**Jesse:** Welcome to Impressive Hosting, a podcast about the role hosting plays in shaping the open web. I'm your host, Jesse Friedman. On this show, we go deeper than uptime and dashboards. We talk about hosting as infrastructure, about ownership, independence, and what it takes to build ethical, high-end WordPress hosting that actually serves creators, businesses, and the internet itself. Before we dive in, head to impressive.host. It's where you can comment on episodes, ask follow-up questions, and help shape future conversations. You'll also find links to follow, like, and subscribe wherever you listen. Today, I'm very happy to have the legend Andrew Palmer, WordPress advocate, product owner, and all-around great guy who's been in the WordPress industry for quite some time. Andrew and I got to hang out in Spain a couple months ago now.
**Andrew Palmer:** We are.
**Jesse:** And it was great hanging out in person. It's really awesome having you on the show today. Tell us a little about what you're up to, where you're from, and what you're working on, and then we'll dive in.
**Andrew Palmer:** Tripana. If you don't know me, I've owned 47 products in the WordPress space and about three restaurants, all sold them profitably, which is always good. And now I have just recently left being a wage slave for a company called Atarim.io, which I enjoyed every single moment. I say I enjoyed working there, and now I enjoy not working there because I really do like to talk to people in the WordPress space, interview them, make sure that they're all happy, and also help product owners develop their products. That's what I'm doing for the moment. I'm enjoying myself, having a little rest. Didn't have time to take a holiday from Atarim while I was there for around about 15 months. So I've had a nice holiday, and thanks, Jesse, for having me on. I've been looking forward to it.
**Jesse:** That's awesome. We had Vito on a couple weeks ago, and he was a great guest. Vito is running Atarim. That's when you and I started talking, that's where you were working. And then we got to hang out in Ibiza and did the Hosts Del Mar event. That was very cool. It was great getting to see you in person because you and I have chatted, but we didn't have a chance to really sit down and hang out. We've seen each other at CloudFest and other things, and we've had a breakfast here and there. But I felt like at that event, we really got to do a couple things together and really hang out. I learned so much more about your past and all the things you're working on. I think legend is a good title for you, someone who's been around for quite a while and done a lot of great things. So let me ask you this. You work with a ton of hosting companies. Off the top of your mind, what are some of the things that hosting companies are facing right now that they need to be pivoting around? What are some of the things we should be thinking about in terms of how we can fix or change the way hosting companies are selling to attract more customers and make people happier? What's top of mind for you?
**Andrew Palmer:** Look, most hosting companies, and this is generic and no offense to any hosting companies that I know, but they're still aiming for the bottom. I think we've got to start aiming for the middle, at least. Get the business owner that understands they need a quality service. You're not gonna go to your backstreet garage when you've got a brand-new Mercedes. You're gonna go to Mercedes. So if I feel that I've got a premium product as a business owner, which is easy enough for hosts to find out from all the searches we do on owners, and say, "Right, you've got a three million a month revenue site or a Shopify site. I think you'd be better off in WooCommerce and WordPress. Come over to my hosting and I will look after you like you cannot believe. I'll give you specific product help, I'll give you specific WordPress help, and I will make sure that your WordPress website really performs, outperforms anything you've got. And yes, I may possibly be able to do it for less. But actually, if you want a premium service, you're gonna have to pay a premium price." The mom and pop shops will pay two-fifty a month. I saw a host the other day offering $1.50 a month with no increase the following year. I mean, that's sixteen dollars a year. It's crazy. So you've got to think about who you want your customer to be. The better customer you can get on board, the less churn, and that's top of mind for every single hosting company I think about. That's why when I was running things at Atarim, I re-architected the do-it-for-me system we had. We made the website and everything faster, more cost-effective, and that really helps ARPU increase. A fifty-dollar-a-year client turns into a six-hundred-dollar-a-year client with maintenance and all that kind of thing. So you've got to really aim higher, and that's what I want hosts to do. If you aim higher, you can charge more. You can actually invest in the things that customers want. One of the things that's very difficult on every single host I've used, and I've used probably thirty of them, is registering a domain and then connecting the hosting. Getting that hosting connected quickly, or connecting to hosting you've already got. It's very decoupled. The domain business is completely decoupled from the hosting business, and if that transition could be made quicker, easier, and more cost-effective, I think hosts could look at increasing revenue while also maintaining clients and reducing churn. I don't know a host that doesn't really care about their customer. But they've got to understand what their customer cares about, and they're not really doing that. They're kind of trapped behind this bottleneck of minuscule hosting charges that don't allow them to increase either headcount or investment in AI to help the client better. So that's what they've got to think about in a nutshell. How do I serve my customer better? The best way to serve my customer better is to charge more and take that chance. One of the real examples of that is rocket.net. Thirty dollars a month. That's it. Yes, you get three websites, but it's 30 bucks a month. That's 10 times more than the bucket hosts at three dollars a month, and you get better service. That's kind of why, in my personal opinion, say hosting.com took on rocket.net as the real flag bearer of what good hosting looks like. And I think that's what you guys do at WP Cloud. You don't charge minuscule pricing. You charge pricing that allows you to do your job better. It's like the really expensive restaurants. If I'm charging 10 bucks for steak and chips, that steak's not gonna be very good.
**Jesse:** And even if it was, the customer probably wouldn't think it would be such good value. Exactly.
**Andrew Palmer:** You've gotta do it right.
**Jesse:** And you're right. At WP Cloud, we definitely take this into account. We don't want to create a scenario where there's so much value in WP Cloud, so many things you get out of the box, that we have to start sacrificing them. When we talk to hosts, the most important things to them are things you can't replicate elsewhere. Automated real-time failover, for example. That's something built in by default with WP Cloud. Multi-region automated failover. That's incredibly hard to replicate, and it comes out of the box. So every WP Cloud partner and customer is offering that. If we were to try and reduce our cost to a place where we could serve these races-to-the-bottom prices on shared hosting, that's something we'd have to start thinking about sacrificing. I think you're right. The biggest issue we see in the industry right now is a race to the bottom on pricing, and it has detrimental effects across the board. One of the things we keep running into is the value that people place on WordPress in general. If they're being constantly advertised to move to Shopify or Squarespace or some other closed platform, and they're currently paying a few bucks a month, maybe $1.50 a month like you just said, what value does that have for the customer? You've maybe invested time in your website, but it probably feels interchangeable. It probably feels like, "Oh, I just have this cheap website. I can go get something somewhere else." The reality is that we see all the time with these closed platforms that they're not really selling hosting. They're not really selling just a website. The way I put it is that they sell a promise of success. They're combining a website, marketing, the support you need, the plugins and tools you need, and they're encompassing it into one big package, and a website just happens to be part of that. Whereas in web hosting, it is the primary thing. And frankly, I think it also pulls the task of building a website out and makes it its own thing, which makes it even more daunting in the grand scheme of everything you have to accomplish. So there is a bit of a mismatch there. They're charging too little, it's not building enough value in the product, and it's having a detrimental effect on the entire ecosystem.
**Andrew Palmer:** You're right about that, because I'm a Shopify partner as well, have been for years. I had an agency, I sold it December a year ago, and then joined Atarim. I basically saw, but it didn't affect me because I was a Shopify partner. Somebody said they didn't want to use WordPress for whatever reason, doesn't matter. I went, "Okay, I can build you a Shopify website, but I would actually prefer to build you a WordPress website because that's got portability. You don't have any platform issues with it because we know how to build a website properly. You're not gonna have any plugin issues because we don't install 42 plugins, we install six."
**Jesse:** Yeah, right.
**Andrew Palmer:** Because it's all about that. And I think that's where talking about what hosts can do better comes in. It's educating agencies on how to build a WooCommerce or WordPress website that will work perfectly with their hosting. Have an AI site builder in there. We've got things like Novamere, but a host doesn't have a very specific AI-assisted WordPress website builder. Getting into WordPress for an agency involves multiple choices. They either go the 10up route with FSE and their own block builders using Gutenberg, or whatever they've been used to. The agencies don't really matter. But the small to medium-sized business that would be happy to pay $30 to $50 a month for enhanced server resources and enhanced support, they maybe do want to build their own website, but onboarding in WordPress is still difficult. It's tough. What page builder do I use, if at all? Do I use full-site editing? It's a little bit too complex for people who want easy onboarding. There was a nice bit of software a few years ago, and it's still going. It's BoldGrid, and it kind of built you a ready-built WordPress site. You chose your genre, if it was a plumber, it put all of the text in there. All you had to do was change the name, number, and address. So I think we need to look at how hosts are helping people build websites with AI in WordPress, not AI and something like Novamere, because that's not WordPress. And when you want to make an amendment, you have to go in and make a suggestion and ask the AI to do it again. Or Arrow from GoDaddy. Great product, brilliant product. Know the developers. Really into helping clients get on board onto the hosting straight away. That's where hosts need to be. If they're gonna invest in WordPress because it's the premium CMS out there, the one of choice, they have to also invest in having a really nice onboarding experience. This is how you build your WordPress website, whether that's through a partnership, buying a product, or licensing something. Make sure that onboarding is really good. That's where the do-it-for-me service comes in handy, because it was priced under what an agency would charge. They wouldn't do a website for $500 or $750, but somebody still did it for the client. That stops client churn because the client thinks, "Actually, this hosting company built my website, I'm gonna stick with them," and it was easy.
**Jesse:** Right.
**Andrew Palmer:** That's the key, I think. Make it easier to use WordPress. Make it easier to have AI in there if you want it. Make it easier to decouple or reconnect your domain. It's tough to do a WordPress website for somebody that isn't technical, and that's the issue. Shopify, boom, done. Squarespace, done. Wix, done. And let's not forget these are minor percentages. Shopify is under 1.6% of the web from what we can measure, so it's a tiny portion. The competition isn't really competition to WordPress. I've always said that anyway. They're picking up people who churn big time as well. Shopify has massive churn. Three months and a customer will go, "Oh, this isn't working for me. It's not the billion-dollar idea I had." So they've got to deal with that churn as well. And then with WordPress, if we just make it easier, it's that simple. Have a little think together. How do we make it easier? How do we stop plugins announcing all these offers all the way through the dashboard? Get control of the dashboard. Make sure there's some moderation within the .org plugin repository. Control the advertising, control the upsells, control all of that. Make it much more comfortable for somebody to log into their dashboard without getting inundated with messages to do this, do that, update this, whatever. And have some real client education around it on the agency side from hosts. It's the host's responsibility as well as WordPress.org. The warning messages people are getting in the dashboard are putting them off using WordPress. How many agencies and freelancers do you know personally that say, "I get so many emails about what do I do about this upgrade, or my client is saying they just got a message saying they've got to upgrade." We need to ease people into using WordPress, and I think that's what we need to do.
**Jesse:** Well, I think you're touching on something really interesting there. This idea that hosting companies should really be focused on differentiating themselves and competing on the WordPress experience itself. One of the things we talk about frequently with WP Cloud is that we're seeing more and more hosting companies outsourcing their infrastructure, whether that's using a cloud platform or something else. That's why we want WP Cloud to exist, because it is the only real WordPress-first cloud platform out there to solve these problems in a way that allows us to manage everything, put guardrails up so that we are hyper-performant, backed up, secure, all these things. Then that allows the hosting company to refocus their own development teams on other things and not have to worry about the management of WordPress. I think if we could shift the mindset from a hosting company to stop trying to differentiate on things like PHP workers and CPUs and server locations, and get them to start differentiating on the WordPress experience itself, that would change a lot. One, the customer is going to feel that experience far more than they're going to feel the actual infrastructure. Two, it allows hosting companies to compete on something that would be really great for the WordPress ecosystem. Because every single time somebody rolls out something that improves the WordPress experience or the site-building experience, another hosting company is going to have to catch up, and we're creating this very positive upward loop where we're constantly competing on who provides the best WordPress experience. I think that's something hosting companies could really pivot toward.
**Andrew Palmer:** They could. And I spend a lot of time in Facebook groups and on Reddit and all around there. There was a person in one of these Facebook groups, a 20,000-person group, a really good one. They were saying, "I've gone to this particular host," because they were getting busy around that time. They were gonna do a survey, so they needed extra server resources. And the host said, "Yeah, you've gotta upgrade. That's an extra $260 a month on an annual plan." Now, one of the things I thought about is that if we're charging a little bit more, $30 a month, $50 a month, $75 a month, whatever it may be, the host can just absorb that for a moment, because it is a moment in time. You know, I'm throwing out a survey, or I've got a Black Friday. I don't want to worry about how many PHP workers I'm going to have. I don't want to worry about whether my site's gonna fall over. Especially if it's a host using their own infrastructure, they've got the ultimate power to say, "We're gonna allow you to go over by 3% or 8% or whatever it takes so that your site is still very performant." And with cloud services, you've obviously got this with WP Cloud. They can just flip a switch and go, "Right, we've been notified by the client that they're gonna be busy." It's like phoning up your credit card company and saying, "I'm going to Turkey. Please let me use my card."
**Jesse:** Right.
**Andrew Palmer:** They go, "Warned, going to Turkey." I've warned my host that I'm gonna be busy for the next five days and my site's gonna spike. We'll turn that switch on for those five days, and that's part of the service we're giving you. It's not an
**Jesse:** Yeah.
**Andrew Palmer:** opportunity to upsell. I don't see that as a reason to charge extra. And there are so many hosts that are using customers' panic as an upsell opportunity, and I think we need to be a little bit more honest about it, frankly. "We can handle that for the next week. Thank you for staying with us." Because what that did was promote a move. That client moved from that hosting supplier and moved to another. So they actually lost a client through an unplanned profit opportunity. I don't think that's the way we should be doing business with people. We see it with agencies too, don't we? I was literally at a coffee shop yesterday morning, had breakfast with a lovely friend of mine, and we arrived early because the time on the website said he was going to open at
9:30 AM. It was breakfast. He doesn't open till
10:00, and he's evidently been asking his web developer for weeks to make that one change on timings. I actually went behind the counter, Jesse, logged onto his website, and changed the footer with the times. Done. We have to up our level of service. We have to make sure that we're customer-centric. And unfortunately, what I'm seeing with AI, and I'm well behind AI, I've just come from a very AI-first company, is a lack of customer care, a lack of speed of turnaround, a lack of clarity for customers using hosting and agencies and the web. I think that's partly to do with the fact that there have been a lot of redundancies in the hosting market. One host we know of has cut 40% of their customer support teams in the last 18 months because they're relying more and more on AI. That's fine. You've got a business to run and profits to make. But we must be very careful about how we're serving our customers. So customer-first. Basically, whatever you need us to do within reason, we're gonna help you do that. Like you say, aim for success.
**Jesse:** Yeah. One of the things I keep coming back to when we have these conversations with hosting companies about WP Cloud is that we've essentially eliminated infrastructure-related support. Pressable went from, I think we surveyed around 30,000 tickets, and there was a very small percentage even related to infrastructure. And when I actually went in and looked at them, they were questions like, "How do you handle this?" or "Will you take care of this if something happens?" They weren't actual problems. So I go to hosting companies and I say, "If you could give your support teams 20 to 30% of their time back, what would you do with it?" Now, obviously everyone thinks about the bottom line and where they can save money, so sometimes the thought process goes toward needing fewer people. But what I really push for and hope to see is using those customer support reps to focus more on success. If we pull out 20% of their tickets and remove them entirely, maybe the reps can widen the scope of what they can answer. So when someone says, "I'm really struggling to get my hours and directions updated on my Contact Us page," maybe the customer service rep could just go in and fix that for them. It'll take a few seconds, and think about how much happier that customer would be, how much more loyal they would be. It would be better for the entire ecosystem. Because when they can't figure out how to do something like that, the next thing they're going to do after contacting support is look to hire someone. And hosting companies maybe don't even recognize this, but you're diversifying your brand loyalty because all of a sudden you're bringing in a new partner, an agency, to solve a problem. And what is the first thing the agency is going to do? Pitch them on a brand-new website, top to bottom. Who knows if they're gonna end up hosting with the same company. So if you can keep that conversation from even happening, and not that I'm trying to steer people away from agencies, that's a whole other conversation, but if you're just trying to solve a small problem on your website, your host should be able to handle that. That's something we do at Pressable. It's something we do at WordPress.com, and I know a lot of other hosts that do that as well. There's an opportunity to cycle back those hours that are used for infrastructure support and redirect them toward helping that customer be far more successful.
**Andrew Palmer:** But that is the point. How do they then justify that on a $2.50 a month package? That's the key. Do you build in your maintenance services, which is what I was working on at Atarim? Do you say, "Right, I can do this for you, but I'm gonna need a couple of bucks," or whatever it may be. When you ring up Amazon, it's $125 an hour for support. You press a button and you decide to pay that $125 an hour for something. I remember having a broken EC2 instance, and if I'd read the 900-page manual, I'd have figured it out. But it cost me $125 for three minutes of advice.
**Jesse:** Yeah, yeah.
**Andrew Palmer:** But people are willing to pay for support, and that's been proven. When you ring your solicitors, they invoice in six-minute increments. There are different ways of helping people understand that this is a cost-per-case basis. All I need you to do is just sign here and I can get that fixed. And actually, why don't you sign up to a maintenance package? We've got them from $50 to $75 to $125, whatever it is, and then you'll never have an issue. You just send in a ticket and it'll be done within 24 hours. All of those extra service levels. And there is a hosting company, I won't name them, but they do this. They have one guy that does this, and he sits there waiting for customers to be pushed to him from support saying, "This guy needs this banner changed." Done. That's just the extra level of service they've got. That's all he does. He doesn't get involved in any other support tickets. All he does is fix people's websites or update somebody's plugin. He probably gets five or six inquiries a day, so he's got a great job. It's great, isn't it?
**Jesse:** I think you're touching on something because we have this almost socioeconomic issue in our own industry. If you're paying a super low price for hosting, you get into this mentality of, "Well, I don't want to charge them 20 bucks to help them fix something because they're gonna be furious." And I think we could be far more transparent. You could say to someone, "Hey, this is the super cheap plan, but you do not get these things. If you want to go to this plan, you do get these things," like added support. Maybe you offer them a $20 one-time payment, or you could say, "Upgrade to the $10 a month plan and you don't have to ever pay this one-off fee." But the thing we struggle with inside the WordPress industry, both at the hosting level, agencies, and plugin developers, is that we conflate open source with non-profit. And you'd be surprised, if you actually sit down with these small business owners, these DIYers who are just trying to get a website live and want to go back to their passion and focus on whatever they're doing, and you ask them, "Hey, you're struggling with this thing." At a WordCamp they might come up to you and say, "I want to solve this problem." And if you ask them, "Hey, would you have paid, like if your hosting company just offered a button where you could pay 20 bucks and they'd just handle this for you and you don't even have to think about it, would you do it?" Nine times out of 10 they're like, "Absolutely. For a fee like that?" Because the thing we keep forgetting is that their time is money. Every minute they're away from baking a good or selling, making a T-shirt, or doing whatever they're selling and doing, it's money away from their profit center. It's taking them away from actually making money. So dropping a few bucks to solve a problem fast is an easy decision.
**Andrew Palmer:** Yeah, and that's exactly where the proprietary systems have it figured out. They're already charging a big monthly fee. Wix or Shopify or whoever they are, they've just put their prices up by 25%, in some instances 48%. That's like a letter you get from your mobile phone company every quarter saying, "We're putting up our prices by 3%." You think, "Ah, it's in line with the index rate or whatever," and you just accept it. We don't have that power in WordPress. We don't feel as though we've got the power to say, "You've been on a $298 a month hosting plan. You can stay on this plan for $298, or you can go up to this plan for $750, double the price, and here's what you get extra because we want to make sure that your websites are up to date and secure," all of those things. We don't know how to charge people in the hosting industry and demonstrate value as they press that button. And I think that's where we go back to what I was saying previously. We've got to get onboarding better in WordPress. WordPress is the base of the hosting we talk about. So if you're gonna offer WordPress hosting, it's really on you as a host to make it as easy as possible for me to launch my website as quickly as, if not quicker than, a proprietary system.
**Jesse:** Yeah. Andrew, I agree completely. I can't wait to keep this conversation going, but we do need to take a break and end this episode. We're at time, so we're gonna come back with a part two and continue this conversation. Andrew, it's great having you on the show, and we'll be right back with another episode next week.
**Andrew Palmer:** See you later.
