Interaction with Tenko Nikolov, Chief Executive Officer of SiteGround.com

Daily Host News had a chance to interact with, Chief Executive Officer of SiteGround.com. Here are the excerpts:

1. Tell us something about yourself and your position in SiteGround.

I am the Chief Executive Officer of SiteGround.com. I have been with the company almost from the beginning. Eight years ago I started as a regular Support Team member. The amazing atmosphere and growth opportunities at the company motivated me to dive deep into the web hosting industry and continuously search for new ideas, technical problem resolutions and improvements, and to contribute to the development of the company. In few years time I had gained great experience and had gradually become senior support, than team manager, VP of Technology and in 2007 I was assigned as a CEO of the company.

2. Give an overview about your company, its origin and services?

SiteGround was founded in 2004 by a bunch of young enthusiasts who had just graduated from college. The founders had a contagious desire to create an extraordinary company and they combined it with a great feel for recruiting extraordinary professionals. Together we have worked hard, tried to think ahead of problems and managed to establish a solid business with reliable services and unstoppable innovation potential. True to our principle to provide our customers not only with web hosting space but with all resources required to create a successful website – such as free website tutorials, templates, extra tools and expert support – we were able to build a large base of satisfied customers. During the years we have extended our offer from the standard shared hosting to Semi-Dedicated, Cloud VPS and Dedicated servers, in order to suit the various requirements of our clients.

3. What do you offer which is unique to your company?

The thing that makes us unique is the quality of technical expertise we have on all levels.

First, on server administration level, we have invented several tools that addressed issues most of the other shared hosting providers would never bother to try solving at that time and would accept as inevitable flaws of the shared hosting platform. To give you only few examples:

1.We are the first to offer the ability to use multiple PHP versions on one and the same hosting account. Until this invention all shared hosting providers had the following choices when an application using a different PHP from the mainstream was concerned: they should have either run a separate server with the appropriate PHP for this applications only, which was not economically wise, or they should have rejected service to those customers.

2.We are among the first to apply a chroot isolation of shared hosting accounts and thus provide unseen before security, by minimizing the chance for hackers to attack a whole shared server through a single compromised account.

3.We have invented the fastest automatic monitoring system that checks and solves many problems, that would take hours in a standard hosting company, in just a few seconds.

Second, we are proud with our level of expertise in the field of the applications our customers use. We have not only created our own resources like templates and extensions for Joomla, we also provide real and expert support to our customers for the use of hundreds of applications to an extent that even hosting providers specialized in hosting just one application seldom do.

4.What is the most exciting as well as challenging part of your business?

The most exciting part is when we come up with an elegant technical solution for problems that most people in our industry think of as unsolvable. The biggest challenge in shared hosting though is that there are too many hosting companies, who try to attract more customers by pushing the prices down. The most challenging as well as exciting part is to be able to keep our prices competitive and at the same time to maintain the high quality of our services.

5. What is your take on eco-friendly hosting?

Eco-friendliness is quite a buzz-word nowadays and unfortunately many hosting companies misuse this term in their ad campaigns and on their website, with the main goal to sell more. We don’t do that. Although we do things to protect the environment (e.g. we do have an eco-friendly dedicated server; the SiteGround team has attended a tree planting initiative, etc.), we do not run on the green PR lane. My colleagues and me, we prefer to be personally environmentally conscious in our day-to-day personal and business activities and be able to leave a clean planet to our children (especially now that I am a new dad :), than to brag with it for business purposes.

6. Where do you see SiteGround in next 5 years?

We aim at becoming more visible on other markets than the USA. We already receive a lot of positive feedback by our customers in Europe, Asia and the rest of the world and we have plans for providing even better services for them. As for the technological development we will strive to keep our leading role as an innovator in the shared hosting segment.

7. Is there anything new you are coming up with to offer to potential customers?

We have many new thing to introduce. To mention only a few: For the last few months we introduced a new cloud based VPS solution and a brand new architecture for our semi-dedicated service that is seven times faster than standard shared hosting. We are also planning to introduce multiple server locations to our customers very soon. Our clients will be able to choose in which country they want to host their web sites. We are working on a new and improved User Area which will have easier navigation and will especially offer an easier start for new customers. We are also planning to be more involved in the communities around the main applications our customers use by sponsoring some of their events and sending some customers to visit them. And there are many other things coming on the road.