SiteGround Hosting Crowned #1 As New Home

We are pleased (more like THRILLED) to announce that we have upgraded our hosting service here at JPIN Supply to SiteGround Hosting.

After a long and extensive search here are some of the reasons why SiteGround Hosting became our top pick not just for this site but our entire brand.

Our parent company, Just Picture It Now, entered into the world wide web with Blogger in 2005. Back then, it was more of a dare and a curiosity. Could a single person make world wide reach and stake a claim here on the internet?

To our delight, and admittedly surprise, we found out we could. But how does one leverage this to the best of their ability in an environment that is rapidly changing and advancing?

It became obvious that our first step was to gain ownership of the content we were creating. In 2005 sites like Blogger were, and still are free, but you don’t own that content, Google does.

We took ownership of our content with our own domain and hosting starting in 2007.

Ownership isn’t enough however. You could have the best idea or product in the world. The most eloquent and compelling copy or writing style imaginable. If your foundation can’t match the weight or the rush – the entire idea or project struggles to survive.

That was our problem in 2019. We built JPIN Supply to sell our great products. In only our third year of marketing, with record traffic and skyrocketing sales our foundation began to crack. Load times became slower, and we began to get notices of our entire site going offline. It wasn’t so much the length, 5 minutes here, or 10 minutes there. It was the frequency of the down time that gave us pause.

Not to mention advancements in technology and how all this internet stuff works. Things like PHP, the programming language or software that let’s you not only find, but read an article like this. Imagine being stuck with Windows XP instead of Windows 10 as an operating system. Slow, unsupported, and lacking any new technology.

Servers, the computers that house and store your site and all your data are also a major factor. When making the switch over to SiteGround Hosting and talking with our old hosting company, the representative mentioned that “these were the old legacy servers”, which personally made us cringe. That’s like working on an old Pentium III when today’s hardware offers Core i7.

Our old service was also nickle and diming us to death. Older services that we were paying separate fees for like e-mail and an SSL are now bundled together with this new hosting plan. The e-mail was simply a bonus, and a nice surprise. However, an SSL, which secures and encrypts important data (especially for a retail site like ours) is a must. This cost savings alone reduced our yearly expenditures so much so, we were able to include and lock in two additional years of hosting when we made the switch.

The back end, what’s been typically known as the Control Panel, or CPanel has been completely redesigned and customized. This is the connection to your server, where your website resides. While we really liked the new look and design, we’ve been viewing the same design and layout of CPanel since 2007. It was familiar and we knew where everything was. SiteGrounds new design is extremely easy to navigate and incredibly clean. It took no time at all to find what we needed for things like File Managers, FTP, SSL Certificates, CDN’s, even those free e-mail accounts.

Other features that came as a nice surprise was the SG Optimizer. Here you’ll find killer features like the SuperCacher, a dynamic caching application which will drastically increase the performance of your site. You can also use the SG Optimizer to enable HTTPS with a single click. You can also configure and upgrade your PHP version to the latest, and most stable version without worry. We jumped from PHP 5.6 to 7.3 during our migration and it’s made a world of difference. (Think Windows XP to Windows 10.)

Speaking of migration, SiteGround Hosting offers a free plugin that migrates your site from the old hosting plan with just a few simple clicks. We used the Migration Tool for this site, and it was not only effortless, but flawless. In a nut shell, it migrates your site automatically and then lets you preview the new site. If everything looks okay, you simply click a button to accept and then change your DNS servers to point to the new domain.

A second and much older site we’ve had hosted, did require some assistance, and they can help with that too – free of charge. It takes a bit longer, but everything is migrated for you via a support ticket, and once complete you accept and change over the DNS servers as before.

While we made this move back in January after a self inflicted site crash – we wanted to put this new hosting through it’s paces. Test it out, and see if it lived up to all the hype. Reading about and researching is one thing. But when you’re selecting a new home for a labor of love like this one – that’s a totally different story. After several months of working with this new hosting plan and fine company, we are more than just pleased, we’re ecstatic.

As someone who’s built and maintained a number of sites for more than a decade now, we wouldn’t call ourselves an “expert”. Just an average person, who geeks out and can get lost for days on end in this kind of stuff. We have seen quite the evolution and have had various degrees of success in getting true organic traffic and sales via sites we’ve hand built from scratch.

This was a new step in our evolution. An important move forward in our growth and stability. It’s not something we take lightly.

With that said, SiteGround Hosting has blown us away with features, ease of use, speed, and service. We couldn’t be happier and are immensely pleased with our new home. SiteGround is far ahead of the curve, and by all accounts committed to keeping it that way.

We believe we’ll be calling this home for many years to come.