## 2×08 – How Do We Build a More Collaborative WordPress Economy?

Jesse Friedman: Welcome to Impressive Hosting, a podcast about the role hosting plays in shaping the open web. I’m your host, Jesse Friedman. On this show, we go deeper than uptime and dashboards. We talk about hosting as infrastructure, about ownership and independence, and what it takes to build ethical, high-end WordPress hosting that actually serves creators, businesses, and the internet itself.

Today we’re doing something a little different. We’re going back into the archive. I talked to a lot of interesting people last season, but this conversation with Tom Fanelli, CEO of Convesio, was one of my favorites. So I decided to bring it back a year later and check in to summarize the episode.

Tom doesn’t even think of Convesio as a hosting company. Once you hear him explain why, it makes total sense. He argues that the race to the bottom on pricing happened because hosts never gave customers a real reason to pay in the first place. Let me say that again because it’s important and fascinating. Hosting companies had to lower their prices because they lacked key differentiators from each other. If all WordPress hosting offers the same thing, how do you compete? How do you grow? The only answer is price.

His solution to the problem is just as interesting as the proposition, and it isn’t better marketing around uptime or support. It’s reframing the website itself, positioning WordPress sites as revenue-generating tools rather than digital brochures. Stores instead of signs. He wants agencies and their clients to associate Convesio with growth, not infrastructure. That’s fascinating to me, and it holds even more true today than it did last year.

There’s more to this episode than that. Tom talked about how he sees hosting as a means to an end. We also go into Five for the Future and how Convesio ended up partnering with WP Cloud to round out their product offering in a way that genuinely surprised me.

Since we recorded this, things have been busy. Convesio launched a new dashboard, rolled out Convesio Convert as an email automation alternative to Klaviyo, and introduced one-click payments to reduce checkout friction in WooCommerce. And after seeing more success with WP Cloud, Convesio has started leaning into it as a core part of their hosting platform.

If you heard this one the first time around, it’s worth another listen. And if you’re new here, this is a great place to start.

#### Teaser

Tom Fanelli: We wanna start building smart, intelligent websites. And by the way, this aligns perfectly. There is no better choice than WordPress for this.

Jesse Friedman: We don’t need to be competitive here. There’s enough WordPress hosting out there for everybody.

Tom Fanelli: We truly do sink or swim as a community. The customer’s not aware of the community. It’s us who are aware of it and how everything interplays.

Jesse Friedman: WordPress as a whole is going to benefit from this ability to level things up. It holds everyone to a higher standard.

#### Introduction

Tom Fanelli: Yeah, thanks Jesse.

#### The Role of Hosting Companies in WordPress Community

Tom Fanelli: It’s great to be back. So we were talking about this notion that the collective success of WordPress as a brand, because in the mind of the end user that runs a business, it’s WordPress. That’s the problem. It’s not some x, y, z plugin that might have an issue with scaling, performance, whatever it might be.

What I think we need, what I would like to see, what I’d like the powers that be to consider, is allowing us to count as a hosting company all of the work and energy we put into diagnosing and reporting issues in the plugins in the community. Count that towards Five for the Future. Here’s why that aligns us with solving problems for our customers. It’s our shared responsibility to make the experience they have on WordPress really good, and that extends beyond core in my opinion. Because honestly, rarely are the problems core WordPress and WooCommerce issues. It’s all these other plugins.

We spend a bunch of time diagnosing, figuring out, and understanding that this query isn’t good, the way you did this in your database structure isn’t good. And collectively, especially for big plugins, that increases the experience of the community using those plugins. I would say it increases the experience of some of the most valuable people, which are the people scaling and being super successful with WordPress. We don’t wanna lose those WooCommerce people to Shopify because they had a bad plugin and they think it’s a WooCommerce or WordPress problem when it’s not. It’s a plugin they installed, and I’ve seen them do all sorts of crazy things.

It would be awesome if that could tie into our contribution to Five for the Future. It’s not directly core, but it’s helping the community overall and helping WordPress’s reputation by making all these other plugins run better. And it aligns to the problems we’re seeing in the trenches every day.

#### Five for the Future and the Value Proposition of Collaborative Community

Jesse Friedman: Yeah, I think that’s really great feedback. For everybody listening, in case you don’t know, Five for the Future is a commitment that Matt has put forward asking that you consider committing 5% of your workforce, your time, whatever it might be, back into WordPress. The reason for that is because as a company that hosts WordPress or builds on WordPress, you are not paying for the actual software. So how do you ensure that it’s going to be around for another hundred years? That you’re doing your part and your responsibility back to WordPress to make sure it has the innovative features it needs, that it can grow, support tons of new customers, pivot if it needs to, things like that.

I think that’s really interesting, Tom, because I think a lot of times people only consider what they actually do to commit code to core or documentation.

Tom Fanelli: Right.

Jesse Friedman: And the plugins repository tends to be this arena of extensible code. It provides so many great features, but it’s typically built by third parties. Anyone from a solo developer writing code at home, all the way up to agencies or hosting companies can build plugins. But the experience a customer has with a plugin can vary completely. The way you get support for Jetpack, for example, with a team of happiness engineers at Automattic there to help you, is not always the case with any other plugin.

I wrote a plugin years ago, and it was just me doing it on the side because it was something I needed for the websites I was building at the time. I wanted to give that code back. But then as a plugin developer, you suddenly take on the responsibility of supporting an entire network of people who are using your plugin in ways you hadn’t thought of.

Tom Fanelli: Right.

Jesse Friedman: All of a sudden they can become quite heavy. So maybe even beyond Five for the Future, maybe there’s a way to create a path for others to become contributors back to a plugin and support those efforts so it can grow and expand. Someone can have it more as like, hey, I built this thing, it’s out there. And I think a lot of times people are a little afraid to fork it because they don’t want it to feel like they’re taking someone’s thing and running with it. But maybe we need to normalize that a little bit more.

Tom Fanelli: I’ll put my pitch hat back on to the powers that be around Five for the Future. I think the challenge we’ve got is that a lot of hosting companies are on the front lines when there are problems like this. We’re the first people to hear about it. The customer doesn’t know it’s plugin B or C causing their problem. We’re the ones interpreting the fatal error logs.

I think most hosting companies just say, oh, you had a problem with this plugin, and that’s the end of it. Because there’s no alignment for them to go support that other plugin. And the problem is that the plugin company may not be capable of diagnosing it either. They’re gonna go back and say, well, give us your hosting environment. And there’s all this runaround that puts the customer in a bad spot because their site isn’t working. They’ve gotta be a project manager now to get information from us to them.

This is where the notion of a guild for professionals in the community comes in, where Five for the Future could be an incentive for hosting companies to level up everybody else. You know what, we’re gonna take a little extra time, document this, and get it to the right plugin company. So the collective experience for the community just rises.

I feel like someone needs to think about how we answer that, because we truly do sink or swim as a community. The customer’s not aware of the community. It’s us who are aware of it and how everything interplays. We just have to be better at sharing information with one another. I would love to see that thought about and pondered more in the larger community overall.

Jesse Friedman: I agree. We keep touching on this idea that a host has responsibility back to the WordPress community. You’re touching on something I hadn’t really considered deeply before, which is that they have so much information about what is actually going on.

Tom Fanelli: We do. We have tons.

Jesse Friedman: And you may not think first about giving that information back, because maybe it’s not easy to compile or easy to send back. Where do you put it? How do you help people understand it? Maybe it just starts with finding a way to funnel that information back to the community so we can make improvements and be in deeper touch with our end users. That’s something we can always benefit from. Alright, great conversation.

#### The Race to the Bottom in Hosting and Agency Pricing

Jesse Friedman: I do want to move things around a little bit. We touched on the race to the bottom. We’ve seen that in hosting companies for quite a while now. The industry has moved towards cheaper hosting, and you talked about how Convesio has held its ground at a higher price point so you can provide better services and support.

You also touched on agencies having their own race to the bottom. I’m wondering about the value of a website. How does an end customer figure out how much they should really be paying for one? A DIY solution on a shared hosting plan can cost less than a cup of coffee a month, and that can still seem expensive to some customers.

I’m wondering if there’s something deeper going on here. A website is not necessarily seen by a business owner as something worth investing in. They feel like because so much of the internet comes free, because you can watch YouTube, you can stream content, you can do so much online and consume it all in exchange for your data and advertising without shelling out money, they expect websites to be cheaper and cheaper.

Tom Fanelli: Part of the challenge, and this is a big question, is that a lot of people don’t value hosting. As I said in our prior episode, this is one of the reasons I’ve been really hesitant to call us a hosting company even internally. I know we’re seen as that, but people don’t value it. They think it’s a commodity, and unfortunately they’ve been trained to think of it as a cost because they don’t get really great service at these other companies. All these hyperscalers, the Vultures of the world, DigitalOceans, are all trying to say you can get an instance for two or three dollars a month. So there’s no real value put on the hardware or the compute resources to do anything.

So where do you provide value as a hosting company, and how do you differentiate? That’s where we’ve tried to carve a path in commerce-enabled sites. The magic for us is that we want to build a platform that enables the end customer to increase their revenue, and in that value stack, increases the revenue to the agency and to Convesio. We have complete alignment in this. This is why we’ve started to become more than a hosting company. We’ve layered in marketing automation tools so people can interact with their audience and transact more with them. We’ve got the payment solution now. We’re trying to be this full value stack around commerce enablement.

One thing that’s interesting to me, and I’m not going to talk about traditional e-commerce or the WooCommerce space specifically, is I’ve been evangelizing to agencies that they should be building commerce-enabled websites. Most agencies are scared of WooCommerce because they’re used to building static websites for small businesses, local businesses, mom-and-pop shops. They think, I can’t do e-commerce because it’s got taxes and shipping and inventory and products and all this stuff I’m not used to. So it’s very scary for agencies that don’t do it to say they’re going to start building WooCommerce sites.

But you can build commerce-enabled sites with plugins. We just did a Convesio Pay integration with WS Form. You can integrate Stripe with Gravity Forms. You can build payment forms for businesses. I think that’s how we start getting people to think of their website not as a brochure, but as a revenue-generating tool. When you can say your website generates X amount of revenue for you, you have a lot firmer ground to stand on to say you don’t want your site to go down, because you might lose a sale.

We also have to start making websites smarter. The brochure days are behind us. We wanna start building smart, intelligent websites. And by the way, there is no better choice than WordPress for this. You can do anything with WordPress, relatively easily. This is the evolution of leveling up the commodity site so it becomes an integral part of a person’s business. Even a tutor, where people can go pay their invoice online or book time through a scheduling app. That’s how we tell the story of the evolution of sites from where they were, where you could get a site at a large host for two bucks a month.

Jesse Friedman: That ties really nicely into a newer product you’re offering that is powered by WP Cloud. Tell us a little bit about how you’re moving forward with that. I’d also love to hear more about how you actually evaluated WP Cloud.

Tom Fanelli: Yes.

#### The WP Cloud and Convesio Partnership

Tom Fanelli: It’s been a really interesting journey for us, and I think we have a very differentiated story from what I know about most hosts adopting WP Cloud. I mentioned I was at Deluxe for a while, which is a multi-billion dollar company that isn’t in the hosting space anymore but hosted millions of sites, a lot of cPanel stuff. We were always asking how do we have a premium WordPress hosting offering, and it was hard to figure that out at the time. There wasn’t something you could go to like WP Cloud.

I think how a lot of folks use WP Cloud is as their premium offering for a discount hosting brand. WP Cloud is hands down one of the best infrastructure platforms to host WordPress on. But for us, we had the opposite insertion point in our business. We’ve been playing at the upper end of the market because we’ve architected this very bespoke platform. You can do anything outside the box with it, like database replication and running a Grafana stack alongside it. We can do all that in our containerized platform. But we couldn’t get the economics to work so we could compete with WP Engine, Kinsta, and Pagely.

Jesse Friedman: Right, and we talked in the last episode about how you’re providing much more of a bespoke experience. Because you’re offering something that’s fine-tuned and tailored to these customers, it’s going to come with a higher price.

Tom Fanelli: Right. And so we basically had this situation where agencies would come to us and say, we have one or two difficult sites we need to host with you, and they’re worth a premium because they’re mission-critical, at scale, whatever. And so we’d say great. But then they’d say, what about the rest of our portfolio? It’s on a dedicated server or a VPS at DigitalOcean and the price per site is really cheap. And we couldn’t compete with that. We didn’t have an answer for two reasons. One, our native core platform just wasn’t designed for that. And two, there was no reliable platform we could say lived up to the level of expectation to sit side by side with our core offering. Until WP Cloud.

This is the perfect solution for us. High uptime, bursting, a lot of the DNA of what we’ve architected, but with the scale of Automattic behind it. That’s enabling us to go back to agencies with a competitive solution and say, hey, you want this white-glove solution? You love us at Convesio but we didn’t have an offering for your full portfolio. I just had a conversation with an agency yesterday. I was telling them about Convesio Express. They said, oh my gosh, I’m bringing everything over. The only reason I didn’t move my entire portfolio before is because I had a financially advantageous deal at a big hosting company.

The thing that’s interesting for us is we don’t just want a shot at providing hosting for that agency. We want to help them succeed. We want to help them commerce-enable their forms with our WS Form integration for Convesio Pay. We’ve also noticed this trend where agencies that get to around 75 sites or more, especially at hundreds of sites, are constantly in Slack dealing with support questions. Some they can’t answer because they’re too technical, so they escalate to us. And it’s that same plugin-jockeying-between-parties problem again.

So we asked ourselves, can we provide white-label support for these agencies? They already know, love, and trust us. They take our answers and pass them to their clients. Could we just act on their behalf and get them out of the mix of doing support, so they don’t need full-time team members supporting a portfolio of two, three, or four hundred sites? That’s where I look and say we want to have the entire portfolio in the Convesio fold so they can grow with us.

I see the value proposition for agencies as being way more than just hosting. I’d actually like to take hosting and give it away to agencies, because there’s so much other value in working with Convesio that we can win together with additional revenue streams to grow that agency.

Jesse Friedman: I love that.

#### Aligning Hosting Success with Client Success

Jesse Friedman: It’s amazing when any company, but a hosting company in particular, aligns their success with the success of their clients. That’s great.

Tom Fanelli: Yeah.

Jesse Friedman: I just want to touch on this one more time. You mentioned there was no other platform but WP Cloud that you felt comfortable putting the Convesio name on. I personally believe that WP Cloud is greater than the sum of its parts, the way we handle everything from management and security to automated real-time failover. But was there one thing about WP Cloud that was the icing on the cake, something that got you really excited?

Tom Fanelli: You have some very cool features that are really hard for hosting companies to replicate. Your multi-data-center failover is really killer. We don’t even have that as a standard configuration at Convesio. To get that out of the box on a competitively priced WordPress site is unheard of in the industry.

But I think the big benefit for us, and for other hosts considering this, is that it’s API-first. You really can’t go to WP Engine and say, hey, as a hosting company, can I just use your infrastructure? So the fact that you built this in a way that’s easily consumable for companies like ours, where it becomes another product on our shelf, that matters. Every product we put on our shelf has to be the best. That’s the litmus test for us.

Knowing the scale of what you’ve done, the reputation behind it, knowing that Pressable uses this infrastructure, the track record is there. The way you built this as a service we could easily consume and power something from Convesio has made it a no-brainer. You’ve hit a sweet spot with this.

And I remember my days at Deluxe. So many legacy hosts in the shared hosting space, the consolidators just picking up cPanel sites, they are looking for things like this to level up. They don’t have the expertise to build it internally or invest the tens of millions you’ve invested to get there.

I love the unique position we’re in now. We’ve got this highly custom platform for when you need it, and we’ve got this awesome option for everyone else. We can take a business that’s just starting out and provide the best WordPress hosting experience all the way up to enterprise-scale customization. We like to say we want to be a place where businesses can start, grow, and scale. Historically we’ve been servicing the scale market. WP Cloud rounds out our product set so we can truly be that starter solution all the way up to the enterprise.

Jesse Friedman: Yeah, absolutely. For people listening at home, whether you’re an agency or a hosting company, WP Cloud is a managed cloud platform built specifically for WordPress. That’s where it differentiates itself. There are a lot of ways WP Cloud differentiates itself against other cloud platforms, but it’s the only one offering a WordPress-first focus.

When you go with any other cloud platform, AWS or Google Cloud, you have to compete with priorities that have nothing to do with WordPress. A fraction of their expertise is WordPress. Automattic built WP Cloud to service the highest-trafficked, most robust websites we have, and then we made it available to others to raise the bar and provide a higher standard of WordPress hosting.

Tom, thank you for that.

Tom Fanelli: You guys have been great to work with, by the way. The fact that we can, as a hosting partner, be aligned with Automattic rather than competitive with them, that’s a really cool thing. We’ve suggested things and you turn them around fast. One of our feature requests got turned around in about 48 hours. They said, oh, that’s a great idea, and then it was just done. That’s the community working together. It’s a big elevator for everyone.

Jesse Friedman: I think WordPress as a whole is going to benefit from this ability to level things up. It holds everyone to a higher standard. But the other thing you touched on is that we don’t need to be competitive here. There’s enough WordPress hosting out there for everybody.

One of the things Automattic works really hard to do is align with other hosting companies, because we see the value in diversity. This whole conversation, the previous episode and today, has been about doing things differently. If there was only one source for getting a WordPress instance, you’d have to compete with the priorities of a single customer base. But with WordPress distributed across many different hosting companies, you’re able to latch onto different opportunities, to focus on different things.

That’s what you’ve done at Convesio. Through this conversation we’ve learned that you’re providing superior hosting and support, you’re in touch with your customers, you want to give back, and you’ve aligned your success to the success of your customers. I think all of that is great.

#### How Convesio Implemented White Label Support for Agencies

Jesse Friedman: The one thing we touched on lightly but didn’t go into depth on, just before we end this second part of the conversation, is that you mentioned wanting to provide white-label support to agencies because there’s so much weighing on them that stops them from focusing on what they care about.

I know a lot of agency owners, and what gets them excited is bringing on a new client, designing something new, building some cool functionality they haven’t tried before, tying something to a public event or a trend. Then they get bogged down with support and end up spending half their day answering simple questions or debugging something. So what are you trying to solve for by providing white-label support, and when did you start thinking about how to scale your own services to help agencies be more efficient, take on more work, and do more of what they love?

Tom Fanelli: Yeah. I would say the differentiation here is white-label support, which might fall under the umbrella of white-label hosting in some way. For us, it really comes down to this: can we be the support agent that the customer interacts with? We do that on behalf of the agency, under the agency’s email address and inside their help desk. We’ve figured out all the technology components of how to deliver that.

The struggle I see is that as agencies scale their portfolio, they spend more and more time each month handling incoming client requests. Some of those they can’t handle themselves because they’re too technical, so they escalate to us. That is our area of expertise. We have to be in the support business. We’re a hosting company. We have to provide infrastructure, security, scaling, support, and performance. That’s an area we’re really strong in when it comes to training and hiring.

If you’re in a smaller market, you might not have top-tier talent available to handle that. So you hire one person to manage it, not ten. That’s just one of many things plaguing agencies with work they don’t want to deal with. It’s not revenue-additive activity. It’s definitely not why they got into the agency business. No agency owner I know got in it so they could wake up every morning to 20 emails in their inbox about why a site is broken or why a form disappeared.

When I see that problem, I think we could solve it. This notion of doing that could be a real stress reliever and a genuine differentiator for a hosting company.

Jesse Friedman: Yeah, that’s great.

#### Conclusion

Jesse Friedman: Well, I think that’s a great place to stop. Tom, would you be willing to come back on at another time to talk about what’s going on with Convesio? I’d love to hear more about how you’ve integrated WP Cloud and what your customers think of it.

Tom Fanelli: Absolutely. Thanks for having me on, Jesse.

Jesse Friedman: Yeah, absolutely. Alright, thank you everybody. This has been Impressive Hosting and I’m your host, Jesse Friedman. We had Tom Fanelli from Convesio on today. Don’t forget to like and subscribe. I hate saying that, but it’s kind of obligatory. Alright, see you guys at the next episode.

#### Closing

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, a thought or comment on anything we talked about, a future guest suggestion, a hosting horror story, or thoughts on what makes great WordPress hosting? All your comments shape the show. Drop them at 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.