Why I am leaving Siteground as a host.

Dynamic Caching

The first big issue that Siteground dropped on me was in early 2020 when suddenly I found that I could no longer see any changes made to existing pages when I published my sites. If I introduced a new page to a site then it would show up online but changes to existing pages were not appearing online in a browser.

My first two calls to Siteground support got me nowhere. The technicians had me rebooting my router to see if that was caching the site somehow and that didn't solve anything. 

Only on my third call did the support guy mention that they had introduced something called Dynamic Caching which basically keeps an image of the website on the server at Siteground and serves that up to anyone accessing the site via a browser. All well and good but what happens if the website has some new content to show I asked. The answer was that Wordpress would recognise that a change had been made and flush the cache. But I'm not running on Wordpress I said. There was no equivalent mechanism for automatically flushing the cache for non-Wordpress sites.

 It became apparent to me then that Siteground were primarily focussed on their Wordpress customers and hadn't thought about the impact on the 60% or so users in the world who don't use Wordpress.

There was a button to press once someone logged into the Siteground Site Tools screens that would flush the cache but it was impractical to do that every time that some piece of content was changed. Support guy number three explained that there was a way to disable the caching using some lines of code in a file called htaccess and I have been using that method on sites at Siteground since that time - i.e. disabling Dynamic Caching as it is more trouble than its worth for any dynamic sites that have regular content updates

Access to CMS denied

Roll forward to the 17th October 2024 when I was contacted by a new client I had been working with for a while. Her site was in development on one of my test sandbox sites and she wanted to make some last minute changes to the text using the Admin page before I copied the site over to her live site. However she told me that when she went to the Admin page and logged in with the PIN code she couldn't see the existing text to edit. Everything was blank, even though it was still showing correctly on the relevant content page.

This got me scratching my head for a while trying to debug what was going on and I suddenly thought to check some other sites. To my horror I found that every single site I had hosted by Siteground, that had Total CMS or Easy CMS installed was exhibiting the same issue. There was no data being displayed on the Admin pages. 

There were a ton of error code 403 messages showing in the development console for each Admin page which means that access to the data was being denied - specifically access to the Total CMS API file was being denied as Joe Workman, the designer of Total CMS pointed out. 

All my other sites that had Total or Easy CMS but were running at different hosts were working as expected so this was an issue specific to Siteground. They had obviously changed something somewhere to deny access. I suspect once again they hadn't considered the possible knock on effect on their non-Wordpress users.

I was all this time trying to get help from Siteground support. Gone were the days when I could just ring them up and talk to someone technical and knowledgeable. The first barrier to talking to someone was an AI system that might work for minor errors but is useless in this situation. Then I got through to a customer support person on a chat session. The first few times I tried this they denied that anything had been changed at Siteground to cause this. By now I was able to point out that this wasn't just happening to me because at least one other person in Canada and one in the US I think was having the same issue. 

It was at this point that I was invited to pay an extra charge to get 'expert' technical help. I baulked at that one as I didn't see why I should have to pay to find out what Siteground had done to deny access to the API that kept my websites working.

On my third attempt, with a different site, I got lucky and the customer support guy agreed to escalate the issue to technical support who came back with the answer I expected - that Siteground had indeed introduced a new security check which effectively blocked access to the Total CMS API.

They could and did undo that security check but only at a site level so then we went through a period where I was going through a complex process of getting into a chat session with the support team and asking them to ask the technical team to undo the change that was preventing access to the Total CMS API would allow individual sites to work again.

Obviously at this point I was asking, wherever I could, why on earth could they not undo this change at a global level?  Eventually one day some weeks later, this appeared to be what happened I believe. At least some of my sites and my clients' sites that I had identified as potentially effected by this issue, suddenly began to work properly again. I can only assume the Siteground had indeed undone this change globally.

So why am I still migrating my sites and my clients' sites to another hosting company?

I'll not deny it. It is a ton of work. For each site to be moved I have to:

1. Take a backup of the data including the CMS folder containing the variable data
2. Set up the site on another hosting company which includes setting up an FTP session, a no-reply email address and configuring SSL security at some point
3. Publish the site to the new hosting company
4. Copy the backed up CMS folder, the htaccess file, favicon files etc to the new location 
5. Update the nameservers on Siteground to point to the new hosting or transfer the domain name away from Siteground. (This can take a few days). 

The fact that a name server change can take up to 48 hours to completely propagate around the world and that a .com transfer request can take up to 7 days to be executed, makes the workflow for this process quite complex. I have to keep records of where I am in the process and although I can be executing some steps of the migration plan for another site, I have to keep in mind where I am in the process for all the other sites I have previously migrated.

Given that I have personally nearly 30 sites on my own hosting and my clients have potentially upward of 45 sites on their own hosting at Siteground it is going to be a long haul.

My overwhelming feeling is that I no longer trust Siteground hosting to support me (and more critically my clients) with a robust service. I feel that:

1. I have been on the receiving end now of two of their changes, both of which have impacted my ability to give my clients a good service. As I said before their main focus appears to be on their Wordpress users to the detriment of anyone else. Having spent a good part of my IT career as a Systems Development Manager for GE this raises serious concerns for me about the robustness of the systems development life cycle, testing and processes that Siteground are employing when making changes to their technical architecture.
2. When I flag up an issue, through what has become a very cumbersome to use support system, the people I have an online chat to, do not seem to be technical support - in fact I am being offered the chance to pay for expert technical support which is ridiculous. Both times I have had a major issue, the support team that I have contacted were not aware of any changes being made. At least thats what they told me. If I had been an isolated case in the recent issue and hadn't been able to quote other developers with the same issue, then I'm not sure that I would have been able to get any sort of escalation at all. As it was it took me 11 days before someone took me seriously.
3. This sort of long delay in getting any sort of resolution to problems potentially has a knock on effect on my clients ability to use their websites correctly and my reputation as a trustworthy developer. Luckily I don't think that any business that I deal with has suffered a financial loss because of the issues I have highlighted but its not hard to imagine a scenario where the inability to speedily update a website might have serious business implications.

Considering that I am personally paying Siteground over £900 a year in hosting and domain charges I no longer feel I can justify this level of expenditure for the service I am getting. So I am continuing with the process of  moving all my own sites, plus friends and family sites on my own Siteground hosting to another hosting company and encouraging my clients who have their own Siteground hosting to do the same. 

For any client of mine where I have built a website for them and launched it using the client's own Siteground hosting I will be contacting them to see where in the payment cycle they are for renewal of their package and whether it is appropriate for them to consider having their site(s) migrated away from Siteground.