All right. And let’s talk a bit about your product, maybe in details so that our audience can know what you guys are up to and how you can help them in their problems.

Sure, that’d be great. So, in, in simple terms, what our plug-in does, it allows you to move quickly and seamlessly from your current hosting setup, so that could be shared hosting, it could even be On your local machine, so it could be your local host. And you can move to AWS with a click, the click of a few buttons, basically. So you put in your license key, click a few buttons, the software packages up your website and it pushes it to AWS, your AWS account, so it’s all nice and secure, and then it builds your website on AWS infrastructure. And in a couple of minutes, you have a replica of your website on AWS infrastructure. And what you can do then when you’re happy, you can change your DNS and now your website is on AWS.

I’m curious to try that. I’m, I’m using AWS for quite a while now and I All I can say is sometimes it can be problematic to start your instance like pulling up an EC2, installing engines, PHP FPM and all the stuff. And it can be time consuming and I believe it would be problematic for a beginner who don’t know how to set up engines for Apache, right?

And does anyone need any special expertise to work on AWS to work hard with your plug-in?

So, to work with a plug-in, all you need to know is how to use a plug-in in WordPress. it’s, it is really that simple. When your site does migrate over to AWS there is indeed some knowledge in terms of setting up your DNS. So getting your domain domain name switched over, and then also understanding how you need to Sort of keep an eye on your infrastructure and make sure that it’s running, that it’s being updated, that it’s secure, and that’s really important that your, your infrastructure is secure. So if you have a knowledge yourself, you could do that. Or if you have an engineering team, perhaps they could, they could look at that.

so, there are other also cloud providers like Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure. why did you decide to go with AWS?

Oh, that’s a great question. I’m really glad you asked it. it, it I suppose our reasons were based on our own experience. So, we, our agency grew and we realized, OK, we need to have a much bigger hosting infrastructure. We looked around at the big players indeed. And what really drew our attention drew our attention to AWS was the focus on security. So your, your account is secure and you control it, who gets into it, who gets out of it. And also the global reach. So, AWS have data centers all over the world. And what’s really special about that is they make a promise that if your data sits in a data center, in a location, that’s where it sits. So it doesn’t get moved around, it doesn’t get sort of duplicated or replicated in other regions if you don’t want it to. And for us, that was really important and for our clients as well because they wanted certainty if they were running a business in Europe, they wanted certainty that their data lived and stayed in Europe. And AWS provide that. So that was the real drivers for us. And then from a development perspective for ourselves, AWS have a really deep and broad API which can be accessed and we’ve built our product off of their API which is for us from a developer’s perspective, is fantastic.

All right. And how can someone get started with Seahorse and their systems?

Yeah, sure. I think the best, the best start point is to download the plug-in, which is free to download off the the WordPress repository and run a trial to see how it looks for your website. the trial is free and we provide the the AWS access key, so you don’t even need your own AWS account to run a trial. It’s really, really nice. The only thing you do need to do is get a trial license from Seahorse’s website, and all the information is in the plug-in, how to do that. If you like what you see, well then you can purchase a license which allows you to either do a one-time migration, or you could go up the tiers of the license all the way up to a full agency license, which means you can have unlimited migrations and also you get access to a whole host of other features like spinning up staging instances or testing out an upgrade of your PHP version before you decide to move ahead with it.

Awesome. And I would like to ask, where you guys based out of and how big is your team? Or do you have any AWS certified engineers in your company?

All right. So, let’s move on to WordPress related questions. So one of them would be, when was it that you entered to the world of WordPress and what keeps you, what motivated you to stay? And continue working with WordPress.

Yeah, it’s really, really nice actually, you mentioned that. like probably many people, I’d imagine, from my personal experience, I started with my own personal website. I thought, OK, I need to, I need to tell the world about myself. I’m, I was, I was a young and fresh developer and I thought, OK, how do I, how do I let the world know that I’m here and I can code, and this is what I can do. So, yeah, it was my first, my first website. I created it. It was, it was a personal blog, I suppose you would call it. and from there, I suppose it evolved like many, many people took the same path, I’m sure, started working with a small agency. We grew larger and then some, myself and some colleagues, we actually formed our own agency from there and then that progressed through to what is now Seahorse. so really nice journey for us and I think with WordPress, we found it fantastic because it’s allowed us to do so much and such varied sort of different types of work. And now here we are developing plug-ins for, for Seahorses sorry for WordPress as a platform. And like for us it’s just fantastic. Yeah, we really like it.

Yeah, we love it too, and that’s why we’re sitting here. That’s it, man.

That’s it exactly. And the listeners can’t see it, but we’re surrounded by absolute beauty here in Porto, sitting outside the the venue and there’s a peacocks and ducks walking around us here at the moment.

Absolutely. So guys, this is not recorded in the proper media room. We are sitting outside in a nature and I’m not sure if you can hear the peacock sound. But yeah, it’s lovely here, like sitting here, watching all the people talk about WordPress, listening, attending event and sponsoring, like you, supporting, supporting the community.

It’s fantastic. And, and you really see it. I mean, you see it throughout the year, ongoing, and then it culminates at the work camp, this feeling of community. I’ve been in there since Wednesday evening, and the place was getting set up on Wednesday evening. We came in to see how things were going. And the enthusiasm and the friendliness and the collaboration between everybody all the way through to today, and I’m sure it will continue to tomorrow, I have no doubt. And the volunteers, the crew, everyone is so enthusiastic, so with a smile on their face, and it’s got to be tough. And I think it it just makes it such a great event for everybody.

Absolutely Mm All right, so, what is that one thing that you love about WordPress?

Oh man, one thing. How do I, how do I sum it up in one thing? I don’t know. Accessibility for me. And I mean that’s sort of now is maybe a different, a different word, a different meaning or many meanings, accessibility in terms of your website. But for me, accessibility in terms of as a platform, as a community, as a, as a structure to be able to access it. Initially, and then progress and proceed through it. So, you can start off really small with a very limited understanding and knowledge, and you can grow, and you can develop, and you can expand, and you can, you can scale up to, well, almost whatever size you want to be.

All right. Yeah, that, that’s fair. last time you came, that was like World camp Europe in Berlin, right? That’s right.Yeah, about 3 years ago now, time has flown. And you know, it’s so fantastic, being here today and yesterday and seeing faces, seeing friendly faces, people I recognize that I met in Berlin and new faces like yourself that we met this weekend. And it’s just so wonderful. And the last two years were really tough for a lot of people, for everyone almost worldwide and for the work camp community. I think it was, I think it was really tough. I, I, don’t get me wrong, the virtual work camps were absolutely incredible and they were amazing. But I, I think a lot of people would have found it quite difficult that, you know, we couldn’t have this annual meetup, and sort of celebrate WordPress the way we do at Wordcamp. so I just think it’s, it’s so wonderful how everybody persevered through. Those two years of no real work camp, I think it’s so awesome that we’re back here today and we can see each other, hang out, have a coffee, have chats. I think it’s fantastic.

Yeah, it’s beautiful. I mean, yesterday we saw 800 people sitting here, working around and helping build the future of the web.

Exactly, man. Everybody is piling in together to make it happen, to make it better, and to make it continue the way, the way it has gone.

Absolutely. So, what is the one thing that you would suggest to the user who just have entered to the Word of WordPress?

Oh wow, yeah. If you’ve just started, I say, I say well done. I think that’s a great move. and get involved. Get involved. So, go to your local work camp. That’s something that I think is, really important. So you’ve got these, these huge events. Word Camp Europe is massive. There’s, I don’t know how many 1000 people here, and it’s amazing. Don’t forget about the local ones. There’s meetups, there’s work camp meetups. You can go down, you can learn new things, meet new people, yeah, get deeper into, into WordPress community. And I think embrace it and roll with it.

All right. So now, let’s move on to the questions, which is what do you do things that are not WordPress, so basically life outside WordPress.Yeah, and I think that’s it’s, it’s important, because I get really excited when I’m developing, and sometimes I have to remind myself to just take a break, take a, take a pause, you know, and that’s important too, because you’ve got to clear the mind and I find it also helps me maybe come up with a new fresh idea as well when I take a little pause, get out, get out from In the middle of it all. What I like to do myself is I like to get out and about, walk, go for walks, go hiking, that type of thing. Be, be in nature. I really enjoy that. Really, really do. It clears my mind. It gives me a lot of sort of thinking space, yeah, creative space too.

Absolutely. And how do you de-stress yourself? I’m sure running a company can be stressful sometimes.

That can indeed, sometimes an example is, you know, your deadlines, they come up and, and they, they have to be met. And well, when you’re a founder or a co-founder, it’s the buck stops with you indeed. So it can be, it can be quite stressful. I think what what I like to do to try and sort of balance that stress out a little bit is, you know, Oh, sorry. Yeah, so what I like to do is, like I said earlier, one of my big hobbies is getting out into nature and going walking and hiking. And to de-stress, what I often do is I just take a little pause and I just sort of maybe sit in a nice area, have a, have a listen to the birds, just chill out. So, yeah, what I, what I really like to do, like I said earlier, I sort of sit in. Yeah, so indeed, if, if anybody finds themselves in a similar situation where you’re really stressed out, your head’s, your head’s doing cartwheels, my suggestion would be take a little break, go out, breathe in the fresh air and enjoy a little bit of nature.

So, next question is, this is like a fun question. I mean, most of our speakers don’t, our guests don’t expect that. So what is your favorite song? Yeah, he’s already laughing.

Yeah, you, you’ve caught me off off on the hop too, man. Yeah, yeah, no, it’s good. Look, I love music. I really do, and I’m looking forward to tomorrow evening when there’s hopefully going to be a bit of music on the closing event. One of my favorite songs is actually an Irish song, not in the Irish language, but it’s a traditional Irish song, and it’s called Raglan Road. And one of the, one of my favorite versions is by the Dubliners, who are a band, unfortunately, many of them have passed, passed away since, because they’re from the 70s or maybe even before it. And Raglan Road for me is a fantastic song. and it was originally a poem by Patrick Kavanagh, who’s a wonderful Irish poet. So if you get a chance to listen to it, it’s, it’s a deep and moving and I really enjoy it.

Guys, definitely go check it out. We’ll try to post a link also in in the description of the song, so that you can find it easily.

Oh, that sounds fantastic. Cheers, man.

thank you for being part of the show. It was lovely hosting you.

Oh man, thanks very much for for the chats. I really enjoyed it and yeah, great to see you here and hopefully we’ll we’ll meet up again.

Absolutely. all right guys, until next time, see you. Bye bye.

Cheers