Konrad Keck: As an entrepreneur and being ambitious, I knew that we were eventually gonna hit the ceiling and I decided that, okay, I’m gonna make some standalone products and projects that I can sell to that customer base.

Jesse Friedman: I think that it’s something that’s starting to happen a lot faster is an acceleration point occurring in the industry right now where a lot of these companies are, you know, very closely related to hosting, but they’re not actually doing it.

Konrad Keck: I think it’s an excellent example that because of the consolidation on the market, there are opportunities happening because consolidators to unify things and tend to simplify things, so they get obviously, more money because of that.

Jesse Friedman: I think the tools and the other services out there that are becoming more available are making it so that there’s a faster on ramp and these companies are starting to recognize that they’re actually leaving a lot of revenue on the table. Welcome to Impressive Hosting, where we uncover the core tenets of great WordPress hosting. I’m your host, Jesse Friedman. Before we dive in, remember to check out impressivehost.com. It’s where you can comment on episodes, ask follow-up questions, and submit questions for upcoming guests. You’ll also find all our links to follow, like, and subscribe wherever you listen. With me today is Konrad Keck. He’s a serial entrepreneur on many projects and founder of PanelAlpha and Web Hosting Today. Among other things, I wanted to have him on the show because he’s working very closely with WP Cloud. He’s building PanelAlpha, which is a newer hosting panel for hosting companies to deliver a great experience to hosting customers. And he has so much experience with the hosting industry that I thought he could come on and help us to learn more and do more on this podcast. Konrad, thank you so much for joining. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Konrad Keck: Yeah. Thank you for having me, Jesse. It’s actually nice to be on the other side of the microphone and answer questions. So, I’ll try to make it as brief as possible. Although it’s not easy, I’m involved in many projects, as you said. So, my journey started back in 2011. I founded a company that’s called Modules Garden. It’s a company specializing in modules development and customizations on WHMCS, which is the most popular billing system for web hosting providers. So consider it like a plugin development company for WordPress, but for a different platform, which has a much smaller scale. It’s a niche for the web hosting industry. And, you know, we became number one in the industry. We were providing ready-made modules and customization services and, as an entrepreneur and being ambitious, I knew that we were eventually gonna hit the ceiling and I decided that, okay, I’m gonna make some standalone products and projects that I can sell to that customer base. So along the way, we’ve created Easy DCIM, which is an automation system for dedicated server providers and data centers. And we’ve created Metrics Cube, which is a SaaS reporting tool, something like Bare Metrics. So you connect your WHMCS, maybe in future things like WooCommerce, and you have a live dashboard, reports, insights into your business, customer segmentations, things like that. And then in 2022, we founded PanelAlpha, which is the most related to our discussion today. I guess it’s a self-hosted control panel for WordPress, targeting web hosting providers, agencies. Yeah, it’s currently integrated. It’s very flexible on the backend. It’s integrated with WP Cloud, as an example. It has, we put a lot of attention into user experience. It’s basically, if you wanna launch something like WP Engine or Kinsta, you can use PanelAlpha as a platform for that, and it takes care of, you know, customer onboarding, providing all the management tools around WordPress. And, yeah, that’s my main occupation right now is working with this product. I’m involved with the AdminBoard as well, which is a control panel for, which is some sort of replacement of cPanel plus DirectAdmin, in a modern way. I am involved. The most exciting project right now that I’m also involved with is Konrado AI. So my name in front is a system that enhances support teams. ‘Cause web hosting industry is very support sensitive. It enhances support teams to provide much more efficient support, faster, less back and forth, with AI. And not to forget that I’m also a co-founder of Web Hosting Today, which we found together with my friend Ash. He’s gonna definitely listen to that. So, hi Ash. It’s after a year it became number one media platform for web hosting professionals in the web hosting industry. So we have news, we have interviews. I host a podcast. We actually had a podcast together last year. And, yeah, it became a hub for the industry professionals, where I get some interesting insights, at the same time.

Jesse Friedman: All right. Very cool. So that’s a lot to cover. I think what would be really great is if we spend the next few minutes trying to think about the ways in which we can leverage your experience and your knowledge in the industry to inform folks at home who might be thinking about starting a hosting company. And so I spend a lot of time working in and around hosting companies and what I’ve been actually spending a lot more time with lately is with companies, agencies, small, you know, what you might consider very small hosting companies who are trying to branch out and become bigger. And, maybe registrars, other companies like that who are really trying to get into the hosting space. And I think that it’s something that’s starting to happen a lot faster is an acceleration point occurring in the industry right now where a lot of these companies are, you know, very closely related to hosting, but they’re not actually doing it. And I think the tools and the other services out there that are becoming more available are making it so that there’s a faster on-ramp and these companies are starting to recognize that they’re actually leaving a lot of revenue on the table. A registrar is a great example of a company who may be the first point of contact for new website. Buying a domain and then that customer then if the registrar is not providing that hosting services, then they have to go out and find hosting somewhere else. And it’s actually something that WP Cloud, you know, my work on WP Cloud we’re very focused on right now is trying to support registrar companies because it’s actually really a powerful thing for the WordPress ecosystem as well. Because WP Cloud is 100% focused on WordPress. The more that we can close the gap between a domain purchase and the launch of a website on WordPress, the less likely it is that that domain will end up on a closed network or closed platform, and not service the open web, you know, which is WordPress. So if we take a few minutes and try to think about the folks at home who are, you know, maybe they’re running an agency, maybe they’re running a smaller company and they’re doing a lot of hosting for their clients, but they’re not actually providing hosting as a service to, you know, to third parties. You know, why don’t we start with what is WHMCS and what is a panel? In the sense of, you know, we know that cPanel and Plesk exist and they’ve existed for a long time, and they have, you know, probably the largest market share of panels being used out there. But PanelAlpha is an alternative to that. So why don’t we take a second and just explain what is WHMCS and what is a panel?

#### What Are Control Panels and Billing Systems for Hosting?

Konrad Keck: Right. Yeah. So starting with WHMCS, WHMCS is the billing platform in most cases, used by hosting providers or, you know, industries, let’s say, to provide ordering of their services, right? If you are offering the domain name, you’re using WHMCS, you’re offering the domain name there. If you are offering hosting, it automates, it takes care of the billing, invoicing, it gives them a way to pay and in the background, it automates all the provisioning, connects with the APIs and creates something in the background. Now, if we are talking about hosting in a traditional way, that’s been around for many years, but I think it’s changing and I guess we are also going to talk about it, is that for many years, most of the hosting providers were using either cPanel, Plesk, or DirectAdmin. I think these three are the most recognizable and the most popular. So these systems take care of everything, what’s going on on the server to have your website up and running. So then you connect the DNS to that server of your domain. And in theory that’s all you have to do to offer hosting.

Jesse Friedman: Right. And so we’ve seen some friction in the industry, I think, over the years because Plesk and cPanel, years ago were separate companies. Then they formed together to create WebPros, which WebPros is also the parent of WHMCS. And the way in which you can think about it is that you, you know, you rent a box or you build a box to house websites on, you install cPanel on it. cPanel then operates as a control panel to give control to the end customer. Things like, you know, provisioning DNS or changing the cache on a site or installing a new WordPress instance, things like that. WHMCS is a bridge between the work that’s done on cPanel and your marketing website where you’re actually promoting your services and trying to sell and get the customer to actually sign up. And so when they actually do go through the process of buying something from you, WHMCS can connect the dots and do all the work behind the scenes of launching a new WordPress instance, launching a new account, giving you access, FTP control, things like that. I nailed it. Yeah.

Konrad Keck: You did. Yes.

Jesse Friedman: Okay. Perfect.

Konrad Keck: I wanted to talk about what you said about that because it’s kind of touching the point of what’s happening in the industry, right? So from my perspective as we were the software provider for these guys for many years, I have a little different perspective than what a founder of a web hosting company would probably say. But if I look at it from the broader perspective, I see two trends that you’ve kind of mentioned.

Jesse Friedman: So you’re referring to like where I mentioned that there’s a little bit of friction, right?

Konrad Keck: Yeah, so there’s friction, so there’s consolidation happening on the market.

Jesse Friedman: Yeah. Yep.

#### How Is Market Consolidation Creating Opportunities for Innovation?

Konrad Keck: In the web hosting is one thing. The hosting companies, you know, big companies buying smaller ones or there’s a group that’s emerging and they’re buying a lot of companies that’s happening. And there’s also another trend. So that’s kind of related that the control panels also consolidated. Looking at it from the industry itself and you’ve mentioned that there’s something accelerating on the market, that there are companies popping up. I think that great example is rocket.net. I think it’s an excellent example that because of the consolidation on the market. There are opportunities happening because consolidators unify things and tend to simplify things, so they get obviously, more money because of that. But it opens up a lot of opportunities on the market and that’s actually, if you look at it on the control panel market, that’s also what we are entering in. We’ve made PanelAlpha because there is need for some innovation that has not been happening for many years, and the reason that they merged together, I think it was a little catalyst to what’s happening.

Jesse Friedman: Yeah. No, I agree. I think you’re right. I think we’ve seen with hosting companies, they’re getting purchased and then they’re being consolidated and I think that tends to remove the diversity that we see in hosting and the way in which they differentiate each other because they’re always leveraging the same platforms, the same billing systems. They tend to even use the same billing plans and things like that. And so you end up looking at multiple hosting companies owned by the same company, and it’s the same flavor of ice cream just kind of marketed a little bit differently. But then also, I think with Web Pros, being that they have a very large part of the market share and that they own these panels and then we’ve also seen, regardless of how you might feel emotionally, like, the fact is that they have raised some prices over the last few years. And I think that adds a little bit of friction in the hosting space. So at the same time that we’re seeing these hosting companies consider and using the same platforms to manage multiple brands, we’re seeing that they’re also looking at alternatives in the panel solutions. And we’ve seen other companies come out of the woodwork with new panels. We’ve interviewed IVA Pix, which is a customer of WP Cloud. They built their own panel. Very sleek, very good looking thing. And now we’re interviewing you today because we want to talk about PanelAlpha because it’s another choice on the market that allows for you to provide a unique and different experience and so that not everything looks exactly the same. And I think too, the other issue that we run into with the fact that cPanel and Plesk have been around and their institutions in the field is that they also come with a great deal of functionality that we don’t always necessarily need for every single example. And so when you look at something like WP Cloud, which is hyper-focused on serving just WordPress and then you look at comparing that with a panel that then is built to support not just WordPress, not just Drupal or open source platforms, but a countless number of other solutions out there. The weight of that panel can be ultra heavy on a platform that’s meant to be very focused. And so that’s why I got very excited about the fact that you and I met and we got to talking. You were telling me about PanelAlpha and we got to talking about WP Cloud and how the two of them could work together. And we’re seeing clients adopting both and it’s going quite well. So what made you think about building, what was the catalyst for PanelAlpha? What made you think it’s time to build something?

#### Why Build a WordPress-Focused Control Panel?

Jesse Friedman: Because it’s not a small endeavor, right? Like this isn’t building a website. This is a massive undertaking. So what was it that actually kicked you in the butt enough to say, okay, it’s time to actually build this thing.

Konrad Keck: Yeah, so I think one of the things was the consolidation of, obviously that’s again, in many cases, and not in every case, but consolidation means that if you are getting a certain position on the market, you are squeezing your customers. Let’s be real. I mean, that’s what’s happening. And again, that’s also happening with hosting providers. They’re buying another company and they are increasing pricing very, very fast, I would say. That’s what’s happening and that creates space for innovation and something that can touch certain niche. Well, I wouldn’t say that WordPress hosting is a niche, but you know, WordPress, if you look at the industry, the statistics, the official statistic is like 40% of websites, 43%, of websites are running on WordPress. If you look at those legacy control panels, as you said, there’s a huge overhaul of useless features. If 40% of your customers are using WordPress and you give them like, I don’t know, Node.js, like Python management, if you look at those legacy platforms, you have 50 or 100 icons that are not related to what you’re trying to achieve, you’re essentially losing customers as a hosting company. Because, and again, look at WP Engine, rocket.net, they have identified that if there are so many customers using WordPress, if you make a platform that is WordPress-oriented, you’re gonna get the edge, right? And you don’t have to compete in pricing. You don’t have to. You are just providing what the customer needs, the legacy platforms have been not catching up for way too long and they were, you know, things like customer experience, proper customer experience around WordPress, proper tooling. I mean, there is some tooling, but compared to many modern solutions, it’s way out of date. And that’s where we’ve seen the trend in the industry that more and more hosting providers have finally recognized that WordPress is a thing that they should support much better. And that’s where, that’s how we decided, okay, let’s make PanelAlpha.

Jesse Friedman: Yeah, it’s very much like if you decided that you wanted to start working on your car and changing the oil and changing the brakes and things like that, and you go to buy a tool set to help you manage the work on your car, and instead of getting this small bag of tools, you get this huge box or crate of tools that are used for, not just for cars, but for trains and planes and all these other things and things that you’ll never end up using, and it’s just causing clutter. And it’s hard to find the things that you actually need because you have to sort through all these other things that you’ll never, ever use. And so, it goes back to what we talk about frequently on this podcast, which is that we have to provide a really superior WordPress experience. And the panel plays a very important part of that because while the hosting company doesn’t necessarily abstain from changing the WP admin and the way in which you use it and build your site and all that stuff. The part where you interact with the outside of your site, the backend, is very much synonymous with the host, right? So you have certain hosting companies that change the way the WP admin works and gives you a better experience or sometimes, not always a better experience, but every host provides you with the management tools that you need to manage your site on the backend. And I think that is just as important to the WordPress experience as the actual WP admin because, and we say this all the time, I’m becoming like a broken record at this point, but the hosts have a responsibility to the first WordPress experience that somebody has. And it can always end up being their last WordPress experience because if it’s not good, they’re not going to then make the decision and say to themselves, I’m gonna go try WordPress somebody else somewhere else. I’m gonna try it with, I tried it with X host, I’m gonna try it now with Y host. In their minds, that is the WordPress experience. That is the same WordPress experience they’re gonna get wherever they go. And I’m talking about these novice users, not seasoned agency owners and things like that.

Konrad Keck: But even agencies, I think they have their own needs and they, you know, then they’re gonna drop out if they don’t have a proper platform to manage their…

Jesse Friedman: That’s, I mean, and that’s absolutely right. They might have a little bit more willingness to try and experiment with a different hosting company, but eventually, if that WordPress experience is not good, and they can’t build it in their workflows and they can’t make money off of it. They’re gonna end up going with something else that does operate in that way.

#### What Makes PanelAlpha Different From Legacy Control Panels?

Jesse Friedman: So anyways, you saw this trend happening. You went and you built PanelAlpha. So tell us a little bit about what, so it sounds like PanelAlpha, and I’m just kind of speaking in this way for the folks at home who maybe haven’t tried it yet, but it’s a narrowed focus. It has less of the huge list of things that you can do. Is it more customizable for the hosting company so that they can create a sleeker design experience? Is it so that they can build it into their workflow? Like what is it that’s a feature about PanelAlpha that we should highlight that differentiates itself from the legacy panels?

Konrad Keck: So you know what, I would say that the most important thing is that we are site centric and not hosting centric.

Konrad Keck: So if you look at the, if we are talking about the end customer, end customer wants to have a website, the hosting is like the necessity, but it’s not what they want. I want to have my website hosted. Right? So our panel is focused around sites and the first thing that they see is site, if they have there, is hosting management. We have to put something like, I dunno, email management or, you know, FTP accounts. It’s more for developers in some extent. But it’s secondary thing and everything advanced and more for advanced users is hidden. And we show the easy interface that, you know, highlights, our website focuses around performance of that website, focuses around, you know, if it’s a proper version, if it’s up to date, if it’s safe or not. So our approach was all about user experience and taking it to the next level. Another thing also related to the user experience was collaboration. So when, if you think about WordPress. It’s one man’s job. You know, I want to use my wife as an example because she’s using WordPress herself, even though she has literally no knowledge about anything, anything breaks, she just calls me, right? I’m this guy in the family that has to take care of all these,

Jesse Friedman: No wonder you’re investing in AI for support.

Konrad Keck: Maybe it’ll, yes, exactly. Konrad AI. You know what? Call Konrad AI. I don’t care. Maybe it’ll happen someday. So if, you know, the way that she sets up the site is that, you know, she had someone working on some integration. has no idea what she’s doing. She has a site and she can invite other users to work on the site. And it’s more like a collaboration environment for these guys. You know, that’s, that’s, I think one of the most, the biggest advantage of WordPress is that flexibility. But the flexibility means that there are many people working on your site and we wanted to have that environment. We wanted to provide that environment with Pan Alpha. So these are like the key features and all the tooling around WordPress, but it’s also WordPress focus. We don’t have any, anything else. We know our panel don’t support any other platform than WordPress.

Jesse Friedman: Yeah. Okay. That’s great. So, if you are at home right now listening to this and you’re an agency and you say maybe you have a hundred sites under management, one of the things I keep talking to agencies about. Is that, you know, they’re building these sites for their clients and then they have to manage a lot of the times they manage the hosting on their behalf of their customer. Now I see all the time I see hosting companies, they either. Bring on customers onto their own hosting that they’ve, that they’ve contracted with. Like for example, Pressable is a great company for this. You can bring on as many sites as you want and a lot of times agencies will partner with Pressable and then they’ll just put all of their sites on Pressable. But then I also see that there’s a diversity in the way in which they choose hosting and that they sell the hosting collaboratively with. With their client or with the host to the client. So like we had, Brad Williams from WebDev on, and he was telling us about how like, independently the client may choose which host that they go with, and so he’ll sell that with them. But either way, an agency ends up doing a lot of the management of, of keeping that site up and running and up to date and all those other things. And so at that point, you know, I think agencies start to think to themselves like, I am doing a lot of the work that a hosting company does already. And I think what the little light bulb that goes off above an agency’s head is, is that when they decide to say, I’m gonna open up this hosting. To any third party out there, and I don’t need to sell them on my agency services yet. I can just, you know, build a marketing website. They can choose a plan, they can sign up and launch a site on their own. Then what I’m doing is I’m creating passive income through this mechanism. Then what’s really interesting, I think, is when the agency starts to provide support to those customers and then they’re able to sell their agency services into that user base. So they’re basically cultivating passive income and a user base to generate higher and greater income to those customers or for their business from those customers. And that I think is something that’s, you know, really powerful when you combine it with a fully managed. And this is a little bit of a plug. But when you combine it with a fully managed cloud platform like WP Cloud and then something like Pan Alpha that gives you the tools and the things that you need to provide those services to customers, you’re basically taking all the work that you’re already doing, creating a workflow that doesn’t create a great deal more work for you, but then creates all this passive income and new opportunities for you. So, you know, I’m thinking if, if an agency like that is sitting at home and they’re on the fence and they’re not a hundred percent sure. I think, you know, I would love to hear from you, like, what would you say to them in terms of like, you know, helping to put their minds at ease around the management of a hosting company and, and transitioning from just being purely an agency to, to a hosting company. Is that something that they should think about? Is that something they should move forward with?

Konrad Keck: Absolutely. And you know, I’ve mentioned briefly that there are trends that I see in this industry and, you know, one of the trends is that the consolidation is happening and that means innovation is needed and there are companies popping up. But the second trend that I see, and I also talked with Vito from ATAR recently, he has, making these agency reports and he shared some insights that actually it’s very, it’s getting more and more popular for agencies to offer hosting their customers because. Why not? Like you are doing it anyway to some extent, as you said.

Jesse Friedman: Right.

#### How can WordPress agencies develop business opportunities?

Konrad Keck: So it is a way for you to expand your business because as an agency, I think that the, you know, we were to some level agency, yes, it was a niche, it was a, we were providing, we are still providing custom development services, but now it’s a very small chunk of our revenue. But if you are doing project after project. It’s, it’s never ending story and you lack this level of like a regular. Income that can happen. But if you work with these customers and you, if you offer things like hosting, it’s going to get you this comfort level that you know, you are growing your customer base and if you even finish the project, the site is up and running, you still get some revenue, recurring revenue from them. And that’s a completely different scaling. Business than just, you know, chasing project after project. It gives you that, you, you, you can literally chill out at some level. You’ll be able to have a little chill and don’t worry about what’s gonna happen next month, or I don’t know, next three months. So I think that

Jesse Friedman: Yeah.

Konrad Keck: opportunity there. And I think the platform like the, and there’s where platform like WP Cloud is, you know, getting to the point is that an agency. If you want to offer hosting, you want to make it easy for you. You don’t want to hire an army of server admins who’s gonna manage It’s not easy. It’s not your profile, it’s not your expertise in many usually. So if there was a platform that you can use as a base. Then on top of that, okay, so platform like Pan Alpha can help you set up your business so you don’t have to worry about things that you are not expert in. Right. It is easy business setup with such platforms.

Jesse Friedman: Yeah, I think it’s interesting because if you look at the timeline for WordPress, right? Like years and years and years ago, there was a higher barrier of entry into building a WordPress website. You had to download the zip file. You had to go find hosting somewhere, upload it via FTP. You know, enable the database, change the name, do all these things, and then all of a sudden the five minute install arrived and then anyone could do it. And then hosting companies took it a step further, and then they made it so that you could just instant deploy and you buy a hosting plan, you get a WordPress. And now I think we’re starting to see the same thing with, with becoming a hosting company and that. There was a large barrier of entry. It was very hard to get into. You had to, you know, have a lot of technical expertise, and it was very difficult to compete on speed and security. But now with things like WP Cloud and Pan Alpha, being able to provide fully managed WordPress hosting as a platform, as a service, we call it like WP as a service, WordPress as a service. Being able to do that now is lowering that barrier of entry and making it possible for other people to become hosting companies. And so I think the last bit of that puzzle piece that they need to solve for that can be quite difficult is support because the technology exists and the way in which you scale up that technology exists. So the last piece of the puzzle is in how do you communicate with your end customers? And one of the things that we’ve come, you know, covered on this podcast many times. The deep value and importance of good support from a hosting company. And I think that’s actually a perfect transition into talking about your AI tools that you’re working on to help provide better support there. But I would be remiss to tell you that if, if I didn’t take a break now, our producer John would be yelling at me soon. So I think what we’re gonna do is take a quick break and then we’ll. We’ll come back in a second episode here with Konrad and, and continue from there. Konrad, thank you so much for joining and, to everyone at home. We’ll be back soon to talk about hosting support and AI.

Konrad Keck: See you soon.

Jesse Friedman: Thanks for joining us on another episode of Impressive Hosting, where we uncover the core tenets of great WordPress hosting. Do you have a follow-up question for today’s guest, thought or comment on anything we talked about, a future guest suggestion, or a hosting horror story? What do you think makes great WordPress hosting? All your comments shape the show. Drop them on impressive.host. We also appreciate you following us on social media and subscribing to the podcast on your favorite platform. Finally, do check out our list of open-source projects that need support at impressive.host. Whether it’s code, community, or cash, you can make a difference. See you next time.

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