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, independence, and what it takes to build ethical, high-end WordPress hosting that actually serves creators, businesses and the internet itself. Before we dive in, head to impressive.host, that’s where you can comment on episodes, ask follow-up questions, and help shape future conversations. You also find the links to follow, like, and subscribe wherever you listen.

Welcome to season two. You may have noticed a different intro. And we’re gonna be doing things a little bit different this season. We had such an awesome first season where we focused on the core tenets of great managed hosting. We had some impressive guests. We had some awesome conversations, and through all that, we learned so much. And one of the things that I learned is how passionate I am about making sure that we preserve and protect and grow the open web. And one of the things that I’m most concerned about is the fact that it seems like we’re moving away from that.

Social media is stepping in and we’re building huge amounts of content on those platforms, and so then there’s less need for us to have things on websites. We’re seeing increasingly that shops and stores are being consolidated to massive, huge platforms like Amazon. There’s so much power and so much amazing stuff that can be done on the web. And I see this happening across not only the actual virtual side of the internet where everything is consolidating to smaller and smaller numbers of places to go and visit, but it’s actually happening in the physical world too, where hosting companies are buying each other and they’re consolidating things. And then you know, we get into a situation where smaller numbers of organizations or corporations are in control of what’s going on on the web.

And so I think now more than ever, it’s really important that we think about what it is that we need to do to preserve the open web and the internet that we all love, and the parts of it that we get to control. So what I wanna do in this episode, you know, I started a little bit more formally, I have an intro to read. But now I’m kind of riffing and there’s no guest today. So what I wanna do is I want to go through and kind of cover what it is that we learned in season one. Talk a little bit about some of the themes that we went over, some of the lessons that we took away from season one of this podcast. And then I wanna talk a little bit about what’s coming in season two and how I’m hoping that we can shift the narrative around this podcast to be maybe a little less technical, a little less specific to the ways in which we can get our hands dirty in managed WordPress hosting and maybe think a little bit more broadly, think a little bit at a higher level about the importance that hosting plays in preserving the open web.

So, you know, if we think about it and some of the themes that we covered, right? We had throughout season one a lot of things that were recurring themes. And so I’m just gonna go through some of those and talk a little bit about what I remember from hosts and guests that we had and the things that we talked about.

So, you know, one of the first things I wanna say is that managed hosting is a transfer of responsibility. It’s not a collection of features. And what I mean by that is that customers believe that someone else is now accountable for the outcomes. And this goes way beyond simply just plugin updates.

As we continue to shift the way in which we talk about hosting, and a lot of this is driven by companies that are working on closed source platforms, building singular pillars of web platform development solutions. They are selling everything as a singular thing, as a singular one thing that you have to buy and that’s fine. But because of that, they have this more natural ability to kinda speak more simply about what it is that you’re getting.

WordPress on the other hand, you know it’s open source and it’s an amazing platform, and it comes with all these great extensions and plugins that you can add onto it. And that gives hosting companies the ability to curate the list of things that they’re building on top of it, the ways they’re bolting things on. But it also means that they’re going to not have necessarily the simplest way to describe what it is that you’re getting.

And so a lot of the times what they’re doing is comparing themselves to, you know, Squarespace or Shopify, things like that. And trying to talk about the platform as a singular, holistic platform that is centralized to exactly what that hosting company’s providing. But in reality, you also have to protect the fact that WordPress is fully extendable and that any customer can put anything else that they want on it. And so in that simplicity, some of the complications that occur is that we don’t have the time or the real estate to get into all the components that go along with WordPress. We certainly don’t want it to sound like it’s complicated or hard. We don’t want it to sound like there’s gonna be a lot of work on the customer’s behalf.

And so, you know, we’ve gotten into this place where we talked about, you know, managed WordPress hosting, and we’ve been using that term pretty universally. We even had a great episode with Just Frick, where we talked about what The Frick is managed hosting and you know, it’s way beyond just simply updating plugins and so much more than that.

So if we think about it from this perspective, that saying that we’re offering managed hosting, we’re not only talking about the technical components of it, we’re talking about the responsibility a hosting company has to that customer to make sure that they’re providing a really excellent experience. Oliver from PatchStack, you know, he said customers are giving away the responsibility to someone who doesn’t actually take it. And one of the sharpest articulations of security and marketing disconnected I’ve seen is in the way in which hosts are describing these things. They simply say secure hosting. What does that really mean?

Well, you know, we would have the assumption that the host is securing everything. But again, customers have the ability to bolt on whatever they want onto WordPress. So are they saying that they’re taking on the responsibility of securing the infrastructure that they’re providing to that customer, but they’re stopping there drawing a line in the sand and that the customer’s now responsible for whatever they install? Is it beyond that? Do they take responsibility for the passwords that customers choose? It is a complicated thing, and I think that it’s really important that if you’re playing in the space, if you’re helping customers to build websites and you’re offering managed WordPress hosting, that you find a balance between marketing content that needs to be succinct and short, take up small amounts of real estate and help people to convert, and balance that with helping them to understand what their responsibilities are.

One of my core responsibilities when I worked at BruteProtect, a company I co-founded before we sold it to Automattic, was that while I focused on security, I wasn’t a systems engineer, I wasn’t in infrastructure. I wasn’t writing the code that helped power this brute force protection service. But I did take on a lot of the work around what I thought was even just as important, if not more, which was explaining to end users the responsibility that they have to their own security and the thing that came out of that was the user experience of security.

One of the things that we assume is that everything just kind of works in the backend and that people don’t have to do anything to make it work. But it’s incredibly important and valuable to that customer if we provide a really elegant security experience as well, and do that with performance and other aspects that they really care about in terms of their hosting and do it in a way that not only gives them the features and the tools and the things that they need, but also educates them at the same time and helps them to understand their responsibilities and the host’s responsibilities.

And I’ll tell you firsthand too, that if you’re a hosting company and you’re listening to this, if you take the time to educate an end customer about what is their responsibility to security or performance or whatever it might be, you will not only create a better partnership with that customer, but you also reduce support issues. And they’re less likely to come to you and start blaming you if they have a better understanding of what is and is not their responsibility.

And that leads me to another theme that we uncovered in our first season. Trust is the primary product of good hosting. Every decision a host makes, either builds or erodes customer confidence. “Pantheon gave me my weekends back,” was something that I remember Chris Reynolds saying when he was a guest on the show. And this was maybe the best compliment a hosting company can receive because of the tools, the workflows, and automations that Pantheon provided. Their customers could stop being on call. Trust that things just work.

And so that got me thinking about the fact that building trust and a way in which we can measure trust is incredibly important. But it’s also indicative of whether or not that hosting company is providing and actually delivering on their promise. And so if you do have a high trust relationship with your end customers, you can feel confident that what you’re saying and what you’re selling to them is going well, and that if that’s converting, then not only are you actually bringing customers in, but they’re gonna stick around and they’re gonna be loyal.

And we’ll talk about this again in the future, but we talked about throughout the whole podcast last season, repeatedly, how if you provide a good WordPress experience, then you are doing a great service for the WordPress ecosystem as well. And so, you know, I think that it’s super important that a hosting company thinks about their level of trust and the way in which customers perceive them. And to think about that is almost like a litmus test as to whether or not they’re doing their job.

We also got into the idea that user experience matters just as much as performance and uptime. And I think this is something that’s near and dear to my heart. I mean, I talked about this before, you know, my work with BruteProtect, for example, it led me down a path of understanding the absolutely vital, critical element that is user experience. And I’m not talking about just being able to use a website and be able to convert and type in your credit card and all these things and have it just work. I’m talking about the actual user experience the customer has in building their site, managing their site, the information that they receive, making sure that it’s accurate. We talked about trust. All of this stuff plays into user experience.

Jamie Marsland, you know, he talked about how customers just want things to work and that there’s a simple truth about DIYers that they don’t want to know about the complexity. They just want to link their domain and set up their email and do it all without a horror show. I mean, it’s a simplistic way of describing it, but at the end of the day, the more we can do to get customers closer to what it is that they want, just being able to type in a domain and get things moving, and if they’re successful with that, you’re building trust, you’re providing a pretty phenomenal user experience at that point. So it’s absolutely vital.

And, you know, the thing that you can think about too is how do I strip things away? How do I make things simpler? Dale from HostIQ said “how do we make it simpler? It’s a question we keep asking about every feature. It’s a step wizard, it’s too complicated.” HostIQ goes back and forth until they simplify it to the point where the customer experience is far better. And so they consider themselves user experience driven, not feature driven, which is amazing because if you spend only of your time listening to your customers and understanding what it is that they want, not only are you able to provide a pretty phenomenal experience, but you’re able to stay ahead of the game.

You don’t have to think about and discover what it is that you need to build next. You don’t need to be surprised when a competitor provides something that’s a new feature, a new service, and you feel a little bit behind on that because of the fact that you haven’t been able to keep up with them. You know, my work at WP Cloud and specifically Automattic, one of the things that we’re pushed to do all the time, whether it’s through our annual support rotations or other things. We are constantly going back and having interactions with the customers and being very customer driven. And so I think that’s incredibly important and it’s a common theme that we saw last year.

And when we think about the experience, you know, we talked, touched on this a little bit, but I think I’ve said this maybe a dozen times, maybe more, but the first experience a customer has with WordPress can be their last. And what do I mean by that? It’s not a reflection of WordPress, it’s a reflection of the way in which we deliver WordPress. It is very rare, very, very rare these days to experience a completely vanilla basic delivery of WordPress. Usually hosting companies are installing it the way that they wanna install it. So, you know, the customer’s first experience often comes through their panel. They’re bolting on plugins, they’re installing themes, they have onboarding flows, AI site builders, a variety of things that they’re curating and building on top of WordPress.

Now, sometimes in the case of what you know, Dale was talking about from HostIQ, that is very user driven. It’s a hundred percent what the user is asking for, and so they’re building in these solutions to solve for very real problems. Other times hosting companies are focused on partnerships, on revenue driving things. They’re just like how we see when you go and search for, you know, top hosting companies, oftentimes those lists are driven by who’s paying out the largest affiliate fees. Sometimes the choices that hosting companies make to bolt on things can be because of the partnership is the most profitable to them, or they’re gonna make the most money. And it’s less about the user experience.

Now we all need to keep the lights on, and it’s incredibly important that hosting companies are profitable because if they’re not, then they won’t be distributing WordPress for very long. And that will be bad for the ecosystem. But I think it’s super important that we think about the way in which we can balance that. There is, very easily, something that can be done to balance profitability and driving revenue with providing a fantastic user experience. And I think that every single hosting company has a responsibility to WordPress.

And so if you’re going to be selling WordPress, if you’re gonna be hosting WordPress sites, and you’re going to be acquiring hosting customers, if you are doing the work of acquiring customers through the description of your hosting products and in there you’re saying that you’re selling WordPress, that customer is probably signing up with you because they want WordPress and they are evaluating your services and what it is that you’re making promises around. And so they’re coming to you for WordPress. But that also means that they’re not going to another hosting company for WordPress. So you’re taking that customer in and you’re making a promise to them that you’re gonna have a great WordPress experience.

But the fact of the matter is, is that for the vast majority of WordPress customers, they don’t necessarily think that their WordPress experience is going to be different with you than it would be with another hosting company. And so if that experience is poor, if you’re putting an extreme premium on driving revenue and not thinking about user experience, if you’re not trying to help that customer be successful, then that customer would say, wow, this was really hard. I was forced to use these tools. They didn’t make sense. I don’t necessarily need all these features. I’m getting all these popups. WordPress is weird. It’s not making sense to me. This doesn’t seem like a very cohesive experience, and unfortunately in that moment they’re blaming WordPress because they don’t necessarily understand the complexity around hosting companies curating the experience and layering their functionality on top of WordPress.

And so what ends up happening, they end up choosing to say, okay, I’m not gonna go with WordPress. I’m gonna go with something else. And then they end up going outside of the WordPress ecosystem. Now, in those moments, I hope that they choose something else that’s open source. But the reality of the situation is, is that they may end up going to something closed. They might go to Shopify or Squarespace or whatever, and I think that is a detriment to the entire WordPress ecosystem.

So this is why we say that hosting companies have a responsibility to the WordPress experience because it has a direct impact on the WordPress ecosystem and whether or not we continue to grow as a community and we’re rising all ships.

And so, you know, then we get into, once they’re in and they’ve signed up, we need to think about the tools that they need to provide to make sure that customers are satisfied, but not only satisfied, but that they also understand what’s going on with their website. Because again, the more we manage for them, maybe the less insight we need to give to them on different things. And we don’t overcomplicate dashboards and make things tough. But you know, as Claudio said from Newspack, that observability is mission critical. Hosts need the ability to analyze things like IP addresses and bots that are hitting sites and you know, what’s happening in terms of making requests and creating slow performance. And then they need to be able to drill down further and look into the different software and plugins and things that are causing issues on the site.

And so, you know, I think observability is an essential element to delivering truly managed WordPress hosting. And that can be that either a hosting company is observing that and they’re monitoring it themselves and providing insight and helping that customer to understand what’s going on, or they’re doing a really great job of raising those concerns to those end customers and giving them the ability to make decisions around those things.

But either way, if we have this inability to kind of expose the things that are causing issues within WordPress or their infrastructure or the way in which things are compiled or built, you’re not only gonna be providing a negative experience for that customer, but you’re gonna be increasing your support load.

And I think that, you know, through all these conversations and my experience over the years is that the more support you have to provide, the higher your costs go. Support is one of the things that are the most expensive. Especially if you’re doing it right, it can become quite burdensome to a hosting company. And so what ends up happening is, is that I think a lot of times hosting companies are not always necessarily thinking about the ways in which they can streamline support by providing a better user experience. They end up streamlining support by introducing things like AI and things like that. And we’ll talk about that in a second.

But, you know, I think anyone who is working in WordPress, if you’re thinking about support, I think you need to think about the ways in which you can provide the absolute best user experience to customers, explain things before they need to go reach out for support, and you’ll actually see a significant decrease in your support costs.

And then we get into support. You know, I think one of the things that we need to remember is that great support is rooted in empathy, not just in technical accuracy. So solving the right problem matters more than answering the stated question as Chris Reynolds, who we referenced before from Pantheon also mentioned. He said 90% of good tech support is empathy. It’s a universal truth. The words coming out of someone’s mouth aren’t always describing the problem you need to intuit and provide the outcome they’re looking for, but can’t always describe.

And so that gets interesting when we think about AI and the ways in which a system can interpret a human emotion, and I think that anybody who’s ever done support around WordPress knows that you end up getting a ticket that’s like, my site’s not working, I need help. Immediately, things are broken, and you know, you may go to the website and see a problem that you see, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s the same problem that they see. And so I think, you know, it’s incredibly important to provide excellent managed support, especially around that promise around managed WordPress hosting.

Another company that does it really well is ConveyThis. Tom came on the show and he talked about how his higher tier customers all get direct support via Slack. And he’s able to do that because he’s also providing incredible insights in his dashboard, he’s making use of a lot of the features of WP Cloud for his customers. And so then he is able to provide a really superior experience to those customers. And then he gets ahead of a lot of the issues that customers have. He makes sure to understand where it is that they’re spending their time. What is it they’re trying to solve for? He adjusts the user interface of his dashboard frequently in order to compensate for the things that customers are facing.

But when they do run into an issue, they get into Slack. And the thing that’s really interesting to me about Slack is that it’s not necessarily the medium that provides better support. You can provide just as good support via Zendesk or a live chat window or a phone call. But you know, what’s really interesting is that it builds confidence in the customer that they are going to get a hold of somebody that is gonna be able to help them.

And I think that’s really interesting because when we think about managed WordPress hosting and the idea that it’s just a level above shared hosting and it’s something better and something that the hosting company is gonna be more intricately supporting. One of the things you still run into is the fact that I need to get in touch with you to ask for help. And in that moment as a customer, I’m thinking to myself, well, let’s see. I can probably, maybe I can figure out a way to solve this on my own, and that’s gonna take x amount of minutes or x amount of hours to solve that on my own. Is contacting support gonna be less than that? Is the frustration level gonna be less than that? Am I going to be talking to someone who’s going to assume that I have absolutely zero knowledge in this and that we’re gonna have to get through the scripted responses of having to restart a browser or clear our cache or do all the most basic things before we can actually get into support?

It can be super frustrating, but what it kind of boils down to is this idea that customers need to know that they’re going to get the help that they deserve. So whether it’s Tom from ConveyThis offering Slack support where they feel confident they’re gonna see a human being, they know it’s a little bit more public inside of that company. So maybe, you know, that transparency adds to a level of support quality or it’s someone like Bluehost, also using WP Cloud for their Bluehost Cloud product. And in that product they offer direct to tier, I think it’s tier three support, and it’s a phone call, kind of like a bat phone. You pick up the phone and you immediately get someone who not only understands WordPress and managed WordPress hosting, but you don’t have to wait in line. You don’t have to start in these lower queues. You don’t have to answer scripted questions.

And so I think a lot of the time what we can do to solve for providing a really superior support experience is to make sure that that customer feels confident, that they’re gonna be taken seriously, that they’re gonna be listened to, that they’re going to get the support that they need. And then in those moments, it actually builds some trust and loyalty. So, you know, take advantage of your support as a mechanism for reinforcing the value you provide to your customers.

And that kind of leads into a conversation we had with Matt Madeiras who had mentioned that human interaction is what people crave. And as AI answers thin content quickly, the real conversations are trusted opinions and that’s what people end up seeking out. Human connection becomes more valuable as automation increases.

So am I saying that we shouldn’t be using AI in support? Absolutely not. I think that’s ridiculous. There are so many support questions that can be answered with amazing documentation that has been used to train AI to answer things. Well, you end up saving money. The customer gets a fast answer. It works out really well. The problem is, is what happens when the customer needs a human being. And if that AI is not providing a solid experience and they’re not helping that customer, you’re gonna see across the industry that people won’t trust that AI is gonna be useful in any way. They’ll learn to detect that it’s an AI and then immediately figure out how to get to a human being.

This is not dissimilar from the old days of telephone support. You know, for those younger listeners out there, you may not remember a time, but we actually used to call companies and talk to them, and then they’d pick up the phone and they’d actually have a human being on the other side of the line. And then, I don’t know when it was, eighties, nineties, somewhere around there, we suddenly started getting these automated answering machines. Press one for this, press two for this. And it wasn’t long before people realized that you press zero to get to a human being and the second that the phone would pick up, you’d hit zero.

Now let’s think about that for a second. Why did they put that up in front of the phone call? Well, because if, say seven out of 10 phone calls are to figure out what time your hours are and well, rather what time you’re open or what your hours are. Then maybe the host of that restaurant doesn’t need to answer the phone to answer that. The automated message can answer that. Okay. But then what happens on holidays? Are you updating your messaging? Are you being clear? Are you saying our normal hours are Monday through Friday, nine to five, but with the holidays coming up, just please be aware that we’re closed on Christmas Eve and Christmas day. No, a lot of companies don’t actually do that. So then what ends up happening is, is that you find that these automated responses are useless and then you go back to bypassing things.

It’s not any different with AI if you are not providing sophisticated, personalized responses that give confidence to the user that what they’re getting is correct and it’s not a waste of their time. And I think that’s the key, that’s the biggest thing there is don’t waste their time because they’re making an investment. They’re making an investment in WordPress, they’re making an investment in building this website. And the second you start wasting their time, the trust goes out the window.

So think about AI in that way. Feel free to use it. Feel free to provide a better experience, but just make sure that you’re actually doing it in a way that is supporting your efforts to provide better support. The way in which we’re thinking about it at Automattic is whether or not AI can help us to solve for the most simplistic answers and those tend to be highest volume, but lowest amount of time taken up. And so let’s say that AI can handle those, boom, we put those aside. Okay, so now whatever our happiness engineers are focused on, the more complex problems, the type of support that really needs you to get in and get your hands dirty. And so then that allows them to focus their efforts on being able to provide a really delightful experience and do something way above and beyond what others are doing and what customers tend to expect. So think about it that way. AI does not necessarily need to be the answer to everything, but I think if you balance it really well, you can provide a really fantastic experience.

We’re gonna go a little bit quicker here because I want to get through our recap in part one of this episode. And actually this is a really great time to take a second here. There’s a lot of people who’ve worked on this podcast with me. The guests have been amazing. The people at Automattic who’ve supported me and the show have been fantastic. Joshua Goode, Elise Prather, Jon Burke, and a variety of other people who I may be forgetting and I’m sorry for that. But I do wanna call out one person, John Beeler, who has been our producer on this show for all of season one. And has done a really remarkable job. He’s the guy I refer to when I try to make him proud and I get an episode done inside of 30 minutes. He’s the guy that’s usually knocking on the door. Anyways, John, thank you for all your work.

All right, let’s keep going here. Hosting companies have the opportunity to raise the tide for the entire web by collaborating. One of the interviews we did was with Christian Dawson, who’s from the i2 Coalition in Secure Hosting Alliance. And he said, you know, there’s a lot that we can learn from each other if we sat down. Hosting companies aren’t talking with one another very often, but if we share the good stuff we’re each doing, we could all use that in a way to make everybody and everything that we’re doing and the collective good for the internet better.

And so, you know, I think that that’s super important. I think especially in a world where we work around WordPress, you know, my work specifically has always been with collaborating with hosting companies. In fact, next week, I might be flying out to help a hosting company with their product roadmap. And it’s something that I am super excited to do because it’s not just thinking about what I’m working on within WP Cloud and what I’m doing with Automattic, but the ability to help out a partner and to take the experience and the wisdom that I have and to share those ideas.

You know, there’s a great video called Radical Openness by Jason Silva. And in that he talks about the idea that ideas procreate. I share an idea with you. You take it, you stew on it, you mess around with it, you come back to me. It’s different. It’s evolved. It’s changed. And I think that’s something that’s super important, something that we can all benefit from. And I think, you know, especially playing in the WordPress space, hosting companies in general have the opportunity to kind of come together and help improve the experience that we’re providing for customers.

We see this a lot. Anytime that a plugin has a vulnerability, you know, we report it safely and responsibly. If there’s a conflict between plugins, we see this very often within the WordPress ecosystem that we all wanna work together to make sure that our plugins can play nicely together. That stuff happens all the time. And so, you know, I think it’s a vital component to providing fantastic managed hosting. If the hosting companies themselves are thinking about not only their responsibility to the WordPress ecosystem, but the ways in which that they can help not just themselves but each other in growing that.

One more thing that came up a bunch is that ownership is a core value of the open web. You know, when we think about domains, data platforms, whatever it might be, these are elements that are durable. They’re long lasting. They’re portable. They’re, you know, we think about WordPress’s data liberation project and the idea that we wanna make sure that people can move their things around and take ownership of it, which is antithetical to what we see with social media, and the idea that those are more like rented audiences.

And so, you know, Eddie from Pork Bun, he talked about the importance of domains. And I can’t tell you how underutilized I think domains are by the general population of people on the web. Domains are your ability to carve out your own little chunk of the weird and open web and put a name on it and make it accessible to everybody around the world. And I think it’s super vital that we think about that in that way.

More domains, more websites, give people the ability to use WordPress for a link in bio instead of using some closed source platform, for example. That’s a great idea for hosting companies to take advantage of because it’s more profit for them. It drives more revenue, drives more customers, but it also expands the market share and the usability of WordPress. So think about that.

And when Eddie talked about domains, he’s, you know, I think in case you want some advice on how to choose a good domain, he said, the test is this. Can you shout your domain across a parking lot? And if someone goes home and types it into Google, will they find you? It’s a good little litmus test there.

The other thing I wanna think about is just data, data ownership and how it’s becoming increasingly important that we make sure that we’re giving back ownership to our customers and making sure that they have everything they need, not only to be compliant with GDPR and California’s laws and things like that, but just to make sure that they feel like the open web and their ownership of websites as a whole are safer or better than what they get with social media. And I think that’s a way in which we can differentiate ourselves.

A couple more notes here. Simplicity is a strategic advantage, not a lack of sophistication. So don’t try to pack in so many features and so many things into your managed WordPress offering that you’re creating cognitive overload. Help keep things simple, help customers understand that you are curating a list that you are making decisions for them or give them decisions and not options. Help them to focus their efforts on getting their site live and building their website. And a little bit less about making sure that you can compete on every single feature that exists on the open web.

Try to think a little bit more about the ways in which you expose features as customers need them, rather than trying to create a laundry list of things that you’re offering on day one.

And, you know, that kind of speaks to the last thing that I really want us to think about today is that the best hosts align their success with their customer’s quality of life. Or rather, you know, they align their success with their customer’s success. I want you to think about this. We’ve said this a hundred times on the podcast, that if they’re a DIYer and if they’re not a DIYer and they’re hiring an agency to do their work, they’re an enterprise level customer. Typically, they’re not web designers. In fact, if they were web designers, they’d be building for themselves. And you know, typically web designers are the last ones to build a website and take care of their own house, right? Shoemaker’s shoes and all that.

But here’s the thing. Whether a DIYer or an enterprise level customer, whatever it might be, they don’t want to be a web designer. That’s not what they want to be. They wanna run their business, they wanna be creative, they wanna launch their book or sell their posters or t-shirts, or they want to write music and sell tickets to their shows. That’s what they’re focused on. And in that they have to pay taxes, they have to run their corporation, they have to hire and fire people. They have to clean the floors of their physical locations, they have to stock the shelves. There’s so much responsibility that it’s, frankly irresponsible for us to think they want to be web designers.

What they want is to build a website to achieve an end goal, get that through the door, get that launched, and get back to what it is that they’re most passionate about. And if you think that they’re gonna be super passionate about web design, then you can classify them as web designers and you don’t need to worry about providing a handheld experience for them. They’re going to solve it for themselves. But if they’re the vast majority of customers out there who are either lost and trying to solve for this themselves or they’re hiring someone else, whatever it might be, their passion lies somewhere else.

So as much as we love WordPress and as much as we spend so much time in the WordPress community and we go to WordCamps and we write documentation and we build new features, and we do all these things that we’re super passionate about, it doesn’t necessarily translate to passion for them. And there can be people out there who are incredibly passionate about building awesome tax software, but that doesn’t mean that we’re expecting people to be excited about doing their taxes. Right. So I think we need to think about it the same way, and if we think about it that way, and then as a hosting company.

We focus primarily on making sure that we are aligning our success with our customer’s success, with their quality of life, making sure that their support is good, making sure that they are getting their weekends back, that they’re building things quickly and launching things. And then it just continues to work. That they understand the responsibility that they have to their security and their performance, and they understand where the line is drawn. That the features that they’re getting are optional or required, and they have a better understanding of how that works and where they go to get new features and how they solve problems quickly. If we align ourselves with those things, then not only are we going to see our trust increase, which we talked about is important, we’re going to see more customers paying for things. We’re gonna see more revenue through the door, but we’re also gonna see a much larger population of WordPress customers being happy, promoting WordPress and building a future for all of us to do really amazing things.

So with that, I wanna say thanks for joining me on the Impressive Hosting Podcast. It’s now a show about why hosting matters and how it can preserve an open, independent, and genuinely weird web. Have any follow up questions from today’s episode? If you have a thought you want to challenge or future topic for, or a great suggestion or an example of hosting done exceptionally well or terribly wrong, go to impressive.host. That’s where you can talk to me, you can share your ideas and frankly, your input shapes this show. So you know, whatever it is that you’re enjoying from the show, please let me know. And whatever you don’t like about the show, please let me know, because then I know to eliminate it. Right.

We also appreciate you following the podcast and subscribing on the platform of your choice. It helps these conversations reach the people who need to hear them. And finally, take a moment to check the open source projects that we are highlighting at impressive.host. Whether you can contribute with code or community support or funding, you can help keep the open web healthy. See you next time.