An amazing 2012 recap event

When you hear “end of year recap”, you probably imagine a big hall full of bored people that cannot wait for the managers to finish their polished presentations. Well, not when the recap event is happening at SiteGround! What we had instead, was a totally transformed office with one half of it looking like a gambling room with Roulette, Black Jack, Texas Hold’em and hot hostesses and the other half reminding of the Olympic Games and holding sport tournaments. These gaming activities were followed by the real yearly recap presentation that I bet was more fun and had better hosts and videos than the last Oscars. And the whole thing ended up with what can be surely awarded as the best night-life event of the year.

What was this end-of-year gaming craze about?

Actually, as frivolous as this may look on the surface, the gaming initiative was organized and held for a really good cause! It aimed to raise funds among SiteGround employees to support two local orphanages and some of their kids to continue their higher education for the whole next year. The aim was achieved. With the money donated by all the employees and tripled by the SiteGround owner and CEO we will make the next year better and more meaningful for several talented children! The whole initiative was suggested and organized voluntarily by a group of SiteGround employees. They have dedicated a substantial part of their free time to talk personally to the children in need, to suggest the best way to help them, to come up with the idea and to actually organize the fund-raising event.

Memorable moments from the recap ceremony!

This year’s recap presentation was a thing to remember too! 2012 was extremely eventful and there were a lot of achievements to go over and many people to be singled out for their contribution. However, there were several things that made the whole ceremony feel really different:

1. The inspiration and the devotion with which the SiteGround owner and the CEO have been preparing the event during the last few months.
2. The unmatched sense of humour of the dedicated hosts (both from the development department)
3. The truly amazing videos, prepared by our devoted film producer and director (one more talent from the development department)
4. And last but not least, the pink underwear of our tech genius Marian 🙂

But what really happened during 2012?

Looking back at what happened during the last year, we can proudly say that 2012 major theme was  “more to the people”. The number of the projects that we successfully finished and the extent to which we enhanced our hosting service has not been reached ever before. Three major objectives were achieved and led to a great evaluation by our customers:

1. Better customer service and experience – We launched new customer area and cPanel theme, enhanced ticketing system and LiveChat interface.
2. Insanely fast website loading speed – To achieve this we set up two new data centers in Europe and Singapore, implemented advanced new hardware, and added CDN service and unique Caching system.
3. More focus on Joomla and WordPress than ever – We sponsored more than 20 JoomlaDays and WordCamps around the world, organized some unique trainings for our staff, and implemented autoupdaters that can keep these two most popular applications on our servers up-to-date and safe.

The team behind all this

Of course all these can be achieved only by a highly motivated and inspired team. Knowing this SiteGround has invested a lot in its people during the year: we moved to a new office, winter and summer vacations and team building events were organised. Honouring the people with outstanding achievements at the end of the year and realizing how many they are, showed us once again that it was totally worth the investment!

The things that never stop to amaze me about SiteGround people is their enormous dedication, their infinite creativity and their great spirit. This end-of-year event had once again highlighted all of these qualities. And it showed one more thing – we can work 24/7 but can also party 24/7! For more images of the event see our FaceBook album.