Jessica Frick: So cussing?
Just kidding.

Jesse Friedman: The thing that I keep going back to with security is the fact that users don’t know what they don’t know.

Joshua Goode: In terms of how you are going to manage all these sites in bulk and do this development work, we give you a buffet of options.

Jessica Frick: Not all servers are created equal, whether they can scale very quickly up to match that viral blog post that you just got. Congratulations, by the way, really is made or broken by your server’s architecture and how it was put together.

Jesse Friedman: If they’re reaching out to support, it’s probably because it’s urgent. It’s scary. Something’s not working. They’re on a deadline, whatever it might be. So being able to get great support is super important and it’s a way for a hosting company to differentiate themselves.

Jessica Frick: So cussing?
Just kidding.

Jesse Friedman: The thing that I keep going back to with security is the fact that users don’t know what they don’t know.

Joshua Goode: In terms of how you are going to manage all these sites in bulk and do this development work, we give you a buffet of options.

Jessica Frick: Not all servers are created equal, whether they can scale very quickly up to match that viral blog post that you just got. Congratulations, by the way, really is made or broken by your server’s architecture and how it was put together.

Jesse Friedman: If they’re reaching out to support, it’s probably because it’s urgent. It’s scary. Something’s not working. They’re on a deadline, whatever it might be. So being able to get great support is super important and it’s a way for a hosting company to differentiate themselves.

Intro 

Jesse Friedman: Welcome to Impressive Hosting, where we seek to uncover the core tenets of great WordPress hosting. I am your host, Jesse Friedman, and with me today is Jessica Frick from Pressable, and Joshua Goode from WP Cloud at Automattic. Welcome both. It’s great to have you. Jess, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself? Where can we find you? What are you working on? What’s got your interest these days?

Jessica Frick: I do have one question for you first, though. How many Jessies could we fit on a podcast?

Jesse Friedman: Software allows for like up to 10 people, I think, so we could find a few Jess, Jessies, Jessicas, Josh.

Joshua Goode: We’d have a lot of J’s?

Jessica Frick: Are you open to changing your name, Josh?

Joshua Goode: I’m pretty attached.

Jesse Friedman: Fine. I was given the name Jess, so I’m just going to keep it. But I’m really excited to be here with you guys. To answer your question, I get to do operations and product at Pressable. The very best managed WordPress host in the biz. I am biased, but I’m also correct. And when I’m not doing that, I am hanging out with my dogs or playing video games or listening to music.

Jesse Friedman: Nice. And you live in Florida, right?

Jessica Frick: Yeah but not that Florida. So far nobody has proven that I have taken bath salts. I know the answer to this! I know the answer to this!

Jesse Friedman: On that note, Josh, we got you on the last episode and we got to learn a little bit about some of the things you’ve been up to. What so recap real quick. Who are you? Where are you?

Joshua Goode: So Joshua Goode, I am the WP Cloud technical solutions engineer, and that kind rolls up a lot of different hats partner success, technical account management, sales engineering, and then all the way down to onboarding and development, support for integrations. So just really helping our partners get the most out of WP Cloud. I do all of this remotely from a rural part of Tennessee, the very far southeast corner of Tennessee. And, if you’ve listened to the past episode, you understand that I also try to disconnect from the computer. I’m on it a lot, so you can find me sometimes on the tractor on the farm or brewing a beer on the side.

Jesse Friedman: Jess, let’s learn a little bit more about you. So you’re working at Pressable.

Jessica Frick: So my role has largely just filled in whatever gaps are needed since I got here. It’ll be three years in February. My background is heavy in ops and product. Product is definitely my biggest love and I am extremely passionate about our product. And so on a day to day basis, right now I’m working a lot with just different programs that we are running, both internally and externally, and also trying to figure out what our roadmap is going to look like for the next year.

Jesse Friedman: That’s great. I’m sure there’s some exciting stuff on there. So how did you join Automattic, and where were you before that?

Jessica Frick: So before here, I was with Liquid Web and Nexus. I was director of product over there and I oversaw all the managed applications hosting. It included WordPress, WooCommerce, Magento. Actually Liquid Web and Nexus were the first managed WooCommerce solution offered to the market. So that was exciting to go from zero to one. And then before that, I was working adjacent with hosting for Copyblogger Media. They had something called Synthesis, Web Synthesis back in the day. Synthesis later became StudioPress Sites, and so that was acquired by WP Engine, along with StudioPress itself. The Copyblogger brand still carries on, but that’s been sold, and those were some wild times. That was back when hosting was still the wild, wild west, and we’re going to be talking about managed hosting today, but it was when the idea of managed hosting was just getting started.

Jesse Friedman: When everybody wasn’t calling it managed hosting.

What is Managed Hosting?

Jesse Friedman: Well, you’ve actually hit on something that we’re going to cover in depth in this episode. But prior to that folks don’t remember this very often, but the installation of WordPress, for example, came from downloading a zip, FTPing it up to a server. Then we got the five minute install, then hosting. They started bundling it by default and then they started tacking on these management services. An informed experience that can range from keeping core updated, adding security features, watching for users being added to the site. There’s a variety of things there, but I think you’re right it stemmed from the wild wild west and that means that there is no universal definition of what managed hosting is. So Jessica Frick, what the frick is managed hosting? I couldn’t resist for those at home.

Jessica Frick: You know what? I’m so glad you did. And that’s a great question. It’s funny, as you were talking, I was remembering my first website that I ever hosted was with a company called like Smitten Kitten, and it was some dude with computers in his garage and the website went down and you call him and he goes out and kicks the machine in his garage.

Jesse Friedman: That’s one form of management, I guess.

Jessica Frick: But that’s how we did it. And we liked it. But today it’s, I would say a good analogy would be like real estate, unmanaged hosting is when you want to buy the lot. You get to design the house and everything that goes in it, you get to pick where the kitchen is and how many outlets you have and everything that goes along with it, where your different lines are going to be placed whereas with managed hosting, it’s move in ready homes. You might get to pick some finishes, but it’s built and ready for you. And so for me, when I’m thinking about the distinction between managed and unmanaged, I’m thinking, a lot of times with good managed hosting, you’ll have full access to everything that you need, but you’re not going to have root access. Because it typically will come with a platform. Up until a few years ago, I used to differentiate between managed WordPress hosts, or at least the ones that called themselves that, by whether they had their own interface. There were some hosts entering the market that were calling themselves managed hosting, but they were still using cPanel or a skin for cPanel some variation of it. But unless they had a custom interface, I wasn’t really considering them true managed because to me managed hosting is an informed experience. Ideally in best cases, it is a modified experience where optimizations are made. And some decisions are made on your behalf, for you. And in that sense, all managed WordPress hosts are absolutely not equal.

Jesse Friedman: Yeah. Okay. So let’s unpack that. So you mentioned the analogy with the real estate market and the house. And I think that analogy is also used by web designers when they’re describing the building a website for a client, right? And they think about, do you want a theme, which is a move in ready house, or do you want to design the aesthetics of that house, right? But we’re actually taking this a step back. This analogy needs to come back a whole step, because what you’re referring to is that move in ready house comes with decisions that are made, things are curated for you, but it doesn’t necessarily impact the front end. I just want to clarify that for folks at home. So when we think about curation for managed hosting. Let’s break this up into a couple categories.

Security in Managed Hosting 

Jesse Friedman: So first off, think everybody on their mind has, or everybody at home listening to this, probably thinking about security, but the reality situation is that for the most part, users don’t always think about security. So where can managed hosting play a part in helping to harden the security of a website or help to take a step forward in the securing of a website?

Jessica Frick: I will answer this. In what I think, but what is actual as well. I will share with you that a couple of years ago, I bought a Black Friday sale for a competitor that was offering their brand new managed WordPress hosting product for $6 for the year. And I was like, what the heck, let’s see what happens. And it was the first time in 15 years I’ve ever been hacked.

Jesse Friedman: Oh, wow.

Jessica Frick: And I know how to run my sites. Like I don’t leave open doors, which tells me it had to be at the server level. And I am certainly not what I would consider the best developer, but I know enough to look around. I don’t think there was much of any protection at the server level to isolate my site from other people or to really protect me from ne’er do wells who might be going for the server directly. So what to me that should look like is, distributed denial of service attacks, DDoS, that can take you down by just hitting your site and hitting your site and hitting your site. But also, you need some firewall protection as well to ensure that people can’t just go directly for the server to get to you and all of your friends. Because at some level, you know, we want to talk about dedicated servers and in many cases, it’s dedicated ish unless you want to go and buy a box. Some level they’re connected and so I think a true managed host does a really good job of isolating sites from one another regardless of how they’re selling the product. And that’s good for performance too, but security especially, because if you happen to be on the same server as somebody who does not update their plugins, does not care what theme they’re running, you know, they bought it or they downloaded it from some sketchy site, and now all of a sudden they’re getting 200 Viagra ads per minute. It’s got to go somewhere.

Jesse Friedman: That’s a lot of advertising.

Jessica Frick: It is, and it’s a lot of Viagra, if we’re being honest but it’s got to go somewhere. And so I think, there are a lot of people that say managed, but it doesn’t necessarily mean the same thing. And so when it comes to security, you have to ask those questions.

Joshua Goode: Yeah, for sure. We’re already hitting a pretty good point is that there are levels to manage hosting and even on those different levels, there’s still not a set equivalency amongst hosts all that much. We do see a lot of still in a managed environment shared hosting where the sites are not isolated as one may expect. Unless the user is really doing their due diligence and their research into what these environments look like or have certain security expectations come to a rude awakening in terms of what they’re actually getting.

Jesse Friedman: I think it’s a great point and it touches on the fact that there is some level of education that users need to be making or doing to be able to make an informed decision, but I think that isolated sites and siloed like that should be the base, right? Like it should be something you get for free with any managed WordPress hosting that we’re putting in quotes. Users don’t know what they don’t know. And I run into this problem a lot. If you have an experienced agency or developer, they’re going to know that backups are important, that some kind of malicious file scanning is important, that understanding vulnerabilities exist in plugins. That stuff’s important, but to the typical user, and we have to remember this, the WordPress community is made up of hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people, but the WordPress user base is made up of tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of people. And those people don’t always have the experience that they need to manage a website. And, we talked a little bit about that 5 minute install, the automatic bundling of WordPress. That actually closed the gap for folks to be able to build WordPress websites, right? The barrier to entry, what did that also mean? It meant that less experienced people were now building websites. And when I co founded Brute Protect, one of the things that we worked on heavily was this cloud powered brute force protection service, because we knew that the number one entry point for a WordPress website was a bad password. And so how can we isolate that, those attack vectors, and take information from them? Information that we’re learning from a variety of hosting companies and apply that to a real solution to help those customers in real time. But in that work, I did countless user interviews with folks who didn’t know why their site would be hacked, didn’t understand why they would need backups. And the reality of the situation is that a lot of times these hackers are going indiscriminately against any domain that gets recently registered and they’re just going to keep hammering on them until they get in. It’s not always a targeted attack. They’re not always trying to get into your specific website. They’re trying to get to the resources that exist behind it so they can do something else malicious. And I think that’s something that’s really important for users to understand is that you aren’t just because you’re running a small mom and pop shop or a personal blog or whatever. It doesn’t mean that you won’t be targeted by malicious actors.

Jessica Frick: That’s actually one of the reasons why I love that we include Jetpack security at no cost with Pressable. And that’s, I don’t mean to sound pitchy different hosts will use different solutions. There are some other solutions out on the market that will protect you at the site level. Obviously server level protection, you can’t replace that with a plugin, but from a site level, it’s great to have just a helper to let you know, like, hey, we see something wrong here. You should probably fix this and Jetpack just makes it super easy to handle for people who are perhaps less experienced, but it has features that are hands off enough that more experienced developers feel comfortable with it as well.

Jesse Friedman: Yeah, that’s a great point. Pressable includes Jetpack security by

Jessica Frick: Yes.

Jesse Friedman: Let me ask you this. Is that something that Pressable does that’s a little bit above and beyond? Or do you think that should be a core requirement of managed hosting companies? Not necessarily to provide Jetpack, but to provide those ancillary security products.

Jessica Frick: That’s an interesting question. I don’t think it should be required, but I think it needs to be resolved and solved. You know, there’s services like PatchStack that you could integrate and have something cool there. I can tell you that by the time this comes out, we’ll probably have released it. We have heavily integrated with WP Scan, which is part of Jetpack. But that’s going to offer alerts within the service. Within your Pressable hosting dashboard to let you know if there’s a vulnerability somewhere. And eventually we’re going to create a way for you to tie that into your automatic updates. So you’re like, hey, every time there’s a vulnerability, just go ahead and take care of it for me. It’s thinking about those sorts of things. So our customers don’t have to that I think really offers that value add. Now that said, there’s that spectrum of WordPress user and the more technical developers and agencies will have their own workflows. They don’t want Jetpack because it gets in the way of something else they’re doing. And so I think it’s really important that managed WordPress providers offer a way to get that turned off if they need it, but by default include it because most people don’t know that they need it.

Joshua Goode: Yeah, that’s great. I think, again, with the different levels of managed hosting out there, I still, I kind of have my ideal managed hosting setup, and I’m sure we can get into more specifics as we go on. I don’t want to override some of that now, but I think security is, one of my big ones is performance, but definitely security. There needs to be some level of security management and kind of not necessarily full on guarantees, but just core tenets of making sure these sites have some level of security. Obviously you can’t always protect against some user intentionally installing some kind of stolen plug in or compromised plug in. That’s something that we have to mitigate with tools like Jetpack Scan. In WP Scan but in terms of things that we provide on WP Cloud, we were really trying to set a standard for what managed hosting looks like and ensure that our partners like Pressable, meet those standards as well. So we try to provide them, the hosts, as much of this managed security experience out of the box and something that we’ve already talked about. A touchstone is important in site isolation. So anytime, if you go to a partner of WP Cloud, like Pressable, those sites are isolated. That prevents some other issues like noisy neighbors to an extent. But if one site out there does install a compromise plugin and gets hacked, that’s not going to impact one of your other sites.

Jessica Frick: I love that you said that. It makes me think of, you know, when I describe Pressable to people that know what WP Cloud is, I try to explain it like an application that lives on top of WP Cloud and allows you to interact with it. Because WP Cloud already comes ready to rock with so many of these features. Like we don’t have to worry about that firewall. We don’t have to worry about the isolation because that’s already taken care of for us. But when you’re looking at a managed WordPress host that lives on their own servers that are managed to handle any variety of end use cases, I think it’s a different experience overall because it’s not built by WordPress for WordPress. So there’s going to be edge cases that maybe aren’t quite so edge.

Jesse Friedman: That’s great. You know what’s funny is that every time I walk into one of these episodes, I get a little nervous about how hard I’m going to be pitching WP Cloud. But I get to sit on the sidelines in this episode and not have to worry about it. Because what we’re really trying to do with this podcast, right, is uncover what makes great WordPress hosting. And I think, we’re sitting on the sidelines knowing that WP Cloud is setting a higher standard for that. We do want to offer real helpful tips and solutions out there to other hosting companies and help agencies and folks at home understand what it is that they need to do to decide on great hosting.

Jessica Frick: We’re not the only host on WP Cloud. I wish we were, I keep trying to tell you to stop selling it. So that they have to come through us, but I understand. But here’s the thing. We’re not the only ones that are on WP Cloud. I’m excited to see the market growing in that direction. The reality is WP Cloud is not for everything. It really sucks for Magento.

Jesse Friedman: I was like, where is she going with this?

Jessica Frick: You know?

Jesse Friedman: Yes, that’s true. WP Cloud is a hundred percent WordPress focused. You’re not hosting non WordPress websites on it. And the thing is, that we talked a little bit about, the security, the different core tenets of security that you need to offer. That you’re going with, if it’s Pressable, Bluehost Cloud, WordPress.com, the list goes on. If it has the WP Cloud logo on it, those security features are being taken care of for you out of the box. So it’s less research you’re going to have to do, and it still allows you to choose the host that’s just right for you. All right, so we covered security.

Performance in Managed Hosting 

Jesse Friedman: Let’s talk about performance. What responsibilities does a host have to performance when they call themselves or are offering a product that’s managed WordPress hosting?

Jessica Frick: So I have seen this handled a variety of ways at the hosts that I’ve worked at in the past and also closely studying the competition. The biggest problem that I will see with performance at this level for most people is this concept of a noisy neighbor. If you have someone who’s hanging out in your apartment and they are making a ton of noise. It’s not going to be super cool for you. And that’s ultimately what happens in hosting as well. When the things that we’ve already discussed aren’t addressed with that expert level of insight and action it trickles down. Now, I think that we’ve made a lot of decisions with performance based on the wealth of experience that comes with WP Cloud, vertical scaling versus horizontal scaling. Most people don’t know what that even means, but if you get a huge explosion of traffic. Not all servers are created equal, whether they can scale very quickly up to match that viral blog post that you just got. Congratulations, by the way, really is made or broken by your server’s architecture and how it was put together. You know, there’s a lot of discount hosts that will give you what is, most people don’t know what a PHP worker is. And that’s, I’ve long fought against listing PHP workers. The resources they give you are just not capable of handling serious business. So if you’re running a store or anything dynamic and when I say dynamic, anything that may be interactive in any way, it’s not a brochure, even if people are just filling out forms or buying things, that’s absolutely dynamic. And I think you really need to understand what is under the hood before you build on a cheap managed host. Because those things just aren’t taken care of.

Joshua Goode: Yeah, there’s, I think performance is probably one where I see some of the most unique approaches to it. We have hosts that are very opinionated on certain approaches, some that kind of leave it as a kind of open sandbox, allowing users to do a lot of different things. And one of the best things is perhaps a middle ground of that. At WP Cloud we have a lot of experience from WordPress VIP, WordPress.com, just millions of sites. So we’ve really been able to hone in on what works and what works at scale most importantly. My preferred solution is one that we provide via WP Cloud. In our partners is where we build in object caching by default. We have page caching by default. We have edge caching in our CDN. All of these things built in by default where you see other hosts may say, okay we provide this to some extent, but now to really use it, you have to go set up Redis, you have to set up a new database here, you have to install this plugin, turn this toggle on, which, some people really may want that control but when you’re managing many, many sites whether you’re the host or whether you’re a customer some of that becomes very, very cumbersome and you see a lot of things that just take a lot of time and maybe just not work as expected. Our approach to where we provide so much out of the box, it’s really fine tuned for WordPress. It’s really fine tuned for sites that need to scale. Especially WooCommerce sites.

Jessica Frick: Can I say something spicy?

Joshua Goode: Yes.

Jesse Friedman: Yeah.

Jessica Frick: I am so glad that we are not dependent on Cloudflare to deliver that kind of performance. You know, that is a trend that I’m seeing among a lot of more expensive managed WordPress hosts. They are partnering with Cloudflare to handle that work for them. And it’s yet another third party you can’t control.

Joshua Goode: I just hope that people can look to WP Cloud and look to partners like Pressable to see this higher bar of what managed hosting should look like and can be. Hopefully you can look at what we’re doing just so we can have a better community experience across the board. So users are served. And one benefit of WP Cloud is we provide some of these great features. It allows our partners like Pressable to really take advantage of those and sometimes take advantage of those into unique ways to really set themselves apart. Pressable does a really excellent job on that. Providing things that WordPress.com and Bluehost Cloud may not or may not at this time and really allowing them to have an amazing product of their own because you’re not, there are things to where we do things in a certain way on WP Cloud, but you’re not limited to that. You have so much more potential and so much more time and resources that you can invest making a unique, diverse product.

The Risks of Relying an External Services 

Joshua Goode: So going back to what I was saying, though about Cloudflare, great company. You know, we definitely see users use their service, but WP Cloud has an Anycast network. So what really powers a lot of what Cloudflare is doing is an Anycast network. I recommend reading the Wikipedia article or even one of Cloudflare’s articles on it. That’s built in by default on WP Cloud. All WP Cloud hosted sites on Pressable elsewhere are part of an Anycast network. So that’s providing a lot of protections for DDoS. It’s also building in these direct points of connection. So an end user is connected to their closest regional server and oftentimes served cache right from that regional server there without the need of adding some other layer, like a Cloudflare CDN.

Jesse Friedman: The thing about Cloudflare being that you’re relying on another service at the same time you don’t have control over that service. So when you’re going with a hosting company that is leveraging Cloudflare, putting it in front of their own architecture, they’re using that typically to speed up those websites and they get a lot of stuff we’ll say for free that they can give to those customers, but they’re paying for it.

Jessica Frick: But so are you.

Jesse Friedman: On the face of it, sure, right, of course. But what I’m saying, I guess what I’m saying is that Cloudflare comes with a lot of the stuff out of the box. And I think you hit on something that’s super important there, which is that users at home probably think to themselves what’s wrong with that? What’s wrong with using Cloudflare? Cloudflare itself is not necessarily a bad product. When you are relying on something to be successful and you don’t have the control over that, you can’t switch it off or on and you can’t configure it. You can’t change it the way you want to change it. That’s adding another layer of risk into that, into the performance of that site.

Metrics in Managed Hosting 

Jesse Friedman: That’s really important for people to think about at home when you’re evaluating managed hosting. What other technologies are being layered in there that you have less control over?

Jessica Frick: And are they going to give you control over whether you have to use them or not? At Pressable, you can flip our edge caching on or off. If you have certain plugins you want to use instead, I don’t recommend it because our edge caching really does rock. You could turn that off if you had your own special way that you wanted to do it. Not all services will let you opt out of that because, again the spicy word that I’m thinking is they need it as a crutch to make up for other things that they’re not doing that we would perhaps do. On where they’re cutting the corners. And I think it would require a certain level of technical prowess to know. But that’s why I love seeing neutral third party performance reports, something like WP Hosting Benchmarks, ReviewSignal does these every year. They didn’t do it this year but he doesn’t turn on those special caching for all of the tests, so you can see how good they are really with and without the caching. And that’s good for most.

Jesse Friedman: ReviewSignal runs hosting benchmarks for folks at home. Our first episode was actually with Kevin Ohashi.

Jessica Frick: Isn’t he so great?

Jesse Friedman: Yeah, he’s a, he is, he was a great guest and he is a great guy. And he’s doing a lot of great work around helping to elevate the hosting companies that are doing really, really well out there so that you can make an informed decision around performance and reliability.

Jessica Frick: And that’s the thing is a lot of times you’ll see on websites. They show their own performance and you always have to approach that with a grain of salt because I can also show you performance numbers where I am the top winner of all things ever.

Jesse Friedman: That’s right. That’s, yeah. I’m sure that’s a list that’s powered by WordPress too, right?

Jessica Frick: Naturally.

Jesse Friedman: Of course. All right.

Reliability and Service Level Agreements in Managed Hosting

Jesse Friedman: So we talked about security. We talked about performance. What about reliability? Do, if you’re offering managed WordPress hosting versus any other type of hosting. Do you have a higher responsibility to reliability, or is it just a default that everyone, every type of hosting should be setting a higher standard?

Jessica Frick: So when you say reliability I think depending on who’s listening, that may mean a couple different things. When I hear reliability, I am thinking about uptime. When normies hear the word reliability, they’re like, can I count on you? So that kind of leads into a support conversation. I’ll pause on that one and I’ll go with the technical reliability first.

At Pressable, we have a SLA, a service level agreement. It promises 100 percent uptime. Now when you hear 100 percent uptime, most people who are technologically savvy will know that’s literally not possible in computing. It’s always 99.999999999%, whatever because computers are computers. We are so confident that you’re not going to find our service to be unreliable that we’re going to back it up with that SLA. And the reason is, again, pitching for WP Cloud. You guys had me on here because you know I’m a WP Cloud fangirl. Isn’t that why you asked me? But WP Cloud.

Jesse Friedman: It has something to do with your expertise.

Jessica Frick: I’m a little nerdy, but I’m also a fangirl. So anyway. We’re doing it. WP Cloud has highly available geo redundant automatic failover. And so for normies, what that means is if something goes wrong at the server level, we have an instant automatic copy that we shift your domain to. So instead of looking for your site over here, we’re going to have it go over here. And for most of your visitors, there’s absolutely no difference. And for you, you don’t have to do anything. We take care of it all in the background. Your site never goes down if there’s a fire in one of our data centers. That, to me, is what I think of when we’re talking about reliability. You can do everything that you want to do to make sure your sites are up and stable. Going back to my smitten kitten guy, you don’t know if he’s gonna have a flood in his garage where your box is.

And so having that really means a lot. Now people talk about high availability and they will charge like an extra zero at the end of your monthly bill, just so that they can give that to you. I think most people are shocked when they find out that we offer that even on our $25 plan. Now, back to the other kind of reliability.

Jesse Friedman: Actually before we jump into that, because I do want to go into that realm, when you think about pricing, a lot of times people who are shopping for hosting out there are looking at the cheapest hosting that they can, and that’s a constant race to the bottom that we see in the industry. Folks are selling 10 sites, 100 sites for 3, 2, 3, 4 bucks a month. Now, if you’ve ever had to do support for websites, I can tell you that whether they’re an enterprise customer paying 2,000 a month or they’re a small blog and someone’s invested in it and they care about their blog and they’re paying 2 a month, there’s still going to be just as much stress and frustration and anger on the other side of that phone call and providing that kind of support is not always easy. But those folks, even though they’re paying a very inexpensive amount of money they feel like they deserve to have their site just up and running. At the end of the day, it’s important for folks to remember that if you’re paying Pressable or Bluehost Cloud or somebody else say a couple dozen dollars a month, twenty, twenty four, twenty five bucks a month, and you don’t have to think about downtime and you don’t have to think about your site experiencing those kinds of issues is that not worth a couple cups of coffee a month? The three bucks a month is not making any promises to you, right?

Jessica Frick: It’s cheaper than rent, but, to the defense of those that spend 5 a month, to them, they’re paying for a service. And that service isn’t doing their one job, which is to host their website successfully. And so I get it, but you have to understand. It’s like saying I can buy a burger for 99 cents, or I can buy a burger for $15. There’s going to be a difference in the quality of the burger. And you just need to understand that.

Jesse Friedman: That’s a great point. We could have made a beer analogy here.

Jessica Frick: I know I’m really, I’m not mad about the beer, but now I want a burger. So I’m just saying. I, we should stick to the real estate analogies, you guys.

Jesse Friedman: Got any burgers there, Josh?

Joshua Goode: Oh, yeah. We, we have some specifically. There’s a whole kind of course out there in the beer world as opposed to the wine world. In the beer world is called the cicerone and so there’s a whole thing on in terms of pairing and stuff that goes along with that certification. So yeah, we can definitely do some specifically suited for burgers.

Jesse Friedman: That’s awesome.

Jessica Frick: But if we’re going to do beer, there’s a very big difference between Josh’s latest brew and a Schlitz.

Jesse Friedman: He takes us back to the pricing.

Jesse Friedman: Alright, so Jess, before I interrupted you there, we were talking about reliability from a different perspective.

Jessica Frick: Yeah. And it dovetails with that. Can I count on you? You have one job and sometimes when the job is not being done or you have a question about it, you expect to be able to talk to somebody that can help you. People are often shocked that those $3 hosts don’t actually have people you could talk to, to help you. They send you to a forum or a bot can answer some questions poorly, and then they promise to get back to you in three to five days. If they respond at all. Those are real things that live out there. It’s hard to tell the story of reliability in that sense, because how do you quantify an experience? Everybody says it’s great.

Jesse Friedman: I think one thing that you’re touching on there that’s really important to think about is the intent and the motivation that that user has at that moment. If they don’t have, if they have something that they need to learn or achieve, and they can’t do it on their own, and it’s not pressing, it’s not an emergency, they’ll start by doing some research. They’ll look at documentation. They’ll ask other people how you do it. If they’re reaching out to support, it’s probably because it’s urgent. It’s scary. Something’s not working. They’re on a deadline, whatever it might be. So being able to get great support is super important and it’s a way for a hosting company to differentiate themselves. And we’ve been talking a lot about WP Cloud and Pressable, but like I will give credit as talked a little bit about before about how like you have WP Cloud underneath that infrastructure and then you have Pressable layered on top of it to give their own answer to what is WordPress hosting, right? Bluehost Cloud, actually, runs on WP Cloud and it comes with Tier 3 phone support 24/7, 365. So you can pick up the phone and you can talk to somebody who actually knows how to build a WordPress website instantaneously. That goes to raising the bar for managed hosting for sure. What is the typical support solution for Pressable?

Jessica Frick: So for me, reliable support would be you can get your question answered one way or another. At Pressable, we really work hard to make sure our documentation is up to date. If you’re shopping around, I would encourage you to look at a host’s documentation. Can you find answers to most of your questions? And is it speaking at your level, not, when you chat in or submit a ticket or a phone call. Are you talking to somebody who, number one, is human? And if they’re not human, are they at least good? And then you can eventually get to a human. And is the human able to understand what you’re asking? Or are they reading from a script or are they basically doing what you could have done with Google? Do you feel like you’re being heard? One of the things is everybody goes through the same rigorous hiring process and people here know, love, live and breathe WordPress. That’s what we do. We can’t fix your VCR. We’re not going to be able to tell you what to do with your Squarespace, but we know WordPress. I think there are some companies that also sell WordPress, and so you’re not going to get that specialized expertise there. If you have specific hosting questions, they may be great, but they’re not going to be able to tell you if a specific plugin is causing problems, or if there’s a conflict between what we do and what you do necessarily. And I think that that also creates some frustration on behalf of customers, because it’s very easy to say, well, you’re using this plugin, go talk to them. And then the plugin providers say, wait a minute, no, it’s not my plugin. Why did they send you to me? And now they won’t ever recommend that host. And like, it just goes around and around.

Jesse Friedman: Yeah, we spent a lot of time working with hosting companies from the Jetpack side to make sure that we got warm handoffs so that they weren’t just hey, it’s Jetpack’s problem, go solve for it yourself. Now a lot of those hosting companies can actually just pass that feedback on to us or we’ve actually even provided training to hosting companies so that they can actually support those simpler questions. That’s great about the documentation, especially something that’s free for you to review before you even sign up for a hosting company.

Jessica Frick: For sure. We even include an API documentation that’s not behind a login. So you can really see what you’re getting before you buy.

Jesse Friedman: That’s great.

Developer Tools and Automation in WordPress Hosting

Jesse Friedman: And actually API leads us to another question, which is around managed WordPress hosting. What development tools do we need to offer to agencies or developers who are out there building, into their workflows because it’s not just about putting up a website and launching it and walking away. It’s about the delivery of code. It’s about updating things. It’s about keeping it all moving and those agencies have to build those hours. So the faster they can work on procedural stuff like that the more money they can actually bring in as a company.

Jessica Frick: That’s a great question. My answer may be different than other people’s answers, but I think this is a great opportunity to be a little more informed. You need to be talking to the developers that are using your platform. For me, I would say base case, you need to give them WP CLI. They have to have SSH. They have to be able to work with their own preferred workflows. Git integration is stakes for developers nowadays. Having a solid library of API calls and webhooks. We take it a step further and let you create your own webhooks and custom applications, but you don’t even have to go that far. We go there because that’s what we’ve been told people want. Now people on our platform, Bluehost, another great service, they may not have those kinds of customers. And so their efforts for those kind of developers may be better spent elsewhere. I don’t know because I’ve never interviewed them. But when it comes to a more technical WordPress user, there’s a lot that is base and minimum because developers are going to come with their own flows. And I think that’s why it’s so hard to win their business, they will get used to using something. They build systems around it to be as efficient as possible. And unless something really, really, really, really, really bad has happened, they don’t want to change.

Jesse Friedman: Josh, if folks at home are listening that aren’t super technical, what’s SSH?

Jessica Frick: Sorry!

Jesse Friedman: No, this is a great opportunity for Josh to just step in and fill those knowledge gaps.

Joshua Goode: So just to start, why would you want the access? And then we can actually, or why would you want whatever this thing is? And then we can delve more into what it actually is. A good point that Jess made is, there’s probably some base layers that you should just provide because so many developers, agencies, individuals will want to do things their own way or their own learned way. And so as a managed host, you should at least provide them this very basic tool sets such as SSH, CLI some, maybe some options for deploying from Git and GitHub. As for what SSH actually is, it’s just a very technical, more fancy way of connecting into a server and being able to run various commands. And this opens up the door to where you can then write scripts that run these commands. To add a layer to that, there’s WP CLI. Which are WordPress specific commands. So I can go in there and I can connect to a site via SSH. And then once I’m loaded in there, I can run a command like WP user list. And that’s going to give me a list of users on the site. And maybe I want to filter that down to just the administrators. And now maybe I want to list out all of the administrators and then reset all of their passwords for whatever reason. Maybe I want to install a theme or a plugin from WordPress.org or maybe I want to install it from my own GitHub repo. I can run wp plugin install, put in the URL and force it and I can choose whether it activates after or not. So these are all just options.

Jesse Friedman: I like the idea of resetting all the admin passwords. Maybe that comes after a party at your place when they’re drinking.

Joshua Goode: This is too much, too much has gone on or maybe it’s too much got on and someone left the computer open and left the site open to install some bad plugins and we’re not sure who did it. So we have to reset all the passwords to lock it down a little bit, at least temporarily. But yeah, these are all just tools that just make the development process, and really beyond that, the multiple site management process, being able to script things out and work with these sites in a very automated way, allowing for automated flows. The kind of approach we take with WP Cloud is giving hosts the opportunity to give users this access like Pressable does for SSH and SFTP. And of course, Pressable has taken it a step further and they’ve developed this API, this awesome API that allows these agencies to build their own, they can build their own panels, they can build their own script managers to run. There are countless commands and countless different queries against these sites in bulk or down to just a select few or just a single site, allowing them to craft their own workflows and get things to match as needed. And so, some other hosts may have a very specific way they want you to do things. And for some people that may be fine, but there are a lot of agencies and developers that need a more kind of open ended thing. And that’s where probably we’re the most open ended on WP Cloud and Pressable compared to others is, we may be very opinionated on how our caching operates, but in terms of how you are going to manage all these sites in bulk and do this development work, we give you a buffet of options.

Jesse Friedman: That’s awesome.

Jessica Frick: Can I add one thing though? So to what Joshua was saying, I think the more technical they are, the less they want to actually interact with your own fast way of handling things. But there are other things that you can do for developers to make it really fun and easy to use. One of the things that I love showing off is how fast a site can be set up on Pressable. It’s literally 30 seconds. With other hosts, you could be waiting 5 to 6 minutes for a WordPress site to be provisioned. It’s little things like that. You know, how fast our DNS is.

Jesse Friedman: You just touched on something that I was about to ask about Jess. We did two episodes before this about higher education. And I’m sure there’s an easy path for people to think about students in those universities, and learning a trade, and trying to get a job out there. And I think that one path that a lot of folks are underestimating is a good opportunity for them to make some money and to do some good out there is to create an agency implementer type business so a developer agency business right requires a lot of education. You have to be good at coding and design and everything else, but there’s another subset of opportunity out there where folks are they set up a WordPress website, they install a theme, or they use the Gutenberg editor, and then they can get a site operational. No code needed but they do that as a step for like a small mom and pop, or a service provider, or something like that. Like you own an ice cream shop, you might not have that 10,000 to hire an agency to build a website. But you might have 500 to hire somebody to put together a theme for you and just configure the website for you.

Cloning Tool for Agencies 

Jesse Friedman: So in thinking about that and creating more job opportunities out there, Pressable has a cloning tool, right? There’s an opportunity there. So what I think that opens up is like, it’s such a simple little tool, right? Like from a user’s perspective, it’s a button. You press it, it replicates a site. But when you think about running a business and trying to get more and more business and move faster you can configure a WordPress website without any personal information on it and configure it the exact way that you want with the right theme. Maybe you have the right plugins on it. They’re configured exactly the right way. And then you can use Pressable to just replicate that. And that’ll be a jumping off start for you to have a new website to operate and to build for somebody else without having to go through all the configuration steps. So that could save you a whole billable hour, maybe. Maybe even more than that.

Jessica Frick: For sure. For sure. And you can keep that template or stencil or whatever you want to call it updated and every time you.

Jesse Friedman: We used to call it a golden image.

Jessica Frick: There you go. Every time you recreate it, it’s already up to date. Take it a step further, we don’t modify WordPress. When you get WordPress from Pressable, it is the real deal as it’s meant to be enjoyed. And so that tight integration also lets you extend that even further. So let’s say your template or stencil has all your built in patterns already set up. You know, you could have your custom blocks ready to rock. There are so many opportunities to extend that and the way that you’re saying it. I would say one billable hour is on the low end for savings.

Jesse Friedman: For sure, for sure.

Conclusion

Jesse Friedman: Alright, well we’re getting to the end of this episode. I want to take the time to say thank you to both of you very much for joining us. Jess, I think that we just scratched the surface with this, so I would love to have you back and talk more about Managed Hosting, WordPress in general, what’s going on in your neck of the woods. If anybody wants to follow you at home, where should they go, what websites should they visit?

Jessica Frick: Easiest is probably to visit my website jessicafrick.com, but make sure you visit pressable.com and we’ll take really good care of you.

Jesse Friedman: Awesome, thanks. Josh, anything you want to add?

Joshua Goode: Yeah, so, well, if you’re a host, and you’re interested in what we’ve talked about a little bit here, definitely visit us over at WP.cloud. We have some good info over there and good ways to contact us. If you want to learn more about me and my beer and my brewing and tractor riding, you can visit Goode.pro. That’s Goode with the E dot P-R-O.

Jesse Friedman: Awesome. Well, thank you so much, both of you. Talk to you later.Joshua Goode: Bye.