SiteGround partners with Cloudflare to bring their customers enhanced speed and security.

SiteGround & Cloudflare: Partners With Aligned Values

SiteGround offers managed web hosting services for personal websites, online businesses, and enterprises. Hosting more than 500,000 domains in 5 data centers on 3 continents, speed, security and support are the three essential pillars of SiteGround’s hosting service as they strive to provide the best of each to their customers.

“Providing clients with the best website speed and security possible has always been a priority for us,” explained Nikolay Todorov, Chief Technical Officer of SiteGround. “SiteGround was growing fast, so we needed partners that could help us scale quickly and efficiently. Partnerships like the one we have with Cloudflare allow us to do just that, while also helping us improve the product we provide and make it more valuable for our clients by giving them easy access to a service they would normally have to seek out on their own.”

An Easy Partnership

“Before choosing Cloudflare we considered a couple of other popular CDN companies, but Cloudflare’s solution matched our needs best. Cloudflare offered both a reliable CDN service to complement our already strong in-house performance offerings and a powerful set of security features to bolster the security of our customers’ sites. The other solutions were too complicated or were only affordable for big, enterprise clients without offering any serious advantages. We wanted a solution that we could offer to all of our clients including small to middle-size businesses, without any compromises on quality, reliability, performance, or security.”

"Cloudflare is unquestionably a reliable and trusted partner for us..."

“Cloudflare is unquestionably a reliable and trusted partner for us,” stated Todorov. “Thanks to Cloudflare’s collaborative spirit and willingness to work closely with us, we succeeded in creating the most beneficial plan for our customers and have continued to expand that plan over time. In 2013, a year after we launched the integration with Cloudflare, we added support for Railgun which is one Cloudflare’s advanced performance features. More recently we added Cloudflare’s WAF security feature.”

Because of Cloudflare’s positive impact for their customers SiteGround worked to make it easy for their customers to quickly begin using Cloudflare. Todorov noted “We designed a special interface for Cloudflare’s features that helps our clients see the feature in context, navigate to it with a single click, and start using it instantly.”

Often times integrating a new partner can be difficult, but Cloudflare worked to ensure SiteGround’s onboarding was as easy as possible. “When implementing new software in the beginning it is normal to have difficulties,” said Todorov. “Luckily, whenever we experienced any issues, the Cloudflare team was very easily approachable and quick to react. That’s what is more important to us – knowing that we have a trusted partner whom we can turn to at all times. We had and continue to have smooth communication with Cloudflare and they are always fast to address any questions or issues as they occur.”

Maximal Performance, Security, and Support for Customers

The SiteGround customers most attracted to Cloudflare are mainly people and organizations with websites that have a lot of media content, high traffic volume, and a global visitor base.

50-60%

FEWER REQUESTS TO ORIGIN SERVERS

“CDN is definitely the feature we love the most!” exclaimed Todorov. “Cloudflare gives us the most reliable CDN infrastructure with multiple and ever-growing data center count that serve to make our clients’ websites load quickly for visitors from every region.” Cloudflare has data centers in over 330 cities around the world that cache and serve content from SiteGround customers’ websites. By serving content closer to the websites end user, geographic latency is reduced and web page performance is dramatically increased. “Prior to implementing Cloudflare’s services,” explained Todorov “we didn’t offer a CDN service for our clients’ websites. Since implementing it, we managed to reduce the load time for all of the websites hosted on our platform, and reduce between 50-60% of the number of requests we served directly from our origin servers.”

“Along with CDN, the most beneficial added benefit of Cloudflare’s service is the DDoS mitigation, which protects our customers’ websites from Denial-of-Service attacks trying to take them offline. Plus, our security is even further enhanced with Cloudflare’s Web Application Firewall (WAF), which we just added to our service offering. In fact, most of our clients choose to upgrade their plan because of the benefits of the Web Application Firewall, especially our customers who build their websites with applications like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and Magento by leveraging Cloudflare’s always-up-to-date ruleset.”

Todorov concluded: “Cloudflare complements our business by helping us increase sites’ performance, security, and support. Тhese three points are the key pillars of SiteGround’s services. Thanks to our partnership with Cloudflare, we managed to strengthen the speed and security measures for our clients even more.”