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 impressivehost.net. 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. With me today is my best friend. That sounds a little corny, but it’s true. A colleague, someone I’ve had the pleasure of working with for 10 years now, maybe, I don’t know, it’s been a long time. Jeff Golenski, product manager at Automattic on A4A. What is A4A, Jeff?

Jeff Golenski: Yeah, so A4A is kind of an internal term code name, but we are the Automattic for Agencies program.

So we are a special program helping agencies grow their business, reinforce the relationship with their clients, and we kind of unite a lot of different Automattic brands. You might have heard of everything from WordPress VIP to wordpress.com, Pressable, Jetpack, and Woo.

Jesse Friedman: That’s awesome. I was a little reluctant to have you on because, you know, now everyone’s gonna know why I wear the white glasses.

Jeff Golenski: You talking about? What white glasses?

Jesse Friedman: Jeff is probably one of the better looking people I know in real life. So I model a lot after him. I mean, you might have noticed some similarities between the two of us, but Jeff and I have been friends for a very long time.

We’ve had a chance to hang out as just friends at WordCamps and then, you know, we started working together at a company called Astonish back in 2010, 2011. And then we worked together at BruteProtect, which we sold to Automattic, and now we’ve been working at Automattic for, geez, it’s gonna be 11 years, so I don’t know.

We’ve been working together for 15 years.

Jeff Golenski: It’s…

Jesse Friedman: 14.

Jeff Golenski: And I think the most fun fact is that Jesse was my professor in college teaching me ActionScript back in the day. Oh, I’m old.

Jesse Friedman: That’s right. I was gonna let you bring that one up because I did not want to drop that nugget. But I do tell everybody in real life, because anytime that anybody’s like, wow, Jeff’s work is so great, I’m immediately like…

Jeff Golenski: Stop.

Jesse Friedman: I don’t let you be modest because I want you to take credit for how great you are because I take credit for having taught you.

So…

Jeff Golenski: Order of operations. I like it.

Jesse Friedman: At Automattic, we have these three-minute flash talks. It was the second one I ever did. I let people at Automattic vote. So a flash talk is basically you have a few minutes where you have to give a talk in front of everybody at the Grand Meetup, and you can talk on any subjects you want.

It literally, there’s no limits. It is a professional stage, but like, you know, other than that. And so I gave everybody at Automattic the chance to kind of vote on it. And one of many options was Marv, Jeff’s cat.

Jeff Golenski: And…

Jesse Friedman: And so Marv is, he’s an old guy now. He’s, what, he’s gotta be coming up on double decades.

Jeff Golenski: Yeah. So, it’s for any cat lover out there. My wife and I have a cat named Marv.

He’s a tabby cat. I’ve had him since he was about three weeks old and last week he hit 19 years old. So…

Jesse Friedman: Yeah, he’s…

Jeff Golenski: He can…

Jesse Friedman: He is…

Jeff Golenski: He’s got plenty of energy, so…

Jesse Friedman: He’s the original grumpy cat.

Jeff Golenski: Yeah.

Jesse Friedman: But in a great way. He’s got a good personality. Anyways, the talk was supposed to be about Marv, but I kinda shifted the entire thing into, like, I showed something like, this is what Jeff’s website design looked like in 2007 or whatever, and then it showed like the most awful ugly website in the world.

And it was like, this is what it looked like after I taught him. And it was like your website and it was gorgeous. I think it was Midnight Shift Studio or something like that. Right?

Jeff Golenski: Yeah. That’s pretty amazing. I think, didn’t you show like a GeoCities site? I was like speaking…

Jesse Friedman: Yeah, it was.

Jeff Golenski: Let’s talk about web hosting from the…

Jesse Friedman: You wanna get off this topic?

Jeff Golenski: No, no, no, no. It’s all good. It’s all good. I just want to give your listeners something of value, not just a bro fest, you know?

Jesse Friedman: Yeah, yeah. No, I could talk about you all day, but yeah, man, GeoCities and the old web, man. We came up in a time when the web was weird and you had the ability to kind of like feel good about making it stand out and do a whole bunch of different things. And…

Jeff Golenski: And…

Jesse Friedman: I feel like, I talk about this a lot, but I feel like the internet has kind of gotten a little sterile. And I wonder if a lot of it, you know, from a design perspective, so you work as a product manager at A4A, but you’re also someone with years and years and years of experience as a designer. I don’t think you’ll ever drop the design part, because it’s not just about pixels and colors and fonts, it’s also about designing amazing experiences, which is what you do every day.

But the, you know, the way the web came up, it was just like, it was an extension of your personality. You could make it anything you want. And then we had, you know, Jeffrey Zeldman, who’s been on the show, and we talked about standards and his push for web standards and then we got into accessibility and then we got into responsive web design and grids and frameworks and all the stuff that goes into helping you to accelerate the work in making websites.

And I wonder, did a lot of that work both help us to…

Jeff Golenski: Make…

Jesse Friedman: Make faster, more reliable, more accessible websites, but did it also kind of strip out some of the opportunities for us to kind of, you know, express ourselves?

Jeff Golenski: Yeah, I think it might have. I mean, looking back, I remember like those Angelfire sites and GeoCities and kind of how I got into web design. I came, I grew up in a very poor family and we couldn’t really afford a computer.

So my introduction to the internet was WebTV. Are you familiar with, is anyone familiar with WebTV? This…

Jesse Friedman: You had a keyboard that would hook up to you. It was a wireless keyboard, right?

Jeff Golenski: Yeah. It wasn’t even wireless. I had, I think I had a wired one, but it was basically you just attached it to your TV and you could do things like go into chat rooms and send emails.

It was very basic. And I got into the internet because I saw like those chat rooms and people were customizing their signatures and their emails. And like at the time, I was super into The X-Files, so I scoured the internet, found like all those amazing X-Files GIFs, you know, or GIFs, depending on how you wanna pronounce it.

Jesse Friedman: Hold on a second. Timeout. It is GIF and then we’re putting an end to this right here, right now. No GIFs here.

Jeff Golenski: One of my personal principles is that I always pronounce the acronym based on the first word. So graphics interchange format. Right? G-R-G there. So I’ll pronounce it like that. That’s…

Jesse Friedman: All right. That’s it. We’ve solved it. No, no, no. That’s it. Like we can cut this up and put it on the internet. Jeff has solved this problem once and for all.

Jeff Golenski: It just makes it consistent. It sets expectations. Right?

Jesse Friedman: I like that.

Jeff Golenski: Good stuff. But yeah, it was like a lot of that and then, you know, it was then coding in Notepad, and it was still like the wild, wild west. There was really no consistency to anything. And I think the web standards really kind of made consistency amongst, you know, building websites.

But then, you know, as we start to see emerging technologies, JavaScript became more popular and all that. The web became very bloated. Advertising kind of took over. Capitalism really took hold, I think. And so I think it bloated the internet quite a bit.

Jesse Friedman: Yeah. You know what? I think you’re touching on something there. It’s like in the past, the way in which the internet was consumed was, I have this idea, I have this concept, I have this content. I want you to consume it.

Jeff Golenski: Mm-hmm.

Jesse Friedman: And I feel very much like the internet of today, I’m not talking about like personal blogs or personal web, I’m talking about like, just generally browsing the internet. It feels very much like there’s this tug of war where you are building a website to trick people into spending time on it, clicking an ad, seeing, being exposed to an ad or whatever. And, you know, we get into clickbait and stuff like that, but like the other day I read an article about something and it clicked me into like, or no, I asked a question and it brought me to a page and I’m on my phone, and it has the cookies banner asking me if I wanna accept the cookies.

Then a video pre-roll comes down from the top. Then there’s a popup over it that asks if I want to have automatic push notifications to this website. I’ve never even visited this website. I don’t even know what it’s about. I’m just trying to get an answer to a question and it’s literally, it’s like bombarding me.

It’s like that episode of Futurama where they actually went physically into the internet and they were like being physically attacked by ads.

Jeff Golenski: Mm-hmm.

Jesse Friedman: I feel very much like that’s a lot of how the internet is shaping out these days. It just seems to be like a way to get people to get to their bottom line and convert on dollars.

Jeff Golenski: Yeah, and you know what? It’s really interesting. I don’t know if people are having this conversation yet, but one of the things I really love about AI is that I get to circumvent all that now. As an example, I recently got really heavily back into Magic: The Gathering, the card game, and I’m relearning how to play and I’m looking up all these rules. And in doing so, there are hundreds of thousands of sites about the rules and the cards, and there are ads everywhere. And now I’m like, I don’t need any of that.

I’ll go to ChatGPT. I’ll ask it. It’ll deliver me the information I’m looking for and there are no ads and I don’t…

Jesse Friedman: Yeah.

Jeff Golenski: Deal with all the video popups or anything like that. So I think that’s a huge benefit because I don’t need to waste time anymore just digging through, which is kind of, it’s nice in a way, but also we’re getting further and further away from classic sites.

And you know, the real joy I think in building the internet.

Jesse Friedman: Yeah, no, I think you’re absolutely right. You know, the interesting thing about AI and the way in which it’s disrupting search engine optimization is something to think about. It’s definitely, you know, I think it’s doing a better job than actually Google in some cases in terms of attributing to the way in which, you know, like where the content came from.

Jeff Golenski: Mm-hmm.

Jesse Friedman: But at the same time, I think there are actual studies being done right now that are showing that people are not clicking through to those websites as much as they would’ve on search engines. And so, you know, a lot of times I think people are starting to panic in terms of like, well, who’s getting credit for my content?

Like, I’m writing this content and then the search engine, I mean, AI is adapting it to deliver it to somebody else. And then like I get no credit for it. I get no visits to my website. You know, and I really hope that maybe there’s something in there where someone can come in and say, like, you know, solve this in a way that gets people to your website, but rewards you in a different way than forcing you to have to pay the bills through advertising.

And I think that’s the biggest problem that we face with the internet is that we don’t have a resolution for this. The way, you know, you have to keep the lights on, you have to pay for this content…

Jeff Golenski: Mm-hmm.

Jesse Friedman: All this stuff. And so how do you actually do that? How do you keep the lights on?

Everything is free on the internet. So it results into ads and then it becomes this battle of, you know, I remember back in the day, it was actually Jeffrey Zeldman, I mentioned him before. He created some kind of, I forget the name of it. It was like an ad network that was very tastefully crafted ads.

Jeff Golenski: Ads…

Jesse Friedman: And I don’t know if it still exists today. But he did it on purpose because they wanted the advertising to be, you know, at the same design level and user experience level as the time and effort that you’re putting into the website. And now it feels like we’ve just kind of gone out the window like, you know, no matter how beautiful your news website is, it still has a car ad running on top of it while there are banner ads at the bottom and everything’s kind of like pushing you in a specific direction and getting to that content. It’s like kind of like…

Jeff Golenski: Like…

Jesse Friedman: Trying to like push through a thick bush and just trying to get to like the other side of it. It’s like a jungle in there.

Jeff Golenski: A lot of times that bush is a briar patch and you come out with scratches and a little bloody. Totally.

Jesse Friedman: Yeah.

Jeff Golenski: Yeah.

Jesse Friedman: For sure, man.

Jeff Golenski: It’s like, depending on the tools that you use, I’m a huge fan of Perplexity. I don’t know if you use it too much, but it has the same power to deliver you AI results, but it also credits the sources, so it’ll deliver some excerpts.

I use it a lot when I do market research when I’m looking to validate new projects and ideas, and then if I want to learn more, I can go to that source and then really dig in and then, you know, the author of that will get the ad spend and the money from that. So…

Jesse Friedman: Yeah.

Jeff Golenski: That helps.

I don’t think too many people are thinking of that as they browse the internet, but I always think that if someone is taking the time to create that content, they deserve to be compensated. And it is very difficult to get paid online. For sure.

Jesse Friedman: Yeah. Yeah. I think it’s an interesting problem that if we can solve, I mean, you know, it’s funny because when we think about hosting companies and the way in which we can tie all this back to the reason we’re here on this podcast, you know, Automattic for many years has been very focused on…

Jeff Golenski: On…

Jesse Friedman: Giving people a voice, right?

Our mission is to democratize publishing. We wanna make sure that everybody can have a website, and so you can build a website on wordpress.com for free. And that gives you a voice, that gives you the opportunity to design. And so you get all these themes, and now with the Site Editor, you can really do some fun things.

You can do some out-of-the-box stuff again. And I think that we’ll see a resurgence of people feeling a little bit stronger, or more opinionated about doing something unique and expressive around their personality. But I think, you know, it’s something that the majority of hosting companies is kind of missing out on is that they’re not recognizing that social media is gobbling up a lot of the market share or need for websites.

And so, you know, you build an Instagram, you build a TikTok, you build a Facebook page. And now these individuals who are influencers don’t necessarily think to themselves right away, I need a website too. And I think that hosting companies are really missing the mark on that one because they can, they could come in and help them to understand the value of WordPress, the value of owning your influence, and owning your connection with your end community and channeling all that through a WordPress open web platform.

Jeff Golenski: That…

Jesse Friedman: You think we’re missing the mark there?

Jeff Golenski: I think it’s subjective, really, but yeah. In some cases I love the phrase of owning your influence, and I see that a lot, especially prevalent with smaller businesses these days, right? They have a platform like Facebook or Instagram, and they take advantage of that because it’s free. But like what happens if someone doesn’t have Instagram or Facebook? Then they kind of miss out on a certain market there. And I think the demographics of the networks like that are gearing towards older folks. And then, you know, the newer generations are using different tools and then they’re missing out on that.

I know, personally, if I go to look at like a restaurant menu and I can’t get to it in like DoorDash or on their website and it tries to take me to Instagram or Facebook, I no longer use those networks. And if I can’t get to that content, I’m out, I’ll find another restaurant. You know, it’s a very privileged thing to say, but I mean, it’s true.

I think there’s a lot of difficulty in trying to capture that wider audience there.

Jesse Friedman: Yeah, I think there’s still something really like marvelous though about owning your domain and having a point of presence or you know, a bit of property on the internet that is solely yours. I think with social media, you know, you mentioned maybe that somebody doesn’t have a Facebook or Instagram.

It’s funny because I think a few years ago we would’ve said, that’s ridiculous. Everybody does. But I think you, myself, I think maybe we’re a little biased because we’re in the same, you know, small circle, but there’s a lot of us. I think it’s a growing number of people who are staying out of social media more and more because it’s just not the environment that they want to be spending their time in.

We talk about like, you and I have these conversations around like, where do we wanna spend our attention? Where do we wanna focus our time? And it’s not in these platforms.

Jeff Golenski: Man. And…

Jesse Friedman: But there’s…

Jeff Golenski: Experience too, when you have your own website. Like if I go to Facebook or Reddit or any of those sites, my attention span is so minimal.

If I see something, all of a sudden I’m looking at something else from another creator and I forgot what I was doing. Whereas on a website, you’re there for one purpose only, really. And I think…

Jesse Friedman: Yeah. Yeah, and I think, but there’s even a bigger problem with social media, which is that you don’t have control over the algorithm that delivers your content to those customers. And you don’t actually own the connection that you have to that end customer, or not customer, but you know, community member.

Jeff Golenski: Mm-hmm.

Jesse Friedman: So you run into an issue where you’re not able to reliably build a foundation on this connection that you have with customers. Because it can be, the rug can be pulled out from under you at any time.

Jeff Golenski: Yeah, for…

Jesse Friedman: Yeah, but let’s circle back to what you’re working on with A4A. So, A4A is an opportunity for you to connect with agencies.

You’re talking to…

Jeff Golenski: You know…

Jesse Friedman: Agencies about what it is that they’re dealing with on a day-to-day basis and the tools that they need to succeed. And you’re collaborating by offering them a set of products and services that kind of bring together some of the best things of Automattic and making that available to agencies.

What is it like talking to agencies and how important is it for a hosting company to be, you know, actually getting into these types of one-on-one conversations?

Jeff Golenski: Yeah, it’s very interesting. I mean, we have agencies of varying degree in size and complexity. We’ll have the solo entrepreneurs that are managing maybe 10 sites, and then we have enterprise-level clients managing thousands of sites, right?

And the workflow of every segment of those agencies is completely different. So if we’re talking about an agency who may just be starting out, they’re really looking for tools to help them be more efficient. They want pre-built things. It doesn’t cost them much time and effort, so they’re looking to adopt pre-made solutions.

You know, I think WooCommerce is great for those things, but also if we look at the larger agencies, they have super refined, advanced workflows and they need things to work a specific way. Security, performance, always top of mind. And so a lot of those agencies are building their own solutions because sometimes things in the market don’t meet their needs exactly as they should, and they need them to, so they’ll modify or build new solutions.

So, there’s a wide range of folks that we see there. And learning about all these different use cases is incredible. I think, you know, we have agencies all around the world from India to Washington state. We have all over the place. And learning about the cultural differences in these different markets, folks in Japan are a lot different than folks in San Francisco. Right? And the way that we perceive tools and just communication in general. So it’s very interesting.

Jesse Friedman: Yeah. That’s very cool. And…

Jeff Golenski: So when you…

Jesse Friedman: So when you say different solutions, you’re talking about the ways in which they’re actually deploying websites, the tools that they’re using, the plugins that they’re building, things like that. But at the end of the day, they’re getting their hosting from wordpress.com, Pressable, these are WP Cloud powered platforms.

And then they have the ability to kind of work it into their workflow. Like Pressable has an API that allows you to incorporate things like straight from deployment into the repo so that you can go right from pushing a pull request into launching it across all the sites that you manage and things like that.

When an agency, you know, we kind of talk about this all the time on this podcast, but like, what is an agency thinking about when they’re thinking about reliability and security and performance? You touched on that, but you know, one thing that we continue to see over and over again when we have these conversations is that…

Jeff Golenski: Is that…

Jesse Friedman: They’re getting far less, they’re not diving deep into the nuances of the technology that lives underneath of it all. They just want a promise or guarantee or testimonial or some kind of proof that things are gonna be up and reliable. And then they’re not actually looking at like, how many cores are they getting?

How many PHP workers are they getting? Things like that. Like, do you feel that that resonates? Do you feel like it’s much more about the promise? Or is it that they’re actually still doing this deep, in-depth research on the technological front?

Jeff Golenski: Well, I think, obviously the important thing is that promise and the end game of course, but everything is just a set of constraints. So we have to look at all of those tools and all the performance and security measures all level up to make that promise achievable. Right? So I think, yes, there always is a focus on the technical aspect of it, but every agency wants the end game.

They want a completely secure site, a completely performant site that’s always online, et cetera. So yeah, it’s…

Jesse Friedman: Yeah.

Jeff Golenski: A set of constraints that we need to focus on all those things to make sure, because there are a lot of companies out there that don’t meet that promise. So we need to, agencies need to spot-check and double-check to make sure that those things are offered.

Right?

Jesse Friedman: Yeah. Very cool. So do you run into conversations with agencies where they’re thinking about WordPress or maybe they’re thinking about Shopify and they’re kind of going back and forth and you need to kind of convince them to stay within WordPress? Or are most of these people coming in thinking, I know I want WordPress, I’m gonna stick with it?

Jeff Golenski: Ooh, let’s get into this. Yeah, good. Yeah, so it’s really interesting.

I mean, you and I know from our history with WordPress, you know, we’ve been involved since almost the beginning, 2005-ish, right? It came about and it was very development-centric, developer-oriented. So it just grew that way. And we’ve seen the past five, 10 years, like there’s been a lot of these services popping up.

Everything from Wix to, you know, Shopify, where it’s very, very low-code, no-code oriented. So essentially, WordPress needed to make that shift like the Gutenberg editor, right, to make it more accessible to everyone. So that’s a huge concern and what we hear from agencies is like a lot of these companies like Shopify are really going hard on marketing to end users.

So the agency clients are seeing Shopify. And that brand is being instilled in their mind. And so instead of going to agencies with problems to be solved, they go to agencies with the solution like, hey, I want you to build me a Shopify store instead of, hey, I want you to build me an e-commerce solution.

Right? So we hear a lot of, then agencies have to kind of reeducate their clients or prospective clients on the solutions and be like, hey, well we could go Shopify and Shopify is great for X, Y, and Z, but if you really need a customized solution that’s gonna handle things at scale, we need to go with like a WooCommerce, for instance.

Right? So really interesting this dynamic where, you know, these companies, Wix, Shopify, Squarespace, are marketing so hard in the industry, all the end users are hearing about that and they think that they need to use those things when I think the better solution is scalability within WordPress and the hosting that comes with it.

So…

Jesse Friedman: That’s interesting. So is A4A like providing help in supporting those agencies to have those conversations?

Jeff Golenski: Absolutely. Yeah. The jargon is enablement materials, right? We’re helping agencies get the information they need to then sell our solutions to their clients and prospective clients. So yeah, we’re definitely going hard on that to help grow WordPress as a whole, really.

I mean, it only benefits all of us, whether we’re talking about Automattic products or any other product in the WordPress ecosystem.

Jesse Friedman: Yeah, that’s a common theme throughout this podcast is this idea that when you are improving the experience that somebody has with WordPress, you’re creating an environment where they’re more likely to stay within the WordPress ecosystem longer. And, you know, I think maybe every episode, I’ve brought this up at least once, where it’s this responsibility that a hosting company has to the WordPress ecosystem to make sure that that first WordPress experience is a great one.

And I don’t think that only applies to, you know, the DIY or self-motivated individual who’s trying to build something on their own. I think it also applies to agencies and enterprise, and that, you know, if they are gonna end up losing a customer, which is their livelihood, which is their ability to hire more people to keep their agency afloat…

Jeff Golenski: They’re gonna…

Jesse Friedman: That customer because the hosting company’s not providing a great WordPress experience, that goes a long way to making them want to do more work outside of the WordPress ecosystem.

And that is detrimental. We had, you know, a couple interviews with folks. We had Brad Williams on from WebDevStudios, and one of the things that he talked about was the power that comes from him pairing up with a hosting company…

Jeff Golenski: Mm-hmm. To…

Jesse Friedman: To co-sell to his clients. And that as a hosting company, they’re working together.

To kind of go after a client and create a unified front. Now, I would imagine, with A4A, you know, there’s, you said, you have these enablement materials, so you are building and crafting these types of materials to help convey the conversation around not just WordPress, but the actual hosting platform itself, and to empower these agencies to make these decisions.

Does that mean that agencies are…

Jeff Golenski: You know, in your…

Jesse Friedman: You know, in your experience, like with WebDevStudios, they’re a very unique agency. They’re very large in the sense that they have, you know, big enterprise customers and things like that. But you had mentioned that A4A kind of caters to a very wide array of agencies from small, medium, large.

Do you get the sense that agencies are passing the bill for hosting onto their end customers? Or are they masking it and kind of like building it into their services and solutions? Like how are they having, at a larger scale…

Jeff Golenski: Mm-hmm.

Jesse Friedman: You know, conversation, how are these agencies having the hosting conversation with their clients?

Jeff Golenski: Yeah, it varies across the board. Again, we hear literally all different agencies all work in different ways, so we…

Jesse Friedman: Yeah.

Jeff Golenski: We have things set up that allows for flexibility like that.

If an agency wants to manage the billing and they want to include it and then itemize it and then bill the client directly on their own, they can do that. If they wanna include it in their hosting package or care package or whatever they want, they can do that.

Jesse Friedman: Yep.

Jeff Golenski: We offer like referrals. So if an agency doesn’t wanna manage the billing, let’s say that they’ve just been hired to build a site and not really maintain it, and they don’t want to manage all the ins and outs of the billing relationship, they can have their client pay for our products directly, and then they can make a referral on that, and then the client itself will own the product or the hosting. And the agency can just get in, build the site, do their thing, and then, you know, they can do whatever they want to do with that relationship.

So we find, I think the smaller agencies really like that approach with the referrals because they don’t really have proper processes for managing tons of clients at scale. And so they might just wanna make some money and then, you know, end that relationship, whatever. So we see that and then we see the larger agencies, the like WebDevStudios, they’re comprehensive, they manage everything.

Right? So yeah, it’s pretty…

Jesse Friedman: You know, I think it’s an interesting thing. So like if you and I were about to have this conversation to a group, a room full of hosting companies who are asking us for our expertise around…

Jeff Golenski: Mm-hmm.

Jesse Friedman: Working with agencies, if they’re building an agency program, it probably makes sense for that hosting company to consider making it so that the agency can package it up, sell it as an add-on to their own services. But also be the main point of contact because an agency may not have, or want, the desire to kind of funnel hosting support through them. So like in the way in which Brad kind of described it is that it’s their responsibility in the sense that they’re the agency and they helped kind of advocate for this hosting company.

So they’re always gonna be a little bit responsible, but in having a direct relationship with the end host, you are creating a line of communication there so that you are not as the agency always the point of contact if something goes wrong, if the site goes down or something like that, the hosting company can have that.

And so then if they’re managing the billing, that even becomes easier. So A4A kind of allows for these different solutions. Then you can kind of approach it from a few different angles.

Jeff Golenski: Yeah, exactly. And really we have two levels of customers, right? It’s the agencies and we also are servicing the clients to make sure that that experience is good for them as well. And again, it all depends. Like there are more technical clients who just want more ownership. And so the agency can give that to them, or the client could be like, hey, handle everything.

I just wanna make sure my site’s online and I can sell things, right? And so…

Jesse Friedman: Right.

Jeff Golenski: As well.

Jesse Friedman: Yeah. Yeah. Well, we’re about the…

Jeff Golenski: The end of…

Jesse Friedman: End of this episode, and we’re gonna have to take a break. But before we do, let me ask you a quick question. When you think about the way in which A4A is kind of communicating the hosting packages to end customers, what are some of the things that are resonating with agencies the most?

Like you only have a limited amount of space, right? You only have a limited amount of real estate. How do you convince somebody to go with a hosting plan? And what is like top of mind for an agency when you’re considering a hosting plan?

Jeff Golenski: I think what resonates most, without a doubt that we hear across the board, is the level of support that an agency will get. Like, we had an example a couple of weeks ago where there was an agency working with another host that, you know, I’m not gonna name who it was, but they had noted that their support went down.

And even though they were paying an extremely high amount of money to host all their sites, support took like, I think, several days to get back to them. And they were like, I needed this resolved immediately. Like it was a downtime issue or something related. And they were like…

Jesse Friedman: Yeah.

Jeff Golenski: We’re paying tens of thousands of dollars a month.

You need to be here. Like, you need to be in the office with me, you know, essentially.

Jesse Friedman: Yeah. Right.

Jeff Golenski: Support is huge and I think that’s like a top factor with some of these agencies because you just need to be there. Like things happen, downtime happens, security things happen, performance goes awry, and you need someone in support who’s very technical on a development level, can help, can help resolve things when they go wrong. And that’s huge. And that’s top of mind for all of our customers.

Jesse Friedman: Yeah, I think that really speaks to something there, because the idea here is that like they’re testing out a hosting plan. They’re trying to figure out if it’s right for their customer. They can test probably the speed of it, they can throw a site on it. They can feel good about that.

They can test the reliability, they can see what other people are seeing. As far as uptime, you know, like Review Signal does third-party benchmarks all the time. Pressable is in there and it shows from a reliable third party how they’re offering a hundred percent uptime through WP Cloud. But the hardest thing I would imagine for an agency to really test is support, right? Like, because you’d have to probably come up with a fake reason to contact support, and that’s something that I actually encourage people to do when they’re trying out a host. Yeah, right. Like it is tough, but like there are litmus tests that you can run to see how a hosting company is gonna be able to provide you with support.

How long are you gonna wait? Is it live chat? Is it phone? What is it gonna be? You know? And so I think to any agency out there who’s considering that, I think that going within that free trial and don’t just test out the technical components of the hosting plan, but actually take the support for a run.

See how it goes, and see how they respond to you. I think that’s a really great tip.

Jeff Golenski: Mm-hmm.

Jesse Friedman: All right, Jeff, we’re gonna have to take a break here and we’ll come back to part two in a bit.