Teaser 

Aaron Campbell: We have to really identify the different types of customers and their capabilities and empathize with each individual group and deliver the correct solution for them.

Jesse Friedman: I really hope that there are some product people in hosting companies really listening to this episode.

Aaron Campbell: Bringing personal vulnerability is not enough. You have to bring company business vulnerability to the table as well.

Jesse Friedman: A hosting company has a responsibility not only to that customer, but to the ecosystem to provide an experience that’s going to help them succeed.

Introduction

Jesse Friedman: 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 impressive.host—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 a friend, Aaron Campbell from hosting.com. I wanted to have him on because this is a person who has years of experience working in the WordPress community, working with hosting companies, and I’m sure has a lot of great stories to share. Aaron, thanks for joining us.

Aaron Campbell: Yeah, thanks for having me.

Jesse Friedman: Yeah. So tell us a little bit about yourself and for the folks at home who haven’t had the pleasure of hanging out with you at WordCamps, year after year.

Aaron Campbell: Yeah, well if you’ve been to WordCamps, it’s highly likely you’ve seen me there. I’ve definitely done my fair share. But yeah, I’ve been in the WordPress space for, gosh, almost 20 years now. It was one of those things that I had an agency building sites for customers, tried out WordPress, started using it. That was all fine and good, but it was when I first fixed a problem in WordPress itself and got that code committed into the project. I was, I was hooked from there on out and pretty much contributed to like every release from whenever that was in like 2006, 2007, all the way up till now.

I love the open source space and that has taken me on an amazing journey through offering products in that space, into the hosting realm where I found just so many fascinating problems to solve. And it pulled up right alongside my love of open source. And I’ve been digging into that space for the last, gosh, I guess it’s been like 10 years now.

I kind of hate that I keep talking about things in the span of decades in my life now, but there it is, I guess I’m getting that age.

Jesse Friedman: Yeah. It’s funny when I talk about my history with WordPress and going, it’s getting longer and longer and longer, and I’m noticing the gray hairs are getting grayer and grayer and grayer.

Aaron Campbell: Yes. Yes, for sure.

What are some of the ways to rebrand a hosting company?

Aaron Campbell: And then now the most exciting thing I’ve been with—a hosting company called A2 Hosting for the last two and a half years and A2 Hosting became hosting.com. Literally this week as we’re recording this, launched on April 28th of this year as the new brand. And that has been amazing.

Jesse Friedman: That’s awesome. So tell us a little bit about that. You went into this rebranding—that’s a big project, right? So like, obviously you grabbed up this domain, but what does that mean for you and the reputation you have with your customers?

Aaron Campbell: Yes, it is a big project and it has really happened pretty much start to finish really in about six months. So I will say that I am now referring to the last six months as a marathon sprint, because that is what it has felt like. Six months at full sprint pace. But we got it out there. As far as what that means for our customers, our existing A2 customers, other than having a much prettier site and a somewhat more friendly panel to use with our fresh new branding in it, they’re really experiencing everything exactly as they always have.

They’re on their same products that they were always using, all their same logins worked, they’re dealing with our same support staff, they’re sitting on top of the same stack that they always were and the one difference is the emails that are coming to them with product updates and stuff say they’re from hosting.com.

As far as kind of going forward, I think that it really gives us kind of an amazing name and brand to build behind that’s gonna let us push hosting.com a lot further than we were ever able to push A2, which is super exciting. We want to bring those same amazing offerings to more and more people.

Jesse Friedman: Very cool. So yeah, I guess in a sense you’re basically just lopping off the A2 part, huh?

Aaron Campbell: Yeah. Which is a bigger deal than maybe it sounds like when you put it that way, because hosting.com feels like a really big deal, but you’re right, we went from A2hosting.com to just hosting.com.

Jesse Friedman: Yeah, it’s a simplistic way to explain it, but it is a huge project and one that has implications from current users who have to now become familiar with your brand and remember, where am I hosting my site, to the people who were on the fence trying to figure out in the middle of this where they’re gonna buy. And now all of a sudden, maybe a little confusion there. So you gotta do redirects and some PR and stuff. And then how does that play with all the places where you’re listed? You know, like I’m sure A2 Hosting is listed in dozens of places recommended as a good hosting company. Are you just relying on the redirect to kind of explain things? Or are you going more in-depth?

Aaron Campbell: Oh my goodness. There are so many moving pieces to this, Jesse, and you are definitely hitting on a number of them, but yeah, I mean, yes, redirects are in place for sure. There are some interesting challenges beyond even just simple redirects though.

For example, our panel that our customers log into that has been at my.A2hosting.com forever exists at my.hosting.com. But we want to make sure that people’s password managers still fill passwords as expected until those password managers understand that the domains are equivalent and those kinds of things. So almost everything at the old A2hosting.com redirects to its new equivalent at hosting.com, but some things like that panel still kind of live transparently in both locations.

When you talk about like all the places that we were listed, we have tried to be very proactive about that, reaching out to people that we know have listed us, especially partners in the space and such where, you know, some of our plugin partners that talk about us and those kinds of things to give them updated wording, updated name, updated logos, all that. But we’re also listed in a ton of places and articles that maybe we didn’t even realize we were listed. And so there’s definitely a long tail of that that we are relying on the redirects to hopefully catch and of course some stuff on our homepage that says things like “A2 Hosting is now hosting.com” so that the people that are redirected there hopefully aren’t excessively confused.

Jesse Friedman: Yeah, it’s not a jarring experience. Yeah. So, you know, you mentioned the password managers auto-filling—it sounds like a little tiny thing, but I think it’s important for people to realize at home that that’s actually indicative I think of some of the things that you see with A2 Hosting or now hosting.com, which is, at least from my experience with your company and what I’ve heard around the community is that you guys do care about the details. You care about performance, you care about the user experience a lot. And I think that’s indicative of that, that you’re going to that level to try and make sure that you’re just not creating any extra friction for your customers.

Aaron Campbell: We really, really do. It’s frankly a lot more work on our side to have to do all that stuff, to care that much about each different layer, each little bit and piece. But our goal is to be the most trusted hosting brand out there. And to build that trust with customers, you have to really make sure that you’re not dropping the ball anywhere. And I think that something that seems so small, like password manager auto-fill, we want them to be able to trust us so much that they’re willing to go ahead and fill that password there. But to keep that, we want to make sure that they’re not going, “Well, am I being scammed here? Is this a phishing thing?”

Right? Like some of the trust that we put in our password managers is catching things like phishing scams. We never want to appear that way, even if we aren’t. And so that takes a lot more planning, but it makes for a fantastic experience.

Jesse Friedman: Yeah.

What is Hosting.com working on right now?

Jesse Friedman: So, you know, we kind of jumped right in here, but real quick, let’s take a step back for the people at home—what is it that you’re actually doing at hosting.com? You in particular, what are you working on?

Aaron Campbell: Yeah. So as we rebranded, I also kind of stepped into a new role, Director of Product Strategy, laying out kind of our future plans, the direction that we want our products to go. Identifying the gaps, the places that customers need things from us that we’re not providing at the moment. And planning all that out. Up until then I had just been Director of Product, which had been a lot more hands-on doing both the planning and a lot of the actioning. We have a lot bigger team now. As we shifted to the hosting.com name, we also brought in a lot more people. And so I’m able to step into this more strategic role, but still really focused on exactly what you were just talking about, making sure that we’re really paying attention to all the little details for our customers and really building out what they need from us, you know, over the next two years, three years.

Jesse Friedman: Yeah, and so with your hosting.com brand. That can be perceived as incredibly broad—WordPress and Drupal and anything else in the world that’s open source plus anything static or anything app-wise or anything. Where is the focus for hosting.com and are you working now on strategizing for product for WordPress itself or like specifically around WordPress, or are you expanding that beyond WordPress as well now?

Aaron Campbell: I definitely am expanding beyond WordPress. We can, in fact, to your point, host pretty much anything that can be hosted. And so WordPress is a huge chunk of that. WordPress is definitely where my personal passions still lie, but we do want to be able to offer more than just WordPress to our customers.

And I do think that that’s especially for some agencies and such in the space that are doing slightly more complex builds that maybe have WordPress but also have something else that sits next to WordPress and completes that functionality, whether it’s some additional self-hosted CRM or something along those lines—that’s the stuff that we can handle. As far as how we’re focusing, hosting.com is a very broad brand. We certainly could hit kind of any part of the market with that, but we are still very much focused on kind of the agency web professional space, and extending on into kind of the small business owner space. That’s where our focus is.

A lot of that again comes from my past passions. I ran my own agency for, gosh, 15 years and dealt with a lot of the struggles that agencies deal with. And on the flip side, working from the hosting side, I really want to see us be able to take all the kinds of amazing tools that maybe enterprise agencies have been able to develop for themselves or purchase at pretty high costs and bring those to the broader swath of agencies and web pros at a price point that they can afford, really to help level them up in their game as much as we are trying to level up in ours. And so that’s where we’re largely focused at the moment.

How do you build success with agencies?

Jesse Friedman: So a couple episodes ago we had Matt Madeira on from—I’m sure you know Matt from WP Minute and Gravity Forms—and we got to talking about hosting companies aligning themselves with the success of their agencies and making sure that they’re doing well. When an agency is performing well, when their workflows are optimized, when they’re saving as much money or launching as much as they can, whatever it might be.

And so when you’re thinking about that focus, and the fact that you’re kind of expanding beyond WordPress, I would imagine that open source is still a primary focus for you, no matter whether it’s WordPress or not. What is it that you’re thinking about when you’re talking to agencies about the tools that they’re using, the workflows that they’re using? How are you implementing that into your platform in a way that allows you to build products that service more than one specific feature like WordPress?

Aaron Campbell: That’s a fantastic question. And Matt is definitely a smart guy. The thing that you were saying there about sort of our success with the success of our customers—to me that is a huge key in accomplishing the kinds of things that we are trying to accomplish. I think that as long as our success is completely driven by our customers being successful…

How do you build trust and empathy in hosting?

Aaron Campbell: That brings a kind of alignment that is always gonna steer us in the right direction of making sure that we’re really delivering what those customers need. As far as how we’re trying to do that to agencies specifically, and how we’re trying to do that beyond just WordPress, where our main focus is, is trying to identify as many of the both pain points and just—what’s the right word for it?—the time wasters that agencies have to deal with on a constant, regular basis and building in things that make their life easier.

So whether that is, you know, proactive monitoring of sites that not only shows that they’re still up, but lets you know when say performance on this page has degraded within the last couple days. We let’s raise that to you so that you can take a look, but also because we always raise that to you when your Google Performance scores have dropped. You don’t need to be checking that every day on every one of the sites that you’re managing. You can just take action when we bring it to you. We really want to push those kinds of things into every little part of every product that we are offering. And so that’s where we’re going with a lot of this.

And one of the big things that we built over the last year and a half, two years was a very WordPress-centric control panel that lets you monitor and control all of your WordPress sites. Because that, like I said, that was our kind of our biggest focus and now we are expanding that out into everything else. No longer does your site need to be WordPress for us to be able to do those performance monitoring things. And so that’s, now that we built the thing, we get to expand it out to work in all the other places.

Jesse Friedman: Yeah, it’s funny because one of the things that we kind of return to all the time in this podcast is that we launched WP Cloud and we built it because, you know, it was something that we needed internally for ourselves. And then when we realized it was something that was as good as it is and it handles all the management and all the other pieces that go along with WordPress-needed or WordPress-first infrastructure, we wanted to make it available to hosting companies who might struggle in that area or might want to expand into enterprise-level WordPress.

What we came into the market with was this idea that you can leverage WP Cloud, but take a lot of the work off your plate so that you can refocus your efforts as a hosting company back into providing services for your agencies, for your customers, and to really kind of do what can help you to better differentiate yourself in the market beyond just the underlying infrastructure.

And it sounds like one of the things that you are trying to do with A2 or now hosting.com is really establish a level of trust that is probably an order of magnitude higher than what other hosting companies might put out there. It seems, you know, just from this very brief few minutes already, like you’ve touched on these themes that tend to—you’re talking about transparency, you’re talking about building relationships, understanding these customers.

So let me ask you this, when you think about other hosting companies out there—and on this podcast, we never point fingers at specific ones. So like we always like to highlight, you know, who’s doing it well—but let me ask you this, where do you think the hosting industry could improve around building trust with customers? And how might they do that?

Aaron Campbell: Oh, so this is such a big topic. I think the last time that we saw each other in person was at CloudFest.

Jesse Friedman: Yeah.

Aaron Campbell: One of the things that I was talking about on one of my panels was this shift from—the shift that like a ton of us hosts are going through from really being kind of an infrastructure thing to being a little bit more of product companies.

Jesse Friedman: Exactly what I’m seeing.

Aaron Campbell: Yeah, in that shift many hosts have struggled to really make that jump smoothly. It’s a really different thing to do—build infrastructure and build product that is a whole solution that you’re offering to customers. But in the infrastructure days, we built a lot of that trust by making sure that the infrastructure always worked. That was where we saw, like it was 99.9% and then 99.99% and 99.999% uptime, and that was a big thing in building trust when what we controlled was the infrastructure and the customer controlled everything beyond that.

And as we have built more offerings on top of that—easy, simple installers, managed offerings, et cetera—we have to also focus on bringing those kinds of things that we did to build trust into that space as well. And so to me, that’s one of the most exciting things to be working on right now because it’s taking those same little kind of attention to detail things that were done before that were all on engineering’s plate and putting that over on the product developer side to recreate.

And so every button has to do the thing that you expect that button to do, and every button needs to be in the place that you expect it to be, and those are the same kind of things that build kind of trust. Hey, every time I go into this panel to do a thing, I can find the thing I need to do, and when I click the button, it does exactly what I expected.

Jesse Friedman: That is a really fun place because you get to talk to customers, you get to see exactly how they feel about your product, which is really amazing. I often talk about the need for us to return back to a place where we’re doing empathetic design and really putting ourselves in the shoes of our customers and understanding them.

I think there’s another component to that that adds a little bit of complexity, which is that when you start to learn an interface you are becoming familiar with it through design patterns and things like that. There’s another component though, that I think is interesting, which is that you need to build trust in that they’re going to achieve what it is that they think they’re setting themselves out to do. And I think one of the things that we struggle with, especially in this industry, is that all too often people will hesitate in just trying something out.

And we wonder why, and I think a lot of times what we settle on is that they’re afraid of breaking something. A lot of times they’re a little bit more worried about whether or not they’re going to actually be able to achieve what it is that they’re hoping to accomplish because the investment in time and learning how to do it, or that the tool is actually gonna function the way it’s supposed to, is so grand that it can become overwhelming and you just say to yourself, oh, I’ll just pay someone to do it, or I’m just gonna try something else, because it seems so much more clear to me.

And so I’m curious, like when you are building these tools for customers who are doing more than just hosting websites now, are you thinking about that? Like, is that top of mind for you? Like are you helping customers to understand the steps involved, the investment involved? Helping to build trust around educational tools and support so that they know that there’s someone there to help them?

Aaron Campbell: Without a doubt. I’m processing your take on this and I’m kind of loving it. The fear could not be that I’m gonna break a thing. It could be that, you know, I’m gonna invest a day of my time and effort into this and it’s not gonna succeed—what a waste.

Jesse Friedman: Exactly.

Aaron Campbell: And I think that this is an interesting thing because the solution to this is not the same for every customer that comes in. And this is a place that you were talking about empathetic design. And I do think that that’s important here, but I think in a similar way, we have to really identify the different types of customers and their capabilities and empathize with each individual group and deliver the correct solution for them.

And so you are a person that does leatherworking for a living and you’ve put up your own site and you’re trying to add some new functionality to it, you want something that’s super easy to understand and you can maybe see what this might look like at the end so that you know that after you’ve done these 12 steps, you will be there. If you are a web developer that’s been doing this for 10 years already, you don’t want to waste your time with a whole bunch of these additional steps of, I don’t know, previews and step-by-step—you know where you’re going, you need easy access to the five tools that you’re gonna need to get there.

And so I think that one of the biggest solutions to this is it can’t be one size fits all. You really have to deliver the tool that is right for your customer. And that could all be the same in the backend, but the way you’re delivering it to them—one button versus five tools, you know, the one button being like, take me on the walkthrough, start step one versus the five tools of these are the things I need to do. I think both of those are valid solutions in their own groups of customers. You just have to target it at those groups.

Jesse Friedman: It is a lot like playing a board game where you can see the whole landscape, but you can go step by step, pull a cheat card and just go to the end if you want to. That handheld experience can be very, very beneficial to someone. It makes me think of, like you said, empathetic design, but maybe it’s like empathetic personalization, like really understanding the individual’s needs, their segment, their customer niche, like their skill level, and designing an experience that caters to that. But maybe it’s the same framework the whole time. It’s just based on those answers to those questions, you kind of skip steps or insert a step or something along those lines.

Aaron Campbell: A hundred percent because you can’t build trust with both the beginner and advanced users by offering them the same thing. If the advanced user comes in and just sees this guided tour walkthrough, they’re gonna be like, I don’t have the power to do the things that I need. And if the beginner user comes in and sees all the power tools, they’re gonna be like, I don’t know what to do with any of these. And in both cases, you’ve lost trust, not because your tool isn’t built with some empathetic design, but because the wrong path was delivered to the customer. And so you definitely need both.

Jesse Friedman: I really hope that there are some product people in hosting companies really listening to this episode because it can go a long way to helping improve the, not only their individual experiences, but the WordPress experience overall. And something that we continue to talk about on this podcast—if you’re actually listening to this podcast every week, you’re gonna hear me saying this over and over again, but a lot of times that first WordPress experience can be their last WordPress experience, and so I think that a hosting company has a responsibility not only to that customer, but to the ecosystem to provide an experience that’s going to help them succeed.

Aaron Campbell: Yeah, I a hundred percent agree. We’re that first line that customers are coming in on. We need to give them the path to success. And I think that we can do that with WordPress, but I still think we need to do that. And you can’t just give everyone WordPress and drop them in WP admin and think that that is a path to success for everyone.

Jesse Friedman: Right, because if you’re a developer, and frankly, all you want is reliability and a vanilla WordPress, there’s ways to solve for that that doesn’t require the complexities of managed WordPress hosting and all those pieces. So I think you’re right when we say that people are coming to hosting companies because they want a product more than just the underlying infrastructure, they want something that’s gonna help them succeed.

And again, we keep talking about this idea of trust over and over again. And one of the things that I apply when it’s either me leading a team or it’s me having a negotiation with a partner or someone like that—my first thought in trying to develop trust with someone is being vulnerable. And so in a personal aspect between you and me, if I share an anecdote about my personal life or I tell you something that I’m struggling with, it allows you to open up and comment on it in a way that creates a relationship and creates a little bit of a connection. And then I remove any guardrails, right? Like I remove any blockades that prevent us from forming that connection through that vulnerability.

How (and why) to implement vulnerability and transparency in hosting

Jesse Friedman: And I’m curious, when you think about a host’s responsibility to the customer and even vulnerability, what do you think is the responsibility from the host to the customer in terms of things like when a hosting company screws up, when something goes down, when something breaks, how do you communicate that in a way that your sales team isn’t gonna be furious with you, but you want to balance it with making sure that you’re being transparent and helpful to your customers.

Aaron Campbell: Okay, so vulnerability time. First of all, I’m a hundred percent with you that opening up, bringing a little bit of your personal self, can be super helpful, especially when you’re building those relationships with people. Or when you are trying to solicit really honest feedback about your hosting or your product or something from someone. But bringing personal vulnerability is not enough. You have to bring company business vulnerability to the table as well.

And so to do that right here, right now, we launched hosting.com, the new brand name Monday, which for me right now, that was what, four days ago. And we had some bumps in the road, like that’s that. I mean, this was a big undertaking. It mostly went really well. But there were some things that had hiccups and as a result, our customer service queues grew beyond what was reasonable, as far as our wait times and stuff. And so if you look at status.hosting.com, we not only said, “Hey, we’re having issues with this thing and this thing and this thing,” we posted what our wait times were like on the various methods that you could contact us—chat, ticket, phone, et cetera. Those were not numbers that we were super excited about at that time, Jesse, but they were real and honest and we have been updating those.

Another update on those numbers goes out now, and we have just said that in order to be the most trusted, we have to make sure that we bring that vulnerability to own our mistakes when they happen and that requires a level of transparency that yes, makes the sales team a little uncomfortable sometimes. But also what we have said as a company is that the way that we are going to get sales in the long run is to have people trust us so much that they’re okay with dealing with hiccups from us because everyone’s gonna have hiccups. But when it’s on us, we understand that it’s on us. We own that it’s on us, and we do everything we can to communicate that and help our customers move forward through it as successfully as possible. And that is awkward, honestly, for me. That is more awkward than sharing some personal details that connect me to people. But I think that it’s the right way to go. And so I love that that’s how we’re doing it.

Jesse Friedman: I absolutely agree. I think in the short run you might lose a customer here or there, and that would be sad and not ideal. But in the long run, what you’re doing is demonstrating that you are someone to be trusted and that at the end of the day, sometimes all people really want to hear is, “I’m sorry, I screwed up.” And, you know, “I’m going to reflect on that and we’re going to apply new strategies and new product solutions or whatever to fix that problem.” I think the biggest struggle I have personally when I run into issues with customer service or whatever, is when you get some playbook answer about a problem that doesn’t actually acknowledge that something went wrong, doesn’t acknowledge my feelings in the situation. It can be really tough.

Conclusion

Jesse Friedman: Listen, we are having such a great conversation. Can you believe it? We’ve blown past the 30-minute mark already. So let’s take a break here and we’ll return next week with a new episode. Aaron, thank you so much for being on the show.

Aaron Campbell: Absolutely. Thanks for having me.

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? 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.