Two Decades of Hosting: Evolution, Insights & Best Practices

Jonathan: Welcome to another episode of Do the Woo. I’m Jonathan Wold, and with me is Bryan Muthig, the CEO of A2 Hosting. Welcome, Bryan.

Bryan: Yes, thanks for having me.

Jonathan: So you’ve been in the WordPress industry for a while now. When did your interest in technology sort of first start?

Bryan: Yeah, so long time ago. I got my first computer when I was 12 years old and I guess you could say I’ve been pretty much hooked ever since. This was back in the day with my 386 and my 2400 bond modem that I think I convinced my mom to get me. So I was an avid BBS’er in the beginning, I’m aging myself here a little bit with that one. But yeah, so started off there. Really just became a hobby, obsession, whatever you want to call it at that point.

The lure of technology

Jonathan: What was it about the technology that you think that drew you to it?

Bryan: I think I’ve just always had that sort of engineery science mind that’s just interested in figuring things out and solving problems. I couldn’t tell you how many times I ended up reloading my system when I broke something, and through the course of doing that, you figure out how things work, right? So sort of started with that. Then yeah, I think I just kind of got hooked on the whole thing and Windows getting reloaded for the 27th time because something went wrong. Back in the days, things were obviously not as stable as they are now, but yeah, through the course of that, software, and then got into the hardware and then you get your modem and it’s slow and you want a faster one. So yeah, that’s really kind of what drew me to it.

Jonathan: So you started out with the internet being a part of it fairly early on. So how would you describe what the internet was like in those early days?

Bryan: Yeah. So I think it’s kind of an interesting story. So I’m in Ann Arbor, Michigan is where I grew up, and so we have the University of Michigan here. So I actually went to a computer camp, like a summer computer camp that the, I’m trying to remember what it’s called, but the engineering department had here. I want to say it was a two week camp and that was really my first introduction to the internet itself. I’ve been doing BBSing and I’ve been doing all that, but getting to use the university computers and we learned UNIX, had access, had accounts, we’re able to actually get on the internet in their facilities, which was very, very new then.

Then actually through that, we were also able to get dial up internet access through the university through that program. So that was really then getting hooked on that after that and seeing all the things. It’s kind of funny, especially at that age, I think also often it’s games that sort of gets you hooked on stuff, right? So I was playing MUDs and that was the thing back in the day. Yeah.

Jonathan: At the risk of showing my inexperience or age on this, but just to make sure that folks understand. So with BBSing, that was more about you’d connect to a specific, it’s all text based and you connect to a specific thing and you would dial into something and you’d be connected and there’d be an exchange of messages. How would you describe it for someone who hadn’t experienced it?

Bryan: Yeah. I mean, sort of very early internet. Yeah, one phone line, one connection, and yeah, you would be able to go onto forums and have discussions, download software. Yeah, it was sort of that very early iteration of connectivity and emailing as well. Sending messages through multiple BBSs became a thing at some point as well. Somebody figured out that was the beginning. Now obviously then you see the real internet and you’re like, “Oh, okay, there’s a lot more to it.”

Jonathan: My first internet experience, well, I wouldn’t say the first, but first I thought the internet, this was on Windows 95. I thought the internet was AOL. So you’d connect to AOL and it was the list of games and the things that you’d have there, it’s the initial screen. I remember that, oh wow, there’s a whole lot more than this little garden that I’m being presented. That was a mind-blowing experience. So you go to camp. So you have this BBSing background, you go to camp, the world starts to open up. What was the point where you’re like, or when did you start to suspect or have that interest in that technology would be where your career would go?

Bryan: Yeah. Well, I would say honestly, my mom was a nurse here at U of M, and so I was always around. I thought I would go in the medical field, be a doctor, be a nurse, do something in that area just because often it is kind of what you’re used to. But yeah, I think pretty quickly, first couple years there I was hooked on it. I just really liked doing it and it was blowing up. The Internet’s blowing up. I made some friends that were doing similar things as I was got, introduced to Linux. Yeah, I mean, just started hacking away at stuff and realizing that I really enjoyed it. It seemed like a good career prospect at the time. The demand was obviously starting to get crazy. They just couldn’t find people that knew what they were doing. So that was the thing. So fully self-taught really at the stage, like many, many folks were. There really wasn’t a lot of formal training for that back then.

Jonathan: When did hosting first come into the picture for you? What was your first experience with hosting? A concept? Like, when did that come in?

Bryan: Yeah. Well, I’ll continue a little bit further then. So I actually ended up going to Michigan Tech for a year and a half doing electrical engineering because really back then it was EE or CS were your kind of options in sort of that technical computer field. I had been programming. I knew how to program. It wasn’t a passionate mine though. The EE side was way too much on the hardware end of the spectrum that I also wasn’t particularly interested in all the nitty gritty details. I would say my background really was UNIX system administration. I liked putting all the pieces together, integrating everything and putting a platform together and getting that all to go.

So that was kind of the hobby. I went up to college for a while, ended up realizing that I really didn’t want to do this EE thing. It seemed like, oh my gosh, I’m going to be doing this for another three years. I had a friend who had started working as a UNIX system administrator at Ford Motor Company here. I made a deal with my mom. I basically said, “If I can get a job this summer that pays well, like a real job, a real, real job, and you can’t really get mad at me if I don’t go back to school.” Right? I think she thought she was going to win that bet. So three weeks later I was hired and I was working also as a UNIX system administrator. So that was my first job and it was a very good foot in the door kind of situation.

There was Solaris training that was provided to get certified and get official. So did that for several years. As far as hosting is concerned, we really just started hosting for family and friends. So I originally had a friend that I started doing hosting with here and we hosted his mom’s website. Little by little then other friends, family members would say, “Hey, I have a website, can you host my website?” We had a server that we had co-located locally on a T1 line, which was amazing. That’s really how it started. So we started doing family and friends for a while, just as a hobby business, just as an aside.

I tell everyone I’m kind of an accidental entrepreneur because I really just kind of fell into this, like many of us are. It’s the dirty little secret I think. Most of us end up just falling into some of these things, so. But yeah, so we did that for a little while and then just we were, “Well, cool. I don’t know. We’re hosting sites for people. We have this setup already. Let’s put up a website.” So we put up a website and allowed it so that others could actually, strangers on the internet could go order hosting services from us. Tried to figure out how to do some marketing, read about this crazy thing.

When the business became a reality

Jonathan: So you’ve been doing the friends and family and just there’s a natural trajectory, referrals probably, that people are, “Hey, could you also do this person?” kind of that, what was the moment where you were like, “Maybe this is a business or we can take this to a next level”? What was that moment?

Bryan: Yeah. I mean, literally the first goal was just to pay for our own server co-location costs. I think we were paying 150 bucks a month or something. We’re like, “That’ll be cool if we had this.” Then yeah, so I would say we put up that first website. I read about search engine optimization. I actually ended up writing the first copy of our first website myself, trying to do this crazy search engine optimization stuff. All of a sudden we started ranking in top 10 for certain keywords and started getting traffic, started getting people coming in, figured out a way to do some stuff that others hadn’t at the time where we were supporting PHP version 5 when everybody was still on 4.

So we found some creative ways to do some stuff like that. So we started getting people coming in and signing up and we saw the numbers and we were like, “Oh, I think if this keeps going like it is, we’re going to be able to do that.” So business partner at the time, he actually ended up working full-time for us. Then a year later I joined and actually left my corporate gig. At the time, I was actually at MCI WorldCom. But yeah, and then we were in, we were working full-time on it.

Jonathan: Because at this point you had taken the UNIX administrator route, you continued that. What’s the approximate year where you made the switch into, okay, we’re going to do this hosting business full-time?

Bryan: So A2 technically started 2003. I believe it was 2005 when we were sort of doing it full-time, both of us. Actually ended up buying out my partner at the time I think a year or two later, and then it was me, right? So then I was on the hook here and it was my business and I was running things. I think we had a few employees at the time already helping us out, and just kind of realized, “Okay, well this is looking like it’s going to be my career, right? This is the thing that I’ve fallen into.” So yeah, I just started taking it more seriously, obviously, and kept trying to figure things out from there.

Jonathan: What’s the story behind the name?

Bryan: So yes, A2, Ann Arbor. That’s the simple story.

Jonathan: Yeah, well I like it. Yeah.

Bryan: Ann Arbor locally here is called A2 or A-squared. A-squared obviously doesn’t really work so well. Coupled that with the concept of back in the day there were a lot of web directory listings, so being at the top, we figured that couldn’t be a bad thing as far as from a marketing perspective is concerned as well, so.

When WordPress comes on the radar

Jonathan: So you have this fairly organic trajectory. You started out with this interest in it, the internet comes along, there’s this fairly natural progression of, “Okay, we’re going to host sites, we’re going to put them up there.” Still, I like the hobby narrative like, “Oh, it would be cool to have a T1. We just have to cover the cost of this. So let’s find some folks who kind of want to do this.” When does WordPress first come into the radar for you?

Bryan: Yeah. Well, I mean, pretty quickly, right? I think, so we’re celebrating our 20 years, WordPress is celebrating its 20 years. So even from the get-go, obviously, I want to say back at the time it was a little more mixed bag of WordPress and Drupal and Joomla sort of being the big three, so to speak. Obviously WordPress ended up taking off and being that primary piece. So we quickly realized obviously there was just a large demand for WordPress. So we had been hosting lots of WordPress sites since the very beginning.

Enjoying the business of hosting

Jonathan: Cool. For the work as a whole, hosting, it’s an interesting business for a lot of reasons. I describe it to folks as somewhat thankless at times, where you tend to not hear from customers a whole lot until something’s wrong. So there’s this ideal world where it’s like, we don’t want to hear from them that much, but it’s kind of an odd business in that sense. It’s also something that’s quite fundamental to many people. There’s a reason why it can be such an elevated or extreme experience for someone because it’s like, oh, it’s my business, kind of all this. That’s interesting. 20 years into the work, what do you enjoy most about it?

Bryan: At my core, I’m still a tinkerer and I like still solving problems and I still like trying to figure out how do we make this go faster, how do we give our customers a better experience, everything along that line. So you kind of hit a goal, you hit it somewhere and you say, “Okay, well, what can we do next? How can we make this better? How can we improve this?” So yeah. I think that’s been the thing that I’ve been most passionate about. Going back, I think it was about 2008, oh no, maybe it was longer than that, maybe it was like eight years ago, but anyway, at some point we did a customer survey and we realized that our customers were looking for fast websites and that was a surprise to us.

We really hadn’t figured that out yet and nobody hadn’t really figured that out yet, that performance was such a big thing. we looked around and I basically said, “Well, we were looking for a differentiator. There’s a million hosting companies. What is it that we want to do? What’s our thing? How are we going to stand up from the crowd?” That was the aha moment for us, right? It was sort of like I looked around, I’m like, “Well, who’s the performance hosting provider?” I couldn’t find it. I couldn’t at the time. Now everybody claims to be the fastest and this and that.

Back then, that really was not something that was on the radar for most people. So I like to say we were, if not the first, one of the first companies definitely to pivot and make that our thing and I’ve been personally very passionate about that ever since because it’s been something we attach to and obviously it’s worked out very well for us.

20 years of business and WordPress, the highlights

Jonathan: So you have this unique, I think, advantage, but also just experience of kind of following WordPress’s trajectory fairly explicitly with 20 years, right? When you started A2 to how old WordPress is today. It’s interesting too, with that performance narrative as well, because it’s been quite interesting to watch as WordPress has grown from a blog with fairly straightforward, I would say, requirements and not a whole lot to it, people doing more and more and more, and ultimately to the focus of this podcast and eCommerce which is an entire world of itself. What are some of the things that stand out to you over that 20 years? Just watching the WordPress as a product and the ecosystem evolve, are there any particular highlights or moments that stood out as you look back over those 20 years?

Bryan: It’s just been a progression and evolution, right? I mean, from the hosting side of things, obviously, which is probably where I’m best positioned to answer. Like I said, performance was always a big issue. I think one of the biggest evolutions on the hosting front was getting into the application layer. That was something that when we first were hosting websites, there was always this separation of like, well, we run the platform. The application and everything, that’s your problem, right? That’s not our problem.

That has caused obviously a lot of frustration for a lot of people who weren’t maybe WordPress experts or understood all the bits and pieces that need to go into tying the hardware and the platform in with the application and making, like I said, I’m an integrator by heart, so making all those pieces work together and really understanding. I mean, there’s been obviously a huge evolution in that over the years, but I know that was a big one where we would have discussions internally and you’re like, “That’s not going to work anymore. We can’t just say, oh, go find a dev to fix your problem. We’re going to have to own this too for people.”

That’s certainly on the hosting side I think been a big evolution for sure, just the development of the platforms and caching plugins and all these different pieces that really allow a WordPress site to be performance when properly configured now. Unfortunately, you see a lot of ones that are not properly configured still. So that’s an area where we feel like we can help out a lot.

And then there was WooCommerce

Jonathan: What about WooCommerce? When did that first come onto the radar for you?

Bryan: I’m not going to be able to give you a date off the top of my head here, but obviously Woo got super popular. We started seeing people ask for it and same sort of thing, right? We just started saying, “Okay, well this is a different beast, that’s eCommerce, right? There’s a lot of dynamic content. How are we going to address the specific needs from a performance aspect for WooCommerce site?” So.

Jonathan: I think one of the keys is that you asked the question, asking those types of questions because one of the common mistakes that I would see early on are hosts who take kind of a one size fits all approach, oh, this is just WordPress and we have a standard play here, cache all the things. Then hearing from customers, why isn’t this stuff working? I can understand, it’s a general challenge that I’ve found is if you’re not paying attention and curious, you don’t notice how much is changing. eCommerce coming into WordPress is a great example of almost 180, at least from my perspective, in terms of expectations of how it’s going to work and what the playbook is.

So yeah, for me, knowing that ends up being the key that you ask those questions, right? So, okay, this is different, our customers’ needs are different here. So how did you handle that? So you have a playbook that’s working for WordPress, you have this, okay, this is what we do, this is how we sort of dial performance, and now eCommerce comes into the picture, has very different needs. How’d you think about that?

Bryan: Well, I think the way I would look at it from that aspect is just because so much of the WooCommerce’s dynamic and pieces can be cached, but a lot of things can’t be cached in the same way that a static normal site would be able to. So we look at it as addressing all the layers in the platform, right? You need solid hardware at the base of this, right? We need fast CPUs, you need things that are going to make PHP go quickly and be able to process those requests. That is still the case, always has been, makes the performance and the experience so much better.

So we look at all those layers and that’s really what it comes down to. I guess I’ll say too, we developed our A2 optimized WordPress plugin as part of that, right? Again, how do we take all the things we know that work on our platform to optimize websites and try to make that easier for customers to do? So we started that years and years and years ago, again before most people that… I’m not even sure that anybody else had been doing anything like that, that I’m aware of, but that was a big piece of doing that. We also have WooCommerce specific things in there and obviously caching plugins that we’re using that are also WooCommerce aware and are trying to obviously do the right things for a WooCommerce site versus a standard WordPress site.

Thanks to Avalara for their continued support

A hosting perspective on proprietary platforms

Jonathan: You have this strong sort of open source alignment from the early days, WordPress, Drupal, Joomla. You’re getting to see that side of things. What was it like for you or does anything stand out to you about noticing the rise of software as a service? For instance, in this particular context, let’s reference Shopify, right? You’re seeing sort of open source growing, you’re also seeing some of the challenges with it, and then suddenly these proprietary platforms are growing quite quickly. What was your perspective on that as a host? Was it just like, ah, it’s all kind of off the side? How did you think about that?

Bryan: I mean, definitely scary in the beginning, I won’t lie, right? You get your Wixes and Weeblys and Shopifys and Squarespaces and these guys coming up and you’re like, “Oh gosh, what is this going to mean for us and for work for WordPress and WooCommerce specifically?” I think what we found is of course those folks have taken chunks of the market, but WordPress and WooCommerce have this ecosystem and community. I think that those are obviously some of the hugest strengths there.

So even though I think we can all agree that there’s some frustration sometimes because you having to piece together things versus a Shopify where basically it’s all on a united front and it kind of tends to work out of the box, well, there are downsides to that as well, cost, value and customization, right? That’s the downside. You can’t necessarily do all the things that you want to do specifically for your site. So I think on the one end of the spectrum, you have these services, these SaaS services that lock you in. You can’t get out of the ecosystem.

If you want the freedom and flexibility to do what you want to do, you have to look elsewhere for that. That’s where the WordPress ecosystem and community come into play. I don’t know that that’s going to change ever, right? I think there’s a place for both of those things. I think it just depends on the customer and what their needs are.

Where the hosting industry is going

Jonathan: Where do you see hosting as an industry going? You’ve referenced some of the key points on the SaaS side, right? There’s a simplification to it. They tend these days to have better onboarding experiences so you can get up and running. Hosting is a massive industry. I think a lot of people sort of miss that, especially if you consider the global nature of the ecosystem. For someone who’s been in this now for 20 plus years, where do you see it going?

Bryan: I think customer experience is the thing that everybody’s really starting to focus on here as well. I think you look at, kind of like you just said, how do we bring a better customer experience for WordPress and WooCommerce customers that are as easy as these SaaS options, right? So I think directionally, and I don’t know, some people have certain customer bases that they’ve figured out pretty good solutions for, but I think all in all, even just the WordPress community, I think we would all probably agree that it’d be nice if it were easier, right? I think that is something that you hear from everybody. So I think we’re going to see continued development in that area. That’s really just going to be continued developments, how do we make it easier to use for customers?

Jonathan: How do you as a host relate to that too? Because you’ve got your own base of customers that you’re responsible for, and at least generally, I don’t know what it’s been like for you, but a lot of hosts in my experience in conversations tend to… WordPress was just what customers asked for and then they wake up one day to find out that, wow, this is the dominant platform. So then, okay, what do we do about this? So on the one hand, it’s what the customers want that matters, right? If there was suddenly this new thing and it was just taking off like crazy, you would owe it to your customers to provide support and sort of build around that.

On the other, like WordPress seems quite clearly to be here to stay, WooCommerce the same, on the market side of things. I’m curious for you as a host, what degree of influence or responsibility do you feel that you have for the product side of things? Yeah, how do you think about that?

Bryan: We’re constantly trying to improve the experience and simplify things for people. I mean, we have so many customers we get that they come in and maybe they have 50 plugins installed. They’re wondering why their site is slow, right? It’s just not easy for them to manage their sites and keep everything updated and upgraded and up to date and check on performance. It’s the management portion of that that’s a struggle for a lot of folks. I think there’s a desire for them to have services that allow the simplicity of some of these SaaS platforms within WordPress. So I think directionally that’s still a problem that we as hosting companies can continue to do a better job of solving.

I think there’s still opportunity there for that. For example, I kind of mentioned our A2 optimized plugin, but that plugin itself is designed kind of as a DIY, right? You go in, you see, hey, here are our recommendations, what we can do, click the button, we’ll turn on Redis caching, we’ll turn on this kind of caching, that sort of stuff, right? Oh, we noticed that you’re doing this and that’s not best practices, slowing the site down. Or you have outdated plugins, that kind of thing. So we’ve actually been beta testing now going in and doing a lot of those optimizations for customers because people are just it’s beyond what they’re comfortable doing.

So we’ve been looking at how do we have a service where we can basically go in and make your site faster for you? What we’ve found is very positive, huge reduction in churn, right? Customers that come and you get them a high score are obviously happy because you delivered on that promise for speed, right? If I can do some numbers here real quick, because I do like to do that is we had 92% of our sites that came through this optimization service had their Google Core Web Vitals overall score increased an average of 19 points and 80% of those sites we were able to get over 90 or above and on average a 60% load speed increase on this.

So the numbers are fantastic, right? For most of these folks, we’re able to take even their existing sites that maybe haven’t been updated, maybe weren’t designed with performance in mind originally, and maybe they don’t have that developer, they don’t have that person to help out. So I think what we’re finding is that there’s just a demand for help in these areas. So anything we can do to help make this process easier for customers and offer them the services to be able to do that work for them and help them maintain and manage.

Specifically when you’re looking at small agencies and SMBs, they want to focus on their business, right? They don’t want to deal with hosting and WordPress and WooCommerce updates and testing it out and seeing out where are my performance scores now that I built this site. So we can come in and basically help with some of those things. That’s kind of what I was getting at, just to look back is coming in with the experience, providing tools and services to be able to help solve some of those problems that customers are facing. We have to get into the nuts and bolts and the nitty gritty of WordPress and WooCommerce to be able to help with that.

Because as you know, just throwing a CDN, some hosting companies will just throw a CDN on and say, “Good.” Like I was saying, it’s about good hardware, the stack being good, your plugins have to be configured properly. All of these different pieces need to work together from a hardware and software standpoint for you to get that best experience. That’s really our bread and butter.

Builders providing a better experience for their clients

Jonathan: Let’s talk a bit more about the experience side of things. So now take the audience, the builders that are listening. So you have your agency folks, you have product folks focused on WooCommerce. There’s a curious tension when it comes to experience where for you as a host, it’s like how far into the customer’s experience do you go, right? Where’s that line? Because some hosts, if they could just wave a magic wand, it’s like they don’t ever want to have to touch the applications. They don’t care. They just want to provide the applications.

WordPress and WooCommerce increasingly prove to be applications that aren’t that way. They tend to require a bit more of an integrated experience. Because you get to see a lot, you all sort of agencies working on things, you get to see a wide range of products, at a high level, what are some of the opportunities that you see for builders who want to provide better experiences to their customers on WooCommerce? What are some of any trends that stand out to you? Anything that this would be great if this was better?

Bryan: I mean, not to harp on the same things here, but I think that is still a huge piece of the puzzle that we see. We see companies and builders and agencies that often just don’t have the full stack optimized and it’s maybe not there. They don’t understand that. They’re going maybe to another managed WordPress provider, for example, like I said, and then getting a CDN turned on and that helps with certain things. But why is my WP admin slow? Why are all these pieces? Those are the things that we like to dig into, to understand why that is, how do you solve those problems.

That is 100% going into the application layer, it’s all the pieces of it. I don’t think that’s going anywhere. It’s just going to be more. We are just going to be going more into the nitty gritty details and it’s not easy, right? Every theme has settings that work with that theme and settings that don’t work with that theme particularly well for caching. Those are some of the learnings that we’ve been going through and trying to find ways to make sure customers are having a good experience with us.

Jonathan: It sounds like a starting point when you’re in an open source ecosystem like ours is curiosity because that’s a theme that I’m hearing recurring. Your experience and what you’re describing is like, “Okay, how does this stuff work?” For some folks, the challenge might be like, “Oh, I just want to turn on a CDN and expect that it’s all taken care of.” It’s like, “No, in this ecosystem, in this world, for better or for worse, your benefits and trade-offs, there’s more complexity to it and it’s important to ask questions about it like why is this not working that way? Why is this slower over here? What’s going on here?”

Bryan: You can’t just throw CloudFlare in front of it and assume that everything is going to be fast. Certainly helps, but there’s more to it. There’s a lot more to it.

The opportunities for agencies

Jonathan: So let’s take agencies for a moment first, people who are in the service side of things. What are some of the opportunities that, and I want to point out too, it feels there is a clear line because unless I’m mistaken, you only really want to go as far into customizing the application as you need to to make sure the customer’s taken care of. That’s not the business that you’re wanting to be in. You’re not wanting to go in and someone says, “Hey, I want to have a new landing page in my store.” You don’t want them calling you for that, right?

Bryan: We’re certainly not at that level at that point right now. It’s really a question of what can we do to help support your business if you’re having problems, whatever those problems may be. Obviously, it’s like if your site’s down or your site’s slow, we always end up getting blamed for that, right? That’s almost always what happens despite the fact that it most of the time ends up being a software configuration issue, right? It’s just not optimized. We’re not using caching properly. The expectation keeps growing that that’s something that the host needs to be dealing with and taking care of.

So that’s where we’re moving. We’re just saying, “You know what, we have to own this because the customers are demanding, asking that we own this.” So that’s the path that we’re continuing to take so that… For agencies, yeah, they want to build their sites and keep their customers happy, so if we’re providing services that are keeping their sites, the customer sites fast, that’s a win for them, it’s a win for us. They have happy customers, we have happy clients, right? Everybody wins.

Jonathan: So you get to see a lot of products, a lot of plugins, a lot of different configurations of things. Sometimes too much, maybe sometimes not enough. We’re seeing a lot of growth in the product space where people are building extensions for WooCommerce, new plugins. We’re also at this interesting place where the future of WordPress is also evolving with full site editing and the Gutenberg transitions, et cetera. So what are some of the opportunities… Well, I’ll put it this way. What do you like to see in products? For entrepreneurs who are coming into this space, obviously you care about performance. So let’s just take that perspective alone for a moment. What are some of the, I guess, indicators for you that a product is showing that they care about performance in the development and how it’s put together?

Bryan: Compatibility with themes and other… That’s the big piece of it, right? Because there’s so many variations that customers are using, different themes, different builders, different. So we see that some things just aren’t compatible with each other. So taking that into account even from a performance aspect is understanding have we tested this with all these different, at least the big ones, to understand is this going to cause a slowdown, is this going to cause a problem, does this break my caching because these two things aren’t talking to each other about what should be cached and what shouldn’t be cached. So we see a lot of that depending on, like I said, specific builders.

I look at it this way. We want to give you a solid platform. There’s a lot of folks out there that they just want this rock solid starting point, right? They know what they’re doing. They know what plugins they want to install, what themes they want to install, especially for agencies, folks that do this all day long and that’s fine. We love those customers because they’re great. They want fast support, fast websites and fast setups. That’s our performance pledge. We talk about that internally. Those are the things that we think are going to help customers be successful.

Now what I’m talking about is leveling up to help out the customers that maybe need some assistance in that area, right? If there’s something specific that they’re not familiar with or they’re saying, “Hey, I’m banging my head against the wall. We’re having performance issues.” This is obviously an area we know a lot about and trying to help them out, for filling any gaps that they may have in their knowledge.

The ecosystem working together

Jonathan: As you think about let’s just take the next three years in the ecosystem. So you see this natural trajectory. WooCommerce, as a great example, has grown a lot over the past couple of years and so there’s growing pains associated with that. I think I would be very surprised if any of the early developers on Woo, and I know this is anecdotally, most people working on it never saw, never predicted that it would go this far. So there are challenges, there are things that we have to work through now that we’re making progress on. But as you think about the next couple of years, from your perspective as a host, what are some of the things that you would like to see more of in the ecosystem?

Bryan: I’d like to see the ecosystem working together, right? I think that there’s opportunity there where we do have these sort of disjointed, everybody has their plugin or their theme or whatever that they are working on, and we don’t have a cohesive set necessarily like a Shopify does where we can get these things to work together and it just works out of the box, right? You’re kind of on your own for a lot of that still. Don’t ask me what that looks like. I’m on the hosting side of the fence.

But from a community and ecosystem standpoint, I think being able to really work together to come up with some of those solutions for customers and ultimately the customer just wants a solution, right? They want to be able to sell the thing that they’re doing. Most of them are not going to be interested in the why’s and the what’s and the details. It just needs to work, it needs to be fast and it needs to be easy.

Jonathan: I love it. You are going to be heading out to Athens in a couple of weeks for WordCamp Europe. Is there anything in particular you’re looking forward to about that event?

Bryan: Yeah. It’s been years since I’ve been able to go. Obviously COVID and everything happened. So I’m just excited to see people, talk to people, understand where are we at now, what problems are we running into, what are the opportunities we have to help from a hosting perspective, what can we do to make your lives easier as WordPress and WooCommerce professions, right? I think that to me is the conversations and that networking is always super exciting.

Jonathan: Bryan, we really appreciate the work that you’ve been doing over all these years. Hosting’s a really important part of what makes this industry possible. Congratulations on the 20 years. Also really appreciate the just growing involvement that A2 has had in the community broadly. That’s a big deal. Looking forward to seeing you guys at WordCamp. For folks who have questions or want to connect with you, what’s the best way to get in touch?

Bryan: You can email me if you like, a2ceo@a2hosting.com, which is a public email that we share with everyone that I still get those messages myself and I still read them. That is one that we send all our customers when they sign up. If there’s anything that you feel gets to the level where you would like me to know about it, that email address is available for you to use. Otherwise, I’m on LinkedIn and all the normal places there, so yeah. I will just add real quick, we will also be at WordCamp U.S. with our leadership team. So we’re going to have, and a couple other folks joining us as well, including developers of our optimized plugin. So reach out, find us there as well. We’ll have lots of people to be able to talk to you.

Jonathan: Awesome. Bryan, thank you for joining us and we look forward to seeing you at WordCamp Europe and talk to you again.