We Are Turning 17 And This Is How We Have Matured
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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.
- Supporting businesses and causes during COVID-19
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.
Comments ( 12 )
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Fatimah Desai
We're very happy with the siteground! We moved from one host to the another host. Experienced downtime and lots of stress. Since we moved to siteground, which has been almost a year, life is too smooth!
Simon Allen
Over the years I've had many situations where I just didn't know why my site/s were doing what they were!! A quick chat with Siteground always helps to fix the problem - even when it isn't strictly their problem to fix! I can't rate them high enough and their willingness to help in times of need. They even helped me out when finances were tricky and I was struggling to pay the fees - empathy, a kind word and a workable solution were all provided. If I was in the business of placing clients with hosts, Siteground would absolutely be my recommendation.
Norman
I've always been impressed with the support, as a naturally timid tech user. The quick responses and friendly approach has kept me with Siteground for many years.
Anthony
I have been a SiteGround user for over 10 years now and the best compliment I can give you guys is that in such a long time I have never worried about my websites. Even in the rare instances where I had an issue, your reps handle it instantly and made sure everything was resolved. I have recommended SiteGround to tons of friends over the years and I hope they were smart enough to stick with my recommendation. Thanks guys.
Hristo Pandjarov Siteground Team
Glad to have you on board for such a long time!
Robert Glass
Over the years I've had many situations where I just didn't know why my site/s were doing what they were!! A quick chat with Siteground always helps to fix the problem - even when it isn't strictly their problem to fix! I can't rate them high enough and their willingness to help in times of need. They even helped me out when finances were tricky and I was struggling to pay the fees - empathy, a kind word and a workable solution were all provided. If I was in the business of placing clients with hosts, Siteground would absolutely be my recommendation.
Lis
Happy birthday, Siteground. Youve been nothing but great all these years. I built my web design business from the ground up using siteground, and ive been satisfied all the way. Cheers to many years to come. P.s, You arent legal yet to drink, sitegound, i got my eyes on you! Much love.
Hristo Pandjarov Siteground Team
One more year :)
Edward
I see you're celebrating your birthday by limiting GoGeek plans to five sites (previously unlimited). How's this going to affect existing GoGeek customers? It's certainly within your right to change your plans, but I have to say, this sort of thing really pisses me off - I see no reason why you can't send a message to existing customers and let them know what's changing instead of letting them find out by accident and then being left to wonder how it might affect them, and make *them* responsible for contacting you to find out. By the way, I frequently recommend Siteground to clients and others, as I still think it's one of the better shared hosts on the market. If there's one area that SG is weak, though, it's in communication. You could do a lot more to inspire customer loyalty by being openly communicative and transparent.
Hristo Pandjarov Siteground Team
we haven't emailed you simply because the change does not affect your account :) The new quotas are for newly purchased accounts. Existing accounts remain unchanged. This said, quotas will apply on you as existing client only if you want to switch account plans.
Edward
I understand that it doesn't affect my EXISTING account now, but I only understand that because I contacted support to ask them. In my view, a corporate decision that gives pause to existing customers to wonder how they might be affected would be a good candidate for proactive communication. But let's put aside my existing account and talk about me as a client-partner. What if I have a longer term plans with SG? It will certainly affect my future growth. Since there are SSD and Inode limits on my existing account, I'd eventually need another Go Geek account if I'm going to grow clients I bring to SG (in fact, I already bought a second one two days ago). And that's my point, I guess. I'm not IBM in scale obviously, but I have a small business model in which I have consciously chosen to make Siteground a strategic partner. I don't think I should find out about a significant change to the pricing structure against which I'm planning my future business by accident at the time I act to purchase. Siteground is not the cheapest way to host websites, and I often have to talk people into moving to SG despite the extra cost. All I'm saying is, I'd like to see my loyalty to Siteground minimally rewarded with the courtesy of treating me like a valued partner by being proactive about communication. This is not an aggressive attempt to provoke defensiveness and I won't belabour it. Please, just accept it as constructive feedback from a customer.
Hristo Pandjarov Siteground Team
Thanks, really appreciate your feedback. We've actually already adjusted the quotas increasing them in order to accomodate people with business model similar to yours better. In addition, we will try to communicate this better in the future :)
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