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Jesse Friedman: Welcome to Impressive Hosting, where we uncover the core tenets of great WordPress hosting. I am 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 the links to follow, like, and subscribe wherever you listen. With me today is a good friend and colleague, Joshua Goode, the WP Cloud Technical Solutions Engineer. He’s a sales engineer. He’s the security guru, the innovation magician on our team, the integration wizard. He does everything that helps us look good at WP Cloud. Josh, thank you so much for joining us today to talk about WP Cloud and everything else we got going on.

Joshua Goode: Well, thank you Jesse. It’s very kind words there. But I guess when I explain what I do to people, it’s just I try to get people to have the best experience with WP Cloud as possible. Whether it’s you as a host or your customers that you’re trying to get onboard into your hosting solution that uses our platform.

Jesse Friedman: And you do that so well. You also make me and the rest of the WP Cloud sales team look so good doing it.

Joshua Goode: Well, we couldn’t do it without you or our massively talented engineering team. I want to say massive sometimes, but we have a pretty good core and I wouldn’t say small, but we have a good tight-knit team. So many thanks to them, of course.

Jesse Friedman: Very efficient team, I would say.

Joshua Goode: Yes.

Jesse Friedman: So remind us, where are you located?

Joshua Goode: I’m in the east Tennessee area here in the United States. A nice rural mountainous region with nice rivers and valleys. I guess it’s part of the Tennessee Valley system. And it’s just an awesome benefit of working with Automattic is being fully remote, so I can be out here where you normally wouldn’t find a lot of tech employees. We do have some cities like Chattanooga and a little bit further away Nashville and Knoxville, but those are like two hours away. So it’s just great being able to be in this nice kind of easygoing area and still being able to focus on the tech world.

Jesse Friedman: Yeah, that’s very cool. You’re very connected into everything that we’re doing from a technical, engineering, security standpoint, all that. But you also find some time to unplug too. You do some analog offline, mechanical stuff, right?

Joshua Goode: A little bit. Yeah. So we have some old farmland that’s been in the family and stuff. Nothing that we’ve ever made a lot of money off of, but we probably spend more money just kind of keeping the land clean and making sure that it’s kind of there for the future, whether we hold onto it or it gets passed down or it becomes part of some kind of land grant thing. We just try to keep it good for us, keep it good for nature. So I do spend a lot of time out there in the fields, cleaning stuff up, helping our tree population be curated to the trees that we want and what’s best for nature. So when I’m not on the computer, you can find me on a tractor. You can find me on some mowers there. You can find me planting trees. So it is a bit of a contrast. But it’s good. It gets me out there, gets me some sun, gets me a little sweat equity into hopefully contributing to a more beautiful area down here.

Jesse Friedman: That’s awesome. I think it’s super important to actually physically unplug and get into the wild every once in a while. I have a sabbatical coming up and we’ll have some news about that at the end of this episode. But you know, my thing is I want to read, I want to write, I want to connect with the planet a little bit better, so all my time at the beach camping, being outdoors. So I’m always a little envious when I get to hear about how you’re out doing some work or something.

Joshua Goode: Yeah, it is nice. I will say it’s not always fun sometimes, but it is great. I’m very lucky to kind of have that space to disconnect to.

Jesse Friedman: I love that you’re thinking about sustaining and sustainability in terms of the environment and the natural elements around you, but you’re also thinking about that in terms of WordPress and the internet, the open web. And so you’ve been working with WP Cloud one way or the other for quite a while now. I’ve had the pleasure of working with you for what has it been almost two years now closely. But prior to that, you were also working at Pressable on top of WP Cloud. So tell us a little bit about where your history within Automattic and working with WP Cloud has evolved and what it is that drives you that way.

Joshua Goode: Yeah, so we’re going over six years now of being at Automattic. I kind of got started with WordPress.com and also some early transition periods to what would become WP Cloud. Just some backstory on WordPress.com. When we decided that we wanted to offer some higher level plans that expanded the capabilities and performance for users. The old plans were very performant, but we wanted to both allow people to expand their customization options and do more advanced kind of developer-focused things. And so at that time we worked on this infrastructure that was shared in a way with Pressable. And that was known internally as Atomic, and that was Atomic V1. At a later time though, we wanted to get Pressable, Atomic, or Pressable on WordPress.com, all these things on a singular platform with potential future support for allowing other hosts, external hosts to use and enjoy the same benefits. And so that became internally Atomic V2. And so I was there from the kind of early start of V1 and really using that. And I was heavily involved in the transition period to Atomic V2, which ultimately became WP Cloud. And so spent that first half on WordPress.com. Kind of worked my way up a bit through different teams and different projects, and ultimately supporting a lot of their operations on WP Cloud. And then moved over to Pressable to serve as their technical lead, senior technical lead in helping their focus development team and their support and the whole company there make the most out of their WP Cloud integrations and supporting any kind of issues or something that they encountered along the way. And then once we decided to really focus on expanding WP Cloud and getting more hosts on. Once that decision was made, that we really did want to open it up. And Jesse, that’s a lot due to you and your work. That’s when I joined y’all and joined the WP Cloud team officially.

Jesse Friedman: I remember where I was when I heard you were joining the team, and I was very excited. And it was actually on the heels of CloudFest in, I forget what year it was, but I remember seeing that we had some partners of WP Cloud wearing WP Cloud swag. There was a lot of talk about WP Cloud. It was really like the word of mouth was starting to rise up very quickly. And I was thinking to myself, we’re gonna be getting a lot more partners in, and we are getting partners in regularly now using WP Cloud because they see the value in it. And I was like, who’s gonna run this? Who’s gonna make sure that these hosting companies have an awesome experience? And so when I found out that you were joining the team, I was ecstatic. And so the efforts there around what came out of us needing to build WP Cloud as a way to serve our own needs was then made available to other hosting companies. And the way in which we kind of described this is that WP Cloud is the platform that we built for ourselves to say like, how can we do this at scale, how can we do it on top of a cloud platform that we own and operate, that we’re not reliant on a giant cloud platform somewhere else that doesn’t have a focus on WordPress or care about WordPress the way that we do. And then so we built it internally to service those needs. And then we said to ourselves, how can we make this accessible to other hosting companies? And the reason we wanted to do that was because it’s very easy these days, I think, to get into hosting. You could do it as a reseller, you can do it on top of other platforms. You can build your own homegrown thing, whatever it might be. There’s so many entry points into hosting, and so what that means is that there’s a lot of people getting started with it who maybe don’t necessarily have the years and years of experience that you do Josh or that other people do, or they’re leveraging something like a cloud platform that isn’t WordPress-focused, and so it’s not solving specific WordPress problems. And so what we thought about was like, could we make WP Cloud accessible to allow hosts to offer a higher standard of hosting. But do it through a lens of it being WordPress-first. And so that I think is something that you, myself, Elise, the other people on the team Barry, we’re very proud of is that WP Cloud is WordPress-focused. As of right now, it is a WordPress-first platform. It has these guardrails up specifically to solve very specific problems for WordPress. In your experience working in this realm across multiple different hosting companies now, and now making it available to hosting platforms, what are some of the success stories that you’re seeing? Where do you feel like hosting companies are benefiting the most from WP Cloud?

Joshua Goode: Well, you know, just to take a step back, what we’ve done with WP Cloud is we’ve taken the many years of experience hosting well over a million sites on wordpress.com. We took all of our experience hosting enterprise sites on WordPress VIP. We took all the experience from Pressable who was at the time when we really started that partnership, Pressable was a pretty rising or top star already in the managed hosting space. And so we took all of that and we really boiled it down to what really works for you as a host, what really works for your customers, and how do you strategically fulfill the right needs at the right time and do it well, and do it to where it can be profitable for both us and any partner that we’re working with. And that essentially was the formula for WP Cloud. And we took people who’s had experience in the hosting space, specifically WordPress hosting space across all of those different, whether it’s VIP, wordpress.com and took all of that great knowledge and experience to build what we have. And so that’s really allowed these hosts, our external partners to just take advantage of taking something that can be so complex, you know, getting hosting just right, getting your performance, your security, just right and pairing it with being able to spin up a site in seconds and have it accessible with all these features. Whether we’re talking about our built-in caching, that covers origin caching, edge caching, object caching. Whether we have our security features of our WAF and our DDoS protection, a lot of benefits from Edge come into play there. Whether we have our patching to where we can apply vulnerability patches to the entire platform before a plugin or theme has even had a chance to investigate. All these things are built in. And again, a host can come in, send a single API call, and within seconds have a site that’s fully accessible with all of that ready to go out of the box. So when we look at some of our partners, whether it be Bluehost Cloud, Pork Bun, Conve, I think it’s just that ease of not having to set these things up, not having to go through and go through a checklist and making sure that you’re provisioning all of these things. Not only are we handling that for you, but it’s all automated in a way to where Pork Bun can, where are they at now? You know, they had a massive kind of migration and growth here recently and all they’ve had to do was send a single API call, maybe run some scripts that we allow them to do, also over the API and via other features like client SSH, and they’re able to either spin up new sites or completely migrate stuff from their old legacy infrastructure within seconds. Some of the migrations may take minutes, but without any kind of heavy investment in having to spin up new infrastructure or spin up really advanced scripts to make it happen.

Jesse Friedman: Yeah, I love that when I talk to a hosting company, I get to say that the WP Cloud platform itself exists below this API layer, so that the hosting company still gets to put their brand first. They get to focus on the connection and the communication that they have with their end customer, they maintain the ownership of that relationship. They provide support and they are responsible for what is held on that site. And so that’s them creating a go-to-market strategy that allows them to maintain everything that’s important to them as a hosting company. But then there’s this layer that goes on beneath that, where WP Cloud just gets out of the way in terms of branding. We don’t interfere in the way in which they run their business. They are free to build plans any way that they want to. We have hosting companies who bundle resources and allow you to kind of distribute them how you want to, across multiple sites. We have some hosting companies that just have a preset, defined exactly, this is exactly what you get. And there’s a lot less flexibility ’cause they know exactly what their customers need and they want to present just that. And so they have all these options and they can go to market any way that they want to. But having everything operate at that API layer means that WP Cloud is focused on what we do best and that hosting companies focused on what they do best. One of the things I think that I hear of most often is that both internally within Automattic and externally is that once they get WP Cloud up and running, they’re not getting tickets anymore around infrastructure. So the support requests end up actually one significantly decreasing, ’cause they’re not getting issues around rate limiting or issues around security problems or things like that. But what they are getting is more questions around like, how do I run a marketing campaign on my website or whatever? that is much more focused on the customer being successful. And so I often get the opportunity to ask these hosting companies, like, what would you do if your customer service team was less focused on infrastructure-related tickets and problems and white screens of death and things like that. And more focused on helping those customers be successful. And you as someone who both operate from a perspective of helping a hosting company be successful, but you’re also getting your hands dirty with end customers as well. Do you find that to be the case that the support for WP Cloud powered sites is definitely like a significantly reduced in terms of platform-related tickets.

Joshua Goode: Yeah, so comparing with my life before Automattic, with my experience on wordpress.com and Pressable, which are clients of WP Cloud in a sense. The support was totally different. You know, prior, in past work, we would get requests, Hey, I need to up my memory limit for this, or I need to increase the timeout time and stuff like that. And we’ve taken those experiences and from the start and on WP Cloud day one, we set these certain settings and different levels of things to be kind of, not just perfectly in the middle, but often well above what’s necessary. And the way that we’ve built our infrastructure in a way allows us to do that and again, allows us to do it in a profitable manner for both us and our clients. So you may have users saying, Hey, I need to come in and increase my timeout for this or increase my file uploads or something, which is a classic infrastructure-related question. And often it’s our support teams, if they even reach you, because a lot of plugins are smart, they’ll check and see if it’s necessary. And most of them will recognize, oh no, the user doesn’t have to do anything. But maybe a user’s reading a guide or watching a YouTube tutorial or something to where, oh, you must go do this thing. You must up the limit for this setting or something. And when a host gets a support request like that, it’s mostly them. Just, it’s a quick reply. It’s like, well, no, you don’t have to adjust that. Here’s what it is. It’s well beyond that requirement. And then Yeah. When it comes down to-

Jesse Friedman: ’cause you’re on the WP Cloud

Joshua Goode: Exactly. Yeah. You don’t have to worry about that. And so, yeah, that’s, it was a breath of fresh air on my time supporting wordpress.com and helping the team support Pressable was, we really did not have to worry about complaints and worry about just these more advanced requests. And I’ll say there will always be some support requests where ultimately maybe adjustment is being asked for. A feature that may be out by the time this podcast is released is related to PHP memory limits, for example. And we’re going to allow hosts to just with a simple API call. Or adjustment when they’re creating a site, they can actually set it when they’re creating a site change. The PHP memory limit, we’re already pretty high, but we’ll allow you to go all the way up to two gigs, for example. If a site really needs that, and it’s often rare that we see a site truly need like two gigs of memory per PHP worker, but it’s part of the flexibility that we’re offering. If you do encounter a customer, that absolutely needs that, you will be able to set that. But that’s a pretty strong edge case.

Jesse Friedman: Yeah, I want to talk about that though, because when I’m out there and I’m talking about WP Cloud and I’m talking to a hosting company, a lot of times they come to us and they say, well, we have this agency, or we

Joshua Goode: Mm-hmm.

Jesse Friedman: that has these requirements. And they say, well, can you up your memory limit per worker? And what you’re touching on there is it’s a new feature and I want to talk about the genesis of that and how we got to it. But what I’d say at that time, it would be like, no, you probably don’t even need to do that on the WP Cloud platform. And they’d say. no, we have to because we do it on this platform now, and there’s no way this client’s going to be happy unless they have the ability to go up to like two gigabytes of memory. And it’s funny because they come with these misconceptions that because of the fact that they were forced into configuring their website a certain way on a certain host, that they are going to have to replicate that on the WP Cloud platform. But in fact, that’s not necessarily the case. And what we see is that we, what we do is we ask a hosting company to say, bring a site over. Let’s throw some traffic at it. We’ll show you how it can operate on this. And I think that kind of goes back to these conversations that we have with hosting companies around the whenever they’re analyzing WP Cloud, they’re also looking at these big cloud giants, right? And they have to compete with them on their focuses. And what I mean by that is that if you look at AWS or Google Cloud. WordPress hosting, specifically website hosting is a small fraction of their experience and their time and focus. So of course all those engineers that they have and all those people working on that platform. They’re handling virtual reality and warehouse logistics and shipping and the video game world and everything that goes into all of that, they have to build a platform that operates across all of that. And so WordPress becomes a small focus. And so what we get to say is that we’re a WordPress-first cloud platform. Everything that we’re doing is WordPress focused. And so I’m curious from that perspective, ’cause I can talk about this all day, but I’m curious from your perspective, like how do you think that’s helped? Hosting companies that have a little bit more confidence and assurance inside of WordPress hosting in general, but also WP Cloud’s platform that we are a very granularly focused platform.

Joshua Goode: Yeah, so much of the power of WP Cloud is just that one focus. That’s it. We have one focus: hosting WordPress and doing it the best way that we’ve identified is possible. Around the time we’re recording this, we did see a large cloud hosting player have some issues and that impacted our community quite a bit.

Jesse Friedman: Yeah.

Joshua Goode: Now it’s not to say that as a cloud provider we may not face issues in the future. I’ll say we’ve never had an outage of that scale. But we have a lot of redundancy built in with that. One thing a lot of people like to talk about is the performance at WP Cloud and the security and the ease. But one thing a lot of people may not appreciate is that we have multi-region automated failover built in to every site. To recreate that in another cloud environment or with another host can be very expensive. And it’s something that we were very focused on from day one. What this means is whether it’s one of our single servers in one of our data centers, or whether it’s the entire data center having issues or going offline, all of these sites are fully replicated in real time, or the closest to real time that physics allows, to a completely different region.

Maybe a story we can talk about in a future episode is we’ve had situations where we’ve shut down an entire data center before and rerouted all that traffic immediately to a totally different geographic location. Not a single client even noticed. They didn’t reach out, they didn’t talk to us. And to my knowledge, none of their customers contacted them. I even went around and checked with people to spot check that. I think that, and explaining that to our partners and also informing them so they can really explain that to their customers, is a very powerful thing. Our singular focus allows us to build out things in just the right way to allow us to have that failover. Sure, you can get into the cloud space and failover can be available. You often pay a lot for it or you have to build it out. But for us to really hone down on fast…

Jesse Friedman: Common when you’re analyzing the entire ecosystem of WordPress, right? It’s actually pretty rare.

Joshua Goode: Right, right. I would say it can be a common goal or a common thing. You’re right, common maybe not the best word. More of it’s a known thing that some people do try to go out and do.

Jesse Friedman: Exactly.

Joshua Goode: Exactly. And you often don’t find that in your cloud hosting providers or your WordPress hosts. With us and with that one focus, we’ve been able to ensure that our replication is built out in a way where we can do this near real time, which I would say is real time in the grand scheme of things.

Jesse Friedman: I’d say real time.

Joshua Goode: Well, it is. And that’s what we do say. I always like to, as a technical perspective, I’m like, well, physics exists. We’re still dealing with hardware and physical things and the speed of light.

Jesse Friedman: We’re not all quantum computers yet.

Joshua Goode: Exactly. It’s true. But with that, we’ve been able to stay so hyper-focused on WordPress and WordPress hosting to where that just works magically. It works so insanely well to where again, we shut down the entire data center and no one knew.

Jesse Friedman: I think for folks at home, let’s translate this for a quick second here. You think about the perspective of a hosting company saying that they offer some level of guarantee of uptime. A lot of WP Cloud partners actually offer a hundred percent uptime because they know that they can do it. The way in which they’re doing that, or the promises that they’re making, like if you’re an end customer who’s running an e-commerce shop, for example, and every minute of downtime is lost orders or problems, or gonna result in customer service requests and the list goes on. It can be incredibly expensive.

A lot of times I think people think about downtime as like, oh, I missed out on the chance to get a visitor who’s gonna click on an ad, or who’s gonna click on a product and pay for it. The list goes on from there. It’s way beyond that because I can’t get in, so now I’m contacting support. And even if your site’s back up in 30 seconds, that support ticket still needs to be answered. And that’s X amount of cents or dollars per ticket that’s gonna cost you money. You’re gonna be pissing off your customers and you’re gonna be ruining your brand. The list goes on in terms of the cost of that.

The way in which WP Cloud is operating is that we’re replicating the site in real time to another data center. And then in that moment of chaos where something actually does go wrong, we’re rerouting that traffic so that a visitor to a site is not actually experiencing that downtime. What you’re talking about is that these customers don’t even know that this stuff is happening behind the scenes. And that’s how well it works.

It’s one of those things that’s so important that we are very vocal about it to our hosting partners because we want them to be able to communicate it to their end customers. And I would say to you, if you’re at home and you’re listening to this and you’re running an e-commerce shop or a news site or something that’s super critical that you have uptime, I would challenge you to go to your hosting company and say, are you offering real time automated failover at some level? Because if you don’t have that, there’s really no reason for you not to move to a WP Cloud powered partner. And it doesn’t have to be WordPress.com or Pressable. It could be Bluehost, CloudConvert, Porkbun. The list goes on of partners who are using WP Cloud because they identify this as a must-use core tenant of what we’re here to talk about on this podcast, which is great WordPress hosting.

When you create that as a default standard for hosting, what we’re doing in our work on WP Cloud is making it accessible to hosting companies to provide a higher standard of hosting. And it’s something that you don’t necessarily get from other cloud platforms because it’s on you to build that yourself. Yes, they give you access to data centers and boxes and things like that, but what you don’t get is the thought and the effort and the innovation that goes into crafting and building a platform specifically for WordPress to solve those specific problems.

Joshua Goode: Yeah, that’s right, Jesse. And this is something that’s just baked in. You don’t have to turn it on. As soon as you create that site with that one API call, it begins. It starts from there.

Jesse Friedman: Any one of our partners who is a WP Cloud partner, if you see the words WP Cloud, you have automated real-time failover. There’s no one who is on WP Cloud and doesn’t have access to that. It’s on by default.

Joshua Goode: Yeah, that’s right.

Jesse Friedman: Yeah.

Joshua Goode: I think it’s a great feature for people to look for in their host and to choose a WP Cloud partner. I mean, personally, if I left Automattic, left WP Cloud and I was starting a new company, that would be a top number one requirement. You know, performance is key, security’s key, but that would be a number one requirement. A table stakes thing that should just be there, regardless of where I hosted. And so an easy choice for me, considering my bias, would be a WP Cloud hosting partner.

Now, obviously I would love for everyone who’s looking for that feature to come to a WP Cloud host. But if anything, I hope that us offering this and offering it at this level and offering it in an affordable fashion just elevates the entire WordPress hosting community. I would love to see a day where, you know, again, I would prefer personally and with my bias that people would come to a WP Cloud host. But I also have a hope that we see that as a more common thing across the entire hosting community.

That’s a lot of the things that we do with WP Cloud. Our focus on just WordPress, our focus on these very specific features to offer the best WordPress experience possible. I see that as a way that we can obviously get people to come, whether it’s Porkbun or many other hosts. But if anything, improve the entire hosting ecosystem to where people want to see WordPress succeed no matter where you’re hosted. It’s a major benefit. And plus, I would love it if you’re on WP Cloud, but I want to see people loving and using WordPress anywhere all the time. If anything happens with what we do with WP Cloud, I hope at least one thing is that we elevate the hosting community.

Jesse Friedman: I think that’s exactly right. Because like one of the things that we’re talking about here is that we’re setting a higher standard and making that accessible to all hosts. If you’re a hosting company and you have a few thousand customers, or your hosting company has a million customers, WP Cloud’s accessible to you. You can use it, integrate it into your platform and make it accessible to your customers. What does that do? Obviously that’s beneficial to Automattic. I’m not gonna lie.

Jesse Friedman: I think that’s exactly right. Because one of the things that we’re talking about here is that we’re setting a higher standard and making that accessible to all hosts. So if you’re a hosting company and you have a few thousand customers, or your hosting company has a million customers, WP Cloud’s accessible to you. And so you can use it, integrate it into your platform and make it accessible to your customers. And so what does that do? Obviously that’s beneficial to Automattic. I’m not gonna pretend that it doesn’t help us keep the lights on and provide a better hosting experience to our customers, but at the same time, it is setting a higher standard for the ecosystem as a whole so that even the hosting companies who don’t choose to use WP Cloud are then going to have to benchmark themselves against it and say, can I provide this or better to be able to compete with now all these other hosting companies that are gonna be leveraging it. And if they can’t do that, then they’re gonna have a problem. So it’s not just about us making it available and spreading it across the ecosystem. It’s about us saying, this is how you should be hosting WordPress. This is the minimum level requirement that we wanna see. And set that standard at that point so that everybody else can say, okay, I’m gonna invest in my technology, I’m gonna do this, I’m gonna do that, and I’m gonna really stand out. And then the people who can’t do that are going to, by the natural course or the Darwinism of capitalism, be phased out. So it really helps me to feel extremely good about the work that I’m doing, the work that you’re doing, the team is doing, because it’s not just about us distributing a platform that makes us feel like we’re reaching internal business goals, but it’s also about helping the ecosystem to thrive. And what we talked about, just to kind of loop us all the way back to the beginning of this episode and around sustainability, that’s about sustaining WordPress and making sure that it’s around for our next 1,000 years. Josh, listen, this was such a great conversation. I wanna keep it going, but we need to take a break and come back for our part two.

Joshua Goode: Great. Sounds good, Jess.

Jesse Friedman: All right. See you in a bit.

Joshua Goode: See you then.

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.