Category: Product Updates

2020 was unquestionably a memorable and overwhelming year for all of us. It was full of challenges, worries about staying safe, working, and living in isolation. Throughout a rough year, our team has found comfort and motivation in providing lots of service enhancements to YOU, our clients, and supporting different communities the way we can.

⚙️ New Tools & Service Enhancements

In just 12 months, we managed to introduce many new tools and service upgrades. They make your website faster, help you manage it more comfortably, and give you more resources than before.

Some of the great improvements we did in 2020 are the complete switch to the Google Cloud platform, the development of the Ultrafast PHP setup, many speed optimizers for WordPress sites, the additional resources we added for free to our hosting plans, and more!

Learn more >>

❤️ Support for Communities in Need

Alongside upgrading our service, we also dedicated time and effort to support our communities in their battle with the COVID-19 challenges. We made donations to various medical institutions, gave away free hosting and renewals to highly affected clients, and helped our employees adapt to the new normality of working entirely remotely with a special wellness program.

Learn more >>

🥇97.7% Customer Satisfaction Rate & Awards Received

We are proud to see that all our efforts paid off with the appreciation we got from our customers and other stakeholders. Traditionally, at the beginning of December, we ask clients what they think about our service. We’re incredibly proud and happy to see that we earned an average of 97.7% client satisfaction across the key service indicators – speed, security, support, uptime, value for money, and range of tools.

We were also honored to receive 2 Stevie awards for Customer Service, BigSEE award for our HQ building, and 12 Employer Awards! We couldn’t be happier and more thankful for that evaluation, and we hope we will keep up to it this year too!

🎁 Share Our Recap & Win Bose Headphones

You can read the full 2020 recap here and share the page on your Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram profile until January 29, 2021, along with the hashtag #SiteGroundRecap2020. One lucky winner will get a special prize from SiteGround – branded Bose headphones!

We hope our work throughout the year has managed to generate value and positivity for You, our clients! Stay tuned for more service enhancements coming up in 2021! 🎉

>> SHARE RECAP & WIN

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We’re happy to announce that we have deployed the latest release candidate version of PHP 8 on all our servers. As always we are among the first companies to provide the new PHP on their hosting platform. PHP 8 is expected to facilitate developers to write cleaner code with better quality that gets executed faster. Since release candidates are not suitable for live sites, we invite you to try it out on a staging copy of your site or on projects that are not live yet. We’ll give away awesome PHP elephants to 10 of the early adopters who share their opinion about PHP 8 with us. 

What are the PHP 8 improvements and features

Faster code execution

The latest PHP version brings a lot of new things but the one we are obsessed with is JIT (just in time compiler). It is the first time that PHP version has a compiler – JIT – that caches a version of your already interpreted code and generates a machine code as an output (machine code is on with 0’s and 1’s only). The “just in time” compiler promises speed improvements for complex tasks and algorithms and opens new opportunities for the PHP language to broaden its reach and applications. 

Some of you may wonder how JIT relates to the Opcache, which brought significant performance gains to many websites? The main job of the Opcache is to cut the processes of tokenization, parsing, and compiling of Opcodes, which then get processed by the Zend engine. The role of JIT is to save on the execution of the Opcodes by the Zend engine, so it joins forces and intervenes to spare resources where the Opcache cannot help.

It’s worth mentioning a few downsides we have noticed so far:

• Running PHP 8 with JIT might make it harder for you to troubleshoot code errors because it may be harder to locate which piece of your code in this interpreted version is actually at fault.
• If you are running a WordPress site you may not be able to note significant performance improvements thanks to JIT. The WP developers are still working on making WP compatible with PHP 8 and are now calling for testers, meaning you won’t be really able to test PHP8 on your WP site right away. Also, because of the way WP interacts with MySQL, a lot of the waiting time does not come from the PHP compilation, but from the MySQL response time, which cannot be solved with the help of the JIT compiler.  

Code with higher quality 

One of the major differences that you will notice is that many of the warnings and notices that weren’t catchable are now exceptions or errors, which can be caught and logged. It is possible that due to this change, a lot of problems that remained hidden with the previous PHP versions will now surface. This is a great improvement, as it will allow developers to spot potential issues easier. However,  have in mind that it may be a good idea to set display_errors=Off if you decide to use PHP 8 on a live site to not show such errors to your site visitors.

Cleaner, shorter code

Some of the new elements, such as the nullsafe operator, greatly improve the readability of the code, making it shorter and neater.  Instead of nesting several “if’s” you can use the “null” operator to write all those in just 1 line of code. 

The “type” trend

For several versions now, PHP has been trying to define the arguments that each method could adopt and become more of a typed language. In this latest release, there is a feature called “union types” which allows you to define 2 value types for each function, which is a natural continuation of that trend. As the example below shows, the function can return an integer or a float: 

public function getNumber(): int|float {
return $this->number;
}

The list of new features keeps going and we suggest this article as a good reference point for PHP developers:

https://stitcher.io/blog/new-in-php-8
https://stitcher.io/blog/php-jit
https://wiki.php.net/rfc/nullsafe_operator

How to take advantage of PHP 8 on our platform?

All our clients can change the PHP version of their sites from their control panel – Site Tools > Dev section, or cPanel > PHP versions. With PHP8 still being a Release Candidate, we strongly advise that you do not enable it for your live sites, but run tests with it on our staging environment (staging is available for GrowBig, GoGeek and Cloud plans), or create copies of your sites in your accounts if you do not have the staging functionality. 

At the moment, we have deployed PHP 8 without the following modules: mcrypt, geoip, ioncube.

Tell us what you think and win a PHP elephant

We tried to give you the big picture on what the new PHP8 is all about. Now we would like to hear what you actually think about it, once you get the chance to try it out. What do you like and what do you dislike? How does it work on your website? Do you see any performance improvements? We are looking to explore how our more experienced users take advantage of this early release candidate before it becomes official.

To stimulate you to share your tests and opinions with us, we have styled and branded the original PHP elephants to celebrate this new release. We’ll give away 10 elephants to 10 random users who share their thoughts on PHP8 by November 26, 2020 in a comment under this post, or on Facebook or Twitter, tagging @SiteGround and using the hashtag #PHP8 in their post.

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It has been а little over a year since we launched our new client interfaces – the revamped Client Area and the in-house developed Site Tools that is replacing cPanel. In August 2019 we started onboarding all new clients to the new interfaces and shortly after we began working on the migration of our existing clients. As of now, all our clients are using the new Client Area and we have also successfully converted more than 9000 servers from cPanel to Site Tools. 

Looking back on the past 12 months, evaluating the complexity of the transfer process and the non-transfer related challenges 2020 has placed in front of us, I believe that we have managed to keep a healthy migration pace. This was achieved thanks to the tremendous amount of work of all teams involved in the transfer and despite the occasional slowdowns coming from various circumstances.

Still, we have a lot more accounts and servers to convert and many of you may be wondering why it is taking time and when is your site’s turn coming. That is why we decided to do a follow-up and tell you the story of what we have done behind the scenes during the past year and what’s the forecast for the upcoming months. 

The innate complexity of the migration

It is not surprising that the migration of over a million live sites from cPanel to Site Tools is a tremendously complex process. I might say it is comparable in terms of efforts and resources needed for the creation of the new interfaces and systems themselves. It is quite a challenge to move operational sites from one platform with a certain structure to a new platform with a completely different one, without affecting the availability and functioning of these sites. 

On the surface, it seems that there is just one simple difference between the two frameworks —  no addon sites under one hood. What this actually means is that we have to be able to untangle any subordinate sites from the main cPanel account and recreate them as separate stand-alone accounts in our new platform. And to illustrate how complex this process may be for different website setups I will list a few examples below:

Multiple addon domains using one and the same database

Normally, this is not a reasonable thing to happen, as each website, even addon ones, should be using their own database. However, this was technically possible with cPanel and there are actual sites set up this way by our customers. When such a site needs to be migrated, our migration script has to detect the case and create a separate database for every site and copy the data. After that, the script automatically reconfigures each website to use the respective database.

Applications with absolute paths in their configuration

Another thing that the migration script should fix is multiple applications set to use absolute paths in their configuration. The system has to detect those and once they become independent sites with different system users, to automatically reconfigure them to use the new system paths.

The Addon/Parked/Subdomain infinite setup options 

The infinite number of ways users can set up and sometimes mess up their document root paths for the different applications when using the addon, parked, and subdomain functionalities in cPanel is the biggest challenge for our transfer process. We have managed to list more than 30 different ways of unorthodox document root path cases. One of the most common examples is when more than one addon domains are configured to use the same folder.

This is a common “hack” of the cPanel system people use to park a second domain to an addon site — an option that is officially not allowed in cPanel. So in such setups, the system has to automatically decide which site is each domain going to and in what role (primary or parked). In some cases, the setup is so complex that the domains cannot be configured automatically and the migration should be attended manually.

Serious Development Assignment 

Automating all possible processes

We started our first migrations in September last year very cautiously. The migrated sites were manually reviewed and each of the issues described above, plus many more that appeared, have been addressed with new iterations of the migration script. Needless to say, the manual checks of the first migrations took a lot of time and was not something that could be sustainable in the long run, so we have added several additional automations to the migration script. 

We now do automated pre-checks of all accounts to be migrated. If there is an indication of a possible problem, we fix it before the migration has started. After that, the account is actually migrated from cPanel to Site Tools. Once the migration is over, we run another automatic check for post-migration issues. If any issue is detected the account is marked for manual review.

Additionally, we have developed an automated system for communicating the progress of this process with the customer whоse accounts are being migrated. With all these systems now being in use, we are able to convert about 900 cPanel accounts per day with a very low fail rate. 

Switching to the New Customer Area first

In the beginning, we planned to migrate each customer simultaneously to the new Client Area and the new Site Tools. However, we soon realized that it will be much better to untangle the new Client Area from Site Tools and move all clients to the new Client Area first. There were several reasons for this decision: 

• First, the Client Area migration was in itself less risky, as it did not directly affect the hosted websites functionality. 
• Second, we figured out that providing the Client Area first will give all our customers some time to get used to the new interfaces. We do appreciate the effort needed to learn a new interface, so by getting used to our new UX logic with the Client Area, we wanted to make the transition to the more functionality-dense Site Tools smoother for our users. 
• And third, daily maintenance of two Client Area interfaces was taking away precious time from our technical teams. Time that could have been spent on perfecting the migration scripts.

The decision to untangle the transfer to both interfaces required temporary focus change, as we now had to invest some development time into accommodating cPanel accounts in the new Client Area interface, which was not initially planned. However, in the long run, we believe that this decision brought the end date of the whole migration closer. We are very proud to have all our clients successfully using the new Client Area since May 2020. 

The challenges of 2020

As we all know this year has been extremely unpredictable and for perfectionists like our managerial team, planning has become a nightmare with too many variables and dynamic factors that inevitably slowed down the migrations during the year. 

Transfer to Google Cloud Platform

One of the things that made us reorganize our initial plans was really positive — the finalization of our contract with Google Cloud. Moving our service to a cloud-based platform was the other big project we had been working on in the past years. We knew that moving to Google Cloud would provide a lot of immediate benefits to all our customers and completing this migration first would enable us to dedicate all resources to the much more complex switch to Site Tools.

Therefore, once we finalized the contract with Google, the migration to Google Cloud was prioritized in the queue of our DevOps and SysAdmin teams. They worked fast and did a great job – we managed to migrate our whole platform to Google Cloud in less than 4 months. And we are talking about more than 4 PB of data! Though a big part of our resources was invested in the Google migration for several months, we still managed to do considerable work on polishing the Site Tools migration scripts in the meantime.  

The COVID-19 effect

Of course, we cannot forget the COVID-19 effect. During April and May, with quarantines affecting many of our geographical markets, we have seen an unprecedented uprisal in support inquiries. It was only natural, as the online presence has suddenly become much more important for a great number of people and businesses, leading to a higher level of activity by all website owners.

We were truly swamped and for the first time since we started operations, we had to literally throw all our resources into customer support. Despite hiring new people, the volume of work was so big that every department had to focus and contribute in some way to the provisioning of the service and optimization of how that service was delivered. Again, that was putting the focus away from the migrations and even though we kept a core team working on them, the managerial and operation attention was elsewhere and migrations were going slower during this period.

That being said, I still believe we managed to address both of the big 2020 events quite well and managed to remain reasonably on track with our third main endeavor — the transfer to the new interfaces. 

Current status of the migration

At the moment Cloud accounts are being migrated with the highest priority. We aim to complete the migration of the majority of the clouds by mid-December. There is a small percentage of Cloud accounts that are not included in this plan. These are accounts where existing WHM functionality was used to create custom cPanel plans. This means that custom resource limits were set by the cloud owner to the separate cPanel accounts on the cloud. As preserving these settings is a serious additional complexity to be addressed by the migration script, we will have to postpone such accounts’ migration. (In case you own such a cloud account, and you believe you do not need to keep your custom cPanel account settings, you may contact us through the Other Technical Issues category in your Help Desk and request your cloud inclusion in the current migration schedule.)

In the meantime, we are also working hard on the shared server migrations. Due to the larger volume of data on them and the different setup specifics, their migration rate is much lower at the moment. However, now that we are close to finishing the cloud account migration, we have focused more resources on optimizing the shared servers migration process and expect to see a larger number of shared accounts migrated in the next several weeks. 

On behalf of the whole SiteGround team, I would like to thank you all for the patience this year. We are fully aware we have created expectations for a change and it may be taking longer than you have anticipated, but we really do our best to make this super complex switch happen as soon as possible and at the same time to be a safe and easy experience for all our customers.

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We have just released a stand-alone Webmail application for hosting plans using Site Tools, which allows all email users to change their password and set up different email automation like autoresponders, filters, and forwarders. Until now users could access their mail through a browser (yourdomain.com/webmail* or via the server name), but certain control features were a privilege of the hosting account owner through Site Tools only. 

Users can change passwords and manage settings from their webmail interface

Hosting account owners have had access to a number of tools through Site Tools that allowed them to change passwords and set configurations for all the email accounts created and hosted on their hosting plan. Through the Webmail app now each individual email user gets access to the same tools for their account only:

• Email users can change their email password directly from the Webmail app. 
• Users can download an auto-config file for setting up their email account on different email clients or just get the needed settings to do it manually. 
• Autoresponders can now be created and managed through the Webmail app. 
• Webmail users can set up their own forwarding rules. 
• Different email filters can be configured directly in the Webmail application to enable email users to organize and automate the distribution of their incoming emails. 

More convenience for our clients and their users

Thanks to the new Webmail app, our clients and hosting account owners can now grant access to their users to all relevant email tools they need to manage their individual email accounts. That will offload part of the email maintenance work you may have been doing for your clients. 

When accessed through the webmail app, these tools work exclusively for the specific email account in which the user is logged. All the changes made through the Webmail are automatically reflected in Site Tools (the same applies in the opposite direction, too). That will allow you, the account owner, to monitor the changes your users make through Site Tools and intervene if anyone needs help.

If you need more guidance, feel free to check out our tutorial on how to use webmail in Site Tools

NOTE:

Just a reminder that you can access yourdomain.com/webmail only if your domain is pointed to our servers and if you have an SSL installed. If you don’t have an SSL, the browser will display an error.

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