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The London Trip

We have been quiet for a while, so I thought you might be interested in what’s new at SiteGround. Well, Reneta and I went to London at the end of last week for a business meeting with the CEO of The Planet (our main datacenter located in Texas, USA). It was only a two-day trip, very short but also interesting.

nobu1

On one hand we had a productive meeting with a major partner of ours and on the other, we enjoyed one of the most amazing restaurants we’ve ever been to. It’s called Nobu and as it turned out it is a very popular place in London. Maybe due to the fact that Robert De Niro owns the place and once in a while, you might see a movie star dining there. Well, we didn’t see any stars, but we were totally amazed by the food. I hate sushi, honestly, and when I entered the restaurant, I was hoping I won’t have to eat any raw fish out of courtesy. But everything we ate there was superb! The chef is incredibly good in mixing the spices and achieving extraordinary combinations. We tried several types of Sake too, which was a terrific experience. So, take this as a referral – if you are willing to spend some quality money in London, go to Nobu 🙂

siteground_kitten

Now, you would say, a two-day trip (even a day and a half) is not a long time to be away from office. But, we are full of surprises. When we came back, we found out that we have a new member of our team. Well it’s a kitten, but you know, we are very tolerant…and it’s so cute, so irresistible! Actually, we are now looking for a respectable home for the kitty. Anyone interested, be quick – applications are piling up 🙂 Also, the little boy doesn’t  have a name yet, so feel free to share with us your suggestions.

So, don’t think we are just losing time around here. We are also working very hard on a few new projects that are to be launched shortly. But, I won’t say a word now, just wait and see what’s coming next…

In the meantime, you might want to see the kitty’s pics on Facebook.

Tenko

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SPAM? Who said SPAM?

You do know what spam is, right? Well, if you don’t – open your email. I am sure you will find out a dozen emails there, that you did not request to receive and don’t have ANY idea who their sender is. They are annoying, irritating and can drive you crazy with their high volume – that is SPAM.

So, how do you fight SPAM? Well, there isn’t any universal method that can get rid of ALL the Spam you receive. However, there are some things you can do. And certainly, there are some things your email provider can do to prevent SPAM emails being received by YOU, the End User.

SiteGround as a web hosting provider aims to prevent most of the SPAM emails which are sent to or by our servers to reach their destination. At first, we do the common and obvious things:

  • We check the sender’s domain name and IP address versus several large RBL (Real-Time Blackhole List) lists. If we find out any of them is listed in any of the lists, we discard the email message.
  • We check if the message contains a valid ‘HELO’ request. By RFC (Request For Comments) definition, each email client should start the email communication with a ‘HELO’ request. If no such are present, we ban them.
  • We check in an internal database if the IP address of the sender or the domain name of the email has tried to send too many emails for a short period of time. If it has, we discard the emails and send a warning message to the customer.
  • We screen each message and the sender’s address and identify it as spam.

So, let’s assume the email passes our phase-one checks. Then, it is relayed to the Spam Assasin (http://spamassassin.apache.org/) daemon which gives a SPAM score to each email. Emails with score lower than 7 are directly delivered to the customers’ mailbox. Emails with score higher than 7 might be flagged for a manual or automatic review by our internal in-house built systems or might be discarded.

If the email passes the Spam Assasin score system, it’s checked for bad attachments (for example .dll or .pif files – which may and will harm your computer) and is discarded if such are found.

We further check if the user trying to send emails to any of our servers is brute forcing email addresses and if we catch him to do that, we automatically discard the email. The same applies to a user trying to identify to the server with too many usernames and passwords for a certain period of time.

The latest addition to our Anti SPAM filters is an ACL (Access Control List) filter which denies sending emails from a spoofed domain name. This means that if you, for example, host the domain name “yourdomainname.com” with us and “yourdomainname2.com” with another hosting company, you would not be able to send emails from the “yourdomainname2.com” domain from any of the SiteGround servers.

With all that said you should already know that SiteGround has invested a lot of time and effort to build automatic systems to prevent SPAM. And we’ll keep doing more and more. Fighting spam is a continuous process and we make sure we stay ahead!

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SiteGround partners – Singlehop

We stated that our blog will be about life behind the scenes. And life behind the scenes is not only SiteGround employees, procedures, and customer service policies. It is also about our partners. In this first episode of “SiteGround Partners” series, I am pleased to say Hello to Dan Ushman from SingleHop. He agreed to answer my questions in an email interview for you. See what Dan & Singlehop have to say about their experience with us.

singlehop

Tina: Tell me how long SingleHop has been doing business with SiteGround and what are the services you provide us with?

Dan: SiteGround and SingleHop joined forces in the middle of 2008 to offer dedicated servers to customers whose websites have outgrown their shared hosting accounts. SingleHop provides infrastructure and automation services while SiteGround focuses on sales, marketing and customer service. SiteGround has thrived due to their unrelenting commitment to its customers needs (both technical, and ease-of-use.) So, overall the relationship is truly unique because it is more than just a business relationship, our partnership has powerful synergies that produce some of the industry’s best technical innovations and customer experiences.

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Server security and reliability – Kernel Upgrades

There are so many new and interesting things happening around here that I just didn’t know where to start my post. So, I thought I should go talk to Marian. He is our chief system administrator and is a real source of inspiration when it comes to servers and technology. After an hour spent chatting with him, I decided that “the kernel” is the answer. Marian’s team has just upgraded our kernel again and was quite excited about the new tweaks they made.

For those who haven’t encountered the term ‘kernel”, here is a brief explanation I took from Wikipedia: -– “A Unix kernel — the core or key components of the operating system — consists of many kernel subsystems like process management, memory management, file management, device management and network management.” Although you may run a system with a default kernel, the well- built, stable and secure kernel is essential for offering top notch web hosting services.

Nowadays it’s not that big of a deal when you say you are using the “Latest Linux Kernel”. Everybody does that and most of the modern Linux OS will update their kernel with a click of a button. So, “What’s so special about SiteGround’s Kernel then?” you will ask. Read on and you might just find out:

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Trips continued – Rome, Italy

rome_colosseum

You remember that I told you about the awards 35 people from our team won on our 2008 Christmas party? Good!

Well, trips continue! Last Friday, 14 people from our team went to Rome, Italy.  I was there too. Not only it was a great opportunity for a mini team building, but also we were able to visit remarkable landmarks such as the Colosseum – the largest amphitheatre ever built in the Roman Empire; the Roman forum – the central area around which the ancient Roman civilization developed; the Vatican City – the smallest country in the world by both population and area; the Trevi Fountain – the largest and most impressive Baroque fountain in the city, and many, many more.

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Web Hosting Day 2009 Overview

Hello! Some of you may remember my last post about the Web Hosting Day conference in Germany, which a few people from our team (including myself) attended last week. The Web Hosting Day (WHD for short), although organized only for a second time, turned out to be a big event so I would like to make a quick overview of what happened there.

The topic of the event was “cloud computing”**  and “software as a service”. So initially, our team expected that we were going to learn about the latest developments of such platforms and that the information flow would be significant as the topic is quite hot in the industry. Unfortunately, most of the people who spoke at the conference were too busy selling their products (products that were not necessarily new), instead of trying to educate the public. Selling is of course a normal part of such events, but it shouldn’t really be the only focus of a web hosting cloud computing conference.

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Work – life balance at SiteGround

siteground_team_barcelona

Do we work hard? Yes, definitely! Do we care about work-life balance? Yes, definitely!

Really?! How?

The answer goes back to our 2008 Christmas Party. Traditionally, each year we have Annual Awards for MVPs, distinguished achievements, and significant contribution for the overall SiteGround development. Usually at least 10 people from the whole team go home with an award. Last year, however made a difference – at the 2008 Xmas Party almost 35 SiteGrounders (out of 70, hey this is half of the whole team) were awarded for their work and unceasing devotion to SiteGround development.

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Happy Birthday SiteGround!

Siteground.com turned 5 yesterday! I was thinking for a while what to write in this birthday post – thought about presenting numbers of employees, customers, achievements during the years. However, I believe that what matters here are the people who have ever contributed to what SiteGround.com is today. Without the people, neither the number of customers would be that impressive, nor would the achievements be that significant.

So this post is to say a big “Thank you” to everyone who ever contributed to what SiteGround.com is today. Special thanks to our customers without which SiteGround could barely exists – thank you for trusting us host your websites, for your continued support and valuable feedback!

Last but not least, a huge thank you all SiteGround employees for the dedicated work and effort for making our customers grow, our services improve, and our features excel!

Time to celebrate now! Happy Birthday, SiteGround!

Tenko

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What are we working on?

siteground_team_work

We promised that this blog will be about life behind the scenes. So, this time I will tell you about the main projects our team is working on. Here is what’s next in line:

1. Brand new automated server monitoring system – the current server monitoring system performs server checks within 9-10 seconds and in case of server load signals to the system administrator to fix the problem manually. The new monitoring system will practically solve problems on its own and will reduce the need for human action – artificial intelligence software. In the end of the day most of the problem resolution will be invisible for you and you will experience much shorter, if any at all, service interruptions due to high server loads or service instability issues.
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