Category: Product Updates

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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We are excited to announce that as of this month, we have deployed a system for geographically distributed backups, which minimizes the risk of data loss and аllows for fast data recovery even in case of a serious incident that may affect a whole data center. 

Backups are stored in a different physical data center from the one hosting the live account

As of this month, we started backing up accounts in a data center different from the one hosting the live account as follows: 

• Iowa, US servers are backed up on machines in Virginia, US
• Virginia, US servers are backed up on machines in Ohio, US
• California, US servers are backed up on machines in Oregon, US
• Texas, US servers are backed up on machines in Southern Carolina, US
• London, UK servers are backed up in Eemshaven, NL
• Frankfurt, DE servers are backed up in Eemshaven, NL
• Madrid, ES 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
• Paris, FR servers are backed up in Madrid, ES

This service is not available for accounts hosted in Singapore for now. These accounts are backed up on different servers within the Singapore facility.

Enhanced data protection

Data storage and safety is a key component of our service and there are multiple risk factors and threats that we keep in mind when coming up with data security solutions. The most common ones are human errors, hardware failure, and hacks. For those occasions, we rely on our daily backups stored on different servers independently from the live account. But then, there are the less likely, yet more damaging risks such as fire, power outage, or a natural disaster that may shut down a whole data center facility. Hosting the backups in a different location means we improve the chances of saving your data and putting it back online even in case of such a serious incident.

Faster service restore

Now imagine your website goes offline due to a massive power outage and the ETA is unknown, which most often means hours of downtime. Or, a hurricane completely destroyed the facility and all servers are lost beyond recovery. That was a very real threat we experienced with Katrina hurricane back in 2005 and is a growing risk in some areas given the climate change and the growing number of natural disasters all over the world. Or, maybe a fire burns the datacenter and a lot, if not all, servers are hurt. That one happened quite recently to a third-party data center in France.

Thanks to our new system, we now have you covered since we have your data safely backed up not more than 24 hours ago in a different data center. In case of an incident, we would be able to put your website back online in the new location that is fully operational.

Thus the distributed backups not only save your data but allow us to restore service in the new DC much faster than any optimistic ETA would forecast for restoring in the original DC.

The distributed backup strategy has been something we have considered for a long time. However, it became practically possible once we started to use the Google Cloud infrastructure. The use of one and the same provider for all our geographical locations, with a super fast interrelatedness between its different data centers and a wide network of facilities around the world, allowed us to distribute data across regions, countries, and continents in a way that was not possible before.

We have to recognize the fact that before switching to Google Cloud infrastructure that strategy for distributed backups was not possible in such a sophisticated way. Google Cloud has given us easy access to all their worldwide facilities, including networking capacity and that generated various new possibilities to distribute data across regions, countries, and continents.

Same level of data privacy

Our Privacy Policy and DPA continue to apply in light of our new geographically distributed backups. Our clients’ data will be protected in the same way as before, as promised, and under our DPA.

While we are hopeful that no natural forces will affect any data centers, our team prefers to be prepared for the worst and provide our clients with reassurance for their websites.

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Data centers play a big role in the Internet industry: they store, process and deliver all the websites’ information on their non-stop running servers. They are usually part of massive facilities which need a controlled and artificially-cooled environment to run properly. That requires a huge amount of energy, indeed, according to recent studies, global data centers are estimated to consume 1% of global electricity use, issuing high quantities of CO2.

As an international hosting provider that manages more than 2 Million domains and 5PB of data, we are fully aware of this impact on the environment and it is in our hands to actively mitigate it by committing to provide green web hosting services as much as possible. From designing our hosting operations and services with the highest efficiency in mind, to implementing several policies that support an environmentally-friendly mindset, we take it seriously because we truly care.

Since today is Earth Day and we want to celebrate that day with joy and gratitude, it seemed relevant to give you some background on what it means to be a green web hosting provider, what to keep in mind when choosing one, and what actions SiteGround is taking towards sustainability.

What is green web hosting and how hosting providers can mitigate their environmental impact?

Green web hosting means that the hosting provider is committed to contribute towards the health of the environment and proactively takes eco-friendly actions that involve either carbon offsetting or renewable energy usage in order to reduce or mitigate the environmental impact of their servers’ energy consumption.

There are two main actions a hosting provider can take on the way to offering green hosting service:

1. Use renewable energy to power up their data centers and facilities. This means that the electricity they use comes from natural resources that are replenished naturally, such as sunlight, wind, rain, tides and geothermal heat.
2. Buy carbon credits. With this option, the company can buy a permit to emit one ton of carbon dioxide per credit or its equivalent of any other greenhouse gas with the aim to offset their carbon footprint.

As the internet industry evolves, so does the amount of energy and resources needed to process all the operations that the content storage and traffic implies. Choosing a hosting provider which is actively running actions towards better efficiency of their data centers and fostering initiatives to reduce their business environmental footprint is becoming ever so important, as it all makes a great impact on climate change, in addition to having several advantages for you. Three of the main ones are:

• Carbon footprint reduction of your e-business and online operations, since green hosting providers usually opt for renewable energy usage or buy carbon credits.

• Better efficiency of your website, as their efforts towards sustainability may include the adoption of latest technologies and resources optimization. 

• Easiness to be part of the green change, as at the very moment you host your website with a hosting committed to the environment, you are already making a difference compared to others in regards to climate change.

Actions SiteGround is taking as a green web hosting provider:

Reducing our carbon footprint by partnering with commited providers

Since we are not a data center provider, and are not operating our own data center facilities, we need to rely on the green policies of our main data center partners. That’s why, a key motivating factor for our decision to move our infrastructure to Google Cloud Platform was their commitment to sustainability. Google’s data centers match 100% of the energy consumed by their global operations with renewable energy and maintain a commitment to carbon neutrality. Choosing such a leader in energy efficiency as our infrastructure partner is something that we are very proud of.

Optimizing resources by providing customers with top-notch technologies for better efficiency of your website applications

Efficiency is another key factor of green web hosting. Simply put, every website operation is managed and executed by its hosting server processor, and requires CPU, RAM, and storage resources. The heavier your website is, the longer its server processor and resources are in use, the more electricity it consumes. 

At SiteGround, we are constantly optimizing our server software to get the most out of our technology and reduce the resource usage of our clients’ websites. As a result, the better optimized our servers are, the less resources and less energy your website will use for the same volume of tasks, making our operations and clients’ websites “greener” thanks to our software performance. For example, our Ultrafast PHP can speed up website performance up to 30%, making it consume proportionally less energy. Our latest RAM optimization of our cloud MySQL setup on our servers additionally increases client websites’ resource usage efficiency. 

We also constantly look for ways to optimize our internal operations for maximum efficiency – for example, performing regular backups at certain hours when the overall server resources usage is relatively low, to avoid putting extra load on the server processors, thus balancing energy consumption. Overall, our policy to always strive to make the latest website technologies available for our clients to use not only helps you reach top website performance, but promotes energy efficiency, as well.

Reducing the environmental impact of our workplace

In early 2019 we finished the building project of the new SiteGround Headquarters building. One of our main goals was for it to be built entirely in accordance with the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) requirements. LEED is the most widely used green building certification in the world, globally recognized as a symbol of sustainability achievement.

Encouraging a more conscious lifestyle among our team members

In addition to our efforts on a business and company level to become a green web hosting provider, we constantly try to maximize our impact by encouraging every single employee of SiteGround to lead a more conscious lifestyle. We are running several internal initiatives to help us do that:

• Company E-cars, e-bikes and free e-charging stations at the disposal of our employees during work hours or for running small errands. Following this benefit, we saw more colleagues opting for electric cars in their own households and others seriously considering it!;

• No plastic water bottles, containers, or water coolers in the office: we installed water filter dispensers across all our offices to replace plastic use due to daily water consumption;

• Using custom green-friendly tissue for our company gifts: For all SiteGround-branded gifts and packages that we send to employees and partners, we use a custom-design eco-packaging by Noissue’s Eco-Packaging Alliance. For every order made they plant a new tree, contributing to global reforestation and carbon neutrality;

• Our last (for now) team building event in 2019 was dedicated entirely to the Zero-waste idea, which was reflected not only in all team workshops and activities, but across the whole event organisation, banning single-use plastics, separating and recycling all our waste from the event, etc.

Having in mind all of the above, we are fully aware that sustainability is a process – it starts with an intention and only goes on and improves with time. We will continue looking into adding even more meaningful actions to continue delivering green web hosting features. But the future depends on all of us. We all need to realize that our personal choices have public consequences, and be more conscious about what we can do in order to sustain our business or way of life, but in a way that is also considerate for the environment.

In addition to us sharing our efforts towards sustainability, we’d love to hear from you! Share in the comments below what you are individually doing to achieve a greener way of living, working, and doing business. It is always comforting to know every single step that is done at every level, as when put all together, they will sum up to turn into a big leap towards mitigating environmental issues.

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Mission Accomplished! The last one of our cPanel servers was switched to Site Tools yesterday. We are so excited to see this long and complex migration come to an end as now each and everyone of our customers is safely brought to the new era of SiteGround development. A year and a half ago we started the transition from a 15-year old server setup, dominated by third-party software that was inevitably putting reins on many of our boldest dreams, to the new state-of-the-art hosting management platform, driven by our own unique server software. Since we launched our first server on the new platform in 2019, we were finally able to unleash the full potential of our imagination and we have already created a lot of speed, security and usability improvements that would have never been possible with the old platform. And, we know that the best is yet to come!

The idea and vision for our new cutting-edge platform was born about 4 years ago and soon after, we dived into building SiteGround’s Site Tools and new Client Area. We started onboarding new clients to it in the summer of 2019, but switching all our existing clients was a hugely complex task that took us another 1.5 years and tons of hard work. Here’s a glimpse of all the effort that went into this complex migration process to explain why this is such a milestone and a proud moment for us.

Large Number of Accounts and over 3367.46 TB of Data Migrated 

The huge amount of live hosting accounts and website data that had to be transferred from servers with cPanel to servers with Site Tools setup was a fundamental part of the challenge. Performing such a massive operation successfully required a meticulous organization of manpower and resources. During the past 1.5 years our management team spent countless hours coordinating teams and shuffling resources to ensure that we are migrating away from cPanel in the fastest and safest way possible for our clients. To sum it all up, we transferred a total of 15 774 servers with 3367.46 TB of data on them in the period from September 2019 to April 2021, and that is a huge deal! 

A Multitude of Use Cases and 44,000 Lines of Code Written for Migration Automations

Besides the large volume of data, the second biggest challenge was the multitude of edge cases that had to be reviewed and addressed with a solid technical solution – multiple applications set to use absolute paths in their configuration; websites with either addon, parked or subdomain infinite setup option; multiple addon domains using the same database; and more! Our DevOps, Software Engineers and Technical Support teams all had to dig deeper into identifying, analyzing, and providing a solution for each of those cases. Once we identified them and crafted an efficient solution for each, we got to automate it. Our DevOps would write scripts for pre-migration checks to detect matching potential issues on a server, call special migration rules for them, and then run post-migration checks to make sure nothing was broken. If anything did go wrong, we would audit the scripts and get back to coding to improve them. In addition, in case of any issues with the automations, our Technical Support representatives would take over by running manual website checks and fix them.

We had 35 of our experts in charge of writing migration scripts, iterating, testing, and enhancing their code over and over until we made them as fast and efficient as possible. Together, these dedicated professionals lived and breathed this project every day, writing 44,000 lines of code in total to get us where we are today.

Our Best Record: 8985 Accounts Migrated in One Day 

In the beginning, we were shyly moving at a few hundred account transfers per day with a high fail rate, meaning we had to go over many of them manually and fix any issues that might have been caused by the migration. Thanks to the constant improvement of our scripts and our admins’ growing expertise, we managed to speed up the process tremendously and drop the fail rate significantly. It all led up to our record-breaking day – March 7, 2021 when we migrated 8985 accounts in a single day!

60,000 Hours Invested in Manual Post-migration Verification

Another big challenge was our determination to move all of the accounts in the shortest time possible without affecting the availability and functioning of the sites. As explained above, manual checks were an intrinsic part of the process, no matter how much the fail rate was dropping. We counted 60,000 human hours in total distributed among 160 000 accounts that were audited for post-migration issues and manually fixed after.

So many new features now available to all!

On behalf of the whole SiteGround team, make yourself at home with Site Tools! Here’s a short overview of the new features you will enjoy:

• Easy multiple website management under one login, 
• Seamless team work by adding website collaborators,
• One-click transfers of ready-made sites to your clients,
• Giving your clients  white-label access to their websites’ Site Tools, 
• Interfaces designed in line with accessibility standards,
• Faster MySQL setup,
• Unique Ultrafast PHP setup,
• Top speed technologies being implemented much faster on the Site Tools servers such as Brotli compression, support for the Webp image format, and more.

We are truly excited and proud of being able to provide so many new features and service improvements to all our customers in such a short time. Despite the adversities, we have proven once again that even the most ambitious goals and complex processes can be successfully mastered when the best team runs a tight ship, paddles in the same direction and gets the best source of motivation – the trust of all our beloved clients and the desire to deliver the best customer experience!

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Turning 17 is exciting for everyone, even for a hosting provider! And today, March 22, 2021 marks our 17th Birthday! During these years we managed to keep our enthusiasm and spirits just as high as that of a high school senior, but gain even more experience. In this past year alone we matured tremendously, having been through a lot of changes and facing challenging times that made us stronger and better than ever before, especially in terms of our service and commitment to our communities and those who were in need during the COVID-19 crisis. What helps us celebrate and enjoy this anniversary is knowing that we have done a lot of good work and we want to invite you to join us on a short walk down memory lane.

Enhancing our interfaces for a smooth user experience

Looking back at our beginnings, it is quite impressive how our increasing focus on delivering a top-notch user experience has been reflected in our interfaces. Those days in which website platform, dashboard or control panel were a synonym for complicated routes to follow only suitable for the most technical ones are gone.

SiteGround User Area from 2012 to 2019

Now with our renewed User Area and Site Tools interfaces, which are already available for ALL clients on our shared hosting servers and almost all of our Cloud ones, the experience of managing a website has become easier than ever and accessible to all.

SiteGround User Area from 2019 onwards

Developing the fanciest, high-quality hosting platform

Our platform has evolved tremendously since when we started back in 2004. Moving from bare metal servers with a pretty standard LAMP setup (Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP) with cPanel (a control panel used by pretty much every other host out there) to a sophisticated cutting-edge platform with in-house developed technologies and a unique control panel is our pride and joy.  Our clients now enjoy one of the fastest and safest hosting services thanks to a unique configuration built over the years by some of the best IT experts. To remind you about a few of the more recent ones:

• Unique Ultrafast PHP configuration for up to 30% faster sites;
• Custom MySQL setup to reduce the number of slow queries on our servers;
• Nginx Direct Delivery for caching of static resources like images and CSS and dynamic caching mechanism now available to all clients for up to 5 times faster sites;
• The one and only SiteGround Optimizer plugin that allows users to enable tons of performance boosting features on their WordPress sites;
• An ultrafast Daily Backup System that saves hours in data recovery;
• AI antibot system to prevent the most obnoxious brute force attacks;
• Infrastructure powered by Google Cloud that helps us be even more stable, faster and greener, and more…

Maturing as a socially responsible company

Part of growing up means maturing in many different ways. One of the aspects that we are much proud of is how we evolved with regard to our corporate social responsibility. Although we don’t often put our good deeds in writing, nor do we have a corporate page officializing these responsibilities (yet),  we care and we get involved. 

• Supporting businesses and causes during COVID-19

The COVID crisis hit all of us hard both personally and professionally. In a moment when so many people were in need and such a large number of businesses had the urgency to go online, we put all our efforts to help as much as we could with our #StaySafeBeKind initiative, giving free renewals to clients and free accounts to local heroes, donating more than 350,000 EUR to hospitals, and more.

• Thinking about the environment and creating awareness

Our increasing concern about the environment is like a red light that moves us to sponsor, support and organize various green projects – Zero-waste team building in 2019 (the last one we had unfortunately), partnering with Google Cloud and the importance of their carbon-neutrality program in our decision, building a green headquarters building, buying electric cars for our corporate needs, and more! We act whenever we can because we care.

• Supporting open source communities

OK, let’s not forget about the open source. Ever since the beginning, we have been involved with various open source communities – Mambo, Joomla, WordPress being the forerunners. We believe in the open source software because it lowers entry barriers and makes technology more accessible and we support it by sponsoring conferences, building solutions for the communities and more.

Keeping high client satisfaction rate across the years

There are many things that have changed along our journey, but one has remained unchanged over the years – the high client satisfaction rate. 

Our commitment to deliver the best service and experience has been strong since our beginnings, and we assure you that it will endure for many more to come.

Time for sharing…

Now that we have shared ours, let’s see what you have got down your SiteGround memory lane 😉. We invite you to comment under this post and tell us some of your best moments with SiteGround. A good story always melts our hearts and help us make this day special!

Last, but not least, we would like to thank all of You for choosing SiteGround as your hosting provider. We couldn’t have made it without you and we hope you join us on this exciting ride to our next anniversary.

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