The Evolution of WooCommerce and WordPress Hosting

Zach: Welcome to another episode of the Woo DevChat. I’m Zach Stepek, here with Carl Alexander today.

Carl: Hello.

Zach: How are you doing, Carl?

Carl: I’m doing good. How about yourself?

Zach: I’m doing really well. We’re missing Till today. He injured his knee a week ago. That’s not fun. But he is hopefully doing better. He said it’s mostly healed now, which is nice.

Carl: So he is taking it easy, as one should.

Zach: Yeah, he absolutely should take it easy. So today we’ve decided that we’re going to talk about the evolution of hosting and what does that mean?

Carl: Yeah, we’re two people that work with hosting. You’re with Cloudways, I’m trying to build my own thing. I think it’s a really interesting discussion. So there was also Syed’s tweet thread. Did you see that a week ago?

Zach: I did not.

Carl: So he did this tweet thread, we’ll definitely link it in the description, but he was discussing a bunch of topics with WordPress, but one of them was basically managed product hosting. So like managed EDD, which they’re doing with Site Ground. Nexcess is basically doing managed LearnDash Cloud. So just discussing this idea of where hosting is going with more dedicated hosting platforms. So it’s not just WordPress now, Oh, I want to use this specific product and I want to host it on a platform that’s really optimized for this specific product, and how do we that? So I thought that’s really fascinating because I feel that’s where, and I’m curious to hear your opinion on that as well, I feel like that’s where it’s going for the next decade.

I did a Reddit post two weeks ago, I think, discussing how basically hosting WordPress sites, your news sites, your content sites is generally pretty solved at this point. There’s a bunch of different architectures, but they all have similar components, and they’re just different flavors of vanilla ice cream, basically. Do you like this vanilla flavor? Do you Häagen-Dazs or do you want just standard vanilla flavor? There’re just pretty much different ways of doing the same thing. So hosting WooCommerce is just starting. Well, Nexus has been in it for a while now, for a few years, but GoDaddy, at WordCamp US, just came out with managed WooCommerce hosting and I think WP Engine has it already as well, I think. And then there’s some that are more dedicated.

Zach: Bluehost announced something during WordCamp US as well, and that’s really interesting to see where that stuff is going. I’m really excited about the GoDaddy offering, but it’s Pagely and SkyVerge. I believe Becca ran this team to build this new product. So Beka from SkyVerge.

Carl: I don’t know who Beka is and I don’t even know really much about SkyVerge, so talk away.

Zach: Yeah, so SkyVerge, for those of you who don’t know, built most of the plugins that are on the WooCommerce marketplace. So they have been an integral part of the success of WooCommerce by making it do things that it didn’t do by default. They wrote the structure for how payment gateway plugins are created and created over 70 payment gateways themselves. So a lot of those are them.

Carl: That’s an insane amount of payment gateways.

Zach: It really is. I might be wrong on that, but it feels like 70. So if I’m wrong, absolutely call me out. But it feels like a lot of payment gateways, and 70 is just the number I’ve always gravitated toward. But there are so many plugins that they’ve built. WooCommerce memberships is them. They built the Stripe plugin before it was handed over to the WooCommerce team. They built the Square plugin before it was handed over to the WooCommerce team. And so GoDaddy acquired SkyVerge a little over a year and a half ago now, I think. So in doing so, they acquired that entire library of plugins that are in the marketplace. So what this offering from GoDaddy has done is it’s taken all of this knowledge that SkyVerge has and it’s coupled all of those plugins with a hosting platform that’s built on top of Pagely’s infrastructure. It’s a really cool offering. So you get all those plugins that normally you’d pay a hundred dollars a piece per year or $50 a piece for some of them per year, and they’re just bundled with your hosting. So really pretty cool.

Carl: Yeah, I think that’s what a lot of players are looking at doing now. That’s why I think a lot of the hosting companies are buying all these plugins is they’re trying to build their wall garden offering. How good it is for the larger community is up to debate. But as somebody that’s building something to host these WordPress applications, as I like to call them, because they’re not really WordPress sites, they’re more applications than content sites. It’s really hard to optimize and increase performance and things like that when you can just install whatever plugin you want. Especially with Woo, I’m sure you’re well aware, optimizing Woo with a bunch of add-ons and things like that is really, really complicated.

Zach: It can be, especially if some of those plugins or extensions are written well, and some of them are written really badly. And I’m not saying they’re badly written in general, I’m saying that they’re not written for scale. I have to be really clear about the delineation there because I’m not trying to be rude to people who’ve built good plugins that just don’t scale. It’s just that it’s really hard to test for scale, and especially toward the beginning of the ecosystem’s creation, it was even harder, because nobody knew what scale was going to look like in WooCommerce. Right?

Carl: And e-commerce scaling is just hard period.

Zach: It is. Yes.

Carl: Coming from Magento and stuff like that, it’s always hard. So it’s not also WooCommerce’s fault necessarily. They have some tech debt that they really need to be working through using the post meta. Now they have dedicated tables for that, for example. That’s a good example of tech debt that they’re slowly going through. But that applies to plugin as well. Some plugins just don’t scale well because they just weren’t designed that way initially, but now they’re starting to be used on stores that are going to have a lot of traffic and a lot of sales volume, and then all these things break.

Zach: Yeah. Well, and I think that’s the same for any of these larger ecosystem says Jonathan Wold likes to call them. Anything that introduces a suite of functionality for an audience, anything that provides an integration layer for additional extensions, and that creates and shapes its own ecosystem over time, that’s an ecosystem plugin. That’s how he defines it. And I think that what we’re seeing is that hosting companies are seeing an opportunity with these ecosystem plugins to own a part of the ecosystem. So Automattic acquired WooCommerce to own WooCommerce’s ecosystem. That’s the long and short of it.

There’s a benefit to having an ecosystem like that. WP Engine wanted Advanced Custom Fields because it’s an ecosystem. It’s something that other people have extended that is integral to the way that some agencies do their work. And all of these ecosystem plugins, they have a marketplace around them. They have other companies adding into what they can do. Gravity Forms is an ecosystem plugin because other people create plugins for Gravity Forms. Gravity View wouldn’t exist without Gravity Forms.

Carl: Some businesses with multiple employees, sometimes dozens, just build Gravity Form products. That’s insane.

Zach: It really is. But these ecosystem plugins are really the big hosting problem as well. Right? And I say problem, but really it’s just challenge. Right? They’re a challenge to host well. The bigger the ecosystem, the harder the challenge is. And one of the interesting things about having this open web ecosystem that we live in, in WordPress is hosting providers. Hosting providers, they’re a part of this ecosystem. They benefit from the ecosystem, but they’re really free riders and this whole free rider problem and open source is an interesting thing. WordPress is free to use. Right? The four freedoms guarantee no restrictions on its usage. It’s maintained by volunteers, and the confidence of free riders and WordPress has led to investment.

So that’s why we have ecosystem plugins. Hosting companies should be investing in ecosystem plugins and extending their distribution. I fully agree with what Jonathan had to say in his article on hosts and the free rider problem regarding that. And the other thing he says is that product creators should be working hard to build partnerships with as many hosts as possible and not be exclusive. And I wholeheartedly agree with that too. So WooCommerce has done a really good job of this. There’s no single host that is the defacto standard recommendation for WooCommerce hosting. There are some that are better than others.

Carl: At least not yet.

Zach: Right. Not yet. It could happen in the future where there’s somebody who pulls far ahead of everybody else. But the great thing about a marketplace like this is that if somebody pulls ahead, that helps everyone. Right? Because everyone else gets to see and learn from what that person did, or what that team did. And so that’s a very interesting piece of this whole puzzle. And we’re seeing some really interesting things happen at WordCampUS. They announced WP Cloud.

Carl: Apparently it had been existing for over a year. I only learned about it a week and a half before WordCamp US. But if you look back, I think on the way wack machine or whatnot, I think it’s from 2021, it came out, the site’s been up.

Zach: Yeah, it’s been around. And it looks like Jessie Frick is involved.

Carl: She’s with Pressable? Right?

Zach: I believe so, yes.

Carl: Yeah, because Pressable runs on that. So that’s what they told me.

Zach: And the interesting thing is WP Cloud feels a lot like what VIP Go was. Right? Now we have WP Cloud instead of VIP Go.

Carl: I mean it’s very close to what Ymir is because Ymir is basically an API product. So they’re very similar. I was just like, oh okay, I’m not the only one basically doing API driven infrastructure anymore.

Zach: No, it’s a validation of the work you’ve been doing with Ymir, right?

Carl: Yeah, I have an interesting take on some of this because I think you’re right, for some aspects I think it’s going to go that way. But I’m also thinking, I think a lot of those plugins are going to become their own standalone products.

Like Gravity forms because have Typeform. Right? Technically if Gravity Forms wanted to just self host on a platform, that’s where I think I come in actually, but if Gravity Forms wanted to just host Gravity Forms, not WordPress, not nothing, just host forms based on WordPress, and you can just create forms and try to compete with Typeform, they could do that if they could manage an infrastructure to just run their product on.

So I think there’s a lot of that as well that’s happening too. So you have this dedicated hosting setups. So managed WooCommerce, maybe something for LYFT LMS, because I think LearnDash Cloud is more what I’m thinking about with Gravity Forms. I think it’s just a standalone.

Zach: I would agree with that. Yeah.

Carl: I think it’s just standalone, but that’s what I mean. But that’s a good example of the dichotomy of the two things that are going to happen, I think, is you’re going to have dedicated hosting services for specific products, but you’re also going to have basically the standalone WordPress Plugin Pro as a product in itself, like LearnDash Cloud is. And I think that’s also a thing that’s going to probably happen because some of these products could compete, theoretically, with those SaaS products. The problem that they have right now is that, how do I host that?

So LearnDash was easy because they got bought by Nexcess. It’s a StellarWP brand, so they’re under Nexcess. So Nexcess was just like, okay, we’ll just build the infrastructure for that. But if you’re on your own, how do you build that infrastructure? So that’s where I’m interested in that space, obviously, because I think there’s a lot there as well for these larger platform ecosystem plugins.

Zach: I agree. I think that what we’re going to start seeing is, well what we’re already seeing in the WooCommerce space, which is people building these customized hosting products just around WooCommerce. You said I’m working with Cloudways, obviously. There’s a WooCommerce stack at Cloudways that you can deploy. We have players that are focusing on just WooCommerce hosting like Convesio. Nexcess has been around for a while. There’s just a whole bunch of players in this space that are trying to make WooCommerce better, and make it easier for store owners. And that’s really the key. Right? Because we can’t have an army of people running agencies that are making tons and tons of money off of customizing WooCommerce to make it scale. It’s just not something that can be sustained long term. Customizing WooCommerce to build stores? Absolutely. That’s something that long term can be sustained. But working just in this performance and optimization space, it’s something that, at some point, the community or the ecosystem itself needs to take care of. Right?

Carl: Yeah, it’s hard. My friend Patrick, who’s doing Woogo stores, basically on top of Ymir, is basically doing something like that where he is trying to basically build Shopify. Because there’s nobody really that’s trying to do it right yet, something like Shopify, but with WooCommerce. So you basically sign up and you get a store. Just the store not at the entire WooCommerce install or whatnot. You don’t even necessarily know that it’s WooCommerce, you just set up a store and then it’s WooCommerce behind the scenes. How do you get to that? How do you get to scaling that? Because right now that’s a thing I was saying, nobody could host Kim Kardashian’s clothing line with WooCommerce. She’d send an Instagram out, for a sale, and it would just literally blow up.

Zach: Well, to be fair, at one point Kylie’s cosmetics line was on WooCommerce and it was running well. It wasn’t perfect, but it was running well and making tons and tons of money. But it did eventually move to Shopify. And why did it move to Shopify? Well back then, this was 2017, I believe, 2016. It moved to Shopify because they were sold on the fact that Shopify would always have the performance there and they wouldn’t have to worry about it anymore. Right?

Carl: Yeah, exactly. And they probably sell even more now than they did back then. So think of the problems they were having then versus now. That’s what I mean. It’d be very hard right now to sell a really, really high volume, burst volume WooCommerce site. Just keeping it up would be really hard. Borderline, I’m not sure if possible.

Zach: It’s not impossible. One of the things that we did when my former agency and I were working on native deodorant, we would work on elastic beans stock, have auto scaling in place, but we’d also prescale. So we let them prescale the number of servers that they had for horizontal scaling of their web heads before they sent out a marketing email. And that generally was enough to keep the site up with a two million person email marketing list. And they did really well on Woo. In fact, Moise, the founder of Native at e-Commerce Fuel live in early 2020, I believe it was January of 2020, he said that he wished he had never left WooCommerce.

Carl: Who is he with now? Shopify?

Zach: So they’re with Shopify, because they were acquired by Proctor and Gamble for a large amount of money, and all of Proctor and Gamble’s properties are on Shopify. So they moved to Shopify, but they lost some of the functionality that they had on WooCommerce, that was specialized and built for them. The ability when somebody went to cancel a subscription, to put the questionnaire in front of them asking them why they were canceling, and move them into a lower tier product rather than having them cancel completely. It was all custom built for them on top of WooCommerce subscriptions, and couldn’t be done, at the time, on Shopify because none of the subscription platforms had that. So their rate of attrition went up.

Carl: Yeah. Those are good examples, and that will be the problem also if somebody builds a WooCommerce platform, you’ll be locked into whatever plugin suite that they want. You’ll be like, okay, well we optimized for those. We’re not going to let you install whatever you want because we don’t know how it’s going to behave. Because, like you said, to loop back to what you said at the beginning, it’s not necessarily the plug-in developer’s fault, but there’s just these scaling issues that you can’t really grasp until you’ve seen it.

Zach: Let’s be fair, even WooCommerce didn’t know that WooCommerce was going to scale to the levels that it has. So when this whole thing started, nobody expected that WooCommerce was going to be powering stores that were doing hundreds of millions or billions of dollars in sales per year. It just wasn’t something we thought was going to happen. And then it did, and then it broke, and then we had to figure out to make it work. That’s been the challenge, building for scale is much harder than building just for functionality. Right?

Carl: Boy do I know that. That’s all I deal with.

Zach: And so it presents unique challenges. How do we handle things like fragment caching? How do we handle things like optimizing our queries to make sure that they are running as quickly as possible? How do we create adequate indexes so that look ups happen faster? How do we make sure that our code is running in the most efficient way possible? How do we get away from the fact that at scale a structure of the value and value meta, post and post meta, or item and item meta, doesn’t work at scale? It just doesn’t work when everything is a custom post type, it just blows up.

Carl: Magento has the same problem. It’s a known pattern. It’s called EAV, it’s Entity Attribute Value. And basically that’s what post meta is. There’s a trade off, basically. You get flexibility in how you can basically assign metadata to things. You can assign anything to a post, you can create whatever post meta and sign whatever information you need to. The problem then becomes, okay, well that basically makes the database incredibly hard to query, because now you have to basically do a whole bunch of joins.

Sorry, I’m being a nerd right now. Zach’s head is nodding vigorously, but basically after that you’re stuck doing a bunch of joins on the same table to get the information you need on the same entity. And that’s where the whole thing breaks down, because when it’s all on the same table, it’s a lot easier. You just look up the post and then you get all the information you need. The problem is, it’s hard to adapt that table because you want it to be flexible with the data that it has.

So it’s managing that trade off, that’s really challenging, which is not really WooCommerce’s fault per se, but it’s a common e-commerce problem because e-commerce suffers from the problem of you need a lot of custom data. If you sell shoes, you need to keep shoe sizes, manufacturers, that’s not just SKUs. If you sell coats, it’s something else. If you sell cosmetics, it’s something else. So you need something, a data structure that you can with with to represent this information. And that’s even more complex if you’re a hardware store. Now you have to deal with all sorts of different things that have all sorts of different metadata. And you have to be able to query that and get that information out, is just very complex.

Zach: Imagine a grocery store with a hundred thousand plus products. Right? I’ve never dealt with that. Not even once.

Carl: Yeah. No, that’d be crazy as well. Large department stores like, RIP Sears, but Target things like that, like you said, it’s the worst of all the worlds. You carry food, you carry hardware, you carry electronics, you carry everything.

Zach: And then add the complexity of market based pricing and market based tax rates. Right? And then you add in the complexity of things like local pickup and delivery and shipping.

Carl: Shipping rates is fun. If we had my friend Patrick, that’s what he used to work on before he started the Woogo stores.

Zach: It’s an interesting thing.

Carl: Oh my God. Yeah, he was ripping his air out. And we’re in Canada. I’m bad, I don’t even know how many provinces we have, but we have a lot less than 50 states, I’ll tell you that much. So shipping rates between states, from state A to state B is maybe not the same from state C to state B. So it’s a hot mess.

Zach: Well, and taxes in the United States are interesting because there are some areas where, I believe it’s in Louisiana, that each parish can have a different tax rate.

Carl: Oh, I didn’t know that. But I love Louisiana because they have parishes and it’s very French, so I love it.

Zach: And there are hundreds of parishes that you potentially need a different tax rate for, and that’s why companies like TaxJar and Avalara exist, because these are complex problems. Right? And so e-commerce, in and of itself, WooCommerce, especially in the context of what we’re talking about, these products handle very complex data, very complex information, and they have to handle it for every possible scenario.

And so we see the WooCommerce team moving toward custom order tables, which we’ve talked about before. We see the need for flattening some of these data types away from the posts table in order to improve overall performance. And some of these things are just now beginning to be tackled by the WooCommerce core team. And hosts have been pushing for this for a long time. When we were first working with Liquid Web, when I founded my previous agency, we were working on the custom order table plugin. That was the first project we did with them, was working on custom order tables, and then working on some crazy, big, elastic stuff that we were trying to make work.

Those were our first projects with them, trying to make WooCommerce faster by implementing new things. And we were running into the problem that they outlined, in this new post they released today, about high availability WordPress hosting, and talking about high performance order storage. So one of the things they talk about, and I know we want to keep some of this stuff for another one of these podcast episodes, but one of the things that they’re talking about is that there’s this overhead that they’re going to keep synchronization so that every transaction is synchronized between both the current post and post meta model of storage and the new data store, which is the WC orders table, and the related tables for order addresses, operational data and order meta. The reason why they say that this whole synchronization thing has to happen is because there are a number of plugins that still aren’t using the CRUD layer that was introduced in WooCommerce 3.0 in 2017.

So the CRUD layer was released in WooCommerce 2.7. The first post about it was October 27th, 2016. For those of you who don’t know, CRUD stands for create, read, update and delete, or create, retrieve, update and delete depending on who you talk to. They implemented these CRUD classes, they’re abstracts that abstract away how WooCommerce interacts with data stores for products, customers, orders, order items and coupons. So since 2016, we’ve been capable, and since release in 2017, we’ve had the code available to implement custom data stores for all five of those data types in WooCommerce. The problem has been that numerous plugin developers still find it easier to interact directly with the post meta table than to use the CRUD classes that were created to avoid the problem that’s being caused by interacting directly with the post meta table.

If you’re interacting directly with post meta and data moves out of post meta, your plugin will break. If you use the CRUD classes and data moves out of the post meta table, your plugin will continue to work. It’s the whole reason they’re there. And if you’re not using the CRUD operations, the REST API uses them already. The admin and WooCommerce uses them. There’s a whole bunch of features that use these CRUD classes. If your plugin is not using them, you are breaking the capability for WooCommerce to move forward into custom tables. I’m just going to be blunt about it.

Carl: There you go. You’ve been shamed. You’ve been shamed.

Zach: You are stopping our forward progress as a platform. So if you’re plugin developer, you’re building commerce plugins, make sure you’re using the CRUD classes. If you need help, reach out. Happy to talk to you about how they work, and what they do, and where the documentation for them are. But they’ve been around for a while now and we should be using them. So I’m going to get off my soapbox now.

Carl: That’s funny.

Thanks to our Pod Friends Captcha 4WP and Mindsize

Carl: There’s a reason why the hosts are locking it down. Right? Because it’s hard, if it’s not clear at this point in our conversation, e-commerce is hard. What do I want to say? I’m having a brain fart here, but I don’t envy, yes, that’s it, I don’t envy anybody building an e-commerce platform because it’s very hard. But at the same time, if you want to be able to scale it, you need some form of control so you can manage those variables, because there’s so many of them. So that’s why you see these platforms having, with GoDaddy, they’re built on top of SkyVerge stuff because it’s just like, okay, they’re a known quantity, we can just build around that, and we know that’ll scale and we have control over it.

So that’s another thing too, when I’m thinking about these hosted platforms, if you hosted Gravity Forms. So if you just use Gravity Forms on a SaaS platform, Gravity Forms can do the work of optimizing their code themselves. They have the priorities in place more than somebody else would have. So there’s an incentive structure too there, where it’s a bit harder for WooCommerce hosting. I know from having talked with Tom Finelli, WooCommerce it would behoove WooCommerce to hire a DBA, just flat out, it would behoove them to have a database administrator. That’s what DBA stands for. Just somebody that’s an expert about databases and queries and things like that, and can be like, Okay, you can do this better. We have to rethink this and things like that, because that is an important job of WooCommerce, a scaling, and just WooCommerce performance in general.

This entire podcast started because we just did one podcast on performance. Database performance is very important for an e-commerce platform. So having somebody internally that’s more focused on that, and making sure that, that progresses as well would be important. But it’s hard when you’re on the outside, you’re trying to make it work from the outside and you don’t have control as much on the priorities. If you’re a product, if you’re like Syed with EDD or you’re like your Carl with Gravity Forms, you can set those priorities. So there’s an advantage to that as well when you own the platform that people are building on, you can set those priorities when you’re trying to host them and scale them.

Zach: Yeah, we’re talking a lot about what should be done, but let’s talk a little bit about what has been done that’s unique in the WooCommerce space. So one of the conversations that I’ve been having a lot lately is about a marketplace for WooCommerce or WordPress plugins in general. We have a marketplace for WooCommerce extensions, but we have no marketplace for WordPress plugins.

We have the free repository, the plugin repository, but nothing that allows selling WordPress plugins. And so all of these ecosystem plugins are creating their own marketplaces. They’re creating their own place where people can buy things that extend their product, or we have the issue with everything being an island. So you have a plugin like Gravity Forms that can’t resell everything. They can’t resell everything that everybody makes that works with Gravity Forms. So there’s no real way to get everything Gravity Forms can do with all third party extensions to it in one place. Right?

WooCommerce has done a really good job of consolidating a marketplace for extensions for their product, and they have gotten really good about being more inclusive in that marketplace than they used to be. It used to take a lot to get into that marketplace, because they were trying to make sure that they had quality over quantity at the time. And it’s come to a point now where there’s definitely a need for more quantity than just quality. And I’m not saying the new things being added aren’t quality, I’m just saying that quantity has become the goal now, let more people in. Right? And they’ve done a great job of that.

Carl: Yeah, I agree. The good thing is when you have a big platform like WordPress, there’s different ways to approach a problem and they all come with pros and cons, and it’s really up to the customer to decide really what is the best approach.

Zach: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And I think that there are quite a few ecosystems that would do well to have more of a marketplace around them.

Carl: Yeah, I think you will see more of it, at least that’s where I wanted this show a bit to go towards, is this idea that the first decade of WordPress was a lot about hosting just content sites. But I think what’s coming up next is a lot of these products and applications. It’s how do we host those? How do we package those? How do we sell them in a good way? Because what I’m finding is that, I think, in general for hosting, it’s generally solved. Like I said, it’s generally solved. Most people that are worried about hosting, they’re not worried about their site going down generally anymore. They’re just like, is the support good? Is the price good? Do I get a good price to quality ratio? And if you’re getting a lot of traffic, sure. You’re worried about whether you’re going to get enough traffic, but otherwise there’s nothing too much to differentiate yourself on anymore.

Zach: Absolutely. It looks like Till just joined us. I don’t think we’ve ever had anybody join mid episode before, so we’ll have to see how this works.

Carl: No, this is a first.

Till: Yeah, I like to be a pioneer.

Zach: We know that already.

Carl: We’ve talked for the last 40 minutes, so that means you need to talk for the last 20.

Zach: Yeah, we’re done now. It’s all until now. You have no context of what we’ve been talking about but go. Just the exhale there was perfect. So we’ve been talking about the evolution of hosting and how hosting is starting to be more product focused rather than just WordPress focused. So the advent of WooCommerce specific hosting and the possibility of other product led hosting in the future for things like EDD, or Gravity Forms, or any of these other larger ecosystem plugins.

Carl: Yeah, LearnDash Cloud.

Till: Yeah, I hear a lot of this and there’s a lot of things in the works. It’s working with all these hosting companies for Object Cache Pro. I hear a lot of product focused hosting products being in the works with a lot of people. Not only the hosting companies, also actual product owners or product creators. Companies who make products who then want to go into the hosting market, and are looking for how can we host this and actually focus on, obviously can’t talk about any names, but if you have something really difficult, any community or LMS focused sites, sometimes the hosting requirements are so niche or so specialized that they actually want to create their own hosting offerings. Plus they already have the customer base that they’re selling to or marketing to. I think the market is going shift quite a bit in the future.

Carl: Or SaaSify your offering, basically. That was the example with Gravity Forms. Let’s say Gravity Forms wanted to compete with Typeform, for example. That’s what keeps me going, basically I think EMiR is really well positioned for that because some of my customers, that’s literally what they’re building. They’re building products on top of WordPress, but you don’t really see that it’s WordPress. It’s really WordPress, the application and the-

One’s in beta right now, so I’m looking forward to when it launches and I can talk about it. But this idea, you have WordPress and maybe just even WordPress is just as an API. So could just be a [inaudible 00:43:02] or just a REST API, and then you have something headless, basically, built on top of that. So you have Next JS Vercel hosting the front end and it’s still a product, it’s still WordPress. So we’re getting closer to Matt saying WordPress was supposed to be WordPress OS, operating system. So we’re getting closer to that.

Till: I don’t know about that. That’s a long gap between OS and where WordPress is right now.

Carl: Yes. It’s a platform. It’s an application framework, if you want. As two of us that use Laravel pretty extensively, I think I’d rather use Laravel than build on top of WordPress. But it’s possible. That’s a lot of what I did early on, even a decade ago, was use WordPress to build very complex… And that’s what basically those large plugins are. LearnDash is more of an application than a CMS. Some of these plugins are basically full blown applications. They just run in WordPress.

Till: Buddy Boss is another good one. It’s massive.

Zach: Yeah. That it is. And OptinMonster was an interesting story. When they rebuilt OptinMonster, the team at Awesome Motive built it on top of WordPress. Right? So not a plugin for WordPress, they built the actual SaaS on WordPress, and I don’t know if it’s still running.

Carl: Yeah, that’s what Syed was talking about in the thread we will link.

Zach: Yeah, I was going to say, I don’t know if it’s still running that way.

Till: They still use Object Cache Pro on optinmonster.com for their API. So I assume so

Carl: Yeah, as far as I know, it’s still basically WordPress that’s running that product.

Zach: Yeah, it’s just a gigantic… That’s crazy to me. It’s awesome. But it’s crazy to me that, that’s been built on top of WordPress. Right?

Carl: The craziest thing, and I’m sure Till agrees, they went and they decided, you know what? We’re going to rebuild it. We’re going to use WordPress. I was just like, Oh my goodness.

Till: Who was in the room present? Yeah, I’d like to hear the detail.

Carl: I’d love to be a fly on the wall where they debated that. I was just like, yeah, how much trouble could it be?

Zach: Yeah, it’s very interesting to think about building a large SaaS product on top of WordPress. Right?

Carl: But that’s what’s coming. Because, like I said, all the content stuff is generally well solved and then they’re competing with Wix and Squarespace, but really it’s the full site editor. But in terms, especially for hosting and stuff like that, they’re focused on what’s next. How do we expand our markets? What are the ways? Some of them are looking to host. If you’re Pantheon, for example, you hosted Drupal, you got into WordPress. Kinsta is a good example. Kinsta is branching out into hosting databases and web servers, and not necessarily just WordPress. They’re going more of the cloud route, more of a digital ocean route versus dedicated products around WordPress. But that’s where everybody’s going. They’re like, Okay, how can we diversify our market?

Till: And I also noticed that a lot of hosting companies are starting to do partnerships instead of everything gets bought up, which is still happening, but there’s more Patch Stack, I think, Oliver is a really good example, who doesn’t want to sell, doesn’t have to sell, who’s got a sweet product. And all the hosting companies are slowly partnering up with them because it provides a really valuable service on top of their WordPress specific hosting product. Plus like WordPress plus, here’s the three four essential you always want, your performance, your security, and I assume there’s three other categories that I don’t care about, but they’re probably important for most people, that are included. Maybe it’s the page builders. I don’t know what the other categories are, but I often find that you always want to cover at least security and performance.

Carl: For sure.

Till: I like the partnership model growing without everybody being bought out. I really like seeing this.

Carl: That’s what I’m trying to do, but we’ll see. But it’s a different type of partnership.

Till: With what?

Carl: Well, just with plugins, people. Because I don’t want to do hosting, I just want to partner with people that want to offer scalable, the serverless stuff.

Till: So Ymir has a platform that people can leverage.

Carl: Yeah. WP Cloud is really the closest thing right now, Till.

Till: Which is extremely locked down. You have zero freedom of what’s running. You just get a static box and you can do user and PHP stuff. But that’s it. Which is, if you want to build large scale applications or anything custom, sometimes you need a specific PHP extension to do international date… Whatever it is. I can’t come up with an example here.

Carl: No, that’s a good one. There’s definitely stuff. For example, something may not come with Imagick. So if you wanted an image manipulation extension, there’s a bunch of things that having it locked down that is a detriment, for sure.

Till: I think it’s going to bite them in the ass.

Zach: It’s a double edged sword. Right? Because you want to limit what people can do in order to reduce the support burden, in order to offer a lower cost product. But at the same time, the more you restrict, the more people complain and don’t like your product. Right? So Cloudways for example, you don’t get root access, you have an application and a master user, you don’t get root. Why? Because it would increase the support burden if you could just do whatever you want. Right? So in order to keep costs low for support and focus, support on only the things that they should have to worry about, things are a bit locked down. I think that’s a good balance. But it depends on your use case.

Carl: Yeah, I’m struggling to see how I’m going to balance that myself. I think it’s just going to be higher… The way I want it is just having partnerships with agencies or whatnot that can just do the more bespoke things that you want, or the optimization. Because right now, have one customer, I’m just basically auditing their… That’s why large platforms like ALTUS or VIP do code audits too before. It’s very complex because there’s so many moving parts and people can install whatever they want. You just have to make trade offs around how you want to support that.

Zach: Well, and that’s a big part of the cost involved with VIP or with ALTUS as well, is just that code review process. It’s not cheap. Right? So that’s why those products cost what they do, because that entire review process takes time, effort, engineers, and it’s all to make sure that you are better in the long run for it. But it does increase the cost. Right? So when you’re looking to do things that are extremely complex and custom, I expect your cost of hosting to go up proportionally to how custom it is. That’s where I’m at, or how I feel things be. Your costs should be reflected based on how much effort it takes to keep things running.

Till: The trade off between quality of support and flexibility on your server. I can see that. Makes sense. Carl and I had many, many long text conversations about this, because there’s a Finnish made product called Laravel Vapor that could host my API, and it would do everything I wanted. I don’t think there was any really big downside. There was some weird technical decisions, but I could probably look over them. However, they had full access to my AWS account or the AWS account, and to me that is like I don’t want to expose all my customer data to the support team. And of course what are the chances that someone would log in? It’s a lot of hurdles that they have to jump through, create new accounts.

Carl: But that’s also a thing I’m worried about, because basically EMiR is Laravel Vapor. Some people worry about that.

Till: And some don’t. Yeah.

Carl: I think there’s ways around. There’s different technologies. Github had the same problem. Right? You could sell on-prem. Right? They self-host the thing. I call those future call problems. I have 20 something customers, if you’re worried about me giving access… At least I take a lot of precautions. I’m sure they do two on the Laravel side, but credentials are encrypted at REST and it’s a different encryption key than the application key and things like that. Because I take that stuff quite seriously. But yes, realistically you could create it without and just choose very specific permissions. It’s just easier to just do the full access. But eventually I could just audit what you actually need and then just be like, okay, you need to add these 20 roles and you’ll be good.

Zach: So we are coming up on an hour here, so I think we should start to wrap up and save some of this topic for later. I’m sure there’s more we can talk about here. Maybe in the future we can have a guest on that is running one of these more specialized WooCommerce hosting platforms, and talk with them about what they’re doing, and what makes them unique.

Carl: What keeps them up at night. That’s what I’m interested in.

Zach: Yeah, what keeps them up at night is always an interesting topic too. Till I’m glad we were able to have you join here.

Till: Gentlemen, it was a pleasure seeing you.

Carl: Yeah.

Zach: Likewise. And yeah, I’m glad we’re able to do this every month. Bob, thank you as always for giving us this platform in which to be ourselves.

Carl: Yeah, thanks Bob.

Zach: But thank you everybody who listens for listening to us talk about all of these technical thoughts that we have. If you’re getting value out of this, please let us know. If you want to hear about certain subjects or topics in the WooCommerce space and development, please let us know as well. And Bob will link to how to get in touch with us about those things in the show notes. So thank you both for being here. Carl, Till it’s been great. And we’ll see you next time.

Till: Have a good day.

Carl: Yeah, see you next time.