Category: Product Updates

It’s time for another roundup of all the awesome new website hosting speed, security, and management enhancements that we launched in 2021! This time, to make it even more fun, we’ll let you guess some of the facts, and enter a giveaway for 5 exclusive portable speakers!

Enhanced Speed & Security Performance

In the past 12 months we did a lot of work behind-the-scenes to ensure you have an even faster and safer website hosting experience for your sites!

Some of the unique speed and security boosts we introduced are:

• А new MySQL setup for faster query processing
• Unique Dynamic (full-page) caching solution enabled for everyone
• New off-site backup system for more safety even in extreme situations

New & Improved WordPress Tools

We also expanded and improved our selection of WordPress tools that make managing, optimizing and securing WordPress websites easier than ever:

• A brand new all-in-one SiteGround Security plugin – free and available for all WordPress Users. The plugin protects you from malicious login attempts, brute force attacks, hacks and malware, and helps you embrace better security practices!

• A new major update to our SiteGround Optimizer Plugin that includes enhanced image compression technology, improved user experience and much more!

Superior Website Management for Everyone

2021 marked the end of a complex migration from cPanel to our in-house Client Area and Site Tools. This allowed the release of multiple new service enhancements that wouldn’t have been possible with the old site-management platform. After all, when we started SiteGround our goal was to create and maintain a service that we would want to use ourselves. 

98% Client Satisfaction Rate

Of course, what keeps our team innovating is the feedback from our clients. Every year, we ask them to evaluate our service and we are extremely proud and happy to see that we earned an average of 98% client satisfaction rate. 

Take our Recap Quiz & Win Bespoke Speakers

You can find out more about our accomplishments and the raw facts in our 2021 SiteGround Year in Review quiz. Five lucky winners will get a special prize from SiteGround – branded portable speakers.

>> ENTER 2021 RECAP QUIZ & WIN

Now, let’s see what 2022 will bring us.

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In this highly globalized economy, we believe that offering services customized for the local markets is the best way to deliver better quality and more convenience for our users. That is why we are proud to announce that besides English, Italian, and Spanish, we now start to offer our hosting services in German as well.

In the past few years, we have seen a growing number of customers from Germany, which has led to our decision to provide a data center location in Frankfurt. Now we are happy to attend to another need of the people from this region and we are adding the German language as an option for our site, all knowledge base articles, client interfaces and, most importantly, as a language on which our clients can communicate with our support via chat and ticket. 

Our new German Website: de.siteground.com

To visit our new German website you may go directly to de.siteground.com, or you may choose region Germany in the footer. People visiting siteground.com from German or Austrian IPs will be automatically redirected to de.siteground.com. By ordering a hosting service from this website, you will have your account created by default in our Frankfurt data center and all your client interfaces, including the helpdesk will come pre-loaded in German.

How to switch an existing service to German?

If you are an existing client, you may easily switch your service language to German from the Profile page in your Client area. Thus your Client Area and Site Tools interfaces will be turned to German, you will be able to read all our tutorials and knowledge base articles in our Help Center in German and you will also be able to post your support inquiries and receive the responses from our representative in your preferred language. Please note that for all service languages except English, support communication may be aided by Google Translate.

We also would like to remind you that if your account is not hosted in our German data center, but you wish to host in it, you may have your account transferred to it through our relocation service.

We are happy that our service is now more accessible to all German-speaking customers and we hope that our decision to support their native language will make their hosting experience better than ever.

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Exactly 2 years ago we launched our new Client area and Site Tools. It was a huge moment for us not only because it completed a 2.5-year long software development cycle, but also because it set our hopes high on the infinite opportunities for service enhancements that opened ahead. To celebrate the anniversary of our new tools, we decided to recap which of those opportunities we turned into reality and what were the reactions and impact from all those improvements altogether. Oh, we’ve decided it’s time to stop calling them “New” Client Area & “New” Site Tools since any software that has successfully crossed the two-year and 5000 bug fixes and feature requests mark is officially proven and tried-and-true into maturity.

Revamping Our Technical Setup For a Faster & More Redundant Service

Once we completed the development cycle and perfected our migration scripts to transfer all existing accounts from the old to the new server setup and interfaces, our DevOps resources got fully directed into platform improvements. The three major and most essential projects that we completed, which were possible thanks to our new Site Tools server infrastructure, were focused on the key components of our service: PHP, MySQL, and DNS services. No website could run on any server without these 3 (and the actual web server software of course), so they lay the grounds of how your website will perform even before you have selected an application or put it live.

UltraFast PHP for Up To 30% Faster Page Loading

Running a PHP service is not a challenge. Many webmasters do it on their home machines. But if you want a fast, stable, and secure PHP, while supporting Apache and the variety of .htaccess rules defined by a multitude of users and apps which run on a large platform like ours, things get complicated. After several iterations, our DevOps managed to overcome the biggest “speed over security” challenge and delivered an amazingly fast PHP with our Web Application Firewall and account isolation integrated, getting better performance results without compromising on security. You can read the full post about our Ultrafast PHP here.

Faster MySQL Setup, Faster Sites

Since we had started on the essentials, it was only natural that we reevaluated how the MySQL worked after the PHP had been optimized. MySQL is especially important for the performance of websites with large data bases, which are usually e-commerce sites, quite widespread on our servers. The new MySQL setup that we crafted allows for a considerably higher number of parallel requests to be processed simultaneously. This affects the effective handling of heavy MySQL queries and leads to a significant drop in the number of slow queries on our infrastructure.

Centralizing the DNS Service

Next on the list was reworking our DNS (domain name system) service. The DNS essentially translates domain names into IP addresses, so people can actually open a particular website. In order to make this process faster, more secure and reliable we just introduced our new centralized DNS service which operates in 5 geo locations and on multiple instances. Webmasters will witness faster domain resolving, enhanced resilience and availability of the DNS service, better protection against DDoS attacks and simplified DNS management among other advantages. All this translates into faster websites with added safety and ease of management.

Collaboration & Reselling Made Easy On Our Platform

One of the main reasons we were not happy with cPanel was that it was blocking us from creating our own Access control system the way we believed it should be. One of the things that we launched together with the new Site Tools and Client Area was a new user role – the “Collaborator”, already available on all our plans. This user role made it possible for our clients to invite their designers, developers, and friends to collaborate on their sites without sharing logins and creating any security risks.

Over time we also made it possible to add a “Client role” to our GoGeek and Cloud plans together with the option to create custom hosting packages on our Cloud plans, especially useful for people building websites for their clients. The Client role is a more sophisticated way of controlling the access you grant to your clients by defining which parts of the Site Tools they can access.

Improved Web Accessibility

Our team also put significant effort into integrating features that make our service easier to use for everyone, including people with different levels of motor or visual disabilities. Our Site Tools came with a high-contrast theme, screen reader support and keyboard handling, and eventually Easy read font which is designed to improve readability for users with symptoms of dyslexia, but can be used by anyone who prefers it and finds it easier to read.

New useful tools and features in Site Tools

Of course new and useful tools kept coming….

Multisite SFTP Key for Easy Multiple Site Management

More recently we introduced the option for Multisite SFTP access with a single SSH key which empowers users to easily and safely manage multiple sites. The Multisite SFTP access can be used for all the sites our clients own or have been added as a collaborator in a single Client Profile. This option provides multisite owners with the convenience and security to manage more than one site.

Search and Replace Tool for Easy WordPress Management

Our team introduced a WordPress Search and Replace advanced tool designed to enable WordPress admins and developers to replace all occurrences of a certain string within their WordPress code in a single click.

Enhanced Webmail App

We released an updated Webmail application with improved look and feel. The app enables our clients to provide their users with access to all relevant email tools they need to manage their individual email accounts, such as changing their passwords or configuring autoresponders, folders, and forwarders.

HTML in Autoresponders

SiteGround users are now also able to set up autoresponder content to be sent as HTML. They can choose whether their autoresponder email is sent as plain text (default) or HTML. This option is available for all themes and resolutions in both the Autoresponders tool in Site Tools and in Webmail.

We are proud that we introduced the Client Area and Site Tools and all the enhancements backed up by amazing test results, but what makes us really motivated is the feedback we receive from our clients. Thanks for your continued support, and your business – together, we hope we continue to raise the standard of web hosting services! 

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This summer has been especially hot at SiteGround because new features come up one after the other. The latest addition to our platform is the option for Multisite SFTP access with a single SSH key. From now on, people that manage multiple sites on our platform will no longer have to use a separate SSH key for each of their sites in order to be able to securely upload files over SFTP. The Multisite SFTP Access can be used for all the sites you own or are added as a collaborator in a single Client Profile. 

Multisite SFTP Access is super convenient

This feature is especially handy for people that manage a lot of websites on our platform. If you are one of them, with our new feature you will no longer lose time creating a separate SSH key for each of your websites you wish to access over SFTP. Moreover,  you will no longer need to remember different usernames and hostnames for each site. From now on you may authenticate for an SFTP connection to each of your websites through one and the same central hostname and username. Our system will then grant you SFTP access to all the sites that have been added to your multisite SSH key. 

Multisite SFTP access is highly secure

The Multisite SFTP access is definitely making it more convenient to manage multiple websites. But rest assured this convenience does not come at the expense of security. As with our single site SFTP option, you get an encrypted file transfer between your local computer and the remote server hosting your site. We also use the much more secure authentication method of SSH keys instead of simple passwords. Keys have a number of undeniable security benefits – they are much longer and more complex, making it impossible to be brute-forced. In addition to that, the key itself is not transmitted during the authentication process. On the other hand passwords, even ones generated from tools, are prone to brute force attacks and they often rely on the same master password stored on a computer that could be potentially infected. And if you want to add a layer of security yourself, you have the option to easily restrict the multisite SFTP access of your SSH key to a specific IP.

Multisite SFTP access is easy to set up and manage

To use our new Multisite SFTP access you just need to create a master SSH key through your Client Area. At the time of the initial key setup you may choose which of your current sites to be accessible through it. Once you activate the key, each new site you create or you are made a collaborator to, will be automatically added to the key. You can edit the list of sites accessible through the key at any time through your Client Area. To learn more check out our detailed Multisite SFTP access tutorial.

NOTE: An obvious prerequisite for using our new service is to have more than one website managed through your client profile. If you have just one website, you still can access it through SFTP, of course, but you need to use its unique SSH key, generated through its Site Tools.

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Data storage and safety are key components of our web hosting service. That is why we are extremely conscious of keeping your websites frequently backed up and safeguarding those copies in good status for a potential future usage. Having been in the business for 17 years, we have witnessed different incidents seriously affecting or threatening different hosting providers around the world. There have been hurricanes in close proximity to big data centers, power outages due to a state emergency, and quite recently, we all saw how a large data center in France was caught by fire and all data, including backups was lost.

That is why we never let our guard down, periodically evaluate the risk and add new policies to make our disaster recovery strategy better and better. For example, we recently introduced a new backup algorithm that keeps your accounts’ backups in а datacenter different from the one hosting the live account and in case of an accident we can power up your website quickly in a new facility. 

Now we want to give you an overview of how we keep your data safe and how we restore them when needed so that you rest assured we are proactively taking care of your websites and information.

How do we keep your data safe?

• Google cloud infrastructure redundancy and omnipresence

Since we migrated our platform to Google Cloud’s infrastructure, we feel more confident in the redundancy of our service. Natively, Google Cloud maintains a highly redundant clouds of servers in different data centers worldwide and allows us to easily migrate data from one virtual machine to another, or one data center to another, regardless of the continent. That by default means that in case of an incident with your live server, it is quite likely that your files would be still on the cloud.

• Daily backups

The Cloud-based infrastructure ensures a great ground level of data safety, but  is not a 100% guarantee that we will be able to restore your files when needed, which is why we have been creating free daily backups to all our accounts. Not only that, but we keep multiple backup copies of the accounts we host. That way even if our backup script fails for some reason one day, we will have previous copies to revert to and that significantly improves the chances for having a backup when you need one. To be specific, for StartUp, GrowBig and GoGeek plans we store 30 copies, while for cloud accounts we keep 7 copies.

• Backup storage in a different geo location [NEW FEATURE]

To minimize the damages possible due to a server failure, we have always kept your backups separately from your account – on a different physical machine, but in the same data center. As of last month, however, we have introduced an awesome enhancement – we now keep your account’s backups in a different physical facility from the one hosting the live sites. 

We evaluated the risk factor of having not just a whole server down, but the whole datacenter and with the climate change which leads to an increasing number of natural disasters worldwide, as well as a recent incident when a fire hit a large data center in France and resulted in huge data losses, we see that probabilities are growing so we decided to take actions. Thanks to Google Cloud’s facilities, we are now doing the following:

– Iowa, US servers are backed up on machines in Virginia, US

– London, UK servers are backed up in Eemshaven, NL

– Frankfurt, DE servers are backed up in Eemshaven, NL

– Eemshaven, NL servers are backed up in Frankfurt, DE 

– Sydney, AU servers are backed up in Singapore, SG

This service is not available only for accounts hosted in the Singapore data center.

• On-demand backups

Since the highest likelihood of losing data and breaking a website is when users try to upload changes on their sites, we strongly recommend using the on-demand backup creation tool available in your Site Tools. Make a backup right before you deploy new code, plugin, theme or else on the site so you can revert in a click in case anything goes wrong. Try to make it a routine! You have the tools at your disposal, just go and hit that backup button before you deploy anything!

How do we recover data in case of an incident?

In case of any incident, whether a self-incurred by the user website damage, or a more serious hardware failure, your account data can be easily restored from the available backups. Here’s how:

• Restore tool for quick website issue resolution 

All our clients have a free restore tool in their Site Tools control panels, which gives you access to all available copies made by our daily backup script or manually by you from the backup creation tool. Just click and restore the copy that is either the most recent one, or seems to be unaffected by malware or human errors.

• Mass incident disaster recovery

So accidents happen, regardless how much you try to protect against them. In case of a massive server crash, or power outage for a long period of time, or a natural disaster, we as your host need to be able to step up and find a way to restore your data and minimize the downtime. That is why years ago we built our sophisticated backup system. The main advantage of this system is that it could migrate TB of data in just a few hours as it allows simultaneous restores from multiple backup instances to multiple production servers. 

What is more, we will be able to power up your website on a server that is in a different country or continent if that’s the fastest way to put it back online!

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