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Last weekend was all about WordCamp Europe! The city of Leiden in the Netherlands got shaken up by the WordPress people. The first and biggest WordPress European event was something to remember as there were lots of great stories told, new things learned, friendships made, and it was all topped up by the wildest event after party I have seen recently. So if you were not there you definitely missed a lot!
Brace yourself, Europe! In October the SiteGround crew is coming for the biggest WordPress conference on the old continent – WordCamp Europe! And that’s not all – four of our clients will have the chance to win a free entry ticket for the event and be invited as VIP guests at the SiteGround booth and at a special SiteGround dinner.
Hey there! My name is Brian Krogsgard, and I’m one of the co-organizers of WordCamp Birmingham, a regional WordPress conference in Alabama that we affectionally refer to as WP Y’all.
I was introduced to some of the SiteGround team at WordCamp San Francisco, where we had an opportunity to talk about the awesome things they are doing in the managed hosting ecosystem. Trust me, it’s some cool stuff. And you know that of course, since you’ve entrusted them with your business!
Continue reading “Brian Krogsgard: WordCamp Birmingham Free Tickets, y’all!”
It’s Jazz Friday again. Happy new WordPress release everybody! WordPress 3.6 is live and the list of improvements, new features and bug fixes seems to be endless. Since you may have already looked over the official post at WordPress.org I’ll try to highlight only the most important changes and skip those 700+ fixes and minor UI changes. SiteGround uses WordPress to power up this blog and our knowledge base, and I have already updated both instances without any issues along the way.
Continue reading “WordPress 3.6 “Oscar” is Live and Kicking!”
We just got back from a long and utterly exciting journey to San Francisco for the biggest WordCamp of the year – WordCamp San Francisco. We proudly sponsored the conference for a second consecutive year and to say that we had a blast will be an understatement! There were more than 600 people attending, and I had the feeling we spoke to almost all of them, amazing line-up of speakers and sessions, including Matt Mullenweg’s State of the Word, and the Contribute day that made this event especially valuable for me personally.
Continue reading “Why WordCamp San Francisco rocked my socks!”
We’re excited to announce that a new WordPress tool has been added to our servers. WordPress users who love command line will be happy to find WP-CLI pre-installed on all SiteGround accounts.
WP-CLI allows you to do multiple things like updating your WordPress, installing themes and plugins, setting up multiple sites, etc., and all that without using a web browser. To take advantage of the tool you don’t need to install anything yourself. Simply login to your account via SSH, navigate to the folder of your WordPress installation and start typing management commands – it’s that simple!
To learn how to use WP-CLI you can refer to our WP-CLI tutorial. Additionally, you can find a full list of WP-CLI commands on their official website.
SSH can be easily enabled for all SiteGround accounts through your cPanel or Site Tools account. For detailed instructions check our tutorial for SSH on Site Tools.
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Lately, we have added some fancy new features for Joomla and WordPress users and you might be wondering what’s next in our queue. We intend to add such features for other popular applications on our servers as well. So the good news this week is that our Drupal users can enjoy Drush 6.0 preinstalled on our servers!
Continue reading “The CLI for Drupal – Drush is now preinstalled on SiteGround servers!”
Ever heard of „cowboy coding“? More or less, we’ve all done it – no time for planning, let alone test website changes, each new upload messing up your CSS, installing an incompatible plugin, doing everything „live“ and visible immediately for all your website visitors to see. After all this, you end up hoping you had a backup.
Continue reading “SiteGround Staging – Don’t be a cowboy coder!”
At the time we post this there were not many official statements made by other web hosts, now more than 24 hours later we have seen several official statements how other approach the problem, and we would like to turn your attention to the fact that the solution to the Global WordPress brute force attack, proposed by the majority of the other hosts has some serious limitations. It is based on editing .htaccess files. We believe that this is only a partial fix to the problem. If your host relies only on .htaccess rules to stop the attackers, they actually allow them to reach your server, make requests, process those requests, check whether they should be blocked and then finally reject them. All that causes server load and makes your site slower, even if the brute-force attempt is stopped. Last but not least, this causes problems for the people who don’t know about the attack and only see themselves unable to access their sites.
We at SiteGround have taken a different approach preventing attackers from even reaching the server. This means that no load is caused on the server, no sites are slowed down and all targeted sites are protected in a way that most of our customers won’t even notice the attack!
It seems spammers and hackers didn’t get much sleep the last few weeks. We’re seeing an abnormal amount of hacking and bruteforce attempts towards Joomla and WordPress sites the last two and a half weeks. Additionally, the popular WordPress plugin Social Media Widget was reported to have suddenly started to insert hidden spam SEO links. Solving these problems immediately became our security team’s goal number one. There were some easy solutions like fully restricting the access to the application login forms for the time of the attacks and forceful removal of all faulty plugins. We saw other hosts take these actions. However, we do not like easy security solutions that make customers feel punished, while other people are the real wrong-doers. Guided by this belief we once again solved the problems in our own way – efficiently and at the same time user-friendly.
Continue reading “Recent WordPress Brute Force Attempts and More – Solved!”
In 2012 we started the SiteGround How Cool Is That challenge to help our clients learn about the cool technologies that only we provide. Every week of the challenge we posted a new infographic explaining one of our unique features. In the final stage of the competition, our clients were invited to vote for the coolest technology by sharing their feedback in a comment. Over 100 people voted for our Auto-updates technology for Joomla and WordPress as the coolest SiteGround feature. Read the comments to see the feedback from the clients who voted for it!
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