Web Hosting Box

I have been looking at many of the new products and services being offered in the website hosting marketplace lately. In particular, I’ve been trying to figure out if web hosting prices are going up or down. It’s not as easy to figure out as you might think.

For example – take UK web hosting company 34SP.com. The company used to offer a Personal hosting plan for £17.95 per year. Then they retired that hosting plan and created the new Professional hosting plan for £3.95 per month (which translates into £47.40 per year). So they have raised their prices, right? Well, not so fast. The new package includes many new features and dramatically increased resources. For instance, the new plan includes free spam and virus protection, free SMTP, and free weekly backups. These ”extras” were are charged for under the Personal plan. Also – as you can see in this hosting comparison chart – the new Professional plan has ten times the resources as the older plan. So it ought to cost ten times as much, right? See how difficult it is to compare pricing on hosting plans?

Now consider the case of Rackspace Managed Hosting. A few years ago you couldn’t even dream of getting into a managed dedicated server with Rackspace for less than about $400 per month – and that was on the lower end of the range. Fast forward to today and the company has acquired two new brands: Slicehost and Mosso (now the Rackspace Cloud). Both of these newer brands offer entry level hosting prices of around $20 per month. That’s a dramatic price decrease in terms of minimum price compared to just a few years ago. However, if you look closely at the offerings, you’ll find that Rackspace servers are fully managed and many of the maintenance tasks are included in the price, while the much lower priced offers are in effect unmanaged. That means you have to do more of the heavy lifting yourself. It still look like a price reduction to me though.

Then there is the case of a brand new product from Lime Labs which is a new hosting and domain registration service, LimeDomains. LimeDomains is an ICANN accredited domain registrar and also offers shared hosting products. What makes this relevant for the issue at hand is that the company is offering one of the hosting products for free. Even that isn’t groundbreaking – there are plenty of free hosting companies out there. What is truly different about LimeDomains and the free hosting product is that it looks and feels almost exactly like a paid hosting product.

From the Lime Labs press release, ”All LimeDomains accounts come with access to an extensive catalog of open source web applications ranging from popular blogs such as WordPress, to full-featured content management systems such as Drupal and Joomla. Users can also upload their own files or transfer their existing websites – such as their Geocities pages – to LimeDomains via a built-in file manager, or any popular FTP client. Most popular web design applications, such as Adobe Dreamweaver, are also supported.

Unlike other free hosting services, there are no strings attached to the free hosting offer on LimeDomains. Users do not have to sign-up for any third party services, or submit themselves to a barrage of solicitations (e-mail, or otherwise), or place mandatory ads on their website. Most importantly, the free accounts are not crippled in any way – and receive the same quality of service, performance and reliability that most other hosting services charge a premium for.”

If you’d like to check out the new free hosting account and specifications from LimeDomains please visit: http://www.limedomains.com/hosting.

So now this appears to indicate that the price of shared hosting is going down. I plan to conduct a bit of further research to get to the bottom of the hosting pricing puzzle. Look for more tangible data soon.

SiteGround was a proud sponsor for a second consecutive year of the largest Conference for open source software on the Balkans – the OpenFest. The event was held last weekend in Sofia, Bulgaria. This was the 7th consecutive annual gathering of open source developers and fans from the region and it attracted more than 30 speakers and 700 participants.

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

By SiteGround Web
Hosting

The SiteGround extras just keep piling up! Thanks to our latest collaboration with MySpace SiteGround customers from USA 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

By SiteGround Web
Hosting

SiteGround has always been focused on providing feature-rich hosting solutions. As we continue expanding our extra services to portfolio, we have recently enabled SSH access on our shared hosting servers.

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

By SiteGround Web
Hosting

For quite some time now SiteGround’s unique server setup has allowed our customers to use 4 different PHP versions – 4.4.7, 5.0.5, 5.1.6 and 5.2.5. on one and the same hosting account. Needless to say, our customers loved this feature. And there were three serious reasons for this:

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

By SiteGround Web
Hosting