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SiteGround 2010 Recap

2010 was quite an eventful year for SiteGround. We have added many new services and applied a lot of technology innovations to improve the customer experience. In this post we will summarize the most important things that happened during 2010.

New Server Technologies

Cloud HostingIn 2010 we have incorporated numerous important server technologies. We continue to optimize the shared hosting servers performance by using the innovative server management software of 1H.com. With the help of their unique server monitoring system we significantly minimized server downtime during 2010. 1H intrusion prevention systems also made our customer websites more secure than ever.

Cloud hosting, which is gaining popularity, is another important new technology we started to provide to our customers. In 2010 SiteGround launched its Cloud hosting packages and thus allowed many websites to benefit from being hosted on a cloud of powerful servers, and yet pay only the resources they need.

Last but not least we did a lot of improvements and innovations for our business customers. During the year our Business Hosting package went through a lot of improvements. We added one free year of SSL use to it, made the servers PCI compliant  and added  more server power to finally transform the business plan into a Semi Dedicated hosting solution. With these resources and the safer environment we believe that we have created the perfect place where everyone would like to develop his/her online business.

Joomla Extensions and dozens of new Joomla Templates

Joomla ExtensionsWe did many innovations for our Joomla customers and all Joomla users during 2010. We have been working to provide free resources for this application since the beginning of our company. Now, we are proud to be the host with most Joomla resources in the industry.

The brand new Joomla related venture of SiteGround during 2010 was the development of our Joomla Extensions. The idea started with the simple will to help our Joomla users to become less vulnerable to hacker attacks. This is how our first Joomla Extensions – jHackGuard came to life. We put all our experience and knowledge into a simple plugin that does great work protecting Joomla applications from many different kinds of attacks. After we received feedback from our customers and other Joomla users, we decided to make more useful Joomla Extensions and developed six more modules, plugins and components.

As far as our Joomla Templates are concerned, we can proudly announce that our designers have created 73 unique and completely free Joomla 1.5 designs. In 2011 we will continue to contribute free resources for Joomla users, including designs for Joomla 1.6 when its stable version is finally released.

New and Improved Services

Exclusive Support ServicesIn 2010 we have done a lot to make our customers reach the services they need on our site easier and faster. We made it easier than ever to request a Script Integration, web design assistance, security audit, file transfer and much more.

In addition to the existing services we added a lot of new ones in order to help our customers create, manage and develop their websites better. Some of the new services we now offer are Google Analytics integration, Security Audit, Secure Shell Access, Spam Killer, Daily Backups and many more!

Last but not least we replaced our old SiteBuilder with the new Website Wizard. We have always wanted to provide our customers with no web design experience and HTML knowledge with a tool to make good websites. Our SiteBuilder tool was serving this purpose well for years but we wanted something newer, better and faster. This is why we replaced it with our new Website Wizard.

Continuing Improvement

Through the entire year our administrators have worked to improve our services and to make them more stable and safer. Our servers work faster than before, our customers’ sites are better protected than ever.

We will continue to work towards improving each aspect of the hosting experience you get from SiteGround. We hope that during the next year we will make our services even better!

Hristo

Product Development – Technical

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More Than a Customer

Essential part of the hosting service is the communication with clients. It allows us to meet interesting people, to discuss and solve problems together. That is how we become closer with some of the people and they join our large community – facebook group, twitter followers…

In this article we introduce to you one of the most active and helpful members of our community – Alin. He is extraordinary in many ways – smart, helpful, good-natured, honest and always eager to reach the bottom of the problem. You should know his life has not been easy, the least said. He is diagnosed with Quadriplegic Spastic Cerebral Palsy and has gone through the worst in life: read Alin’s story here. He has been kind enough to answer a few questions for our blog:

 

SiteGround: Please, introduce yourself and tell us something about you.

Alin: Hi Siteground customers and Siteground prospectives. My name is Alin S, I run http://alinssite.info and http://disabledplanet.net one is a WordPress-based blog and the other is a phpBB3 forum for people with disabilities. I use the blog to help people learn more about me and stay in the loop. I also get donations to help me pay for medical equipment and people also buy DVDs of my speeches.

SG: What is Internet for you and what do you want to accomplish with your site?

A: The internet for me is one of my very few only connections to the outside world and Siteground helps me get myself out there so I am not forced to go find people to connect with, people find my site and or my forum and connect and start talking to me and my friends and other members. It’s great because with how limited my mobility is and how bad my pain is i only go out when its necessary. Most of my “fun” takes place online or at home with people visiting.

SG: Which is your favorite Content Management System?

A: My favorite CMS (Content Management System) is WordPress since it features SO many plugins and can be used for ANYTHING. When you say WordPress you think blogs, newspapers, and other “press” related things. NOT AT ALL! WordPress can become a full fledged E-Commerce system, It can be a photo gallery system, pretty much just about anything that its 50,000+ Plugins allow it to do! And best of all if you know code, it’s all open source so feel free to dig in! (But make sure to back it up first, I’ve broken my installation doing things like that!)

SG: What are you looking for in a web hosting company?

A: When I think web hosting I look for a clean cut leader of companies, not some company that offers the cheapest hosting package on a bunch of cloud servers, no I want a company that knows their servers, has data center technicians always ready, has 24 hour support that turns around with an answer within 10 minutes or less! I also expect a company to be generous to its customers and not cold and stingy and that is exactly what Siteground is.

SG: You are an active member in our forum and communicate often with our support. Would you like to share your experience.

A: Siteground staff also partake in the Siteground forum which is a great place to chat with support professionals about non critical issues or things like “My wordpress does not look right how do I format X header to fit with this type of footer” or “What plugin would I use in Joomla to produce a cool effect of snow on my site?”. Tell them it’s verbatim from my head and that its their problem to edit it LOL!

We hope you have enjoyed Alin. You might want to check his Donations-Gifts page and show him your support for what he does.

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Good Bye Old SiteBuilder, Hello New Website Wizard!

During the last few months, SiteGround has gone through a serious reformation related to the SiteBuilder solution we provide to our customers. The changes were triggered by some copyright issues, which our primary SiteBuilder provider SiteMagix was unable to handle professionally. This situation forced us to take decisive actions and find an alternative solution, despite the high costs of changing such a vital part of our service. The end result of our efforts is a better site-building tool for our customers and an entirely new Make Website package.

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SiteGround.com Launches New Cloud Hosting Service

SiteGround.com, the leading web hosting company, today announced the launch of a new cloud hosting service. The new product uses the best virtualization technology to deliver a service with outstanding reliability, redundancy and flexibility, suitable for business websites of various sizes. The cloud hosting service includes number of free extras, which makes it the most affordable offer on the market.
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SiteGround Goes Green

A lot has been said about global warming and “going green”. Our team has always been enthusiastic about reducing pollution, saving energy and water, but we always felt that’s not enough. So, we decided to try a more effective, down-to-earth, hands-on approach to doing something good for our planet. This weekend the SiteGround team planted over 400 trees and cleaned the surrounding area.

There were more than 50 of us – SiteGround employees, friends, kids and a dog. Our task was to plant willows along a riverbank. Willows help both the local eco balance and prevents collapsing of the riverbank. We also cleaned up the waste from the area. It was exhausting, it was cold and muddy, and it was great fun!

We trooped up in front of the entrance of a big cave and the local ranger briefed us how to use a shovel to dig a hole, how to plant a sapling, how to mold and water it. Then, we separated into groups and went to the spots where the actual work and fun began.

Some were lucky to be planting on nice and easy-to-dig earth and planted their saplings in no time. Others got spots where the riverbank was stony and the soil was very hard. One of the groups had to cross the river bare-footed to reach their sites.

The guys dug enthusiastically their first few holes, but then the passion started to fade and it was time to take the beer out of the trunks to keep us going! The girls did the planting and watered the newly-planted trees with water from the river. After lunch we regrouped and those who were done with their spots went to help those who picked up the short stick with the stony soil.

It was a hard day’s work that ended sooner than expected due to the pouring rain. Yet, we were quite proud with the result. We got home wet, exhausted, yet happy. And we immediately started planning when to do it again!

For us, that was just one small step for helping our planet. We are going to keep up with the green initiatives and think of ways of involving our customers and friends as well!

See photos here

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osCommerce Vulnerability Fixed on All SiteGround Servers

As probably most of you know, osCommerce is a shopping cart application for creating and managing online stores. It is very widely used and has many implementations and variations. Many popular shopping cart applications like OscMax, ZenCart, CreLoaded, etc. are actually based on osCommerce and use its code.

Unfortunately, for quite a while now, there has been a known vulnerability in the osCommerce code and the code of the applications based on it through which a hacker can exploit the admin area and take malicious actions. Although on the osCommerce official website there is some information how the problem can be avoided (http://svn.oscommerce.com/jira/browse/OSC-1069), the vulnerability has not been fixed yet in the latest osCommerce release and with each new download and installation of a related shopping cart software, new people and online stores become potential targets.

When there is a vulnerability in such a popular application and many sites are at risk, we at SiteGround do not believe in the approach: “let each user find and apply the bug fix him/herself”. First, most of the users understand about the issue only after they are already affected. Second, many of them are unable to apply the fix themselves. To protect our customers from hacker attacks, some of our best technical experts investigated the problem in details and applied a global solution to all potentially vulnerable customers’ applications.

The results from our osCommerce patch operation are:

  • the osCommerce package available for installation through Fantastico has been patched so that the new installations are not vulnerable to the exploit;
  • all future transfer clients with osCommerce-based websites will get the vulnerability fix as part of the website transfer service we provide;

We are proud that once again SiteGround has provided a security service high above the standard level for a shared hosting company. Our knowledge and reaction in situations like these make us believe that we do provide the best osCommerce hosting.

Hristo
Product Development – Technical

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More Great Extra Services from SiteGround

Last month I gave you a hint about the more extra services to come this season. Here is a quick write up to get your attention at two of our latest additions. We’re launching premium versions of two of our services that traditionally rank us among the best in the industry: our reliable email spam protection and first-class technical support.

SiteGround Premium Support

We know that some clients need things to move faster than other. The idea behind our Premium Support service was to top up the customer support that we currently offer to all of our clients in order to address the pressing issues of those with special needs.

Naturally, we started with speed. Even though we’ve always managed to stand up to one of the fastest response times in the industry, with our Premium support service we’ve cut the wait time to a minimum. What is more – the problems reported under our Premium Support subscription are assigned a top priority. They are automatically posted in a special, top-level category and handled with special priority. The new service also has its own separate Premium Support interface to let you submit tickets faster and more easily.
This is really a big step forward in our customer service efforts, as we put all the years of experience into it. You can check out more about our new service on the special Premium Support page in our Customer Area.

Spam Killer and Virus Protection

All of our email servers have been especially optimized against spam and virus threats, ranking our standard spam protection significantly above the average industry level. However, to suit the needs to those looking for the best anti-spam system on the market, we have invested in a new solution – our latest Spam Killer and Email Virus protection feature.

Our Spam Killer and Virus Protection feature is based on MailFoundryTM -arguably the best hardware email filter currently available. If I had to describe the technology in layman’s terms, I would say that it is a piece of hardware that acts as a gateway for all incoming email traffic. It scans all messages and tells which ones are legitimate and which ones are spam and/or contain viruses. To go in a little bit more details, the appliance includes a human intelligence powered email filtering engine called MessageIQ. The MessageIQ engine uses a technology called Spam Profiles, which is extremely accurate in detecting spam.

*What are Spam Profiles and why are they so accurate?*

Spam profiles are highly targeted profiles of a sender of spam, an individual spam message or a collection of spam messages. Spam Profiles are created by human editors, in real time, to provide the quickest reaction to new spam outbreaks. Spam Profiles are updated every five minutes and are automatically sent to our Spam Killer.

This means that you are protected by a clever, adaptive and always up-to-date filter that guarantees up to 99% spam detection on all of your incoming mail.
Our Spam Killer is a “hands-off” solution, so there is no need to download and install anything on your computer or waste time on annoying updates. For a full feature list of the new extra, go ahead and visit our special Spam Killer and Virus email protection page.

Dima
Product Development – Marketing

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SiteGround sponsors OpenFest conference

SiteGround was a proud sponsor for a second consecutive year of the largest Conference for open-source software on the Balkans – the OpenFest. The event was held last weekend in Sofia, Bulgaria. This was the 7th consecutive annual gathering of open-source developers and fans from the region and it attracted more than 30 speakers and 700 participants.
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