SiteGround: Empowering businesses to build a successful web presence
About SiteGround
Founded in 2004, SiteGround is a global web hosting provider that currently hosts more than 2 million domains around the world. It offers a specialist platform and dedicated customer services that make it easy for users to build and grow their websites with performance in mind.
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Contact usBy migrating its web-hosting services to Google Cloud, SiteGround enhanced availability, performance, and environmental impact for the 2 million domain owners subscribed to its services.
Google Cloud results
- Helps decrease infrastructure maintenance overhead and improve operational efficiency
- Meets custom needs to ensure a dynamic hosting environment for hundreds of applications
- Simplifies data migration with Persistent Disk
- Achieves up to 500% faster performance when combined with other software optimizations
Migrates 5 PB of data to Google Cloud, cutting overheads
In the last 10 years, an internet presence has become a necessity for almost every business around the world. This is driving rapid growth in the global web hosting industry, projected to expand at an annual rate of 15.5% to 2027. In this fast-growing environment, SiteGround has developed a solid reputation as a web hosting provider powering more than 2 million domains. Customers cite its quality of service, from 99.9% uptime guarantees to top-flight platform speed, great security, and innovative features, including its own optimized control-panel software.
“Delivering high-quality service has always been our priority. Apart from our expert customer service, we believe we achieve that by engineering solutions for website management, performance, and security. Working with Google Cloud has helped remove a solid maintenance overhead, so we can focus on crafting unique hosting solutions,” says Ivailo Nikolov, CIO at SiteGround.
For years, SiteGround ran its services hosted on bare-metal servers, based at four data centers around the world. That infrastructure, despite its undeniable performance indicators, came with a maintenance burden. Teams needed to match capacity to demand in a cost-effective way, upgrade capacity on individual machines as technologies developed, and plan for hardware failures and scalability. So SiteGround looked for a cloud solution to help reduce its maintenance overhead, enhance the reliability of its service, and minimize the risk of failures. The company turned to Google Cloud for the solution.
“Our DevOps teams dedicated a lot of their resources to developing maintenance systems to monitor the health of the infrastructure we used and automatically prevent disasters. With Google Cloud, those tasks are minimized, and we focus on engineering software that enhances the performance and security of the websites we host.”
—Ivailo Nikolov, CIO, SiteGroundFacilitating innovation and decreasing maintenance overhead
After SiteGround migrated its infrastructure to Google Cloud at the beginning of 2020, its DevOps resources were mostly redirected to custom infrastructure software development. The company began launching service enhancements and new features at a higher speed than ever before. It completely revamped its PHP and MySQL configurations to offer a new Ultrafast PHP that improves web page loading by 30% and innovative MySQL setup to handle more parallel requests and better process slow queries.
“Our DevOps teams dedicated a lot of their resources to developing maintenance systems to monitor the health of the infrastructure we used and automatically prevent disasters. With Google Cloud, those tasks are minimized and we focus on engineering software that enhances the performance and security of the websites we host.”
Using Google Cloud, SiteGround relies on its global network of data centers, which also facilitate the launch of tailored solutions to its diverse client base. Thanks to Google Cloud’s global coverage, the company launched two new data center locations—Frankfurt, Germany and Sydney, Australia to add to its existing four in Iowa, London, Eemshaven in the Netherlands, and Singapore. That allowed the company to better cater to the needs of some of its bigger markets and plan for further service enhancements. A recent service enrichment is the introduction of geographically distributed backups, a boost in its disaster management strategy, which SiteGround has been aiming at for quite some time, but which only became possible after migrating to Google Cloud.
“Previously, moving resources meant copying data from one space on a physical server to another, which would take time and impact performance. Using distributed storage with Google Cloud Persistent Disk, we just detach from one instance and attach to another. It’s so much easier to migrate data.”
—Ivailo Nikolov, CIO, SiteGroundAccommodating custom requirements and making data migration easier
Thanks to Google Cloud’s wide range of products and its willingness to develop solutions to benefit its clients, SiteGround’s setup has found its new home. Where most cloud providers design services for single clients hosting single applications, SiteGround, as a web hosting provider powering 2 million domains, has to cater to hundreds of different applications in a single, dynamic environment. The company approached cloud providers with a heavy list of technical requirements for their highly customized software stack, such as assigning public IP addresses to specific VMs, instead of to a load balancer. Not long after the contract was signed, Google Cloud completed the development of BYOIP, which allows clients to import their IP addresses to the network.
SiteGround migrated more than 5 PB of data in just three months. Now its hosting platform runs an in-house implementation of Linux Containers on Compute Engine instances, eliminating the need to maintain infrastructure at data centers. Because SiteGround can spin up and customize instances at speed, it can scale CPU, RAM, and storage in line with demand in a way that’s responsive to customer needs. The team also uses Persistent Disk storage as a distributed solution with multiple redundancies, minimizing the risk of data loss.
“Previously, moving resources meant copying data from one space on a physical server to another, which would take time and impact performance,” says Nikolov. “Using distributed storage with Persistent Disk, we just detach from one instance and attach to another. It’s so much easier to migrate data.”
“In Google Cloud, we have found a partner with the same priorities that we have. Our clients enjoy a more reliable service, while we focus on being a forward-looking, environmentally conscious organization that believes in innovation. Google Cloud shares that vision for the future.”
—Ivailo Nikolov, CIO, SiteGroundWorking together towards a shared vision for the future
Today, all SiteGround customers use a solution run on Google Cloud infrastructure. And the SiteGround team feels better able to deliver to their core needs: uptime, speed, security, and innovation. “We are way above our 99.9% uptime SLA, and we have the peace of mind that we will not suffer catastrophic failures on infrastructure and need to restore from backups,” says Nikolov. “In the year we have operated on Google Cloud, we have not had a single serious incident.” Using the fast global Google Cloud network, SiteGround spins up instances close to where they are needed, to deliver high networking speeds for customers. And for security, the team uses Cloud Identity and Access Management (Cloud IAM) to restrict access to those who need it, without having to build their own access controls.
But the partnership isn’t just about delivering a faster, better infrastructure. SiteGround emphasizes sustainability and green policies, so it saw Google Cloud as a natural partner, thanks to its commitments to carbon neutrality and renewable energy. “In Google Cloud, we have found a partner with the same priorities that we have. Our clients enjoy a more reliable service, while we focus on being a forward-looking, environmentally conscious organization that believes in innovation,” says Nikolov. “Google Cloud shares that vision for the future.”
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About SiteGround
Founded in 2004, SiteGround is a global web hosting provider that currently hosts more than 2 million domains around the world. It offers a specialist platform and dedicated customer services that make it easy for users to build and grow their websites with performance in mind.