How WP Cloud transformed Porkbun’s hosting services with 155% monthly growth

Background

Ray King, a tech entrepreneur from Portland, Oregon, originally created Porkbun as a spin-off from Top Level Design, a TLD (Top Level Domain) company, intending only to sell .design domain names. But the company’s dedication to customer service and affordable prices quickly drove expansion beyond the initial .design focus. As sign-ups accelerated and word-of-mouth referrals increased, customers requested more than just .design as an extension. Porkbun responded by steadily expanding its offerings to include hundreds of domain extensions.

The company built its brand by keeping markup costs minimal, and focusing on customer satisfaction rather than aggressive marketing. The result was strong word-of-mouth, and the business kept growing. In 2015, Porkbun expanded into additional services including email, website hosting, SSL certificates, and WHOIS privacy, all natural extensions that provided additional value to their quickly growing client base.

By 2024, this focused approach had propelled Porkbun to manage over 2 million domains, positioning them as one of the fastest-growing domain registrars in the market. Current projections indicate that Porkbun will reach 3 million domains by late 2025, with approximately one million additional domains annually thereafter.

The challenge

As Porkbun experienced that rapid growth, their commitment to delivering what the company calls an “oddly satisfying experience” led them to closely examine their WordPress hosting infrastructure. In all of their growth, Porkbun’s approach to its user interactions was to make their platform easy to use and to make it fun.

Excessive downtimes, slow-loading sites, memory issues, and compromised or overly restrictive security measures are not fun and not easy. Scaling the business wasn’t just about expanding the customer base, it was about scaling the company’s values so that the hosting infrastructure mirrored their internal core values. 

The team’s technical assessment highlighted several WordPress-specific scaling challenges: 

• Resource Optimization: WordPress sites require carefully balanced server resources to maintain optimal performance under varying traffic conditions.
• Memory Management: The WordPress application ecosystem, particularly with multiple plugins and themes, demands sophisticated memory allocation to prevent exhaustion during peak operations.
• Security-Flexibility Balance: Porkbun’s security protocols included measures like restricting wp-login.php access and limiting wp-cron execution – effective for preventing attacks and conserving resources, but potentially limiting for developers requiring advanced customization options.

Porkbun faced a strategic decision: either invest significantly in building brand-new WordPress hosting infrastructure, or partner with a WordPress-focused hosting provider who had already solved these scaling challenges.

That’s when Porkbun teamed up with WP Cloud.

Scaling core values and the business

Partnering with WP Cloud provided Porkbun with a specialized WordPress hosting infrastructure that addressed these challenges while maintaining robust security standards. The strategic collaboration delivered multiple benefits to Porkbun’s hosting platform and its customers.

Scalability: WP Cloud’s platform enhanced scalability to accommodate Porkbun’s growing customer base, allowing them to manage thousands of new WordPress installations monthly without performance degradation. This elastic infrastructure ensured that as demand increased, resources could be provisioned efficiently without manual intervention.

Resource Allocation: The partnership also significantly improved resource allocation for better website performance. By implementing WP Cloud’s optimized WordPress stack, Porkbun could offer customers faster loading times, smoother backend experiences, and more consistent performance even during traffic spikes or resource-intensive operations; a more “fun” experience.

Advanced security: WP Cloud’s solution offered robust cloud security with automated DDoS mitigation, encryption, proactive WAF, site isolation, and preemptive security enhancements without restricting core WordPress functionality, including accessing wp-login.php and wp-cron executions, key components to making WordPress “easy.”

Developer flexibility: Working with WP Cloud offered greater flexibility for developers using Porkbun while maintaining protection. Site owners gained access to more customization options, development tools, and WordPress-specific features without sacrificing the security and stability that were essential to Porkbun’s service promises.

Measurable results

The partnership with WP Cloud delivered immediate and substantial growth. In just the third month of collaboration, Porkbun achieved a 155% month-over-month increase in new sites hosted on WP Cloud with over 2000 sites.

WP Cloud has outperformed our old platform in terms of revenue handily.

– Porkbun CTO Owen Borseth

The migration process represented a significant technical challenge, as Porkbun had thousands of sites hosted on their legacy system. Together, the companies implemented a seamless transition strategy that:

• Successfully migrated thousands of sites with zero service disruptions
• Enhanced feature offerings, including a world-class CDN provided at no additional cost
• Maintained Porkbun’s commitment to transparent pricing while delivering premium performance