Category: Community

SiteGround is excited to support the Bulgarian Freeride ski and snowboard team for a second year in a row! The 2022 – 2023 winter season is starting strong for the young professionals. Despite the lack of snow in her homeland and, therefore, the impossibility of preliminary training, the young snowboard star Teodora Ilieva has already won one silver and one bronze medal at the first starts of the season in Chamonix and Avoriaz, France.

In general, the Bulgarian team made a good start, but the competition is extremely tough , and most competitors have a head start in the preliminary field practices due to the better winter weather conditions in their home countries.

“We are happy with this start in France, and we hope for more podium finishes until the end of the season. We are in high spirits.”, commented Simona Kamberova, the team’s manager.

The full standings for the two starts in France are as follows:

Chamonix:

• Teodora Ilieva – 2nd place, snowboard
• Iliana Mihovska – 4th place, snowboard
• Simeon Pavlov – 5th place, skiing
• Tina Bliznakova – 7th place, skiing
• Boryana Angelova – 10th place, skiing
• Daniel Uzunov – 23rd place, skiing
• Valentin Balov – 30th place, skiing
• Martin Roshkov – 31st place, skiing

Avoriaz:

• Teodora Ilieva – 3rd place, snowboard
• Iliana Mihovska – 6th place, snowboard
• Tina Bliznakova – 8th place, skiing
• Martin Roshkov – 22nd place, skiing
• Simeon Pavlov – 24th place, skiing
• Daniel Uzunov – 27th place, skiing

There are nine athletes representing Bulgaria this season at eleven starts in five locations worldwide. Three of the boys’ and girls’ team members move on to the “big league.” They are Tina Bliznakova (ski), Teodora Ilieva (snowboard) and Martin Roshkov (ski). Eagerly-awaited is the prestigious competition with the rank of “3 stars”, which will be held on the freeriders’ favorite slope under Mount Todorka, in Bansko, Bulgaria on March 17-19, 2023; and at its last year’s edition, our team won two podium finishes. Keeping our fingers crossed for an even more successful race this year!

Our commitment to the team as an official sponsor for the forthcoming year continues our dedication to the development and promotion of sports and a healthy lifestyle. Over the past three years (2020, 2021 and 2022), SiteGround’s management team has supported social causes with nearly 900,000 BGN, including the Mountain Rescue Service at BRC-Bulgaria, the Organization of Observation Lodges in Bulgaria, hospitals, non-governmental organizations, and other institutions of public importance in the country. Thanks to its large-scale commitment and investment,  SiteGround is the recipient of more than 20 awards in 2022 as an employer and a socially responsible company.

December 2022 was magical, full of joy, gratitude, happiness, and fun.

• The month started with an amusing Movember contest at the office accompanied by laughter and pizza. During “No Shave November” some colleagues grew and groomed nice mustaches and beards for a full month supporting the cause of raising awareness about men’s health.

• We joined forces with the Freeride Team BG to celebrate the official season opening before the holidays. For the second year in a row, SiteGround supports them, this time as an official sponsor.

• We gladly announced our support for the World’s first expedition by rowing a boat from Antarctica across the Southern Ocean, in the face of our Bulgarian representative Stefan Ivanov, whom you might know from Neverest Ocean Row. The expedition is planned to begin in January 2023 and is set to accomplish six Guinness World Records. You may follow the expedition in real time via this tracker.

• Our country manager for Spain José Ramón Padrón and Joan Boluda met for the monthly Uptime Podcast to review the latest news in digital business, web hosting, and technology.

• Santa Claus and Snow Maiden came to our offices to bring presents and make our employees’ kids happy. We gathered a total of 152 children who were playing and dancing. It was a magical event!

• We’ve enjoyed a Secret Santa gift exchange with our colleagues. All presents came along with many happy faces and excitement! 

• And last but not least, right before the holidays, we organized our company’s End-of-Year event and annual internal presentation in which we wrapped up the previous 12 months. Afterward, we ended the day perfectly with a Top Gun-themed party to pay homage to the sequel of the legendary movie released this year – with lots of music and dancing together.  

It’s the beginning of a new year, and our team is ready to take on even more significant challenges and adventures! We are so looking forward to seeing what 2023 holds!

2022 is coming to an end, and here at SiteGround, we marked another winning and eventful year. We worked hard on enhancing our services and tools and fine-tuning our hosting environment to be even faster and safer for our clients.

Now it’s time to wrap up and look back on the whole year! Go to our 2022 Recap, unlock our milestones, collect points, and enter to win a pair of custom noise-canceling BOSE headphones!

>> Go to 2022 in Review

Technology Optimizations for Faster and More Secure Websites

In the past year, we took our hosting environment security and speed to yet another level. Some of the service enhancements and cutting-edge tools we launched are: 

• In-house built CDN for blazing-fast website loading time with a one-click setup. 
• Private DNS Service for enhanced online privacy and seamless white-label hosting management. 
• New Block country traffic tool to limit unwanted or malicious traffic and streamline your business. 
• Boosted AI brute-force blocking system with a traffic validation functionality, which cuts down the number of brute-force attacks by 95%. 

Improved WordPress Tools For All

Our custom plugins for unmatched WordPress speed and security – SiteGround Optimizer and SiteGround Security – have together been installed nearly 3 Million times already. This year marked another big step on this journey, after we released both plugins for free use by everyone, regardless of the hosting platform you are using. In less than a year, SiteGround Optimizer has had more than 1,000,000 active installations on top of the 2+ Million SiteGround users and is ranked among the top 3 performance optimization plugins. The SiteGround Security plugin is close to 1 Million new installations and is ranked as one of top WordPress security plugins by the community.

In 2022, we also increased the WordPress memory limit for all of SiteGround clients in response to a growing demand in the community for raising the default WP memory value and to accommodate the ever-growing development of WordPress sites. The new limit of 256 MB on our servers means our WordPress clients have more room to expand their WordPress sites right out of the box.

Expanded Data Center and CDN Network

In 2022, we introduced 4 new Data Centers and 7 CDN locations across Europe and the USA. Our new geographical locations provide better website performance and faster content delivery. 

Our clients can now host their websites as close as possible to where their visitors are to ensure faster page loading time and better user experience.

98% Client Satisfaction Rate

Being customer-driven has always been a cornerstone for us. Our clients’ feedback is the driving force behind everything we do at SiteGround. For this reason, each year we ask our customers to rate our efforts and services throughout the year. 

This year our client satisfaction rate remained a steady 98% on our annual end-of-year survey. And to share our gratitude for our customers’ input, we’ll plant a tree through TreeNation for each person who completed the survey.

Explore Our Milestones and Win Bose Headphones

Revisit these and more annual accomplishments in our SiteGround Year in Review and enter our raffle for a chance to win a pair of custom noise-canceling BOSE headphones! And that’s not all – get extra entries by sharing our recap on social media with #SiteGround22 by January 9, 2023!

2023 is around the corner – supercharge it with some extra points from 2022 and SiteGround, and let’s see what it has in store for us!

>> Go to 2022 in Review

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November brought Black Friday, Thanksgiving, great employee events, and more awards.

• November 01 is National Revival Leaders Day. At SiteGround welcomed 60+ of our employees’ children to our offices in Sofia and Plovdiv. On this important Bulgarian holiday, our little awakeners took part in a series of educational fun games and interactive workshops, thanks to which they discovered the activity of the Bulgarian leaders of the National Revival in history, as well as modern ones, and learned a lot of new things.
• Plamen Petrov, one of our full-stack developers, gave a talk on ZagoraDev in Stara Zagora.
• SiteGround Founder, Ivo Tzenov, and CEO, Tenko Nikolov, spoke about the DNA of Success by Forbes Bulgaria.
• We took part in Plovdiv Game Jam and supported the event.
• On World Records’ Day, Stefan came to SiteGround to tell the story of Neverest, that broke two Guinness records.
• We helped 25 children from low-income families get a personal laptop from SiteGround. This will allow the kids to learn and develop more easily, receive information and knowledge faster and to work comfortably with modern technology, and be better prepared to face the challenges of the world today and tomorrow!
• Have you seen our latest awesome product videos? In our recap you can also take a quick peak behind the scenes.
• As part of the WordPress community, we again hosted the WordPress meetup in Plovdiv and took part in WordCamp Griñón in Madrid, Sevilla, and San Jose (Costa Rica).
• We supported and saw the Marketing Challenge at American University in Bulgaria.
• We received Jamba’s award for First Place of Agent of Change for our CSR efforts.
• Of course, we celebrated Thanksgiving: in our offices and also by supporting the American Chamber of Commerce Annual Thanksgivings Charity Dinner.
• Keeping a good mind in a good body is very important for SiteGround, and we took part in probably the last running event for the year: Big Tech Run.
• Our GM for Spain Jose Ramón Padrón presented at EMMS about making a content marketing strategy.
• Back in April, SiteGround pledged $ 6.5 M to AI institute INSAIT and in November we welcomed the first PhD students at the Presidents’ office.

What a great month November was! Can’t wait for December and the excitement of Year-end. If you want to learn more about life at SiteGround and our open positions, check careers.siteground.com.

Fall is here that brought lots of pumpkins, smiles, great talks and events at SiteGround.

• SiteGround Brand Gurdian, Dima Peteva, got invited to talk about advertising on podcasts and also gave a keynote at the Future of Work conference about how to think like a start up in a big company and grow through talented people
• The HR team was really busy this October:
  • They attended the biggest HR conference, Unleash in Paris
  • They filled 4 of the top 100 HR pros spots according to CareerShow
  • SiteGround HR Director, Victor Fachev, spoke at AIBEST’s Annual Forum about innovative ways of retaining people and also presented SiteGround at the Fall edition of the Meet the Members of British Bulgarian Business Association
• Traditionally, we support the Sofia OpenFest and open source community. This year, SiteGround was one of the biggest sponsors, had 2 speakers and a booth where we met great people
• Back in April, we went and planted a forest in Vitosha mountain. This means that over the next few years, we need to occasionally go to take care of it. In October, we went to check on it and prepare for the cold winter and were so happy to see that most of the trees have grown through the summer
• Another open source community we are great supporters of is the WordPress one and this month we hosted a meetup in Plovdiv and attended WordCamp Valencia
• Our team also attended TarugoConf in Madrid
• At SiteGround, each team gets the opportunity to attend conferences to hear and learn about new ideas, network with the top professionals in a specific field. Our System Test Engineer Team attended PostgreSQL Conf in Berlin
• SiteGround CEO, Nikolay Todorov, got invited as panalist to the Digital Trends 2022 Conference
• October was Cyber Security Month, and Daniel Kanchev, Product Development Manager, gave a webinar on how to bullet proof your site security
• At SiteGround, we take sport and wellness seriously, and employees (and their kids!) took part in the Sofia Morning Run
• And at the end of the month, our offices got spooky as we celebrated Halloween.

What a great month! If you want to join the fun and growth, learn more at careers.siteground.com.

The two SiteGround entrepreneurs foundation will be called “Lead by example” 

Ivo Tzenov, founder, and Tenko Nikolov, CEO, of the leading Bulgarian IT company SiteGround are among the ten Leaders of the Bulgarian National Revival – the public campaign of the Bulgarian National Radio, which each year distinguish ten people who inspired those around them, created change and did good through the year.

In the video, Tzenov and Nikolov, explained  about their social activities during the years, vision regarding the development of the foundation to support Bulgarian sports, healthcare and education. If you think their mission is close to your values ​​and deserves your vote, support them by voting HERE.

A team of journalists from the Bulgaria National Radio nominated the most outstanding persons and projects in the past year, and the public radio listeners sent in nominations for their Leaders of the Bulgarian National Revival for three weeks. Among all the nominees, more than 200 applications – a jury consisting of Prof. Ognyan Gerdzhikov, Dr. Rumen Manov, Svetoslav Ivanov, Daniel Nenchev, Eleonora Gadjeva, Dobrina Cheshmedzhieva and Iva Doichinova determined the ten names that marked the year 2022 with their awakening activity.

“SiteGround has been supporting various educational and social initiatives for years, so the decision came naturally to establish our own foundation, which will be called “Lead by example” and will work in the field of health care, education and sports”, commented Tenko Nikolov and Ivo Tzenov.

Until now, SiteGround is among the largest investors in Bulgarian education. In 2021, the company supports the “Tеch for Bulgaria” foundation with BGN 20,000, and from 2022 the commitment is worth BGN 100,000 over a period of three years, or a total of BGN 300,000. The company will donate BGN 12 million to the first Bulgarian Institute for Computer Sciences, Artificial Intelligence and Technologies (INSAIT) within five years. The amount will cover the costs of remuneration of the world-class scientists that the institute will attract to teach in our country, for a period of five years. SiteGround is among the biggest investors, along with the Bulgarian government and tech giants like Google and Amazon.

SiteGround has also donated to various NGOs that support career guidance for young people as well as entrepreneurial projects and mentoring.

It’s amazing to see how when people get back from summer breaks, September is always full of events, conferences, initiatives… and awards.

• We attended the biggest local QA Conference: QA Challenge Accepted. We listened to some great lectures and greeted QA and DEV enthusiasts at our booth.
• Our CEO, Tenko Nikolov, got invited several times on stage this September – on TV, radio, and at the Forbes Innovation Forum. The reason was him being invited to the Board of Teach for Bulgaria Foundation and the founding of the Role Model Foundation by Tenko and Ivo of SiteGround, which has pledged to donate 100 Mln BGN for education, sport, and healthcare initiatives.
• As a big WordPress contributor, we had a very strong presence at WordCamp US in San Diego, California. It was great to be back in person after two years and meet many of our community friends. We also hosted the WordPress MeetUp in Plovdiv and represented at WordCamp Pontevedra.
• We have been big supporters of the career development of young people, and we met with very talented and dedicated people at the Tuk-Tam Hive in Sofia.
• We are very proud and happy to receive 3 GOLD Awards and 3 BRONZE Awards from Career Show. This is a great recognition of our efforts.
• Protecting the environment is a very important cause for us, and for the first time, we participated as a company in World Cleanup Day and helped clean the Batak Dam, a favorite place for us for team-building and off-site events.
• Our Table Tennis pros showed their skills at the IT Sofia Table Tennis Championship.
• At SiteGround, we support the learning and development of our colleagues, and September had some great conferences where they got to learn and explore new ideas:
  • Awwwards Conference in Amsterdam for our UX and Design team
  • INSAIT conference in Sofia for our AI enthusiasts
  • ECONGRESS Malaga in for our e-commerce team
• Dima, Head of Brand, gave a great interview for Capital Newspaper about how we still retain our startup spirit and growth no matter how big we get.
• Georgi of R&D and Elena of WP Initiatives got featured as Developers on Focus.

What a great start to the fall season! We are excited about all that we have prepared until the end of the year. If you are interested to learn more about us, check out careers.siteground.com.

The leading Bulgarian IT company SiteGround is the best employer in Bulgaria according to this year’s edition of the Career Show Awards. The company received a total of six awards in a contested competition with 457 projects: gold in the category of best employer, green office and employee engagement strategy, and bronze in the corporate social responsibility strategy, work-life balance and outstanding team achievements.

“For us, SiteGround being honored as a Best Employer and simultaneously winning several other awards related to the company’s team, is a testament to our successful social practices and human resource management. The investment in the development and building of the team, social benefits and satisfaction are a key element of our overall policy in terms of providing the best conditions and opportunities for our employees and customers every day”, says Victor Fachev, Director of Human Resources in the company.

This year in June, SiteGround also received a silver award in the ranking “Top 100 of the best employers in Bulgaria 2022”, according to the criteria of the Career Show Index. The ranking is compiled on the basis of Bulgarian and international awards won in the last three years. SiteGround is in the top places for the second year in a row, topping the rankings in 2021.

SiteGround has three offices in Sofia, Plovdiv and Stara Zagora. They employ more than 500 employees, and the company continuously invests in the development of their expert skills and professional competences.

SiteGround also offers many benefits, including shorter working hours on Fridays, own restaurant and barista, own gym, additional health insurance, annual medical check-ups, psychologist, massages, sports cards, unique office environment, various traditional initiatives to support the physical , emotional, personal and professional development of employees.

The leading Bulgarian IT company SiteGround stands behind the cause of “Teach for Bulgaria” to ensure better education in the Bulgarian schools. BGN 300,000 in total is the donation that the foundation will receive from SiteGround for three years, divided by BGN 100,000 on an annual basis for 2022, 2023 and 2024.

The financial support will be invested in the training and development of teachers, principals and school teams from all over the country with a focus on modernizing their management and teaching practices aimed at the individual progress of each student.

The support that SiteGround provides to the “Teach for Bulgaria” Foundation is a continuation of a long-standing partnership. Within it, the company has helped both financially and with the strong individual commitment of the management team to the cause of education. The SiteGround CEO, Tenko Nikolov, has also personally actively supported the organization, being a member of the Board of Directors of the “Teach for Bulgaria” foundation since 2022 and participating in the strategic development of the organization.

“SiteGround has been supporting various initiatives of “Teach for Bulgaria” for years. We decided to turn this into a sustainable collaboration. I believe in the cause of better education and I think business has a key role to play. It can help analyze problem areas and propose innovative solutions in response. Getting better educational opportunities for the Bulgarian children is the goal”, commented Tenko Nikolov, CEO of SiteGround.

“SiteGround’s support is extremely valuable for “Teach for Bulgaria” because it allows us to support more Bulgarian schools with a long-term horizon. In education, this is key to making a real impact in every school and for every student. We are even happier that in the person of SiteGround and the people of the company we see true like-minded people, people with whom we share common values ​​and a vision for the future of Bulgarian education and together we will work for them”, commented Trayan Trayanov, Executive Director of “Teach for Bulgaria”.

SiteGround is among the biggest investors in the Bulgarian education. In 2021, the company supported the “Teach for Bulgaria” foundation with BGN 20,000. SiteGround will donate BGN 12 million to the first Bulgarian Institute for Computer Sciences, Artificial Intelligence and Technologies (INSAIT) within five years. The amount will cover the costs of remuneration of the world-class scientists that the institute will attract to teach in our country, for a period of five years. SiteGround is among the biggest investors, along with the Bulgarian government and tech giants like Google and Amazon. SiteGround has also donated to various NGOs that support career guidance for young people as well as entrepreneurial projects and mentoring.

At the end of the summer, we are sharing a quick recap of a month full of rest time for our employees, team buildings, festivals, kids & smiles in our offices, and new learning and development activities. Our efforts were recognized as finalists in 5 categories of Employer awards.

• We accommodated one full workweek care of more than 60 SiteGround kids, ages 3-14, in Sofia and Plovdiv. They had the amazing opportunity to spend the week where their parents are working, make new friends, enjoy exclusive healthy meals in our restaurant, play a lot of fun games, do some really cool sports & dance activities, and learn many new things about the magic of web hosting. I got to speak more about it with Капитал Кариери (text in Bulgarian only).
• Developing our employees means taking care of managers as well. We tried out metasim – a VR-powered training software – with three of our managers for a course on giving feedback.
• At SiteGround each team receives its own dedicated (and pretty generous) budget for team-building. That boosts collaboration and team spirit, and for some teams working from multiple locations, allows them to spend quality time together in person. Part of our Technical Support team made it all the way to the capital of waltz and Mozart Kugeln – Vienna.
• Supporting the local IT community is very important, so we sponsored the biggest IT event in Bulgaria – DEV.BG All in One. SiteGrounders also attended and enjoyed the lectures and discussions.
• We also hosted the WordPress MeetUp again in Plovdiv.
• Our Plovdiv office got pimped with its new foosball table.
• Taking care of our employees includes looking after mental health. We are partnering with digiburn – an app that helps people live more fulfilled lives by overcoming burnout.
• We had more than 190 employees visit the Arte Festival – enjoying the great bands, comedy scene, cuisine, and a fantastic time at our very own dedicated SiteGround zone.
• Our efforts got recognized again, and we are finalists in 5 categories out of 457 entries in the CareerShow employer branding awards: Best Employer, Exceptional Team Achievements , CSR Strategy, Green Office, and Work-life Balance. Keep your fingers crossed – September 13 is the award ceremony.

We are looking forward to what the fall brings. If you are interested to learn more about us, check out careers.siteground.com.