Webit Congress has been recognised as one of the best meeting points for the digital industry players from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) – and basically the rest of the world too. Leaseweb attended as one of 5000 professionals from the digital marketing and IT industry in CEE, including companies such as Facebook, Google, Microsoft Advertising, eBay, PayPal, Yandex and Yahoo!
The topics on everyone’s lips were cloud technologies, the evolution of mobile marketing in Bulgaria, and ways to measure online advertising effectiveness. Here we wanted to share some of the discussions and insights we took away from the event, across the areas of online marketing and advertising, e-commerce, gaming, networking, hosting, streaming and telecommunications.
Webit is the only industry event of its scale outside of the UK and Germany, making it a fantastic opportunity to understand the CEE hosting market and meet major internet companies. Every year the event gets bigger; with the number of participants, exhibitors and speakers growing. CEE is a growing marketplace and there are opportunities for new business for Leaseweb.
We specifically learnt lots about the Bulgarian hosting market. Interestingly it seems that many emerging markets are moving straight to mobile. This is really significant for anyone considering launching web services in the region as the way end users view and search content on the smartphones, and the speed and connectivity required, is very different to for traditional platforms.
Although it’s a smaller, less mature hosting market, Bulgaria has relatively good and affordable connectivity. There is an also an abundance of datacenters, making it an attractive option for any online marketing, e-commerce or gaming business. Local providers offer hosting at competitive prices, and while traffic from abroad is expensive, internal traffic, on the other hand, is free of charge. For this reason, the vast majority of Bulgarian websites are hosted in local datacenters in Bulgaria. There are a few major players on the market, with Host.bg, Superhosting.bg and icn.bg leading the market. Leaseweb was able to have some really interesting discussions with Bulgarian companies who wish to expand to the other European markets. It’s a really exciting marketplace for us to play in.
We’re already looking forward to packing our bags for next year’s Webit, and meeting with more people! If you didn’t get a chance to speak to us this year please do not hesitate to get in touch at info@leaseweb.com, tweet us (@Leaseweb), or leave us a comment below. We love any opportunity to talk about the market in Central and Eastern Europe.