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

According to Joomla developers, the first stable version for branch 1.6 will appear in the mid-to-late first quarter of 2010. As a considerable number of our customers use Joomla we decided that it is a good idea to see in details what is coming. Thus we will be ready to make all the necessary updates in our Joomla hosting, Joomla templates and Joomla tutorials to meet all the needs of the new Joomla users. Below we will share our experience with the second Alpha version of Joomla 1.6. This is still a very early stage in the new Joomla release and that’s why we will neglect all the bugs inherent to this level of the development.

Joomla Templates

As we are proud to maintain one of the biggest galleries for Free Joomla Templates, and we plan to continue providing templates for the new Joomla, our first area of investigation naturally was the Joomla teplates.

Our first impression is that Joomla 1.6 is not much different from Joomla 1.5, especially on the frontend. By default it comes with the well-known template Rhuk Milkyway, which is exactly the same as in the previous stable release. So are Joomla 1.5 templates compatible with Joomla 1.6? The answer is ‘generally yes’ and a proof for that is the working Rhuk Milkyway template. The fact is that the template engine itself has not changed. However, many templates rely on core Joomla functions which have been changed in the new version. This means that they will give PHP errors/warnings and will definitely fail. We have tried a few popular templates from leading providers and all of them gave errors. That’s why we believe that most third party Joomla 1.5 templates will need to be modified more or less in order to become fully compatible with version 1.6.

Joomla extensions

The next question is about the compatibility of the Joomla 1.5 extensions. Our tests show that no popular Joomla 1.5 extension works correctly in version 1.6. According to Joomla devs updates are to be expected for all extensions so that they can work properly with the new Joomla. In most cases those updates should be minor if the extension is written on the native 1.5 API. However, extensions relying on the Legacy Mode will not work at all. This implies the idea that there will be no longer legacy mode in version 1.6. SiteGround support team will continue to follow the development of the Joomla extensions compatibility and will be ready to offer extension installation as part of its professional Joomla support, once the new version is released.

Joomla upgrade from 1.5 to 1.6

Of course, an upgrade from version 1.5 to 1.6 is envisaged. The upgrade feature is in the to-do-list for Joomla 1.6 but its current progress is 0%. This will cool down all enthusiasts who dream of early migration to Joomla 1.6. Here we will be monitoring the progress too, so that we can once again offer professional upgrade for our existing customers’ website once this is possible.

Joomla Admin Panel

Now that we’ve quickly gone over the general things, let’s peek inside the Joomla 1.6 administrator panel. Its default admin template is slightly redesigned but as a whole most positions are preserved from the previous version. There we find the following new features and changes:

1. The much talked about ACL (Access Control Lists). Generally, the idea is to be able to define separate user groups with different permissions. Permissions can be granted for:

• viewing and editing of categories and articles;
• using components and modules;
• using (viewing) user profile directories and files;

2. The next notable improvement is that the complex article management model of sections/categories has been substituted with a simpler categories/sub-categories model. This will definitely be a great relief to all novice Joomla users.

3. The next interesting thing is that the former ‘Frontpage’ articles option is renamed to ‘Featured’. This is definitely more precise because a featured article may appear not only on the frontpage. This improvement will help to decrease the overall confusion.

4. Last but not least, there is a functionality for ‘Update’. While at this stage it is unclear how exactly it will work, we suppose it will be something similar to the update functionality found in WordPress. In other words, updating your Joomla and extensions should be done with just a few clicks.

Our conclusion is that Joomla 1.6 is an important step forward. The improvements on usability and security have impressed us. Still, there are many more things to be desired. The SEO/SEF functionality for example is untouched and there are no plans for its improvement. If you are interested in learning all the new things planned and their progress, please check the official Joomla 1.6 status page.

Finally, if you wonder when you will have to migrate to the new Joomla 1.6, chances are that it will not be before the second half of 2010. At least not if you want to have third party extensions and templates working.

Hristo
Product Development – Technical

By SiteGround Web Hosting

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

Check out our two latest Joomla Template: “Christmas Tree” and “Dental Fresh“. You can download them through our Templates Gallery. In addition, there is a Live demo for each Template that you can browse to check whether it is suitable for your website or not!

SiteGround is now proud to have the biggest gallery of Free Joomla Templates. Each week our designers enlarge it with new, in-house created Joomla Templates. Currently we have more than 100 unique Joomla outlooks, suitable for a wide range of website topics.  More Templates will be released next week especially for the Christmas season!

Hristo
Product Development – Technical

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

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

SiteGround has been providing Joomla hosting since Joomla CMS appeared and many of our customers started to use it for creating and managing their websites. After so many years of experience in Joomla hosting we now have a big number of resources that make using this great application even easier. Many of these resources are available to all Joomla users, no matter if they are hosted by us or not.

Start your Joomla website in minutes!

Our Joomla customers enjoy an improved single-click Joomla installation system. With it they can install a Joomla with a several templates and a sample text created by SiteGround in less than a minute. With our system even people without technical knowledge can create and maintain successful Joomla websites without having to spend thousands for developers and designers.

Choose your website design!

Our devoted team of designers has created the Largest Joomla Templates Gallery on the Internet. We have designed a broad range of templates that will serve even the most demanding users. And the best part is that all templates are free to use even if you are not a SiteGround customer.

Learn how to use Joomla!

The SiteGround support team has created comprehensive Joomla Tutorial that covers the most common Joomla-related topics – from installation and configuration to more advanced topics like the How to create a Joomla template tutorial. We have prepared video tutorials to make it easier for you to learn and become a Joomla pro! In addition, if you don’t find what you are looking for, you can search for it in our Knowledge Base that has hundreds of Joomla-related articles!

Get Joomla knowledge from our experts!

As we have thousands of customers that use Joomla our supporters and server administrators are among the best Joomla experts in the hosting industry. Our servers are especially set up so that Joomla and all its popular addons function in the best possible way. We are also sharing our Joomla knowledge both with clients and anyone else interested on the special Joomla section of our forum. You don’t even have to be a SiteGround customer to receive some friendly advice from our team!

We believe that everyone should be able to create a website without having to spend many hours reading technical documentation. Joomla is a great tool and we do everything to make it easy for our customers to start using it and to help others learn how to use it!

Tina
Marketing Specialist

By SiteGround Web Hosting