Welcome to the second installment of our new Customer Spotlight series. In it, we highlight the many different kinds of companies and organizations that use SnapShooter. Today, we’re excited to have Iakovos Frountas, founder of Bake My WP.
Hello! Tell us about yourself and your business?
My name is Iakovos Frountas and I’m a Web Developer based in Greece. I am 31 years old and I have founded a small agency called Bake My WP which is primarily focused on providing Premium WordPress Support to everyone. Apart from support, we provide custom WordPress theme design, fixes for plugins, customizations and, of course, migrations of every possible platform to WordPress.
Can you give us a quick overview of your [company]?
Our Company was founded in 2018 and has been running for 3 years now. The idea came from our everyday routine. We were striving to provide top notch WordPress support to the Greek market but it didn’t take us too long to realise that was a bigger market for us out there. Premium WordPress support is something rare. Most companies are selling shared hosting as Managed Hosting and the term Managed Hosting has increasing demand in the WordPress ecosystem.
Bake My WP is different from other WordPress Support companies in several ways. The most important thing is that we assign a dedicated project manager to every single customer. We do not have general support tickets that everyone can answer. Every single site has a dedicated contact person who knows everything about this project. This way we work together with the client in order to suggest improvements and tweaks that will ensure more sales or traffic.
Another principle of our company is to provide only the best possible solutions to every single customer at affordable prices. That’s why we have chosen SnapShooter as our main backup provider.
What’s your backstory and how did you come up with the business idea?
My background is technical. I am a Computer Engineer and I love to work with WordPress. It’s been my primary platform since 2012. When I was in college, I first discovered the meaning of support by helping my classmates with programming courses. That thought never left my mind. Since 2015, I have been helping people voluntarily as a member of the WordPress community. I am an active member of the European Community of WordPress and I have co-organized many WordCamp in Europe including the city I live in, Athens. Our company is a reflection of this action and vice versa. Giving back to the community is something special for me so I came up with this idea.
Tell us about how you use SnapShooter?
We have been using SnapShooter as our main backup provider for almost a year now. I am really impressed with their platform. The first thing I asked when we joined was integration with Dropbox. They never told me to forget it, instead, they responded that it is a difficult connection but we have a roadmap for it. After 6 months or so, they came up with the Dropbox support.
In our setup we are using GridPane to manage our servers. SnapShooter's integration with GridPane is pretty solid and robust. I was looking for a fresh platform to manage our backups and I am very happy that I found SnapShooter. Before SnapShooter we were using R1Soft but the lack of the UI made us search for alternative solutions. SnapShooter has one of the easiest user interfaces I have ever seen. Seriously.
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Every single button has its own purpose and you do not have to search or guess what you are going to do. This one was a game changer for us because we have a written process for everything in our internal setup. This allowed us to dramatically reduce the steps needed to manage our backups once and for all.
Do you have a good horry story of when a backup failed?
When I started building sites back in 2008, the term backup wasn't so popular as it is now. I remember that I was making minor changes in a small website and then for some unexpected reason, the server went offline. The server disk had crashed and I lost my very first site. It took me three or four days of hard work to rebuild everything from scratch. This was the last time I went into the wild because I defined my backup strategy and many years later we have numerous places that we keep backups, backups of sites, backups of servers, backups of backups and so on. If I can recommend a proper backup strategy for every website owner it would be that simple.
1. Local backups in the server just if there is a "whoops" moment
2. Remote backups in one provider
3. Remote backups in another provider just to be sure
What other tools and resources do you recommend to people?
I would recommend GridPane for server management, DigitalOcean for server hosting, New Relic for WordPress monitoring and Google Cloud Monitoring for server monitoring.
From the WordPress ecosystem itself I would recommend GeneratePress for building sites, Advanced Custom Fields to add extra functionality to every theme and of course a reliable forms plugin, Gravity Forms.
Where can we go to learn more about your business?
You can visit our site https://bakemywp.com anytime in order to see our services or schedule a call with us to discuss your next project.