The Servebolt Team’s main aim throughout 2019 has been to address the most pressing issues that were holding back our growth rate. Some projects had already been started at the end of 2018, and some big ones were started, concluded, and launched during this year.
This article is a write-up of the top-level results we have achieved during 2019.
Business Results
We see growth across the line. Our top-line growth rate is more than 40% this year. We onboarded multiple of the World’s top 10.000 websites, according to their Alexa.com rank, to our newly created Enterprise tier plans.
We are seeing growth in both the Partner Program and user sign-ups like never before. That means more agencies, site owners, and developers than ever are experiencing our extreme performance and easy-to-use hosting.
Crowd Funded Financing
Servebolt ended 2018 with a successful round of crowdfunding with Monner. More cash was needed to meet the already increasing customer demand. We also wanted to expand global operations further and initiate projects that deliver a positive impact on our growth rate. We closed the round of financing at the end of 2018 and have been wisely investing this money during 2019.
New Cloud Region Singapore
High-performance hosting is in demand all around the globe, and Singapore is the place to be if a hosting company wants to cover India, South East Asia, Hong Kong, and Japan, and even Australia.
We opened our Singapore Servebolt Cloud Region in February, together with our network infrastructure provider Blix Solutions. Having this location has proven a wise choice, as it has already delivered us large clients that had an Asian presence as a requirement.
Brand update and new Servebolt.com
In March 2019, we launched our new brand identity, along with a completely redone Servebolt.com. We needed new brand elements that were in line with how we see ourselves and how we want the world to see us; friendly and professional. And that’s what we got!
The first implementation of the new branding was done on Servebolt.com during the summer of 2019, followed by a style update of our control panel later this fall. We will continue to implement and improve the profile and branding across all our platforms during 2020.
A big thank you to Prototypen.no for helping us create better content, Simpleness for designing our new site, and Emil Fabio for doing our awesome illustrations and brand elements.
Review Signal 2019
Early in May, Kevin Ohashi finally published the results of the largest independent hosting test in WordPress. Servebolt entered in 4 out of 6 price tiers, ranging from $99 to the Enterprise tier.
And we did good! We excelled spectacularly with our results, acing most tests and dwarfing some of the established giants in hosting. Top tier performance across the board, 100% uptime, and steady, faster performance than the rest of the participants. We love it.
When we were asked to join for 2020, it was easy to say yes. 2020 testing is currently ongoing, and it is putting our new hardware platform to the test.
Servebolt BV
The fully owned subsidiary was set up in the spring of 2019, and from February 1st, we will have a new Head of Partner & Customer Relationships joining Servebolt in the Netherlands.
WordCamp Nordic
We believe one of the best ways to contribute to the WordPress community is to share our knowledge. Both Thomas and Jonathan got their talks accepted for the first WordCamp Nordic. It took place on Women’s Day in Helsinki, Finland.
It seemed Jonathan was the only Swede on stage during the event (for the record, Sweden is most definitely part of the Nordic). He delivered a talk about WordPress plugins that your hosting provider fears.
Thomas filled the large stage with his talk about Thinking Performance First. The audience applauded all the straight aiming messages and made it clear the WordPress Community understands the need for fast WordPress hosting.
Cloudflare Partnership
This year, we have had the pleasure of entering the new Cloudflare Partnership Program. We were already part of the old partner program, but we got the opportunity to enter the new partner program as one of the first 10 partners globally.
The new partnership is a close collaboration between people at Servebolt and Cloudflare. It is providing us with better insight into the inner workings of Cloudflare and has enabled us to bundle Cloudflare into some of our Enterprise offerings and plans.
Since this is a long-term and strategic partnership, we have also started the work of implementing Cloudflare into the Servebolt control panel. Which, when launched, will give our customers easy access to better tools. Specifically, to use the awesome combination of Servebolt and Cloudflare for security and web performance.
Billing Platform
When Servebolt was founded as RaskeSider.no, the focus was 99% on the platform, our offering, and providing awesome hosting in general. Billing was not in any way the primary focus. This year, however, since we now have the workforce to complete large internal projects, we did a total rework of how our billing works. That meant largely changing the billing backbone.
As of November 1st, 2019, Servebolt has an automated and self-service-focused billing platform. This enables all customers to manage the plans and add-ons themselves without any human interaction needed from the Servebolt team. Ultimately providing more flexibility and easier billing. Customers can now buy and remove extra storage themselves and only be billed for the time the extra storage is in use and is timed to the millisecond!
For us, the new billing platform means that we can build and launch new features at a much higher pace. It also means we can spend more time on building the future of Servebolt and less time on back-office and billing tasks.
A growing team
Every company that grows needs to increase its workforce. This year’s additions to the Servebolt crew have been primarily focused on the support team and our development team.
Increasing the workforce in these departments enables the rest of the company to focus on growth and sales. It also ensures that customers get better support and faster.
New Hardware Platform
Silently, up until now, we have deployed our 2020 hardware platform in New York and Amsterdam. The platform is already being used and delivers crazy fast performance compared to everything we have done before.
While we have seen some of our competitors continue down the Intel CPU path, we decided to switch to AMD. We fell in love with the smashing properties of their EPYC CPUs. Their current CPU offerings are super attractive, both in terms of the performance they deliver and the economy they provide.
Perfect Black Friday
Black Friday, or actually the night before Black Friday, is the most exciting day for Servebolt every year. We take pride in making sure that all our customers have their stores open the entire day without putting visitors in line in a virtual queue.
This year, like last year, was conducted with 100% uptime across the whole Servebolt Cloud!
Thanks to the Servebolt team!
The Servebolt Team has done an astonishing job this year, and I am looking forward to continuing this amazing journey in 2020!
Happy holidays and thank you for a great 2019!
