SiteGround: Please introduce yourself and your online projects hosted by SiteGround?

Web-Pepper: My name is Ralph de Groot, Web-Pepper is a nick related with my one-man company. At Web-Pepper I build and maintain WordPress websites for small and medium sized business and various artists. I would describe myself not only as a webmaster, but also as someone that provides highly personalized assistance to my customers with their websites.

I started Web-Pepper in 2003, before that I worked as computer hardware service and support engineer servicing some of the highest end computer users in the Netherlands like several ministries, governmental agencies, and high-end computer businesses in the Netherlands. That’s where I learned what high-end support is.

SiteGround: Tell us more about yourself and Web-Pepper.com! When did you start your business and what kind of services do you offer?

Web-Pepper: My father was already programming Z80 processors in about 1980. We have had a computer at home since I can remember. From the earliest Apple to the 8086, 286, 386 we had them all. I recall people coming at our house to see a 10 Mb hard disk in function. That is how I got infected with the computer-flue.  I can remember when I was a little kid (I was born in 1971) my father told me that one day, there would be a global network, and you would be able to use a computer anywhere you want. At that time, I thought: “If I can find a way to earn your money from that network, I can work anywhere I want, THAT’S GREAT!” I first came online in 1995. IRC was the big things and I started to create small websites for the IRC channels.

SiteGround: How did you come with this particular name (Web-Pepper)?

Web-Pepper: Initially, I used another name for my company. Back then I was still repairing computers and giving support to people at home. But I also started working business to business and specialized in WordPress. One day I needed to explain to a customer what a CMS system could do and how is it better than a static HTML website. I told him that this kind of technique would “spice up his website”. This guy was (still is) very VERY creative and he answered “So you Pep-Up the website?”, “You are a web-pepper!” It sounded cool and as my current company name was really more suitable for a computer-repair-shop I went for Web Pepper instead.

SiteGround: You are quite active FaceBook user and one of the most active fans of our own FaceBook page. However, your profile web pepper seems to be more of a professional one. What is the role of FaceBook in your professional and personal life?

Web-Pepper: It is true that I use FaceBook for my company Web-Pepper, but actually Web-Pepper is not just my job it is my lifestyle. I do it 24/7 and I like it. It does not feel like work anymore. I check my FaceBook as often as my email.

SiteGround: You specialize in WordPress – why do you like it, what are WP’s advantages compared to other website applications?

Web-Pepper: When I first started building websites, I programmed them in MS Frontpage, but I soon noticed maintaining them wasn’t fun and took me too much time. About 6 years ago I started to work with WordPress. Why WordPress? Well… Some guy told me to stop creating websites by hand and start using a CMS System. He could not tell me which one to use, so I had to find out. But since I had to start learning a system from scratch, I decided to go to the one who was the most easy for my customers to use.

I tested several options including Drupal, Typo3, Joomla and WordPress. Then I found a person who did not know anything about computers or internet: my mother. She tested my 4 websites for me. After 2 weeks she came back and told me she could not do anything with them except for WordPress, she told me that one was so easy to use, even she could handle it. Then I knew that I needed to start learning using WordPress.

Maybe you could read this, it also gives you a nice story (it’s in Dutch, but maybe you could use Google translate) http://www.web-pepper.com/nieuws/websites-van-bekende-mensen-bedrijven-gemaakt-in-wordpress/

SiteGround: You also offer SEO services – could you tell us more about the challenges in this area?

Web-Pepper: It’s a part of delivering a good website. I think SEO is pretty difficult and there are many ways to do good.

SiteGround: Which website you worked on is your favorite project ever and why?

Web-Pepper: I can’t answer that question. I don’t have a favorite customer, I love them all. I have customers calling me 5 times a week and customers that I need to call after months not heard; there are some pretty (internationally) famous persons that use my service, like Jan Vayne, Micky Jooren, Sascha van Esdonk, Hugo van Neck and Wolfgang Peppmeier, but I am just as happy working for ordinary people and helping them with the great effort to start their own small business and want to do something online. I’m a service-guy with a big heart, I love helpting people.

SiteGround: Which of your projects was the most challenging as a setup or ongoing maintenance for you, what made it so difficult?

Web-Pepper: I remember a website I once built, it’s not online anymore, for a reunion of some pub. They first told me they needed a really basic website and I agreed to take it on some relatively low and fixed price. After some meetings it turned out they had some really crazy ideas and the project got quite complicated. It took me hours of research. At the end I had it going. It did not pay off very well in terms of money, but it brought me a lot of new experience. That’s more worth than gold!

Tell us a little more about your experience with SiteGround hosting!

At this moment I have more than 50 accounts at SiteGround with over 70 websites and 0 server worries. Whenever I have a question, SiteGround support helps me in no time! Another thing I really like about SiteGround is that they keep innovating, making new stuff to make things better, faster and safer. For example adding Cloudflare, SG SuperCacher and that kind of stuff.  I feel that SiteGround and Web-Pepper have the same personal approach to their customers needs; I think that’s why I like SiteGround so much!

SiteGround: How did you find us and why did you choose us at first place?

Web-Pepper:Well, I have used a lot different hosting companies but they all had the same problem for me: Their irresponsiveness outside office hours. Once I had a problem with a website and to solve it I needed to contact the hosting company with a single simple request. It was a Friday 17:05 in the afternoon, and I had to wait until Monday-morning. All that time my clients website was down.

This situation made me look for a hosting company that would suit me better by having an attitude similar to mine: I needed someone that will help the customers like they are friend or family. SiteGround does this. I’m not a server-guy, and I don’t want to become one, so I needed a hosting partner I could really count on. And this is SiteGround.

SiteGround: What role does SiteGround hosting play in the services you provide?

Web-Pepper: Well SG takes care of my websites like they are their own. They take care of protection, provide me with feedback. I’m a one-man company, whenever I have a question I use Google and SiteGround-Support :c)

SiteGround: What was your initial impression after you started using SiteGround hosting, did it change during the years?

Web-Pepper: At first the most important was that I could reach someone 24/7/365 when I have a problem. However, I got to see that SiteGround Support is not only there to answer the question you ask, they really think along with you. You can go and ask questions like : “what plugin should you prefer for… “ which is definitely not like reporting a hosting related issue they need to fix, and they will still answer! Another thing I really appreciate is that SiteGround is open for ideas. If you miss a functionality and tell them about it, for example something in the reseller area, they at least TRY to do something about that OR explain to you WHY it can’t be done.

SiteGround: What was the main reason that made you use SiteGround for so many projects?

Web-Pepper: Because I can rely on SiteGround, I choose for separate accounts for my clients. It is very clear and is practical and functional. Maybe not the cheapest solution with all that separate accounts, but it is affordable, clear and SiteGround is money well spent.

I am extremely happy to report that our first webinar about Joomla speed was a great success – we had a very big crowd of people showing up, loads of questions in the end, and excellent feedback from our attendees!

Daniel shared so many speed optimization tips and of course as it’s practically impossible to process all this at a time, we received numerous requests to record the webinar and share the slides. So here they are:

Webinar video

Webinar slides

There were many meaningful questions in the end, so make sure to watch the webinar to the very end. Still, we couldn’t answer all of them but as we promised, Daniel has provided personal response to all the questions we couldn’t cover. You can check them out here.

Have an idea about our next webinar topic? Don’t hesitate to share it in the comments below.

Enjoy!

In the light of the recent botnet brute force attack, yesterday our very own CEO Tenko was invited by the quickly rising Joomlabe.at podcast of our friendly host and passionate SG ambassador Peter Bui.

Tenko tells us how old he was when he got his first computer, why our philosophy about technology and innovation is different, and goes into the depths of the brute force attacks and what’s their target – you’ll be surprised – it’s not your website. Make sure to listen until the very end of the episode; Tenko shares some quite useful tips and tricks on how to remain safe and protected from similar attacks.

Oh, and by the way, if you haven’t subscribed to the podcast yet, make sure to do it and stay up to date with the latest developments in the Joomla world!

We’ve been thinking for quite some time now what will be a cool way to extend our resources and help you get your websites and business up and running, and here we are – starting a fresh educational initiative through webinars. We’ve got some of our partners excited about this idea too and will cooperate with them to bring you first hand experience and knowledge on the nitty-gritty of setting up and running an online business.

The first webinars will be in the next 2 weeks and we will be covering the topics of Joomla speed and performance optimizations, and the muddy waters of Joomla SEO. We have invited our friend Richard Pearce from BuildaJoomlaWebsite as a co-host and he, together with our very own performance guru Daniel Kanchev, will be the superstars of our first two webinars.

WEBINAR 1: How to Speed Up Your Joomla Site

Wednesday, April 17, 2013 at 5pm EDT
Presented by Daniel Kanchev

Speed optimizations is not rocket science and Daniel will share tons of useful tips and tricks that will help you make your Joomla site literally fly: hidden Joomla backend gems, template and extensions tips, caching methods and plugins, CDN options and many more. Register HERE

WEBINAR 2: How to Get Higher Rankings for Your Joomla Site

Tuesday, April 23, 2013 at 5pm EDT
Presented by Richard Pearce

Website speed is definitely a ranking factor for Google already (hence previous webinar, heh), but is it the only one? Certainly not, and Richard knows what the other factors are. He’ll tell you how to target and place the right keywords in your Joomla site to get higher rankings. Register HERE

This is an experiment and we hope we’re off to a good start of what will turn into a regular educational series. We have more ideas on interesting topics for the future, but since these webinars are for you, we ask for your input. Let us know what you want to know, throw your suggestions in the comments and help us choose the next webinar topic!

It seems spammers and hackers didn’t get much sleep the last few weeks. We’re seeing an abnormal amount of hacking and bruteforce attempts towards Joomla and WordPress sites the last two and a half weeks. Additionally, the popular WordPress plugin Social Media Widget was reported to have suddenly started to insert hidden spam SEO links. Solving these problems immediately became our security team’s goal number one. There were some easy solutions like fully restricting the access to the application login forms for the time of the attacks and forceful removal of all faulty plugins. We saw other hosts take these actions. However, we do not like easy security solutions that make customers feel punished, while other people are the real wrong-doers. Guided by this belief we once again solved the problems in our own way – efficiently and at the same time user-friendly.

Issue 1: Brute Force attack to Joomla and WordPress login pages

We started seeing this problem getting bigger than usual two weeks ago. Why is this happening, you would ask? The reason is simple – SPAM (read more about the relationship between spam and hackers). Huge botnets seems to have become quite active recently targetting hosting companies’ IP ranges, discovering Open Source CMSs such as WordPress and Joomla and try to bruteforce their admin password.

We made our customers’ passwords stronger

Of course if your admin password is strong enough (such as “hkjJKT689  6&%$khn!“) no bot will EVER find it. However this is not how things work in reality. Just after the bruteforce attempts started two weeks ago I had SG’s security team do our own in-house bruteforcing towards admin passwords for various CMSs. And guess what? There were tons of customers using “admin” as their password. And if you are using “admin” as your password, please DO CHANGE IT NOW since “admin” is one of the first passwords botnets are trying to guess simply because many people are careless about security.  Some of those apps that used a simple password were already hacked and used for spamming when we identified them. This is how we discovered the bruteforce attack was taking place – follow the SPAM trace and you will find the problem So step one was to change all easy passwords we were able to find on various apps and email our clients their new password, as well as an explanation why did we do the change in the first place.

Things got even more serious

Yesterday, on 9^th of April, all of a sudden a hundred or so of our servers popped up in our monitoring system with abnormally high load. When we dug into it, we found that ALL our servers in the US are under a brute-force attack that targets WP and Joomla sites. The botnets were using more than 1000 different IP addresses per server (we’ve blocked logins of more than unique 92,000 IPs so far) and tried to guess the passwords at a unique pace. At this point I was furious, now it was not about few websites with weak passwords that were hacked, but about endangering our server performance.  Our goal now became to stop the attack immediately and once for all. Therefore, I gathered the security team and a few moments later we had a temporary solution that took place immediately and an idea how to permanently stop those botnets, forever. I will not go into details in terms of what we did, cause chances are some of those hackers running those same botnets would read it and will try to outsmart us, but the facts show that for the past 12 hours we have blocked more than 15 million bruteforce attempts (That’s A LOT!) towards our clients and our servers are not experiencing any load issues.

Issue 2: WordPress plugin Social Media Widget – gone bad!

Another WordPress related SPAM issue that became hot yesterday was the announcement of Sucuri that a popular plugin called Social Media Widget contains a bad (SPAM) code inside it. The Plugin was immediately removed from the WordPress official repository and many hosts forcefully uninstalled it from their customers’ WordPress instances.

What we did instead, was to find all the customers that were using the Social Media Widget and deleted the bad code from their plugin. Additionally, even if someone installs now the plugin we have made a server level fix that will not allow the bad code to execute and add the unwanted spam links to our customers’ websites. Thus the problem was solved without forcing our customers to give up a plugin they have chosen to install and probably need.

If we had to sum up web hosting in a simple formula, it would be: servers + people. The first part is easy – anyone could get servers. Maybe not the best ones out there, but essentially, servers are relatively easy to find. But what makes the big difference, are the people. Combine good hardware with the unique approach of skilled professionals and the attitude of great people and you get a unique product. That’s our company’s philosophy and in order to achieve it, we need unique HR practices. We recently had a new wave of fresh talent hired for the SiteGround Technical and Customer service departments and in the heat of the new training season, we decided to tell you a little bit more about what it takes to become part of our team.

Natural Born Helpers

When looking for new talent, the fundamental prerequisite is that the candidates are friendly, helpful and empathetic people. Finding customer service reps with these essential skills is often more important than them having an extensive background in technology. A passion for the job combined with genuine curiosity is also a great start that promises a candidate will catch up with what’s missing in knowledge in no time.

We never hire on a massive scale – on average, out of a hundred resumes, we do thirty interviews and hire only five candidates. All our customer support representatives are in-house and hired by the same management team that continues to work with them on the job. We oppose the widely-accepted practice of impersonal service, based on pre-defined template answers, that’s why we never outsource and don’t believe in delegating any part of our services to outside agencies. For us, customer service is more than just having someone to address a question to. Our goal is to build a customer support team, be it technical or sales, that possess the skills and temperament to effectively solve a client’s issue at one go and positively represent our company’s culture.

Back to School

Our customer care representatives handle a variety of issues, since we cover a much larger scope of support requests than the average hosting company. To prepare them for that, even if they do have technical experience, we do intensive in-house training in two parts: theory and practice. After the initial hiring procedures, all newly hired employees come in our head-quarters for a month of excessive theory training (and drinks with the whole team in the evening). Once theory has been covered and we’re certain each new guy gets the names of all colleagues right, it’s time for them to meet the clients. This means 3 months of hands-on practice sessions with a mentor – one of our senior customer service representatives.

Every client might come across a newbie once they start practice sessions – each new guy has a “Trainee” badge in their agent profile in our chat system and a “Newbie” badge in our HelpDesk. But don’t worry, even in training mode, we never compromise our services – one of our experienced seniors is surely standing by their side, making sure the only thing to give away you’re talking to a newbie is their badge. Each new chat or ticket handled by our trainees is followed-up with feedback right afterwards. This makes a total of four months training period, combined with regular evaluations and step-by-step guidance by our experienced seniors in both our Customer service and Technical Support departments. No wonder that just a few weeks into their theory training, our latest SiteGrounders are already pretty tired and crammed with information, as you can see by the pictures.

The importance of PLAY

But it’s not all work and no play. We’ve always drawn a strong connection between happy, empowered employees and good customer service. According to a recent global call centers report, customer service staff turnover ratio is 35% on average. At SiteGround, it’s close to zero. Generally, most customer service representatives leave within their first year of work. At SiteGround, it’s after that same first year that people become really good at their job. Our internal benchmark that someone is experienced and knowledgeable enough is 10 000 handled tickets. We’ve set a standard for exceptional customer care, as confirmed in the recent survey among our clients – our best and most effective brand ambassadors – a large share of all new accounts at SiteGround are opened by people, who are referred by an existing client.

We also make sure to always leave room for growth for our employees due to our policy to appoint all managers from the inside and rotate people between departments: the same person could easily start at customer service, continue as technical support and get promoted all the way up to our specialized server operations and administration officers. SiteGround is an employee-driven company – we never hire outside people at managing positions, all managers have worked and grown their way up to their current positions. So, hopefully, these same tired and shy guys you see on the pictures will be the ones running the training themselves in a couple of years.

Yes, we turned 9 last week! So many things have happened since we initially registered our domain name (on 22nd of March, 2004, which date we have chosen to celebrate as our birthday), that I feel like we have started it all in another lifetime! But what is SiteGround now, nine years after it was founded? As part of the birthday event there were lightning talks given by different people from the company, who felt like sharing some thoughts and ideas with the others. There were no rules who will talk and what will be the topic covered. However, what people chose to talk about naturally became a very good representation of what SiteGround is curently really about:

SiteGround is truly geeky!

How else would we have someone talking about automating the pedal pushing of his off-road vehicle with a software, so he can stop using his feet? Or making his kitchen light bulbs controlled through his smartphone? Or having created the perfect home multi-media device installing Linux to a circuit board (on the image)? And who else is better than this same geek to come up with all the great server performance optimizations that were developed during the last year?

SiteGround’s support people are super heroes!

How else would they inspire their manager to come up with his unique tale about what is it to drive a tram and how it is a completely different job than what his crew does. As he said: “To be a good support person, you should not be a carman, you should be a Batman! There are no laid trails that you can just follow; instead you should be ready to go beyond what is obvious to find the best solution of the reported problem.”

People like working at SiteGround!

This was once again stated in the very first talk: “Why I do NOT want to work for Google?” And the simple answer was: because I already work at SiteGround and I really like it! I cannot agree more with that. I think that what makes SiteGround a great place to work is not simply the great office or the cool working benefits, but its inspiring people. It just feels great when your colleagues can make you laugh with their great sense of humor. It also feels great when your co-workers can make you cry with their true empathy with people in need. And it feels awesome to be a part of a team that creates something really good!

SiteGround makes great parties!

Another truth about SiteGround: we never miss an opportunity to make a blasting party. Below are just a few captured moments from the Birthday celebration, more are available in our FaceBook profile.

As you already know, we @SiteGround HQ are obsessed with server performance and website loading speed. That is why we initially created the SuperCacher. It has already speeded up many of our customers’ websites and has been extremely well received by our users. Now, just a few months after the initial launch, we are happy to announce а new great caching option added to our SuperCacher — the Google’s PageSpeed Apache module.

What is mod_pagespeed?

To put it in layman’s terms mod_pagespeed speeds up your site and reduces page load time automatically, with no additional knowledge required on the users’ side. It also optimizes your website for mobile view and for better browser rendering.

To read more visit Google’s mod_pagespeed website.

How our SuperCacher makes using mod_pagespeed easier than ever?

• It provides a management interface integrated with cPanel

  SiteGround tech team is proud to announce that our SuperCacher plugin is the first and only that fully integrates Google’s mod_pagespeed with cPanel. This integration allows easy management of the PageSpeed options as part of our user-friendly SuperCacher interface located in the cPanel of each shared hosting account.

• We allow activation on a per domain basis

  With SiteGround’s SuperCacher you can enable PageSpeed for any of your domain names, be it primary, addon, parked or sub-domains – as easy as a single mouse click

• We have improved the mod_pagespeed cache flushing

  Normally, with mod_pagespeed the cache can only be flushed on a per server basis, which by shared web hosting definition means, if user A truncates his cache, users B, C and D, hosted on the same server would also get their cache deleted. One of the key benefits of the SuperCacher plugin is the ability to flush PageSpeed’s cache on a per domain basis or for your entire account, without affecting others on the same server. This feature is extremely useful for developers or website administrators developing a website.

• We allow advanced PageSpeed filter editing from the interface too

  By default, the PageSpeed module is enabled with a set of default filters, designed to safely optimize the content of your website, without affecting its look or behavior. This is what most web hosts offer in their implementation of PageSpeed, but SiteGround’s SuperCacher plugin has the unique ability to allow you to customize your PageSpeed setup for each website. You can enable different filters using the “Advanced filter edit” button. We recommend using Google’s PageSpeed Insights browser addon, to determine how PageSpeed can further boost your website and apply the necessary filters using the Advanced Editor.

To learn more how to use Google PageSpeed with your SiteGround account you can refer to our tutorial.

Few days ago our security team has come across a JCE related vulnerability that has the potential to affect many Joomla 1.5.x based websites. The problem is that an old version of one of the JCE addons called ImageManager has turned vulnerable to attacks. The number of the affected websites is big, because many templates  providers include the JCE editor together with ImageManager as part of their template bundle installations. So many Joomla users have these extensions without having installed them themselves.

After we noticed that few of our customers are hacked this way, we have immediately intervened in order to prevent this from spreading on our servers. Our security team has added custom rules to our Apache servers that will block any attempts for hacking Joomla 1.5 sites through this security hole. In addition, files with malicious code have been identified and removed immediately. If you’re a SiteGround user and think your website is compromised, please contact our Technical Support Team and we will take a look at it immediately.

However, we strongly recommend that all Joomla 1.5 users check if JCE with ImageManager is included in their installation and make sure to update both to their latest versions.

And another side note: if you use Joomla 1.5 you should seriously consider moving to Joomla 2.5 as soon as possible. The whole 1.5 branch is no longer supported by Joomla and though it has been stable for a long time and has no known security issue at the moment, if one occurs in the future (say tomorrow) it will not be fixed. So as always the number one rule to stay safe is: always use up-to-date applications and extensions so you stay one step ahead of the hackers!

In 2012 we started the SiteGround How Cool Is That challenge to help our clients learn about the cool technologies that only we provide. Every week of the challenge we posted a new infographic explaining one of our unique features. In the final stage of the competition, our clients were invited to vote for the coolest technology by sharing their feedback in a comment. Our unique security technology gathered most of the votes and was chosen as the coolest Siteground feature among all others. Read the comments to see the feedback from the clients who voted for it or check a short infographic on how it works.

]]>

In 2012 we started the SiteGround How Cool Is That challenge to help our clients learn about the cool technologies that only we provide. Every week of the challenge we posted a new infographic explaining one of our unique features. In the final stage of the competition, our clients were invited to vote for the coolest technology by sharing their feedback in a comment. Over 100 people voted for our Auto-updates technology for Joomla and WordPress as the coolest SiteGround feature. Read the comments to see the feedback from the clients who voted for it or check a short infographic on how it works.

In 2012 we started the SiteGround How Cool Is That challenge to help our clients learn about the cool technologies that only we provide. Every week of the challenge we posted a new infographic explaining one of our unique features. In the final stage of the competition, our clients were invited to vote for the coolest technology by sharing their feedback in a comment. Our Daily backup features received great support. Read our clients’ feedback in the comments or check our a funny infographic on SiteGround Daily backup.

In 2012 we started the SiteGround How Cool Is That challenge to help our clients learn about the cool technologies that only we provide. Every week of the challenge we posted a new infographic explaining one of our unique features. In the final stage of the competition, our clients were invited to vote for the coolest technology by sharing their feedback in a comment. The SiteGround partnership with CloudFlare received lots of shout-outs from the clients who used it. Read our clients’ feedback in the comments or check out our infographic on what CloudFlare CDN can do for your website on SiteGround servers.

In 2012 we started the SiteGround How Cool Is That challenge to help our clients learn about the cool technologies that only we provide. Every week of the challenge we posted a new infographic explaining one of our unique features. In the final stage of the competition, our clients were invited to vote for the coolest technology by sharing their feedback in a comment. Our unique caching technology was chosen as first runner-up with only 3 votes behind the winner. Read the comments to see the feedback from the clients who voted for it or check a short infographic on how it works.

On this year’s Christmas day, many WordPress users were quite unpleasantly surprised by a vulnerability in the popular W3 Total Cache plugin. The issue was a serious one, allowing the attacker to get access to sensible information from the WordPress database including password hashtags, usernames and much more. This meant that an experienced hacker could get full access to your site, download your personal information from it, change its looks, include malicious code, add backdoors for future access and much more bad things, you wouldn’t want to experience. Sounds scary? Not if you host with SiteGround!

W3 Total Cache vulnerability explained

The exploit is quite simple – there is a folder where W3 Total Cache stores its database cache. This folder should have permissions that block outside access to it. Only your plugin should be able to access this directory. Unfortunately, for some reason the folder has been left with permissions that allow everyone to browse through it. The problem gets even worse if you have directory listing enabled for this folder because the attacker can simply download the cache files. However, disabling directory listing doesn’t help either because it just makes it a little harder for the hacker to get to your files. Just a little though, because file names can be guessed since they are using standard naming logic.

What we did to secure the WordPress sites we host?

As usual SiteGround security team was on its guard even at Christmas. As soon as the vulnerability was officially announced at sucuri.com we worked out our own solution that was applied on a server level and preveneted possible intrusions through this WordPress plugin security hole. We patched our web servers to block all requests to the w3 unsecured folder. Thus your plugin continues to work correctly and your information remains safe at the same time.

What to do if you are not hosted by SiteGround?

The official patching solution suggests that you add an .htaccess file with “deny from all” in it, to the folder where W3 Total Cache stores its database cache – “/wp-content/w3tc/dbcache/“. So we highly recommend all w3 total cache users to apply the patch as soon as possible.

In conclusion, if you’re a SiteGround customer you can sit back and enjoy the holidays, we got you covered! If not, you should patch your site before all your information gets stollen… or you can simply transfer to us

When you hear “end of year recap”, you probably imagine a big hall full of bored people that cannot wait for the managers to finish their polished presentations. Well, not when the recap event is happening at SiteGround! What we had instead, was a totally transformed office with one half of it looking like a gambling room with Roulette, Black Jack, Texas Hold’em and hot hostesses and the other half reminding of the Olympic Games and holding sport tournaments. These gaming activities were followed by the real yearly recap presentation that I bet was more fun and had better hosts and videos than the last Oscars. And the whole thing ended up with what can be surely awarded as the best night-life event of the year.

What was this end-of-year gaming craze about?

Actually, as frivolous as this may look on the surface, the gaming initiative was organized and held for a really good cause! It aimed to raise funds among SiteGround employees to support two local orphanages and some of their kids to continue their higher education for the whole next year. The aim was achieved. With the money donated by all the employees and tripled by the SiteGround owner and CEO we will make the next year better and more meaningful for several talented children! The whole initiative was suggested and organized voluntarily by a group of SiteGround employees. They have dedicated a substantial part of their free time to talk personally to the children in need, to suggest the best way to help them, to come up with the idea and to actually organize the fund-raising event.

Memorable moments from the recap ceremony!

This year’s recap presentation was a thing to remember too! 2012 was extremely eventful and there were a lot of achievements to go over and many people to be singled out for their contribution. However, there were several things that made the whole ceremony feel really different:

1. The inspiration and the devotion with which the SiteGround owner and the CEO have been preparing the event during the last few months.
2. The unmatched sense of humour of the dedicated hosts (both from the development department)
3. The truly amazing videos, prepared by our devoted film producer and director (one more talent from the development department)
4. And last but not least, the pink underwear of our tech genius Marian

But what really happened during 2012?

Looking back at what happened during the last year, we can proudly say that 2012 major theme was  “more to the people”. The number of the projects that we successfully finished and the extent to which we enhanced our hosting service has not been reached ever before. Three major objectives were achieved and led to a great evaluation by our customers:

1. Better customer service and experience – We launched new customer area and cPanel theme, enhanced ticketing system and LiveChat interface.
2. Insanely fast website loading speed – To achieve this we set up two new data centers in Europe and Singapore, implemented advanced new hardware, and added CDN service and unique Caching system.
3. More focus on Joomla and WordPress than ever – We sponsored more than 20 JoomlaDays and WordCamps around the world, organized some unique trainings for our staff, and implemented autoupdaters that can keep these two most popular applications on our servers up-to-date and safe.

The team behind all this

Of course all these can be achieved only by a highly motivated and inspired team. Knowing this SiteGround has invested a lot in its people during the year: we moved to a new office, winter and summer vacations and team building events were organised. Honouring the people with outstanding achievements at the end of the year and realizing how many they are, showed us once again that it was totally worth the investment!

The things that never stop to amaze me about SiteGround people is their enormous dedication, their infinite creativity and their great spirit. This end-of-year event had once again highlighted all of these qualities. And it showed one more thing – we can work 24/7 but can also party 24/7! For more images of the event see our FaceBook album.

The latest stable WordPress version, named after the famous jazzman Elvin Jones is finally available for download. The star of the show is named “Media Manager” – the completely revamped tool for adding multimedia and organising it into galleries is both the best and the worst thing in the latest WordPress release.

The bright side of life

The admin backend of WordPress has received some polishing – buttons look shinier than ever and all the icons are now Retina display ready, which means they have a lot more pixels stuck into them. As I mentioned in this post intro, however, the main thing is called Media Manager. Once you hit the Add Media button to add a photo to your post, you will notice the changes. It looks and feels much better than the previous tool we had for upload, sorting and inserting of images into our posts. Finally, there is a quick, easy and visual way to create and insert galleries. You can now sort the images with simple drag-and-drop, choose which ones to be inserted into the gallery, without having to exclude them in the HTML mode(now called Text mode by the way), which is a great improvement for those of us who use image galleries on a regular basis.

The dark side of the moon

The greatest improvement in WordPress 3.5, however, is the one to blame for the majority of issues that users experience in this version. The most common problem, reported by so many in the WordPress forums is that the Add Media button simply doesn’t work. The reason behind most of these issues is called jQuery. For quite some time the people behind WordPress are trying to make developers of themes and plugins use jQuery in a correct, safe and risk-free way. Developers, on the other hand love to hardcode, include old versions of the popular JavaScript library and so on. Usually, this doesn’t generate much issues but in the latest versions, the media manager simply stops working, which is really, really bad.

I’ve been doing a lot of testing today and it turned out that the best course of action if you experience issues with the Media Manager is as follows:

1. Make sure that you haven’t disabled the visual editor for your username. You can do that from Users -> All Users -> Edit button under your username -> Uncheck the “Disable the visual editor when writing” option.
2. Change your theme to Twenty Twelve (the new default theme introduced by WordPress 3.5). If this solves your issue, then you should check your theme. Most probably it is loading some JavaScript files or even an entire version of jQuery in its functions.php file. In addition, you can contact your theme developer for assistance.
3. If all of the above doesn’t help, then try disabling your plugins one by one and test the Add Media button after each. If it starts working after a certain plugin is disabled, then it’s certain that it is causing the problem. Keep it disabled and start enabling the others you’ve previously stopped. Check if the Media Manager is working after each plugin is enabled since there may be issues in more than one. Once you pinpoint which one is problematic, contact its developers in order to receive assistance.

In addition, take a look at this thread in the official WordPress forum dedicated to the Media Manager problems since it covers more specific cases that may cause troubles.

The panoramic view

All in all, WordPress 3.5 is a great upgrade. It fixes a lot of usability issues and core bugs, adds functionality and helps you produce better and more organised websites. This, however, comes at a cost. Theme and plugin developers will be forced to start writing their code in a more clean and standardised manner. Although that’s good for the WordPress application in general, that will cause problems for a lot of users. Hopefully, these issues will be soon fixed and forgotten!

Throughout the years SiteGround accomplished remarkable results in terms of performance and loading speed of our clients’ websites. To name a few of our achievements: frequent change of server gear with newer and more powerful one; rewriting the most commonly used software (such as Apache & php) in order to serve web pages even faster; tuning up our OS so it serves millions of requests per minute; adding multiple server locations across the globe so that content is nearer to your users, etc.

We like what we’ve accomplished so far. Our clients seem to appreciate it as well. In a recent survey we conducted, 93% of our clients were really satisfied with the speed and performance of their websites hosted by SiteGround.

Still, we wanted to go beyond fast loading times. We wanted to improve and strengthen your site to hold up against massive traffic spikes and handle 100 times more of their normal traffic. The only way to accomplish that was to add different layers of caching. That was a really complicated task on a shared hosting environment. It took more than 6 months to build, and a lot of people along the way told me, what we were doing was impossible on shared hosting. But it’s finally live!

What is SuperCacher and how does it work?

SuperCacher is a web caching service that we developed internally and exclusively at SiteGround. It sits in front of your web server (e.g. Apache). Whenever a browser requests to load a web page from SiteGround’s web server, the web server returns the HTML result to the browser AND the cache stores a copy of that same page. Next time that particular page is requested, the request gets served from the cache directly while the web server sits idle. Cache is known to significantly reduce the impact of many visitors/hits onto your website’s loading speed by sparing the resources of your host server and delivering the websites dramatically faster. SuperCacher is flexible, as it has several layers of caching available and more to come in the future.

Three Layers of Caching by SiteGround SuperCacher

1) Static Cache is the simplest form of caching. What it does is when a page of your site is loaded, it takes a copy of your static content – e.g. Images, CSS Stylesheets, Java Scripts, Flash Objects, etc. – and puts them into the servers’ RAM Memory. Next time that same object is required – say an image – it would be loaded from the servers’ RAM which is dramatically faster than loading an image from the Servers’ hard drives. And should you multiply this by a big number of visitors at the same time, the impact would be… spectacular

Who is it for? Static cacheis suitable for any kind of website. It’s enabled by a simple on/off switch in your cPanel -> SuperCacher.

2) Memcached is probably the most popular memory caching system that is used by thousands of database-driven sites on the Internet including YouTube, Facebook, Wikipedia. It speeds up these websites by caching results from database queries in 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 was one of the things that’s almost impossible to do on shared hosting. I’m proud to say that we’re the only host that offers Memcached on a shared hosting environment.

Who is it for? Memchaced is available to all our clients in their cPanel => SuperCacher. However, please keep in mind that in order to use Memcached your app would have to support it. Some apps have native support for it (e.g. Joomla, Mediawiki & Magento), though some additional configuration may be needed to make it work. Other apps, like WordPress, need additional plugin to be added in order to use Memcached.

3) Dynamic Cache is by far the most complicated thing we’ve ever done. Dynamic cache differs from Static cache and Memcached by one simple thing – the latter two only cache parts of your website – e.g. images or a query result. With Dynamic Cache the whole web pages are cached. In order to explain how dynamic caching works, I’d need to go into some more detail on how dynamic web languages (such as PHP) work.

Web browsers don’t understand PHP. They do understand HTML though. So even if your webpage was purely PHP written, it would still generate HTML code and send it to the web browser, so that the browser could actually understand it and display it to the user. PHP as a programming 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.

What’s dynamic data then? Say, you want to show what date it is on a web page – that’s dynamic content, cause it would change over time. Another simple example – dynamic content can allow you to show to a person from Australia a kangaroo page and to a person from Bali a golden beach page on the homepage of your site.

How does caching work , when everything is dynamic? Well, the concept is simple. Every time the webserver generates an HTML page from the PHP, that page is cached by SuperCacher. Next time that page is requested, the pure HTML would be displayed form the Cache which is in RAM, and as opposed to wasting CPU and I/O resources to read the PHP file from the disk, the cached result is much faster to display with almost none resources wasted.

Who is it for? As explained, the nature of dynamic cache is much more complex than the static cache. Therefore it is only available for our WordPress and Joomla users for now. We’d be adding more applications soon, with Magento on our short-term to do list.

Possible Issues? In fact there are few. In order for dynamic cache to work properly, it needs to flush the cache any time something new is added to your site. Say, you have a WordPress site and add a new blog post. If cache is not flushed, that new post won’t appear, since results will be served from the cache and the cache won’t have that new blog post. But we’ve thought about that as well – we’ve written plugins you need to download for WordPress & Joomla, before turning SuperCacher Dynamic on. Those plugins will make sure each time there’s something new, your cache is purged and content is displayed properly

SuperCacher Results

Each caching level of our SuperCacher service can increase website performance hundreds of times and reduce the impact of your website onto the server dramatically. And when enabled simultaneously, all three layers of caching give outstanding results, to say the least. To activate all three or a single layer of caching for your website, simply go to cPanel and click on the SuperCacher icon, then enable the cache type of your choice.

Once you try it out, post a comment about your experience below! We’ll be happy to hear what you think and examine any results and improvements you have achieved.

Have you noticed the shiny new banner in the your cPanel and the gold cloud in front of a sunburst icon that we have added at some point last month? If not, it is time to take a good look at them, because they link to a service that can make your website faster and safer. During the last few months we have been working on the implementation of the CloudFlare CDN into our web hosting service and now it is completely ready! Why did we bother and why should you care? Because CloudFlare CDN will add ninja power to your website with just one click and at no additional cost!

See the ninja power that CloudFlare adds to your website!

• How using CDN makes your website faster?

  CDN stands for Content Delivery Network, that consists of servers located in different data centers around the world. The content of a website that uses such a network is distributed across the web, instead of being served only by the single server where it was originally uploaded. Thus if your website that is hosted on a server in the USA is visited by someone in Australia for example, it will still load fast, as it will be served my a machine in Australia, instead of the original US server. Most of the big international websites pay tons of money for using CDN services, as they want to achieve consistency of loading speed around the globe. Now we make the technology available for all our customers in partnership with CloudFlare.

• How CloudFlare increases security too?

  In addition to speed optimizations, CloudFlare adds some really cool security features to protect your website from a wide range of online threats like comment spam, excessive bot crawling, SQL injection and denial of service (DOS) attacks. Based on the large number of websites that use the network CloudFlare accumulates knowledge about which traffic is good and which is bad and automatically blocks malicious traffic from reaching and possibly hurting your own website.

How to switch CloudFlare on and use it?

We have designed a brand new user interface that you will find in your cPanel. There you can activate and manage your CloudFlare CDN. You will have the choice to activate the Free version or the Plus version if you need more speed optimizations and if you want your SSL to work through the CDN too.

To learn more and get started login to your User area: https://ua.siteground.com/cloudflare.htm