110.1 – Vikas Singhal (InstaWP)

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 and partner, Vikas Singhal from InstaWP. He’s the CEO. He’s been working on some pretty awesome things for a couple years now. InstaWP is working on a variety of tools to help hosting companies and agencies do a lot more with WordPress, from ephemeral websites to demo tools, to actual hosting. Vikas. It’s awesome to have you on the show. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself.

Vikas Singhal: Thanks, Jesse. Great to be here. Yeah, so we started InstaWP three years ago and it was a pet project, so I also run a plugin and theme company for WordPress, we have a bunch of plugins and themes, which we still sell by the way. And from that, InstaWP started as a thought experiment that. Is there a why is why there is no easy way to launch WordPress site click of a button. We did that and then it started getting viral and people started loving it. And three years later, we are a full blown cloud for WordPress. We have over a hundred thousand users using the platform. The idea grew from launching a sandbox or temporary website, as you said, all the way up to like a proper hosted websites. Now, users can do anything which they require for in the WordPress ecosystem. And we can talk about that a little bit longer, but yeah, that’s about it.

Jesse Friedman: That’s very cool. And where are you based?

Vikas Singhal: I’m in Bangalore, India.

Jesse Friedman: That’s right. And so are you excited that WordCamp Asia is coming to India next year?

Vikas Singhal: A hundred percent. So looking forward to it. The whole team is looking forward to it. Since it is going to be India and a flagship event, are you going to be there?

Jesse Friedman: Yeah, I think so. You know, India has been on my list for a long time, so this is a really good excuse to make it out there.

Vikas Singhal: Yeah, the Mumbai area is lovely, right? I will be happy to show you around, even though I’m not from that area, but it’s something.

Jesse Friedman: So, you know, it’s funny because I’ve run word camps and I’ve done more of the local smaller ones. But I’ve never had a flagship, country level WordCamp in my personal area. Obviously we have WordCamp US, but it bounces around and US is pretty big and it hasn’t been anywhere near Rhode Island where I’m from. What does it actually mean to have India chosen as a country for WordCamp Asia? Does it feel like to the local community, like is there a buzz or excitement or is it kind of just like, just another conference?

Vikas Singhal: India, I think is a little bit different than other countries because I’m not, I’m kind of new to word camps. I started three years ago with InstaWP, but as far as my experience go, I have seen that lot of local word camps happen in India, in various cities, and that was awesome. WordCamp Asia as a flagship event is icing on the cake. Right?

Jesse Friedman: Yeah.

Vikas Singhal: I think India and the nearby countries in Asia, contributes a lot. Not just in WordPress core and like open source plugins and themes, but as a business also a lot of great businesses are in India and around. So I think it’s a great opportunity for people to travel and showcase their stuff.

Jesse Friedman: Yeah, that’s what I’m looking forward to. ‘Cause I know that there is a huge community of developers and designers and folks out there making some pretty great things. And bringing them together around a word camp like that, I think it always helps to drive a little bit more intermingling around the community, getting people involved with each other. I think those relationships that you build in those, in those word camps, carry with you, you know, whether it’s for a year or years, you tend to meet folks there and then you get to hang out with them, or you connect with them, or you work with them in the future. And it’s always been nice, you know, at these word camps, we see a variety of folks. We see hosting companies, we see agencies, we see people who are just trying to get started building a blog. It runs the whole spectrum. I think InstaWP kind of services that same spectrum. You have tools for hosting companies, you have tools for agencies, you have tools for someone who just wants to run one website. How is it that you’re approaching, you know, building out a set of tools that might go to, you know, in a sense, a competitor, in a hosting company, but also servicing agencies and also servicing people who are, you know, running one website.

Vikas Singhal: Yeah, that’s an interesting question a few people have asked me before, as well. So the problem which we’re trying to solve is becoming the backbone of WordPress internet, which means that the tools which you have to build a WordPress website is kind of fragmented, right? You go and build a local site, and then you convert to a hosted instance, or you migrate it. Then you have tools to manage it. And then so many other infrastructure level dev tools, etc., are all fragmented and they don’t work well together. That’s what we wanted to solve. We never wanted to be in this position actually. This is how we grew into what we are right now on the feedback and the journey which we have through our agencies, hosting companies. Also, when we started going to CloudFest. Somebody told me you should come to CloudFest. And when we met, I think that was our first meeting at

Jesse Friedman: Yeah. Yeah,

Vikas Singhal: in the hall for Jet

Jesse Friedman: That’s right.

Vikas Singhal: And that was, and then I felt, man, these guys are doing something else, right? If we were building for developers and agencies, the same tools can be just repurposed and reprogrammed for hosting companies to use. Right? And it did right, especially the demo product. So the demo product can be used by hosting companies to instantly launch a demo site when somebody lands on their page. So the narrative changes completely from someone coming to a hosting company and seeing the pricing plan and then dropping out. And on the other hand, they click a button and they get a demo site. So they get to experience WordPress firsthand. Then you combine that with bunch of tools, and then you have like an onboarding experience, click a button, go live, etc. So the whole experience changes from a technical WordPress vanilla installation versus experience what with what other SaaS companies are trying to do. Since now, I think a lot of people are non-technical, and they have tools now. Hosting companies can’t just be a simple hosting company. They need to reinvent themselves. And I have a lot to talk about how a hosting company should think about in 2025 and beyond.

Jesse Friedman: Yeah, we definitely want to touch on that because it’s a common theme from this. Hosting world needs to rethink the way in which they go to market because of the fact that people aren’t really buying hosting anymore. They’re buying a website and a success package and a platform and a, you know, it’s productizing website design. But then the hosting companies who are still selling these plans that are describing exactly, you know, the RAM and the gigabytes and all this other stuff. They’re kind of getting left behind because it’s not hard to find. Especially with like things like WP Cloud becoming more prevalent and more available to people, it’s not hard to find really powerful, high-performing hosting. So how are you differentiating yourself as a hosting company? And one of the things that we talk about frequently on this podcast is the responsibility that a hosting company has to that first WordPress experience. If you are someone who’s getting started with WordPress. You were recommended to use it by a friend or a colleague. You were told how easy it is. And then, if that hosting company doesn’t provide a great experience to you, they don’t necessarily stay with that hosting company, but they don’t also necessarily go and try WordPress three or four more times with, you know, three or four other different hosting companies. That was their WordPress experience and then they’re out. And so I think that there’s, you know, something really important to think about there, and I think you are specifically trying to solve that in that. You are, you know, you’re talking about demo sites and I think it’s good to take a quick second to take a quick step back here and say, what, what is it that you’re actually building? Because I said ephemeral sites, you’re saying demo sites. These are websites that are spooled up instantaneously. Then they’re configured in a way that a hosting company has the opportunity. They can bolt on the plugins that they want, the themes that they want, they can pre-configure it, stop me if I’m getting any of this wrong. And then, that way, you know, without having to submit a credit card, create an account, do all these things that are barriers to entry, someone can spool up a website and get start and actually start building it. And so what have you seen? How does that change the customer’s perspective when they get to play with WordPress and actually use the hostings tools, the hosting company’s tools before they actually buy?

Vikas Singhal: Yeah, that changes the game completely. When a user lands on a traditional hosting company, choose a pricing plan, they enter their credit card. They click, I think, 10 more buttons to get their first WordPress website. And WordPress, as you know, is very developer focused. And for a newbie who has heard that WordPress is great, it can be challenging sometimes. Now, versus the experience when you go to a hosting company, you click a button, you get a WordPress site instantly because that is internally powered by InstaWP, the insta site, right? Hence the name. So the site is spun up instantly. It has SSL installed, it has a sub-domain. Everything is set up for the user, and then you slap a bunch of AI plugins or onboarding experiences. You can build custom anything, right, or as you said, theme or plugins. You can preload that with demo content and then user gets to experience what they would have after 20, 25 clicks. And like, let’s say 15 minutes of setup. By the time they just lose interest and the user is not warmed up. So we also solve, through this experience, we solve conversion problem for the host at the same time. And we have seen almost 10 to 15% conversion rate increase on the first week itself. And then in long term, it increases even more.

Jesse Friedman: And what about churn? Is it helping to reduce churn for customers as well?

Vikas Singhal: Hundred percent.

Jesse Friedman: Yeah.

Vikas Singhal: Since the account is activated, they’re using an active website. It’s a built website.

Jesse Friedman: Right.

Vikas Singhal: And we have seen instances where hosting companies can sell unique, niche down experiences. For example, they can create a template for hairdressers or dentists. They can just target that niche. So instead of selling hosting for WordPress or WordPress hosting, they will sell websites for hairdressers.

Jesse Friedman: Yeah.

Vikas Singhal: And powered by WordPress. So how cool is that? Because the end user or the business owner, they don’t really care on which platform the website is built. They want to solve their business need.

Jesse Friedman: Yep.

Vikas Singhal: And the hosting company can do that. And we love that it is powered by WordPress. That’s our goal to do that.

Jesse Friedman: Yeah. Yeah. You guys are definitely interwoven into the open web and trying to make sure that WordPress has a very long life. You know, I see how hard you guys work to build tools and help to bring people onto WordPress. You know, it’s really interesting when you talk about those business owners who are not so interested in the way in which things operate underneath. You know, when I was growing up, it was kind of cool. A bunch of my friends and I, we all had trucks living on Cape Cod and you know, we thought we were cool ’cause we were getting under the hood and we were learning how to change the oil of our cars and swap out the brakes and things like that. But I see that even less and less these days when it comes to automobiles. It’s the same thing. I think it’s a similar trend within the web industry, right. Less and less people are concerned with what’s happening underneath. They come into building a website with this expectation that it’ll be secure, it’ll be fast, and it’ll be up. And so because of the fact that they have that expectation, and that’s where we’re just kind of setting things. It’s not like the old days where, unfortunately, hosting companies were able to differentiate themselves on uptime. You know, it was very common to see some level of downtime in the early days of the internet, and then it got better and better over the years. But we’re now at a place where uptime is incredibly well thought out. Like WP Cloud Partners for example, they offer a hundred percent uptime a lot of the times, and it’s because they can actually do it because they have access to a platform that can make that available to them. So when you have these expectations, it’s very similar to buying a car. You are buying a car because of its performance, its miles per gallon, the way it looks, the way it makes you feel, things like that. But no one’s opening the hood anymore at a car dealership and telling them about the intricate components and all these other things. They care about safety, security, things like that. And so when I think that a hosting company is shifting in the industry and they’re starting to think about ways in which they can acquire customers. I think what you’re doing in terms of demo sites and ephemeral sites is really interesting because it gets them in and gets them trying the tools out. They can configure things. I really want to touch on the niche stuff, but there are also other ways in which you can use ephemeral sites, and I’m really interested in this because I think it gives the customer the ability. I think this idea of ephemeral sites is, you can flip it on and flip it off. It really gives us the ability to try out things and solve problems that we’ve seen in the industry for a long time. I think one area of that is plugin development. If you are, you know, one of the things that we struggle with with WordPress is that while it’s so robust, the number of plugins and themes and things out there that you can use to extend WordPress, that’s also a bit overwhelming for customers as well. You know, you type in contact form into the WordPress plugin directory. I think you get like 2000 results. If you are new to WordPress, you don’t know that Contact Form 7 or Gravity Forms or Ninja Forms or Jetpack have these great form tools. It’s all equal, right? And it’s all misunderstood. But what you’re doing is you’re also providing ephemeral sites for plugin developers to give people the ability to actually try out a plugin without the risk of the plugin developer losing proprietary code or missing a sale because they were able to just download the plugin and do it. What do you think that’s doing to the way in which WordPress’ ecosystem operates? If I as a plugin developer don’t have to charge to give you access to a plugin, does that change the marketplace a little bit?

Vikas Singhal: Yeah, it’s very similar. It’s underneath is the same fundamental which we are trying to solve. You go to Gravity Forms or any of our partners who are powering their sites. The experience needs to be very similar to what hosting companies are doing. But in this case, people go to Gravity or other form builders and they click try demo, and then they instantly are able to try the demo. It’s not just like a plain WordPress site. It is populated with content, with the plugins, authors liking, and it’s an onboarding experience, right? And then the user can make easy decisions before they buy. The main advantage of that. And the underneath, as I said, the fundamentals are the same to make the experience easier for the user. Now we are working with our plugin partners, and a lot of products in Automattic as well, especially the Sensei LMS.

Jesse Friedman: Yeah.

Vikas Singhal: And WP Job Manager. They also are powered by insta demos.

Jesse Friedman: Yeah.

Vikas Singhal: And we are creating almost thousands and ten thousands of websites every single day just for the demos. So what we are offering now to plugin companies is that they can enable these demo sites with the go live button, very similar to what we did for hosting companies. So the first step is getting a demo site. Second step is that as a permanent instance. So that’s where the cloud part also comes in. So that we connect all the dots together. And then the customer doesn’t just have to click like two, three times and get from a demo to live site. That’s it.

Jesse Friedman: So now, what’s the motivation? I know the answer to this question, or I have a feeling I know what you’re gonna say, but for the people at home, what’s the motivation for a plugin company to want to become a hosting company?

Vikas Singhal: The motivation for them is that they obviously want to add additional revenue, line of revenue, right? Because in WordPress, unfortunately, you have to do either LTDs or yearly sales, and there are like 50% renewal rates and things like that. So if you add a hosting revenue along with that through commissions or through pure revenue that will add top line revenue to your company instantly because you already have the traffic. You already are using instant demos.

Jesse Friedman: Yeah. I think there’s also one other element there too, which is that they get to control their plugin experience. Whereas with a third party hosting company, they have the ability to configure things a certain way, turn things off. We’ve seen this with certain hosting companies. They’ll disable things. They’ll install something else that they know is not necessarily as compatible by default. And so when your plugin gets installed, maybe it’s not as compatible with that hosting plan. So I think plugin developers as a company are starting to recognize that they can control the end-to-end experience, which kind of circles back to this idea that people are going to be more focused on buying a product and a SaaS service rather than just purely hosting. And we see this too, like a great example is the work that Elementor’s doing. They have this site building tool. Everybody knows Elementor, but they also have Elementor hosting. And a lot of the, I would imagine that the big reason for them owning that is because they get to tailor the hosting experience around Elementor rather than having a hosting experience that has to have a puzzle piece kind of fit into it. So I think it’s really interesting when you think about that because as hosting becomes a little bit more accessible. Tools like WP Cloud make it more available for, as we say, it’s making great cloud powered hosting accessible to other companies. There’s other services out there too, other cloud platforms. It’s making hosting a little bit easier to get into. And the one thing that we kind of run into is that we see as still as a blocker, because it hasn’t necessarily been provided in a productized way yet, although we’ve had some people on the podcast talk about this, is support. So how does support work within CWP if you are providing these demo sites via a hosting company? So like, I arrive at XYZ hosting company, and I get a demo of an InstaWP powered site, but I’m not necessarily signed up yet. Does support fall into that? Like are you giving customer support? Are you telling them to sign up in order to get support? How does that work?

Vikas Singhal: So, as I said earlier, the products which we offer to hosting companies are a hundred percent white labeled. So that means that the user thinks that this is not an InstaWP product.

Jesse Friedman: Right. They don’t experience the InstaWP brand, right?

Vikas Singhal: And sometimes hosts tell us that your infrastructure is actually faster than what we actually offer, at least for the demo site because the traffic is not there, but at least the spinning up part and the experience of using the site is actually really fast.

Jesse Friedman: No worries. This is the perfect time to be able to cut to a commercial from our sponsor, though we don’t have a sponsor.

Vikas Singhal: That would be automatic.

Jesse Friedman: Yeah, right. Don’t worry about that. We’ll cut that out. So feel free to just restart.

Vikas Singhal: Where were we?

Jesse Friedman: I was asking about support and the way in which they do support, and you had said that you might wanna just kind of start over again with your answer, which is that you were just saying that basically they white label everything.

Vikas Singhal: Right. So as part of our hosting offerings, we white label everything and the end user doesn’t actually experience that this is an InstaWP product. And that’s the beauty of it. Also, the answer to your earlier question is how do we sell to both agencies and hosting? We don’t see both of these as different customer bases. They are obviously different customer bases, but they are means to the end user. We don’t have plans and then we don’t do end user reach out, right? Because we’re built for, as I said, the backbone of WordPress internet. That’s who we serve, and we wanna serve on both sides because we cannot reach a hundred percent of the audience.

Jesse Friedman: Yeah, so I think it also gives you an opportunity. I think a lot of times hosting companies see support as a cost, and if you ask any executive at a hosting company, they’ll be able to tell you exactly what a support interaction will cost them. You know, I think what’s lost on a lot of people in the hosting industry is that support can actually be a mechanism for creating and delighting an experience and then getting a customer to convert. So in fact, if the hosting company is white labeling your product and their brand is in the forefront, they can actually provide support in these moments during a demo site. It sounds like that’s an opportunity for them to show them that not only is the technology available to them, the tools that they need to be successful, but we’re also gonna be there for you to help you along the way. And then they can push them to make a sale. I would imagine as well that there’s something to be said about the fact that you invest the time in building something, a demo site. You are probably reducing churn because people get a little bit sentimental about what it is that they created and they don’t necessarily wanna lose it. And so they kind of keep going. So what about, you know, we talked a little bit about the industry shifts that we’re seeing within hosting companies, but is there anything else that you see that’s happening in the industry around customer acquisition, about site building, around the way in which people launch WordPress that you feel like the hosting industry should be aware of and maybe pivoting around?

Vikas Singhal: Yeah, that is obviously, as you are and others are aware, a massive shift, which is coming, which is the AI-based website building experience. WordPress made it easier for semi-technical people to build sites and AI is making it easier for anybody to build websites. WordPress is right in the middle of it. And I think a bunch of companies, including WordPress core team, they have an AI team now, so I’m very excited about that. And apart from that, we are also doing a lot of stuff which you will see in coming weeks, including a Lovable-type AI builder for WordPress. But this is a massive opportunity when you go to Lovable or Bolt or anything else, right? You can’t just build an e-commerce website. E-commerce by itself is a platform. You cannot just code a WooCommerce overnight or in few hours. Right. The checkout, the My Account and the orders page, everything is just so much complex.

Jesse Friedman: It’s funny because the tools are there to help you with the design of an e-commerce platform, but I think people don’t necessarily recognize the level of regulation, the settings that you have to set up, payments you have to configure. You know, a lot of times you’re forming a company and you’re waiting for your tax ID to come in, or you have to set up how you’re gonna sort out shipping to another country. It’s not as easy as 1, 2, 3. And as much as we want the software to be super quick and help you with that, there’s a lot of moving pieces beneath the design of an e-commerce website that really take a lot of time.

Vikas Singhal: And it’s the same with others. Other examples, like a membership site or, for example, an LMS site.

Jesse Friedman: Yeah.

Vikas Singhal: All of these are huge complex software underneath, and WordPress is poised for AI. I’m dying to have that built by someone. And we are doing some stuff there. I think 10up.com is doing some stuff there and then the core team is doing. What I am thinking is hosting companies either take someone who’s building these solutions or they build experiences around these. One of the easiest low-hanging fruits is give them an AI building site-building experience for brochure kind of websites. And there are a bunch of tools available out there, including 10up and Yoast, and then so many there. So I think start utilizing those as a starting point. Even hosting companies can now. So hosting companies in the past, which I’ve seen, has been very hesitant to go inside WordPress admin. I will recommend to go inside WordPress admin panel and customize at least the landing page and the onboarding page according to how you feel your customers would like to see that, right? Because now customers can experience a WordPress site through demos. But then don’t throw a vanilla plain WordPress site at them. Right? Install some kind of AI-based onboarding solution, which you can build. Also, it is now very simple to build or use an existing solution. So I think there is, the water is boiling in this area. Our vision is that we provide a Lovable kind of experience where you can say, hey, I need an e-commerce site for my beauty store or a health store, and it just builds that store with WooCommerce wired underneath and everything is like you can chat to WooCommerce as you work while building the website. That kind of experience is something I think is coming to the WordPress industry.

Jesse Friedman: You know, I think you’re touching on something that’s quite amazing. I mean, if you think about it, Gutenberg and its block system laid down, and this is kind of a funny pun, a foundation that made AI, you know, it’s going to make AI accelerate incredibly fast in terms of design. Because in the old days, if we tried to apply AI to a WYSIWYG-type editor, there’d be so much work in the development of the HTML structure and every AI tends to get a little bit different. And they apply things differently and then all of a sudden, the AI is not only trying to lay out a website, but it’s also trying to actually create the structure of all those components as well. Getting into page templates and other things. It would be a nightmare, but now AI doesn’t have to worry about those pieces because the scaffolding is already there through blocks. Right? And so all you need to do then with AI is to identify the blocks that you want to create patterns and layouts and things like that. And then force fit some content into it. And voila, you have a website. But what I think what you’re getting at is that you’re thinking that AI can actually get beyond the superficial, beyond the design of the site, but actually help with the configuration and the building of the backend that people need so much work with. And I really want to dive into that. I want to touch on that. But John is always on us about ending the show in a timely manner so that people can digest this stuff well. So we’re gonna take a break and come back for a part two with Vikas. Vikas, thank you so much for being on the show. It was awesome having you. And yeah, we’ll jump back into AI and other things that you’re working on shortly.

Vikas Singhal: Thank you. Thank you, Jesse, for inviting 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.