Based in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, Savvii provides premium, managed WordPress hosting to a global customer base. The company’s CEO, Flip Keijzer, started Savvii in 2013 as the broader web hosting market in Europe became crowded with providers similar to each other. Today, Savvii provides specialized web hosting services and expertise to hundreds of clients and thousands of websites.
To become a leader in the managed WordPress space, a company needs to focus on providing a high level of performance and support. This commitment made one of Savvii’s earliest decisions to rely on others to manage the company’s infrastructure an easy one.
“It was important for us to leave infrastructure to someone who could put the capital, speed, and globalization behind it,” said Flip Keijzer, Savvii’s CEO. “I also knew how much time it would take to manage our own hardware.”
Flip and his team set out to develop an application layer with WordPress as the core on hardware from Rackspace. Unlike other managed WordPress providers, Savvii decided to not provide domain name services or email, but to focus on providing world-class WordPress hosting. “Our value isn’t providing the hardware or the infrastructure. It’s how we use that hardware and infrastructure to stand out in a highly-competitive market,” said Flip.
Savvii’s ideal customers are high-impact creative and marketing agencies, as well as web development companies. Its solutions quickly become a top choice in the Netherlands, Germany, and throughout Europe. The company’s lasting go-to-market strategy centers around personal contact with its customers—promising no more than 30 minute response times—and fast, reliable hosting.
Reducing Risk and Exceeding Customer Expectations
While growing pains can be expected for any company, Savvii had to make a vital decision sooner than it had hoped. “Our original cloud hosting provider was really on top of everything, but a few years later, that changed,” recalled Flip. “Their focus changed, and we could also see it in the level of support; it took longer to get answers, and the team was frequently changing.”
Savvii further reduces risk by leveraging the strengths of multiple hosting companies. A multicloud architecture gives Savvii the freedom to use cloud providers strategically for specific business cases. For instance, some customers require Dutch IP addresses provided through another cloud provider. Other Savvii-hosted websites satisfy data localization and sovereignty requirements by relying on Linode’s London or Frankfurt data centers, which typically outperform another provider’s cloud infrastructure in Amsterdam.
Savvii’s growing list of customers isn’t concerned about how things work; rather, they want to get a return on their investment, relying on Savvii for outstanding performance and service. For Flip and Savvii, their partners must pay attention to them to fulfill that promise to their customers. “We want to be noticed in the infrastructure world, so I need providers that notice me,” he said.
Product development is also essential when Savvii considers cloud partners. The company was an early adopter of the Linode Kubernetes Engine, a fully-managed container orchestration service. “We are looking into containerization, and although we want to understand how that works and how to do things on a container level, we don’t necessarily want to be able to run it ourselves,” said Flip. “It’s crucial to have that type of development done by our partners.”
Finally, a candid Flip doesn’t hesitate to recognize the noticeable increase in competition not only for his customers’ business but in the cloud hosting space. Yet, he remains committed to alternative cloud providers that have a global footprint, offer industry-comparative hardware resources, around-the-clock worldwide support, and much more all at a fraction of the cost of hyperscale providers.
“The hyperscalers, on average, are more expensive for us than using alternative cloud providers,” he said. “They’re fantastic in feature development, especially Amazon, but there will be about 80% of features that I don’t need, which makes it tough to handle, and the support, we would not know where to begin to get it.”
