I have been online for a while now. More than half of my life. And I registered my first domain www.novaslap.de in 2004. I dare you to use the wayback-machine to see what it looked like.
My first provider was a friend’s uncle, who had somebody run a server for him, that powered his ecommerce business. His business did not only connect me with html, css, cms, php, osCommerce and so on – it gave me access to web servers. That does not seem to be a big deal now. But it was back than. Considering I a was a minor and could not just open an account with a hosting company. Owning webspace back then was not that common, to put it modestly.
The customer service I got was the best I could get at the time: when I had a problem I used to chat with him, he resided in China – me in Germany – and the msn messenger connected me to him. If he hadn’t already set his status to “away to destroy beers”.
I felt like chatting was an ideal tool for communicating server related issues, since you can multi task while holding the conversation.
Things developed and the server got moved a few times and landed with an actual hosting company. The company was re-branded and sold a few times and with each of these sales the service got worse. In the meantime, I was building websites for other companies and got to see the user interfaces of major German hosting companies, like strato and 1&1, as well as smaller ones, like mittwald or the Swiss company switchplus.
About ten months ago, I switched to siteground because I was researching extra secure joomla hosting. My result was to migrate my servers to siteground and I have been a real fan ever since.
Hacking changed my view on hosting companies
Fast forward, never ever have I have gotten such quality hosting services as with siteground.com.
Actually, I feel like I have never gotten such good customer service with any other company!
OpenSource cms, like wordpress and joomla, must be constantly updated to insure security. Backups for files and the database are essential.
Once you had a hacked cms, which can not be restored, you wish you could go back in time.
Here is a scenario: Your website is being hacked and the hackers do not take immediate actions. Your auto-backup will back up the infected system and one by one all good copies are now overridden with bad ones.
All big hosting companies do offer Auto-Installers for cms options including wordpress. They also offer auto-updates. But that does not work all the time. If you have worked with a lot of wordpress set-ups, you will know about plugins and their compatibility problems with core updates.
With siteground you get dedicated hacking protection – they even code their own joomla and wordpress plugins to screen websites 24/7.
And in case you need help: They have amazing employees.
What makes the difference are the people behind the chat screens. They aren’t bots. They do not use pre-formatted standard answers. And they are available ALL THE TIME. It’s like they are on their extra mile from the get go.
A server is a computer that is connected to the internet at all times, so we can access files.
Yeah right, at all times. My previous hosting company achieved between 98% and 99,xx% uptime per month. Since migrating to siteground about 10 months ago it has always been 100% uptime.
Siteground has their base covered and delivers amazing customer support. What else?
Pricing and Security stand out as well
You can choose between web hosting, cloud hosting and dedicated hosting plans. Since this company wants to grow, they offer a lock-in price for the first 2 years. You definitely want to take advantage of that! Here is my affiliate link which you can use to browse sitground’s service. I do recommend all my clients to use siteground hosting.
Oh: and do not worry about migrating your existing websites and content management systems – because they will take care of it for you!