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All SiteGround Accounts are Now Using Site Tools

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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We Are Turning 17 And This Is How We Have Matured

SiteGround_17_Birthday

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. 

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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Piping Email with PHP and SiteGround

One of the fun things to do with computers is to think outside the box, to use tools for things they aren’t exactly designed for. Email is one of my favorite toys with which to play with. Email is universal, and everyone has it. So when you create a new user for it, everyone can now do that.

What can we make email do that it doesn’t do already? Well, email is a delivery system, so we can use it to not only deliver data of some kind, but also to trigger an event that causes a computer somewhere to do something. If necessary, email can also respond back to you.

In the early days of the web, there were email addresses you could send an email to with a URL in the body. It would retrieve the URL and send you back the copy. Email pre-dated the web on the Internet, so there was a time when people had email but not web browser. This was a great way to get to the web before you got a web browser. The downside was that most email at that time didn’t support images, but this was okay because most webpages at this time didn’t HAVE images. 🙂

I’ve also used email to deliver data and trigger processing. Last year for Mother’s day, I built my mother and mother-in-law digital picture frames based on Raspberry Pis. The front-end media management for these frames is a WordPress site. This gave me a convenient API already built to deliver images to. The problem is that my siblings are not programmers, so I needed an easy way for them to send images to these frames. Email was that easy way.

I created a system that allows them to send a picture via email. Each digital picture frame has an email address, and they can send pictures to it. While WordPress handles all the user management and image processing, SiteGround’s email system allows me to make all of this happen.

The way to do this is called a “pipe” because you are “piping” the contents of an email to a program of your choosing.

I’ll stop here and tell you upfront that if you are not a programmer or at least a very technical user, this is not for you. Programmers can write programs (like I did) to take the input and process it. Technical users may also be able to install programs on their server that will accept the input and do something with it. If you are not in one of these two groups, I suggest you go find a programmer you trust and hire them to help you do this.

In SiteGround, the process is pretty simple. You first create an email address, then you create a filter for that email address. In my case, I created momspictureframe@example.com (not the real email address) in my Site Tools.

Then I went to filters and created a filter for momspictureframe@calevansxample.com.

  • I gave it a name that I could recognize, “Pipe Pictures to Mom’s Frame”.
  • I set the proper condition. I want this filter to trigger any time any email comes to momspictureframe@example.com. So I set it to:
    • IF ANY
      And then, I set it to trigger on the TO email address.
    • TO EQUALS momspictureframe@example.com
  • Finally, I set it to perform actions. In this case, I perform 2 actions.
    • First, “Pipe to a program”
      This is where you need to be a programmer. I wrote the program necessary to process the emails and uploaded it to my SiteGround site. I have to know the exact path and program name for this to work. Even a good programmer is going to have to experiment a little to get this right. Still, once they get it right once, it’s easy to do it again for other pipes.
    • Second, I set a “Discard Message” action.
      Remember that the first thing I did was create an actual email address? This means that unless I do something, emails will actually be stored for this address. Since I never plan to log into the email server to view them, I want it to toss each and every email coming to momspictureframe@example.com after I’ve handed it off to my script for processing. If I wanted to archive the email for future use, I would drop this action.

That’s it. Assuming you have a program handy that will accept the contents of an email and do something, you can now trigger it using a SiteGround email pipe.

Once you understand the power of piping emails to programs, the possibilities are endless. The example I gave you was a simple one but by no means the only one I’ve written. Again, since email is ubiquitous and available on just about any platform, you can open up a whole new world of processing and interactions for your users.

One word of caution, be aware that email is designed to be mostly insecure. You need to build security into your applications to make sure that only the users you want to, can interact with your system. The easy way to do this is to check the sender of the email, but that’s also insecure. If you do this, it should just be one of the checks you do.

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SuperCacher and Up to 5 Times Faster Sites for All!

It was in the ancient 2012 when we announced our SuperCacher – the feature that allowed our clients to enable static cache, dynamic cache, and Memcached for their accounts. Since then, we have heavily enhanced the technology and fine-tuned its behavior and we believe it is one of the most powerful speed tools we have created for our clients. Currently, the most massively used part of our SuperCacher is the Static cache (NGINX direct delivery), as it is switched on by default on all our plans. Today we take a major step that will result in much more massive adoption of the other two SuperCacher layers and will significantly increase the speed of the sites we host. We now make Dynamic Cache and Memcached available at no additional cost on our StartUp plans too. Additionally, the dynamic cache will be activated on our servers by default. 

Dynamic caching ON for everybody!

Between 50% and 500% faster page loading

To briefly recap, dynamic caching is a technology that caches the HTML output of your PHP code. The PHP language is used so that the content of that same HTML is changed dynamically and upon a set of conditions predefined by the web creator. When using cache, next time that a page is requested, the pure HTML will be displayed from the Cache which is in the server’s RAM, as opposed to wasting CPU and I/O resources to read the PHP file from the disk. Thanks to that mechanism the web page loads significantly faster. And by “faster”, we mean like 50-500% faster based on our internal statistics for sites that have it turned on. The bigger the impact we see on heavier sites – those with more products and queries. Once you enable the cache, the pages start loading as fast as your Internet allows it, literally, since the page response is returned instantaneously from the memory of the server.

WordPress cached out-of-the-box, other applications can also be configured

Until now, the dynamic cache has been available on our GrowBig and higher plans and had to be activated by the users through our WordPress SiteGround Optimizer plugin. Now, we are making the cache available on all plans and we are activating it by default on all servers. Thus, all WordPress sites hosted on our platform will be cached out of the box. Additionally, our clients will be able to configure other applications to take advantage of the cache too. For instructions on how to use the Dynamic Cache with some of the other popular applications, you can refer to our SuperCacher Knowledge base articles.

Dynamic cache management options 

As already mentioned, our dynamic cache option will now work with WordPress installations out-of-the-box. However, WordPress users will achieve the best results through the Dynamic Cache controls of our SiteGround Optimizer plugin. The plugin acts as an additional connector between our dynamic cache and the WordPress application. For example, the SiteGround Optimizer tells your server to clean the cache automatically on each relevant content change and it provides you with an easy option to exclude URLs from being cached altogether. You can also turn off the caching through the plugin. 

If you are using another application, you may need to allow the caching from its backend in order to start using it, regardless that it is activated on server level by us.

As for the flush option, if a change on your website is not shown immediately, as the cached version is still served, you may always use the Flush button in your Site Tools. 

Memcached available on all plans to opt-in

Memcached is probably the most popular memory caching system that is used by thousands of database-driven sites, which speeds up these websites by caching results from database queries in the server’s RAM. Thus, if the result of the same query is needed again, it will be instantaneously taken from the RAM, rather than generated again from the Database, which is usually a slower process and requires more computing power.

Memcached is now available on StartUp plans with Site Tools as well. You can enable it from Site Tools > Speed > Caching, look for tab Memcached. However, please bear in mind that you also need to configure your application to use this cache, once you switch it on from our interface. For WordPress, this takes just a click in our SiteGround Optimizer plugin > Memcached control section, for some of the other popular applications you can refer to our SuperCacher Knowledge base articles. 

Note:

The described changes will affect only our Site Tools based servers. However, in case your account is still on cPanel, don’t you worry – by the end of March 2021 we aim to complete all migrations from cPanel to Site Tools so you’ll also get these SuperCacher enhancements soon.

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The Hidden Cost of Free

the hidden cost of free

I’ve been involved in the open-source software movement since there was an open-source software movement. Over time I’ve seen the perception of it change. In the beginning, there were a lot of people writing software and contributing because they could. It made them feel good to give to others.

Users of open-source software recognized this gift they were being given and respected it and the talents of those doing the giving. Many users contributed back to their favorite projects by way of code, documentation, advocacy, and sometimes even money.

Over time, things have changed. These days I see more people using open-source software because they think it’s free. They think that because they didn’t have to pay a programmer for their efforts they are getting away free. Sometimes, this is true, sometimes you can install a piece of software and just start generating value from it. WordPress used to be like this.

These days, however, software, even open-source software, is complex. Yes, WordPress used to have the “5-minute install,” and yes, you may actually still be able to install WordPress in 5 minutes. However, if your goal is to do anything more than write your own blog, you are going to need to add a few hours, or days, to that number.

These days software is complicated. WordPress themes used to be pretty simple. Now, they are complex beats with settings pages and many configuration options. Options that, if you aren’t familiar with the theme, can be difficult to navigate.

This is the hidden cost of free. These days, this is the high cost of free.

Many plugins are “free” these days, but they require you to subscribe to their underlying backend service. Technically they are free, but it is still going to cost you. Other plugins offer you a free version but lock the best features until you pay. Again, technically free, but if you want them to do the cool stuff, you are going to have to pay.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not advocating that all software should be free. As someone who earns their living writing code, I strongly advocate paying developers. It’s just that as a non-technical site owner, you have to understand the cost of “free.”

Be prepared to hire someone to help you. In most cases, you will need:

  • A project manager. We used to call these “implementers,” but these days, I think that term has fallen out of favor. This is a technical person but may not be a programmer. They understand WordPress, plugins, and they know how to make them work together to get things done. They also know when a developer is needed and usually know a couple they can call on for help.
  • A designer. You will most definitely need someone who can make your site look good. Bonus points if they are also a User Experience (UX) expert so they can make your site easy to understand and use.
  • A copywriter. (You thought I was going to say developer, didn’t you?) Yes, you are going to need a copywriter — someone who is a wordsmith. You want them to look at every word on your site and make sure that what you are saying is clear and easy for your user to understand.
  • Optionally you may need a developer. If you do, your project manager will know this and should know who to hire. Don’t go around them and hire your niece and put her on the team. Let the experts do the job you hired them to do.

Once you’ve got your site up, it’s still not free. Make sure you are hosting it with a reputable host who understands WordPress. It may come as a surprise to some of you, but I have sites that are not hosted at SiteGround. Some of my WordPress installs are hosted on a virtual server that I manage myself. I understand what needs to be done, and I understand the risks of managing my own server.

The projects I host myself are fringe projects with special requirements that many hosts won’t provide out of the box. While in a technical sense, yes, each additional site I spin up on my virtual server is “free,” it’s also one more thing that I have to worry about. My time is not free so hosting sites on that server turns out to be very expensive.

For all my sites that do not have very special requirements, I use SiteGround. After 25+ years of managing web servers and 15+ years of managing WordPress, I know what I need in a web hosting partner, and SiteGround ticks every box.

Free and Open Source (FOSS) software is awesome. It literally powers the world we live in. But a lot of times, free only applies to the price you pay for the code itself. When you are preparing to launch your next site, factor in more than just the cost of the code. If your site is going to add value to your enterprise, prepare a budget that will let you do it right. Don’t forget the high cost of free.

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What are Brute Force Attacks and Why YOU Don’t Have to Worry About Them

Exactly what is a “brute force” attack on a website? Just the name “brute force” conjures up a bad guy in a cheesy action movie. For most websites, a brute force attack can be very serious.

What is a brute force attack?

A brute force attack is exactly what the name sounds like. There is no deep logic involved in guessing logins or passwords, it’s just a bot that starts with a login of “A” and a password of “A” and works from there. It will patiently try every combination of letters and numbers there is until it finds a login and password that works. When brute force attacks started, that was all there was to it. Over the years, they have gotten more sophisticated, but at the core, it’s just a bot.

These days, you have bot networks that do this. The problem was that brute force attacks from a single computer were real easy to detect and block. So now a network of hundreds or thousands of computers work together to attack your site and guess a login or password.

Also, these days we have “dictionary tables” which are just lists of passwords that have already been used or words that can be combined together to make a password. A bot network can try thousands of times per second to guess a login and password. Your site is only as secure as the weakest password on it.

In addition to dictionary tables, attackers have gotten even smarter. As a site is hacked and all of the user info is pulled down, the logins and passwords for that site are added to the ones to try. They know that a lot of people don’t bother to create different logins and passwords most of the time so a login on one site is probably good on another.

How do you mitigate a brute force attack?

Well, there are 2 answers to this question.

If your website is not hosting with SiteGround

If you are not hosted with SiteGround then you need to start researching security plugins and configuring firewalls. We’ve talked about some of this before in previous blog posts. You will need to:

Install an application firewall and properly configure it.
There are several good plugins in the WordPress plugin repository that will secure your site against brute force attacks and other types of attacks. The top 3-5 are well respected and while I won’t recommend one here, you can probably find one that comes highly recommended and get it implemented. All of the good ones have a monthly fee associated with them but that’s what it takes to protect your site.

Require strong passwords for all users
We’ve talked about passwords before but it bears repeating. Strong passwords are your first line of defense. Your users might not like it but it will keep your site and their data secure.

Require Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) for all logins
2FA mitigates brute force attacks 100% because the login and password are only 2/3 of the login procedure. For the final 1/3, you have to have the person’s phone. That’s a game-ender for brute force attacks.

As with strong passwords though, users usually hate 2FA. You can limit 2FA to admin accounts but if an attacker gets into your site, you are compromised. So you have to decide which is more important and that’s a bad choice to have to make.

Implement a password rotation policy that forces new passwords at least every 90 days
Another one that users hate but is effective in helping prevent brute force attacks is requiring users to reset their passwords. This is another thing that users hate and if you do enough things in the name of security that users hate, you start to lose users. So it’s a tightrope you have to walk.

Bonus tip: Fail2Ban
In addition to all of those, my personal favorite tool is Fail2ban and WP-fail2Ban. Properly configured (and it takes a developer or network admin to properly configure) this combination can be a very powerful tool to prevent a brute force attack. It’s not easy to configure but it is very powerful. Fail2ban is open source and free, the plugin WP Fail2Ban has a pro version that seems to be worth the money.

I don’t usually recommend specific plugins but this one is unique. I have the free version installed on all my blogs that are not hosted on SiteGround and it works wonderfully. I am strongly considering upgrading to the pro version.

WARNING: This plugin requires Fail2ban to be properly installed, configured, and working on your server. Fail2ban itself has a couple of requirements as well. This is not a trivial plugin to get working. If you are not a developer or very familiar with Linux, get help.

If your website is hosted with SiteGround

If your site is hosted with SiteGround, go back to sipping your coffee. SiteGround has a full suite of tools already implemented including AI to detect brute force attacks from bot networks. This doesn’t mean your site is 100% absolutely secure, nobody can get to 100% safe. It does however mean that this is one less thing you have to worry about.

Wrapup

Brute force attacks are well known and well understood. There are tools that you can install that will mitigate the risks of them compromising your site. That having been said, your best bet is a hosting partner like SiteGround that deals with it for you to that you can spend your time making your site more awesome.

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New MySQL Setup For Faster Query Processing

Update

We’re currently migrating all our servers to MySQL 8. Learn more about the migration process in our blog post.

Two of the most frequent reasons a site might be slow are unoptimized PHP processes and heavy MySQL queries. Website code optimization is always a crucial part of the constant battle for more website speed. However, webmasters hosting with SiteGround, have always had a reliable ally by their side in this quest.

Recently we have announced the new Ultrafast PHP, which significantly speeds up the processing of PHP scripts and improve the website performance up to 30%. 
As a natural next step in our efforts to offer a premium and superfast service, we deployed a server-side solution to optimise database queries which has already brought down the number of slow queries between 10 and 20 times!

What are slow MySQL queries and why they matter ?

If you are managing an active site with a database, you probably understand that when a visitor enters your site, there are tons of scripts that start running, some of which ask your database for information. For example, if you have an online shop and a visitor is trying to purchase an item, your store should check for its availability in the database and display if it’s possible to be ordered. That check triggers a MySQL query. And depending on how that query is written it may be quite heavy and time-consuming to be processed by the server. For you as a webmaster, these slow queries are a problem because you will be losing clients. You know how visitors drop out of the site when they have to wait longer than 2-3 seconds for a page to load? Well, you get it. For us as your host, we don’t like it when our servers get throttled processing too many slow queries because this means that the CPU and RAM of the machine get blocked and cannot be used for other processes, which are also important for yours and the other websites hosted on the server.

What did we do?

The battle with slow MySQL queries is an ongoing process, which involves both the webmaster and the host. That is why we recently launched a new MySQL setup on our servers, which takes an innovative approach to distributing the server RAM and allocating it to the MySQL. The new setup allows a much higher number of parallel requests to be processed simultaneously and this has a great impact on the effective handling of heavy MySQL queries. So great that the Sys Admins, watching the server load after the new MySQL setup launch, still don’t believe it – they saw a drop in slow queries between 10 and 20 times! 

All of our latest service improvements such as the Ultrafast PHP and now the MySQL setup are possible thanks to two things – the Google Cloud platform and the switch from cPanel to Site Tools. Since moving to Google Cloud, we upgraded our server configurations with more RAM. The RAM unit price is not cheaper, but working in the cloud offers possibilities for better distribution of that resource among different machines. And the fact that we don’t comply with third-party’s software resource requirements such as cPanel, gives us more freedom to innovate. Our DevOps feel empowered to create and keep developing smart technologies that benefit the greater majority of the sites we host spot on!

Who gets it?

Everyone hosted on our shared Site Tools servers already got the new MySQL setup! If you have been seeing an enhancement in the performance for the last week or so, it’s because of the new setup.

That means it’s less likely that you hear from us asking you to fix a slow query and “socially-distancing” your site due to that. Fewer slow queries, faster servers, less hassle for you!


Cloud accounts are also scheduled to receive the new MySQL setup by the end of February, 2021.

Still a SiteGround client on cPanel? We expect to migrate everyone by the end of March 2021 so all you need to do is wait just a little bit longer.

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More Site Speed Gains with Brotli Compression Algorithm

We are happy to announce that we have deployed and enabled by default the Brotli compression algorithm on our Site Tools servers so websites hosted there could get up to 15-20% speed gains from using it. 

What is Brotli?

Brotli is a next generation compression algorithm developed by Google as a successor to the popular gzip method that we’ve had running on our servers for ages. The idea is simple – once your application produces the HTML output of your website and the output is compressed together with all the resources it loads, the data is transmitted over the Internet and then the browser decompresses the content before rendering it. This process significantly reduces the size of data that’s been moved from the server to the visitor, resulting in speed gains multiple times bigger than the milliseconds lost for compression and decompression.

How much faster is Brotli compared to gzip?

The new algorithm provided by Brotli compresses the website into smaller data size, which makes it faster to transfer. JavaScript files compressed with Brotli are roughly 15% smaller than the ones compressed with gzip. HTML files are around 20% smaller and CSS files get around 16% size reduction. Those numbers of course will differ depending on your particular files.

A test with one of the WordPress’s default themes – TwentyTwenty shows that it produces a 19584 bytes of data uncompressed, 6003 bytes compressed with gzip and only 4863 bytes when compressed with Brotli! This means that you get more than 75% reduction in size from uncompressed content and 19.5% from gzip. 

How to use Brotli?

We have enabled Brotli on all our Site Tools servers and if your account is hosted on one of these, your site will automatically take advantage of it. You don’t have to do anything to get it! 🙂 Browsers that support Brotli compression, which are the majority of the browsers now, pass the appropriate “accept-encoding: br” header when performing the request and get the Brotli-compressed content. Older browsers that don’t support it will be served with gzip-compressed data. If you are still hosted on a cPanel server, don’t worry – we expect migrations to Site Tools to be completed by the end of March 2021 so you won’t have to wait long to get it as well.

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Wrapping Up 2020: Service Enhancements, 97.7% Client Satisfaction (& A Gift To You)

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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What is CRON and What You Can Use It For?

“What the heck is a cron?” I field this question at least once a month from non-developers. It’s a great question. I’m going to break it into two questions though.

“What is a CRON?”
“What is WP-CRON?”

What is a CRON?

At its heart, a cron is a “time-based scheduler”. It handles tasks that need to be done on a regular basis and at a specific time. As an example, if you want your WordPress blog to display the weather forecast in the header, then each morning you need to go get the weather forecast. Yes, you could hire someone to log in each morning, go get the forecast and paste it into a widget.

A better plan is to have a program that runs each morning and talks to an API to fetch the day’s forecast and update your database for you. The program that runs your weather fetching program is called a CRON. The name is derived from “chronological” which roughly translates into “in order of time”.

Most systems these days have some concept of a cron. Unix based systems (Unix, Linux, macOS, etc.) actually have a version of a traditional cron. While some might put a nice graphical interface on them, they all boil down to a program named cron and a file named crontab.

The program cron is always running in the background and every minute it looks at the crontab and figures out if something needs to be done. If not, it goes back to sleep.

The crontab file contains when a program should be run and which program should be run. Each line represents a different task. They look something like this.

1 0 * * * ~/fetchForcast.sh

While this may look cryptic, all it is telling cron is that at 12:01 AM every day, run a program called fetchForcast.sh. Note that time added in the Cron tool is in UTC by default. Here is an easy guide to reading a crontab.

# ┌───────────── minute (0 – 59)
# │ ┌───────────── hour (0 – 23)
# │ │ ┌───────────── day of the month (1 – 31)
# │ │ │ ┌───────────── month (1 – 12)
# │ │ │ │ ┌───────────── day of the week (0 – 6) (Sunday to Saturday;
# │ │ │ │ │ 7 is also Sunday on some systems)
# │ │ │ │ │
# │ │ │ │ │
# * * * * *
1 0 * * * ~/fetchForcast.sh

Now that you have the key, it’s pretty easy, huh?

That really is all there is to a traditional cron. Most hosts like SiteGround allow you access to the cron for your system. Sometimes you have to edit the crontab manually, but many hosts have a much better interface for you to use. Either way, you have the ability to run programs at a specific time and on a regular basis.

What is WP-CRON

Like most things, WordPress does things just a little differently. Because many plugin authors needed to be able to schedule things to happen regularly, and because many WordPress site owners don’t know where their crontab is, much less how to edit it, WordPress re-invented the cron.

At its core, WP-CRON acts like a traditional cron in that a developer can “schedule” a task to be done on a regular basis. However, unlike a traditional cron, WordPress does not have a program that is always running in the background of your server. So to make this world, WP-CRON is a process that is called every time a page is viewed.

On busy sites, this works fine. However, if your site isn’t busy, a task scheduled for 2:00 AM might be run at 5:24 AM if nobody visits your site until then. Sometimes this is ok, other times this is a problem.

If the tasks you need to run are time-sensitive and have to be run at the time scheduled, WP-CRON is not the scheduler you want to use. If on the other hand, the tasks you need to be done can happen “around” the time you schedule them, then WP-CRON is fine. Again, a lot depends on how busy your site is.

What are the alternatives?

If you have tasks that are time-sensitive and your host does not allow you access to the system’s cron, you have 2 alternatives. First, you can switch to a host like SiteGround that gives you this access. If that’s not possible, then there are several services free or paid that are nothing more than cron services.

They run cron and you can set a job to run via a nice web interface. The job would use a program like curl or wget (think of them as headless browsers) that call URLs on your site to fire a specific task. Most plugins that require a cron will give you the URL to call if you want to use an external cron. All you have to do is paste the URL in, set the time for it to run and you are done.

CRON is a valuable tool and once you understand how to work with it, you will find more uses for it. If you have plugins, then I can almost guarantee that your site has wp-cron jobs running. If you are curious, go to the WordPress plugin repository and search for cron. There are plugins you can install that will show you all the WP-CRON activity on your site. Be very careful though. Plugins set these for a reason. If you decide you don’t like one and delete it, the plugin that depends on the job will stop working.

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