We Are Turning 17 And This Is How We Have Matured

Turning 17 is exciting for everyone, even for a hosting provider! And today, March 22, 2021 marks our 17th Birthday! During these years we managed to keep our enthusiasm and spirits just as high as that of a high school senior, but gain even more experience. In this past year alone we matured tremendously, having been through a lot of changes and facing challenging times that made us stronger and better than ever before, especially in terms of our service and commitment to our communities and those who were in need during the COVID-19 crisis. What helps us celebrate and enjoy this anniversary is knowing that we have done a lot of good work and we want to invite you to join us on a short walk down memory lane.

Enhancing our interfaces for a smooth user experience

Looking back at our beginnings, it is quite impressive how our increasing focus on delivering a top-notch user experience has been reflected in our interfaces. Those days in which website platform, dashboard or control panel were a synonym for complicated routes to follow only suitable for the most technical ones are gone.

SiteGround User Area from 2012 to 2019

Now with our renewed User Area and Site Tools interfaces, which are already available for ALL clients on our shared hosting servers and almost all of our Cloud ones, the experience of managing a website has become easier than ever and accessible to all.

SiteGround User Area from 2019 onwards

Developing the fanciest, high-quality hosting platform

Our platform has evolved tremendously since when we started back in 2004. Moving from bare metal servers with a pretty standard LAMP setup (Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP) with cPanel (a control panel used by pretty much every other host out there) to a sophisticated cutting-edge platform with in-house developed technologies and a unique control panel is our pride and joy.  Our clients now enjoy one of the fastest and safest hosting services thanks to a unique configuration built over the years by some of the best IT experts. To remind you about a few of the more recent ones:

• Unique Ultrafast PHP configuration for up to 30% faster sites;
• Custom MySQL setup to reduce the number of slow queries on our servers;
• Nginx Direct Delivery for caching of static resources like images and CSS and dynamic caching mechanism now available to all clients for up to 5 times faster sites;
• The one and only SG Optimizer plugin that allows users to enable tons of performance boosting features on their WordPress sites;
• An ultrafast Daily Backup System that saves hours in data recovery;
• AI antibot system to prevent the most obnoxious brute force attacks;
• Infrastructure powered by Google Cloud that help us be even more stable, faster and greener and more…

Maturing as a socially responsible company

Part of growing up means to mature in many different ways. One of the aspects that we are much proud of is how we evolved with regard to our corporate social responsibility. Although we don’t often put our good deeds in writing, nor do we have a corporate page officializing these responsibilities (yet),  we care and we get involved. 

• Supporting businesses and causes during COVID-19

The COVID crisis hit all of us hard both personally and professionally. In a moment when so many people were in need and such a large number of businesses had the urgency to go online, we put all our efforts to help as much as we could with our #StaySafeBeKind initiative, giving free renewals to clients and free accounts to local heroes, donating more than 350,000 EUR to hospitals, and more.

• Thinking about the environment and creating awareness

Our increasing concern about the environment is like a red light that moves us to sponsor, support and organize various green projects – Zero-waste team building in 2019 (the last one we had unfortunately), partnering with Google Cloud and the importance of their carbon-neutrality program in our decision, building a green headquarters building, buying electric cars for our corporate needs, and more! We act whenever we can because we care.

• Supporting open source communities

OK, let’s not forget about the open source. Ever since the beginning, we have been involved with various open source communities – Mambo, Joomla, WordPress being the forerunners. We believe in the open source software because it lowers entry barriers and makes technology more accessible and we support it by sponsoring conferences, building solutions for the communities and more.

Keeping high client satisfaction rate across the years

There are many things that have changed along our journey, but one has remained unchanged over the years – the high client satisfaction rate. 

Our commitment to deliver the best service and experience has been strong since our beginnings, and we assure you that it will endure for many more to come.

Time for sharing…

Now that we have shared ours, let’s see what you have got down your SiteGround memory lane 😉. We invite you to comment under this post and tell us some of your best moments with SiteGround. A good story always melts our hearts and help us make this day special!

Last, but not least, we would like to thank all of You for choosing SiteGround as your hosting provider. We couldn’t have made it without you and we hope you join us on this exciting ride to our next anniversary.