As you know, our beloved free hosting service 000webhost was officially launched in 2007. The business scaled up organically, attracted millions of users with cloud-based web hosting technology, unlimited resources, and a dedication to giving freedom to our customers without pushing too many ads nor desperate attempts to urge customers to purchase the paid plans.

Our Head of Marketing, Daugirdas Jankus, had the opportunity to speak to Laura Bernheim from HostingAdvice.com, sharing insights on how 000webhost scaled up as one of the world’s best free web hosting provider despite all the challenges. Published on February 16th, 2018, 000webhost was selected as HostingAdvice’s 2018 Featured Expert.

Obviously, it is a huge honor to be featured as one. This privilege highlights the long-hour work and endless consistency in delivering the best service possible. And yes, we would like to dedicate this accomplishment to our amazing customers.

We are Always Improving!

Over the years, 000webhost’s services have significantly improved. For instance, just recently, we spent nine months in 2017 only to build and evaluate an automated database system that allows us to answer more than one million unique user queries per minute.

This is the extra miles we are willing to take. While it’s always easy to provide free service for everyone, striving for excellence is something we are constantly looking for. We know, without solid performance and easy-to-use website environment, we do not deserve our customers. For that matter, we employ MariaDB in LXC containers and currently route queries using HAProxy and ProxySQL. We handle heterogenous hardware and added more than 50 new servers.

These servers are automated between nodes when any of them becomes overloaded.

Community Discussions and Emphasis on User Education

A tight-knitted community has also been the backbone of 000webhost for many years. Rather than picking out dedicated staffs to run forum discussions, we rely on longtime customers who volunteer as moderators. There are a lot of experienced users who stay within the forum and are willing to help new users.

By the same token, 000webhost provides localized versions in 40 different languages. It follows the step of Hostinger which have applied the same strategy before. Why we do this? That said, we want to get closer to our customers as much as we can. Quoting Daugirdas, “We understand that English is not always the most popular language,” Daugirdas said, pointing to Indonesia and Brazil — areas where the company has seen recent growth.

“People still want to learn and develop, so we’ve invested a lot into providing a localized experience for them.”

In recent years, 000webhost has heavily invested in promoting educational opportunities for people who are interested in web hosting and website development.

Related to this matter, “We believe that everybody in the world should have free access to learning tools and the ability to build great things online,” Daugirdas said. “We don’t necessarily expect everyone to become IT professionals, but we at least want people to understand technology and the internet in general.”

000webhost currently joins BitDegree, a blockchain-based online education platform. Users can benefit much from its Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) and earn BitDegree tokens to be used for future coursework.

We completely understand that skills matter in today’s tech world. Tech companies are looking for experts, as well. 000webhost supports your growth, equips you with sufficient skills to win the competition online.

000webhost Listens to You

Feature request functionality is popular among our customers. That is no doubt. We are always listening to you, our beloved customers. When it comes to deciding which feature to be added next in line, from time to time we let the customers determine what they do want.

Many features have been carried out from listening closely to our customers, to name a few, email management, search engine optimization tool, site optimization, backups, and SSL certifications.

During the interview, Daugirdas said, “We’re always listening to our customers, even though we don’t know what we’ll be working on later in the year,” adding the company plans biweekly dev sprints three months in advance. “The market is changing quickly, so you can’t plan for a full year. Whatever our customers want, we’re pretty confident we can deliver.”

Dear our beloved customers, we will never give up on you. That is definitely the sole reason why we do not stop improving over the years. We are a unity who believe in the power of the internet and that internet is an ocean of endless opportunities, only if you utilize it the right way.

As what we have said before, this article is created upon previously published feature on HostAdvice entitled “2018 Featured Expert 000webhost — The Challenges of Scaling a Free Hosting Platform While Optimizing Learning Experiences for Users.”

See the full article here.

https://www.000webhost.com/blog/hostingadvices-featured-expert