MariaDB Foundation is delighted to welcome Seravo as a Silver Sponsor, turning a long-standing relationship in the open-source ecosystem into formal support for the future of MariaDB.

Seravo is a Finland-based specialist in premium hosting and upkeep for WordPress and WooCommerce. Open source sits at the heart of its technology stack and its company culture, and MariaDB has been part of that story for many years.

For hosting providers, databases are not an abstract technology choice. They sit underneath millions of page loads, online transactions, content updates and applications that people depend on every day.

Seravo uses MariaDB as part of the infrastructure behind its WordPress hosting platform, alongside technologies including Linux, Nginx and Redis. The company has built its hosting environment specifically around the requirements of demanding WordPress sites, where database performance, stability and scalability can have a direct impact on the experience of users.

That connection is becoming particularly interesting in e-commerce. Seravo is also working with WooCommerce, where database-intensive operations such as product searches, carts, checkouts and high-traffic sales periods put the underlying infrastructure firmly in the spotlight.

This is exactly the kind of downstream ecosystem that matters enormously to MariaDB.

A database grows not only when somebody consciously chooses it for a new application, but also when hosting providers, platforms, software projects and infrastructure companies make it an easy and dependable choice for their own users.

Seravo’s support for MariaDB did not begin with this sponsorship.

The company hosts the MariaDB.org website, while MariaDB itself has long been a cornerstone of Seravo’s own hosting platform. Seravo team members have contributed to MariaDB and other open-source projects, and in 2018 Seravo hosted a MariaDB Developers Unconference in Tampere, bringing together core developers and new contributors from around the world.

There is something particularly fitting about this circular relationship: Seravo relies on MariaDB to deliver its services, while MariaDB Foundation has relied on Seravo to keep an important part of our own public infrastructure running.

Now Seravo is taking the next step by supporting the Foundation financially as well.

“I especially love welcoming sponsors who are already part of the MariaDB story. Seravo has been using MariaDB, contributing to open source and supporting the Foundation in practical ways for years. Their sponsorship formalises something that has existed for a long time: a shared interest in keeping the open-source infrastructure underneath the web strong, independent and thriving.”

Anna Widenius, CEO, MariaDB Foundation

Seravo has a broader history of participating in the open-source communities it depends on, including WordPress, Linux and other infrastructure technologies.

That philosophy closely matches how we see a healthy MariaDB ecosystem.

Open-source infrastructure works best when the organisations building businesses on top of it also participate in sustaining it. Sponsorship helps MariaDB Foundation maintain the independence, continuity and openness of MariaDB Server, while continuing the work needed to make MariaDB relevant and accessible across the wider technology ecosystem.

We are very happy to have Seravo with us as a Silver Sponsor, and even happier that this is another chapter in a relationship that was already many years in the making.

Welcome, Seravo, and thank you for supporting MariaDB Foundation and the open-source MariaDB community!