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At SiteGround we are always looking for new ways to offer great opportunities for entrepreneurs to grow their small business online. That’s why we are happy to support VeriSign domain registrar in their latest initiative – a contest for small businesses with .net and .com domain names.

The contest’s grand prize is $25,000 and all you have to do is answer the following question: Where will .com/.net domain take your business?

Apart from the $25,000 Grand Prize, the first 36 candidates to submit an entry to the contest will be awarded a $50 U.S. Visa Award Card. In order to participate, you simply have to upload a photo of your business, accompanied by either a written entry of between 100 and 300 words, or a short video. Submissions should be posted on the official contest websites:

www.dotnetforsmallbiz.net

www.dotcomforsmallbiz.com

This is clearly a great opportunity for small business owners who understand the value of expanding their online presence. The contest is open for participants worldwide- not just in US and Canada, but in countries including Mexico, Germany, United Kingdom, Poland, Turkey, Japan, India, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand. To look up if it is available in your country of residence, simply go to the official websites and browse the countries drop-down.

The contest ends on May 31^st, so you need to hurry to make sure you have enough time to submit your application. Visit the official contest websites www.dotnetforsmallbiz.net and www.dotcomforsmallbiz.com to read more about the contest terms and complete the official entry form.

We wish good luck to all our customers who will participate – it’s definitely worth the try!

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As some of you may already know, last month we announced that we will be giving two awards of 3 FREE years of hosting to two of our clients for Thanksgiving.  What our clients had to do in order to get a chance to win was to simply take advantage of our Thanksgiving discount for new hosting accounts or share our Thanksgiving promo offer with their friends.  We’re very happy to announce that the promotion had great success and we thank all of our clients for participating and sharing the spirit of Thanksgiving with us!

We’re also very happy to announce the two lucky winners.  The first person to win 3 Years FREE Hosting is Adam Diminic. Smartly enough, he signed up for our Thanksgiving promo and got 1 year hosting for the price of 1 month for his website imagetreehouse.net.  His name was drawn among all others who participated in the promotion and we wish him to keep being this lucky in the year ahead!

The second award of 3 Years FREE Hosting was well-earned by our client John Hart. We’re very proud to award this special prize to him, as he did a great job recommending our services to as many friends as he could and loyally respecting all rules of the referral promo. The award has already been added to his website acumengaming.com and we wish him good luck with developing his gaming network!

Congratulations to both our winners – we hope they will be sharing many more holidays with us in the future! As for the rest of our clients – we’re happy to let you know that the Holiday season at SiteGround is just getting started. Big surprises are coming up for our existing clients, so stay tuned to make sure everyone gets their Holiday presents from SiteGround!

Dima Peteva
Product Development – Marketing Department

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What better way to start the year than with fresh website promotion?

We’re happy to announce that SiteGround has partnered with one of the best advertising networks out there – BidVertiser. Now our customers can try out their network for free and get a $20 worth of free clicks! BidVertiser give you the opportunity to advertise across thousands of websites within their network and reach your target audience easily in order to start receiving quality traffic in no time. This offer is a great way to boost your website promotion with no risks or obligations.

Get $20 in FREE clicks from BidVertiser

But that’s not all – to help even more of our clients to get an edge with their website promotion, we have also raised the value of our MySpace advertising credits. As you already know, MySpace MyAds is an excellent and budget- flexible advertising program offering great targeting opportunities. While until recently we gave a $25 MyAds credit, now our US customers get as much as $50 in FREE advertising on MySpace. That’s twice as much and completely free of charge!

Get $50 in FREE Advertising on MySpace

These are both great opportunities to get an edge over your competitors without spending a single dime. All you need to do is log in to your SiteGround Customer Area and claim your $50 FREE MySpace Ad Credit and $20 FREE Clicks from BidVertiser.

Dima
Product Development – Marketing

By SiteGround Web
Hosting

SiteGround has now added a new service to its hosting portfolio – the Advanced Business Hosting. The new hosting solution is based on our long experience in providing shared hosting but targets people whose websites need more server resources and additional services than the standard shared hosting provides. The business hosting solution came out as a natural response to the rising demand for a middle solution between the standard shared and the high end dedicated hosting.

What are the advantages of the Business hosting?

1. Fewer accounts – more server resources

Our business servers host up to 10 times fewer accounts than a standard shared server. This means that a website hosted on this server will share its resources with ten times fewer websites and will enjoy great performance all the time.

2. Priority support – problems solved in 5 minutes

Businesses that rely greatly on their websites usually value highly a fast resolution when a problem appears. That is why tickets posted by business hosting customers get on top of the support team list and are solved first.

3. Daily backups – never lose important information

The website content is often one of the most important assets of an online business and unfortunately sometimes one can lose it easily with a hasty wrong mouse click. That is why we take special care for protecting our business hosting customers’ website content. We make full backups every single day and keep the copies from the last seven days.

4. Great price – much lower than the price of other higher end solutions

The price of the Business Hosting is much lower than that of the next level hosting service – the VPS (Virtual Private Server). However, websites hosted on a Business hosting solution can often perform better than sites hosted on a VPS. There are two reasons for this.

First, the standard VPS system divides server resources equally to all users on a server. Thus a website cannot use more than its allocated share even if there are free resources. Our in-house built software gives much better server resource scalability.

And second, we can apply all server optimizations and security enhancements from our shared hosting servers which are often incompatible with the VPS generic setup.

The new Business Hosting service was initially launched only as an upgrade for existing shared hosting accounts. However, since it has received a significant attention by our existing customers during the last two months, it is now available for all SiteGround visitors at:

http://www.siteground.com/business-hosting.htm

Dima
Product Development – Marketing

By SiteGround Web
Hosting

As probably most of you know, osCommerce is a shopping cart application for creating and managing online stores. It is very widely used and has many implementations and variations. Many popular shopping cart applications like OscMax, ZenCart, CreLoaded, etc. are actually based on osCommerce and use its code.

Unfortunately, for quite a while now, there has been a known vulnerability in the osCommerce code and the code of the applications based on it through which a hacker can exploit the admin area and take malicious actions. Although on the osCommerce official website there is some information how the problem can be avoided (http://svn.oscommerce.com/jira/browse/OSC-1069), the vulnerability has not been fixed yet in the latest osCommerce release and with each new download and installation of a related shopping cart software, new people and online stores become potential targets.

When there is a vulnerability in such a popular application and many sites are at risk, we at SiteGround do not believe in the approach: “let each user find and apply the bug fix him/herself”. First, most of the users understand about the issue only after they are already affected. Second, many of them are unable to apply the fix themselves. To protect our customers from hacker attacks, some of our best technical experts investigated the problem in details and applied a global solution to all potentially vulnerable customers’ applications.

The results from our osCommerce patch operation are:

• the osCommerce package available for installation through Fantastico has been patched so that the new installations are not vulnerable to the exploit;
• all future transfer clients with osCommerce-based websites will get the vulnerability fix as part of the website transfer service we provide;

We are proud that once again SiteGround has provided a security service high above the standard level for a shared hosting company. Our knowledge and reaction in situations like these make us believe that we do provide the best osCommerce hosting.

Hristo
Product Development – Technical

By SiteGround Web
Hosting