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.