CMS Expo adventure: super heroes, thunderstorms and more!

Just as you may know, SiteGround super heroic team headed for Chicago last week to attend the CMS Expo – the biggest conference for content management systems. Our challenge was to redefine what web hosting is and to prove that shared hosting, when done right, can be a great option for the CMS users. Nothing could stop us to accomplish this mission even the raging nature itself. 🙂

Scared by a thunderstorm – not us!

Getting to Chicago was quite challenging itself. Tenko and Niki were supposed to arrive about 6 hours earlier than me (we were on different flights) and you can imagine my surprise when I got to the hotel and they weren’t there. So what happened? There was a thunderstorm: their plane got hit by a lightning, the O’Hare airport was closed and on top of it all – they were getting out of fuel! Luckily, the plane was fully operational after the lightning hit and they successfully landed in Milwaukee. So after an 8 hour delay and wandering around the airports, team SiteGround gathered together in one piece in Evanston (where the event was held) and got ready for the conference!

Who is the real super hero?

The visuals of our marketing materials for the conference were built around the symbol of the SiteGround superman, who is redefining how web hosting should be done. Our super mastermind Tenko Nikolov also had a presentation about the tips and tricks on squeezing maximum performance from the different hosting platforms and proved with real life test results that when done right shared hosting can be great. His presentation slides are available on SlideShare.

However, once more we acknowledged the simple fact that the real super heroes, who can spread our message most effectively than anything else, are our own customers! Many of the people we met at the expo, who have built their business around the CMSs represented on the event, were already using our service and were extremely positive about their experience. Among them was also our very special customer: Megan Valentine – the person, who won SiteGround Word-of-mouth hero award in the beginning of the year and whom we granted a free pass to the conference. Here’s what Megan shared with me about our meeting:

“The highlight of Day 1 at CMS Expo was meeting Tina, Tenko and Niki from SiteGround. They’ve been a great webhost for us for years and it’s nice to know the people behind the company are equally awesome. We all went out to dinner and chatted about anything and everything…it was hard to believe we’d only met earlier that day. It was also good to know that they’re aware of exactly how awesome SiteGround is compared to other webhosts and have no intentions of changing that (other than to make it even better!) I hope I get a chance to hang out with them again someday, maybe at CMS Expo next year.”

And I want to say back to her: the highlight of the whole conference for us was meeting you and people like you, who motivate us to always give our best!

Now go check out the pictures from the event and stay cool! Meanwhile, we’ll be preparing for the next show. Which one is it? I’ll let you know soon!

Best,

Tina Kesova
The SG events ninja