Interview with SiteGround, Sponsor of the Critic's Choice CMS Awards

We are excited to announce that SiteGround has elected to sponsor our Critic's Choice CMS Awards this year. We decided to interview them to find out more about their decision and to learn a bit more about their products and services. Here is the interview.

CC: What connection is there between SiteGround's hosting services and the CMS industry?

SG: We’ve always been very closely connected with the CMS industry; especially with the free and open-source CMSs like Joomla, WordPress, Drupal, Typo3, and others as we seem to target one and the same user group – people who need shared hosting. We are big on shared hosting and combined with our long-term experience and expertise on fine-tuning our servers for optimized CMS performance, we seem to be a good match!

CC: What CMS platforms do you support?

SG:  The list with our supported CMS is really long, but for the sake of clarity and brevity, we’re compatible with any PHP/MySQL based CMSs.

CC: What other involvement does SiteGround have in the CMS industry?

SG: We have been sponsoring and attending numerous JoomlaDays, WordCamps, DrupalCons and this has been a great experience – all those CMS have unique communities by itself and meeting up and talking to the people behind the CMS has given us an opportunity to know better their needs and thus – improve even further our solution for them!

Aside from that, one of our goals as a hosting company has always been to educate our customers and make it easier for them to get started with their preferred CMS, which is why we have created a lot of free resources like tutorials, templates and plugins/extensions for the most popular CMSs. They are available for everyone of course, no matter an existing client or not ☺

CC: Why did SiteGround choose to sponsor the Critic's Choice CMS Awards this year?

SG: Two reasons, we've been in that industry for a very long time and believe that we can contribute with knowledge and advise for the nominations and awards themselves. The other reasons is that a competition like the CMS Awards fosters competition and competition is what makes the CMSs out there innovate and grow further! In the end of the day, growing and developing CMS community is what we want to see!

CC: What can you tell us about your product offerings?

SG: We provide a wide range of hosting services, thus ensuring that we can accommodate the needs of your website every step of the way. We offer several shared hosting solutions, VPS, dedicated and reseller packages. Our most popular plans are the shared plans – standard shared hosting, shared PLUS and the semi-dedicated hosting offer. The standard shared is the entry level hosting package and thus suitable for any start up website. The next level is the shared PLUS plan – it is mainly for customers with multiple websites and is also used for upgrade when a little more CPU power is needed. The most advanced plan we provide on a shared platform is our semi-dedicated offer. This is a service we are particularly proud of, as it provides better performance than most of the dedicated solutions for a small fraction of their cost. We achieve this performance by combining RAID, SSD and internally developed security and speed increasing systems.

CC: Do you offer Cloud hosting solutions? If so, what makes them unique?

SG: Yes, we do. What is different and unique about our cloud offering is that it is a combination of VPS and a cloud. It is an all-inclusive VPS server with all the advantages of cloud hosting. Our Cloud VPS Hosting offer allows you to have a private server with guaranteed resources, typical for the VPS technology, together with the redundancy and storage distribution over multiple machines, characteristic of the cloud. And last but not least, it is extremely affordable compared to the competitive cloud offerings.

CC: What other resources, other than hosting, do you offer your customers?

SG: Aside from the free tutorials, templates and extensions that I’ve already mentioned, we offer our customers a lot of additional features like tools for creating a mobile version of their websites, free website promotion tools, tools for malware protection and many more. We also offer backups, CDN, caching services, SSL certificates, to name a few. The reason for offering so many other features and resources is that we want to offer not just a hosting plan, but an integrated hosting solution where you can easily get started with your website, promote it and develop it, while we take care of the technicalities for you.

CC: What do you hope to see as a result of these awards?

SG: We hope that we’ll see which CMS has been doing great throughout the years and am positive that the awards will be representative for the CMS industry trends so that we can all cross check if we’re moving in the right direction.

CC: Do you have any closing comments?

SG: Good luck to all participants in the CMS Awards and hat tip to you Mike and your whole team for the effort and time organizing this great initiative!

Visit SiteGround to find out more about their exceptional hosting offerings.