Our review of 2019: bigger, more colorful, more sustainable.

"The year was exciting" is probably written in every annual review. For us, it's still true. Simply because of the growth of our team and our platform. This article is a thank you to our customers and employees. And to all those who want to become one.

Raidboxes is growing - and becoming more diverse

The demand for our managed hosting for WordPress and WooCommerce is increasing significantly. Over 7,000 customers now rely on the leading WordPress hosting in the German-speaking world, and we are seeing this in all areas. And with that, the Raidboxes team has also doubled in size.

What began in 2014 with three people as a start-up in Münster has long since grown up. We are still young, unconventional and dynamic. And we value that too. The cornerstones of our colorful team:

Raidboxes is more diverse than ever: six of our 20 colleagues are female. This means we are still a long way from where we want to be. But for IT and WordPress, that's a very good figure. Our managing directors and the team have worked hard to achieve this, even though it was anything but easy.
More customers also mean more tasks: And that despite new employees. Raidboxes manages this primarily because we rely on the holacracy management model. This means flat hierarchies, independent work and happy faces. Because everyone can contribute their individual strengths.
Strong brand: A capital increase will help us to further expand our market position as the leading WordPress hoster in the DACH region. It will also enable us to grow into other European countries.
Distributed working: There is now not only the Münster location, but also home offices in Hamburg, Magdeburg and Freiburg via remote colleagues.

Raidboxes is one of the few companies that supports collaboration in the remote model. Even in the WordPress scene, this is not yet a matter of course everywhere. See our blog post on the advantages & disadvantages for employees and companies.

The eleven new faces in 2019:

Ariane is responsible for administration and happy management
Auke actively supports the system administration
Marcel sets up sales together with Neele
And another Marcel, he and his colleagues take care of product development
Milva and Frauke provide top support
Me (Michael) and Annie conjure up content for marketing
Sebastian and Jesus join the development team

Raidboxes continues to grow. Do you want to help realize the best hosting platform for WordPress worldwide? Then become part of the Raidboxes team now.

Sustainability @ Raidboxes

Alongside growth, sustainability is our most important topic in 2019 because we want to make our positive development as climate-friendly as possible. #GreenHosting has been a matter close to Raidboxes' heart from the very beginning. It's not for nothing that we are the first climate-positive WordPress host in the German-speaking world, probably even worldwide.

Hosting Plant Trees — Our partner Eden plants a tree for every new contract with us

If you run a website or an online store, you consume a lot of resources. We counteract this for you. This year, we have once again significantly increased our commitment - also thanks to our customers:

For every WordPress site or WooCommerce store that you host with us, we plant a tree for you. In 2019 alone, we will donate over 29,000 trees!
Our Christmas campaign: For every new BOX added in December, we will finance 10 trees instead of one.
At WordCamp Europe in Berlin, all camp participants were able to make a mark at our stand and hand in a card for climate protection. Our promise there: For every vote received, we will plant an additional tree. But also for every participant. In the end, 3000 new trees were planted.
Raidboxes uses 100 percent hydroelectricity for hosting and the office. We are aware that not all green electricity is the same. That's why we pay attention to strict framework conditions with our energy partners.
In addition to compensating for green hosting, we are gradually implementing a corporate philosophy that focuses on sustainability in all areas. You can find out more about this in our article Green Hosting for WordPress.

We are constantly working to live up to our social responsibility. And hope that the models mentioned will find many imitators.

Of course, we also ask ourselves when companies' ecological approaches are authentic: Does a sustainable internet even exist? How "green" can WordPress really be? In the text WordPress and sustainability you will find the current status of the discussion in the German-speaking WP community.

One lever that is particularly interesting for developers, agencies and bloggers: simplify the source code of your plugins and themes, update old code libraries or remove them, compress your images. Every byte that is not transferred saves resources. Your code is used on a large number of websites. The total traffic that is saved through careful development is therefore multiplied! See our article on reducing HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

Note: Do you have an initiative or an idea on how to make WordPress more sustainable? Then get in touch with us or let us know in the comments. We'll report on it, or maybe even sponsor your idea.

The mission of Raidboxes

What contribution can our company make to the common good? And what vision are we pursuing? Addressing these issues is also part of sustainability. Our team used several workshops to develop a suitable corporate vision for Raidboxes. The results include

Turnover - as a symbol for an economic indicator - is particularly important for investors, employees, founders and suppliers. However, they also create the basis and the necessary security to be able to act sustainably.
Our mission is primarily focused on the customer. Our mission is to give freelancers, WP professionals and agencies more freedom when it comes to hosting. And thus give you time for the really relevant things.
The article Advantages of Managed WordPress Hosting shows how we support you in concrete terms. In particular, read the sections on saving time, reducing costs and scalability.
All Raidboxes employees can use this mission as an argument when it comes to shaping their role (see "Holacracy" above).

Regular team events are also part of the Raidboxes program. This helps us to think outside the box. And it welds us together. This is particularly helpful for new employees.

Raidboxes Team Events — Part of the team wakeboarding

We live the slogan "Create more freedom" every day. A small example: We had an internal discussion about the procedure for PHP updates for WordPress. Is every customer responsible for carrying them out themselves? And are they obliged to do so? This would definitely be the simpler solution for us and our support team.

With our mission in mind, we finally developed a check mechanism for PHP updates. After an auto-update, this automatically tests whether the result is identical to the initial basis before the update. If not, it reverts to the old version. At the same time, every customer is given the freedom to keep their old PHP version in the event of problems.

We also give ourselves more freedom - and a better culture of discussion within the team. Raidboxes sponsors courses on non-violent communication (NVC) for its employees, among other things. Trainer Marianne Oshege regularly comes to our office to introduce us to the model. Through non-violent communication, we learn how to recognize conflicts among ourselves more quickly and with greater awareness. And how we can resolve them better.

Heroes in support

Our fabulous support team makes you happy every day. In chat, on the phone, at WordCamps, on social networks and at Trusted Shops, we regularly hear how unique our support is. In addition to our technical features for WordPress, this is what sets us apart from other web hosts.

Trusted Shops currently gives us 4.92 out of 5 stars. Jan, Milva, Frauke, Jeffrey, Tino, Johannes and other colleagues will answer you within minutes. And not within hours or even days:

Personal
In your language, during your working hours
From Germany
On several channels
Without an anonymous call center

With us, you're dealing with "real" WordPress experts. I emphasize the "real" because it is unfortunately not a matter of course on the hosting market. You can reach us in live chat every day from 8 am to 10 pm. Even at weekends and on public holidays. Our support is so well received that some people can't wait to deal with it 😉

The Raidboxes Blog

This year, we have greatly expanded our WordPress magazine OUT OF THE BOX. High-quality blogs with a clear thematic focus are the perfect tool for acquiring new customers. But also to provide existing customers with important information. This is reflected in OUT OF THE BOX's success figures. The associated newsletter alone currently has over 3000 loyal subscribers.

We now cover all the important topics relating to WordPress in our blog. This is thanks to our new content strategy, which allows us to reach our readers even more precisely. The key points that were added in 2019:

Team of authors: We are working much more with guest authors and expert interviews. This allows us to cover additional topics for which we do not have 100 percent expertise. Or for which there is no free capacity in the team.
Diversity: The diversity of the content and our keywords that we cover on Google also significantly loosens this up.
More resources: The content team has been expanded to include myself and Annie. Among other things, this allows us to produce more articles on WooCommerce and new e-books.
Editorial planning: We have been using an editorial plan for some time now. Our Content Manager Leefke has significantly intensified the associated process once again, for example with a fixed rotation of topics.
Variety: In this way, we ensure that no category is neglected. And that our keywords are used according to a predefined weighting.
Target groups: In future, we will focus more strongly on the target groups of WP agencies, freelancers and WP professionals. This includes our new categories Agencies & Freelancers and Online Marketing.

As part of the strategy, we were able to recruit several well-known authors for the blog. For example Jan Tissler, Daniela Sprung, Torsten Landsiedel, Sven Scheuerle and Dominik Stein. This gives WordPress additional awareness and reach.

Note: Are corporate blogs also exciting for your business? Do you have questions about our content strategy or our experience with it? Then feel free to use the comment function at the end of the article.

At the beginning of 2020, our WordPress magazine will be significantly expanded once again, with a completely new design and more focus on our core topics. Let us surprise you and subscribe to our newsletter to stay up to date.

The Raidboxes partner program

We owe our growth to our customers, but also to our many partners. We want to invest even more in this area in the future. And you can be part of it. The following opportunities are available:

Become one of our FREE DEV partners and host your projects with us now for free. You'll receive up to €1,500 commission for every new customer. More than 800 agencies and WP professionals are already taking advantage of this opportunity.
Do you run a portal yourself, are you a blogger or do you publish on another channel? Then take a look at our classic partner program (affiliate) for WordPress and WooCommerce hosting. Here, too, you can earn commissions far above the industry average.
We are currently looking for cooperation partners: We will include you in our attractive network around WordPress and WooCommerce. The first cooperation partners include, for example, Händlerbund, Weglot and TemplateMonster.
Content partnership: We are not only on the lookout for guest authors from the WordPress scene. We are also happy to exchange ideas with your blog or magazine about WordPress & WooCommerce.

Do you have questions about the individual models? Or further ideas for cooperation with us? Then feel free to contact us or use the comment function here.

Product features and improvements

We regularly receive very good feedback on our managed WordPress hosting features. Do you have an idea on how we can improve? Submit suggestions for improvement at any time via the feedback forum in your Raidboxes dashboard. Take a look at the ideas of other users and vote on them.

Here is a list of the most important features we implemented in 2019 With the help of the Raidboxes community:

E-mail inboxes

Until 2018, we didn't offer emails due to our specialization in pure WordPress hosting. But here, too, the community has convinced us. In collaboration with our partner mailbox.org, we now offer you secure email communication from anywhere. Our mailboxes are GDPR-compliant, hosted in Germany, ad-free and climate-neutral.

Functions such as encrypted mail transfer (optionally via PGP), anonymous email headers, virus and spam protection, blacklisting, redundant storage and webmail ensure that you have full control over your mailboxes at all times.

By far the most common type of attack on WordPress sites are brute force attacks or unauthorized login attempts. The RB Login Protector prevents these malicious attacks. It uses a known mechanism and improves it: Limit Login Attempts. This means you no longer need an additional plugin.

You can set exactly how many failed attempts are allowed before an IP is blocked. And how long blocked IPs should be blocked. In addition to the blocking rules, you can also define a whitelist. IP addresses on this list are not excluded.

WPML multidomain

With WPML Multidomain, you can now assign a separate domain to each language of your website. You can use the settings to turn your BOXES into multidomain BOXES. This makes it even easier to implement multilingual projects:

Are you planning to translate your site with WPML in the future? Then take a look at our article Multilingual WordPress. It shows you how to use WPML to internationalize your site. And which settings make sense.

WordPress multisite

Many users wanted WordPress multisites on our BOXES. The work on the feature was extensive, after all, multisites should also be easy to set up on Raidboxes with just a few clicks - fully automated and including multisite domain mapping.

Note: The new multisite functions are available in an open beta. You are welcome to test them.

Advanced WordPress templates

The WordPress templates from Raidboxes are an extremely practical feature. It saves you a lot of time when managing and developing projects. Our customers can now create up to 35 templates for WordPress and WooCommerce. Previously there was a maximum of 10.

With the templates, your favorite plugins, themes and favorite settings are always preconfigured and ready to use when you start a new project. Use them to clone pages with similar content. For example, one template for customers from industry A and one for industry B. This means you don't always have to start from scratch with the configuration.

BOX status

In the first version of the status overview of our BOXES, you can read out the utilization of the CPU and RAM. More information will be added soon, such as detailed log files. This will simplify your monitoring. You will also be able to react even better to large visitor loads.

Extended caching

Raidboxes' server-side NGINX caching becomes active before WordPress takes over. This means we deliver your websites extremely quickly. The advantage: you no longer need a separate caching plugin. However, you need to set up exceptions for some sites. For example, with WooCommerce, otherwise the shopping cart may not work correctly.

You can now use your BOX settings to specify exactly which parts of your website should be cached and which should not. We define default settings for the most common use cases. They can be adjusted at any time if required. You can create as many rules as you like via the caching settings of your BOX.

Features 2020

In the coming year, you can look forward to some new features that will take even more work off your hands. And which will make your websites even more powerful. These include

Content Delivery Network (CDN)

Due to the GDPR and WordPress 5.0, the introduction of CDN has unfortunately been postponed once again. It is now planned for the coming months. A content delivery network is a network of servers that are strategically distributed across several locations worldwide.

This allows you to further optimize the performance of your websites: The geographical proximity of the end user to the CDN nodes reduces the latency between client and server. This is particularly important if part of your target group is very far away. Thanks to its distributed structure, a CDN also guarantees optimum data throughput, even with large load peaks.

BOX status v2

Our status overview is far from being at its limit. We are already working on new functions. For example:

Cache usage
Breakdown of your files within the WP installation
Speed analysis of your site
ResponseCode listing

and much more. We focus on functions that provide maximum support for the day-to-day work of your agency or when working on your website.

Other innovations

The other features are also quite impressive. They save you even more time and money when hosting, developing and managing your WordPress projects:

New infrastructure: We are working behind the scenes on a new technical infrastructure. With even more speed and more flexible development environments.
WooCommerce: Extended functions make your online store more productive. For example, the much sought-after topic of caching for WooCommerce.
Performance: Every millisecond counts online. We get even more out of it for you. With server-controlled CSS/JS and automatic image minification, among other things.
Security features: We already protect you effectively against hacker attacks. But we want to keep getting better. This includes automated WordPress salts or SALT keys.
Improvements for agencies: Collaboration between several employees is further optimized through more efficient team management in the dashboard.

With Raidboxes, we have created a platform that is as easy to use as possible. It gives you the flexibility to create WordPress sites and collaborate with others. As a freelancer or in an agency, the finished product can be seamlessly passed on to your customers. That was and is our mission - also for the coming year.

WordCamps 2019 and 2020

Raidboxes regularly sponsors WordCamps in Germany and Europe. This is one of our contributions to the community. WordCamps are meetings of WordPress and WooCommerce users. There are lectures, workshops, discussions and question-and-answer sessions on various topics related to the CMS. A WordCamp usually lasts one to two days. It is planned and carried out by a volunteer organization team.

Technical topics play just as much a role as agency work or the marketing of blogs & co. The most important thing there is the shared exchange: there is no other place where you will find so many experts on WordPress. Do you also want to network? Here are a few event tips for 2020.

Matt Mullenweg Raidboxes — WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg has Raidboxes explained to him in Berlin by Johannes (left) and Torben

This year, we supported the following WordCamps financially, and in some cases also organizationally. We were on site with a stand at most of them:

WordCamp Osnabrück in March. Leefke and Johannes were part of the core organizing team. You can read their exciting insights into the community work in the Osnabrück recap.
WordCamp Vienna in April.
In June, the Europe-wide WordCamp Europe in Berlin provided exciting insights into the future of WordPress. The "new" editor Gutenberg will do away with many old concepts - freelancers and agencies will have to adapt to this. With over 2,700 participants, the event was not only one of the largest WordCamps in Europe, but one of the largest in the world.
WordCamp Zurich and WordCamp Nijmegen in September. Both communities - Switzerland and the Netherlands - have grown even closer to our hearts.
In September, we sponsored the Press4Word Conference in Israel and the WordPress Meetup Day in Potsdam.
The same goes for WordCamp Stuttgart and WordCamp Düsseldorf in November. The event in Stuttgart was a pioneer in terms of "green" camps, with a sustainable and diverse agenda.

Would you like to meet us in person next year? So far, the following WordCamps have already been confirmed:

Meet us in Austria at WordCamp Vienna on February 15 and 16.
Or in Belgium: The WordCamp Antwerp/Antwerp will take place from March 27 to 29.
WordCamp Retreat Soltau: From April 30 to May 3, 2020, an extraordinary camp in the middle of the countryside - WordCamp, events, leisure activities, access to the community, meals and accommodation all in one.
WordCamp Europe 2020 in Porto: Bem-vindo in Portugal! We'll be there from June 4 to 6. Networking and talking shop with WordPress fans from all over the world.

We will keep you informed about other WordCamps here in the blog or via our newsletter. You can also meet the Raidboxes team at events such as CloudFest in Rust near Freiburg, the Online Marketing Rockstars Festival (OMR) in Hamburg or DMEXCO in Cologne.

Thank you.

Our growth would not have been possible without you. Whether you are a customer, partner, employee or just reading our blog. The Raidboxes team wishes you a peaceful Christmas and a great start to the New Year. See you soon!

Raidboxes with Matt Mullenweg at the WCEU

Your questions about Raidboxes

Do you have questions about Raidboxes, our mission or our features? We look forward to your comment. Do you want to be informed about new posts about WordPress and WooCommerce? Then follow us on Twitter, Facebook or via our newsletter.

Table of contents

Our review of 2019: bigger, more colorful, more sustainable.

Raidboxes is growing - and becoming more diverse

Sustainability @ Raidboxes