Best of 2018: More Site Speed, Better Security, Plenty of New Tools, and 98% Client Satisfaction
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This year was quite busy and eventful for us at SiteGround. We worked hard on multiple projects that extend and improve the tools we offer, enhance the performance of all websites on our platform, and block millions of security threats daily so that they never reach your sites. It’s been a remarkable year, but what matters most for us is what difference did it all make for you. Judging by the outstanding 98% client satisfaction in our end-of-year survey, our efforts did not go unnoticed. Here are some of our highlights of the things we launched that helped us get your high mark.
We made your WordPress sites even faster with the new version of the SiteGround Optimizer.
With the new version of our SiteGround Optimizer plugin, we introduced an all-inclusive performance solution for your WordPress sites. With its powerful caching capabilities and new front-end and image optimization features, it optimizes the performance of your site to the point that many sites experienced between 20% and 500% speed increase!
We secure your sites better than ever, stopping millions of threats each day!
This year, we’ve been hard at work keeping your sites secured. We responded to three times more threats compared to last year in a way that you probably didn’t even notice. Statistically, we:
- Wrote 250 new custom firewall rules
- Added 125 livepatch kernel modules
- Mitigated 186 DDOS attacks
- Stopped 7 million brute-force attacks
- Stopped 160 million bad bot requests towards clients’ sites each day with our anti-bot AI solution
It’s insanely easy to build a real, functional site with our WordPress Starter.
Our WordPress Starter plugin makes the process of launching a fully-functional site a lot easier and faster. Quickly choose a theme and add important functional plugins, all of which get automatically installed on your site. In the short period of nearly three months since the release, the Starter plugin has been used to create 30,455 new sites!
We automated the migration of WordPress sites to SiteGround.
We developed a new tool — the WordPress Migrator that lets you transfer as many WP installations to SiteGround as you wish in just a few clicks and with no technical skills required! The migration is seamless and runs in the background. No wonder we have seen 3TB of data and 15,000+ sites migrated in the last five months without any hassle!
We went the extra mile to ensure a smooth transfer to Gutenberg.
The WordPress 5.0 version brought new key features, notably the Gutenberg editor which sparked a lot of buzz and some fears. We went the extra mile to make the transition to Gutenberg smooth and risk-free for our users. We closely monitored the results of the update and installed the previous Classic Editor plugin as an option, so you can have the flexibility to choose which one to use at any moment.
We gave Free Let’s Encrypt Wildcard SSL for your site and subdomains.
We made protecting the sensitive personal data on your main site and all its subdomains easier too. We provided free Let’s Encrypt Wildcard SSL certificates that can be enabled with a few clicks. Even though we had challenges with the automatic renewal of this considerable volume of Let’s Encrypt certificates, in the end, we managed to streamline the process and fix all SSL-related issues for our clients.
We are thrilled to host more than 1,800,000 domains and excited that more than 95% of their owners would recommend us. Тhat’s a clear sign that all our efforts have paid off. Thank you all for making 2018 yet another wonderful year!
Comments ( 29 )
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Gilbert
Hello. When I see this page, I understand Siteground is not a friend of Joomla....
Hristo Pandjarov Siteground Team
Quite the contrary, we’ve been supporter of the Joomla project since day one and we host a lot of Joomla powered websites on our servers. Many of the service enhancements, which we worked on are impacting all types of sites hosted on our platform - the web application firewall, Anti-bot AI, free wildcard SSL, etc. On the other hand, this year we did work on lots of WordPress-specific tools due to certain market demands and trends that we had to address. This does not mean we are not paying attention to Joomla users and their needs.
Gilbert
OK. And I know there are much more users of WP than Joomla, but I love Joomla, and I use it for all my clients sites. Another wish, concerning WP and Joomla : a lot of webdesigners (managing a lot of sites), would appreciate to have Perfectdashboard/AutoUpdater in Cpanel (for such a price ...:) ), like other well-known hosts. ... and a more recent version of Cpanel. These are my best wishes for 2019. Gilbert
Hristo Pandjarov Siteground Team
Our AutoUpdate system supports Joomla too, you can check it out in your cPanel right away :)
Gilbert
The Perfectdashboard/AutoUpdater does much more than only the update of the core, Joomla ot Wordpress, it checks and updates also all the extensions. Indispensable when you manage a lot of sites. And the other tools available, as Watchful, are very expensive. You can have a look (I'm not an employee of Perfectdashboard)
Hristo Pandjarov Siteground Team
Thanks for the suggestion, I will look into it!
Barnsley
Sounds like you'll soon be naming SiteGround, WordPressGround. Should your other CMS customers find a different hosting company - one that values all CMS customers, not just those using WordPress?
Hristo Pandjarov Siteground Team
Actually, all infrastructure and service updates and improvements that we apply affect all our customers and not only those, using WordPress. New PHP versions, SSL certificates, security rules and the anti-bot AI solution and many more all work for you no matter what CMS you’re using. I have to agree though that this year we’ve primarily worked on a lot of convenience tools that are WordPress-specific, which are mostly demand-driven. That doesn’t mean that we have stopped supporting other CMS users, or we will not provide relevant service to their needs.
Neil Robertson
Good luck with your 2019 Customer Satisfaction survey!
Tim
Got to admit agreement with Gilbert and Barnsley ! A high number of your Blog posts seem to focus on WordPress.
Peter
Thanks for all the hard work and additional add ons and features last year.
Tom Kay
You've mentioned the WordPress Migrator. Are you planing on developing similar tools for other platforms? In my case, it's Tumbler. All the importing tools I could find are useless for picture posts, and "assistance with such cases falls beyond the scope of your tech support".
Hristo Pandjarov Siteground Team
It is very different to migrate one WordPress to another compared to a migration from Tumbler to WordPress for example. First, it would require data migration from one application to another and second keeping the design would be impossible. Last but not least, site services as Tumbler are closed environments and don't grant enough access so you can migrate away from them. Usually, there's an export of some sort which is really hard to be handled by a service like the SG Migrator.
Grant M
Does this mean that if I have a WP site already then it cannot be easily migrated to your server? What is the migrator mentioned above? I have a new site but there are bugs and it is not as flexible as I had hoped. I was looking to change my website managers.
Hristo Pandjarov Siteground Team
If it is a WordPress website where you can install the migrator plugin and doesn't have additional restrictions - then it should work just fine.
Usman, R.
I am a new comer to SiteGround. Having had my first website hosted here and learnt what you have been telling your costumers so far, I am truly impressed. Keep up your hard work and achieve more successes to spread the world in many years to come. Good luck!
Robert J. Hopkins
Great job -- RJ Hopkins
Kaj Maney
Fast and accurate help, great uptime, what's not to love? Great job guys...been a very happy customer for several years now
Harry
Wellbivlike you guys. Keep up the work
https://sweetmemorystudio.com/
Just updated SG Optimizer on this site: https://sweetmemorystudio.com/ to Version 5.0.13, and an issue started to happen. 1) cannot enable Dynamic Caching 2) cannot enable Enable HTTPS
Hristo Pandjarov Siteground Team
You are having browser cache issues. We have a React-powered interface and some browsers just are too aggressive when caching and despite all our efforts keep in their memory old content. Please, clear your browser cache completely and you will see the interface properly. I've checked your site - evrything is working fine including your dynamic cache.
kokitree.com
Cleared browser cache: still not work Cleared Cloudflare catche: still not work Disabled and enabled the plugin: work again! Thanks!
dan
I just left AWS and signed up with SiteGround. The reason I did that is because I am tired of companies mixing business and left wing social justice policies. Bezos takes the profits from AWS to put into the Washington Post to then demonize non-Democrats like me. I'm not interested in being a part of that. I was on the verge of signing up at DreamHost, but then on their about page, I saw they have a communist black power fist. I'm so tired of all this left wing social justice nonsense permeating business life. I just need a company to host my web page. That's it. No politics. That's why I am at SiteGround now. So far, I am quite pleased with SiteGround.
Jules
Let me know when Gutenberg actually lets me put images where I want to put them, aligned in text blocks. Until then, I refuse to use it.
Riani
Great story of SiteGround. Keep up your hard work and achieve more successes :)
Alok Kumar
Amazing Hosting Ever.... I'll Transfer My Websites to Siteground in Next Month.
Mike
Yes, Finally an article worth reading! You guys rock and just as everybody else admits, I am blown away by your amazing, fast and dedicated customer support! SiteGround for Life!
Snehal Chauhan
what are the plan to fix this > Apache HTTP Server Privilege Escalation (CVE-2019-0211)?
Angelina Micheva
Hello Snelal, SiteGround infrastructure is not affected by this vulnerability and our customers are safe. Please note it can be exploited only within specific configurations and our servers use custom setups with additional protection. Our security team constantly monitors threat alerts and we always maintain all of our software up-to-date.
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