More sustainability, more team cohesion, more exchange with our partners and a spoiler on the "new" raidboxes®: What was this year, what's coming in 2024? What can you look forward to as a customer? Our review and outlook.

New year, new servers

After many months of intensive work behind the scenes, we can announce one of the most important innovations of recent years! At the beginning of 2024, we will be taking our brand new servers live - with more resources per Box and a whole range of new security features.

At this point, a big thank you to our engineering and the project team, without you this success would not have been possible. The go-live is planned for the first quarter. The new infrastructure is being created together with the team.blue group, to which Raidboxes belongs, more on this later.

The new servers are not the only important innovation for 2024. Do you want to be informed about the details and new features in good time? Then follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter or via our WordPress newsletter.

Sustainability: Raidboxes is Benefit Corporation

Sustainability has always been much more than just a buzzword for our team. From the very beginning, it was important to the founders Torben and Johannes to develop the first truly "green" WordPress web hosting. It all started with the planting of trees per Box, supplemented by many other initiatives to reduce CO₂.

We are aware that many factors need to be taken into account in a company to ensure that sustainability is truly lived. This is only possible with a strategic approach. Until now, the team at Raidboxes was too small to fully develop one. But now, with our colleague Julian, we have a permanent contact person who bundles all sustainability initiatives and puts them to the test.

We want our efforts to be measured objectively in order to prevent pure "greenwashing". For this reason, Raidboxes has not only been certified according to the standards of the Economy for the Common Good since this year, but also as a Benefit Corporation.

Certification as a B Corporation is an award for companies that have achieved a certain minimum level of social and environmental standards. From the outset, we at Raidboxes were concerned to create a company that focused in particular on social impact in addition to the financial constraints that are customary in the market.

This can be seen not only in the projects for greater environmental protection, but also in the way Raidboxes supports its employees. Currently, for example, we are taking extensive measures to address the issues of fair salary distribution and reducing the gender pay gap.

In order to move away from a pure capital focus towards a focus on the common good, Raidboxes drew up a common good balance sheet back in 2020. However, as we like to constantly scrutinize ourselves from different angles, we also decided to take the long road to becoming a Benefit Corporation.

In our interview with Julian, you can read how we achieved this, what measures followed and what effort is involved. Perhaps we can motivate even more companies and agencies from the WordPress scene to become certified. For a measurably more sustainable corporate culture.

The team grows together

In 2022, Raidboxes grew significantly. In 2023, the focus was primarily on integrating these new employees into their teams and roles. See the management method of holacracy, which promotes particularly autonomous work.

Our ambitious goal is to create a working atmosphere for all employees in which they feel they belong: to Raidboxes, to their teams and to our values.

A People Team of 5 employees, some of whom have additional roles, takes care of the needs and requirements of our employees on a daily basis. With a total of 53 employees at present, this is by no means a matter of course. Raidboxes consciously accepts this investment in order to motivate and retain its team.

The following measures and projects, among others, contribute to successful cooperation at Raidboxes:

• A separate People Culture Care role. Their task is to initiate projects to promote sustainable growth, as well as the personal development of all employees.
• This growth should be based on authentic motivation, with honest feedback as the foundation. To this end, we use monthly anonymous employee surveys on various topics, such as communication, workload, remote work and diversity.
• The resulting feedback flows directly into measures that are developed and followed up by a dedicated project group.
• Two equal opportunities officers and two other contact persons for mental health serve as a neutral and anonymous point of contact for all questions relating to professional and private challenges.
• Regular training courses on the non-violent communication method (NVC), in-house and remote.
• Other formats such as an (anonymous) feedback format with our management. Offers of mediation, coaching or psychological counseling (the latter is provided by an external provider).

In addition, all employees receive detailed and structured feedback from their team and their team leads at least once a year. Based on these moderated discussions, measures and objectives are derived that serve the purpose of personal development and further training.

All of these projects should ensure that everyone in the team is still "seen", which is sometimes not easy with our growth and our remote approach.

We know that we cannot always reach all employees with our measures. Nevertheless, we are proud of the fact that satisfaction in the team is currently growing continuously, as our anonymous (and therefore as unbiased as possible) surveys show.

The first Raidboxes Partner Day

September 1, 2023 was something special for Raidboxes: our first Partner Day took place! The sales team puts a lot of energy into supporting and advising our agency partners in order to grow together. So it was all the better to get in touch with the participants in person. With networking, inspiring presentations and exciting Q&A sessions.

Around 80 participants from all over the DACH region found their way to us in Münster. Raidboxers from all eight Circles were also represented. This day was not only about pure business relationships, but also about strengthening ties with our partners, sharing knowledge and building networks with each other.

The agenda was filled with program items that were of particular interest to our partners. For example, with exclusive insights into our upcoming infrastructure or the Dashboard rebuild, with even more functions and user-friendliness.

The Q&A talks offered exciting insights into the work processes of our partner agencies, but also into Raidboxes itself. Participants learned how we are facing the challenges as a remote company and where Raidboxes and WordPress hosting will be heading in the coming years.

After the sessions, there was the opportunity to discuss the individual topics further in the deep dives. Read Patrizia's experience report to find out more about the event. She covered the day for our marketing and social media team. Or watch our video about the Partner Day:

New Growth Circle

Through the holacracy we work in roles that are assigned to so-called Circles. This is a type of work team, but its members can work much more flexibly and independently than is normally the case.

At the beginning of the year, we established an additional Growth Circle, which has important interfaces with all other Circles and works closely with Marketing. The aim of the Growth Circle is to identify areas of activity that promote the growth of Raidboxes.

On a day-to-day basis, our growth team works with live experiments in individual channels and funnels, for example. These are continuously monitored for their success: we follow up on what works and cancel what doesn't - so that we can try it out again at a later date if necessary.

This method is based on the assumption that individual teams often operate within an "experience bubble" and therefore only seem to know which measures might work and which might not. With conventional working methods, numerous growth opportunities remain hidden, which only become visible through experiments and A/B tests.

The reasons why we opted for the agile growth approach are:

• Bundled know-how: The new Circle combines the expertise of several disciplines (sales, marketing, product development, engineering, research and analytics) in a single unit dedicated to growth. This gives it more weight than traditional teams.
• Promotes collaboration: A growth team structure promotes collaboration between team members, as all employees play a specific role in achieving growth targets. It only works together.
• Improves efficiency: A well-structured growth team is designed to work efficiently, with each team member focusing on their expertise and working together towards a common goal.
• Enables rapid iteration: A growth team structure is designed for rapid iteration and experimentation, allowing teams to immediately test and refine their strategies and assumptions to continuously achieve better results.

However, it is not just about increasing our sales, which would be the result of our measures. In terms of sustainable management, our goals include:

• Generate more new signups via campaigns (e.g. through discount campaigns, bundles, conversion funnel optimization, word of mouth programs, etc.)
• Convert these signups to testers by optimizing onboarding
• Convert more testers into customers and retain regular customers or reduce the churn rate

Would you like to find out more about our growth approach or do you have any questions? Then feel free to use the comment function at the end of the article.

Social Media @ Raidboxes

In addition to growth and content marketing, the main focus in 2023 was on reorganizing our social media presence and newsletter. Since this year, Patrizia, who previously worked for us as a student trainee, has been responsible for the latter two channels.

Our social media channels grew significantly in 2023:

• We recorded an increase of almost 400 new subscribers on Instagram.
• On Facebook, we achieved a total of 7.5 million impressions (organic and paid).
• On LinkedIn, a channel that is becoming increasingly important for us, we even recorded 3500 new followers.

A strategic adjustment that we have made: In future, we will no longer place advertising on X (formerly Twitter). The presence of hate comments and similar content on the platform has become unacceptable to us and is not in line with our values. We do not wish to provide financial support for such content. As soon as the WordPress community identifies a suitable alternative, we plan to withdraw completely from X.

Here is an example of our content on Instagram, with which we repeatedly address current social issues:

Check out this post on Instagram

A post shared by raidboxes® (@raidboxes)

Raidboxes and team.blue

In the summer of 2022, Raidboxes joined the team.blue group, a wide-ranging merger of web hosting and web technology companies. team.blue now comprises 40+ brands in 15 European countries and was originally formed from the merger of the hosting groups Combell, TransIP and Register.

Strategically, Raidboxes became a "big player" in the European WordPress hosting market virtually overnight. Our new infrastructure, see the section on Raidboxes 2.0, is only possible thanks to the integration of team.blue technology. This will give us a clear advantage over our competitors, over and above our previous exclusive tools for the most efficient WordPress hosting.

Our teams will work closely together on this in the future:

• Turning customer feedback into features even faster
• Building new infrastructures for even more speed
• To further optimize our Dashboard
• Fine-tuning the world's best solution for managed WordPress hosting

In recent months, teams such as our Engineering and other Circles have been working on exploiting potential synergy effects. In 2024, we will evaluate other areas where collaboration makes sense.

For example, decisions have to be made in the People Circle: Where does it make sense to use which tools together? Where, on the other hand, do we stick with existing solutions because they have become established or are specifically geared towards the German-speaking market and local legislation?

Among other things, this is about not losing our corporate culture and the Raidboxes spirit, while at the same time we want to motivate our teams to work together in more than just a purely "technical" way. Joint meeting formats and training opportunities are a first step towards growing together culturally as well.

The WordPress community is back

The WordCamp Europe in Athens in June and the WordCamp Germany in Gerolstein in October finally provided an opportunity to network again after a long period of Covid abstinence. We were present at both camps as a sponsor.

It is important for our team to maintain contact with the community and to give something back through sponsorship. By participating, we can respond even better to the needs of our customers, which is often easier to do on site, as our Partner Day also showed.

Many thanks to the WCDE and WCEU teams for organizing the two events. It is not easy for the German-speaking community in particular to manage this effort and the associated risk.

"See you", also next year, and we are very much looking forward to it. So far, WordCamp Europe 2024 has been confirmed and will take place from June 13 to 15 in Turin, Italy.

Our mission for 2024

The stated purpose of Raidboxes is to enable agencies and creatives to build successful and sustainable websites as easily as possible. We have been working on the attribute "simple" since our foundation in 2013, the result is a unique WordPress hosting Dashboard.

Of course, we only have limited control over whether our customers' solutions are successful and sustainable. But with our new infrastructure, keyword performance, we automatically support these goals. We have many more ideas for 2024 to help your WordPress website become more powerful and sustainable. Stay up to date with our WordPress newsletter.

The team at Raidboxes is working every day to make our WordPress hosting even better. We are very excited to see how the new infrastructure and the optimizations to our Dashboard will be received by you. Want to get involved? Then take a look at our vacancies or recommend them to others.

With this in mind, we can only say: Thank you for your support, we couldn't have done all this without our customers. Have a good and hopefully peaceful time. 🙏🏼🌟 Feel free to use the comments on this post at any time or get in touch if you have any questions about Raidboxes, our annual review, the new infrastructure and our hosting.