Hosting Realities and WooCommerce Best Practices for Agencies

Jonathan: Welcome to another episode of Do The Woo at the Special WordCamp Europe Edition. I’m your host, Jonathan Wold. And with me today here at WordCamp Europe is DJ. Hello, DJ.

Daugirdas: Hello, hello.

Jonathan: It’s good to have you, man.

Daugirdas: Yeah, it’s great to be here. Thank you so much.

Jonathan: How do you pronounce your name, give us the full pronunciation?

Daugirdas: Oh yeah. My name, it’s really a tongue twister, and it goes Daugirdas Jankus.

Jonathan: Nice.

Daugirdas: But my foreign friends call me by my initials, and that’s perfectly fine. So DJ is perfectly fine.

Jonathan: Excellent. Well, it’s great to have you. So you work at Hostinger.

Daugirdas: Yes.

A bit about Hostinger and its history

Jonathan: Tell us, what is Hostinger? What do you guys do?

Daugirdas: We do a lot of hosting, at the very essence of it. However, we look broader at things.

So we like to say that we are working to help small and medium businesses to scale and grow, but in the essence, we are rev hosting companies.

Jonathan: Yes. Now, tell us a bit about the history. So you guys, how did you start? How long ago did you start? Kind of tell us a bit about your history as an organization.

Daugirdas: Yeah. So what’s interesting about us is that we are bootstrapped, an employee owned company. And the very beginning of our company dates back to early 2000s, 2004, 2005. It all started as a hobby and a side hustle of a couple of people. And it was a learning project, so one of our first projects was 000WebHost. It’s a free web hosting platform. It is working up until now. And for a very long period of time, it was still a playground for our early founders.

However, it gained traction, and the rest is kind of history. So we grew together with our clients. We started as a free playground, then we saw a demand for some premium services, some pretty basic ones. We did that. Then eventually the demand for more advanced services emerged from our existing user base. And one thing led to another and here we are now at WordCamp.

Jonathan: How big is Hostinger as a company?

Daugirdas: At the moment, we are close to 1,100 employees.

Jonathan: Yeah. Wow. And what’s the arc, how many years since you guys started? So you had the 000 project first.

Daugirdas: WebHost. Yeah.

Jonathan: And then you started Hostinger. How long has it been? What’s the arc that we’re talking about here?

Daugirdas: Yeah. So when it all started back in 2004, it was kind of slow growth compared to what we have now, but growth was always there.

It’s in the company DNA, but we grew from zero basically in 2004, from the first person in 2004, to 70 people worldwide in more than 10 years. So in 2017, when I joined the company, there was 70 people worldwide. And since then till now, it’s more than 1,000.

Jonathan: So that’s a massive jump.

Daugirdas: Its kind of exploded. Yeah.

Lessons learned in 10X growth and challenges

Jonathan: What lessons have you learned in the process? So you’ve seen about 10X growth in your own time there.

Daugirdas: Exactly.

Jonathan: So what have you noticed? What are some of the things that stand out to you from that growth and scale experience?

Daugirdas: You can never rest. If you feel and think that things are stable, it means that you are missing something. So change is constant. And you always need to be preparing in advance for the next big thing. So this is how we operate.

Jonathan: How do you reconcile this idea of not resting with also enjoying the process? Because you’ve experienced a lot of success, you’ve had that growth. There’s a lot to be proud of. How do you reconcile that idea of not resting, but also appreciating progress and celebrating?

Daugirdas: I think it’s in our DNA as a company, and it’s the people. We are young. Our average age is, I don’t know, 30 years, maybe even less. So we are young, ambitious people, and we like to do stuff which resonates on big scale. And the whole process is just real exciting for us. And somehow, it comes naturally.

We always have a really ambitious, almost unreal goal in place. And once we get there, it’s kind of like, we have another goal already and we kind of start working on it. Yeah.

Jonathan: You’ve scaled a lot. What are some of the challenges that you’ve noticed with scaling? That 10X growth and just your time here so far?

Daugirdas: Yeah. Challenges are everywhere. From hiring perspective, it is a constant challenge. From product kind of things, we always develop new features and we need to make them in line with all of the other offerings as well. It’s crazy. I’m thinking where to begin, but it’s a constant challenge.

Jonathan: Are there any particular aspects? So hiring’s a good example. Just getting the people that you need. With hiring because people are complicated, there’s all these new challenges that you bring in. How have you managed decisions, for instance? When it’s small, you can kind of move quickly. You guys still have this ethos of moving quickly. How do you do that across a thousand people?

Daugirdas: Yeah. It’s painful and it’s not for everyone. So I think the biggest challenge is hiring and onboarding. And we deal it with radical openness. We work with remote first mindset. So for example, we have no private channels. Everything’s public. We write a lot and read a lot. So if decision is being made, we groom it for a while.

We are very inspired by Amazon, for example, and their narrative approach. We do the same. In this way, everyone in the organization gets a say. They can comment on the ideas, they can submit their feedback. But at the same time, it’s a big challenge because it’s a huge information overload.

And if you as a person cannot manage it, it can get so overwhelming that it gets out of hand pretty fast. I’m not sure, but somebody said, I think it was Matt Mullenweg, that communication is like oxygen. Or is it like one of WordPress principles at Automattic? I don’t know.

Jonathan: One or both. Yeah. That’s something he says often.

Daugirdas: So we have this in our handbook as well. Information is like oxygen. And it’s a big reward to have everything in the open. But also, it’s a huge risk. But yeah.

Jonathan: It is double sided, right?

Daugirdas: Yes.

Jonathan: There’s risks associated, but there’s also a lot of risk in not doing it.

Daugirdas: Exactly.

Jonathan: And for an organization that’s moving fast, by not doing it you risk bottlenecks and stagnation.

Daugirdas:
Yeah. So we take this risk very mindfully.

Dealing with the risk of siloing

Jonathan: I worked at WooCommerce up until last year. And at the time, Automatic was 1,400 people. Now it’s like over 2,000.

And it’s interesting to see there are trade offs, there are trade offs to doing everything in the open. There are trade offs. One of the big trade offs, one of the challenges is the risk of siloing, where you have an empowered team and empowered culture to make decisions, to challenge the status quo. That’s good. That makes your organization resilient, less susceptible to the big risks. How do you guys deal with that risk of siloing? Of people becoming disconnected from each other?

Daugirdas: Yeah. Maybe it’s a silly thing. It kind of feels silly sometimes for many of the early employees, but we constantly repeat several mantras. One of the mantras is that we need to challenge everything. We ourselves need to challenge our ideas because a year ago when we were 500, 600 employees, maybe it made sense, and now it doesn’t anymore. So you constantly have to challenge the status quo. And in many cases, you have to challenge yourself. And another mantra is, information is oxygen. Sometimes you have to let go. Sometimes you have to be okay by missing things if that’s not your focus at this time.

Growing communication as part of the culture

Jonathan: So this idea of communication is oxygen. People have different ways of communicating. There are people who are a lot better at it than others. I believe strongly, in my own experience, it is a skill to be developed. How do you guys, as a culture, encourage people to get better at communication? What does that look like at Hostinger?

Daugirdas: We proactively promote a synchronous communication, first of all, because it is maybe a bit more difficult.

Jonathan: It is.

Daugirdas: And not natural. But in a sense, everyone gets a say.

Jonathan: Makes it more accessible.

Daugirdas: Yeah. Who are not that extroverted or they’re not confident in their spoken language. And we have people ranging from all over the globe on many of different kind of countries. So that’s one thing. And then we constantly talk about this when we have a chance. So when we have OKR reviews or monthly performance reviews. When we do it live, we still record everything and everyone can watch cool and participate. Even if there’s the time difference, they still can do it. And they still see it in different kind of forms on different kind of occasions. And that kind of helps us to cope with it. But I think this is one of the things that can always be improved, so you just have to deal with it.

Thanks to our Pod Friends Nexcess and Yoast SEO

The WooCommerce cut of the pie

Jonathan: So let’s talk about WooCommerce. You work with lots of customers, not just WordPress, but WordPress is a majority of kind of what you guys do, and they have all sorts of different needs. A lot of your customers tend to be a more small business.

Jonathan: Is that right? Yes?

Daugirdas: Yeah.

Jonathan: And of that, how prevalent is WooCommerce? How much of your WordPress base roughly do you think is in the WooCommerce?

Daugirdas: It’s like WordPress dominates in our user base, and it dominates the internet. That’s for sure. Yeah. 70, 80% of all of our new clients are using WordPress in one way or another. 30, 40% roughly are using WooCommerce as well.

Jonathan: Okay. It’s a big part of the ecosystem.

Daugirdas: Huge, huge part of it.

Serving the WooCommerce ecosystem

Jonathan: One of the things that I imagine that you guys, because you have that many customers using WooCommerce, you’re going to be in a position to hear all sorts of feedback from customers, right? You’re kind of seeing what’s happening. For the people who are listening, so we’ll have folks who build plugins for WooCommerce. We’ll have folks who provide services. Let’s just start with this. Based on what you hear from customers, what guidance would you offer them to help them serve the WooCommerce ecosystem better?

Daugirdas: We get a lot of feedback, you’re absolutely right on this. And somehow, I’m under the impression, and I talk with the clients myself a lot, I’m under the impression that somehow the market or the ecosystem focuses on starting things a lot. And many of the clients, they do something, they launch projects to life And then they expect that something magical will happen and they will get the traffic, they will get the clients, and you’ll be happy and that’s it. Ride to the sunset. But actually, this is when actual thing starts. And this is where the actual heavy lifting starts. And somehow, the whole ecosystem doesn’t focus that much on this ugly part of things.

So my take on this is that, be very open minded about this. And you have to understand that it’s the easy part to get started. The whole magic happens when you have the project launched. And when the first traffic starts to appear, first clients try to appear, and you have to use it. The user feedback is a gold mine. And you don’t need to invest that lot. You talk with three or four or five clients. If they all say the same thing to you, most probably there’s something you should focus on, and you do not need to invest heavily into that.

The largest issue with WooCommerce extensions

Jonathan: So let’s touch on the folks building extensions for WooCommerce first.

So most of your customers, if they’re using WooCommerce, they’re probably also using extensions that provide a bunch of additional functionality. And totally fine if you don’t recall off the top, because large organizations, you see a lot of different things. Are there any particular issues that you notice that come up with customers where they’re like, “Hey, we’re having this problem for that extension ecosystem.”

Daugirdas: Yeah. So one thing that clients are vocal about is fast speed and performance.

We invest into it heavily and we try to build our infrastructure to be fast and reliable right away, but it is not enough because each project is very unique and we receive a lot of questions, requests for guidance on that. But there’s also another elephant in the room, which is very important. It’s the security side of things.

And many users, many clients, many projects, especially when they start things off for the first time, they kind of try to overlook this because they know that it will be fine and look at it later.

And in many cases, when you grow bigger, it’s kind of already late. And then you have to really invest heavily into it. Or worst case scenario, something bad happens.

Jonathan: So for you as a hosting provider, when you have a customer come to you and they’re frustrated, maybe their WooCommerce site’s running slow. you look at it and you know that the issue is not at the core software level. The infrastructure’s fine. And you can see that there’s an issue with an extension. Maybe it’s built really poorly. What position does that put you guys in? How do you relate to that?

Daugirdas: It’s a very painful position, because we do not want to be like. And we want to honor decisions of the people. And it’s kind of personal to give the feedback on the stack, extensions and plugins that clients use. So we try to be very polite about it and we try to invest into building content, tutorials, webinars, and videos with Hostinger Academy initiative. To kind of educate people and try to help them persuade themselves, in a sense.

And to move in the right direction. But being a fast paced company, it’s frustrating for us because sometimes we kind of think, look, maybe we will do it for you. We’ll fix it really quick. We’ll just patch it up and then you will be good to go. But this kind of tact leaves some bad taste.

Jonathan: Yeah.. It’s a risk. And is it fair to say that it would be better if these extension creators took performance more seriously?

Daugirdas: Yeah. I think it’s safe to say that.

Jonathan: Yeah. And I’ve seen some positive signs. There’s been a lot more investment in the core project, for instance. Google’s worked on their investing in the performance team, because we all benefit when things are fast. You guys put a lot of the time and attention into that raw infrastructure level.

At the end of the day, the application that runs on top of it, though, has a lot to say about what’s going to happen. So that’s extension providers. We all love to see them pay more attention to performance. Do you have any recommendations for someone, do you guys publish any guidelines for extension authors? If someone… because you guys have a large amount of WooCommerce customers, right? So you’re in a good position to be able to offer guidance. Is that something you guys have considered?

Daugirdas: Actually, that’s a very good idea. We don’t do this, but maybe we should focus on this more because, at the moment, we are focusing on end clients mainly.

Jonathan: Which makes sense. That’s your core business.

Daugirdas: Yes, exactly. But moving into this next level, it’s a very interesting twist for us.

Jonathan: Maybe because of that end client, but you also have the prosumers, right? Like you have the people who are servicing them. That’s a whole industry.

Daugirdas: Yeah.

Jonathan: That’d be fantastic because you guys are in a position where you see so much feedback. And you can say, “Hey, if you guys want to succeed with these customers, here’s some things that you should keep in mind.”

Daugirdas: Yeah, exactly. We have lots of traction with end clients, and we can kind of pilot on that into sharing more feedback with the whole ecosystem, basically.

Guidance for service providers with clients

Jonathan: Well, now what about the service providers? I kind of want to end on this. For the people who are the freelancers, the agencies, you made a great point. Oftentimes, we overly focus on the start. And just kind of getting it up and running. You guys have this broader emphasis on customer success, right?

You want to see your customer succeed, whatever their objectives are. What guidance do you have to offer for service providers working with clients? What are some of the things that they should be keeping in mind in order to help their customers succeed? So for the service providers, the freelancers, the agencies that are working with your WooCommerce customers, What are the things that they should be thinking about to help the customer succeed? Because it’s a partnership, right? You guys are providing the hosting, but the service provider is the one talking oftentimes to the clients and giving them guidance. What should they be thinking about?

Daugirdas: Not sure whether this perfectly applies, but what we see from the standpoint where we at is to focus more on those actual clients. Because we see service providers and clients of ours focus a lot on their ideas, which are brilliant.

Jonathan: They can lose that.

Daugirdas: Sometimes, we have to adjust. Sometimes it’s 10% difference that makes the whole change and really push you to the next level. And sometimes we are so focused on our ideas, our services that we provide and our projects that we are running, that we forget that there’s a gold mine basically lying around. And just spending, as a founder, as a CEO, as an executive, whatever, a freelancer or whatever, spending a couple of hours a week just asking simple questions to your existing audience can make huge difference in the long run.

Jonathan: I love that. It’s so true. From my time at WooCommerce, one of the mistakes that we’d see these merchants make is… rather, I’ll put it this way. The ones who do really well keep that focus on their customer. And what I’m hearing you say for the service providers listening, for the builders, helping your clients, helping your customers stay focused on their customers. That seems like that’s the magic, right?

Daugirdas: Yeah, exactly.

Jonathan: Because that leaves you open to recognize new opportunities, and puts you in a position to be able to maximize how much value that you’re providing.

Daugirdas: If we want to make this super actionable, so I can share how we do it. So we send a simple survey, simple request for our existing clients, and we allow them to book time with us. And then we do a call, and that’s it. And we ask two, three simple questions.

Jonathan: And on the one hand, someone be like, “Oh, that’s scary. We’re going to have all these people.” I’m betting that it’s probably a smaller percentage that take you guys up on it. When they do though, they’ve got something to say.

And the things that they have to say can end up being a new idea. It could be a problem that you hadn’t seen. That’s powerful.

Daugirdas: Exactly. It’s scary at first. It’s scary for everyone. It was scary for me when we started this. But exactly what said. Those who respond to this, they are automatically prone to share their feedback. And feedback is good, so there’s nothing to be afraid of.

Jonathan: DJ, thank you for your time.

Daugirdas: Thank you.

Jonathan: Appreciate what you guys are doing. You guys are a super admin sponsor of WordCamp Europe this year.

Daugirdas: Yeah. It’s our first time.

Jonathan: Your booth looks fantastic. Yes.

Daugirdas: And we are super admins right away. So whole experience is just overwhelming. We cannot wait to get back.

Jonathan: It’s been great to have you guys here, and I appreciate you sharing your insights today. And we’ll see you next time.

Daugirdas: Likewise. See you around. Bye-bye.