The SiteGround Blog

How the Vary HTTP Header Can Be Bad

Vary is а powerful HTTP header that plays a significant role in how your website cache is working. When this header is set correctly, it ensures that your site visitors see the right content, regardless of the caching applied. However, if this header is set up incorrectly, it can totally overrule even the benefits of the best caching system and cause resource overusage. In this blog post, I want to shed some light on how the Vary header affects your SiteGround hosted site and specifically our caching system, and to show you what's the recommended use of Vary header for your site.

To crawl delay, or not to crawl delay?

Taming bots not to consume extensive amount of hosting resources has been an ongoing task for us. After the successful launch of the new Anti-bot AI system, which has already blоcked more than 1 billion hits only from malicious bots, we’d like to shed some more light on another measure in that area - the crawl-delay setting. Read on to find out what it is, why you might want to consider it and why we no longer apply a default crawl-delay setting on our servers.

Our Top Customer Care Rep in May

Our Top Customer Care Rep of the Month Velizar can easily solve complex technical issues, but he can also masterfully play Mozart pieces on the violin, or tell you about War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. He has a wide range of interests and an amazingly positive personality, which is probably why so many of the customers he serves are happy.

14 Years of WordPress Playlist

It's that time of the year when we're getting ready to celebrate another WordPress anniversary. Tomorrow, May 27th, WordPress turns 14! To mark the occasion the SiteGround way, we made a playlist featuring a track by every musician that's ever had a WordPress release named in their honor. The mix did wonders for our productivity in the office, so we decided to share it. We hope it makes your day better, whether you had to spend it working on your website or celebrating. Enjoy and a Happy 14th Birthday to the whole WordPress community!

Let’s Encrypt Interface New Options

Making SSL certificated accessible and used by everyone has been our ongoing effort for more than a year now. We were among the first to provide the free Let’s Encrypt certificates. Then, we automated the SSL issuing for all accounts. Later, we upgraded our WordPress plugin, SG Optimizer, to allow 1-click WordPress SSL configuration. Now we’re making the next step - our latest upgrade to the Let’s Encrypt tool in cPanel allows you to force all your domain traffic through HTTPS with a single click regardless of the application you are using. Read below to find out what are the new options in our Let’s Encrypt interface.

How our new anti-bot AI prevents millions of brute-force attacks

For the last few days we have been gradually launching a new AI-based bot prevention system on our servers developed by our own DevOps specialists. We are already seeing amazing results from the operation of the system. Each hour it blocks between 500 000 and 2 million brute-force attempts across all our servers. Thus, we have prevented an unknown number of potential unauthorized logins, but what is even more important -- we have managed to save an enormous amount of server resources that can now be used for a meaningful and legitimate activity by our users.

Our Top Support Rep in April

Elena is a member of our Technical Support team and this month she became the top rated representative by our customers. So we interviewed her about her life in and out of SiteGround. Find out her favorite books, music and why she thinks she doesn’t actually work a single day in her life.

SG Optimizer – Our WordPress Plugin

In 2012 we released a SiteGround WordPress plugin. Its purpose was to connect the WordPress installations of our users with our caching service - the SuperCacher. For many years all updates we have made to the plugin were only related to the caching functionality. However, in the last few months we have added two completely new functionalities (HTTPS switch and PHP 7.0 updater) and have changed the plugin name to SG Optimizer. To learn more about what is now included in the SG Optimizer read below.