We sat down with Maik Gruppen from managed WordPress hosting company Savvii to talk about WordPress and WordCamp Stockholm 2017.
What does your organization do?
Managed WordPress Hosting for European agencies and entrepreneurs that is fast, secure and stable. From the community for the community.
How do you help support WordPress enthusiasts and professionals?
First of all, all not-for-profit WordPress related sites host for free at Savvii. Secondly, we believe that sharing = caring. We are very focused on helping the community with relatable and actionable content. Not only hosting related. For example: How agencies can grow with recurring revenue models, how WooCommerce shops can prepare for the holiday season or which themes are a smart choice to implement. We also host events that are not WordPress specific, like PHP and tech meetups.
What kind of client would be a good fit for you, and who wouldn’t?
Especially three types of clients are very happy with us: Agencies, developers, and entrepreneurs, like publishers or bloggers with a large audience. We only do WordPress hosting and nothing else, period. That focus is real important to us. Companies looking for generic hosting solutions, like domains and other-than-WordPress CMS’, are not our target audience.
How does your organization add value to the WordPress community?
We do a few things that are implemented in the core of Savvii. We’re community-driven. That means we organize Meet-ups (WordPress Meetup Nijmegen, our home town) and help organizing others. Also, we’re contributing much to WordCamps. Not only by sponsoring, but also by volunteering, coming to Contributor Days with a large team and by giving talks. Next to that, we develop for and with open source software. For example, our plugin, Warpdrive, is open source. We also contribute development time improving open source software.
Is there anything in WordPress that you would change, and why?
We would love WordPress to be friendlier to the modern developer, for example with a MVC set-up, and to stop supporting ancient PHP versions. We also would like WordPress to become even more friendly for enterprise customers with a better roles & user rights system.
Where will WordPress be in 2 years from now?
Aah, the good old crystal ball, like Automattic, we are a strong supporter of net neutrality. That is going to be the next battle of the Internet, and we’re going to fight it together. As for the software itself, because more and more (bigger) companies adopt WordPress, a shift to more enterprise features will be necessary. Think of high availability options, better multisite and multi-language options built-in and more granular user management. At the moment though, it looks like development is heading the other way, with Gutenberg focusing on a broader audience.
Is there anything else that you would like the WordCamp attendees know?
I am giving a workshop about recurring revenue for agencies on the Contributor Day and I am combining it with some Roman history. So if you want to know how to grow your company with a subscription model and learn some cool facts, please join us! And if you’re interested in talking with us: We’re the guys in the blue Wapuu shirts!