3 Things You Probably Don't Know About SiteGround Clouds

We introduced our new cloud platform built on Linux containers almost 2 years ago. Since then and especially during 2016, we have seen a very dynamic development in this service. There has been a sharp increase in the number of new cloud hosting accounts opened with SiteGround, as well as a threefold increase in the upgrade activity within existing cloud servers. So, we recently took time to analyze our users behavior and we have some interesting findings that we would like to share.

Our Clouds are Now Used by Really Big Websites

At the beginning, most of our cloud users were mainly people, who had simply outgrown their shared hosting plan. Their sites were just a little bigger than the ones we host on our shared servers. That is why we came up with an entry cloud configuration, that provides affordable access to a powerful cloud platform to any website.

During the last year, though, we witnessed a major shift in our cloud user base – more and more bigger production sites were starting to use our cloud service, and they needed more resources. To adequately address these new needs, we have recently substantially increased the parameters of our Entry plan.

Clients Configure Their Own Cloud Resources

One of the features we were particularly proud of at the launch of our Linux containers cloud was the flexibility it provided. The “Create Your Own Plan” link may not stand out prominently on our website, but this is obviously an yet unmatched resource flexibility option that SiteGround clients appreciate and use intensively.

It turns out that every second cloud we manage has a custom configuration different from the ones predefined on our website. This comes as no surprise, as none of our immediate competitors provides a similar and easily available feature. Another explanation is that adding more resources to our cloud plans is practically seamless. Our container based platform allows each user to upgrade their CPU cores, memory or space at any time without delay or downtime.

The Hidden Treasure of Our Cloud Service is The Autoscale Feature

Our autoscale feature allows automatic adding of resources to a cloud account in times of traffic spikes without any service interruption. The system checks the resource usage every 5 seconds and when an increasing consumption is noticed, it reacts in accordance with the settings.

The Autoscale is highly valued, especially among a certain group of our customers, who tend to run marketing campaigns that result in irregularities in their incoming traffic and whose website availability is more than critical for their business results. However, it seems that there are still many users, who are unaware of the existence and the real benefits of our autoscaling. So, if you haven’t found and used this hidden treasure yet, the upcoming Black Friday and Cyber Monday are just the right time to activate the feature. All sources project record-breaking traffic spikes and with our auto-scaling your site will be ready to meet them!