the timing and make sure they have already made backups.

👉 Related: How to Backup WordPress Site: Hosting + Plugins

Final Thoughts

To maximize the value of your investment, I suggest you start with a more comprehensive plan to take full advantage of the lower rates.

Make sure to set a reminder for the renewal date to reassess your hosting needs and budget before the price increase takes effect.

This ensures you continue to receive the hosting services you require without unexpected expenses and align with your website’s growth and traffic needs effectively.