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I have been thinking a lot lately about our hosting business at Pleth. We never have really fit into our industry very well because our philosophy is completely different than 90% of the hosting companies in business today. Most web hosting companies offer low-cost hosting plans with very few bells and whistles so they can keep their costs down and undercut their competitors prices. Services like DNS Management, Website & Database Backups, Storage, and bandwidth are often sold separately as add-on items because they have little or no profit margin in their hosting rates.
My partners and I have never wanted to take our hosting business in that direction, primarily because the market is saturated already with companies trying to do exactly that. Another reason we haven’t went that route is because it’s just not our style. We see ourselves as niche hosting providers with a unique perspective in that we are also developers. We cater to a large population of clients that could care less about web hosting, they just know they need it for their website to stay online, and they will pay extra to have someone else worry with all of the technical issues surrounding it.
Our business philosophy when it comes to our hosting business has always been to add value to our infrastructure as opposed to looking for ways to cut corners and reduce overhead. Since we started we have established our NOC (network operating center) in Dallas, as well as an alternate location in Houston. We have also put a lot of thought into things like Bandwidth, Storage, Virtualization, and Automation. We also have system monitoring in place as well as automated backups that will allow us to quickly restore any of our clients data that might have become lost or corrupt. In addition to our robust backup system, we also have the industry’s leading control panel software, Plesk, running on our shared servers for our managed hosting clients. Our server admin, Matt Critcher, has also devoted countless hours configuring our security solution, mod_security, to fight off security threats.
Before I go any further, I should probably say that we have done quite well with our hosting business. I would venture to say that we have several hundred hosted domains running at any given time and our business continues to grow leaps and bounds despite the fact that we haven’t ever spent one penny on advertising campaigns, etc. Our entire business has grown via word of mouth. I have often wondered what our business would be like now had we promoted ourselves, but I honestly don’t see how we could bring on many more projects than we are handling currently.
The past few days I started thinking back to this past weekend’s Wordcamp Fayetteville where I met a lot of people who work with wordpress on a daily basis, and that utilize a lot of premium solutions, such as premium themes and plugins. Something I noticed at the conference was that the vast majority of people there were developers and bloggers who have their website(s) hosted by a third party provider. This got me to thinking about premium wordpress hosting. Granted, not everyone would be interested in paying for hosting their blog when they can get it for free or next to it from a handful of providers in the industry, but here’s what I keep coming back to. The days of the Mommy Blogger sharing recipes and baby photos are behind us, I know several women right now who are actually bringing in a substantial income from their blogs, the same goes for men too. My thoughts are that if someone has a blog that is bringing them $10,000 monthly in revenue, then they probably have already given some thought as to what they would do if the server their website is hosted on crashed. I think this is the target market for this premium offering.
In my mind, premium wordpress hosting not only consists of web storage for your database and files, but it also includes disaster recovery / backup solutions built in w/out having to purchase add-ons. Premium Wordpress hosting also includes a secure environment made possible via our ever changing security protocols and configuration. One thing that I also feel is very important is redundancy and failover connectivity, for example, our network has 19+ backbone providers.
Last night I started mocking up a child theme for Genesis / Studiopress that would be a clean, simple, and very user friendly landing page of sorts to promote this premium offering. I decided to use the enterprise child theme as my starting point for the project and somehow in between catching up on client emails and answering the telephone, I have managed to get the vast majority of the design & layout coded. Below you will find a screenshot of the home page.
My initial plan was to just add a page to our existing corporate website, which runs a different CMS than Wordpress so after talking w/ a few people I had discussed this with earlier, I decided to create a small simple landing page site w/ details about this premium solution. As of right now, I have no idea as to when this site will come online, it’s going to be a very basic site w/ only a few pages outlining our service offering but it’s likely going to take me several weeks to put together all of the content together given my current workload so stay tuned to this blog for more info on this project…
If you are interested in Premium Wordpress Hosting, don’t hesitate to drop us a line…
Your Thoughts on Wordpress?
I pretty much develop all of my clients websites these days using wordpress as the backend content management system unless there are some really far out project requirements that I don’t see wordpress as a good fit for. Honestly I don’t hear many project requirements these days that won’t work inside of wordpress, especially given the number of plugins that are available.
In fact, did you know that you can now deploy a plugin that will more or less turn your wordpress installation into an auction website like eBay? I was just testing a plugin for a friend a few days ago that does exactly that, and it’s pretty robust too!
This past week I have been working on a project involving wordpress 3.0 and the studiopress genesis theme framework and I have been amazed at just how much more control the end user, or client, is going to have once this version is released. Granted, there is a slight learning curve for developers when it comes to learning everything that is new w/ 3.0, not to mention how genesis from studiopress operates, but once we all get it, lookout!
For instance, I was wrestling today with a header issue on a client project and ran across Nathan Rice’s Genesis Simple Hooks Plugin, compliments of Brent Passmore, this plugin alone extends wordpress further than it’s ever been pushed by allowing the end user, or client, to input content – both shortcodes and php code, into one of the many hooks located on a websites theme. All of this from inside the user-friendly dashboard of Wordpress. Incredible. There is also the PODS CMS plugin for handling different content types and extending the wordpress custom fields option. Is there really anything you can’t push wordpress to do these days?
I know that I have a lot of developers that read my blog so I thought I would invite everyone in for a discussion on this topic, here are a few starting points:
- Do you currently use wordpress exclusively for projects?
- What are your thoughts on wordpress vs the other open source solutions?
- What content management solutions do you offer your clients?
- How much of a factor is wordpress’ name recognition becoming?
- What are some of your favorite wordpress plugins / themes?
- What are some of your likes / dislikes about wordpress?
Wordcamp Fayetteville #WCFay
I don’t know how this one slipped by me but there is a Wordcamp coming to Fayetteville at the Fayetteville Town Center on May 29th and 30th. I was talking to Brent Passmore tonight on Twitter and he filled me in and I immediately registered online. If you are a wordpress guru in the Central Arkansas area you should definitely think about heading up for the conference. I think registration is like $30 if you signup before May 1st and after that date it goes up to $40. Definitely worth the haul if you are into Wordpress.
There will also be an ‘unconference’ day Sunday at The New Design School. If you are heading that direction be sure to give me a heads up so we can try to hook up and head down to Dixon Street the night before…There are two tracks for the conference, one for developers and the other for bloggers, here’s a little more information:
You can attend any session you want during the seven 45-minute blocks, but you might want to decide which track better serves your educational and developmental goal for the conference.
- Blogger track: We want to teach people who’ve never blogged before, up to intermediate level, how to use this free tool known as WordPress to their advantage. Whether you’re a citizen journalist, a small business owner, educator or nonprofit executive, we can help you learn to get your message out into the Interwebs.
- Developer track: This is for advanced WordPress users, theme designers, plugin creators or those who just like to get dirty with WordPress code. We are our own best resource so lets teach one another.
Church Websites: Wordpress.org & .com
My partners and I are planning on adding Church Website Development and hosting to our list of services in the next year or so so I have been doing a lot of research on the topic. Our solution is going to be built on the wordpress framework so when I found this post on Church Blogger about the differences between the two wordpress services and the advantages I figured I should post it here for reference: (I should probably state for the record that it is my opinion that Church Websites should be hosted on their own domain and developed by an organization like Pleth Networks, LLC unless the church has an IT staff or group of volunteers that are extremely web saavy, and/or comfortable with Wordpress’s hosted solution.)
This post clarifies this issue for any who do not know the difference between wordpress.com and wordpress.org.
Wordpress is a PHP/MySql based content management system that you can download and install on your server. It is hosted at wordpress.org. At this site, there is a support forum to help you solve problems that you are having.
But at wordpress.com you can obtain a free blog which is powered by wordpress but which is not customisable to any level. You can choose from a variety of themes, but even after paying a fee you can only change the CSS.
Wordpress.com is good cheap option to get you started, but churches should have their websites hosted elsewhere where they can customise it. But most importantly, so they can get a custom domain… www.mychurch.org.uk, rather that mychurch.wordpress.com
The church website that has been set up uses the wordpress code on its own site wordpress software, rather than being hosted on wordpress.com.
Update: wordpress.com now allows sites hosted to pay and use their own domain so one of the points above is not so relevant. However, they can only register .com domain names and no others, which is a bit of a problem for UK based charitable organisations.
Source: Wordpress.org vs. Wordpress.com « Church website and blog ideas
