Harambee! Raidboxes and team.blue – even stronger together

The word “Harambee” is Swahili and means something like “together” or “pulling together”. With this in mind, Raidboxes is now part of team.blue, making it a “big player” in the European WordPress hosting market.

I keep reminding myself of Harambee because it puts into words exactly what we have been living at Raidboxes since 2016: Collaborative thinking and a shared mission to transform the WordPress hosting market in the B2B sector across Europe as one team. And, above all, to give agencies, freelancers and companies that earn their daily bread with WordPress more freedom for their own business.

The beginning: Good. Better. gutado.

We developed Raidboxes out of our own frustrations and aspirations that Johannes and I experienced in 2016 as owners of a small internet agency called gutado. Back then, there were only large, generic hosting providers in Germany. For real WordPress hosting specialists, we had to rely on US companies. This resulted in long support times (due to the time difference), but also very slow performance of the WordPress websites – how could it be otherwise when the servers are located in another part of the world?

It is also important to note that we had hardly any competition in the area of specialised WordPress hosting in Germany and Europe at the beginning. The big generic hosters only had a weary smile for the idea of quality instead of quantity. In some cases, we were even laughed at by big names in the IT industry after we presented our idea in order to obtain venture capital.

Class instead of mass – a promise

However, it quickly became clear that our target group was and is grateful to receive truly high-quality managed WordPress hosting instead of loss-leader offers such as “3 euros a month” or “3 months free now!”. With exceptional performance and the best support on the market, our customers are also willing to invest more money in WordPress hosting. Not least because they save several hours of labour per month thanks to our integrated features in the Raidboxes dashboard.

Today, six years later, Raidboxes is the largest WordPress hosting expert in Germany, Austria and Switzerland for the target group of agencies, freelancers and companies that earn their money with WordPress. We currently have a total of over 16,000 customers to date, with more than 27,000 dedicated WordPress hosting servers, two partially rented data centres and customer projects from over 55 countries worldwide.

Our team has grown from three founders (Johannes, Marcel and myself) to 45 people over the past few years. Employees with a variety of different skills work every day to realise our mission of more freedom for our customers – remotely or at Raidboxes’ headquarters in Münster.

team.blue is coming, the Raidboxes brand remains

However, we are still a long way from achieving our goal of being the European specialist for the WordPress B2B sector. After months of intensive discussions and joint exploration, Raidboxes is now part of team.blue. Nothing will change for you, as Raidboxes and its entire team will continue to be there for you as an independent company.

Team.blue was formed in 2019 from the merger of three customer-focused hosting groups: Combell, TransIP and Register. The company is based in the centre of Europe, in Belgium. From the moment we first spoke to the team at team.blue, our customers were always at the forefront of our minds.

Our discussions focussed strategically on how we could best advance the next level of software and dedicated hosting for the WordPress creative industry together. It quickly became clear that we and team.blue were on the same mission, and that together we wanted to focus even more on developing solutions for WordPress freelancers and agencies.

Big player in the European WordPress business

Strategically, this makes Raidboxes a “big player” in the European WordPress hosting market. In the future, we will focus even more on providing agencies and freelancers in other European countries with the freedom and simplicity of our specialised managed WordPress hosting. With the strong infrastructure and hosting expertise of team.blue, the course for Raidboxes – in addition to the continued central D-A-CH region – is fully set for Europe as a whole.

At Raidboxes and team.blue, we see huge potential for professional web design and web development in the coming years to create even more freedom when working with WordPress. In the future, our teams will work together and in close coordination to implement customer feedback into new features even faster, build new infrastructures in European countries and provide improvements to the existing software.

Unlimited opportunities for all

Together we will drive the vision of Raidboxes to be the most successful platform for professional WordPress services in Europe. In order to realise our vision of limitless opportunities , with which we enable everyone in Europe and all over the world to build their own WordPress business.

We continue to make it our mission to explore unconventional paths and dedicate ourselves even more to the common good and sustainability than we already do. With the additional resources from team.blue, we will be able to advance our personal concerns at Raidboxes even faster.

Promoting sustainable projects and the common good

Together with team.blue, we will provide even more intensive support for sustainable projects, as we are already doing. Among them:

• Continue to operate every WordPress website and all servers completely climate-neutral
• We continue to plant trees for every new WordPress website – we have already planted over 354,000 trees, primarily mangroves in Madagascar
• Support for initiatives to eliminate waste in the oceans(currently the equivalent of approx. 772,200 plastic cups)
• Regular donations to charitable organisations instead of Christmas mail and other customer communication by letter

Johannes and I are particularly pleased that, with team.blue, we have now firmly incorporated the topic of the common good and a positive impact as a company into our company charter, thereby laying the foundation for our B-Corp certification. As managing directors, we are thus obliged to orientate ourselves towards all stakeholder needs and to exert a significantly positive influence on society with Raidboxes.

Achieving even more with more employees

We want Raidboxes to be and remain a very special place to work. As part of team.blue, we will do everything we can to ensure that our employees enjoy working at Raidboxes and that our values such as transparency, freedom, diversity and equality are practised throughout the company.

Over the past six years, we have been very fortunate to build a really talented, focussed and incredibly motivated team of currently 45 “Raidboxers”. We will continue to intensify this with the help of team.blue and look forward to additional great additions to the Raidboxes team. Incidentally, 60 per cent of Raidboxes employees now work completely remotely. The same applies here: unlimited opportunities to work with us.

What has characterised Raidboxes over the years and will continue to be part of our DNA is the great team spirit, the shared corporate values and the customer focus we live by. Maintaining our high standards on the market is our goal and we will always focus on quality instead of quantity. Be it the performance of our WordPress websites or our outstanding support, which our customers can rely on 365 days a year.

We will continue to do everything in our power to support our employees in Münster and throughout Europe in the future.

The best ideas are the ones that nobody believes in

Finally, I would like to thank all of our customers, agencies, freelancers and WordPress service providers whose trust in Raidboxes made our successful development possible in the first place. This was the only way we were able to grow from an idea to a bootstrapped startup without any budget to the point where our first investor, HTGF (2016), and our business angels (2017-2019) provided additional capital.

This enabled Raidboxes to become the successful company it is today. With team.blue, the funds are now flowing back into the early-stage fund HTGF and we can make our contribution to this successful ecosystem. Johannes and I will continue to be part of these goals in the coming years and focus on realising the mission and vision of Raidboxes in Europe together with our team and team.blue.

We are incredibly excited about the future and are really looking forward to it!

Johannes & Torben

Founder & Managing Director