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We had a chat with Jack Oderland, CEO at our Diamondsponsor Oderland, about WordPress, it’s future and what they do to make WordPress better.

What does your organization do?

The simple version? We’re a premium web hosting company. We’re focused on delivering great hosting experiences for customers who value performance, stability and the right support at the right time.

With our Premium line of hosting plans, you have access to Elastic Sites. With it, you can scale up or down resources on a web hosting plan (that’s right—no VPS required) as you need. For more resource-heavy applications we’ve got you covered too, of course, with our Managed Server line.

We like technology and have some extra features in all our web hosting accounts that you won’t find everywhere. From one-click SSL certificates via Let’s Encrypt to Git, memcache, shell access and other developer-friendly tools. And as a WordPress developer, you might appreciate built-in support for wp-cli across the board too!

How do you help support WordPress enthusiasts and professionals?

As a hosting company, we are at a good position to provide meaningful help for WordPress enthusiasts and professionals.

Our infrastructure supports a wide range of tools that are extra helpful for WordPress websites. One example is built-in WP-cli on all accounts, another being caching solutions like memcached.

Regular WordPress users might not appreciate this as much as our developer friends. They will, however, appreciate the support and assistance available to them. Such as helping to optimize a WooCommerce store for performance. Or our security scans and patching features to help everyone stay secure.

Agencies love our partnership setup where we help to offer hosting services to their clients. It’s quite a bit different than your typical reseller or affiliate setup. Our agency customers tell us they love it.

What kind of client would be a good fit for you, and who wouldn’t?

After 20 years on the Swedish market, we’d like to think we know who the ideal customer for us is.

If you value solid performance, then come talk to us. Our plans are targeted at offering premium technology at a good price.

Agencies will feel right at home too. We have special flexible program to help agencies provide hosting to their customers. It’s more than just your standard reseller package.

On the other hand, if you’re just looking for the cheapest space available, we aren’t the host for you. Your business critical website needs more though, doesn’t it?

How does your organization contribute to WordPress and the WordPress community?

In addition to trying to advance the technology that we can offer customers who work with WordPress, we are committed to the WordPress community as well.

WordCamps are an important part of the WordPress community. We regularly sponsor WordCamps in Sweden and now Oslo too.

Our headquarters are in Gothenburg, Sweden and we head up the local WordPress meetup group. Where we can, we also like to contribute code back to various WordPress-related projects. Just as you, we like seeing WordPress grow and succeed.

Do you think there are any specific things we as a hosting company can do for the community. We’d really love for you to tell us. Don’t be shy!

What’s your best WordPress tip or trick?

Our support team got to choose from the top questions they got. SSL certificates were one of them.  As you probably know, most if not all websites will need to switch to HTTPS by July.

One of our favorite FAQ among our clients is this one about activating SSL for WordPress (Swedish): https://www.oderland.se/support/artikel/hur-aktiverar-jag-ssl-for-wordpress/

What’s your biggest pain with WordPress, and how would you change it?

There are many things in need of improvements, as always. One thing springs to mind though, when viewing WordPress from a true, global, CMS perspective (as we should): Multilingual support in core.

While there are great community efforts addressing multilingual support, they aren’t at the level of user friendliness and performance that a core solution would be. Developers would be able to create better solutions, editors would have cleaner workflows and users a better experience.  With such a large percentage of the world needing multilingual solutions, it’s about time, frankly.

How do you see the future of WordPress?

We are in a transition phase for WordPress. As the entire web becomes more modular, so will WordPress. With the REST API inclusion in 4.7, using WordPress as an application framework got even easier.

In say, five years time, that’s where we will be really at. Using WordPress as a component-based framework to create powerful next-generation websites and web applications.

Anything else you’d like to tell the Norwegian WordPress community?

We’re really happy to be at WordCamp Oslo for the first time this year. Everyone who visits keep saying how fantastic the event is.

If you have any thoughts about WordPress hosting, we’d love to chat with you. We’re here to listen to you and hear what’s on your wishlist. With this, we hope to help solve your problems and make your life a bit easier.

… And by the way, we are hiring! We are looking for senior UX/frontend developer for work in Gothenburg, talk to us or send us an email.

Enjoy WordCamp Oslo! We’re proud to have the opportunity to be a sponsor.

We have had a chat with Edmund Turbin from our sponsor WP Engine about what they do, what’s good about WordPress and how they contribute to the WordPress community.

What does your organization do?

WP Engine provides a Digital Experience Platform around WordPress. The WP Engine platform allows customers to use WordPress without having deep knowledge of servers, security and optimization that one would need to be a WordPress expert.

How do you help support WordPress enthusiasts and professionals?

I have had an amazing experience traveling through Europe representing WP Engine as an evangelist and technical expert. I have had the honor of speaking at many WordCamp events and I have attended contributor days to learn and share with other folks in the WordPress community.

What kind of client would be a good fit for you, and who wouldn’t?

I enjoy working with complex solutions and it is always a pleasure to figure out how something can be done that initially looks like it’s a challenge. Turning a “no” into a “yes” is an awesome reward and can be a great achievement.

How does your organization contribute to WordPress and the WordPress community?

WP Engine sponsors many WordPress events and several of our employees are regular contributors to WordPress. In addition, we also publish a leading resource for the WordPress community, Torque. An award-winning publication, Torque is dedicated to providing new and advanced WordPress users with expert insights and information to help them create, grow and optimize their WordPress sites.

What’s your best WordPress tip or trick?

It can be easy to build a WordPress site, but difficult to optimize and make it run efficiently. Using performance monitoring tools like New Relic to understand bottlenecks make your user experience better by improving speed and performance.

What’s your biggest pain with WordPress, and how would you change it?

One common issue that comes up frequently is excessive use of plugins, which can decrease performance. It’s easy to add a plugin, but resisting the temptation and actually coding can be a great learning experience and with massive benefit to the performance of your digital experiences. You can build exactly what you need to meet your requirements rather than use something that has some of what you want and other things that don’t get used.

How do you see the future of WordPress?

It’s amazing to see the rapid growth of WordPress to nearly 30% of all sites on the web. I’m positive that number will continue to grow and there will be an increase of applications that integrate with WordPress via API. The REST API opens up doors to other applications and systems that take advantage of what WordPress can do and display it in a different format.

Anything else you would like to tell the Norwegian WordPress community?

Norway is one of my favorite places to visit and I really enjoy meeting the community. I’m looking forward to seeing you all this year!

[NORWEGIAN ONLY]
Vi hadde en kjapp prat med Kenneth Stensli, Partner Manager hos vår sponsor Collector.

Hva er det din organisasjon gjør?

Vi leverer Betalingsløsninger som er spesialisert mot netthandel. Vi leverer også Factoring, belåning og andre finansieringstjenester.

Hvordan hjelper dere WordPress entusiaster og profesjonelle?

Vi leverer betalingsløsninger til netthandelen som øker konverteringen i din nettbutikk

Hvordan type kunder passer hos dere, og hvem gjør ikke det?

Alle nettbutikker eller bedrifter som selger varer eller tjenester over nett er en meget interessant kunde for oss.

Hvordan bidrar din organisasjon til WordPress og miljøet rundt WordPress?

Vi gjør det enkelt for kunder å installere våre betalingsløsninger i WooCommerce.

Hva er ditt beste WordPress tips?

Bruk Collector Checkout WooCommerce Modul og øk konverteringen i din nettbuitkk.

We had a chat with Erlend Eide, the CEO of our sponsor Servebolt, about WordPress, the WordPress community and what they do to contribute.

What does your organization do?

Servebolt provides the fastest WordPress and WooCommerce hosting available in the market today. We guarantee that your site will be faster when hosted by us, and you can expect to cut response times in half – or more.

How does Servebolt help support WordPress enthusiasts and professionals?

We contribute to the community financially as sponsors, as volunteers (Thomas is the Lead Organizer of WordCamp Oslo), as speakers, as translators, plugin developers and performance experts – and all over the internet and in real life as WordPress and WooCommerce enthusiasts.

What kind of client would be a good fit for you, and who wouldn’t?

We do hosting without cutting corners, by delivering extreme peak performance – without basing performance on full page caching. Our hosting is fast because of kick-ass hardware, a self-maintained software stack designed for performance and security, and a world-class R&D team that develops and optimizes the stack to the bleeding edge in regards of performance. Not everyone needs that. But if you need high performance, scalability and a reliable environment that is amazingly fast, we’re the right fit.

How does Servebolt contribute to WordPress and the WordPress community?

For us, the WordPress community with Meetups and WordCamps are essential to meeting the right people, and to plant our ideas, spread our vision and make our contributions available to the community.

The community is the cornerstone of WordPress and is essential for making better sites with WordPress, especially since many WordPress professionals work alone or in small teams. This is why we support the community as best we can with sponsorships of Meetups and WordCamps, and share our performance knowledge with the community.

What’s your best WordPress tip or trick?

The simplest one-off trick to speed up WordPress is to use better hosting. The second best tip is to use less plugins. We’ll share more about how you make your own WordPress site blazing fast in our session on contributors day – be sure to participate!

What’s your biggest pain with WordPress, and how would you change it?

We see WordPress from the hosting perspective, and address the biggest pain points in WordPress in our Servebolt Optimizer plugin for WordPress. It is primarily aimed at Servebolt clients, but may also do good for sites with other hosting providers.

How do you see the future of WordPress?

Servebolt believes that WordPress will be powering even larger E-commerce stores, especially as WooCommerce continues to professionalize and evolve. We also believe that WordPress will be increasingly used as a backend and CMS, and less just for the front-end application.

Anything else you would like to tell the Norwegian WordPress community?

Our partner network is open for submissions. Our affiliate program is ready for you to earn easy money. And we’ll love to chat with every WordPress professional, and agencies large and small about a partnership. We want to help you build better websites!