All SiteGround Accounts are Now Using Site Tools

Mission Accomplished! The last one of our cPanel servers was switched to Site Tools yesterday. We are so excited to see this long and complex migration come to an end as now each and everyone of our customers is safely brought to the new era of SiteGround development. A year and a half ago we started the transition from a 15-year old server setup, dominated by third-party software that was inevitably putting reins on many of our boldest dreams, to the new state-of-the-art hosting management platform, driven by our own unique server software. Since we launched our first server on the new platform in 2019, we were finally able to unleash the full potential of our imagination and we have already created a lot of speed, security and usability improvements that would have never been possible with the old platform. And, we know that the best is yet to come!

The idea and vision for our new cutting-edge platform was born about 4 years ago and soon after, we dived into building SiteGround’s Site Tools and new Client Area. We started onboarding new clients to it in the summer of 2019, but switching all our existing clients was a hugely complex task that took us another 1.5 years and tons of hard work. Here’s a glimpse of all the effort that went into this complex migration process to explain why this is such a milestone and a proud moment for us.

Large Number of Accounts and over 3367.46 TB of Data Migrated 

The huge amount of live hosting accounts and website data that had to be transferred from servers with cPanel to servers with Site Tools setup was a fundamental part of the challenge. Performing such a massive operation successfully required a meticulous organization of manpower and resources. During the past 1.5 years our management team spent countless hours coordinating teams and shuffling resources to ensure that we are migrating away from cPanel in the fastest and safest way possible for our clients. To sum it all up, we transferred a total of 15 774 servers with 3367.46 TB of data on them in the period from September 2019 to April 2021, and that is a huge deal! 

A Multitude of Use Cases and 44,000 Lines of Code Written for Migration Automations

Besides the large volume of data, the second biggest challenge was the multitude of edge cases that had to be reviewed and addressed with a solid technical solution – multiple applications set to use absolute paths in their configuration; websites with either addon, parked or subdomain infinite setup option; multiple addon domains using the same database; and more! Our DevOps, Software Engineers and Technical Support teams all had to dig deeper into identifying, analyzing, and providing a solution for each of those cases. Once we identified them and crafted an efficient solution for each, we got to automate it. Our DevOps would write scripts for pre-migration checks to detect matching potential issues on a server, call special migration rules for them, and then run post-migration checks to make sure nothing was broken. If anything did go wrong, we would audit the scripts and get back to coding to improve them. In addition, in case of any issues with the automations, our Technical Support representatives would take over by running manual website checks and fix them.

We had 35 of our experts in charge of writing migration scripts, iterating, testing, and enhancing their code over and over until we made them as fast and efficient as possible. Together, these dedicated professionals lived and breathed this project every day, writing 44,000 lines of code in total to get us where we are today.

Our Best Record: 8985 Accounts Migrated in One Day 

In the beginning, we were shyly moving at a few hundred account transfers per day with a high fail rate, meaning we had to go over many of them manually and fix any issues that might have been caused by the migration. Thanks to the constant improvement of our scripts and our admins’ growing expertise, we managed to speed up the process tremendously and drop the fail rate significantly. It all led up to our record-breaking day – March 7, 2021 when we migrated 8985 accounts in a single day!

60,000 Hours Invested in Manual Post-migration Verification

Another big challenge was our determination to move all of the accounts in the shortest time possible without affecting the availability and functioning of the sites. As explained above, manual checks were an intrinsic part of the process, no matter how much the fail rate was dropping. We counted 60,000 human hours in total distributed among 160 000 accounts that were audited for post-migration issues and manually fixed after.

So many new features now available to all!

On behalf of the whole SiteGround team, make yourself at home with Site Tools! Here’s a short overview of the new features you will enjoy:

  • Easy multiple website management under one login, 
  • Seamless team work by adding website collaborators,
  • One-click transfers of ready-made sites to your clients,
  • Giving your clients  white-label access to their websites’ Site Tools, 
  • Interfaces designed in line with accessibility standards,
  • Faster MySQL setup,
  • Unique Ultrafast PHP setup,
  • Top speed technologies being implemented much faster on the Site Tools servers such as Brotli compression, support for the Webp image format, and more.

We are truly excited and proud of being able to provide so many new features and service improvements to all our customers in such a short time. Despite the adversities, we have proven once again that even the most ambitious goals and complex processes can be successfully mastered when the best team runs a tight ship, paddles in the same direction and gets the best source of motivation – the trust of all our beloved clients and the desire to deliver the best customer experience!

author avatar
Tenko Nikolov

SiteGround CEO

For the last few years Tenko Nikolov has been one of the masterminds behind the success of SiteGround. He has come up with multiple successful strategies for overcoming technical problems and has achieved real business results for SiteGround. His vision and skills have made SiteGround a leading host in terms of technology and platform reliability.

Comments ( 38 )

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Isaac Nueton Rubarema

Apr 02, 2021

Thank u Stgrnd for the hardwork, I have been using the services so far for 2 years and I don't regret anything. Long serve Siteground!

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Henry Tong

Apr 15, 2021

SG is the best host service for us now, we have paid for over 5 years now. And we have enjoyed the best service some years. Hope our sites can be improved as perfect sites this year.

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Ian Franzen

Apr 06, 2021

Do you think there will ever be integration with WHMCS?

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Hristo Pandjarov Siteground Team

Apr 06, 2021

No, we will not integrate WHMCS, it is part of the WHM and cPanel system and not compatible with anything else. We will, however, extend the Site Tools functionality, so please monitor the blog for new functionality added :)

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Lex Jansen

Apr 06, 2021

Statistics are much more limited than before. Will something like AWStats return?

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Hristo Pandjarov Siteground Team

Apr 07, 2021

We are providing all the necessary stats for a proper account management. AWStats is a nice tool but most of the information it provides isn't really being used. What information about your account are you missing?

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Elizabeth Spiegel

Apr 06, 2021

Documentation needs a lot more work as the interface is far from intuitive. A promotional video tells me how wonderful it is, but not where my emails are going missing. Hosting has become a lot more expensive over the last couple of years and I'm seriously considering moving.

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Hristo Pandjarov Siteground Team

Apr 07, 2021

We're constantly working on improvement of our documentation as a matter of fact as early as next week we will have a lot more articlecs about every single tool in Site Tools available in our Knowledgebase. I am sorry that you had issues with your mails. Those are very rare and usually occur because of a custom mail setup. In such cases, please contact our Support team. My colleagues will happily assist you.

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Peter CS

Apr 06, 2021

We had a lot of problems with the new dynamic caching and had to have you turn it off for our sites as it interfered with our (bespoke) login authentication. Is there a specification available of the dynamic caching protocol so that we can adapt our software to use it? I'm afraid that that, and several other issues, made it less than a smooth transition for us.

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Hristo Pandjarov Siteground Team

Apr 07, 2021

Best would be to install the SG Optimizer plugin which will handle cache clearing and will provide you with all the exclude options you need - per URL or per post type. Alternatively, your app can pass the proper no cache headers for the pages you want out of the cache. Last resort would be to comletely disable it: https://www.siteground.com/kb/disable-dynamic-caching-website/

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Andrew C

Apr 06, 2021

Kudos to your team. I’ve been waiting patiently for the migration and was pleasantly surprised when the requirement to change the IP address was no longer there. Great job that was essentially seamless to the end users

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Hristo Pandjarov Siteground Team

Apr 07, 2021

Thank you for the kind words!

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Rick - XTREME IT

Apr 06, 2021

Thank you all at Siteground. I migrated from another service a couple years back. The services and support from Siteground is nothing but Stellar! I’m so happy and my clients love the speed and support I’m able to offer them. I’M A LIFER!

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Kris

Apr 08, 2021

I have a feedback concerning File Manager extract operation that always output contents as full paths rather than absolute paths for example; ABCD.zip contains ...\1234\*.* If I extract ABCD.zip in File Manager, it always output archive like ...\ABCD\1234\*.* dissimilar to cPanel. So I have to drag ...\1234\ folder in ...\ABCD\ to target folder every time I update or install an application. It will be perfect If there are extract option like full paths or absolute paths.

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Hristo Pandjarov Siteground Team

Apr 08, 2021

Thanks for the feedback, I will pass it on to our team that manages the File Manager tool :)

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Jane Aitkens

Apr 08, 2021

Under Site Tools, I don't see any FTP accounts and my FileZilla doesn't work. Do all FTP accounts have to be recreated?

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Hristo Pandjarov Siteground Team

Apr 12, 2021

Check in your other Site Tools instances. FTP accounts are migrated but under your main domain. For addons that now are separate instances you need to recreate the accounts.

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Jubel

Apr 09, 2021

Is there any plan / option for deploy website (Google Cloud) via Siteground on India any location.

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Hristo Pandjarov Siteground Team

Apr 12, 2021

We don't have a DC in India and at this point we don't plan on adding one.

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Jose

Apr 11, 2021

We are happy to see the change come although when we updated to GoGeek nearly a year ago we were expecting to have these services like all new users. We feel penalised for upgrading our account rather than not having been explained that only new hosts were receiving these services for the same cost or less than those of us who have upgraded.

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Hristo Pandjarov Siteground Team

Apr 12, 2021

Starting new, blank accounts is easy since Site Tools was ready couple of years ago. Unfortunatelly, migrating accounts with content, configurations and sites that should not be damaged by the process proved to be very, very difficult task. You should not feel penalized because until the last cPanel server we ha, services like the latest PHP versions were maintained accordingly.

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dec

Apr 12, 2021

... i thought i asked already: does this mean we don't need other caching/optimization plugins; or do they work in tandem ie complementary?

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Hristo Pandjarov Siteground Team

Apr 12, 2021

No, install and configure the SG Optimizer for best results on our servers :)

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Peter Ashford

Apr 13, 2021

I have moved back to Siteground (ex customer from cpanel a few years back). The new interface works well for my requirements and is simple to use. A lot of hard work has obviously gone into this. Performance has also really improved and the issues I had in the past have gone. There is only one thing missing for me and that is the staging tools for Joomla installations. Your site plans don't say this is only a Wordpress feature at point of purchase, so I didn't discover until I signed back up. Why was this removed? Please bring it back - saves so much time. thanks Pete

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Hristo Pandjarov Siteground Team

Apr 13, 2021

At this point we don't have plangs to bring back or develope a new staging tool for Joomla. You can use one of the staging extensions in JED for this purpose.

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Peter Ashford

Apr 13, 2021

That is disappointing. Why did you choose to remove this? Can you update your plan details to make this clearer for new customers? In the go geek sales blurb it says "our staging allows you to create a copy of your site..." no mention of only Wordpress, which is very misleading..

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Hristo Pandjarov Siteground Team

Apr 14, 2021

We have deprecated this tool simply because it wasn't used by many of our clients. Thanks for reporting this text though, although it doesn't specifically say we have a Joomla staging, I will make sure it's addressed.

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Moshe

Apr 14, 2021

I'm extremely happy with the migration, makes life a lot simpler. Just one comment, as I use the filemanager a lot, the new SG Filemanager is quite small on the page, it would be amazing if you can add a fullscreen feature or something. What I do at the moment, and I'll post it here as it might help others in my situation, I added in my browser a bookmark with this js snippet javascript:const pos = document.getElementsByClassName('file-manager-dynamic-toolbar')[0];const selector = document.getElementsByClassName('st-site-select')[0];pos.parentElement.insertBefore(selector, pos.nextSibling);document.getElementsByClassName('file-manager')[0].setAttribute('style', 'position:fixed;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;z-index:70;'); pos.setAttribute('style', 'overflow:unset');selector.setAttribute('style', 'background: transparent; overflow:visible;');selector.firstChild.setAttribute('style', 'color:black;') Thanks

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Hristo Pandjarov Siteground Team

Apr 15, 2021

Thanks for the recommendation, I will pass it on to the PM team :)

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AWhite

Apr 27, 2021

Thanks! That would definitely be helpful.

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Peter stanyer

Apr 15, 2021

Siteground is a bit expensive but I have had great support and it's fast. I cant fault the service its always be up and running. A few more idiot guides would be helpful for this like certificates and ftp.

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Lam

Apr 19, 2021

Great job to all the team, it's one of the best hosting companies. And best customer support always.

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John S.

Apr 21, 2021

Best hosting ever. So far ahead from competition.

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craiger

Apr 25, 2021

In my cloud account, each of my hosted wordpress sites was in its own cpanel to prevent the possibility of malware infecting other sites in my account. Is that still the case after my account was migrated? In other words, are each of my sites in their own "sandbox?"

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Hristo Pandjarov Siteground Team

Apr 26, 2021

Now, each site has its own Site Tools :) Yes, accounts are fully isolated from one another and one can't affect another in case of a malware infection.

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AWhite

Apr 27, 2021

Wow, I didn't realize you have been doing all this enormous work behind the scenes! And I've been in and out (clients' sites) for over 3 years. Great work! And SG Optimizer plugin is superb, I only wish it was available for other hosts. Your support was always the best in this industry. Keep up the good work and we'll keep bringing you more clients.

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Philip

May 04, 2021

It is quite incredible what you have achieved with this upgrade… I love the new simple easy to use tools it is such an improvement.. All the fiddly cluttered third-party software was frustrating in cPanel… this is great progress! It's hard to describe the difference between my previous hosts and SiteGround… you guys put so much work into what you do... I certainly can't imagine taking my business anywhere else… Are you guys are quite simply the best… Thank you so much for all you do!

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Hristo Pandjarov Siteground Team

May 10, 2021

Thanks for the kind words, glad you like it!

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