Plesk APAC Partner Day 2019 – Our Experience and Key Takeaways
Here’s some valuable insights of what we’ve learnt.
Why Exabytes Attended Plesk APAC Partner Day 2019?
Besides of being a reputable and reliable hosting provider in Singapore, we are also social media and technology enthusiasts, who enjoy keeping ourselves updated, networking and connecting with like-minded people within the same industry.
Here’s why we are so crazy about Plesk APAC Partner Day 2019:
- Get a first look on the new features of the newly launched version (Plesk Obsidian).
- Learn how to leverage on Plesk features to provide more value to our clients.
- Learn a better way to acquire new users who experience problems in managing their server/VPS — using the Plesk to eliminate their problem.
- Create more happy clients along the journey, with the help of Plesk features and the large ecosystem.
- To better serve WordPress users with better security, simplicity, a more reliable back-end, and many more.
- See better ways to enter new customer segments with more targeted solutions.
- The opportunity to share our point of view at the event.
Sharing & Takeaways
Opening speech by Plesk CTO – Jan Löffler. He started the introduction using an interesting Star Wars storytelling method together with some web statistics indicating the current number of websites in the world.
Wonder how the Star Wars storytelling method work? Jan presented the size of each hosting company in the world using the size of the stars. Next came the most important statistics to all web hosts – 34.6% of the world’s websites are built using WordPress!
Finally, Jan officially introduced the newly launched Plesk Obsidian to us. According to Jan, the new Plesk Obsidian is built with better security, more reliable back-end, and much more convenient to use.
Key takeaways:
The new Plesk Obsidian is built with better security, more reliable backend, and much more convenient to use.
2. A look behind the scenes of Plesk Obsidian Development
Andrey Kugaevsky is a Senior Program Manager at Plesk for more than 14 years. He is also the product owner and the main driving force behind the popular Plesk WordPress Toolkit. Andrey builds better UX and human-friendly software based on user feedback, which drives the decision of whether which feature is staying or leaving the Plesk. Plesk WordPress Toolkit is a Fast, Smart, and Secure tool for your WordPress Management.
Some brand new functions were also introduced – Plesk Remote Management and Standalone WordPress Toolkit.
Key takeaways:
Improvement should always based on customer feedback. Plesk WordPress Toolkit can help greatly in WordPress Management.
3. A designer, a web designer, and now Exabytes VP of Marketing
Vickson Tan is an experienced graphic-web designer and a passionate digital marketing strategist. With Plesk, it really helps business owners to properly set up and manage websites, backed by attractive design and enhanced user experience. It gives you insight of your website security, SSL, firewall and many more.
According to Vickson, from a web professional’s perspective, Plesk is doing a good job when it comes to his favorite features and functionalities. He shared his insight on how Obsidian reduces complexity and impacts user experience, and how he adored the chance of bringing service providers/web hosts and end users together through this event.
Key takeaways:
Plesk helps business owners to properly set up and manage websites, backed by attractive design and enhanced user experience.
4. Bloggers need Managed WordPress Hosting too!
Liew Cheon Fong is now a WordPress consultant from Malaysia, after full-time tech blogging for over a decade. He is also very active in the WordPress community.
Web hosting and bloggers aren’t always best friends. According to Liew, bloggers want the best infrastructure for their blog, and when a lot of hosting companies out there are offering hosting for less than the cost of a cup of coffee, the nightmare starts for some of the bloggers. Liew added that this might happen when a blog starts to grow its website traffic and hits the bandwidth or disk space limitation easily. Moreover, he also shared that many WordPress bloggers are worried about having their blog updated, which can cause failure on certain functions of the website.
Key takeaways:
Go for cloud for your traffic and business to grow seamlessly.
5.Speak Their Language
Sam Suresh is the founder of MU DOT MY PLT, a tech development & training company based in Kuala Lumpur. Sam also contributes to WordPress as a Global Community Team member.
He shared about challenges faced by WordPress users when it comes to Web Hosting. Many web hosting companies do not Speak Their Language. 100GB Storages, 1GB RAM — most new WordPress users have no idea how much storage they need and how many visitors the web hosting service can handle. He hoped web hosting companies will take the initiative to guide and provide more information on this.
Key takeaways:
To all the web hosts out there, speak your customers’ language!
6.Sell Value-Added Services Rather Than Infrastructure
Patricia Hillebrand is Director of Global Channels at Plesk who is passionate about developing new business opportunities and revenue streams in the cloud.
We all know how to market to Gen X and millennial. These generations spent a lot of money during the golden age of hosting but if we still want to be in business tomorrow, it’s time to start marketing to the next generation.
Gen Z will make up 40% of the world population as of 2020 and represent an enormous buying power. The challenge is that they are the first true digital natives and these young people completely differ from yesterday’s.
There’s no choice but to drop traditional marketing methods if we want them to buy from us.
Key takeaways:
It’s time to start marketing to the next generation, Gen Z.
– Take them seriously
– Social media will be your bread and butter
– Mobile marketing should be your primary platform
– Speak their language
– Develop unique products and campaigns
– Entertain first, information second
– Personalize your brand’s vision and mission
7. Automating Protection and Expanding Business with Acronis
Oleg Prosvetov is a technology consultant at Acronis recently assigned to APAC region. Before joining the Acronis team, Oleg worked in similar roles in Varonis and Symantec, specialized in Cyber Security solutions.
He shared on how we can automate backing up and recovering services through the integrations with Plesk and also what the new features next on Acronis.
Key takeaways:
Through the integrations with Plesk, users can automate backing up and recovering services.
8. From Complexity to Simplicity Using Virtuozzo Infrastructure
Maik Broemme is Senior Product Manager, Virtuozzo and Virtuozzo Platform. He doesn’t consider himself a real geek despite a strong passion for technology, open source and Linux. Maik has more than 10 years of experience in managing and designing large scale storage and virtualization environments.
He shared on how to leverage on cloud solutions and some real-life use cases on how Virtuozzo Infrastructure will accelerate business growth using cloud instance technology and how it helps to reduce operational cost by using cloud.
Key takeaways:
Virtuozzo Infrastructure can accelerate business growth and reduce operational cost using cloud instance technology.
9. Panel Discussion: How Digital Transformation Affects the Hosting Industry
Gavin Gibson, COO and Co-Founder Dreamscape Networks, Singapore
Andy Saw, COO, Exabytes Networks, Singapore
Manoj Dhanda, CEO and Founder – MicroHost, India
Discussion Topic: Technology is radically changing many aspects of our daily life, and in the midst of digitalization transformation, hosting providers are facing fresh challenges to serve generation Z. Just like the Plesk team, it has to develop Obsidian to improve and keep up with the trend. Do you know how many litres of coffee it took to develop Obsidian?
So, what are the fundamental skills to driving different needs and priorities?
How can service providers steadily grow the competitive market and at the same time secure existing core users?
Summary:
Understand what your customers are looking for and provide a suitable service to them with support and advice. At the same time, bundle the cloud services to customers as a value addon. It depends on how you position your services to the client and also meeting what they really want from your services.
The most important note to remember from Plesk APAC Partner Day 2019 is that we must be there on the channel that our audience is visiting regularly. Come out with different value proposition/solutions compared to competitors like Alibaba and AWS cloud.
Keys to selling to Generation Z: fast response time, engage with them more often. Keep it simple as a solution to help them achieve what they desire with your services.
Summary: WHY Plesk Obsidian?
Plesk Obsidian enables web professionals to Better and Intelligently Manage Servers, Apps, Websites and Hosting. Run your servers supported by a more secure and a more reliable backend. Plesk Obsidian now comes with a newly optimized user interface that was introduced in this version of Plesk to let users navigate easily.
It is a proven powerful management platform that supports digital transformation in cloud, besides adding value to your existing cloud/hosting infrastructure. The main benefits of Plesk Obsidian? It helps developers to enhance their web performance, manage caching, smart updates, staging, backup and much more. In other words, it’s your powerful Server, Website and WordPress Management Platform in the Cloud.
And that’s the reason why we offer Plesk managing tools for FREE on our SSD-VPS, especially Plesk WordPress Toolkit, the most complete, optimized, secure and versatile toolkit for WordPress users. We decided to be the first to offer Plesk in our WordPress hosting plans, and let WordPress users enjoy the benefits of it, which in turn would help to simplify their tasks and management.
Lastly, a BIG thanks to Plesk for their gifts and goodies during Plesk APAC Partner Day 2019!
In a Nutshell
If you were to ask us to attend Plesk Partner Day again, our answer is ‘Definitely Yes!’
Experts from Plesk at the event gave us so many valuable ideas and tech insight. More so, the event gave us a new perspective and the opportunity to connect with countless awesome people.
