Lilyana Yakimova is the Marketing Director @ WordPress hosting specialist SiteGround.com. She joined the company since its very foundation, and has led all marketing and communication strategies to date. Effectively communicating SiteGround’s strengths, Lilyana’s vision has helped grow the company from a single client to an international business, building the brand to what SiteGround is today.

Who is SiteGround? And what are you guys doing?

SiteGround is a cool web hosting company that has been around for more than 10 years. We have servers in the USA, UK, the Netherlands and Singapore. We have offices in Bulgaria and Spain. We host 200K WordPress sites plus thousands of others too.

These are some hard facts about SiteGround, but the real soul of the company are its people. Every day I have the pleasure to work with a great bunch of SiteGrounders, each of whom is passionate about what s/he does. This includes: making websites faster and safer; always being there for the customers who need support and even travelling around the world to tell the SiteGround stories at events like WCLDN!

What is SiteGround’s mission?

Our mission is to be real craftsmen in what we do. This means that we do not just follow the latest developments in our field. Instead, we are proud to be among the few who actually take the lead. To illustrate with a small example: we were updating WordPress instances automatically in order to secure our WordPress customers long before the term “managed WordPress hosting” even existed.

What do you do with WordPress?

Firstly, we make the lives of WordPress users easier on our servers. Apart from automatic updates, we constantly monitor for WordPress related vulnerabilities and take proactive measures to protect our customers. We have also developed our own dynamic WordPress cache solution (SuperCacher) based on NGINX. It makes websites really fast. We’ve also created a one-click staging tool for our WordPress users. Using wp-cli and creating git repositories of a WordPress site is also very easy on a SiteGround account.

Second, we give back to the community. We are proud to have as a part of our team a very talented WordPress developer, whose time is fully dedicated to writing code for the WordPress project. We also sponsor, speak and attend many WordCamps.

Is this your first time sponsoring a WordCamp?

Оh no. We’ve been sponsoring various WordCamps all around the world for a number of years now. Too many to count but all have been super fun. Last year alone we sponsored 22 WordCamps and physically attended 10. Apart from the Camps, we sponsor other WP-related events and meetups as well. Our events page holds our entire WordPress event history! Also people from our team have been actively involved in the organization of a few WCEU’s and WCSOF’s.

Why do you sponsor WordCamps? What do they mean to you?

In a world, where hosted website building solutions are becoming more and more popular, WordPress is very important for the web hosting industry as we currently know it. So we, as a web hosting company, have a solid business reason to sponsor WordCamps and thus support the growth of the WordPress community.

Another reason is that many of our current and potential users and partners are visiting these events. So being a sponsor is a great way for us to tell them our story and hear their stories in return. Thus we attract new customers and learn what WordPress users need.

Join us in thanking SiteGround for their generous participation at WordCamp London 2016 – and don’t forget to say hello when you pass them by!