Today in Digital Marketing - SPECIAL: How WPX.net Can Benefit Marketers

Starting point is 00:00:00 One of the most important factors in digital marketing is your home base, your brand's website. You need it to be stable for consumers and fast for the search engines. After all, a slow website can tank your Google ranking. Many brands use WordPress as their CMS of choice. And for those of you who do, today's special might be of interest to you. Terry Kyle is the co-founder and CEO of WPX.net, one of the world's fastest WordPress hosting companies. And as part of a paid partnership with this podcast, Terry has joined me to chat about how WPX is different and how those differences

Starting point is 00:00:37 benefit marketers. But Terry, I want to start with the why. Why should a digital marketer care about the web hosting they're choosing? It's a good question. And I think when you think about any commercial enterprise or operation, the infrastructure that supports it's really important. So for example, one way I kind of describe web hosting, it's a little bit like electricity for your corner shop. So you want to be with a stable, professional, consistent provider of that electricity. So when it comes to your presence online, you need a very fast provider, because obviously, we're all a bit more impatient now. And we want those web websites webpages to load very, very quickly. And that's been a huge focus of us for almost the entirety of our existence as a company.

Starting point is 00:01:32 But also you need, obviously, uptime, stability, and you need great support. And, for instance, one of the things that we have done at WPX is, and we introduced this many years ago, we over-resourced live chat support. And we use live chatting independent software and we average under 30 seconds response time for any support question. Is that by chat or by email or by phone? We don't offer phone, but all the others are there, but we focus heavily on live chat.

Starting point is 00:02:03 So we average under 30 seconds there, and that's usually by an agent who can resolve the problem for you without escalation. So it's one thing for it to be fast, but obviously it needs to be good as well and to get the problem resolved for you. So I think if you're a marketer in a way, and I actually come from, I'm kind of the marketer in the company. I come from that non-techie entrepreneurial background, but we have a ton of tech people who do all that stuff. They're way clever at that stuff than me. You kind of want to get on with running your business, growing your business, trying things out, you know, research, new products, new services, all of that testing.

Starting point is 00:02:46 And you don't want to kind of be bogged down too much on technical stuff and having to become a bit of a systems administrator and learning too much of that. And we kind of pride ourselves on being built for non-technical, solo, entrepreneurial type, small agencies and that sort of commercial operation. So we try to sort of de-technologize web hosting, which can be pretty complicated, basically so that our customers can just get on with running their business, running their marketing, and doing all of that. There are in sort of the world of web hosting services,

Starting point is 00:03:25 companies that do everything, not often well. And then there are companies that choose to specialize in a particular platform, WordPress being the most popular, I think, of the specialties. Which one are you? So at the very beginning, back in 2013, when we were building WPX, I had a different name back then. That's another story. We looked around and because I had been using web hosts since about 1998, somewhere around

Starting point is 00:03:56 there, and the web looked a little bit different back in 1998, Todd. Hard to believe, I know, but it was a bit different back then. We settled on WordPress was kind of the obvious no-brainer one. And we also had the philosophy that the problem with being an all things to all people is that you can't specialize and really deep dive into that and execute at a very high quality level. And it's a little bit like if you look at something like decathlon athletes in the Olympics, they may be super strong in one or two areas, but there are others where they're not that great. And they, you know, they're sort of generalists. We never wanted to be that. And we've always just focused on WordPress. Obviously, it's a huge platform.

Starting point is 00:04:46 And we just every year add more and more kind of expertise and speed, you know, optimizations and things like that. And I think when you spread yourself across too many areas, that's very, very difficult to execute on. You know, one of the challenges, I think, also with a lot of the sort of the larger providers, perhaps the most well-known one there, and you touched on it earlier when it comes to support, is that support is so critical. Because when a website goes down, unless you have, you know, a staff of database experts, it's difficult to sort of know what happens. And I don't know how many times where I've just sort of been sitting refreshing our

Starting point is 00:05:25 agency's website and it's been down and i have no idea where to turn to that's why i think it's really important that and it sounds like you have this where the people who are at the other end of that chat session or that email exchange actually know wordpress like actually know the software you're trying to run as opposed to just kind of going through a scripted escalation checklist. And one of the things we brought in about five years ago, because it always struck me as very odd with web hosting, was that if you had a problem, you went to support, they would send you a link to this very complex technical article, and then expect you to understand it and apply the solution and i always found this really bizarre and it's a little bit like if you take your toyota down to

Starting point is 00:06:11 the toyota dealer and you've got an engine problem and the mechanic throws you the manual and says it's in chapter six just go and read that and fix your car and you're going dude i'm a i'm a surfer or a chef or whatever i I know nothing about engines. So, we kind of introduced this thing called a fixed-for-you guarantee. And if you look at most of our reviews, for example, on Trustpilot, we have over 2,000 reviews there. Almost all of them talk about this thing that we introduced. Now it's kind of normal practice in our DNA, which is if your site goes down and you approach us, we will fix it for you fast and free.

Starting point is 00:06:52 Because typically we, our guys can kind of troubleshoot the problem, diagnose it very, very quickly. And probably within, you know, a couple of minutes, five minutes, 10 minutes, they'll have the site back up and working. Something's gone wrong with an updated plug-in or something like that if you want a technical article we can send you a link we have all of those but most people we find don't want that all they really want like a broken down car and you call the roadside mechanic guy is just to get

Starting point is 00:07:23 your car working again and get operational. So that's a pretty big difference with us as well, I think. It's funny that we're having this conversation because not even a month or two ago, I left the hosting platform that I had been using for years and years, Bluehost, because they're terrible. Like they're just bad.

Starting point is 00:07:42 Now they're cheap, but I mean, you get what you pay for. And part of my frustration with them was that they had no firewalls. They had no security that was protecting my sites because WordPress is a huge target by hackers. They have scripts that just assault your login pages, you know, 24-7. WordPress is always—WordPress itself as a product is great, but it is a big target out there for a lot of people that want to do damage. And so Bluehost did not seem to do any sort of protection except for a paid service that they sold. And what they did was they detected that,

Starting point is 00:08:16 you know, there was some sort of SQL injection or something that had happened to my database and they would shut my site off with no warning. And then I would call them and I'd say, dudes, what's with my site? And they'd say, well, you need to have some site-secure product that they sold, which was SiteLock. That's right, which I did not want. It felt very, I don't know, I'm not a lawyer.

Starting point is 00:08:42 I don't think extortion was what they were doing, but it certainly didn't feel good. Can you talk about the levels of protection that you have for your client sites? host does at their end. So we have a dedicated SecOps team who specialize in all of this. And it's always a kind of a moving target. So you've got to be constantly initiating, innovating, keeping everything up to date. And we definitely do that from our end. But also part of the problem is, and I remember one specific customer we had who had over 200 active plugins on his site, 200, which was a record. So then he came to us complaining about speed issues. And we said, dude, that's the least of your problems. Because part of the issue with security, Todd,

Starting point is 00:09:39 is that even if your plugins are up to date, the actual software company or developers may not yet be aware of a vulnerability in their up-to-date version. Then we've seen this with Intel had the same issue with that the Spectre and Meltdown bugs that were there for ages, decades possibly, you know huge vulnerabilities that were uncovered by other people, maybe Google, I think, from memory. So obviously, the site owner needs to run, in my view, kind of a minimal plugin setup. And we all hoard plugins. We all have too many. We try them out, but we never delete them,

Starting point is 00:10:20 deactivate them, and all of that. And probably most of them we're not actually using, but we just kind of keep hoarding them over time. So at the very minimum, you can set your plugins to auto-update. Obviously, you need strong password protection. We use Lightspeed, and that has capture facility on the login page as it blocks a ton of attacks there. So we are super conscious of that security. And one of the things that does set us apart as well in our SecOps team is we remove malware for free for customers. So companies like Bluehost use SiteLock. I think that's a couple of hundred

Starting point is 00:11:01 bucks a year or something. It's quite expensive, kind of doubles or triples your hosting costs. Other companies expect you to get a subscription with a provider like Securi, which is owned by GoDaddy, which is $200 a year for the base plan per website for cleanup. So if you've got like three or four websites and you're covering all of them, it's getting mega expensive. For years now, we have offered free malware removal. Quite a few hosts give you the detection, but not the removal. And we don't have any, even on bandwidth over usage, we don't have any automatic shutoffs because we have huge capacity. We have our own content delivery network, a custom one that we built for us. We can handle a huge amount of bandwidth overage, but the customer will get an email from us saying, dude, what's going on here?

Starting point is 00:11:58 They might have had a launch or something like that, a huge spike, but we don't have any auto shutoffs. And when I originally co-founded WPX, that was one of my pain points, things I was really annoyed about, those auto shutoffs, where you're promised kind of unlimited bandwidth and unlimited resources or whatever, but suddenly you've exceeded it, usually while you're asleep during a launch and your site went down and, you know, it's a bit of a crisis. So malware removal security is also obviously a really high priority for us and sort of ongoing education to our user base about what they also need to do from their side. Part of the other structure as well for web hosting is caching, content delivery networks, and so on. Do you have those? Do you use those? Where are your servers located? Give me the part of your system that exists between the click.

Starting point is 00:12:57 Yeah. So we have our own content delivery network. We've had that for several years, which I think the last time I checked was at 26 endpoints, but it might be 30-ish now. The guys have been adding more. We do use a lot of caching in that. And some people are critical of that. I've no idea why, because caching just makes sense. If you kind of apply that Pareto 80-20 principle You'll just have a few pages on each website that get most of the traffic and these are the ones that are cached on a CDN and that means wherever the The visitor is coming from whether it's South Africa or New Zealand or Germany Scotland whatever they are going to get Lightning fast load time from that cached pages on the CDN

Starting point is 00:13:48 network around the world so caching to me really makes sense and actually those pages that get no traffic don't need to be cached because almost nobody goes there anyway so we use W3 total cache is a plugin we've been using for a long time, but we're actually developing our own, which will work with our own CDN. But CDN, if you have a global audience, that's essential in your niche. If you're a local website, like a local restaurant in Vancouver or Toronto or whatever, not relevant because your traffic is local. So the service probably in Toronto or Vancouver, it'll load quick pretty much even on older service probably.

Starting point is 00:14:33 If you're in a niche that has a global reach like learning guitar or whatever it might be, you probably want your visitors from all over the world to have kind of a very, very fast user experience on your site. You need that CDN for that. Sometimes the challenge with caches, server-based caches, is that they do a great job unless you're actively working on the site. If you're tweaking pages here and there, and then you go to reload, your changes aren't there. So is there an easy way in your backend to just reset the cache to say, look, I've been making some changes. I want to clear it out right away and start seeing the new versions. That's not always easy for some

Starting point is 00:15:12 providers. I know. We have an empty cache button there in the backend panel for users. You can just have that open while you're doing your changes to your site, adding images, changing a bit of text here or there or whatever. And you can just empty the cache instantly to see the current version. I have to say that as tiny and as nerdy technical as that may sound to people listening, having a single button that you can press that empties the cache so that you can see the changes you've made on your site is actually really important. Agree. Totally agree. You might make a change and it looks awful or the image is the wrong size or whatever.

Starting point is 00:15:50 And suddenly you're, oh my God, I need to fix that or whatever. Then you're waiting, waiting. Your browser is caching it as well. That's the thing. There are all these different levels of caching going on. There are plugins that people slap on top. So if you've got a server slap on top, you know, so if you've got a server-based cache like you have, then someone may have, you know, Hummingbird or

Starting point is 00:16:09 some other plugin-based cache and the browser is caching. So yeah, you've got three levels to clear, which can be convoluted. So that single button I think is great to have. How does your pricing work? We actually haven't changed our pricing since 2013 when we started. And we had the brilliant, in inverted commas, idea of charging the same price as WP Engine, who we viewed as our main competitor at that time, who were $24.99 on their base plan. But instead of that's for one site with them, we had it with five sites for us. So we wanted to kind of multiply the value there. So $24.99 a month, or it's about $20 a month if you go annual with a discount there for five sites. And then there are two other plans, 15 sites for $50, 35 sites for $100. And we've never changed that.

Starting point is 00:17:06 Obviously, over time, our costs have gone up, salaries have gone up, inflation, blah, blah, blah. But we work in a very price-sensitive industry and you have your blue hosts and whoever constantly pumping out the $3 a month hosting ads out there. So we're conscious of that. But we feel for the blend of performance and support quality that we offer, we think that's a very fair price. Back to the nerd stuff for a moment. Often one of the things that happens with WordPress hosts is

Starting point is 00:17:40 that you get access to WordPress, you get access to your back end, but if you need to do things like get into the actual weeds of the database or FTP files around, some providers, and we used to be a WP Engine client, and I believe they were one of them, where you did not have access to that because I guess they, I don't know why. Do you provide your customers access to the databases, to tools like phpMyAdmin, to FTP, to a file manager? Yeah, we have all of those. You can use FileZilla.

Starting point is 00:18:14 You can use our own file manager, which is a bit out of date, looks a bit too 2008 at the moment. They all do, don't they? Yeah, I don't know why. But by the end of this year, it'll look much prettier and work faster. But you can do all of those things in our backend or what I've used myself when I've used FTP is just FileZilla, for example, and we have all the instructions on how to use FileZilla if you want to do that.

Starting point is 00:18:42 And just to put the point on this, can I use PHP My Admin? Yes, yes, you can. It's in our backend. See, that's great. Yep. Yeah, yeah. I think people underestimate how important being able to get at that,

Starting point is 00:18:56 especially if you've got a developer working with you and so on. So anyway, sorry, I probably interrupted you. You mentioned that you were trying to sort of bring yourselves in line with and under some of the more premium prices. What are your actual price points? So we only have three plans for simplicity. Business plan is the base one, $24.99 monthly for five websites, $49.99 monthly for 15

Starting point is 00:19:21 website slots, or $99 a month on Elite, which is 35 website slots. And that's it. And that includes free malware removal? Yes. We don't have any service differentiation in our plans apart from the number of website slots and resources like RAM, for example. The memory for each of those plans is a bit different, of course. We have free migration within 24 hours on all of those from your other hosts. That's seven days a week. The free malware removal. We have free site speed optimization for core web vitals, score improvements. That's free across all plans as well.

Starting point is 00:20:08 One of the things we set up originally philosophically is we wanted to not have upsells. Actually, it's almost impossible to find any upsell on WPX. We have one or two, which are like, one is if 24-hour migration is too slow for you, it's the fastest in the industry. But if that's too slow, you can have one-hour migration. That's $98. Wait, one hour? No. One hour. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:20:39 But you've got to wait for DNS propagation as well. But the actual site will be moved. Yeah, no, I get that. But I'm thinking like, are you talking about migrating everything, including all of the WordPress databases and tables and the theme files and... Hopefully your site is not like 50 gigabytes in size. Sure, sure, sure, sure.

Starting point is 00:20:57 Because getting it off the old host can be pretty slow. But assuming it's kind of a relatively normal-ish site, we do have this one-hour migration facility for $98. The only other upsell, if you call it that, we have is if you change your domain during migration. So instead of going from, let's say you had toddsblog.com, but the new one was toddsamazingblog.com with a brand new domain uh we charge like 98 bucks for that because there's a lot of database editing and checking manual checking that has to be done for that otherwise sure and a lot of people unfortunately hard code you know image

Starting point is 00:21:39 urls and things like that into the files that that yeah, it's not always as simple. Yeah. You've been in this industry for, what, 15, 20 years now? So we started WPX back in December 2013, but I've sort of been a web entrepreneur since about 1998. So prior to 2013, I'd used almost every hosting company in the world at least twice. So I came at it, Todd, as what I call a customerpreneur. So I was a heavy user of a service and I thought it sucked pretty bad.

Starting point is 00:22:17 And I thought, hey, I can do this way better than these guys. So that was the big driving impulse behind creating WPX back in 2013. And it's worked pretty well. Is there anything that I haven't asked that you think is important to know? I think one thing about WPX is that we are still one of the last very, very few independent hosting companies. You have EIG, who own Bluehost. And you also have Silver Lake, the GoDaddy kind of group who have just kind of gobbled up almost every single hosting company out there. And if you look at

Starting point is 00:22:52 much of the feedback on what happened to those companies after takeovers, it's pretty horrific. And the significance for us with independence kind of has two dimensions to it. One is that we're completely bootstrapped with no VC money. So the two owners, myself and Georgi Petrov, we can decide to do whatever the hell we want, however unprofitable it is. So if we were part of EIG or Silver Lake, we would say, hey, we want to have our own CDN or we want to do fixed for you guarantee

Starting point is 00:23:25 where we fix customer sites instead of a knowledge-based article. And they would say, you're out of your mind. That's not profitable. Forget all that and just get back to work. So we can kind of do whatever we want, which we think is good for the company and even good for the team internally.

Starting point is 00:23:42 So like team building, we do crazy stuff like skydiving and bungee jumping from hot air balloons and all kinds of stupid dangerous stuff. But also as a company, we can choose to do, and we spend a lot of money on things that are not directly profitable, but we think will create a great customer experience. And that's really about building. It's playing that long game, building for the future. The other thing is that most of our customers also value independence and they're kind of attracted to getting out of corporate life or they want to become digital nomads or have more free time

Starting point is 00:24:24 and be location independent and financially independent and all of that. So we feel there's a nice synergy there because we're not corporate at all. If you saw our headquarters, our office, you'd know what I'm talking about. And that is very much in sync, I think, with our user base and what they want to do with their lives. Yeah, definitely. Well, Terry, thank you so much for your time. Terry Kyle is the co-founder

Starting point is 00:24:47 and CEO of WPX.net. You can get 25% off all WPX hosting plans for the first month at WPX.net today. I should mention WPX also has a rescue dog foundation called EveryDogMatters.eu, currently trying to fix the homeless rescue dog foundation called everydogmatters.eu, currently trying to fix the homeless rescue dog situation in Eastern Europe, improving the shelters, and so on. This has been a paid partnership with WPX.net.

Starting point is 00:25:15 Thanks for listening.

Today in Digital Marketing - SPECIAL: How WPX.net Can Benefit Marketers

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