Just as you may know, SiteGround super heroic team headed for Chicago last week to attend the CMS Expo – the biggest conference for content management systems. Our challenge was to redefine what web hosting is and to prove that shared hosting, when done right, can be a great option for the CMS users. Nothing could stop us to accomplish this mission even the raging nature itself.

Scared by a thunderstorm – not us!

Getting to Chicago was quite challenging itself. Tenko and Niki were supposed to arrive about 6 hours earlier than me (we were on different flights) and you can imagine my surprise when I got to the hotel and they weren’t there. So what happened? There was a thunderstorm: their plane got hit by a lightning, the O’Hare airport was closed and on top of it all – they were getting out of fuel! Luckily, the plane was fully operational after the lightning hit and they successfully landed in Milwaukee. So after an 8 hour delay and wandering around the airports, team SiteGround gathered together in one piece in Evanston (where the event was held) and got ready for the conference!

Who is the real super hero?

The visuals of our marketing materials for the conference were built around the symbol of the SiteGround superman, who is redefining how web hosting should be done. Our super CEO Tenko Nikolov also had a presentation about the tips and tricks on squeezing maximum performance from the different hosting platforms and proved with real life test results that when done right shared hosting can be great. His presentation slides are available on SlideShare.

However, once more we acknowledged the simple fact that the real super heroes, who can spread our message most effectively than anything else, are our own customers! Many of the people we met at the expo, who have built their business around the CMSs represented on the event, were already using our service and were extremely positive about their experience. Among them was also our very special customer: Megan Valentine – the person, who won SiteGround Word-of-mouth hero award in the beginning of the year and whom we granted a free pass to the conference. Here’s what Megan shared with me about our meeting:

“The highlight of Day 1 at CMS Expo was meeting Tina, Tenko and Niki from SiteGround. They’ve been a great webhost for us for years and it’s nice to know the people behind the company are equally awesome. We all went out to dinner and chatted about anything and everything…it was hard to believe we’d only met earlier that day. It was also good to know that they’re aware of exactly how awesome SiteGround is compared to other webhosts and have no intentions of changing that (other than to make it even better!) I hope I get a chance to hang out with them again someday, maybe at CMS Expo next year.”

And I want to say back to her: the highlight of the whole conference for us was meeting you and people like you, who motivate us to always give our best!

Now go check out the pictures from the event and stay cool! Meanwhile, we’ll be preparing for the next show. Which one is it? I’ll let you know soon!

Best,

Tina Kesova
The SG events ninja

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The location

The two-day conference was held in Woudschoten Hotel & Conferentiecentrum in Zeist. Zeist is a small town near Utrecht, but incredibly beautiful and peaceful. The hotel is actually located out of the town in the very tranquil and picturesque forest and you could occasionally see a rabbit running near your feet or a peacock stretching its impressive tail and walking around the hotel area covered with fresh green grass – we totally felt like Alice in Wonderland! The other good thing about the location was that all attendees, speakers and sponsors spent the weekend together which was very good for networking and socializing too! Hat tip to the organizers for picking up this location and for doing a brilliant job in organizing the event!

The people we met

We have always been aware that a great number of people out there use Joomla! However, what totally struck me is how many people actually change the whole course of their lives after getting acquainted with this application. A boat skipper, an insurance company employee with no previous web experience whatsoever, and a financial analyst were just some of the people we met that now earn their whole income or a part of it building Joomla websites for other people. It is truly amazing how a piece of software created by volunteers and shared freely can change so many lives.

It also felt good that most of the people we met have already heard about SiteGround. We got the chance to meet personally several customers. Quite a few people said they use a SiteGround Joomla template too, and one of the visitors even showed us her great recipe website that uses one of our free templates. Talking to people, who actually use our Joomla related services, was great. We tried to use each conversation to gain some understanding about their needs and we gained useful insights how we could improve our products and services even more.

And finally, apart from the numerous Joomla! fans we also had the chance to hear some of the thoughts about the future development of the project personally from some of the key players in the Joomla! community including the president of Open Source Matters (Paul Orwig) – the nonprofit organization standing behind the Joomla! project. This was a worthy experience too.

Tenko’s presentation

Our CEO delivered a presentation trying to answer the question “Is hosting Joomla! on shared hosting a really good idea?” and luckily, it generated quite a productive discussion. It seems that people were rather surprised with the test results of different hosting platforms Tenko revealed and as one of the attendees puts it “It really was an eye-opener to me, never thought shared hosting could ever be better than dedicated hosting at all.” If you’re curious to see the presentation itself, it’s available online here.

Fun

And a conference is never as good if it isn’t fun! And Joomla!Days Netherlands was definitely fun. One of the best parts was when we found a dart board in the bar and started playing a game that has been created by our software developers called Zombie Darts (we play it in the office quite a lot) and many people joined us in the game! They all enjoyed it so much that we’re now building a new website for the game and are getting ready to make it even more popular. It seems that Zombie Darts is going to be a thing! But you’ll have to wait for a while to learn all about the game till the website is ready for its big launch. To get some ideas what it is about you can read what one of the new Zombie fans writes about the game in his blog post about Joomla!days Netherlands. In short: “Zombi Darts involves hurting people, resurrection, turf wars, alliances, etc. It’s like darts, on steroids”.

So after all the talks, presentations, games, Dutch pancakes and beer, it was time to get back home. We’re glad we helped making this event happen and are looking forward to the next great event where we hope to meet even more great people and make friends! Which is the next event? I’ll let you know soon!

And now go check out some pictures from the event on our Facebook page!

Tina Kesova
The SG events ninja

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So save these dates: the 21st and 22nd of April in Zeist, Netherlands.

First, our CEO Tenko Nikolov will deliver a presentation trying to answer the question: “Is hosting Joomla on a shared hosting a really good idea?”. He will share our experience about the usual pitfalls of a standard shared hosting and what SiteGround has done to avoid them. He will also show some very interesting results from performance tests we have made on different hosting platforms and will discuss how different hardware and software configurations can affect Joomla speed.

Second, as a diamond sponsor of the event we will also have a booth on site where we will present our Joomla hosting services and our new servers in the Netherlands. We have also prepared some nice Joomla and SiteGround swag for the booth so everyone who stops by will get a small gift from us! I promise pictures from the event ☺

Third, SiteGround will participate in several great giveaway surprises throughout the event. Actually, we have already started this by providing free tickets to two of our Netherlands customers to join us for the event. So we are looking forward to meeting Tim Huism and Maarten Alexander Bekke in person in Zeist!

So Netherlands, stay cool, we are coming!

Tina Kesova
The SG events ninja

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We aim to address better the needs of the thousands of international customers we host.

Although till now we have operated only servers based in the USA, our hosting services have always been used by many people outside the States. Part of these people choose our service because they operate websites that target mainly US customers, so having such a site hosted on a US server made perfect sense, as it would be faster and easily available for its visitors.

Another group of non-US customers however, chooses us because the US located shared hosting industry as a whole provides some advantages (like more generous resources and lower prices) over many local providers. As this particular group of users is constantly growing, we decided to pay a closer attention to their needs. We have seen that sometimes they have to put up with lower loading website speeds due to the remote server location. So we asked ourselves: “Can we have the same quality, resources and price geographically closer to our customers, so that they can enjoy the same loading speed, we are so proud of, as our US customers?” We made some serious investigation and we found out that this is actually possible. So we now start to expand our geographical presence.

We now have servers in Europe too!

The majority of our non-us customers are located in Europe. So our first goal was to provide them with a hosting service physically located on their side of the Atlantic. Soon we found out the best spot to guarantee top loading speed and reasonable prices for all the Europeans and it was in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. We chose this city as a starting point for our expansion for several reasons. First, it is located close to the geographical center of the continent, so it provides good proximity for all the European countries. Second, what is even more important, is that Amsterdam is one of the biggest internet hubs in Europe providing exceptional connectivity from each country in Europe and the rest of the world too. So here we are!

Our new European server launch schedule

1. Starting from today, all our customers from the Netherlands will be able to choose if their new shared hosting account will be hosted in our US data center or in our new Europe data center in Amsterdam.
2. Next week, starting from 17^th April not only the Dutch users will be able to choose hosting account in Europe. On this date the offer will become available for all, and anyone interested will be able to choose European server on the SiteGround order page or to relocate an existing account from a US server to our new server in Amsterdam.
3. We have also become a sponsor of Joomla!Days in the Netherlands that will be held on 20-22nd of April and our CEO will meet in person all the Dutch Joomla fans, to announce that they can now enjoy our Joomla hosting expertise on a local ground (more information about the conference to be announced in the blog next week).

And this is just the start, more locations are planned to be added to our offer, so stay tuned!

Lilyana Yakimova
Marketing Manager

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We started in 2004 with very little experience, but multiple times as much enthusiasm. We were a group of tech geek friends committed to learn and improve – and so we did. We very soon managed to make a name for ourselves as a small web hosting company with great potential. Our investment in skills and people in the form of multiple technical and management trainings paid off pretty soon. In short time we had everything we believed a good web hosting company should offer – fast and reliable hosting infrastructure, a variety of feature-rich hosting plans to fit the needs of any type of website, and first-class customer service ranging from our sales representatives to server administrators and technical support experts.

But simply becoming a good hosting company was not enough for us. We had two big aims ahead: first, to create a service that is technologically superior to the industry standards, and second, to go beyond providing just web space and actually take care of the whole web experience – from starting off as a newbie, through growing your business and your website simultaneously, to establishing a steady and efficient online presence – all that with ease, no hassle and no extra budget for our clients.

We are proud to set industry trends with our technology!

Heading toward our first aim, being technologically advanced, we have achieved a lot and we have re-defined what security and speed means in the hosting industry. We have a simple rule: we did not put ourselves up with issues that are taken as “normal” in the hosting industry. We always look for ways to solve such issues, even when anyone else consider them as mere “facts of life”. This rule made us not only always use the latest technologies, but also helped us create innovative server management solutions. One of our inventions allowed us to provide unseen security by isolating the accounts on our shared servers in a way that no one has done before. We are also proud to have created the fastest server monitoring tool in the industry and thus to have something that guarantees better uptime than any other host. Our in-house invented technologies evolved to become a project of their own – 1h.com, and are now used by many other providers being on their way to re-define the whole industry. Our desire to be on top of the technology has always moved us ahead. Recent results are the two great services we launched: the new cloud VPS service and the accelerated semi-dedicated service. And we are already working on our next technological innovations!

We are proud to provide more than just hosting!

Our second goal, to create a holistic web experience, made our service unique in other amazing ways. One of the most important things we learned by being genuinely interested in how our customers built their websites, was the power of the open source software. Based on this knowledge we created hundreds of free resources like templates, extensions and tutorials for multiple software. SiteGround name is often seen when you search something related with Joomla, WordPress, etc. The aim of the resources was to help our customers use more easily the tools they have already chosen for their website creation. We have recently taken an even more pro-active role in the industry – we started and will continue to sponsor major open-source events and send our clients to visit them for free. Now our customers can learn not only from our tutorials but by networking with other application users.

Another achievement we are proud of is the level of expertise of our customer service. We not only know what our customers are using as software, we understand how the applications work and we are ready to help our customers with application related issues that other hosting companies, even ones that advertise themselves as application experts, would identify as beyond their scope of technical service. Our years of investment in advanced application training of our staff pays off – our customers can count on us as we provide fast, efficient and real human help on all stages of their website development!

What has made us going strong during the last eight years is our constant desire to improve and always strive for more. However, our main motivating factor is you, our customers. So now at our birthday we want to say a big thank you! Thank you for always demanding the best, for supporting us, for criticizing us and for making us better at what we do.

Best,

Tenko
CEO SiteGround

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During the years our system operations team, the brilliant geeks who write all the beautiful system software for SiteGround, has written thousands of lines of code to help us optimize the security and speed of the hosted websites. We’ve revolutionized  how shared hosting industry works with the 1H Software, which by the way provides one of the fastest methods of running PHP nowadays. Since then, all our shared and semi-dedicated servers run and operate with 1H Software and many clients have praised us about the speed with which their websites are delivered.

Yet, we know we could do even more. So, our admin team started the year 2012 with one goal in mind – creating the fastest shared web hosting platform out there. And I think we’re almost there. Here’s in brief what’s cooking for you in our admin kitchen. I’ll be updating this as it goes on throughout the year, but the results I am about to share are already impressive…

Starting today, we will be migrating all SiteGround Semi Dedicated Servers to a new FAR MORE POWERFUL hardware. Apart from the much more powerful new 16 cores CPU upgrade (which by the way is 4 times more, since old CPUs have only 4 cores), RAM memory on new servers is increased from 4 to 16 gigabytes, which is 4 times more too. We have also put RAID 10 (the fastest RAID option) on our semi dedicated servers and chose very fast hard drives to be put into the RAID.

At this point of choosing the hardware, we ran some stress tests on the server to see how it performs. Results were impressive. This is how we tested: we installed a default WordPress script and tried to access it as many times as possible within 60 seconds with 20 concurrent connections. On a normal semi-dedicated server this test resulted in something like 2000 requests being serviced for 60 seconds. On our new server hardware setup with heavily tuned software setup and kernel,  the result was dramatically better – nearly 4000 requests came through for the same time, which means we almost doubled the loading speed of a simple WordPress site.

Although the results were more than pleasing, I wanted more. I’m known for not being easily pleased and I knew more performance could be extracted out of the hardware.  After a bit of wondering what to do, we found the right answer – we’d put the MySQL databases onto an SSD drive. I’m guessing most of you know what SSD is, but for those who don’t – it’s a remarkable piece of technology for producing flash based hard drives. So basically an SSD is a Hard Drive, but without the moving parts and tens of times faster.

So we put an SSD drive to the server, put all the files of the WordPress install onto the RAID10 array, and put the MySQL database onto the SSD drive. Then we repeated our test. And the result was.. WOW. We almost hit 7000 requests in 60 seconds. This is nearly 4 times faster than our previous semi-dedicated setup.  And to be honest with you, our previous setup was lightning fast too. We’ve taken the time to evaluate how other hosting companies perform on a test like that one and the result was rarely above 1000 requests being serviced in 60 seconds. Some did reach 1400, but most went around 500 or so.

So we’ve tested that hardware config for a bit over a month, to see if it’s worth it when it comes to reliability and we are starting to roll it out publicly. And when we’re finished with that, we will start adding some great features to it, like MEMCACHE, eAccelerator, CDN and even more. But I won’t spoil the surprise for you

Here you can try out our new Semi Dedicated hosting offer!

Best,

Tenko
CEO SiteGround

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After all the hassle around the organization, we finally took off heavily equipped and ready for adventures. We were warmly welcomed by a beautiful ski resort with serene sky and picturesque landscapes. And there the fun started – not all of us were that good on skiing and snowboarding and in tune with SiteGround’s team spirit, some of us were devoted to teach others. My students were highly motivated and persistent but that did not prevent them from getting involved in some of the most comic accidents that I have ever seen. Here I should surely mention Petar from our Sales Team, who in spite of all the obstacles, managed in two days first to dart off into a ravine and then to interrupt a ski-race by landing onto the racing slope just inches away from one of the athletes. Every beginning is hard but the memories are priceless.

Not everyone from the SiteGround Ski Team was a beginner. Another group of skiers was participating in their own extemporaneous race. The gold went to one of our system administrators who managed to gather the insane speed of 77.1 mph.

This vacation, however, was not only about sports – it was about bonding and helping our team perform better. At the end of the day, we had great fun, we love our work even more, and we work together more efficiently to provide our customers with the best possible service!

Can’t wait to see what the next day in SiteGround will bring…

Ralitza
SiteGround Sales Team

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Sadly enough though, WordCamp Slovakia did not sound as much tempting to our customers from Slovakia and so far no one has claimed a free ticket for this event. You still have time, WordCamp Slovakia is this Saturday – March 17, and we still have the free tickets. If anyone is interested in attending – just leave a comment below. It is definitely going to be a worthy experience and you’ll be a proud visitor of the first ever WordCamp event in Slovakia.

And now – here are the lucky ones who are going to attend the other two events for free and will receive a special SiteGround t-shirt:

WordCamp San Diego – March 24-25, 2012
Eric Ramos
Danny Aguilar

Joomla!Day New England – March 31, 2012, Brattleboro, Vermont
Susan Thomas
Henry Rotzal
Helena Anderson
Andy Grant
Lori Grant
John Saltarelli
Dan Mooney
William Case

We hope they all have great time there! And finally – a personal message to the lucky winners: stay alert in San Diego and Brattleboro as we have sent a few more special gifts and giveaways at both events!

Just as we promised, we continue our initiative for sponsoring and giving away free tickets for Open Source community organized events. This initiative started last December when we had few free WordCamp tickets to give away and thought “why not give them to our customers, now that we can’t personally attend”. Initially, this wasn’t meant to become an ongoing project, but we did receive some great feedback from the people who attended the past events and no longer doubted if we should continue this. We learned that these events are a great opportunity for everyone, no matter how advanced user he/she is, to learn, network and gather new ideas and knowledge for the development of their own websites. And if there’s one thing we strongly believe in, it is that we should help our customers along every step of the way: from a quick sign up process, through an easy and straightforward web site build up, to future growth and development of their online presence. And what better opportunity to get new knowledge, inspiration and ideas than attending such events? On top of it – for free!

In the end of the day, we have at least two reasons to be happy and proud of: on one hand we’re helping the communities to grow by sponsoring the events, and on the other – we’re helping you – our customers to make a difference with your website!

Without any further ado, here are the events we’re proudly sponsoring and giving away free tickets for this March:

WordCamp Slovakia – March 17, 2012 – Zilina
http://2012.slovakia.wordcamp.org

WordCamp San Diego – March 24-25, 2012
http://2012.sandiego.wordcamp.org/

Joomla!Day New England – March 31, 2012, Brattleboro, Vermont
http://www.joomladaynewengland.org

As an addition to the free attendance, our free ticket winners will also receive custom SiteGround T-shirts designed especially for these events by our team. As we won’t be able to be present at those events, we hope that our lucky ticket winners will send us pictures and recaps of the events so that we can share with all of you! We are sure that you – our customers – will be a great SiteGround face to both the WordPress and Joomla! events!

Applying for a free ticket is a piece of cake – just leave a comment below specifying the event you’d like to attend, and we’ll get in touch with you for the details. If there are more people interested than the number of tickets we have, we will draw a lot, so that everyone has equal chance. The ticket winners will be announced in this blog post, so keep an eye on it!

Best,

Tina
SiteGround Events Ninja

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Millions of people every day browse the web through their mobile phones – on their way to work, while waiting in line, while they need a quick reference for something. Having a mobile site is no longer an optional extra – if you overlook the performance of your website on a mobile device, you are missing out on valuable traffic.

That’s why we teamed up with mobile website building platform goMobi to let you create a mobile version of your site fast, easy and effectively.

Why do you need a mobile website

• 60% of consumers worldwide access Internet through their mobile phones. Gartner predicts that by 2013 more people will go online using their mobile, instead of their computer. If you do not give mobile users faster access to key information, you will lose them as leads;
• 61% of mobile users will not go back to a site, if it is not optimized for mobile browsers. Even if you are used to visiting a particular website, having a lousy mobile experience can make you give that up in favor of a better user experience.
• According to Google 61% of the users call a business after searching from their phone. Therefore, having the right mobile website features to engage mobile users in a single click is vital.

Why choose goMobi mobile website builder

• goMobi is really easy to use

  The goMobi setup assistant also automatically generates a mobile website based on an existing website to help users get started quickly. From there on, you can customize and add content to your mobile website as much as you want. Their Setup Assistant is really intuitive and easy to use – you need no technical knowledge to use it.

• goMobi offers all the features you need in an efficient mobile site

  With goMobi you can take advantage of a variety of built-in features to let you engage mobile visitors easily – Click to Call, Click to book, Maps, Social Networking and more. When activated, all these features show on your new mobile site as simple single-click icons – making it really easy for mobile visitors to take advantage of them.

• A goMobi website works on a variety of devices

  Websites created with goMobi work perfectly on both smart phones and desktop computers. Therefore, if you try to open up your mobile domain on a desktop site – it will still look and work great. Same goes for other connected devices such as the iPad, Samsung and other tablets.

And since we also found it hard to believe in the beginning and had to try it out for ourselves – we negotiated a free trial period for SiteGround clients. You can try out goMobi completely free of charge for 30 days and see if it works for you before you pay for it. In other words, you can start right away and it will not cost you anything to have a full-featured and working mobile website in no time!

If you need to learn more about the new feature, just log in here.

Dima Peteva
Product Development – Marketing Department

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Since I started dealing with hosting (and probably many years before that), outgoing SPAM has been one of the most troublesome aspects for a hosting company. It might sound strange to you, but the spammers are causing hosting companies (and you, our customers) a lot of troubles, headaches and even migraines. How? I will explain in details below.

There are so many shared hosting servers out there, configured to be able to send email. Each of them hosts thousand of websites, which according to a rough personal estimation, in more than 50% of the cases run a heavily outdated apps like WordPress 2 or Joomla 1.0, with outdated plugins and themes. This situation creates infinite possibilities for the hackers to intrude into a vulnerable account and use the servers’ email sending capacity to produce a vast amount of emails concerning Viagra, Cialis and cheap Rolex watches on a daily basis.

When such a scenario occurs the hosting company would usually know about the emails being sent out within 10 minutes or less, simply because trying to send thousands of emails causes serious CPU load to the server. The server admin sees that the load level goes high and logs in to see what causes this, he sees the spam and cuts it. But it is too late as 10 minutes is a lot of time for spamming. On a normal Dual Processor Server with stable network connectivity, 10 minutes would be enough for sending at least several thousands or several tens of thousands of emails. At that point the big troubles begin – your server IP gets blacklisted at various RBL lists. And now none of your users is able to send email messages any more unless the IP is white-listed again. The users of course are not really happy with that misfortunate outcome and start calling you, posting you trouble tickets, angry twitter comments, etc. while you anxiously try to get the IP address white-listed again. Which of course is not an easy task to do, since RBL lists are not maintained for profit and they don’t have the best support out there. In fact, we’ve seen cases when whitelisting an IP address from a specific RBL took more than 30 days and you would definitely not be happy not being able to send an email for 30 days…

Throughout the years we’ve been on the fight with this problem continuously:

1. We have built an automated monitoring system that allow our 24/7 admin-gurus to react to a high CPU usage and stop SPAM in 45-60 seconds, which is amazingly fast, but … unfortunately still not fast enough, as our servers are capable of sending a lot of emails for that time and it’s usually enough to get us and our users blacklisted.

2. Seeing that the speed of solving the problem does not help in many cases, we turn our efforts to preventing the problem from appearing at all. We have invented an in-house solution based on SpamD and spam scores, and invested a lot of time to try to train it properly to stop mail messages, that are likely to be SPAM to go out of our servers. However, having access to data about our servers sending behavior only was not enough to train the tool fast enough.

So, at that point of our fight we met SpamExperts at a conference. They had a booth next to ours and this turned out to be an important meeting. Apart from the fact they are a great bunch of people, they had what we did not – a system that filtered more than 50 million mail inboxes and is already so well developed to recognize outgoing SPAM, that we would hardly catch up with our in-house efforts based on a considerable lower number of mails. We were also intrigued by the architecture of their service and the way it works. So, we tested the solution for several months and it showed great results stopping the outgoing SPAM and preventing our IPs from being blacklisted in more than 95% of the test situations.

So having finally found something we believe has the potential to solve our problem with the outgoing SPAM, we were even more excited to see that the same service will address the incoming SPAM too in the same efficient way. Currently, we have our own in-house build SPAM protection already working quite effectively. Additionally, we also provide an extra protection with Mailfoundry Spam Appliance to the interested customers. However, Mailfoundry has one serious flaw that prevented us from providing it to everyone – it was not easily scalable. On the other side, one of the greatest advantages of the SPAM experts solution is that it operates in a cloud environment and it is extremely easy to add and remove accounts to it. In addition to being much more scalable, the SPAM experts solution also has a very cool cPanel integration, which will allow all our clients to manage their spam filtering, quarantine zone and see various stats on their email traffic.

All these facts lead us to an easy decision: we will start using the SPAM Experts solution. We have already started to deploy it on SiteGround Shared, SharedPlus and Semi-Dedicated plans, applying its protection to both incoming and outgoing mail messages. The solution will be used in addition to our current in-house designed tools and will gradually replace the MailFoundry service. And last but not least – it’s going to be completely free of charge for you, the customer.

Best,

Tenko
CEO SiteGround

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SiteGround: You are a web designer in AdCo advertising agency, whose website we proudly host. Tell us more about the agency and your work there?

Megan Valentine: AdCo Advertising Agency is a full-service agency located in downstate Illinois. AdCo can develop work for a variety of internal departments, from media, to studio, to web, to flats. We are one of the fastest-moving agencies in the area and we like to operate ahead of the latest business trends. My job at AdCo is to build websites based on custom designs and maintain/optimize them after the site launches. We build almost exclusively in Joomla.

SiteGround: Apart from the AdCo websites you also manage acmoc.org — a website of a very interesting organization of the people who own antique caterpillar machinery. What is your involvement with this website?

Megan Valentine: ACMOC is one of our clients with whom we have a special relationship. Apart from designing, building and maintaining their website, AdCo is also the editor of the bi-monthly ACMOC magazine that has members worldwide. AdCo has also developed special areas of the website and online store that are available only to paid ACMOC members.

SiteGround: In your experience as a web designer, which is the favorite project you have participated in and why do you love it?

Megan Valentine: One of my personal favorite projects is the website for Maloof Realty (maloofrealty.com). It is a Joomla website but also involved a lot of custom code to allow it to connect to the local MLS listings. I learned new things about Joomla in the process and enjoyed the challenge of working with the MLS database to tie everything together.

SiteGround: And which is the most challenging project you have worked on and what made it difficult?

Megan Valentine: The ACMOC website mentioned above is the most challenging project I’ve had thus far. It involved connecting an existing CMS, an existing message forum, and a new online store. This is one of the few projects where we contracted a third party developer (in this case, a specialist in the online store software) to help with the customizations. ACMOC has a very specialized system that we needed to replicate.

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

Megan Valentine: When I started working at AdCo, we had a few websites hosted with three different companies, one of which was SiteGround. I learned very quickly that two of the companies had terrible support services. After a few bad experiences with hacking and downtime, we decided we really needed a dedicated server of our own. SiteGround had made such an excellent impression with their lightning fast tech support that we decided to purchase a managed server from you.

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

Megan Valentine: I was initially very nervous about moving from three web hosting options to placing all of our sites on a dedicated server with a single company, but any problems I ran into were addressed very quickly and completely. Since then we have added two other dedicated servers with SiteGround and have been assigned a senior support person that we can contact directly if needed. I don’t know any other hosting companies that would do that!

SiteGround: What makes you share your experience with our company in social media like Twitter?

Megan Valentine: Even though we host our sites exclusively with SiteGround, I do still have to deal with other hosting companies or registrars occasionally. In each case, I am reminded how frustrating it can be to get even a simple issue resolved. I find myself thinking things like, “If this was SiteGround, it would have been fixed in 10 minutes or less instead of taking 5 phone calls over 3 days!” However, most people I talk to have never heard of SiteGround, so I try to spread the word whenever I can.

Megan was the last of the four customers we announced to be featured, when this blog post series started in the beginning of the year, but we will be presenting more outstanding customers soon again!

Best,

Lilyana Yakimova
Marketing Manager

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It’s time to announce our lucky winners who are going to attend for free the conferences we’re sponsoring this month. We received great response and I’m really happy to know that there are many active Joomla and WordPress users among our customers willing to learn all-new Joomla & WordPress developments and acquire knowledge and insights on how to get the most of their websites. Without any further ado, here are our winners:

WordCamp Miami – 17-18 Feb 2012
Andrew Perez
Cindy Goodman

WordCamp Phoenix – 24-26 Feb 2012
Michael Davis
Tom Stokes

Joomla!Day Guatemala – 29 Feb – 3 Mar 2012
Luis Aguilar
Mario Torres
Elder Gutierrez
David Fuentes

We hope they all have a great time at the events. We have their promise to get some recaps and pictures of all events so stay tuned!

The initiative we started last December with sponsoring some WordCamps will continue and we plan to sponsor and attend multiple events related with the most popular applications among our customers throughout the whole 2012. The first couple of conferences we are supporting are right behind the corner and we are eager to give away a few free tickets to anyone, who is interested in attending them as part of our sponsorship.

Here are three events we are sponsoring in February:

WordCamp Miami – 17-18 Feb 2012
http://2012.miami.wordcamp.org/

WordCamp Phoenix – 24-26 Feb 2012
http://2012.phoenix.wordcamp.org/

Joomla!Day Guatemala – 29 Feb – 3 Mar 2012
http://www.joomlagt.org/joomladay2012/

If you use Joomla or WordPress and live nearby the corresponding event it is definitely worth visiting. The chances are you will learn some valuable new things that will help you make a better website.

So, how do you apply for your free tickets? Simply leave a comment below no later than February 13 pointing out which event you’d like to attend and we’ll get in touch with you! If there are more people interested than the number of tickets we have, we will make a draw, so that everyone has equal chance. We’ll announce the winners in this blog post, so stay tuned!

Best,

Tina
SiteGround Events Ninja

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SiteGround: Tell us something more about yourself?

Teifion Jordan: When I started the World of Arl website I was studying a Computer Engineering degree, I became an inbound (people called me) salesman for a UK car insurance company and now I handle complaints for that company. I had a brief stint as a web developer but it didn’t last what with the recession and all, I also discovered I don’t like running a business.

SiteGround: The website you host with us since 2006 is about a strategy game World of Arl created and ran by you. It seems that after maintaining it for several years it has come to an end. Tell us more about this game: how did you start it, what was it about in short, what did it mean for you to run it? What will be your next passion?

Teifion Jordan: World of Arl (WoA) would be best described as a play by post game, take D&D and put a strategy spin on it and you’ve got WoA. I started with just 10 players and at one stage I believe it rose to nearly 60 before falling again. I have always enjoyed designing and running games which led to this. I was going to make a replacement game focused on greed and profiteering but I soon worked out it would simply be “spreadsheets in space” and so am mulling over other ideas of what to make if anything. I’ve recently taken up dancing (Salsa, Reggaeton and even Zumba) so my time has suddenly become rather limited.

SiteGround: We see you have already started a website related with your new passion: Zumba Jules and we wish you luck with it! Now tell us a little but more about your experience with SiteGround?

Teifion Jordan: I selected Siteground at the advice of a friend, initially I signed up for only a year on the basis that if the service was poor I would move to a new provider. The service was excellent and I stayed, I also got several friends to use them when starting websites. My initial impressions of Siteground were excellent, I had never needed to contact hosting providers before and found them to be very helpful. I’ve stuck with Siteground for half a decade because it works, they’re clear about the limits on the account and reasonable with the price. They were responsive to any questions asked and in those 5 years I believe I’ve had approximately half an hour of downtime in total.

So let’s leave Teifion has lots of fun dancing and we will be heading off to meeting our next special customer and presenting her to you next Friday!

Best,

Lilyana Yakimova
Marketing Manager

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What we like about Google AdWords

The best thing about the program is its targeting options – when you advertise with Google AdWords, your ad appears next to the displayed results for people searching for your keywords. Therefore, you are advertising to an audience that is already looking for what you offer. That’s why it’s a great way for small businesses to drive quality traffic to their website and grow their business. It is also especially suitable for small websites, since it is very flexible in more than one way – ease of use, budget-saving and good targeting. Here are some of the key advantages that Google AdWords gives you:

• Advertise locally or globally. Choose a specific city, state, country, the entire world, or various targeting combinations  – it is very flexible in terms of location preferences.
• Choose how much to pay and pay only for results. You only pay when interested users click on your ads and go to your website. Set the highest bid you’re willing to pay per click, as well as your daily budget.
• Control your advertising. You’re in control of your costs – there’s no minimum spending requirement, and you can change your daily budget at anytime. Change your ads and start or stop your campaigns anytime.
• Your first $100 worth of ads is on us. Just use the SiteGround coupon code for your free advertising credit and see how it works for you. It’s a win-win offer.

What we don’t like about Google AdWords

Basically, we just want to let more people try it out. Currently, the Google AdWords vouchers are available only for clients from USA or Canada. We have had many clients from Europe and other countries worldwide asking whether they can take advantage of the free advertising coupon, but unfortunately, for the time being, the offer is limited to US and Canadian users.  We would love to get a chance to introduce the program to a larger audience – we are looking forward to  adding more countries to the Google AdWords free advertising offer.

How to sign up:

If you are a SiteGround client residing in the USA or Canada, you just need to login to your Customer Area through this link.

You will need to redeem your unique $100 Google AdWords voucher and will get instructions on how to start using it. It’s pretty straightforward and you’re ready to go.

Dima Peteva
Product Development – Marketing Department

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SiteGround: Tell us more about yourself and your website hosted by SiteGround:

Saleh Bucay: My name is Saleh Ampaso Bucay, a computer engineer by profession. Currently holding the position of a Senior Engineer – Administration & Support, Tawuniya, Riyadh. Saudi Arabia.

SiteGround: From your online projects hosted by us it seems you are quite active in many Maranao and other Islamic charity and professional organizations in The Philippines and Saudi Arabia. Can you tell us more about who the Maranaos are?

Saleh Bucay: Maranaos are the majority of the Filipino Muslims in the Philippines. We are mainly situated at the Islamic City of Marawi, a nearby city of Iligan. The area was recently hit with typhoon called “Sendong” which killed at least 180 and nearly 500 missing. See the news at http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/113133/storm-devastates-south.

SiteGround: Tell us more about your first projects with SiteGround?

Saleh Bucay: The first website I hosted with SiteGround was al-nisa.net and maranao.com back June & July 2004. al-nisa.net is the site of Women of Islam Organization which has the mission to “Empower Muslim women through education and skills”. My involvement with this organization is IT director and adviser. While maranao.com is a site for the Federation of Maranao Associations in Saudi (FEMAS) of which I have been serving as Secretary General (chairman) since 2001 to date. The goal of the organizations I am involved in is to promote peace and tranquility. I started the two websites using the MS Frontpage, then migrated to PHP platform using Joomla

SiteGround:  What were the biggest challenges in front of your projects?

Saleh Bucay: The biggest challenges in front of al-nisa.net and marano.com were how to maintain their existence on the web as it requires a lot efforts and financial sustainability. But with siteground.com as our host, we feel comfortable due to its free resources in addition to the affordable hosting price.

SiteGround: You are one of the first people to start using SiteGround reseller account, but is seems to me that you are not using it to host websites for other people, but you rather have multiple websites of your own? Is this the case?

Saleh Bucay:  I am not using my reseller account for business purposes, but I rather have multiple websites of my own and my close friends.

SiteGround: Tell us a little more about why you use SiteGround hosting?

Saleh Bucay:  I found SiteGround through the search engine. I was looking for a credible hosting firm that suits our needs with affordable price. My initial impression after I started using SiteGround hosting was excellent. It did change during the years for better. The main reason that made me stick with your hosting services for such a long time is because of your unbeatable hosting packages and support services.

Big thanks to Saleh for taking the time to answer our questions and for being such a loyal customer throughout all those years! Looking forward to working with you for many years ahead and hat tip for your dedication and hard work with your projects!

Stay tuned for the next interview coming up next week!

Best,

Lilyana Yakimova
Marketing Manager

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If you have an existing Joomla site we strongly recommend that you upgrade to the latest version. It has some improvements and new security fixes. More importantly, however, Joomla 1.7 has reached the “end of life” period and within a month from today, it will no longer be supported by the Joomla community.

For those of you who want to start a new site – Joomla 2.5 is a great beginning. You can  perform a manual installation by following the instructions in our How to Install Joomla 2.5 Tutorial.

One of the most important changes in the latest Joomla versions is that you can upgrade without having to re-create your template or to wait until new version of all your extensions is released. The improved compatibility makes the upgrade fast and painless process.If you remember the transition from Joomla 1.5 to 1.6 and how templates needed to be fixed after the upgrade, you will know why this is considered a great benefit.

Some of the interesting new features worth mentioning in the Joomla 2.5 are as follows:

- Joomla update notification button: You can now see if there is a new Joomla version available right after you login to your administrative area. There are two buttons that show you whether your application and the installed extensions are up to date.

- Additional databases support: You can now run Joomla on a few additional database engines including Microsoft SQL Server / Windows Azure and PostgreSQL server.

- Core captcha support: Now you can easily implement human verification in your website. Joomla 2.5 has core captcha support and you no-longer need to browse for 3rd party extensions unless you want to add an additional layer of security to your pages.

- User notes: If you have a website with multiple authors and users you will definitely appreciate this function. You can now add notes to all of your users and include all sort of information in them – text, images, video, etc.

- Who’s online filters: Joomla administrators can now show only the online users from a specific group if they want to. This can come really handy if you want to display the available administrators online for example.

For a full list of new features visit the official Joomla 2.5 release note and check the “What’s new” section.

Last but not least, don’t forget to take a look at our our Joomla 2.5 compatible resources:

Joomla 2.5 Templates (compatible with Joomla 1.7 and Joomla 1.6 too)

Joomla 2.5 Extensions (compatible with Joomla 1.7 and Joomla 1.6 too)

Joomla 2.5 Tutorial

Best,

Hristo
Product Development – Technical

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SiteGround: Tell us a little more about your company webnology.be?

Michel Smekens: Webnology is a web design bureau in Belgium. We started designing websites in 2004, and are still alive and kicking. We are now 2 full-time partners, and 3 more freelancers, depending on projects. We develop all of our websites with ExpressionEngine, a marvelous CMS from the guys at EllisLab.

Most of our clients are based in Belgium, but we also have customers in the US and New-Zealand. We don’t see real differences in expectations between these 2 groups, but the communication is off course harder. I actually prefer a live talk with a customer.

SiteGround: What is the main challenge in the web design work?

Michel Smekens: One of the biggest challenges in Webdesign is getting on the same wave length with your customer. They all need logo’s, text, forms, pictures, etc… but getting in their heads, and in the heads of their customers is more important, and is more difficult. Staying up to date with technology, and the browser differences is another challenge, I feel. But I have a good feeling, that if you listen carefully to your customers, have the needed patience, all websites can become as they want it to be.

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

Michel Smekens: Our favorite project is the project we are working on at any given time. Once you get a new project, you can start to get creative, and make it better than the last one. You learned more than yesterday, you are smarter than yesterday, so every project is getting better every day.

SiteGround: Tell us a little more about your experience with SiteGround hosting and why you have chosen to work with us for so many projects?

Michel Smekens: Hosting is very important for all our websites. It is the the oil that makes the engine runs smoothly. I choose SiteGround hosting, mainly because EE websites run beautifully on the hosting, and the support, when needed, is of lightning speed, and accurate. I think I must have an average of about 4 minutes for any hosting related issue.

Thank you Michel for taking the time to answer our questions and for using our services! The series will continue next week with presenting our next outstanding customer!

Lilyana Yakimova
Marketing Manager

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However, the fight isn’t over yet. These bills are NOT dead, they are just not coming up for a vote right now, which is why we still encourage all our supporters and believers in the open Internet to keep opposing the bills and fight for our rights of free speech and privacy. Stay tuned for updates!

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and its sister bill Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) have become a very hot topic for all Internet businesses and users. We have already firmly stated SiteGround position against SOPA back in November and have been actively using our social media channels to raise awareness about the issue. In short: we are against those bills, because we believe they have the potential to take away the most important things we love Internet for – the freedom of speech and the possibilities to express oneself creatively. For more detailed explanation why many people support such a position we recommend the video below:

Latest SOPA developments are encouraging with the White House firmly against and the main architect of the bill backing down. However, there is an important voting in the Senate scheduled on 24th of January and we believe that more people should become aware that Internet, as they know it, is facing a serious change, more people should care and more people should express a strong position built on principles. Recently we have seen the topic being turned into a money making technique by several other hosting companies. We believe that this is dangerous as it makes their position against look driven by profit seeking rather than principles and thus makes it less valuable. We won’t ask you to buy hosting with a “NOSOPA” coupon code. Instead we encourage you to take a minute to think about the bills, and if you find them as inappropriate as we do, to join us in opposing them in our campaign STOP CENSORSHIP.

Enough is enough. So now you already question what should I do to join? It is very simple:

1. Put our “Stop Censorship” stamp on your website showing your opinion and keep it there as long as possible. To embed our campaign stamp, use the code below:

<a style="width:125px;height:130px;display:block;" href="http://blog.siteground.com/stop-censorship/" ><img src="http://www.siteground.com/img/stop_censorship/stop-censorship.png" alt="Stop Censorship"/></a>

2. If you are running a Joomla website, we have also developed a plugin that will let you easily place our STOP CENSORSHIP stamp on your site. Download and install the plugin from here.

3. Be active in social media in regards of PIPA voting and spread the word of your support. Here’s a post we propose in regards with the comming voting that you can post over your social media channels:

Dear Senators, web users are against PIPA. Represent us on Jan 24! I join my host SiteGround #stopcensorship campaign http://is.gd/RtODO8

Or simply click on the buttons below for direct posting over your channels:

Share on Twitter

There are several other voices and campaigns against SOPA that we support and recommend checking them out too:

• A massive web strike is organized for 18th of January against SOPA by Fight for the Future and if you choose to join our campaign we encourage you to have your opinion posted on the same day
• Make censored posts and have people that want to read them call the Senate
• Add anti-sopa ribbon to your WordPress site
• Tweet to increase cPanel donation for the Electronic Frontier Foundation

As always, thank you for your continued support! I am confident that together we can stop the bills and save the Internet as we know it!

Best,

Tenko
CEO SiteGround

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Customers who have built many websites and host them all with us

There were many people in this category and the person we will be happy to start with, is Michel Smekens, the SEO of a web design bureau in Belgium: webnology.be, who has chosen to host their customers with us. He will tell us more about his work and his reasons to be with SiteGround in his featured interview.

People hosted by SiteGround since the beginning of the time

We have awarded with t-shirts several people that have started their websites in the first months after we launched our own website and are still actively using their accounts. The one interviewed from this group is Saleh Bucay from Saudi Arabia. He has more than 10 websites hosted with us, and his first website al-nisa.net was uploaded on our servers only 2 months after launching SiteGround.com. And this is a really interesting site of an Organization of Muslim Women with mission to “Empowering Muslim women through education and skills.”

Word-of-mouth heroes, who share their love in the social medias

We have interviewed two interesting people here, who we have noticed to recommend SiteGround several times on Twitter:

Teifion Jordan from the UK who has created and maintained for nearly 7 years an interesting play by post game, called World of Arl, and is now interested in a completely different and surprising area. Keep an eye on our blog to find out which it is.

Megan Valentine – a web designer in  AdCo – a full-service agency located in downstate Illinois, USA, that is using a dedicated server from SiteGround.

As you can see there are so many truly amazing people with different backgrounds, interests and from different parts of the world, connected by the fact they use our hosting service. SiteGround is a small universe and I am happy to start this blog series to present some of the most interesting people that populate it. So, stay tuned for details about these 4 initial stories.

The campaign is ongoing and we would definitely continue to feature anyone, who stood out some way – either by contributing with his/her knowledge to the SiteGround community or by spreading the word about what s/he likes about us, or by helping us improve the service with valuable feedback.

Lilyana Yakimova
Marketing Manager

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The holiday season reminds us of many things. Among them are family, friends and sometimes pure, good old fun. At SiteGround we know that all work and no fun can make a rep a dull boy/girl, and that’s why among other things we decided to reincarnate a tradition from our high school years called Secret Santa. This “game” is really simple and everyone wins. We wrote the names of each person from the sales team on a separate, small piece of paper. Rolled them all up, put them all in Santa’s hat and mixed them up. Then each of us took one out. When you read the name on the paper, you become that person’s Secret Santa, and by the 26th each of us had placed a carefully wrapped gift under the office Christmas tree. The budget for each gift was set around $20 (yes, some of us went a “little” over the limit, but can you really blame someone for giving too much ) and each of us had a week to pick out the presents.

We started this tradition 2 years ago. Since its initial success each following year has seen better preparation, a larger staff and this year – a brand new office. There is something else to note thought. This year the presents we gave each other seemed like something you would gift to a family member, or a close friend, it was obvious that each one was carefully picked and given a lot of thought to. All of us know how it feels like when the present you get is something meaningful to you, something that resembles you as a person and tells you that someone has been paying attention to what you say. You just rarely expect it from a coworker, let alone 24 of them. With the time the presents became more personal and the event more meaningful. We have been working together for years now, and we know each other, much like each of us knows our loyal customers and their needs, the people that we work with every day, around the clock. People from all over the world, each of them different in a special way.

To be honest, we wanted to take a lot of pictures for you. Pictures of the gifts, people’s reactions and emotions, the awkward moments and all that jazz, but… we kind of got lost in the moment and emotion and never came around to actually snap a shot. We promise to do it next year though. But we will share with you at least the one pre-event picture taken, so that you can see how happy we were just to get together one last time for this year.

We would also love to hear about your Christmas traditions, or about the gifts you got this year and which ones you like the most.

You are welcome to share it with us by leaving comments below. Let’s make this holiday season more fun for all of us, let’s share, that’s what the internet is for after all .

We wish you all happy and safe Holidays and a Healthy New Year!

Levi & Dimitar
Sales Supervisors

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