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    PHP 7.0 is Now Default on SiteGround Servers

    PHP 7.0 is Now Default on SiteGround Servers Last December we were among the first hosting companies to make PHP 7.0 available on our entire infrastructure. Thanks to our system which allows multiple PHPs to be used on one server, anyone could have switched to PHP 7.0 since its zero-day release, while we still kept an older and well-tested PHP version as the global default setting. Now, an year later we believe it’s time for the next step – setting PHP 7.0 as default for all new accounts. Why make PHP 7.0 default? Reason number one is its amazing performance…

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    Linux kernel local root exploit (CVE-2016-8655) fixed

    Linux kernel local root exploit (CVE-2016-8655) fixed Yesterday a Linux kernel local root exploit was found and reported. One more time our dedicated Linux kernel team acted quickly and was able to apply the official vulnerability patch in less than 24 hours. All our shared and cloud servers are now protected and again we managed to do this with no reboots and downtime. Read below to find out more about the security problem and how we patched it. What is the exact security problem? The security hole allows attackers to gain root access to servers by taking advantage of a…

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    Is Your Online Store Ready for Black Friday?

    Is Your Online Store Ready for Black Friday? Black Friday is a date, highly anticipated by marketeers and store owners across the entire world. What started as a purely American tradition is now a global event. On this day stores give their greatest discounts and a lot of people are anticipating it to get the item or service they’ve been looking forward to for months. Usually on Black Friday online stores get a huge traffic peak and multiply their sales. However, you have to make sure that both your website application (e.g. WordPress) and hosting environment are prepared for this…

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    3 Things You Probably Don’t Know About SiteGround Clouds

    3 Things You Probably Don’t Know About SiteGround Clouds We introduced our new cloud platform built on Linux containers almost 2 years ago. Since then and especially during 2016, we have seen a very dynamic development in this service. There has been a sharp increase in the number of new cloud hosting accounts opened with SiteGround, as well as a threefold increase in the upgrade activity within existing cloud servers. So, we recently took time to analyze our users behavior and we have some interesting findings that we would like to share. Our Clouds are Now Used by Really Big…

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    Dirty COW Linux Kernel Vulnerability Fixed

    Dirty COW Linux Kernel Vulnerability Fixed Last week a very serious vulnerability in the Linux kernel, the so called Dirty COW, was reported. Our dedicated Linux kernel team immediately addressed the issues and were able to patch it in less than 24 hours on the majority of our servers. What is more, we managed to do this without server reboot and we avoided the downtime that normally results from such kernel update activities. To learn more about the vulnerability and how we addressed it read below. What is that Dirty COW about? The Dirty COW vulnerability allows attackers to gain root access to…

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    When Your CMS Reaches End of Life

    When Your CMS Reaches End of Life End of Life (EOL) in the CMS world refers to the point in time when an older version stops being supported by the company or community that has built it, and all efforts are focused on current and future versions. No support means performance, and more importantly, security issues, which nobody wants. As a web host, we see our fair share of EOL CMS usage. While we often make our own patches to keep outdated client websites secure and in other cases we notify them about issues, it really is the application’s responsibility.…

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    We welcome 32 Site5 support stars!

    We welcome 32 Site5 support stars! During the last few years SiteGround has been going through an impressive and steady growth. For the first three quarters of 2016 only, we have hired more than 100 new people and the number of our employees went well over 400. Among all these amazing new SiteGrounders there is one group, that is especially interesting. Their welcome packs were sent to 10 different countries, where we have never had employees before. They have tons of relevant experience: one of them has been doing web hosting for more than 14 years! And they all have…

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    The Art of Website Migrations

    The Art of Website Migrations As a web hosting company, we move around tons of websites all the time. The most challenging migrations happen when physical data center locations are changed. On such occasions we transfer upwards of 300TB of data. It usually travels over the wire, but we have also physically moved server machines and literally transported websites by the truckload! Another massive migration event is when we update our infrastructure, and move all our customers to a new platform (for example when we introduced the LXC infrastructure last year). We do this every other year, so that all…

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    SiteGround x CreativeMornings/SOF

    SiteGround x CreativeMornings/SOF “Everyone is creative. Everyone is welcome.” This is part of the manifesto of CreativeMornings–a global monthly breakfast lecture series for the creative community. Their motto in the spirit of our Community Series is just part of the reason why we love and support our local CM chapter. It is also what inspired our joint #CMCreativeTravels campaign that will take one person from our community to a CreativeMornings event of their choice anywhere in the world. But first, a little background. CreativeMornings originated in NYC and is now happening in over 150 cities around the world. Ever since…

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    Safe from httpoxy Vulnerability or How Thinking Ahead Pays Off

    Safe from httpoxy Vulnerability or How Thinking Ahead Pays Off A dangerous easy-to-exploit vulnerability called httpoxy discovered 15 years ago, reappeared again yesterday, leaving server-side website software potentially open to attackers. This security hole impacts a large number of PHP and CGI web-apps. This means that anything that runs on PHP, Apache, Go, HHVM, Python can be vulnerable. The exploit allows man-in-the-middle attacks that could compromise web servers and potentially access sensitive data or seize control of the code. Thanks to our unique in-house developed systems and some precautions taken ahead of time by our DevOps team, SiteGround customers are…

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    How our new backup system saved 24+ hours of downtime

    How our new backup system saved 24+ hours of downtime Remember when we announced our new infrastructure in October last year? Part of the innovation, which we were particularly proud of, was our in-house created backup/restore system. A few days ago this system was put to its first critical real-life test and the results were impressive. We were able to restore 3 times more data, 7 times faster, compared to the previous such event when we were still using the old backup solution. Here is how we did it. How often do we need massive backup restores? The short answer…

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    Jetpack Critical Security Vulnerability

    Jetpack Critical Security Vulnerability Today a critical vulnerability was found in one of the most popular and widely used WordPress plugins – Jetpack. Fortunately, according to the plugin authors there is no evidence that this issue has been used to hack real sites. However, an update of the plugin was released – Jetpack 4.0.3. As usual, our security team was pro-active and updated our WAF (web application firewall), adding rules to prevent the hack from being used. This means that even if your plugin is not updated to the latest version, your site will still be protected. However, we urge all Jetpack users…

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    We Are Recommended by WordPress.org!

    We Are Recommended by WordPress.org! DISCLAIMER This blog post was published on May 17, 2016 and contains information relevant to that time period. Please note that circumstances, facts, and developments may have changed since the publication date. We are very happy and honored that SiteGround has been listed as a recommended WordPress hosting provider on the WordPress.org hosting page. We perceive this as a high evaluation of the quality of our hosting product and work with the WordPress community. How did that happen? Last year Matt Mullenweg, the founding developer of WordPress, reached out to hosting companies letting us know…

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    More Value for Customers with SSL Certificates at SiteGround

    More Value for Customers with SSL Certificates at SiteGround UPDATE: Our SSL offers have evolved since the publication of this post. For up-to-date information, please go to What types of SSL certificates does SiteGround offer. Following the introduction of Let’s Encrypt free SSL certificates on our hosting platform, we are now launching more major upgrades in our SSL offerings. We will no longer provide Standard SSL certificates and all our customers that already bought Standard SSL will be upgraded for free to the premium Wildcard SSL. We are also dropping the price of Wildcard SSLs more than half. The range…

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    Supporting Indie Publishing Through Offscreen Magazine

    Supporting Indie Publishing Through Offscreen Magazine Four years ago we stumbled on the following somewhere on the web: “Offscreen – a print-only magazine about the people behind the internet and technology.” Naturally, our first thought was “Why make a print magazine for people who spend most of their time online?” It certainly piqued our curiosity, and that’s how we came to order our first issue of Offscreen. It was also issue No1 – a brand new magazine. Today, we happily received Issue No14 at the SiteGround office. Four years is a lot in Internet time, but all the while little…

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    ImageMagick Vulnerability Fixed

    ImageMagick Vulnerability Fixed ImageMagick is one of the most widely used services to process images. Most of the web applications use it for many different purposes – to crop images, to resize them, to generate different thumbnail sizes, etc. Unfortunately, a serious vulnerability was discovered within the service, that allows an attacker to execute code remotely on your site. As usual our security team started working on a way to protect our customers immediately and came up with a solution hours after the vulnerability was disclosed. We applied a change in the ImageMagick policies across all our servers that blocks the…

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    Critical glibc Vulnerability Patched on all SiteGround Servers

    Critical glibc Vulnerability Patched on all SiteGround Servers Hours ago a critical vulnerability in  the GNU C Library (glibc) was announced alongside a proof of concept for the attack. This library is one of the main components in the majority of Linux distributions (if not all) including those, used for server OS’es. Without getting into too much technicalities, the exploit allows an attacker to remotely execute code by following a simple link. That’s one of the most severe vulnerabilities discovered in the recent years and potentially affects pretty much any Linux server out there. Given that all SiteGround servers run on CentOS –…

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    2015: The Affiliates’ Assessment

    2015: The Affiliates’ Assessment We said goodbye to a very successful 2015 and the collaboration with our affiliates had a key role in achieving our great results. We have 100% increase in the number of sales generated by our affiliate partners and have paid out commissions worth 4 million dollars! What’s more, the results from our annual affiliate survey results proved that our affiliates are extremely happy with both our service and program features! Read on for the rest of the survey findings. Our Service Quality is Top Reason to Join the Program. Again! In the 2014 edition of our survey…

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    Let’s Encrypt is Here – Open Source Security Certificates Available at SiteGround

    Let’s Encrypt is Here – Open Source Security Certificates Available at SiteGround In December 2015 the new certificate authority Let’s Encrypt entered Public Beta and caused a wave of excitement. The groundbreaking news meant that website owners can obtain security certificates for their websites for free instead of paying for traditional SSL certificates and install them much easier. Naturally since then many of you have asked us when we would introduce the certificates on our hosting platform. For all of you who have been eagerly awaiting this moment, we are happy to say that Let’s Encrypt certificates are now available…

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    The Faces Behind the Pixels

    The Faces Behind the Pixels I’ve been at SiteGround ever since I can remember – more than 11 years now. I have seen it grow from a couple to almost 300 employees. I have collaborated closely with all of our departments on all kinds of projects. However, this latest one was hands-down one of the most fun and gratifying I’ve ever worked on – that’s why I wanted to tell you about it. Around mid last year, when SiteGround was already in the swirl of the most tremendous growth we’ve ever experienced, we realized we not only needed to expand…

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    Looking Back at 2015: Here’s Our Year in Review!

    Looking Back at 2015: Here’s Our Year in Review! 2015 was a wild year for us, but we loved it. We almost doubled the number of new clients, went local in Spain, upgraded our platform, sponsored 100+ events, and a lot more. We have so many things to share, that we created a visual recap to tell you all about it. Check it out and if you like it, share it in social media: www.siteground.com/2015

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    2015: The Clients’ Assessment

    2015: The Clients’ Assessment Table of Contents Above 95% of our clients are happy with our service Increased number of clients perceive us as innovative and technologically advanced More than 60% of our new clients have been referred by existing ones The number of WordPress users is growing super fast 56% of our clients want to increase their skill level in website management New record response rate to the survey – Thank you! The past year 2015 has been a roller-coaster ride for our team. New clients doubled joining faster than we could plan on how to accommodate them. New…

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    WordPress 4.4.1 Security & Maintenance Release

    WordPress 4.4.1 Security & Maintenance Release A new WordPress security update 4.4.1 was announced yesterday. The latest version fixes a cross-site scripting vulnerability that allows a site to be compromised as well as some minor issues. All WordPress sites at SiteGround with enabled autoupdate service have been updated to the new version 4.4.1 last night and are safe and sound. For all WordPress sites that do not have the autoupdate option on, we have applied a rule in our WAF (web application firewall) that will block possible hacking attempts. As our firewall rule is not covering all possible hack scenarios, we…

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    The Force Was With Us This Year

    The Force Was With Us This Year This was one of the most eventful and amazing years in the history of SiteGround and not surprisingly, we had one of the best end-of-year celebrations to commemorate it. It was a year of fast growth with so many new and exciting things happening. We opened our first office abroad (in Spain). We almost doubled our employees. We moved our hosting infrastructure to an entirely new and a lot more powerful setup. And these are just a few of the many. Looking back on the past year and all the achievements and the…

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    SiteGround Adds a Free Website Builder

    SiteGround Adds a Free Website Builder As many of you know, we work with various CMS’s – WordPress, Joomla, Magento being some of the top favorites of our customers. No matter how straightforward we think these CMS’s are though, many customers have difficulties working with them. This is why we spent some time looking for the easiest website builder that we could integrate into our platform and offer to our customers as a solution to their hassles. We are happy to say that we found it in Weebly – a powerful yet simple drag & drop website building tool. Drag…

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    Critical Vulnerability in Joomla Fixed on Zero-day

    Critical Vulnerability in Joomla Fixed on Zero-day Yesterday, a serious vulnerability that affects all major Joomla versions was disclosed. Using this security breach a hacker could do a full remote command execution on the targeted site. We have worked together with the Joomla Security teams and came up with a rule in our WAF (web application firewall) that would block hacking attempts using this vulnerability and we don’t have reports for hacked accounts through this exploit. Shortly after we have patched all our servers, a new version of Joomla has been released. Joomla sites, which have our autoupdate service on,…

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    Day Zero of PHP 7 – Give it a try!

    Day Zero of PHP 7 – Give it a try! Today PHP 7 has reached its General Availability status. As you probably know it has been available on SiteGround servers for quite a while and you can refer to an earlier post of ours about its features. Now it has reached GA status which means PHP7 can be used on production sites. PHP 7 Adoption Status Among CMS Used By Our Clients Many of the most popular content management systems on our servers such as Drupal, WordPress and Joomla! have decided to support PHP 7. Some of them have already officially…

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    Our Second European Datacenter is Now Live in London

    Our Second European Datacenter is Now Live in London Our first data center location in Amsterdam has been serving our European clients quite well over the last few years. However, our strategy to constantly enhance our service urged us to look for more datacenter locations throughout the continent. Each new location we add allows us to deliver better performance and localized service to a certain group of our clients. We are happy to announce that as of this week all our shared and cloud hosting plans are also available from our new datacenter in London. London has come up as…

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    HTTP/2 Now Available on all shared/cloud servers at SiteGround

    HTTP/2 Now Available on all shared/cloud servers at SiteGround The Internet as we all know it today wouldn’t have existed without the HTTP protocol. It is the heart and soul that pumps content to all of us. It makes it possible for us to read the latest news, order stuff online, watch videos on YouTube and get to our favourite websites on all types of devices – workstations with 27-inch displays, laptops, mobile phones, tablets and even e-readers that offer browsing capabilities. Sadly, that protocol has not been changed since 1999 when version 1.1 was released so, when HTTP/2 was…

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    Core Joomla! Vulnerability Patched in Version 3.4.5 Security Release

    Core Joomla! Vulnerability Patched in Version 3.4.5 Security Release A few days ago, a critical vulnerability in the Joomla! core was found. It comes from an unsanitized input in the Joomla! core, which makes an SQL injection possible. The result of such an attack can lead to totally compromised websites – stolen login details, hijacking website access, malicious file uploads, etc. It’s a serious threat, without a doubt, and one that applies to all Joomla! 3.2 versions and above. Server-level protection with custom WAF rules As always, when facing a vulnerability, we tend to take immediate actions in-house. We wrote…

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