Web Hosting Box

Last month I gave you a hint about the more extra services to come this season. Here is a quick write up to get your attention at two of our latest additions. We’re launching premium versions of two of our services that traditionally rank us among the best in the industry: our reliable email spam protection and first-class technical support.

SiteGround Premium Support

We know that some clients need things to move faster than other. The idea behind our Premium Support service was to top up the customer support that we currently offer to all of our clients in order to address the pressing issues of those with special needs.

Naturally, we started with speed. Even though we’ve always managed to stand up to one of the fastest response times in the industry, with our Premium support service we’ve cut the wait time to a minimum. What is more – the problems reported under our Premium Support subscription are assigned a top priority. They are automatically posted in a special, top-level category and handled with special priority. The new service also has its own separate Premium Support interface to let you submit tickets faster and more easily.
This is really a big step forward in our customer service efforts, as we put all the years of experience into it. You can check out more about our new service on the special Premium Support page in our Customer Area.

Spam Killer and Virus Protection

All of our email servers have been especially optimized against spam and virus threats, ranking our standard spam protection significantly above the average industry level. However, to suit the needs to those looking for the best anti-spam system on the market, we have invested in a new solution – our latest Spam Killer and Email Virus protection feature.

Our Spam Killer and Virus Protection feature is based on MailFoundryTM -arguably the best hardware email filter currently available. If I had to describe the technology in layman’s terms, I would say that it is a piece of hardware that acts as a gateway for all incoming email traffic. It scans all messages and tells which ones are legitimate and which ones are spam and/or contain viruses. To go in a little bit more details, the appliance includes a human intelligence powered email filtering engine called MessageIQ. The MessageIQ engine uses a technology called Spam Profiles, which is extremely accurate in detecting spam.

*What are Spam Profiles and why are they so accurate?*

Spam profiles are highly targeted profiles of a sender of spam, an individual spam message or a collection of spam messages. Spam Profiles are created by human editors, in real time, to provide the quickest reaction to new spam outbreaks. Spam Profiles are updated every five minutes and are automatically sent to our Spam Killer.

This means that you are protected by a clever, adaptive and always up-to-date filter that guarantees up to 99% spam detection on all of your incoming mail.
Our Spam Killer is a “hands-off” solution, so there is no need to download and install anything on your computer or waste time on annoying updates. For a full feature list of the new extra, go ahead and visit our special Spam Killer and Virus email protection page.

Dima
Product Development – Marketing

By SiteGround Web
Hosting

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

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

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.

By SiteGround Web
Hosting

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

By SiteGround Web
Hosting