Updated: SiteGround Cloud Service Getting Better

UPDATE: Since July 4th SiteGround started applying a Cloud platform upgrade in our Asia-Pacific Data Center. All customers with accounts in Singapore will now enjoy the same benefits as our Cloud users in other data centers at no additional cost. Check out our Cloud plan details and read below about the upgrade.

From the moment SiteGround started to offer virtual private servers in 2005, which later evolved in our current cloud hosting service, we have always been using virtualization platforms created by third party providers. This has sometimes led to issues that were beyond our control and we have been on the track of taking over everything for quite some time now. For the past 6 months we have been actively working on our own cloud platform and we are happy to announce the first stage of its official launch today!

Why building it ourselves?

The main reason to start working on our own virtualization platform is that with all third party solutions we have used, there have been reoccurring issues we were not able to resolve. Some examples are: delays in problems resolution due to the fact that other people are in charge of the software; prolonged provisioning time issues causing new cloud users to wait for hours to get their instance; and more. That is why we have decided that it was high time to extend our handmade philosophy to the cloud platform and gain full control over the software used for this service, as we already did for our shared and dedicated servers.

Upcoming changes (for our US and EU data centers)

• New platform

  First, all new cloud instances will be provisioned from now on a new platform with the following characteristics: KVM virtualization technique, latest Kernel and OS versions and entirely new API system, which will allow us to troubleshoot problems faster.

  Existing cloud accounts in our US and European data centers will also be moved to the new platform over the next few weeks. We will preserve all current IP addresses, so no change of DNS would be needed.

• Up to 100% RAM increase

  Each of our existing cloud instances in USA and Europe would also get its RAM Doubled!!! Except for our most expensive cloud offering, all the rest would get their RAM doubled free of charge. Our cloud 4 (4096 MB RAM) now gets its RAM boosted to 6144MB for free too. If you are a new client signing up for a cloud instance you automatically get the higher RAM at the current price at no additional cost. The upgrades we are implementing are significant and costly, but their effect will be felt immediately by our cloud customers in terms of improved performance of their clouds. Our calculations show that our cloud 1 (boosted from 1GB to 2GB of RAM) would perform 3.5x faster than before, just because of that upgrade.

• Faster upgrade and provisioning

  The new setup will allow us to upgrade our cloud users and power up new instances in just under a minute.

Vision for the future

The changes going live today are just the beginning. We have envisioned some of the craziest things we’ve ever done to come towards our cloud Users way in the near future too. I will not go into too much detail on that to avoid spoiling all the surprises for you, but here are some of the perks:

• Highly resilient, ultra high performing distributed block storage build with the help of the innovative software by StorPool. We’re already in advance testing phase of this storage solution and we’re amazed by its potential.
• New, developed by SiteGround virtual environment, far more efficient than anything else to date
• 2 seconds provisioning time
• Instant rebootless scalability

Stay tuned for more updates 😉