The State of Cloud Hosting: Insights from the Front Lines

Robert:
Welcome to another Do The Woo Special. I am thrilled to have here today Jesse Friedman, Joshua Goode (as in food, not goody as I’d like to say it), and Kevin Walker from Bluehost. I’m Robert Jacobi, and we’ll be talking about the recent partnership between Bluehost and WP Cloud. Jesse, let’s do some quick introductions.

Jesse:
I’m Jesse Friedman. I’m running WP Cloud. I am a Rhode Island native, well, I shouldn’t say native. I grew up in New York, but I live in Rhode Island now. I’ve been working at Automattic for nearly 10 years, mostly on Jetpack and now with WP Cloud, and really just focused on helping to provide better services to hosting companies so they can succeed in WordPress.

Robert:
Excellent. Kevin?

Kevin:
Hey, good morning. Kevin Walker here. I look after marketing at Bluehost, based here in Austin, Texas, and I really spend most of my time figuring out how to make sure our current and future customers are fully aware of what’s going on from a product perspective. I’m looking forward to our chat today.

Robert:
Yeah, and it’s great that you’re in Austin. I should mention that we’re here at Cloudfest US and NamesCon, and so it’s a very exciting and dynamic crowd, especially with the NamesCon folks on the domain side. Josh?

Joshua:
Yeah, Joshua Goode. I am the partner success manager/technical account manager. We’re still figuring it out. I do a lot of the technical side of things, but I’m also just there to help people onboard, integrate, and handle any rare issues they might encounter.

Robert:
Excellent. So this has been in the making for a long time and was announced back in March during WordCamp Asia and sort of semi-concurrently with Cloudfest in Germany. Let’s start with how this discussion began about Bluehost working on a platform that isn’t theirs, if I can put it that way.

Kevin:
Yeah, I mean, it’s a fair assessment. Outside of Automattic, Bluehost is the largest contributor to the WordPress project, and we’re proud of that. Our WordPress-centric brand, if you read Review Signal and other benchmarking studies, is also very, very good at delivering well-performing, shared hosting. The reality, though, is shared hosting doesn’t meet the needs of some very demanding users, particularly agencies and people who have high-traffic websites.

That was a part of the market that we knew we needed to develop into. We certainly looked at building things internally but came to the ultimate decision, why build when we can borrow, partner, or buy? I don’t know what the right words are with WP Cloud. It’s a fantastic infrastructure that ultimately perfectly meets the needs of the demanding customers and new customers we’re going after. With an existing partnership already in place on so many fronts, it was just a natural progression to continue into the infrastructure as a service agreement that we did with WP Cloud and Automattic.

Robert:
So before I get to your side of the equation, Jesse, as I talk with my hands, which no one can see on an audio podcast, what does that look like to some degree that you don’t actually have to worry about your infrastructure?

Kevin:
Oh, it’s fantastic, right? Certainly we did our due diligence and made sure that the commitment around 100% uptime, speed, and all the other things that we care about are there, and they certainly are. What we get to do is focus on what we do, which is the service and support, which is not part of WP Cloud.

So when you put Bluehost and Automattic together, you really do have a great marriage in that you’ve got the infrastructure people worrying about the infrastructure, scale, and all the things that we’re worried about there. We’ve developed a dedicated support team that’s specific to this product and these customers. So if you’re using Bluehost Cloud today, when you pick up the phone and need support, you’re not going through the typical triage.

I always think about the equivalent when my internet goes out; the first thing they ask me is to restart my router, and I’ve already done that three times. You skip right to the experts who are knowledgeable not only about the product but also about WordPress in general.

I’ll just end by saying a lot of hosts, well, their support team candidly, quickly tries to make sure it’s not their fault and then passes the customer off to a plugin vendor or somebody else. We’re trying to instill in our support team at Bluehost Cloud the mindset of getting to a resolution regardless of whose fault it is. We’ve hired experts in the WordPress space that can help our customers dig into things that are beyond the hosting layer and into plugin compatibility and other issues that WordPress users often find challenging.

Robert:
And so, which of course leads to the question I always want to know, how did WP Cloud even get going? Obviously, Automattic does a ton of hosting. There’s WordPress VIP, which is another flavor of hosting, WordPress.com, and so on. Is this sort of almost like something that’s been in the works for five years, similar to Amazon saying, “Oh, we have a bunch of servers, and now we’re going to make AWS?”

Jesse:
Yeah, you nailed it.

Robert:
This will be our shortest podcast ever.

Jesse:
The WP Cloud team began as an internal company product called Atomic. It was our effort to redefine the way in which we provide cloud hosting for WordPress. We knew we have so much knowledge and experience from our teams hosting hundreds of millions of sites on WordPress.com and the highest traffic sites in the world on VIP. We took the brilliant people behind that to build out the next platform that we wanted to use for ourselves.

Because WordPress.com or Automattic is wholly focused on hosting WordPress, we have some side ventures, Tumblr, PocketCasts, and things like that. But when it comes to websites, we only focus on providing WordPress. That opportunity for focus and those guardrails we put up allow us to do something that other people just can’t. When you look at other cloud platforms, they have a universal solution for everything, from warehouse logistics to virtual reality gaming. WordPress site hosting is a small fraction of their focus.

So we knew that we needed to build something that would revolutionize the way in which we’re serving WordPress. We wanted to do that internally. And so yeah, five plus years, we released it internally as our cloud platform. Then a few years ago, we started to look at ways in which we could bring it to the rest of the ecosystem. We knew what we had. It was working unbelievably well, billions of pages a month already. These sites are incredibly fast, highly reliable. We’re offering 100% uptime with our partners. The reason we’re able to do that is because the platform is tried and tested.

The newest part about it is really the brand. WP Cloud has really only been out in the wild since just before Cloudfest 2023. That was our effort of saying, “Hey, how do we bring this great thing that we built that we know works really well to the rest of the world?” We wanted to identify hosting parties that we knew would be excellent candidates in the WordPress space. Bluehost has been a great WordPress or internet citizen as a company for many years. They do a great deal of contributions to WordPress, sponsoring events around the world, and we knew that partnering with them as a flagship partner would be an opportunity for us to make sure that we’re aligning ourselves with someone who has the same focus on success.

Robert:
Nice. So we’re going to want to know the tricks of the trade. I’m glad Josh is here to tell us what makes that infrastructure a bit more compelling than saying, “Oh, we’re just going to roll up a managed WordPress service on AWS or Google Cloud.”

Joshua:
Jesse kind of hit a good point on that. WordPress.com, millions of WordPress sites, WordPress VIP, some of the highest traffic sites. We took all of our knowledge and experience from those things and built this platform to where it’s just for WordPress and had everything that we needed for performance, security, and those core needs baked into the platform.

So as Bluehost Cloud launched, it automatically had a firewall, DDoS protections, SSL certificates for every site, global caching right out of the box. There are no plugins to install, nothing to configure. You have a Global Edge cache. It’s going back to our Automattic core backbone network that we have all around the world with our edge centers and servers, putting WP Cloud on that and beefing it up. We’re essentially offering this thing to where someone can just go create a site and, whether you’re in Australia or the US, you have amazing speeds.

Every decision on database caching, our decisions on how our global edge cache works, our decisions on just normal page cache. I’m talking a lot about cache because that’s kind of our bread and butter, and our global network is a big chunk of that. The full stack of how simple it should be for a user to create a site and it just works and performs the way they expect and want it to as a user. And then from a host perspective, how easy it is to create those sites and how easy it is to support those sites.

Robert:
Yeah, I’m curious about the API, the platform, but is there any kind of… Is this running on Kubernetes? Is this running here or not? Can we get a little more of the secret sauce? I think folks might just be interested in that.

Joshua:
No, with Kubernetes and different parts of Automattic, no. WP Cloud essentially avoids that type of containerization. We actually keep it as complex as it can be, and again, I’m towing the line here, but…

Kevin:
But that’s why we are on Do the Woo.

Joshua:
Right. We have a lot of experience with Nginx, and we have a very advanced network

of load balancers, server pools, and individual servers. It’s just a very advanced network on there. If you want to know something, DVN, Engine X, however it’s said, that’s kind of there. But no, we actually avoid containers. I will say we have a unique SSH proxy where there may be some containerization there just for security purposes.

Jesse:
The key thing to take away from all this is that we built it up from the ground up and we’re not outsourcing. We make sure that we’re highlighting the fact that we’re partnering with open-source software, PHP, MariaDB, things like that. But for the most part, everything is homegrown.

Robert:
That’s brilliant. So then of course, reading into the APIs and connectivity, from the Bluehost perspective, what does it look like to actually all of a sudden integrate on top of this huge platform?

Kevin:
I mean, so you’re talking to a dumb marketer and not a technical engineer, but I’d take the position that it doesn’t really matter from a customer perspective. What matters is that it works, it’s fast, and if I do have an issue, I can get ahold of the right person quickly to help me resolve it. We put a financial commitment behind the 100% uptime. So WP Cloud and Automattic say, we’re going to guarantee you 100% uptime. We then put a financial commitment to our customers on top of that promise. So if there is, for some reason, downtime, they’re going to get their money back, depending on how long the outage is.

From an API perspective, we have our own console on top of the infrastructure. That’s what I was curious about. It’s an account manager where you can go in and provision sites and manage plugins. You can go into WP admin directly and do most of that as well.

We took the initial path forward that less is more. Let WP admin do a lot of the heavy lifting that people are used to working with and really just keep to the basics around provisioning, scaling up to larger accounts if you need more space or websites, and leave the rest to the native functionality of the project.

Jesse:
I think one thing that’s really interesting is that because WP Cloud or Automattic is handling the infrastructure, managing the platform, making sure that sites are up and running efficiently and fast, that gives Bluehost Cloud the opportunity to reinvest back into the tools they provide for agencies. We’re taking on everything below that API layer and managing that for Bluehost Cloud but also for the end user as well. We do a remarkable amount of management and work around keeping WordPress instances up to date, making sure there aren’t plugin conflicts anytime there’s an issue. When we do run an update, we have regression testing to make sure that there aren’t problems with that. We take care of all of that.

That allows Bluehost Cloud to really focus on the tools they want to provide to agencies, which I think is where the next phase of this innovation is going to be. We’re going to focus on providing the fastest, most secure, and reliable platform. Bluehost Cloud is going to be focused on providing tools that help agencies run their business, save them money, make them more money per hour, be more efficient, and grow. The list goes on from there. That’s why I’m super excited about this opportunity because it’s leveraging something we built to build something even better for the ecosystem.

Kevin:
To get there, this is a fairly new segment. Agencies have been using Bluehost since we created the business, but it was in more of the “I just need some simple shared hosting for my simple client to use” mode. We’re moving essentially upmarket to the more complex, advanced needs of larger agencies. We’re not going to pretend that we know everything about agencies. So we’re taking an approach to, again, start with less is more. We’re having an advisory council that’s been built out that’s going to input into the needs of agencies so we can actually create something that’s valuable, meaningful, and helpful rather than assume that we know everything. By the time this is posted, we’ll have announced that we are launching a program that gives additional benefits to our agency partners in the form of financial benefits, commissions, discounts, and access to certain levels of support.

Robert:
That’s amazing. I have a couple of questions swirling around in my head. You just mentioned support, so let me tackle that. Is there a point where a Bluehost customer would actually speak with support at WP Cloud?

Kevin:
No.

Robert:
No? So that would never happen?

Kevin:
No. We certainly, as a customer of WP Cloud, have access, and we have regular standups and we’re very closely working together. Our engineers and their engineers are on a first-name basis and are close working partners. But the support that you’re going to require, you would contact Bluehost Cloud support. So far, we have 100% resolution on the first call. We’re not seeing any challenges with that.

Robert:
I’m going to make a huge assumption, and Joshua or Jesse can set me straight. Is there sort of a semi-walled garden around what kind of WordPress hosting you can do? I’m just going to make a crazy example. Say I wanted to launch my WordPress 3.1 site on WP Cloud. Would that even be possible?

Jesse:
You might get away with it.

Joshua:
No. We really focus on keeping up to date and staying in line with the WordPress launch schedule. For performance, security, and just the general progression of WordPress, if we all keep up and continue moving together, it just helps the ecosystem so much more. We do offer some transition windows, but no, if you spin up a site right now, it will be the latest release version.

Robert:
So back to the sort of agency side of the universe, I’m an agency with a number of core legacy WordPress sites. Those would probably all have to be updated. At a minimum, if not, depending on how legacy or what plugin issues there might be. So tying to that plugin thing, do you actually have sort of an allow list of plugins, or can I just create my Bitcoin miner plugin and drop it off?

Jesse:
We have a very small list of blacklisted plugins, plugins that we know are doing something either malicious or so outside the box, strange and poorly done that it’s causing performance issues. For the most part, you can put any plugins you want onto it.

Joshua:
We work quite a bit with plugin developers to actually help them spend a good chunk of time if we do notice issues. Given our scale, we can see trends in certain plugins. So I do spend a bit of time reaching out and working with plugin developers, not just to be compatible with our platform or more compatible, but to be better on any host.

Jesse:
Yes, and I think it’s important to recognize that I do understand that there are agencies out there who are running sites for clients that may have older versions of software because the client doesn’t have the budget to upgrade it or it’s a really complex build. When you get to a place where you are allowing these older versions of the software to exist, then again, you get back into a lack of focus. Because we have a very strong focus on providing the sites for the most up-to-date version of WordPress, I think we allow a version or two, we have a transition. So it’s not like the day that the new WordPress version comes out, you have to be ready to move. The point is that when we narrow our focus to provide support for one or two of the latest versions of WordPress, we are able to provide even better performance and security. The minute you start doing dozens of versions, it just increases the amount of work ahead of you.

Joshua:
We want to help improve the standards of the WordPress ecosystem. I work with plugin developers and theme developers, but overall we want to push the whole community forward. The more sites we can keep on the most recent version, the better it is for everyone. We all want to push forward together and make it the best experience for the end user, to the point where the end user really shouldn’t have to worry about their WordPress being updated.

Robert:
Oh yeah, the best kind of hosting is the kind you never think about. I love that.

Kevin:
This is a trend across the industry. I think all hosts, at least reputable ones, are realizing that the financial benefits of supporting a long, long, long list of versions aren’t worth the expense. You’ve got to narrow that focus. You’re paying for it as a customer. I worked at Dell during the whole Microsoft Windows XP situation, and this is reminiscent of that. If you have to support multiple versions, that gets extremely challenging.

Jesse:
Think of that when you call in for support. If you’re training your team to make sure that they’re providing the best support for the most recent version of WordPress, they don’t have to worry about the complexities that went into 3.1. That allows them to provide more efficient, better, and faster support, making sure you’re successful. But I’ll also tell you, we’re sitting right across from the expo area at Cloudfest, and I guarantee you that if you threw a hat in the air and it landed on any one of those tables, that host would have a story about having thousands of out-of-date WordPress sites. The process of upgrading those and keeping them secure, and what that means for the rest of their infrastructure, it’s a terrible process to have to go through.

Robert:
It’s a customer support headache. It’s a resource like physical resource, meaning hardware, whether it’s on some other cloud provider or on your own infrastructure, that you’re probably wasting energy cycles and whatnot from bad code.

Jesse:
To go back to your original question, for the most part, we’re able to host anything here. In fact, we just released domain-based multi-site as well. Previously, we had subdirectory multi-site only.

Robert:
Nice.

Jesse:
So we’re continuing to innovate

in that area and what we can provide support for.

Robert:
I’m curious about agencies who may have legacy content. Is part of the Bluehost agency partner program there to also help onboard existing or new agencies with these sites?

Kevin:
It certainly helps onboarding new agencies. The question of agencies with outdated WordPress sites is one I actually haven’t considered. If there was a meaningful need and we heard from our customers that it was something of value, we’d absolutely figure out how to address it. We’ve partnered with a third party and now have a white-labeled version of a very successful migration tool. We can help customers migrate from our own shared infrastructure into the cloud infrastructure or from a different host onto Bluehost with the push of a button with well into the 90% success rate. We’re really excited about that because the switching costs are getting lower and lower. It’s getting easier and easier. Hopefully, we have an opportunity to be the beneficiary of that ease of movement. We hope to benefit as we bring better and better products to market.

Robert:
I see that as a huge direction for hosting overall. The baseline expectations are commoditized. Everyone can get their WordPress site up for at least a little bit. What’s the value add? Obviously, we’re seeing here today the Bluehost service level and user experience value add. You can’t beat a WP Cloud infrastructure.

Kevin:
You put your site on Bluehost Cloud, stress test it, objectively observe, measure, and benchmark it. You won’t find a better hosting experience or performance at the price point we have it at. Then you layer in a 100% uptime guarantee, financial guarantee, and the premium support that comes with it. I’m well aware that Bluehost does not have the best reputation in the agency space. I think that’s a function of people historically trying to put a round peg through a square hole and using shared hosting, which is not meant for a lot of client-facing needs. That’s where that reputation comes from. Give us a second chance. I think you’ll be really, really, really impressed.

Jesse:
As a customer of Bluehost for almost 20 years now, I signed up for my first Bluehost account in 2005 when you were three years old. I’ve seen Bluehost provide shared hosting to millions of customers and do a really great job of it. I think they became synonymous with providing that service to these customers. Shared hosting is a fantastic solution, especially for WordPress. If you’re running your own site, running a blog, or even an eCommerce shop, shared hosting can be very successful, and Bluehost does it really well.

But I think that has created a slight barrier of entry for an agency considering this product. They may be thinking, “Oh, it’s Bluehost. They’re really focused on shared hosting. It’s not going to be what I need. I have this incredibly high traffic site, or my eCommerce shop is getting thousands of transactions a day.” But if you’re on the fence, if you have a high traffic site like that, reach out to me or Kevin. We’ll figure out a way to get you on there so you can test it.

The migration tools that they have make it a lot easier. If you are on the fence, let us talk to you about it. Let us give you some assurances. We’ll make sure your customers are happy, your clients are happy. At the end of the day, when you try it out for yourself and put some traffic behind it, it’s just going to speak for itself. The biggest problem you’re going to have is how to get the rest of your clients on it as fast as possible.

Robert:
Since this is a WooCommerce-focused podcast, and Kevin has mentioned multiple times this 100% uptime guarantee, is that just per minute it’s out? If I’m running a WooCommerce shop and based on, let’s say, monthly average sales, I’m out for a day, which we know won’t happen, are you saying that a day of sales would be insured?

Kevin:
Not at this time. At this time, it’s to the cost of the infrastructure and your service cost on Bluehost Cloud. But we are talking in seconds and minutes, not in hours or days at all.

Jesse:
But put aside the financial guarantee for a second. Let’s talk a little bit about how we’re providing the 100% uptime guarantee.

Robert:
Yes, please.

Jesse:
First off, we scale vertically, not horizontally. We have the ability to add resources to a site in real-time without having to wait for services and additional resources. That is on top of the fact that we know exactly what we’re doing in terms of supporting hosting for e-commerce. I mean, we do own WooCommerce. If anybody’s going to know how to do it, it’s going to be us.

Additionally, we have baked into every single WP Cloud site, and that means every Bluehost Cloud site has this, we have something called automated real-time failover. It live syncs your site from one data center to another. For example, if you are requesting an e-commerce website, you are a visitor to a website in middle America, and it’s pulling from our Texas Data Center. If something catastrophic were to happen, like the pipe gets cut or an asteroid lands on Texas, something terrible happens, that whole site is live synced to another data center, including e-commerce orders. If you place an order on the site and then instantaneously something happens, we will have live synced it there. We can reroute the traffic to that secondary data center so the visitors to the site won’t even feel the transition.

We have four origin centers and 28 data centers around the globe. We’re doing a ridiculous amount of redundancies in terms of backups, which automatically come with this product. We are taking special care to make sure we are putting processes in place that no one else can really replicate to offer this level of service.

Robert:
I’m the database geek, and I’m going to put Josh on the spot here. How do you do that with the databases?

Joshua:
Every site is doing constant real-time replication to another region. Getting into some of the technical specifics…

Robert:
But you’re not copying the files. You’re doing split queries across multiple…

Joshua:
Yeah, that’s one way to put it. I will say maybe it’s not always the easiest. We’ve had to look in and make sure our binary logs or our bin logs aren’t just exploding in size, but we’ve got it kind of perfected to where every site on WP Cloud has real-time database replication to another. The file system’s already there. If one server or the data center goes down, that site instantly flips to another region.

As for how we’re doing that, I’ll just say it’s real-time database replication.

Robert:
I’m going to say it can’t be just what we think of as traditional replication. So I have to imagine that there’s some kind of SQL abstraction layer that’s potentially data…

Joshua:
There is a level of abstraction there. I would say every single query is logged there in our binary logs, and that’s kind of how it’s handled and pushed out to its secondary database server.

Robert:
For end users on Bluehost Cloud, it just looks like a MySQL database.

Jesse:
If you have an agency that wants to explain it to their client, you can just let them know that we do live sync, which means real-time replication of the data from one data center to another. That gives them the assurance to sell this to their high-end e-commerce clients.

Robert:
So I assume that those talking points from WP Cloud get passed over to Bluehost Cloud, which then, as part of your partner program, gives them that.

Jesse:
I’ll tell you something right now, for everybody at home who wants to sign up for Bluehost Cloud and then sell it to their clients, there is no a la carte or piecemeal parts of WP Cloud that Bluehost Cloud doesn’t have. So anything that you ever hear anybody talking about WP Cloud, whether it’s at a conference like this, another podcast, or whatever, if WP Cloud has it, then Bluehost Cloud has it.

Robert:
Okay, that’s really cool.

Kevin:
The only thing that I think is unique to Bluehost versus some other small hosts that we see around the world, who have also started to leverage WP Cloud, is the packaging and the pricing and how we’re thinking about our packaging. It could vary from host to host, but again, the infrastructure is going to be the same.

We’ve taken a different approach. Instead of a per-site model where we allocate resources per site in a predetermined fashion, you buy a number of sites and with a number of PHP workers, you can assign those workers to sites at your discretion. Maybe the small little site you put two PHP workers on, and this other site that your client has that has really high demand, you might put eight. Where others have taken more of a “every site gets two PHP workers” approach, we’ve added a lot more flexibility in our approach.

Jesse:
This is the beauty of us being able to provide what we’re doing. We’re purely focusing on the platform. Our engineers are not getting into the business of WP Cloud. They’re focused on providing the absolute fastest, most secure platform. What that allows us to do is to partner with hosts and cultivate or even grow the diversity in hosting that we need for WordPress to be successful. This is speaking to something a little bit more philosophical, but the reality of the situation is there are more than enough WordPress websites to go around.

What we’re aiming to do with WP Cloud is raise the bar for the way in which hosting is done. We want WP Cloud to become synonymous with the best cloud platform for WordPress anywhere. The beauty of partnering with Bluehost or anyone else we might partner with is that they have the ability to bolt on additional services, partner with companies that they want to partner with. For example, Yoast, right? With Bluehost Cloud, you get Yoast bundled with it. There are opportunities for them to go beyond that and do deeper integrations into Yoast, things like that. They can bundle their pricing differently. This

gives them the opportunity to really carve out an opportunity to provide better service to agencies, whereas somebody else might be focused on something else specifically. That allows for innovation and solving specific problems.

Robert:
I like that. We talked about the partnerships. What does it cost? I know I’m not going to get the real secrets here.

Jesse:
What Bluehost Cloud costs or…?

Robert:
What does it cost for Bluehost to work on top of or partner with WP Cloud? What does that look like for Bluehost?

Jesse:
I would love for Kevin to talk. I’ll touch on this briefly. I would love Kevin to talk about the pricing for Bluehost Cloud because I think people will be interested in that.

The model we have for WP Cloud is making it accessible. We’re trying to keep our prices generally very affordable and significantly cheaper than trying to replicate this with AWS or Google Cloud. Right now, our pricing is focused on a per-site, per-month cost based on a snapshot of the resources allocated to that site, like the number of PHP workers, things like that.

I would love to go more in-depth into how WP Cloud operates from a partnership perspective, but for today and the audience in the room, I think what’s more relevant is, what does this actually cost the agency?

Robert:
It’s a huge deal, literally, and it’s just interesting to see how some of the sausage is made.

Joshua:
Before we transition, Jesse likes to highlight that there’s no upfront cost. You pay for what you use. Your costs should be diverted to building out your side of the equation, marketing, selling, and supporting them. There’s nothing to sign up and work with us just to get started and to test things out. That’s not a cost. Then it comes from your usage.

Kevin:
To be super clear, he’s talking about WP Cloud, not Bluehost. If you’re a host and listening to this podcast, that was for you. For everyone else, because of what you just said, Josh, you’ll see packages that scale. The price will scale with usage, with some sort of resources allocated to that package. That’s because hosts are being charged based on the amount of resources they’re consuming. Their packaging is probably going to be linear toward price and resources will be somewhat correlated to each other.

For Bluehost Cloud, our early access pricing, which is still live today, a single site plan is $29 a month, and a 50-site plan is $190. Those are the two guardrails. There are 10 and 25 site plans in between. You go compare that to the market, and I promise you, we are extremely cost-efficient at those price points. We’re one of the largest hosts in the world, one of the largest WordPress hosts in the world. Because of that scale, we have the opportunity to give some of that value back to our customers through really advantageous pricing. You’re getting the same infrastructure that another host may be selling at twice the price, but it’s the same infrastructure.

Jesse:
The only place you can get the bat phone. I love calling it that because it’s the blue phone.

Kevin:
Or you’re getting a host that isn’t using WP Cloud, and we can talk about the disadvantage of that. AWS is amazing as a general cloud infrastructure for all these varying needs, but if you were building a WordPress site, why would you not want an infrastructure specifically built for WordPress and WordPress performance? You should test it out and really put us through the ringer. Put a site on our plan and see how it goes.

Joshua:
I was just saying one thing. Sorry, we didn’t go into too much detail about the database. I didn’t want to take too much time.

Jesse:
It’s also important to keep some things close to the vest, not necessarily for IP, but also for security.

Joshua:
That’s right. And for the sake of time. But taking a step back, PHPMyAdmin access is available, but overall, there’s no… As Bluehost Cloud uses this, they use the WP Cloud Atomic API. They spin all the sites up via API, configure them, and make all their adjustments over an API. There’s no setting up a server, no “What’s the database credentials and what’s up with that?” It’s all done with one API call.

Kevin:
Our very first customer. We announced at 10:00 AM Eastern that day. At 10:06 AM, we had our first customer. They bought a Cloud 10 package. They migrated their site. They’re based in British Columbia, Canada, in about nine minutes, I think, is what it took them to get the site live on the infrastructure. They must have realized things were going well because they had nine more sites. Second plan. I mean, it is really, really easy and simple.

Jesse:
We are seeing sites that are incredibly fast. When we pull up a new WP Cloud site, it’s an average of six, seven seconds before you’re in the WP admin. It’s nearly instantaneous. There are a lot of sort of warm sites ready to go.

Joshua:
No, this is all kind of on-demand. The infrastructure is all there, warm and ready to go. But the sites, no. I mean, that’s all new and it’s all provisioned.

Jesse:
You’re absolutely right. The thing that’s really intriguing about that is that we have the ability to provide pools for agencies to really build these things into their workflows. For example, if you’re using the SSH to spool up sites, things like that, manage and configure them. We also have templating tools, things like that. You can create, man, I forget the term, but somebody gave me the perfect one for template sites. If you’re an agency and you run a hundred e-commerce shops, you’re probably starting with the same plugins and the same configuration every single time. Those are things you can just clone, and it’s the same amount of time. Think about how much faster that makes your workflow.

Robert:
Oh, yeah. Stuff you don’t have to worry about. You can actually focus on your customers with an agency, what your value add will be as well.

Joshua:
If Bluehost support is helping an agency that maybe is coming off an old WordPress version and they’re needing quick access to the PHP logs, that’s an API call. You have SSH access if you want to go in and do some other things. But if Bluehost Cloud wants to provide that directly to users or their support team needs it, there’s an API call for that.

Robert:
No, that’s fantastic. Let’s wrap this up so people can actually use it for building out their site. I found the cloud. Any final thoughts?

Joshua:
Yeah, I’m really passionate about this project. I wish we had more time to go into even more technical detail. It’s something I’ve had the pleasure of working on across Automattic for years now, and I’m so excited to have partners like Bluehost and just getting more people looking at the platform. Jesse may have some other stuff they might want to bring up.

Jesse:
It’s too bad he won’t hear this if you’re actually at Cloudfest because it’ll take a little time to publish this. But in a couple of hours, I’m giving a talk and unveiling a new soon-to-be open-source platform UI. The idea there is to really encourage people to rip it apart, extend it, expand on it, or help us to understand it’s in the same light and narrative of what Bluehost Cloud is trying to do, which is that we are trying to provide tools and resources so that we can allow our clients, our agencies, to tell us what it is that they need next, what it is that they want. That’s in total alignment with what Bluehost Cloud is doing.

To that point, I’m on Twitter as @Professor. Although if you go to the WP Cloud website, you’ll see ways to get in touch with me. If you have any questions about this, if you want to talk more, if you want to tell me about your current situation and what you’re faced with and you just want to chat about whether or not Bluehost Cloud or WP Cloud is right for you, please don’t hesitate to reach out.

Robert:
That’s awesome. Jesse and Kevin, you have the last word.

Kevin:
I think you’ll have the last word if I know you well enough. But okay. I think this is an exciting time, and we’re really seeing some really cool stuff happening with the customers that have come over and started using the product. I encourage anyone listening today, if you need a high-performance site, give us a shot. What’s to lose? $29 and some time? I think there’s a lot to gain when you see the performance. The price-to-value ratio is excellent. If you’re an agency, Kevin.Walker@NewFold.com, or go to our website and fill out a form for the agency program, and we’ll get you signed up with a free account to test it yourself. If you don’t need high performance, just a reminder, our shared hosting is Review Signal top best in class. We’re proud of that too. Thanks for having me on, Robert.

Robert:
That’s why Kevin’s in marketing. We make sure to cover everything. Fantastic. I’m sure we’ll have more podcasts, especially around the technology. Do the Woo has a tech podcast as well, so that would be really interesting to have you guys on board for that. Thank you all for listening to another Do the Woo.