It was September 2016, two months before my hosting expiry with Hostgator. I made a tough decision to migrate dozens of my (and my clients) websites to my current hosting – SiteGround. It was not an easy decision and definitely not a piece of cake to migrate such a handful of websites. March 2017 now, with close to 6-month with SiteGround, I couldn’t be more glad.

As a matter of fact, I was with Hostgator for a decade. The key reason for my migration away from it is the inclusion of SSL certificate. Unlike SiteGround, Hostgator do not have a LetsEncrypt auto-installer in the cPanel. And over at LetsEncrypt website, implementation the SSL issuing and installation proved to be technically very tedious.

Then there’s this SSL certificate which must be renewed every 3-month! Imagine the nightmare.

I’d wanted to save the trouble just by buying SSL certificate from Hostgator but that would also need a static IP address which all in all I’ve to spend around $80 USD annually just to convert one site to HTTPS. Not to mention I’d wanted to HTTPS all my sites. After all, Google (should) love sites with HTTPS.

Bitting the bullet, I began my massive site migration to SiteGround – that is when I started to enjoy excellent technical support; which I miss from Hostgator since some years back. These days, getting a live chat support from Hostgator takes “forever” – my last wait was close to 30-minute before I can chat with the tech support. It takes less than 5-minute, on average, with SiteGround.

Comparing server speed and uptime, SiteGround is a notch above I feel. Most oblivious is SiteGround’s cPanel is more featured and versatile including the free LetsEncrypt auto-installer. Update : I realised now if you just addon new domains in your cPanel, LetsEncrypt SSL is install instantaneously even without you clicking the LetsEncrypt icon in cPanel.

Now, most, if not all, of my sites enjoy the free and robust LetsEncrypt SSL!

Check out https://willtan.com/https-wordpress/.