Happy Open Bar!

14th of November, what a day.. I woke up at 6am, which is extremely unusual for me. However, the jetlag and the constant beeps from the birthday wishes coming to my phone made it much easier. Yes, it was my birthday and yes, I was far away from home. To be more precise I was in Orlando and the unusual plan for my birthday included meeting few of the SiteGround customers for the first ever SiteGround Open Bar event!

Open Bar?

The idea for the Open Bar came up because our team had planned to visit two events in the States: Joomla World Conference and WordCamp Orlando, in a very short period of time. The schedule was too tight to travel back home to Europe in between. That was why we decided to spend the spare time in the States and to use it to meet as much of our customers in person as we can.

Why would we do that? Because we believe that although phone, social networking channels, chat  and ticketing system are convenient and create the illusion we are  actually having a real conversation, nothing beats the power of a  truly personal, face-to-face connection.

So here we were waiting for the SiteGround customers in Elixir bar downtown Orlando. There was a slight doubt that maybe no one would show up. After all it is quite a strange idea to go to a bar with some people you have never seen before, coming from the other side of the world, and being connected to you only by the fact that they provide hosting services for your website, isn’t it?

But fortunately quite a few people showed up and made SiteGround´s first Open Bar event and my birthday a really great experience. It was amazing to chat with a long time military man, now readjusting to civilian life, about my home country, which he has visited several times. It was so much fun to learn about Orlando’s hidden secrets, including its night life, by some really party loving local people. And it was great meeting and talking to all the great people that decided to share that night with us!

Ramon, Ian, Anthony, Kevin, Miles, Ezequiel, Frank and Melissa, thank you once again for joining us!

That was the first SiteGround Open Bar, but will definitely not be the last one. That might be the beginning of a new SiteGround tradition! Wait for us, next time we might be in your city and we would love to have a beer with you!