News from our team, events, and communities we support
We’ve been thinking for quite some time now what will be a cool way to extend our resources and help you get your websites and business up and running, and here we are – starting a fresh educational initiative through webinars. We’ve got some of our partners excited about this idea too and will cooperate with them to bring you first hand experience and knowledge on the nitty-gritty of setting up and running an online business.
Photo from brotherhoodofiron.com
If we had to sum up web hosting in a simple formula, it would be: servers + people. The first part is easy – anyone could get servers. Maybe not the best ones out there, but essentially, servers are relatively easy to find. But what makes the big difference, are the people. Combine good hardware with the unique approach of skilled professionals and the attitude of great people and you get a unique product. That’s our company’s philosophy and in order to achieve it, we need unique HR practices. We recently had a new wave of fresh talent hired for the SiteGround Technical and Customer service departments and in the heat of the new training season, we decided to tell you a little bit more about what it takes to become part of our team.
Yes, we turned 9 last week! So many things have happened since we initially registered our domain name (on 22nd of March, 2004, which date we have chosen to celebrate as our birthday), that I feel like we have started it all in another lifetime! But what is SiteGround now, nine years after it was founded? As part of the birthday event there were lightning talks given by different people from the company, who felt like sharing some thoughts and ideas with the others. There were no rules who will talk and what will be the topic covered. However, what people chose to talk about naturally became a very good representation of what SiteGround is curently really about:
When you hear “end of year recap”, you probably imagine a big hall full of bored people that cannot wait for the managers to finish their polished presentations. Well, not when the recap event is happening at SiteGround! What we had instead, was a totally transformed office with one half of it looking like a gambling room with Roulette, Black Jack, Texas Hold’em and hot hostesses and the other half reminding of the Olympic Games and holding sport tournaments. These gaming activities were followed by the real yearly recap presentation that I bet was more fun and had better hosts and videos than the last Oscars. And the whole thing ended up with what can be surely awarded as the best night-life event of the year.
Last week we returned from the inaugural Joomla World Conference – the first worldwide gathering for Joomla fans from all over the globe that was held in San Jose, California! As you probably know, we’ve supported and attended quite a lot of Joomla events this year, each of them absolutely fantastic and different in its own way, but this one turned out to be really special for us! Why? What really made a difference was the atmosphere and the feeling of the event – unlike the first Joomla events we attended when we felt a bit new to the community and didn’t know almost anyone, at the Joomla World Conference it was exactly the opposite – we felt like part of the community and being there wasn’t just about meeting new people, it was more like meeting friends! But most of all, it was the amazing SiteGround customers we met there and their great stories they’ve shared with us.
Continue reading “Joomla World Conference: a story by different storytellers!”
Waiting for the results of the first official customer survey to come out was one of the main thrills during the last few days in the SiteGround offices. Now that we have the results submitted and processed and the winner of the iPad selected, we are impatient to share all the survey news with you!
Having slept over the SiteGround team building that was held this weekend, I suddenly realized how symbolic the event was. It all started, when few of the key SiteGrounders decided that we should aim for the top of the highest mountain peak around (2,925m / 9,596ft high). At the hiking day the weather was far from friendly with strong chilly wind and occasional gusts of rain. At first many people were skeptical about reaching the top, as the track itself was not an easy one. However, at each obstacle there were two forces that helped us move further up: first, the contagious enthusiasm of the people ahead of you and second, the reassuring support from the people next to you.
Continue reading “Team Building 2012 – another peak we’ve conquered together!”
Hello, hello – your conference aficionado reporting again! Our support for open source project events continues and I’m eager to tell you about the last JoomlaDay we sponsored and attended – JoomlaDay Chicago 2012 – August 10-11. We must be very lucky, because just like all the conferences we’ve been attending this year, JoomlaDay Chicago made no exception and was a total blast – amazing talks on Joomla and hosting, passionate community members, friends and lots of beer fun! Read on, to feel the vibe!
Continue reading “JoomlaDay Chicago – yet another amazing Joomla event!”
As you should already know, this year we’ve been actively supporting the Open Source communities by sponsoring and attending different community events like JoomlaDays and WordCamps all over the world. Last week, few SiteGround pals and me embarked on a journey to fly us to the beautiful San Francisco for the biggest WordPress community event – WordCamp San Francisco. The event was amazing and without any further ado I’ll try to share the highlights of our experience there!
Continue reading “The SiteGround WordCamp San Francisco Experience”
Only few days after we moved to the new office we were happy to welcome our first very special guest: Brian Teeman. He is one of the Joomla founders and an amazingly interesting person to listen and talk to. He spent two days with the SiteGround team sharing with us his love for Joomla, his viewpoint what a good customer service is and his great sense of humor. It is just impossible to tell you everything we learned from him during the multiple sessions he held for our team in a single blog post, but I just need to share few of the things my fellow SiteGrounders pointed out as memorable:
Continue reading “Brian says…. or what did we learn from Mr. Teeman – one of the Joomla founders”
