Faster CPUs, More Data Centers, Bigger GoGeek Plans
When we migrated our infrastructure to Google Cloud Platform a few months ago, we knew this was not just a one-time event but the base for continuous improvements for our customers. Today we are happy to announce that thanks to this move, we are able to perform a massive upgrade to faster CPUs, we have two more data center locations and our GoGeek plan offers more space than before.
40% Faster Processors
We will update all processors used to host our clients on the Google Cloud infrastructure. The new N2 CPUs perform roughly 40% faster than the ones we used previously. Both our shared and cloud customers will benefit from faster delivery of dynamic content due to more efficient script execution. With the upgrade, your site is expected to need less CPU seconds than before when serving the same type and number of visitor requests. This generally means more room for growth before you need a plan upgrade. Of course, the benefit for each individual site will be unique, based on its own code and database optimizations.
The upgrade of our current CPUs will be done in the next few weeks. There will be a 24-hour notification about it in your Customer Area. The upgrade will involve minimal downtime due to a necessary reboot (roughly 15 minutes per server). Upgrades are scheduled to happen during the time of the day with historically least amount of traffic. Basically, that should happen very early in the morning, taking your data center local time into consideration.
Two new data centers – Sydney and Frankfurt
Another great benefit of our migration to the Google Cloud Platform is that we can now add more data center locations around the world. It is a great advantage that we can now count on a single data center partner everywhere and benefit from their uniform high-quality service. We have been a host of choice for many Australians for the past 15 years and now we are extremely happy to provide a data center location on their own continent – in Sydney.
A data center in Frankfurt, Germany is also available as a response to the numerous requests for German location by our customers. All new plans for customers from these locations are now activated in the new data centers. Existing hosting accounts can be relocated through the marketplace page in the customer area.
More space for GoGeek hosting plan
Our GoGeek hosting plan is often chosen by people reselling hosting service or hosting multiple sites of their own customers. After the move to Google Cloud platform, we are now able to increase one of the resources our resellers need most — the webspace, without changing the plan price. The GoGeek plans have been upgraded with 10 GB, and now include 40 GB disk space. Existing GoGeek plans have also received this upgrade completely free of charge.
Comments ( 117 )
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George Nicolaou
It would be cool if the allowed number of inodes were also increased because if I had an account with 40000/45000 nodes already (just an example) having 10 extra GBs is cool but I need more inodes to be able to use my 10GBs extra space. Just an opinion nothing bad intended I am just saying
Hristo Pandjarov Siteground Team
At this point I can't say if we're going to update the inodes limit since it is different than the web space one. Howeverm our inode limits are alreadyy set pretty high - 150, 300 and 450 thousands for StartUp, GrowBig and GoGeek accounts accordingly.
Steve C
We have many accounts with you because of inode limitations and there is no way to purchase more of these. In addition, the change from cpanel to the much inferior site tools has caused us issues in at least one of our accounts has caused us to consider a new host partner. We’d love to continue to work with you and your new announcement here is a positive step in the right direction, but looking at the comments, your biggest problem is the inodes and you have done nothing to solve this for customers.
Hristo Pandjarov Siteground Team
Inode limitations are per account. This means that when you purchase more accounts you can host more and more sites with us. All limitations in a hosting account are linked together. It wouldn't make sense to increase the inode limitation since more sites on the same account will reach another limit. If you reach your inode limitation, you can just open a new hosting account for your next website. As for the new Site Tools, I understand that there are differences but it's much, much better hosting management solution than cPanel.
Charles LeMaster
I totally agree. And I miss the cpanel as well in some cases.
Gerry King
The comments on this thread regarding inode limits should surely be providing a valuable insight to Siteground management team. In common with other Siteground customers, inode limits are a constant pain point that I don't experience with other hosting companies. It would seem that Siteground employ inode limits as an upsell driver and I'm sure that in many cases this works however surely you can see that this must be losing you business in the form of customers who either leave completely or when the time comes to expand their hosting go elsewhere. Siteground need to read the writing on the wall and address this.
Hristo Pandjarov Siteground Team
Check out my previous comments on the inodes limitation.
John
January 2021 my Growbig has an allowance of 400000 inodes - what is the new allowance on GoGeek?
Hristo Pandjarov Siteground Team
Currently 600 000. You can check all account parameters and limits at the features page: https://www.siteground.com/shared-hosting-features.htm
Ian Nelson
I agree - it is inodes I run out of much faster than web space already...
Calin
Same here. I have plenty of space, but issues with the inodes limit.
Glenn S.
I agree with George!
Anikesh AK
I think if you will increase the monthly user limit then it will be good for many siteground users
Remco
I am gogeek user, and really also need a higher innode use, as everytime this causes problems for me, while I am a relative low webspace user
Hristo Pandjarov Siteground Team
The inode limit has a different purpose than the web space one and is not part of the current upgrade. However, our inode limits are set pretty high, a normal WordPress site has roughly 20K inodes and the GoGeek limit is 450K for example. This said, you can check your mails, clean up spam and trash folders there or check if there aren't things like backups, unused image sizes, etc. in order to lower the number of inodes you are using since at this point we don't plan to increase them.
craig mullins
Couldn't come at a better time! What will change here: Simultaneous Server Processes: 30 Simultaneous Connections from Single IP: 20 CPU Seconds / Program and Script Executions: 4000/hour, 40000/day, 800000/month Average Process Execution Time per Day: 4 seconds Shared Service CPU Usage: No more than 20% for a period longer than 10 seconds Server Memory per Process: 768 MB Inodes: 450,000 Minimum Cron Job Interval: 30mins
Hristo Pandjarov Siteground Team
There are no changes in this limitations. However, each process will take less CPU seconds so effectivelly you will be able to handle more traffic on the same plan.
Kris
I couldn't be happier to hear that N2 CPU will be faster than current. I'm on GoGeek plan just 1 WP+WooCommerce website with occasional CPU-intensive usage so I could expect to see faster script execution and faster dynamic content load. SiteGround Team is always on step ahead. Cheers!
Phil Lancaster
I'm with George. Extra disk space is always nice but the critical resource on my GoGeek account is the number of inodes. I'm always getting emails that I've reached 80% and warning of the dire consequences awaiting me. I think I'm going to have to open another account.
Hristo Pandjarov Siteground Team
I guess you have multiple sites hosted under the same account. This is normal, of course, but note that even if we increase the inode limit there will always come a time to get another account if you keep adding more sites to it. GoGeek has 450K inodes limit which is set pretty high and can accomodate like 20 WordPress sites easily. You can check if there aren't too many mails in your spam and trash folders for example eating up your limits.
Josh
If we migrate to the new Sydney data centre, what measures will we have available to mitigate any potential downtime? If it makes any difference, both our web hosting and domain are with SiteGround, and we're currently using the old Signapore data center.
Hristo Pandjarov Siteground Team
All our DCs including the Singarpore one are in the new platform with the faster CPUs, etc. If you relocate to the Sydney one, however, you will have better networking to visitors from Australia. The process is automated but if your domain NS records are not pointed to us, you will need to make that change manually since there's an IP change necessary. Rather than that, the rest of the process is seamless and super easy.
Chip
Please increase PHP max execution time to 150. Snapshot Pro from WPMUDEV does not work with your current limit. Can you at least increase the limit of WordPress admin-ajax.php in wp-admin?
Hristo Pandjarov Siteground Team
That's two and a half minutes. Really, it shouldn't take that long. I'd recommend that you contact WPMUDEV so they improve on their backup solution and split it into batches so it doesn't require such extensive limits to operate. This said, note that we keep backups 30 days back for all our shared accounts :)
Jesse T.
But there is no way to download backups. I just talked to support about this. Really disappointing.
Hristo Pandjarov Siteground Team
Those are offserver incremental backups that are designed for fast creation and restoration, not for download. You have full access to your data so you can easily compress and download it as any other file in your account.
David
Isn't it time you honoured your commitments to move from cPanel to the "new" front-end?
Hristo Pandjarov Siteground Team
We are, but it's a slow migration since a lot of things must be checked manually. You will receive an email once your server is scheduled for migration. I hope that's sooner than later.
Mike
Go slowly, I love cPanel, been using it since 1998.
Hristo Pandjarov Siteground Team
Great year, France won the World cup. As Zidane sit on the bench since then and started couching, I think it's about time for cPanel to be replaced by a younger player :)
Digby Green
Great to see Siteground expanding!
MIke
This is great, thank you for growing like this
Lynda Galway
Is there any information available about changing an existing hosting account over to Sydney?
Hristo Pandjarov Siteground Team
You can order an account relocation from your Client Area -> Manage Account -> Relocate :)
Roza
Tankeu
Michael Power
Inode usage needs to be increased to fall into line proportionality to reflect extra 10GB of disk space on Go Geek plans. An extra 33.3% would reflect that as you have increased disk space by 33.3%.
Hristo Pandjarov Siteground Team
Although connected, the inode limitation and the web space one are different and placed for different reasons. There is no hard link between the two and the inodes limits are already set pretty high. If you're running out of inodes, I'd recommend getting a second account because if those inodes are used by regular let's say WordPress apps, this means that you're getting closer to the account resources cap anyway.
AB Sinop
Improvements should be continually if SG wishes to remain competitive. One area which I consider deficient and below first-class is Cpanel File Mgr. SG always pushes tool deficiencies to third-party rather than making or pushing for correctness or upgrade.
Hristo Pandjarov Siteground Team
We are moving away from cPanel to our own system named Site Tools which I believe is much better :)
Dave
Any reason you guys are not using Google's datacenter in Mumbai, India?
Hristo Pandjarov Siteground Team
Even though Google is now our partner, we can't just open DC locations everywhere they have infrastructure. It's still a difficult process of clearing out all legal & taxation parts of the process.
Lif
From performance point of view , is it a big different / or recommended moving from Amsterdam - > Frankfurt for normal Blog < 1000 Users month. any other performance related points to migration to FRA ,
Hristo Pandjarov Siteground Team
Generally, it's better to be closer to your visitors to lower networking latency. However, in your case I don't think that would be necessary or make a great difference since both countries are so well connected with each other.
Abdelhadi
Awesome. keep up the good work!
Jason Koning
Hi Hristo, If it's a cloud hosting account, with multiple sites (70) - what sort of heads up would I receive if I order a relocation to Sydney (from Singapore)? The reason being, I don't have control of all DNS, so I'd be relying on a third party to update some IP addresses (I'm not using your NS's). So I'd need time to inform & coordinate.
Hristo Pandjarov Siteground Team
For cloud servers usually we keep an IP forwarder for 48 hours after the migration but we can extend that period. You can, however mail me at hristo.p [at] siteground.com so we can extend that period longer.
Loughlan
I am glad I read through this; and for hristo answering the questions I was going to ask (inodes, Sydney, etc). I need to clear some or upgrade. You guys are doing amazingly and I am constantly reassured of my hosting decision. Thanks guys.
Hristo Pandjarov Siteground Team
Thanks for the kind words!
Skip
Totally agree
Jorge
Se agradece el espacio y la nueva estructura en Google Cloud . Como usuario y administrador de otras cuentas de plan GoGeek. Me gustaría consultar, si en un mediano o largo plazo tienen novedades para la gente de Sudamérica que confiar en ustedes. (Centro de Datos, etc) Saludos.
Bruno
I would like to switch to Cloud Entry on Frankfurt will the server be "DEFINITELY" Google Cloud?
Hristo Pandjarov Siteground Team
Yes, all our new instances are started on Google Cloud Platform.
Shaikh
Hi Hristo, I am planning to migrate my site to (London or Frankfurt) from Singapore. I want to know if the hardware specification varies across the data centers. Also, are there any restrictions in plans that you can tell us between these two data centers?
Hristo Pandjarov Siteground Team
There are no variations that should be taken into consideration. Select the one that's closest geographically to your visitors. As for the restrictions, tehre are no differences on our end between the two. Just bear in mind that the UK are now out of the EU and that might cause some legal differences depending on the way you operate your business.
iamgergo
It would be great to allow a free relocation to the new DCs. Generally, it is acceptable that relocations have a cost, but in this case it would be great to be able to do it for free. If you had have a Germany DC earlier, I would definitely have chosen that.
Hristo Pandjarov Siteground Team
We continuously improve our product for both our new and existing customers. This said at the time you signed, we simply didn't have that DC available. I am afraid that at this point we can't provide relocation services for free.
Aleksandr
Hristo, can you clarify whether there are advantages to be hosted in one place or another with regards to user privacy (eg. emails). This has been on my mind lately as Siteground's move to Google servers has created unease with regards to storage of private information. At the bottom of it is lack of clarity on whether Siteground protects user data from analysis by Google (eg. by encrypting), and whether this protection varies based on server location.
Hristo Pandjarov Siteground Team
You can check our post about moving to Google Cloud Platforms - there are privacy concerns in the comments which we've addressed. To sum up we have strict legal contracts with Google regarding data privacy and your data is protected with us the same way it was with all the infrastructure partners we've been working so far.
JAnn
I am getting multiple soliciting emails daily from my siteground Contacts portal from around the world in different languages the last few weeks and I am sure these people would not be visiting my website which is very special interest category. I am not high tech and bewildered. Would the move to Google have something to do with this?
Hristo Pandjarov Siteground Team
Not really. I would recommend that you add a captcha to your contact forms. That sounds like some spambots have tried to send emails from your forms which was a success so they continued doing it.
Jann
Thank you!! I will do that.
CleverEver
Dear Hristo, As a marketing Director, keen on Customer Experience (CX), I must say that your communication is absolutely not fair and I would almost say it is bullshit. I beg your pardon for this rude introduction but i consider that you perfectly know that the major limitation of your hosting is innodes limitation. Remember, you launched on online survey a few weeks ago. Would you dare to publish what it most required by your customers according to this survey ?! I guess it is the end of innode limitation. Read also this thread, it's relevant! Instead of making an announcement on disk space increase which is absolutely useless regarding current innode limitation you should have said more frankly that you can/will/ cannot/will not increase or delete innode limitation and explain why. We are grown ups. Whatever you decide, tell us the truth and please address the real problem your customer are coping with but not the ones you imagine or which are easy for you. That's the best advice I could give you to keep them on the long run. For your information, many other major hosting providers, like OVH, have no innode limitation. Hope my post will be usefull. Best Regards, Xavier, GoGeek customer
Hristo Pandjarov Siteground Team
Hello Xavier, Inodes and disk space are completely different limitations. We're increasing one and not the other one - that's the truth, plain and simple. Hosting plans are designed and priced with certain amount of resources. Whether a certain account is suitable for your needs or not depends on your particular website. The GoGeek inode limit is 450 000. You can have one site with thousands of products, images, etc. or you can have 20 smaller ones under the same account - different people, different needs. If you reach the inode limit of that account, because you want to put too many websites in it - then simply open another account. If you can't fit a single website, then I would recommend to a more powerful solution, like our Cloud accounts. I am fully aware that this is associated with extra cost but that's only natural when sites and their resource needs grow. I won't go into comparisons with OVH or any other hosting company simply because everyone structures and prices their accounts differently. All I can say is that there is no such thing as "unlimited". If you use too many hosting resources for what you're paying they will limit you. Every hosting company will.
Abhi Bavishi
Hi Hristo, no hosting company will take down a website and refuse to take it back-up, without giving customers the reason why the website was taken down. I've used other hosting providers, but SiteGround is the first company that takes down your website when you reach innode limitation and refuses to take it back-up until you upgrade to their cloud plan. They don't even allow you to access the website, and their support team can't care any less about whether it takes precious business hours to solve the issue. I would request you to revisit customer protection policy because if this continues to be the level of support, I don't think faster cpu and more data will help you retain customers over the long-term. Thanks, Abhi
Marina Yordanova Siteground Team
Hello, the ticket that our system creates at such occurrences contains information about the reason and guidelines how to solve the issue. When a website, hosted on a shared server, is overloading the server resources in some way, it stops working properly and jeopardises all the other websites on the server as well. This is why we have to take measures to stabilise the server by limiting the website in question. The limitation is temporary until the client is able to resolve the issue on their end. We certainly do not force the client to upgrade - an upgrade is only one of the possible options. The case could be also solved by optimizing the processes running on the website by a web developer, which was also recommended by our team already. Our tech team has also provided additional information and access for your IP so that you can tackle the issue on your end. Please keep the communication with our team in a single ticket, since posting several tickets about the same situation at once additionally overloads our HelpDesk and slows down our Support.
Charles
This is all great to hear. Thank you for continuing to improve your services. One HUGE improvement I would highly recommend is innode increase. I switched to you from a company I was with for over 10 years. I love your platform, site speed and pricing isnt that much more than my previous host. But my innodes are already full and I still have another site to move over to you to cancel the previous hosting...unfortunately I cant, due to the innode issue. They had an option to increase innodes for an extra yearly fee without any changes to my hosting plan. I could increase, decrease at any time. After switching all of the websites I have over to you, I really dont want to switch back to them after all of the work of switching the other websites to you, but this is a huge problem if i cant get that last website over to you due to innodes. When contacting your support I was told I could switch to a cloud server but it would result in name server changes again. All of my clients websites just experienced this and I'm not putting them through that again so soon. Also... it costs WAY more than just switching back to my old provider. I would rather just switch back to them with a much cheaper plan and lowered site speed honestly. If theres anything you can do to rectify this please let me know because I love your setup and support team but I just cant stay with you if this cant be rectified. Thank you!
Hristo Pandjarov Siteground Team
Our inode limitations are already set pretty high. If you can't fit a single website into a GoGeek account, I would recommend that first you look very carefully in that site and see if there aren't any complete backups or multiple emails there. 450K inodes is a lot having in mind that a standard (if there's such thing) WordPress site is something like 15-20K.
Luis
Thanks, that is good news Extra space and memory
Kim
Thank you for the change, I noticed an improvement and my GT Metrix score improved.
GoGetCG
I'm running GrowBig now. What difference does it bring? Will it make my current website faster?
Hristo Pandjarov Siteground Team
It should :) How much, depends on the actual website though.
Musoto
Great work! I hope to see the next one positioned in African. Thanks for your good work
Rainman
1) Will 40% Faster Processors allow us to have a higher number of inodes and allow us to have max db table size increased to 1 GB at least in GrowBig and higher plans (for example, even with 5 visitor site and 0% resource usage DB search table in Drupal, for example, can easily exceed 1Gb but its not resource-intensive) 2) Will there be an option for at least GoBig / GoGeek plans to choose non_Google hardware/servers ? because choice of SG was based mainly on this. Even if big G is no evil and SG has all control, I think many would prefer an option where SG is its own boss, not partner of anyone else! Thanks.
Hristo Pandjarov Siteground Team
I am afraid that the answer to both of your questions is no. We don't have plans to increase other limitations at this point. There have been many things changed around and we will need some time to properly analyze everything before we make adjustments to different limits. As to your other question, we're completely migrating over GCP. You can check our post on the migration for more infor about this: https://www.siteground.com/blog/moving-to-google-cloud/
Kevin
I'm glad to use SiteGround GoGeek plan, and it helps my business better. Thanks for your awesome support. A small question: Is there any way to disable automatic WP update? Because some sites are under active-development with Git. Thanks,
Hristo Pandjarov Siteground Team
Please, open a ticket in your Help Desk and my colleagues will help you out with that :)
Guy
Hi! great news :) How do I know when the CPU change will happen for my servers? using GoGeek.
Hristo Pandjarov Siteground Team
You should receive an email or notice in the Client Area if the upgrade is not done yet :)
Jason
Will there be a change of your IPS or bot detection system? In the previous environment I found I always got caught (needs recapcha or even infinite redirection) when I deployed the Akamai CDN in front. Maybe your system was not correctly identifying the "X-Forwarded" IP header and used the Akamai IP addresses pool (usually owned by the nearest visitor's ISP) which may be on your system's blacklist. I hope that I can use Akamai CDN without issues after the migration. Thanks!
Hristo Pandjarov Siteground Team
Please, contact our Help Desk through a ticket and my colleagues will look into it. We generally whitelist CDN prociders from the system to avoid cases like that one and it's strange that you had such issues with Akamai.
Ian Atkins
Hristo - not sure that is true, have been asking for you to whitelist StackPath CDN - but your support won't and your Twitter account confirmed as much. They state you only whitelist Cloudflare. Means we can't use other CDN providers as your firewall occasionally captcha's other CDNs requests - breaking the cached assets.
Marina Yordanova Siteground Team
Hello Ian, just to clarify, you can use any CDN of your choice. We are not blocking the StackPath CDN IP addresses by default. If you experience any issues, the best course of action would be contacting our Advanced Support Team through the ticketing, so we can check what is blocking the connection and assist you further.
Ian Atkins
Hi Marina, thanks for the reply. Feel free to checkout the ticket with your advanced support which seems to be saying the opposite? #3658299 "It would not be possible to whitelist the StackPath IPs on our Firewalls. The redirects to /.well-known/captcha/ are caused by one anti-bot Firewall. Stackpath CDN is a third-party company and as you understand, whitelisting third-party IPs can present a potential security risk."
Marina Yordanova Siteground Team
Hello Ian, thank you for providing the ticket ID. We will check the case and update it with our findings.
Justin Freid
Thanks for the additional storage space. I’d like to echo others here, please increase inode limitations.
David Adams
Interestingly, my query has thus far not been discussed. I don't care that you're moving to or have moved to Google Cloud Platform, I'm sure you have done you due diligence. I am concerned about your motivation behind moving away from your own hardware. I know a lot of IT service providers that move to cloud services to avoid blame for any perceived under-performance, they call it 'outsourcing the risk', but in really it's just 'avoiding the blame' when things go wrong. An example just the other day, when my SiteGround hosted website was experiencing intermittent connectivity, the response to my ticket was, "Ahh, yes, this problem is due to an upstream network provider issue, sorry 'bout that, but we have reported it to them ". Not our fault, g'vnor, mentality. I trust that you will care just as much about your service provision to your customers (including me), despite your decision to outsource your infrastructure. That you accept *accountability* for service provision, even though *responsibility* might well lie with Google. The day I hear 'Sorry, but it's not our fault' from SiteGround will be the day I close my account with SiteGround.
Hristo Pandjarov Siteground Team
We've never had our own hardware. Owning a DC is a completely different business than having a hosting company. We've always had an upstream provider for the hardware on top of which we've built our product. It is the same now too, we're using our own software on top of the GCP infrastructure, so basically, we're getting better hardware and better connectivity. Networking issues are always hard to diagnose and always include multiple parties. For example when a major backbone between North America and Europe goes down, all our Iowa servers will be inaccessible from London. Hardware and purely networking failures in the DC are possible too although rare. I remember back in 2008 when I was just starting with SiteGround there was a massive fire and explosion at The Planet which was then our upstream provider which shut down something north of 50 000 servers with some of ours affected too. It took some time but we recovered due to good practices, offserver backups, etc. My point is that there's always something that can happen but we've done our best to chose the most reliable partner and to do everything legally and technically possible to assure the quality of our service.
rob h
Much discussion of inodes, not a problem to me *yet* but I see your estimate that a "typical" wordpress uses 15-20. Somewhere in the discussion you write "You can check if there aren't too many mails in your spam and trash folders for example eating up your limits", implying stored email messages consume inodes?? Can you clarify just what factors influence the number of inodes in use. For example I don't use any email accounts at SG does that mean there's more available for the website(s)? What does the "typical 15-20 inodes per wordpress site mean"? what features of a WP site contribute to those numbers?
Hristo Pandjarov Siteground Team
Inodes can be an issue only if you want to put too many websites under the same account. You can open a new one if you start running out of inodes and fill it with websites. It is not 15-20 but 15-20 000 inodes per WP installation - the total codabase with all its files and folders results in that count. Each file and folder counts to the inode limitation so yes, if you don't store mails you have more nodes.
rob
So the issue is that the total number of files (+folders) needs to be within the appropriate 150, 300 and 450 thousand ranges? Meaning some housekeeping to delete obsolete files will "release" some inodes?
Hristo Pandjarov Siteground Team
It is in that range StartUp - 150 000, GrowBig - 300 000, GoGeek - 450 000 :) Housekeeping does exactly that too.
Gary
This is great news. Just wondering though if the move to site tools from cpanel is tied to servers being migrated over to Google Cloud? My GoGeek plan has just been migrated over but I'm still on cpanel? Just wondering if there's a very rough estimate of how long we can expect to wait for site tools once migrated to the newer platform?
Hristo Pandjarov Siteground Team
Those are separate migrations. We're almost finished with the migration to GCP while just about to start the cPanel to Site Tools for shared servers.
Ian Atkins
Now this migration has started, we're not seeing any performance gains on sites ( across multiple different accounts and domains ). If anything response times seem slightly slower by about 10% ~ 20% and also more volatile with more peaks and variance. Could you publish any benchmarks comparing Google Cloud to your old hardware as the performance gains seem negligible to negative at the moment.
Marina Yordanova Siteground Team
Hello Ian, We have run checks in the early stages of the migration to Google Cloud and we have not seen performance degradation overall. Until changing the CPUs, the performance was quite similar. The new Google N2 processors are showing performance improvement. There is one specific though - usually, during the first 48 hours after migration, we run our backup script and it slows down the machine so you may have experienced that effect as well. If you are past that moment, then we are looking into individual cases where some settings of the new machine may be slowing some queries of the site. At the same time dynamic sites are really hard to troubleshoot as they evolve by adding new queries, more clients and orders and all that could also be slowing down the site so comparisons become harder over time. If you were recently migrated (and we have a copy of the site on the old server), we could try to debug by first benchmarking speed on the old vs the new machine. Unfortunately, if there is no copy on the old server, we go into hypothesis and try to look into the website specifics. If you haven’t posted a ticket and you have been very recently migrated, it may be a good idea to post a ticket and let us benchmark.
Ian Atkins
Thanks for the update. Will let the DNS change and backup process settle in and then check again. We haven't made functional changes during this period - hence the surprise to see the response times be slower and more volatile. Will raise a support ticket if things don't settle down. Thanks!
Martin Waring
I’m not a big fan of losing cPanel as that was the main reason to move to Siteground in the first place. I can’t see the benefit of spreading all the tools over several pages so that I have to go hunting for them. It just wastes time. Can there not be an option to retain cPanel please?
Marina Yordanova Siteground Team
Hello and thank you for sharing this. Although there is no option to keep cPanel, you can still use similar or event better functionalities. In Site Tools there is a tool search box on the left side under the main tools categories. You could also use the shortcut Ctrl+K to activate the search box and jump to the tool you currently need. In addition to that there is the option to pin tools to the dashboard to make them easily accessible in the future. Please test these features to see if the navigation is more convenient for you this way.
NN
This is great, I am using cloud server of siteground, am I get benefit for mobile speed performance specially webP format image after this migrations process. And What is the ETA for complete the whole process?
Marina Yordanova Siteground Team
If you use our SG Optimizer, you will be able to create webP versions of your images with a single click. We don't have ETA for this yet.
Alexander W Smola
Using webp will also consume thousands of Inodes FYI, just optimize your images and resize.
Hristo Pandjarov Siteground Team
Enabling webp creates duplicate of all your image files. It is normal and expected to increase the number of inodes you have.
Sabi
G'Day Team, I recently moved my website on GoGeek plan from Singapore DC to Sydney DC. So is the underlying infra of GCP in Sydney DC using N2 CPUs or that's another phased rollout?
Marina Yordanova Siteground Team
Hello, yes, the Sydney data center is using the faster N2 CPUs already.
JM
Like Ian Atkins above we have also seen a performance drop of over 20% since the migration. I've raised a ticket (3686889) but despite providing evidence I'm not getting any acknowledgement that there is a problem. I just want performance to be no worse than before. What's my next step?
Marina Yordanova Siteground Team
We have migrated several hundreds of thousands of websites to the new servers, but up until now we have received only a few signals about slower loading. These occurrences were related mainly to the first few days after the migration when our backup script runs for the first time and might cause a short slowdown. Also, please keep in mind that sites are dynamic systems which evolve by adding new queries, clients and orders over time. Their impact should also be considered when analyzing your data. I can see that our Support representatives have checked the server environment where your site resides, but did not discover a server setup issue. They are suggesting to activate CloudFlare CDN to increase the loading speed, which is quite useful and shouldn't be viewed as a workaround.
Ind Sinha
I would be liking to look for a second account with SG but want a service that is not related to Google in anyways. And if I do want a Google hosting (or domain) - they are doing it directly now, please see https://cloud.google.com/solutions/web-hosting - this has quick reliable support as well as a free plan to test the waters. If that be the case, what is the benefit in using a reseller service (like ?SG) ? Is it not better to have direct relationship with the provider? I think, this is an area of confusion, as many people came to SG so that they do not have to use big G in the first place. And so far there was no problem with speed or reliability with SG and whoever its data-center was.
Hristo Pandjarov Siteground Team
The product you can get from Google directly is a completely different thing. We use them as DC and infrastructure provider on which our own software runs. We've always used an upstream provider for our hardware since owning data centres is a completely different business, we've just switched to the Google ones since we believe they are the best for our needs at the moment.
Ittone
I'm afraid that I have to agree with Ian's statement about the large drop in page load response times of 10-20% since our own account/server change. This is very apparent on both mobile and desktop pagespeed test. Our account (three sites) was upgraded over the weekend of 6/7th June 2020 here in the UK and I had to raise a complaint fault on the 9th. June following complaints of page load slow response from our dedicated Blog users who noticed it first. Using Pingdom/Webpagetest and Google Pagespeed I have always monitored and tuned my site with a URL containing the largest amount of data and media from our four thousand plus webpages. The Google pagespeed for this URL has always been.......Mobile ~85........Desktop ~96 Since the server change of yesterday the same URL is now reporting..... Mobile ~41....Desktop ~61. In the end I had to stop using Cloudflare to, can you believe it....better the figures to around 65/80. Siteground Tech. support scratched their heads and in the end moved my account to yet another server.....but.....the response problem still exists. The main problem showing across all our sites is an intermittent TTFB delay of anything upto four seconds which is shown on a reports waterfall. This has never been the case prior to the Google cloud 'upgrade'. Now, July and our DA has dropped from 43 to 37 Unhappy customer pondering on whether to move his account to a competitor before his site rankings drop off the radar completely.
Hristo Pandjarov Siteground Team
Your issues have nothing to do with SiteGround and the changes, described in this post but with CloudFlare and the way you have configured it. When you measure TTFB while using CF, you are measuring it from their edge point to the test server location / your IP depending on how you perform the test. Since by default CF does not do full page caching, it might be even slower than loading your site directly from us on the same continent. If you're targeting clients in UK mostly, make sure you're in our London DC, disable Cloudflare and make sure that you're using the SG Optimizer and the dynamic caching is working. If those checks are met, you should get 40-180ms TTFB results. As for the rest of your site score on mobile, that's mostly development work that has to be done on it if you want to accomplish better results.
I.T. Tone
Hi Hristo I'm afraid I have to disagree with you, the reponse issues do appear to be Siteground related. Only one of my sites uses Cloudflare, and as mentioned above ALL three sites are suffering the intermittent long duration TTFB response and inferior pagespeed results. Just to clarify, our main site which was using Cloudflare prior to the server upgrade produced pagespeeds of 85 for mobile and 96 for desktop. (Pretty good for 100 images and a lot of text.) After the upgrade it was 41/61 (average) and after switching off cloudflare this went to 65/80... With no URL changes having been made to our test URL for a couple of years tells me that my main site does not require any further development work. Mobile score was originally 85.....not too bad, but dropping to 41 and then after disabling cloudflare we cannot better 65. As for a ttfb of 40-180ms on our main site.....I wish!......Top end perhaps. With so many similar complaints of poor site responses since the upgrades from users not only on this forum who actually monitor the performance of their site/s, and multiple users also reporting poor responses globally since the completed upgrades must tell you that Siteground just may have moved to a problematic section of the Google network. The servers are significantly faster so it can't be them......can it? Cheers I.T. Tone
Hristo Pandjarov Siteground Team
Well, it seems something else went wrong with your website. Comparing PageSpeed scores doesn't really give any meaningful information since it is affeted greatly by many things, most of which related to the way your site is set. As I said 40-180ms is normal TTFB for sites hosted with us that use the SG Optimizer and that have a working Dynamic caching. It is surely not a global problem. If you think about it, since we switched to GCP, almost every plugin in the WP repository got an update. It could be anyone of those updates. You can shoot me an email at hristo.p [at] siteground.com and I will look into your sites and tell you exactly what is wrong and slowing them down :)
Daniel
Hi Hristo, has the rollout to the new N2 CPUs been completed? It mentioned a couple of weeks end of May, but I did not notice any notifications or email that it has been happening on our geek hosting. How would I know that the switch was done? If not, do you have an ETA for when the transition will be completed? Thanks.
Hristo Pandjarov Siteground Team
All servers are already updated to the new CPUs :)
Renato
Hello. Are we going to get a data center in Brazil or South America soon?
Hristo Pandjarov Siteground Team
We will add more DC locations to the list but at this point I can't name exact locations or when they will be available.
Billy
I really like the new Siteground with Site Tools. I was a customer a long time ago when cPanel was used. I left, and then came back last year because I realized you’re one of the best web hosts. It’s such a nice experience now. I just renewed my services. Thank you. Please if you continue to expand, keep prices reasonable. Remember the little folks who run websites as a hobby and don’t make money with their sites (and therefore need good, fast, and reasonably priced hosting). :)
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