Among the most interesting speakers on the conference were Cornel Creanga from Adobe Romania, two of the Bulgarian developers, working on the Samba4 project, Philip Paeps – a prominent FreeBSD contributor from Belgium and many more. SiteGround Head System Administrator– Marian Marinov, also participated in the conference with a special presentation on Artificial Intelligence(AI) in the System Administration, which provoked great interest and was visited by more than 150 professionals.

As a web hosting provider we depend greatly on open source software in our daily work. And what is even more important: our customers greatly depend on open source applications for creating and maintaining their websites. We believe that without the open source ideas and applications the web would have never been so widely used by the people and the web hosting industry would have never been so big and successful. That is why we are happy to support OpenFest and other events dedicated to the open source software development as a humble contribution back from the industry to the great idea.

Lilyana Yakimova
Marketing Manager

The SiteGround extras just keep piling up! Thanks to our latest collaboration with MySpace SiteGround customers from USA and Canada get $25 worth of MySpace advertising. The best part is that we are giving out the credit for FREE with our hosting package!

Target your audience with MySpace MyAds

MyAds- the MySpace advertising program gives you the opportunity to promote your website to more than 7 million MySpace users. It offers excellent targeting opportunities, allowing you to pinpoint your audience based on their interests, hobbies, age , gender, etc. This ensures your ad will be shown exactly to the people it was meant for, making for a great investment return. Now that I mentioned investment, the advertising rates of MySpace Ads are extremely flexible, giving you a chance to experiment with your advertising budget.

A head start with a FREE credit from SiteGround

It’s these kinds of unbeatable deals that we in SiteGround are constantly on the lookout for. So, claim your FREE MySpace Ad credit now to get an edge with your website promotion. Simply set up your MyAds account, create your ad campaign and watch your performance stats go up. Take your FREE credits here:

Take $25 for MySpace ads FREE by SiteGround.

Dima
Product Development – Marketing

What is SSH?

Secure Shell (SSH), known as Secure Socket Shell, is a network protocol allowing secure remote access over an encrypted connection. It is widely used by network administrators and web developers looking to enable direct secure access to their host server.
Through an SSH connection you can easily manage your files and folders, modify their permissions, edit files directly on the server, etc. Both ends of the client/server connection are authenticated using a digital certificate and passwords are encrypted, providing a means for secure large data files transfer .

In-house developed SSH technology

So far so good, you probably already knew that – but why launching the service just now? As you know, at SiteGround we take great pride in our in-house technology innovations. We believe that technology should be designed to serve our clients’ specific needs, not the other way round.

The SSH technology we offer has been developed exclusively to meet the demands of SiteGround clients. Here are some of its main advantages:

1. Our SSH is installed in a chroot environment that is much more secure than what other SSH hosts offer. To put it simply – every customer with SSH gets access to their own secure, but restricted environment. The client is the only one allowed into it, but at the same time it blocks any access to the rest of the accounts hosted on the server. This is how we ensure providing greater flexibility for operations to those who need it, without affecting the rest of our clients in any way. In short – it’s a win-win combination.

2. The only authentication method we accept is through authentication keys for greater security. That way we ensure that even if someone has your login details, they will not be able to break into your account via SSH connection without the authentication keys.

3. We have designed the SSH service to allow greater flexibility to those who use it. The new SSH service allows you to set SSH connection permissions to your account depending on the IP address. Meaning, you have the opportunity to limit the SSH access to connections requested , for example, from your own IP address only.

4. For faster and easier management we integrated the custom SiteGround SSH solution in our cPanel. Therefore, all SiteGround clients can conveniently manage all features of their hosting accounts from one and the same place.

For more information on our SSH extra service, go ahead and visit our SSH hosting page. All registered SiteGround clients can order the SSH extra service as an upgrade from their Customer Area.

On a final note, let me just give you a hint that the SSH upgrade is just the beginning of a campaign of delivering new and better extra services to the large and growing SiteGround community. So stick around for our season treats this winter.

Dima
Product Development – Marketing

1. No hassle with older applications when a new PHP version is released

In terms of backward compatibility, the implementation of 4 PHP versions on one server was a small technical miracle. It saved a lot of hassle to regular users in cases when the applications they used needed serious code modifications or complex upgrades to work with the next stable PHP version. With our setup they did not have to do anything to keep their sites running, as they just continued to use the older PHP version, while the other users on the same server could still use the newer PHP.

2. Different PHP in each subfolder

Another great option for our customers was the fact that they could have different PHP versions in one and the same account under different subfolders. This way you could run your main website on PHP 5.2.5 and at the same time have an older application running on PHP 4.4.7 in a subfolder.

3.Test code on different PHP versions

The availability of different PHP versions on one account was also loved by web developers because they could test their code on several PHP versions without having to purchase several hosting accounts on different servers just for testing purposes.

New PHP versions available now

Given that most hosting companies offer only one PHP version per server, having 4 PHP versions on one and the same account already gave us a serious edge over the competition. However, we like to spoil our customers even more! Now we decided to up the ante a little and offer 7 (that’s right, seven) different PHP versions that each and every account on our shared servers can use. Along with the new PHP versions we’ve added, we have also upgraded and improved the previous ones:

• PHP 4.4.9
• PHP 5.0.5
• PHP 5.1.6
• PHP 5.2.9
• PHP 5.2.9 + Suhosin patch
• PHP 5.3.0
• PHP 6.0.0

As you can probably see, we’ve upgraded PHP 4.4.7 to 4.4.9 and PHP 5.2.5 to 5.2.9. The new PHP versions are 5.3.0 and 6.0.0. All PHP versions now come with IMAP SSL support (useful if you want to connect your application to GMail for example).

Since security has always been one of our top priorities, we decided to add a special PHP version that has been patched with the Suhosin advanced protection system. Basically, Suhosin protects your applications from many known vulnerabilities (bufferoverflows, remote URL inclusion, format string vulnerabilities and many more). See a list of Suhosin’s features.

Another thing worth mentioning is the support for PHP 6. Although it is still in development, there’s no doubt that soon this PHP version will be widely used. PHP developers will certainly appreciate the option to test their work on the latest PHP branch. Of course, you don’t need to be a PHP developer to use PHP 6. As we all know, some people just like using the latest software available. In any case, we’ve done our best to make sure you are not caught unprepared

As I mentioned above, all 7 PHP versions are already available on all SiteGround shared hosting servers. If you are a SiteGround customer, you can check them right away:
Learn how to switch different PHP versions on your account

And if you are not a SiteGround customer, you can check our website and sign up for an account at any time:
Sign up for a hosting account with 7 PHP versions

Hristo
Product Development – Technical

Start your Joomla website in minutes!

Our Joomla customers enjoy an improved single-click Joomla installation system. With it they can install a Joomla with a several templates and a sample text created by SiteGround in less than a minute. With our system even people without technical knowledge can create and maintain successful Joomla websites without having to spend thousands for developers and designers.

Choose your website design!

Our devoted team of designers has created the Largest Joomla Templates Gallery on the Internet. We have designed a broad range of templates that will serve even the most demanding users. And the best part is that all templates are free to use even if you are not a SiteGround customer.

Learn how to use Joomla!

The SiteGround support team has created comprehensive Joomla Tutorial that covers the most common Joomla-related topics – from installation and configuration to more advanced topics like the How to create a Joomla template tutorial. We have prepared video tutorials to make it easier for you to learn and become a Joomla pro! In addition, if you don’t find what you are looking for, you can search for it in our Knowledge Base that has hundreds of Joomla-related articles!

Get Joomla knowledge from our experts!

As we have thousands of customers that use Joomla our supporters and server administrators are among the best Joomla experts in the hosting industry. Our servers are especially set up so that Joomla and all its popular addons function in the best possible way. We are also sharing our Joomla knowledge both with clients and anyone else interested on the special Joomla section of our forum. You don’t even have to be a SiteGround customer to receive some friendly advice from our team!

We believe that everyone should be able to create a website without having to spend many hours reading technical documentation. Joomla is a great tool and we do everything to make it easy for our customers to start using it and to help others learn how to use it!

Tina
Marketing Specialist

As Halloween is getting near we went through the pictures from the last year SiteGround wild costume party and we remembered the great fun we had! Someone from the support team joked how great it would be if this year we can invite one of the funniest customers Mr. Jones, whose tickets have always been written with a great sense of humor, and see what costume he will choose. At first we laughed but after a while it stroke me that there is a place, where we can really invite all our friends and see how original they get. This place is our Facebook page, where we organized a Halloween Photo contest.

Halloween photo contest is now open!

You can now show us how original you get and how much fun you can have. Upload your scary, funny and unique Halloween photos on our Facebook page. You can start today by showing us your favorite moments from past Halloween celebrations. Later you can also add your 2009 Halloween adventures.

Go to contest page and upload Halloween photos

Win great prizes and free hosting

Share your Halloween spirit with us and we will give you a great treat. The best pictures will get one of the big prizes and all participants, whose pictures capture the audience, will receive free hosting from SiteGround. Just upload your best Halloween moments and you will compete for one of the following great prizes:

• Sony CyberShot digital camera
• Digital 7 inch photo frame
• Free hosting for all popular pictures

Bring your friends

The contest is open for anyone that has a Facebook account. You can invite your friends to participate in the contest themselves or vote for your pictures. Just remind them to click on the “become a fan” link on the SiteGround page.

Lilyana Yakimova
Marketing Manager

Recently tried visiting  SiteGround web hosting by https? Then you can’t have missed the latest addition to our homepage – the soothingly green address bar in the browser. The reassuring color pops up thanks to the highest assurance SSL technology we have recently added to our website – the EV (Extended Validation) SSL certificate.

How does the EV SSL work?

As each other SSL certificate the EV SSL guards by encryption the information on its way between the browser and its final destination – the server. What is more – the EV SSL is the only certificate ensuring that the final destination itself is secure too.  We trust the green bar not only because of its reassuring color, but also because it contains company information verified by a trusted Certificate Authority (CA). In seconds, it indicates that a domain is owned and a website is operated by a legitimate organization. It gets even more reassuring – this has been checked personally by an authorized professional as opposed to the automatic checks done when a standard SSL is issued.

How EV SSL brings happiness to everyone?

1.    Our customers are happier
Now our customers feel safer when submitting sensitive information on our website. After all, an authorized professional has checked us thoroughly before letting us turn on the green light on our website.
2.    Our sales people are happier
The more comfortable people feel about submitting their information on our website, the better the results of our sales people.
3.    Our website designers are happier
No more wondering where to place the annoying SSL site seal banner, which never matches the website design and always looks awkward.
4.    Our marketing people are happier
We now have a new tested technology to offer to our customers! EV SSL certificates are now available on our SSL page. Which helps us add to our number one goal:  Keeping customers happy!

Having added one more options to our SSL offers portfolio has made it easier for you to find the best solution to your needs. In addition, you now know how to give green light to your website visitors and turn them into customers. So, make sure to check out our SSL offers and choose the one that suits you best.

HostingCon09 venue

As we already told you, SiteGround headed to HostingCon’09 in the middle of August.  We had so many new things on our mind afterwards, so many talks to get back to and such good time, that we needed a good few weeks time to arrange it all. So, now that our impressions are all piled up, we’d love to share some of the highlights with you.

Some of you asked us to follow up on the tendencies in the web hosting industry. We hear you Although we are a bit late delivering the news, the topics are still as hot as they were in August. The buzz words on this year’s event were hosting business acquisitions, products and services up-selling, affiliate programs, and of course – cloud computing and virtualization.

So let’s start with the acquisitions. Acquisitions in the hosting industry happen in a very specific way.  The buyer who is typically running a web hosting business acquires another web hosting company and merges its operations (support, server platform, billing primarily). Then they usually keep the brand name and website of the acquired company and run the two businesses together, often in competition with each other. Having the two brands competing means that the owner maximizes the probability of winning the customer – if the customer does not choose the first brand, there is a chance he’ll choose the second one.

The question is what this means for the customers. Most often they don’t even understand that something has changed about their host. That is normally a good thing as there is little disruption of the service. The funny part is,  however, what happens when you think you are running away from a lousy host and going to a better one, but you actually end up with the same support and same server platform. The good news is that hosts do not hide their acquisitions and sales, they often make official announcements in press releases and you have a good chance of knowing about all that if you do your due diligence.

From a business point of view, it’s fair to say that consolidation is good for the web hosting industry. The market is so fragmented that hosts are more focused on beating competition with marketing tricks than providing better service to the customer. Few can actually do something meaningful with their product. To be honest, I would rather see the industry with fewer players who are serious about developing their business and thus stay reliable to their customers.

Product Up-selling

The next hot topic lately is “up-selling” – i.e. selling additional products to your hosting customers such as web design,  ecommerce solutions,  SEO,  etc. First, it’s a great way for web hosts to increase their revenue without spending more money on marketing. The more things you sell to the same group of people, the more you collect with the same effort.

Second, most of the shared hosting customers are not proficient in the art of creating and managing a web site. They need more than a simple hosting platform -they need a complete solution, in which the hosting environment is just the basis of the pyramid. So, it comes naturally and in response to that demand to offer a wider range of complementary products to ease things up for the customer.

I can’t miss mentioning that we are also looking for expanding our product range. As always, we will keep you updated on anything new we launch. We will also be happy if you tell us what products you might find valuable. So, if you have any ideas or suggestions, please share them in the comments to this post.

Affiliate marketing

The next hot topic among hosts is affiliate marketing. Right now, that’s the most popular way for web hosts to get their customers and also where they spend the greater part of their marketing budgets. Affiliate marketing works in a very simple way – hosts find specialized hosting-related directories (called “affiliates”) and pay them huge commissions for every sale the directories send to them (commissions are normally higher than the price of the one-year shared hosting product). The reason why this is so effective is mostly the credibility factor – people visit directories to find “objective” evaluation and opinions on what are the best offers out there. When they see you in the directory list of featured hosts, or top ten hosts, they believe you are trustworthy, go check you out and ..eventually buy.

The reason I mention affiliate marketing is because some of you might like the idea and make money out of it. It is more or less applicable in every industry. I should also mention that it has ups and downs, so it’s important how well developed the affiliate marketing is in your game field. Right now, it is huge in the hosting industry. But, it is about to become too costly and web hosts are already starting to look for other ways to market their products.

Cloud computing and virtualization

Just like on WebhostingDay in Germany earlier this year, cloud computing and virtualization took up a good portion of the talks at HostingCon. It seems that more and more hosts (those, mostly focused on providing dedicated solutions, I have noticed) are launching clouds. I am not good with the technicalities, but I do appreciate the business advantages – clouds allow for better and cheaper storage solutions that result in cost savings and are thus important for every hosting provider.

Last but not least, we were very much impressed with the organization of such a huge event as HostingCon’09. We met both competitors and potential partners and we appreciate the quality of information exchanged. The venue location at Gaylord National Convention center was impressive, to say the least. There were many industry top executives present and the lecture sessions were carefully picked and proved useful and informative. We are also now testing some of the solutions offered at HostingCon such as a new webmail product and hopefully, we will deliver some new quality stuff soon.

Once again, you are welcome to share your thoughts about new products or services that you would like to see from SiteGround in the comments below. We might surprise you pleasantly sooner than expected

As seen at Hetemeel

As the end of the Summer approaches, some have taken longer vacations while others are working even harder. This is especially true for the developers of web applications.  In this post we’ll take a sneak peak at what’s cooking behind the scenes of some of the most popular applications.

Joomla!

This summer Joomla! mostly patched security and bugs issues in the current 1.5 version. Support for the old 1.0 Joomla! has finally been officially discontinued.

Work on its next long-awaited version 1.6 seems to be quite busy. We hear the new features are extensive and promising. Google’s Summer of code has also contributed greatly to it, so our expectations are growing even greater.

The only bad news so far is that the next Joomla official stable release is not scheduled yet. But we’ll keep our eyes open!

Drupal

Lately, the folks at Drupal have been releasing security patches mainly and there seems to be little activity for the last 2 months as a whole.

Plans for new releases and features are not proclaimed, so probably most of the work is done behind the scenes. We sure do hope so!

WordPress

WordPress has definitely proven to be the fastest growing and feature-rich open source web application. This summer they released a few mainly security – bug fixes.

Obviously,  they have focused mainly on the next 2.9 release and there has been an interesting feature request vote on their webpage. Plans for its official release are also unclear. Hopefully it will be available before Joomla 1.6.

Menalto Gallery

Earlier this year Gallery developers decided to rewrite its code from scratch. Therefore, work on the old 2.* branch was abandoned in favor of the new version 3. Currently there is a second beta version and things look quite promising. Keeping our fingers crossed!

In other news, here is Menalto’s latest usability survey.

vBulletin

vBulletin have been quite active lately too. They’re on the way of releasing a new branch entering version 4. Holding up to the promises for lots of new features and enhancements, the alpha version has been released already and is under heavy testing.

PhpBB

About a month ago PhpBB posted an interesting article about its significant development changes. That’s how we knew about their plans to work on 2 branches simultaneously – 3 and 4. Version 4 will appear as a complete rewrite, so we hope this will not slow down its release too much.

Magento

Things at Magento are going fast as usual. Even when it looks as it couldn’t be further improved , a new alpha- version 1.4 comes along. Upon taking a deeper look, it seems to be rather a bug fix release, though.

They are putting a lot of efforts on the Enterprise edition which is favorable to the business. We see new popular stores built with it every single day.

That’s it for our brief recap of all things new with the most popular web applications. We will make sure to do a new post, if there are any more surprises not to be mised. And our Tutorials section will be updated accordingly, as soon as anything new comes up the horizon.  So, stay tuned.

What are the releases you’re most looking forward to? Also, do spill the beans if you’re keeping an eye on any other web app we’ve missed to follow, but deserves our attention.

And yet, despite the precautions and improvements, a lot of websites are still getting hacked. Why? The main reason is that many, not to say most, users seriously underestimate security as a whole – not only the security of their websites, but the security of their hosting accounts and even the security of their own computers.

And this is an ideal opportunity for hackers to “show off their skills”. The hackers keep their “software” up to date – new viruses are developed all the time. And while they keep their applications up to date, many users don’t. Once they install an application and start using it, users forget about upgrades and security fixes.

Keeping the above in mind, the next logical question is “What can I do to secure my website?”… Well, I’m glad you asked

Here are a few things you should always do to keep your website secure:
•    Make sure your local computer is safe. For this purpose use reliable updated antivirus software;
•    Update regularly your computer’s software including its base operating system and any third party software installed.
•    Make sure all of your web applications are up-to-date. This includes any modules, components and addons you have added and / or integrated;
•    Pick up strong passwords for the different services you use (email, FTP, etc). Never use one and the same passwords for your different online services.
•    Avoid having directories with permissions above 755. If your applications require such directories, try to put them outside your webroot (public_html) or place a .htaccess file in them containing “deny from all” to restrict public access to these files.
•    Always, and I mean always, back up your website. You should always have a proper backup so that even if someone hacks your site, you can restore its functionality immediately.

You can also check our basic security guidelines for more information on how to keep your website secure. Here are some other useful sites with lots of security tips: bestsecuritytips.com and stopbadware.org.

What do you do to protect your website and applications? We will be happy to hear your experience!

This is just a quick update to let you all know that SiteGround is heading to HostingCon 2009! The conference is the worlds’ largest gathering of web hosting professionals and each year brings all important players from the hosting industry together.

This year the event takes place in Washington, D.C. from 10th to 12th August. SiteGround is excited to be attending for the third time now, especially since with a projected attendance of over 2,000 Internet professionals from over 30 countries, the 2009 event promises to be the best yet.

We’re looking forward to meeting all of you! So if you happen to be there, drop us a line or simply come and say hello. It will be a pleasure to talk to you in person.

To those of you who will unfortunately miss the event – don’t worry! You can be sure that we will surprise you with a detailed post on all things new in the hosting industry as soon as we get back.

So stay tuned and enjoy the Summer in the meantime!

We’ve introduced the new design of SiteGround.com to bring it more in line with the company’s identity today and, generally make it cleaner and easier to get around. We’ve been meaning to do this for a long time now, but finally found the time to do it right.

There are structural as well as aesthetic differences to the website. Structurally, we have tried to make things simpler and clearer, with better labelling and easier navigation. We’ve also added some new sections to the website as well as re-arranged and expanded some of the old ones. Here are some of the major changes in short:

The SiteGround Homepage: So, whereas in the past, you would find general information about our company and services scattered on several different pages all over the website, it now all goes into one place: the slides on our index page. This is an uninterrupted, 5-slide run of the most important things to know about SiteGround web hosting services.

About Us section: We’ve also expanded the About Us section of our website. The idea here is for our pages to reflect the company culture at SiteGround. We are an ever-developing organism. Behind the SiteGround brand stand people with their ideas, knowledge, skills and hopes. What we aim to provide are details of the few that, in our opinion, you will really find interesting. It’s also an attempt to give readers some short, sneak peaks of what’s cooking in the SiteGround kitchen and shed some light on what makes us who we are.

Resources section: We’ve gone out of our way to compile valuable and comprehensive information and make it easily accessible to both our clients and our website visitors. So far we have created and compiled thousands of free website templates to download, hundreds of tutorials to read, videos to watch, Knowledge Base questions to look up. The idea of our new Resources section is to act as a portal. It’s an attempt to give readers some short, easily-digestible snacks of information of where to find what.

The new Siteground.com is already live. And we’d love to hear what you think about it! That is why we decided to ask you to vote on how you like the new website design. To show your support or simply to congratulate us on our new look, please vote in the voting poll below. All other comments are welcome as well, so do drop us a line in the comments section.

I guess that most of you probably already use, have tried or at least have heard of Google Apps. Yes, Google’s online office suite – a set of web applications through which you can organize your emails, documents, presentations, calendar events, etc.

The main advantage of Google Apps is obvious – your documents are always available online. Thus you don’t need to install any additional software on your computer- all you need is an Internet connection and a standard web browser.

We know that many people would love to use Google Apps, but they find it difficult to configure their own domains for services such as Google Docs for example. After all, some users do not understand how DNS works, what CNAME and MX records are and how to create and manage them.

And in fact, it is not necessary to know much about DNS, CNAME and MX records – we decided to save you the hassle and make the process easy and straightforward with the new tool we created – Google Apps Manager. It is free and as the name suggests, it will give you the opportunity to quickly and easily set up your own domain hosted with us for Google Apps.

To say that using our Google Apps Manager is easy would be an understatement. All you have to do to set up your domain(s) is to choose the domain and the Google Apps service you want to use with it, and then click Continue. You don’t want to use a certain Google Apps service anymore? Just delete it from the Google Apps Manager. The tool is available for all shared hosting accounts (will be included for resellers soon as well ) in the SiteGround Customer Area > My Account > Manage > Manage Google Apps. It is also linked in the Get Support Section. Check this tutorial for Google Apps detailed guidelines and how-tos.

If you have any recommendations and feedback, we’ll be glad to hear it! Enjoy!

Tina

Special thanks to Flickr user Mtyndall for making his image available under a Creative Commons license.

In a hurry? Read the short story then:

Got more than a minute? Then read the long story: The first quarter of 2009 showed nearly 183 million registered domain names across all of the top level domain names, which shows a three percent increase over the fourth quarter of 2008 and a 12 percent increase over the same quarter from last year. (VeriSign report). This served to alarm us that domain registration is attractive to a growing number of people and we had nothing else to do but respond to this demand. Yet, we wanted to offer new extensions that are not only attractive but also opening new online business opportunities for our customers. So, we have chosen .TEL, .me, and .mobi.

Why .TEL?

Two simple reasons: 1. .TEL domains provide a great opportunity to publish all your contact information online and thus get found within just a couple of clicks. 2. .TEL domains do not require hosting; your contact information is stored directly in the DNS and is universally accessible.  Thus you get a website for just the cost of registering the domain. See how it looks like. Oh, and by the way, you should check the promo video of .TEL domains.

Why .mobi?

One reason is enough:  with a .mobi domain name you can optimize your main website for mobile browsing. This will help you enlarge your target customers’ base by reaching millions of people browsing via their mobile phones. Needless to say that the trend is towards increased mobile browsing. Last but not least – an optimized for mobile browsing website will add value for your existing customers so you will be one step ahead of your competitors. Plenty of free resources about optimizing your website for mobile browsing here.

Why .me?

Straightforward:  .me is great for promoting both your personal and business online presence. You can use .me for your personal blogs, portfolio, online resume, or personal pages (yourname.me). .Me domains can also help as a catchy business marketing tools. For example, with a .me domain name you can target the younger visitors of your website by launching a .ME web site with your product name in it or for call to action programs. (votefor.me)

If you do not have any other reason to register a preferred .tel, .me, or .mobi domain name, then you can do it simply to protect your brand from competitors who might wish to take advantage of the brand awareness created by your .com/net/info website. Should I mention that for established brand names this is a requirement rather than a necessity?

Finally, let me mention that .TEL, .me, and .mobi will not be the only new domain extensions we will add to our domain portfolio. We plan to offer some new additions, but we will need your help with picking up the winners – so what are the domain extensions you would like to see available at SiteGround? Feel free to post your comments below.

Cheers!

Tina

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

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

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

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

Tenko

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But, we need your help! We are stuck on choosing the best narrating voice. Check the following 2 videos and tell us which voice-over you prefer by voting in the poll right after them:

Video 1

Video 2

You can now use Crystal in Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, English, French, German, Hindi, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, or Spanish. Just login at Crystal (yourdomain.com/cpanel), go to Preferences and look for the Change Language icon. Choose your language, hit “Change” and you are done. Simple enough, right?

We have also added backup functionality in our cPanel. It’s not the default backup script that cpanel offers as that script tends to overload the server. The backup script you get in Crystal is a custom one created by our team. Check out this video for details:

Last, but not least we’ve also improved the “Notices” section in our cPanel. In the “Notices” section, you will see alerts when any of your email accounts goes beyond the email quota and will provide directions on how to optimize that particular mailbox. Don’t worry! We will not disable your email accounts. On the contrary, once you’ve completed the notice instructions, your email will be working flawlessly and without any interruption.

The good news: we keep ourselves busy and will soon add more alerts and improvements. We just want to make sure that customers will not miss any important information related to their hosting accounts.

Have suggestions and opinions about Crystal? Do let us know!

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

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

Tina: How long have you personally been in the web hosting business?

Dan: I have been in the business for just shy of 7 interesting years. I think during that time, the industry has changed so much that it’s basically unrecognizable when compared to what it was 7 years ago.

Tina: How about your experience with SiteGround? Any interesting stories?

Dan: My most personal memory of SiteGround is when Zak and I visited SG’s office. When we first walked in, we were greeted with what can only be described as a truly warm welcome. It was great putting names to faces and shaking everybody’s hand.

Tina: How has our partnership helped your company succeed?

Dan: We’ve learned a great deal from SiteGround’s desire to consistently innovate and improve their customers’ experience. That said, I believe that there are many benefits from our relationship, and probably too many to list here

Tina: Do you have any recommendations for making our relationships stronger?

Dan: SiteGround is an experienced provider with a talented and devoted team. SingleHop is a technical innovator focused on both satisfaction of end users and technical automation. Together, SingleHop and SiteGround form a unique synergistic partnership, built on a foundation of cooperation and mutual understanding. My recommendation to build a stronger relationship would be integrating our respective technologies further to create a more streamlined service.  At SingleHop we know the value of automation, from a reduction in human error to faster provisioning and better overall service. We are very eager to build on both SiteGround and SingleHop’s automation technologies to offer the end-users more control over their servers and solutions. Be it booting into Server Bailout System for troubleshooting, or receiving up-to-the-minute bandwidth and resource utilization information and so on, through tighter integration we can offer SiteGround’s dedicated customers a truly exceptional, mature product, designed for both advanced and novice users.

Tina: Your view for the web hosting business development in the next couple of years?

Dan: The technology of web hosting evolves so will the business side of web hosting. The industry has been maturing at a rapid pace and has become more of a cooperating community, at the same time there will be more consolidation and smaller players will be purchased by larger players. This will eventually result in there being fewer, larger providers. This will put a great deal of pressure in terms of customer service, quality of service and technical innovation. SiteGround has been wisely focused on providing the highest quality service to their customers, and this is one of the many reasons that SiteGround has been so successful.

As far as technical innovation, the industry as a whole will continue to expand and innovate. At the same time, consumers will demand more and more control over their systems. This goes hand-in-hand with technical innovation because the technology to empower customers is evolving at a very rapid pace.

When the industry first started, there were no control panels. There was no such thing as IP KVM. There was no such thing as a Server Bailout System, which enables a remote administrator to boot their server into a special rescue environment even when not physically present. These technologies will drive the industry. Companies who focus on innovation and customer service will succeed while others who do not innovate, will eventually fade into the background. This is one of the great things about the SingleHop-SiteGround partnership: both organizations are obsessed with customer service and technical innovation.

Thank you, Dan!

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

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

1. Always up2date with Security Patches:

There is a new Linux Kernel release every once in a while. To be completely honest with you, we do not update the core each time there is a new version available. The kernel updates, as they come out pretty often, are usually very small changes with really minor updates and it would mean rebooting all of our servers each time there is a new minor release. But whenever there is an update concerning security, reliability or system stability, we would be among the first to implement, test and deploy that.

Here are some of the features the latest kernel allowed us and you – the user:

• Improved memory management scalability (more info can be found here)
• Better control of the I/O (Hard Disk) operations to ensure that the I/O operations of all users processes are shared equally. (more info here)
• Memory tests on boot and during the lifetime of the system – early memory corruption detection (more info here)
• Kill of previous unkillable processes and free unused resources (more info here)

2. Additional patches to improve security:

GRSecurity is an innovative approach to security utilizing a multi-layered detection, prevention, and containment model. Here at SiteGround, we built each and every kernel with GRSecurity support, as GRSec has proven itself over the years to be among the best security enhancements for the Linux Core.

Often the Linux Kernel with major security updates comes out to the general public pretty quickly after a security breach has been found. However, the GRSec is not really a part of the Kernel but is more like a module for the Linux Core. Therefore, you can imagine that in some cases, the Kernel comes out and it takes weeks or even months to get the GRSec patch for that particular Kernel. But our sys admin team has a solution for that issue too: they port the GRsec to work with the latest Kernel themselves. It saves us time on waiting and it spares the security risks for you.

3. Latest Kernel + Latest GRSec + SiteGround InHouse Chroot = Immortal Combination?

Last year, Marian developed an InHouse Chroot system. Chroot is an operation that changes the current disk root directory for the current running process (and all of its sub-processes) and doesn’t allow accessing files and folders outside that directory.

A simple example of how Chroot works and how you benefit from it would be: if another customer’s website, hosted on the same server gets hacked due to whatever reason, the hacker will not be able to affect anything on the server but that particular customer. The attacker will not be able in any way to access/change/delete any system files/folders or other customers’ files and folders. On a standard host server without such a Chroot system, when one customer gets hacked, all customers on the same server get affected too.

With all of the above said, you can probably imagine how secure a customer can feel whenever his website is hosted on a server that has:

• The Latest Kernel with heavy modifications
• Latest GRSecurity for the Kernel (ported, if there is none) with Chroot enhancements
• A Chroot security system built in especially for our needs.

Unfortunately, I was able to mention only a small portion of what Marian told me he and his team do for the Kernel. If I were to mention them all, nobody would have read that article as it would have been 20 pages long. But the bottom-line here is: If I were the customer, I would rest assured that my website is safe and secure with SiteGround. And what about you?