- [Allie] Welcome everyone.
Welcome to technically the first WP AMA.
This is a weekly series
hosted by WP Buffs.
My name is Allie Nimmons.
I'm your host.
In case you don't know,
we round up your questions for a week,
and then get together
here, live, to answer them.
Questions are first come first serve.
We have questions
that are submitted online via our website,
www.wpbuffs.com/wp-ama-series,
so make sure to check there every week
and submit any questions
that you have for that speaker.
If you're just tuning in
and have questions yourself
that you didn't get to submit before,
please leave them in the chat.
And if we have time, we will
get to those at the end.
We also do a random giveaway
at the end of every episode.
This week we're giving away
one free item in the WP Buffs store.
So make sure you stay until the end
and you might be chosen.
This episode will be
available to watch on YouTube,
our YouTube channel,
and captions will be included
on that video as well,
if you would like them.
This week answering questions
about WordPress website hosting is
Christie Chirinos.
Hi Christie.
- Hi, I'm excited to be here
for the first official.
- I'm excited you're here, first official.
Christie is the product manager
for Managed WooCommerce at Liquid Web.
Did I get that right?
It's a lot of words.
- Yeah.
Cool (laughs).
And she'll be speaking at
our WP MRR virtual summit
at the end of the month,
at the end of September,
which is really exciting.
And she also happens to be
a very good friend of mine.
So let's get started with the questions.
We did have a I'll call
dry run on Wednesday
where we kind of started
with these questions.
So Christie has heard the first two,
but all of the other ones
after that are going to be a surprise.
So let's start with the first one,
which we're running right in
with a big philosophical question.
How can good web hosting
make the web better?
- I remember our big
philosophical question
from our practice on Wednesday,
and I'll answer it the exact same way.
I've had two days to think about it
and I don't think I've
changed my mind, right?
And I think that what's
interesting about web hosting is
that it is a product
in your WordPress website
stack that's required, right?
Like some people will buy premium themes.
Some people won't.
Some people will buy premium products,
some people won't.
Some people will buy maintenance plans,
some people won't.
But absolutely everyone
has to have web hosting.
That's why the big web
hosts are everywhere
because the market share is large
or the market potential,
excuse me, is large.
But that also means
that the space is super competitive.
And when you have super
competitive spaces,
there's an opportunity
to make the web better
by pushing the super competitive space
in the right direction, right?
Because what ends up happening is
you have this product that
absolutely everyone needs.
And so many people are
trying to get a cutoff
that if one company
really does something
right that stands out,
it pushes all the other competitors
to also do that one thing, right?
So if we can lead from
this base level service
into a more secure, faster,
and more reliable website sphere,
and I think that
that's something that
gets me really excited
about web hosting, right?
It's that foundationally,
that's the base of everything
else that's going on.
- [Allie] Love it, such a great answer.
Next question.
What kinds of things can
you expect to be inside
or outside the scope of a hosting company?
What limitations should people look for
or be aware of when they're
shopping for hosting,
so going back to like, you know,
your very first time ever
looking at web hosting.
You're not really sure what it should
or should not entail.
What are those things?
- Yeah, so I'm gonna answer
this question similarly
to how we did it in the practice run,
which is a pretty long answer, right?
That I think it's really important
to understand all of
the different offerings
that are available in web hosting.
I think that unless you're in the space,
you're looking closely,
you kind of find something that works
and you don't know what else is out there
in terms of product options and ideas.
And I mean, for me (laughs),
I told you this on Wednesday, right?
I've been at Liquid Web
for a year and a half now.
And before that I was a
consumer of web hosting
because we all have to have web hosting
for all the work that we do.
But that didn't really mean
that I knew anything about web hosting
other than maybe how the brands are known,
who the big brands are, and
maybe the rough price points.
But I didn't really understand
what was sitting under the hood (laughs).
And I remember the month
leading up to, you know,
my first day on the job, I
was like on LinkedIn learning,
watching all these videos
about like Linux, right?
Like being like, how does this work?
What's a server, right?
Like, what's a VPS?
Because my job as product manager
for Managed WooCommerce is
to mostly focus on the relationships
and the partnerships that power
this sort of like top of
the stack type products
and manage the application, right?
So the infrastructure aspect of it lies
underneath the work that I do,
which is that WordPress, WooCommerce,
and value added bundle layer
of stuff on top that brings
an online store to life.
So getting a big lay of
the land of the products
was actually really interesting, right?
I think that maybe on your
most simple end, right?
When you're looking to put
a WordPress website online,
is that you're able to get,
well, let's back up, right?
Like you can, if you want to,
sign up for something very bare metal
and stand everything up yourself.
And I look at web where we do manage
the application hosting.
We like to talk about that approach
as being the to make a peanut
butter and jelly sandwich,
step one, plant the peanut tree, right?
And yes, technically, right?
But it depends on how far you want to go
and how much you want to
offload some of the work.
So certainly that is an option, right?
Like we have seen people
with unique configuration requirements
and the in house skill for dev ops
set up WordPress websites
on AWS Hyperscale,
and it works really well,
and it's super fast,
and it's infinitely scalable,
and it's all those things, but
it does require maintenance.
You know, that tends to be
an enterprise option for big, big hitters.
And I don't think that
that's what we're talking about here.
So on our beginning beginning stuff,
we probably have something that is
shared hosting on a server.
It's usually pretty affordable.
Usually get something like C panel on it.
And that means that you can do
that one click install of WordPress
or whatever other
application you're using.
And most of the time your support will be
the scope of hosting support, right?
So maybe permissions
for certain file types,
maybe management of storage,
maybe management of RAM,
maybe restarting server processes
when they're overloaded.
That's about it.
That's a great option for people
who are looking for something low cost,
who aren't going to be doing
lots of mission, critical stuff, right?
Where if your site goes
down for a little bit,
it's not the end of the world, right?
For example, my personal website,
www.christiechirinos.com is a thing.
It just has a quick overview of my resumes
and links to my LinkedIn, right?
And that's exactly the kind
of presentation brochure
or a personal card website
that isn't what we would call
a mission critical website, right?
Surely I don't want my
personal website to go offline,
but my personal website
is not the kind of website
where if it went offline for two minutes,
I'm losing 100 orders
because it's a WooCommerce
site with lots of traffic.
That can be a really great option,
especially for people who are
getting started as freelancers
or making websites or practicing
to have something affordable.
And, you know, that gives you
a lot of access and forces
you to learn about WordPress.
The next layer after that is
the space that we call
managed WordPress, right?
So I think a managed WordPress is
something that we tend to think of
as sort of being pioneered by
Pagely and WPEngine, right?
I think maybe Pagely innovated it
and WP engine commoditized it, right?
And did it sort of really
big and on scale, right?
And that means that, hey,
WordPress is so big and
powers so much of the web,
and it is an open source project.
So if you have problems
with your hosting provider,
they can help you with server stuff,
but they can't help you
with WordPress stuff.
You have to look at other WordPress stuff.
Well, what if we included
a service offering that also
included WordPress stuff?
So now you can write your
host and you can say, hey,
something's wrong with my website.
And they can say, oh, you know,
we can figure out your permissions here.
We can restart engine X
or we can, oh, looks like it's an issue
with PHP config, right?
Or excuse me, with LDAP config dot PHP.
And so that scope of support is
what the managed WordPress
scope of support is, right?
And what's interesting is that
that first example tends to be called
managed hosting in the industry, right?
So we start sort of reusing a lot of words
because then you have like managed hosting
and then you have
managed, managed hosting,
which has managed hosting
plus management WooCommerce,
or excuse me, plus managed WordPress,
but that's sort of the standard.
So today in 2020, right?
There's very little reason
if you're running a WordPress website
to not have a managed WordPress host.
I mean, there's just so many little things
that can go wrong with a WordPress website
that it's going to save you
so much money in the long run,
and these plans are so affordable.
At Nexus right now you can sign up
for $9 a month of managed
WordPress support.
I mean, like, (exhales) right?
And then when you have
something like that,
then a maintenance plan,
like something with WP Buffs,
which is actually cheaper.
Do I have that right?
I believe that WP Buffs is cheaper
if you're a managed WordPress
than if you're on like a whatever VPS.
- [Allie] I don't know that for sure, but.
- I don't know that either.
- [Allie] I'm sure it's on a website.
- It's on the website, yeah (laughs)!
But if I remember correctly, right?
Like sort of the maintenance space prefers
that you have managed WordPress
because it's easier to deal
with your hosting provider
if that's what happens.
And so, you know, there are some people
who started making sites
before managed WordPress really took hold
of the market and we all,
I'm one of them, love
the things that we know,
but I think that really looking
at managed WordPress
today makes a lot of sense
because it's super affordable
and the scope of support is much larger
and much more helpful
for a WordPress website or
WordPress application, right?
And then on top of that,
we have the other innovations
in addition to that, right?
So that is where you can start looking at,
we have managed WordPress
on shared hosting.
We have managed WordPress
on dedicated servers.
We have managed WordPress,
and it's what we have at nexus, right?
On cloud hosting that
dynamically allocates resources.
So distributes the load
across multiple boxes, right?
And so on and so forth.
And then we have different
scopes of management
for scalability, for security,
for support, and for speed, right?
So will your hosting product
also include load testing, right?
Like you have a big,
important campaign coming up,
some hosts, Nexus will do this,
will allow you to open up a
support ticket that, you know,
checks to make sure that
you have the right resources
for whatever simulated amount of traffic
you were expecting to get on the real day.
And so these differences in features are
what drives the difference
between sort of like your $10 a month
managed WordPress hosting
and your $40 a month
managed WordPress hosting
and your $110 a month
managed WordPress hosting.
It's things like that,
and then we have the additional
and final layer for now, right?
That is managed application hosting
for applications on top
of WordPress, right?
So that is what Managed WooCommerce is.
So when it comes
to Managed WooCommerce
product at Liquid Web,
that means that you're
getting managed hosting,
so we'll help you with permissions.
We'll help you with security.
We'll help you with, you know,
malware identification,
whatever, all the server stuff.
But we'll also touch that
WordPress core installation
and make sure that the
problem's not sitting in there.
And we will also look at the
WooCommerce plugin itself
to make sure that the issue
that you're opening up a ticket about is
not in the WooCommerce plugin itself.
So now we've eliminated
vendor hell, right?
Because if you didn't have
that, you would have to say,
oh, you know, my product
page listings aren't showing,
or they're not zooming in,
or some JavaScript function
is not working the right way.
You open up a ticket
with your hose and they
say, no, it's not that.
You have to open up,
good luck finding
WordPress support, right?
Like (laughs) I don't know,
open up a ticket with
the WP Buffs, I guess,
if you have that plan,
and you have to sign up
for the plan, or, you know,
you have to go on the
www.wordpress.org forums
or you have to like find
a group on Facebook,
and then if the problem,
and then they say, no, no, no,
it looks like it's with
the WooCommerce plugin,
look, this error is coming
up in this one folder
of the WooCommerce plugin.
Then you have to open up a
ticket with Automatic, right?
And so now you don't
have to do that, right?
Like you have one product
that includes that
entire scope of support,
and that'll be outlined
on the product page
and in your SLA.
And then you have the different layers
of support for that, right?
So some of the, now there's
many companies coming out
with Managed WooCommerce like products,
and at Nexus, that product also includes
support and management and
things like load testing,
things like the dynamically
allocated resources
and support for all the products
in the value added bundle, right?
And maybe some of the
other hosts don't do that.
And, you know, storage
management, things like that.
So yeah, long answer,
but it's a big space to understand, right?
And really understanding
your options can save you
a lot of heartache in the future.
- [Allie] Absolutely.
So I feel like the sort of the TLDR
of that is, it depends, right?
On like what it is you need
for the site that you have
and what plan it is that you choose
for the site that you have.
It all kind of comes with different tiers
and different layers of support.
So like, you know,
what just stuck out to me is
I feel like some people
are not always aware
that when you purchase hosting,
you do have to find a company
or you should find a company
like WP Bluffs that maintains it for you.
Like your hosting company is not, well,
not a lot of them do
automatic plugin updates,
but they're not going to be
like updating the content on your site.
They're not going to be, you know, doing,
you know, holding your hand really.
And it's an interesting
point that you bring up is,
you know, not every hosting package
that you get is going to be,
you know, somebody, when you
went into to that support,
it's not always going
to be somebody that is
like a WordPress expert, who, like,
I remember at one point
when I was starting out
and I was talking to (murmurs) support
for a client of mine,
and the support person
said to me in the chat,
I don't know anything about WordPress.
And I remember feeling
like, what (laughs)?
(Christie laughs)
Like that was so unbelievable to me,
but it's worth noting that,
yeah, having something
like a managed WordPress
it's like what you're paying for is
like that additional knowledge, right?
Of the people that you're
working with on the hosting side.
So I think all of that
is incredibly valuable
to keep in mind when
you're looking for hosting,
when you're learning
about hosting as well.
- Yeah.
The other TLDR, right?
Is read the fine print.
That's the TLDR.
It's really understand what you're getting
and what you're paying for, right?
Where does the line of your
managed WooCommerce support end
and your freelance
developer hourly rate begin?
And where does your hosting company's
managed WooCommerce support end,
and your WP Buffs plan begin?
And where does your WP Buffs plan end
and your freelance developer's
hourly rate begin, right?
And really having a sense
for who to go to for what,
and maximizing that balance
of expenditure can really save
a lot of heartache in the long run.
- [Allie] Absolutely.
One question that I have,
which was not asked to us,
but I want to touch on it really quickly,
because you mentioned like shared hosting
versus dedicated hosting.
And I remember when I had clients
that I would help shop for hosting,
they asked that question all the time.
What's the difference
between shared, dedicated?
What's the other one, VPN or VPS?
Like a lot of times on those sales pages,
you'll see all this different terminology
that may not make sense
to someone right away.
So can you give us kind
of the CliffNotes of like,
what are the differences
between those kind
of basic levels of hosting?
- Yeah, okay, that's a
really good question.
And actually something
that we work really hard
to educate on at Nexus,
because looking at it as a duality, right?
Like shared or dedicated is old,
throw that away.
That's not all we have anymore.
We have so many more options now, right?
Like that's like how would used to be?
And it traumatized a lot
of people, right (laughs)?
And that's why clients ask about it.
And that's why the
developers ask about it.
They're like, but it's
a shared or dedicated?
And why?
Because one of the worst
feelings in the world is
when somebody else goes viral
and your site goes down, right?
And so we got this like collective trauma
over shared hosting.
All that it means, this is how I tell this
when I explain it to
like my dad, you know,
like you ever watched Silicon Valley,
you know that like one plot line
where they're like, we're
going to pivot to making boxes?
(laughs) No, maybe not?
There's this one plot
line on Silicon Valley
where they were going to
pivot to making boxes.
And it's a big joke.
But the thing about the joke that is true
is that even though our entire lives are
and feel so online in every single way,
every website, every single one lives
somewhere physical, right?
- [Allie] I get the joke now (laughs).
- So yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
every website live somewhere physical.
It doesn't feel like it
because we have computers
and we have all this
innovation, but you know,
Liquid Web owns data centers, right?
That are actual physical
buildings with keys, you know,
where actual physical servers live
and how we distribute those
computing resources is
where the web hosting innovation comes,
and the most baseline
version of it, right?
Was you signed up for a web hosting plan,
which is basically renting
out a little bit of space
in one of those boxes, okay?
That was like the very
first version of it, right?
Like you're not running
it off of your computer
in your basement right now.
You're doing it on ours.
And we can manage that server
and make sure that it is secure
and make sure that it is always on, right?
- [Allie] It's like renting
a storage pod or something.
- Right.
- [Allie] Where you keep
all your extra stuff, yeah.
- Exactly, exactly.
Keep all your extra stuff.
And your domain name is
the key for access, right?
And so we could rent out a same box
to multiple people, shared hosting.
And then, you know, that
comes with some complications.
Like if one person has an insecure site
that allows for the server to be hacked,
then everybody else's site
kinda can struggle a little bit.
Okay, that was the old
paradigm of web hosting though.
That's really not the case anymore.
But one of the ways in which
we innovated on top of that was
we said, well, you know,
for a higher price,
we can offer a dedicated hosting.
Okay, cool.
So you get the whole box, awesome.
Now the other way we
innovated on top of that is
the virtual private server.
So it's like a dedicated
box through software, okay?
So we prevent that issue of the sort of,
kind of like lame situation
where we're all sharing a box
and you know, your neighbor
lights their apartment on fire.
Everybody else's apartment goes on fire,
hope you had insurance, right?
And then we have innovations
on top of that, right?
So then we got cloud hosting
and container based
architecture that then says,
well, you know, we can make
servers talk to one another.
And then that way the computing resources
across multiple servers
can all be allocated
to one single digital property
as they're needed and scaled back
as they're no longer needed.
So most of your higher end hosts,
so Nexus, Liquid Web,
Pantheon, Convesio, right?
Will have an infrastructure like that.
You know, WPEngine, Kinsta,
Flywheel at certain levels,
it'll have different options as well,
depending on how much
you want to spend, right?
And that this is sort of like
the most sort of basic
how I would explain it
to my dad type situation, right?
And there are different applications
or different folks again, right?
Like I don't need, you know,
OpenStack on AWS
for my one page resume
(laughs) website, right?
Like it's just, it will hurt,
but I don't need it, right?
And it might be a little bit too expensive
and it's not really required.
Whereas if I was making
money on that site,
that would be a different situation.
And so figuring out
that cost versus benefit
and reliability across different kinds
of web hosting products can be
a really great way to, again,
save yourself a lot
of heart rate heart ache in the long run.
- [Allie] Absolutely.
I love it.
Let's see, next question.
This is probably going to be,
what am I trying to say?
This is probably going to be
kind of complicated to answer
or maybe not, who knows?
- Yeah, we're getting into the questions
that I haven't heard now, so.
- Yes, we are.
Vague, that's what I was looking for.
This is kind of a vague question.
So I'm interested to
see how you tackle it.
What is the biggest challenge
with hosting ecommerce sites?
- Okay.
So yeah, that's everything, everything,
that's a real answer.
Honestly, everything,
everything about hosting
ecommerce sites were complicated.
Why? Because if you do anything wrong,
you're losing money every second
that you did that thing wrong.
- [Allie] Yeah.
- And when you're hosting
an eCommerce site,
you wanna do business with a company
that understands that, you know?
There are many companies
that will pride themselves
on their uptime percentage, you know,
and the reality is that sites do go down
and having mostly uptime is great.
But when you're running
an eCommerce store,
and you're processing, you know, hundreds,
if not thousands of orders each day,
tens of thousands of orders each day,
that downtime is not like, oh, you know,
it's within our expected
uptime, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah,
It's like, no, I'm losing money
every second that this thing is not up.
And so that can be a really good challenge
because you bring on smart
and interested people
who really care about being
your partner in business
and then it can be good, or it can be bad
because you need the people
that you're working with
to have the same kind
of urgency that you do.
So I think that's the biggest challenge
with hosting ecommerce sites,
because we could get
into the nuts and bolts
of all of it, but at the end of the day,
things will go wrong with
hosting ecommerce sites.
Do you have a team on your side
that understand that when
hosting ecommerce sites,
the little minutes,
every single minute makes
a big difference, you know?
So outside of that, though,
I think things that you
most commonly see are
probably speed concerns.
Oh my god, probably speed.
And, (sighs) sorry, my
phone started ringing,
and I got distracted, and
scalability concerns, right?
So when you're running an online store,
we want those product listing pages
to show up really quickly.
We want to not be worried
that when we do a launch of a new product
that lots of people are
really excited about,
that they'll be able to order it.
Something common that we see is
a lot of hosts will rely on making sure
that like your site has caching on it,
but you wanna make sure
that caching is intelligent
and has good rules that
are intended for ecommerce.
You never want a cache a checkout site.
You never want to catch other things
that need real time interaction.
You never want to cache, really,
even a shopping cart, right?
And so does your host
understand those nuances
of managing the speed of your site
with the fact that you're
not just displaying content,
but also running an application, right?
Especially in the
WordPress ecommerce context
because other ecommerce contexts tend
to be a little bit different, but yeah.
I gave you three examples, though,
and you can see how those
examples all dial back
to does your hosting provider understand
that ecommerce is a
minute by the minute game?
- [Allie] So it sounds like,
kind of at the root of that is
the competition of it, right?
Like that if your store
loads a second slower
than somebody else's store,
like they could grab that business, right?
Because online purchasing
is so competitive
in so many different ways
that every single iota of speed matters
in that instance,
more than it would have maybe
like a service based site or,
you know, something else.
Yeah, that makes sense.
All the three things you said, like,
yeah, they all tie into each other
in a way that makes a lot of sense.
- Right, right, and with
Nexus Managed WooCommerce,
a big part of what my job is, right?
And I'm telling you that funny story
about how I was hired
without a lot of web hosting expertise.
I was hired for different skills.
That's because the company
was trying to focus
on hiring people who understood
how to grow online stores, right?
Web hosting can be learned,
but do we have people on the team
working on this ecommerce
hosting product that understand
that underneath all of these decisions are
actual real orders
that provide actual, real
dollars to merchants?
- [Allie] Yeah.
That actually leads
into a future question.
So I'm gonna skip around a little bit.
What encouraged you to
work in website hosting?
So you started to answer it a little bit,
but I thought that was
an interesting question
that was kind of a
little bit more personal,
a little bit less about hosting,
but I think it's an interesting, like,
I know your background,
like I know your professional background.
So how did you end up at
Liquid Web working in hosting?
- Oh man, I'm so curious about the fact
that you were like, I know
your professional background.
'Cause I'm like, do I know
my professional background?
Am I real?
I don't know (laughs).
I mean, so the way that I ended
up working at Liquid Web was
my boss, Chris Lema,
offered me this job, right?
But I don't think that's the answer
that people are looking for.
I wonder if there is a narrative there
about my professional background.
I got into WordPress in 2015.
I've been making websites
for longer than that,
but it was WordPress that I
particularly started looking at,
being pretty involved
with the business and
entrepreneurship school
at Florida State University.
I met the person who would
become my business partner,
Josh Pollack, in Florida.
And yeah, started out
making freelance websites.
I ended up getting a couple of jobs
managing technology stacks for a couple
of pretty large nonprofit
organizations in New York City.
And from there started working with Josh
on what would then be,
in two and a half years, Caldera Forms,
which is a form building
plugin for WordPress
that right now has about
200,000 active installs.
And it's a part of the Saturday
Drive family of products,
which includes Ninja Forms, SendWP,
and a couple of other WordPress plugins.
So that was really cool, you know,
to grow this plugin and
sell it to somebody else.
That was awesome.
And I think at that point, you know,
I had worked in an agency context.
I worked at a WordPress development agency
for a little bit.
I worked on the plugin and product side.
I worked on the in house, you know,
development and nonprofit
communication side.
And I had worked the freelance job
and the freelance WordPress thing.
And the one thing I hadn't
done was web hosting,
you know, and.
- [Allie] So, check (laughs).
- Yeah (laughs), yeah,
but, you know, I think that
that was really curious to me, right?
Like it was because of the first question,
the first answer was
all about how can web
hosting change this game?
And it was like, well, here's the thing,
agencies, plugins,
nonprofit communications,
they're all little silos,
but every single one of these
spaces needs web hosting.
So underneath all of it is web hosting.
And to me getting into this new space
that's sitting underneath all of it
and learning a ton about it,
And being able to tell you
and to explain to my dad,
you know, how putting
things on the internet
actually mechanically works is
a really powerful piece of
information to be armed with.
And for me, the appeal of it
too, was the impact, right?
When you have a fantastic
web hosting product,
you can really make a
difference in someone's site.
And the Managed WooCommerce
product in particular was
interesting to me because
I remember working
on Caldera Forms and I swear, right?
Like my blood boiled when somebody opened
a support ticket with us
and we had to be like, ah, you know,
it looks like it might
be your hosting plan.
Like you might wanna reach out to GoDaddy
and let them know about this.
And then it just disappears
into the nether, right?
And like, did they talk
to GoDaddy about it?
And did GoDaddy tell them
no, it's Caldera Forms?
And then, you know, or GoDaddy told them,
no, it's this theme.
And then they reached
out to the theme support
and the theme was like,
no, it's, you know, and, and that,
that's crazy to me, right?
Like you're working on a website.
You wanna be able to get answers
and get it to work so
that you can just focus
on making it beautiful
and making it make sales
and driving traffic to it.
And so the idea of a fully
integrated hosting product
that included the hosting,
WordPress, WooCommerce.
And then in addition to that, you know,
Stripe for WooCommerce,
PayPal for WooCommerce,
several foreign plugins, Beaver
Builder, and all this stuff,
and it was all on the SLA.
So then you could have just one spot
to have the totally open source,
totally flexible, super affordable,
but not horrendously
distributed type product.
I was like, that's awesome.
That's impact, right?
And that was really attractive to me.
So here I am (laughs).
- [Allie] No, it makes a lot of sense.
Like, I feel like I'm
hearing, you touched on,
you were dancing around hosting,
like your entire career,
like, oh yeah, I'll build websites.
Oh yeah, I'll work on a plugin company
and like yeah, at the center
of all of that is hosting.
So I knew all that about
you, but I never thought
about that kind of almost
natural progression
that you took of like, all right, well,
let's go to the foundation, right?
I know all this other
stuff that's up here.
Let me go to the
foundation and work there.
And make that a better place,
and I think that has to change.
- Right, 'cause whatever.
- [Allie] I was gonna say,
I think that has such like
a trickle up quality, right?
Like if your hosting is good,
that's going to affect
every single other thing,
which actually leads me into
the next question that we have,
which is kind of the
opposite, is somebody asked
how much do changes
in WordPress affect the hosting industry?
- Oh, that's a really
interesting question.
So again, I imagine that
it must be very different,
at the different hosts,
but I'll tell you what it's like
inside Liquid Web a little bit, right?
Which is updates to WordPress
and updates to any of the other products
that we work with, right?
Cause, keep in mind that we also bundle
about $5,000 worth of premium plugins,
themes, and apps into the
Managed WooCommerce product.
So I'm looking at updates
all across the board,
across many, many, many
different things, right?
It's something that we
have to constantly monitor,
and we have to make sure
that our platform is prepared, right?
Like what a managed WordPress
or managed WooCommerce
host is essentially doing,
it's just automatically
deploying WordPress to stuff.
So do updates to WordPress itself create
conflict with the stuff that we have
that automatically deploys WordPress?
We're constantly looking for that.
A large part of product management is
being abreast of the changes
that come up and reading into them
and potentially identifying problems
and making sure that we lead the charge
into testing to make sure
that nothing goes wrong.
One of the interesting
things that you were saying
about the last question
that actually loops into this one is
a lot of our job at a
good web hosting company
that cares a lot about what
your experience is like is
no news is good news (laughs), right?
When you don't notice us,
when you don't think about us,
(laughs) no?
Your site's running, you're
focusing on other stuff, right?
And we're just in the background,
keeping the lights on and
spinning all the plates, right?
And updating all your plugins
and themes and WordPress,
without you noticing.
You mentioned something
about plugging updates earlier, right?
And one of the key
features managed WordPress
and Upstack at Nexus is
automatic updates with visual regression.
So updates everything nightly.
And then if it looks wrong
on a visual regression test,
then reverts and lets you know,
so that you can take a manual look, right?
So in theory, if it all goes
right, you hear nothing.
You don't think about us.
You don't see us.
We're little elves that
come into the night, right?
And stay on top of WordPress updates
and WooCommerce updates and
Jilt updates, and Glue updates.
And you know, all the other updates,
everything, vulnerabilities
across multiple plugins.
And we're constantly talking about them
to make sure that you don't
have to think about them.
And that's what you're paying for
when you pay for something
like managed WordPress,
as opposed to, you know,
like VPS, where you host
a bunch of your sites.
- [Allie] Mm hm, I love it.
That's awesome.
I'm really excited for this question.
Like I saw this question
come in and I was like,
I can't wait to ask this.
- Oh gosh, what's it gonna be?
- [Allie] Where do you see
the future of WordPress
hosting in the next five or 10 years?
- That's so funny.
It's actually so funny how
frequently I've been asked,
where do I see the future?
I don't know.
I don't know what I'm having
for breakfast tomorrow, you know?
Like (laughs) I'm just being
honest with you, you know?
Anybody who tells you that they know
where the future of
anything is going is lying,
is making stuff up.
With that said obviously, right?
I have some opinions
about what's gonna happen
that are penciled in.
- [Allie] Yeah, I want your hot takes.
- Yeah (laughs), my hot takes, you know?
So one thing that I do
think we're going to see is
we're going to see more and
more integration, right?
Being someone that has been plugged
into the ecosystem for awhile.
I remember when Liquid Web rolled out
this Managed WooCommerce product.
There had been nothing
like it in the market
at the beginning of 2018.
And I remember looking at
the site and being like,
oh my god, that's so cool, right?
Like I didn't even work here,
but I was just so excited
about that vendor issue that I
was telling you about, right?
Like how frustrating it was for me
watching Caldera Forms support
tell people, I don't know,
like open a ticket with your host.
Or I was like, no, I
hate that so much, right?
And so we're going to see more of that.
In 2018, that was brand new.
Liquid Web was leading the charge.
And now we're seeing other companies
also engaged in the
managed WooCommerce game.
We're going to see more managed,
blah, blah, blah come out, right?
Because we have very well integrated
and beautiful seamless experiences
that are also closed off and proprietary.
And many people want that full flexibility
and the affordability
and all the goodness and
stuff that WordPress provides
without having to, you know,
be locked into an ecosystem.
So your hosting companies are all going
to come together and say, okay,
well, let's put together packages
for specific groups of people, right?
So I wouldn't be surprised
if we start seeing versions
of managed WooCommerce
that are for elearning,
that are for what else?
I don't know, digital downloads,
that are for subscription
and membership sites.
I think that
that is probably something that
we're going to start seeing.
On the other hand, so
we'll see the bundling
continue to intensify,
and then some people will say,
oh, sorry, I totally just got distracted.
- [Allie] That's okay (laughs).
- So some people will continue
on the bundling trend.
Some people will say, you know
what, we're not doing that.
So then the other thing
that we're going to see is
debundling and focus on
infrastructure, right?
So there's still a lot of
issues with web hosting, right?
Like keeping stuff online consistently is
harder than you'd think.
And so we're going to see a lot more
of people stripping away
all of that extra support
and stuff like that.
And instead, just focusing
on innovating infrastructure
and figuring out how to
get companies like WP Buffs
to fill in the gap of the support
and stuff like that, right?
So I think that we'll see
that, especially as, yeah,
as cloud hosting container
based architectures become
more and more common,
that's going to become
the standard, right?
Like we're quickly going to forget
that weird world we used to live in
where it was shared
versus dedicated hosting.
And instead we're all going to get used
to dynamically distributed
resources across multiple plans,
across multiple sites to
make sure that everything's
sort of getting the computing power
that it needs as it needs it.
- [Allie] I love that.
That's awesome.
Cool.
All right, So I only have
one more question for you.
I think I actually know
who sent in this question.
You might know who sent him this question.
What Taylor Swift song
should I be listening to
when selecting a web host?
(Christie laughs)
That is an honest, that
is an actual question
that somebody sent in through our,
we had questions sent
it through our forum,
and we had the team at WP Buffs send in
a couple of questions as well.
And that one came in
anonymously through our forum.
What Taylor song should I be listening to
when selecting a web host?
- That's so funny.
Oh my gosh.
Okay, so.
- [Allie] And why.
- And why, yeah.
WordCamp Boston is doing
that like musicians of WordPress feature.
And just before we went on
air, I was asking Holly,
what should I submit?
She's like, just like a straight hour
of Taylor Swift covers.
I'm like, that's actually a great idea.
That would be so funny.
For people not watching, yes,
some of the most
embarrassing facts about me,
so embarrassing honestly, is
that I am a total Swiftie.
- [Allie] She's a Taylor Swift Stan.
I'm a Taylor Swift Stan, I am, I am.
And you know the worst part about it is
I didn't really, like I
didn't dislike her, you know?
But I didn't feel any
particular sort of way about her
for most of the time she spent, you know,
taking over pop music,
and it wasn't until I
was living in Pittsburgh,
I was in Pittsburgh for seven months.
We set up an office for
Caldera in Pittsburgh.
And I remember like I was in
like a MeetUp group, you know?
And somebody posted to the MeetUp group,
they were like, oh, by the way,
I have this like random
Taylor Swift ticket.
It's like 40 bucks if
anybody wants it, you know?
And I was like, whatever, you know,
but $40 to see
the highest grossing female
recording artist of all time?
Like I love live music.
I hadn't been to, Pittsburgh
has that really cool,
the Steelers' stadium.
It's called Heinz stadium,
and it's, you know, a big landmark.
So it was kinda like, okay,
like this kind of checks
off a lot of boxes for me.
And just a random Taylor
Swift concert, no big deal.
I went, no expectations.
And I walked out a Stan.
I was like, oh my god, what?
Like, you know?
- [Allie] The power of live music.
- You know, the power of live music
and openness to new experiences.
So to answer the question,
I think that as you purchase
a Nexus Managed WooCommerce plan,
the Taylor Swift song you
should be listening to
that you should put on
as you initiate the
checkout process should be,
I'm looking at Spotify.
- [Allie] It's an important question.
Gotta get it right.
- You should play "Love Story."
♪ It's a love story, baby just say yes. ♪
Yeah, uh huh.
So play that through the checkout process.
It'll take you right through.
And then you're obviously going to have
to do the work of canceling, oh wait,
you're going to have to request
a free white glove migration
from our Nexus support team,
which you can do by just
sending an email to support.
And so while you request your migration,
obviously you should be
listening to "Style" (laughs).
"We never go out of style" and yes,
the migration will happen auto-magically.
It'll just be done by the migration texts.
And then, last but not least,
you will have to cancel
your old hosting plan
with your existing host.
And for that, obviously the song
you should start playing as you begin
to create the cancellation ticket is
"We are Never Ever Getting Back Together,"
- [Allie] Nice.
- By Taylor Swift.
So there you go.
There is your Taylor Swift playlist
for opening up a new hosting plan.
- [Allie] I love it.
That was perfect.
We got three songs for the price of one.
That was awesome (laughs).
Well, like I said, that
was our last question.
So we're going to end off there.
Thank you so much, Christie.
I learned a whole lot.
I hope that everybody watching
has learned a whole lot.
Where can people find you
or get in touch with you
if they have any more
questions about web hosting
or Managed WooCommerce with Liquid Web,
or Taylor Swift, or you know,
anything else that you know lot about?
- Absolutely.
Anything that you want to know about,
whether it's about WordPress,
WooCommerce, web hosting,
Taylor Swift, Caldera Forms,
the WordPress ecosystem.
Yeah, like I said,
I've kind of worked all the
different jobs now, right?
I've done the freelance web thing,
and I've done the in house staff thing,
and I've done the agency thing,
and I've done the web hosting thing,
and I've done the product thing.
So any questions that I can
help with, I'm super available,
www.christiechirinos.com.
You can find my email and all
my social media stuff there.
If you are on Twitter, I'm
pretty available on Twitter.
My DMs are generally open most days.
So you can just send me a question
about whatever might be going on.
You can post it publicly,
send it privately.
I try to make it a point to answer.
Sometimes the filters do
catch stuff, you know,
but most of the time they shouldn't.
And of course, you know,
through the Nexus website,
www.nexus.net/woocommerce, you know,
you won't find my email
on there, but you know,
if you like open a support
ticket and you're like,
I need to talk to Christie
Chirinos, it'll get to me.
- [Allie] Sounds good.
Perfect.
Alrighty, so it is time to pick
our random giveaway winner.
Yay, somebody is going
to win any item they want
out of the WP Buffs store.
So I opened up a random
number generator here,
generated a random number,
and picked that person out
of our subscriber list.
And that person is number five,
one, two, three, four, five.
Roslie, R-O-S-L-I-E.
It does not look like they are here
in our Zoom call right now,
but we will send them an email
and get them their info.
Awesome, and if they don't reply,
we might pick somebody else.
Cool, cool, cool.
So our next WP AMA is going to
be announced later on today.
We're gonna be announcing
it on social media.
Make sure you go to
www.wpbuffs.com/wp-ama-series
to submit your question for that person.
Questions are first come first serve.
So by being signed up, by
being subscribed to our list,
your questions actually
get the front of the line
since you find out before everyone else.
And you're also automatically entered
to potentially win a prize
if you are signed up in that list as well.
Like I said before,
this episode will be available to watch
on our YouTube channel, WP Buffs.
If you missed any portion of this,
captions will be included on that video.
And if you want to find
out anymore about us,
go to www.wpbuffs.com.
Find us on social media,
Facebook, Instagram,
LinkedIn, Twitter by searching WP Buffs.
That's all folks.
Have a good one.
- Woo, thank you for having me.
- [Allie] Woo, thank you for being here.
Bye bye everybody.
