**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. That'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. And today, we're back with part two of an episode with Andrew Palmer, the legend, the WordPress advocate, the guy who's creating all the stuff behind the scenes. If you don't know Andrew, he's definitely someone worth knowing. If you see him at a WordCamp or a CloudFest event, you should reach out, shake his hand, and tell him what an impact he's had on the industry, because it's true. You've been working on a variety of products. You've been helping to shape a lot of things going on behind the scenes. One of our favorite products to highlight is Adderin, and we had Vito on. You worked with them for quite a long time. In the last episode, if you haven't seen it yet, go back and watch the first episode with Andrew. It was a great episode. We talked about a lot of different things, mostly around the responsibility that hosting companies have to the WordPress experience and making it better for agencies, DIYers, and people who need to have it done for them. And we talked about a race to the bottom on pricing. One of the things I wanted to touch back on, Andrew, is that we talked about how one of the things hosting companies can do to really improve brand loyalty, the value of the product, and get people to stick around longer is to raise prices. It seems counterproductive, but in reality it's what we're all seeing and what the industry needs. When you're thinking about your product roadmap as a hosting company, where do I invest our time, what are we gonna build next, there's gonna be very little R&D in that shared hosting space when you're charging a buck a month. It's very hard to justify building out a new feature or a new tool in that space. What ends up happening is a lot of these platforms end up cutting things over time and not adding things. I'm curious if you think that's the correct way to think about it. Should we also be thinking about raising prices so that we can justify adding more to these products, or is that way off base?
**Andrew Palmer:** Oh, I think that's completely right. And let's not forget that governments around the world generally allow a tax break on R&D. Think of the pharma industry. They have an R&D budget, and they spend billions on making a new headache pill or whatever, and they get that R&D back. The same is true in the tech industry. If I'm developing a new product, I have an opportunity to get either a tax refund or a tax rebate on that. So that's an opportunity for hosting companies and any product owners developing anything in tech. But to raise prices, you have to be able to raise them with functions, features, or services. And I think all of the hosting companies use the same type of language, so there's no differentiation between them at all. The best WordPress hosting around, the best hosting for WordPress, whatever. The key is I need to see that you as a hosting company are different. If you can demonstrate to me that building my WordPress website on you is easier, getting email from you is easier, do you offer email or do you suggest other email providers like Google or Titan? How easy is it to use your services? Do I have to make an extra effort to use your services and facilities, like asking for a key to use the disabled toilet at a restaurant? If you can demonstrate that it's just a smooth process, and within 30 minutes to an hour I can have my hosting set up, my email set up, my 2FA set up, everything set up at that premium price. And it doesn't need to be $2.90 going up to $30. It needs to be $2.90 going up to $10. You've got another $2 a month for R&D as far as I'm concerned if you're a hosting company. I don't want hosts to lose money. I want them to make money because I want them to invest in me as a customer. I know what I want. I've been building websites for 25-plus years, from HTML, Notepad, Perl, CGI, all the bits, and it's still a pain in the neck. Still. So why haven't we fixed that? Why haven't we fixed the fact that we've got to connect to a CDN, be it Cloudflare or Bunny.net or any one of the CDNs? Why haven't we fixed the fact that I still see hosts out there charging for SSL? It beggars belief. By charging me for SSL, you've put a roadblock in front of me. It's another thing I've got to pay for.
**Jesse:** Not just another thing you have to pay for. It's another thing you have to make a decision on. And the cognitive overload that these customers feel is just immense.
**Andrew Palmer:** Because the cognitive overload is basically word blindness. I look at this and I go, "I don't know what I'm doing. I'll go somewhere else. I'll go to Shopify. That's easy." And then I've got to find out how to connect my domain to Shopify, or Squarespace, or another proprietary system. So make it easy for me to make those decisions. Make it a no-decision process. That's a no-brainer. But don't charge me for SSL. Charge me a little bit more for hosting. It's the little things. I don't understand, as a small business, what a PHP worker is. I don't want to understand what a PHP worker is. All I want to understand is that my website will be fit for purpose, and my hosting will be fit for purpose for what I'm doing, whether it's a brochure site, whether I'm selling one product or many. And the hosts are not getting that message across. They're confusing you with all these options. I went to one host the other day. There are over 20 pricing options to choose from, which means I have to read 20 pricing panels with another 15 lines in each one of them explaining the difference. Four times CPU, two PHP workers, whatever it may be. I don't know what they are. I don't care. I don't wanna know what the delicious ingredients of the sauce that came with my fish were. I don't care. I just know it's really easy to eat.
**Jesse:** Yeah. Well, we talked about this in the last episode. These other platforms are selling a promise of success. They're packaging everything up into a larger bundle and selling it as a holistic package. Then you look at that versus traditional hosting and WordPress, and it becomes inherently more complicated simply because you're pulling out this one piece that you get for free with these other services and saying now you have to build all these things around it. And if you compound that with a race to the bottom on pricing, the next thing you need to do is figure out how to be profitable. How are we gonna be profitable when we're selling unlimited websites for three bucks a month? You start thinking about ancillary things and what you can add on. So it becomes security, it becomes backups, it becomes additional marketing and other things. And all of a sudden you've got a hosting company taking all these different components that they could have packaged up into a single neat bundle, and instead they're piecemealing it, probably trying to pull in the same amount of revenue as if they had just packaged it differently. We went to Ibiza, and we talked about this in the last episode. Adderin and Monarch and these other companies put together an opportunity for a bunch of hosting executives to come together under a single roof and share a weekend, and one of the things that kept coming up for me was just how nice it was to have all these people together in one place. Because then we can start actually thinking about ways to address these industry-wide issues. This podcast exists because I want to get so much more information out to hosting companies and agencies who are buying from hosting companies, messaging around what we could be doing to protect the open web and doing more to help make customers more successful, and in the end, making hosting companies more profitable. But there aren't a lot of opportunities to bring people together like that. I think if we can start to think about it from a perspective where there are opportunities to compete, to differentiate ourselves, and even to poach customers from one another, there's still an opportunity to figure out how to work together to raise all ships.
**Andrew Palmer:** I think the benefit of Ibiza, what I loved about it and the idea behind it, was our friend Vito. He had another friend, the CloudFest guy, Soren, whose birthday it was, and then it turned into an event. And I was lucky enough to be the host the first year, so I really got to know people, announce people, all those kinds of things. Ryan, the marketing manager from Atrium, took over this year. So that allowed me even more space to sit down for breakfast with Seb and Dominic from hosting.com, with yourself, your lovely wife and daughter, and actually have time to speak to people rather than running around. That freed me up to speak with Adam Kilgore from the Miss Group, learn what he's doing with his 40-plus hosting companies, and met his lovely wife Sam as well. You just get to be friends with these people before you talk about business, before you talk about what they're doing. Sitting down with the Patchstack guys and the Monit guys, you must see this as an advantage. WP Cloud, as far as I'm aware, doesn't really need these extra services because you've got your security built in. But it also gives you an opportunity to learn from these guys about the problems they're facing on a server level from other hosts. That actually gives you a bit of an advantage when you're selling to other hosts. But you become friends with these people and you learn what their intrinsic value is to the hosts out there. So even if a host doesn't want to use WP Cloud, you say, "Well, I think you should talk to Oliver at Patchstack," or whoever it is at wherever they are. And they will up your game. One of the things I'm saying is, take an example. The host can take examples from people like WP Umbrella. Aurelio there has done a deal with Patchstack, so every client gets the opportunity to have Patchstack on their situation. Why hosts aren't doing this in the majority, I have no idea. Not just with Patchstack, but with Monit and others who do similar things. Let's highlight the fact that we are in partnership with people who help your website go faster, perform better, actually help you sell stuff, maintain stuff, and keep your security there. I want C-suite people meeting more in situations like Ibiza because I think it's beneficial to everyone. The decision-makers, the purse-string holders of these hosting companies need to have that neutral place to meet and say, "Guys, what are you doing about this?" And that's the benefit of Ibiza. I just hope it goes on. And if it does, Vito, don't forget to invite me again.
**Jesse:** Yeah, for sure. Getting those people together in a room was fantastic. Getting to have those conversations and developing those friendships, or even just relationships in general, is such a great way to communicate things going on within the industry. Any time we run into something from a WordPress perspective and need to reach out to other hosting companies, it's great to have had these conversations previously. If there's a security update or something along those lines, we want to be able to talk with all of our friends in the space who are also competitors and address it immediately. And like you said, WP Cloud doesn't necessarily need third-party security tools because everything is built in, but that doesn't mean we don't want to have those conversations. Oliver from Patchstack was on the show because we wanted to highlight the things they're working on, talk about what's going on, share ideas, and perpetuate the positives instead of cycling around things that aren't raising all ships. We're gonna take a quick break and we'll be right back.
And we're back. So Andrew, we talked in the last episode about how onboarding is complex for agencies and for DIYers. People who are entering WordPress for the first time are having a subpar experience. A lot of that comes from the fact that hosting companies are trying to jumpstart the user experience and give customers a heads-up on plugins they should have included. Sometimes hosting companies include these plugins because they get a cut or developed a partnership, but other times they're including them because they'll provide a better experience or they know the customer is going to need them. One of the things I keep going back to is that I've built several onboarding solutions for plugins, for WordPress, for bespoke platforms, and the first thing I do is have people perform tasks before I make any improvements to onboarding. Then I build out the onboarding, have them perform the same tasks, and see if we can speed things up. One of the exercises we did with Jetpack years ago was having people just install a contact form. Didn't ask them to use Jetpack, didn't ask them to use anything. I just said, "Here's a vanilla WordPress installation. Nothing has been done to it. Go install a contact form." You can isolate your customer base, go to agencies, go to people who have some experience, and you might change the question since it would be different for everybody. But what I did was sit in a Starbucks with gift cards and say, "Let me buy your coffee. I just need five minutes of your time." These were random individuals with anything from high-end experience to barely knowing how to use a browser. And I asked them to install a contact form. The first thing I realized is that they need to figure out what a plugin even is. The idea that a plugin is inherent knowledge is just frankly wrong. You're building a website, you want to add a contact form, you don't think to yourself that you need to figure out what a plugin is or where to go get one. The WordPress directory is where you go to get vetted, safe plugins. Then you have to type in "contact form," and as much as I love the WordPress directory for all the advantages it comes with in terms of extending WordPress, it is a complexity when you add the fact that you type in "contact form" and get like a thousand results. Then you have to narrow it down, look at ratings and reviews, figure out where you're gonna get support, and finally install it. What I think is really interesting about WordPress is that there's a simultaneous ability for a plugin developer to innovate, create a new environment, pull in the technologies they want, make it drag-and-drop or Gutenberg blocks or shortcodes, however they want to do it. But the end user's experience is split even further, because now you've installed Contact Form 7, then some newsletter plugin, then some SEO plugin. All of a sudden your WP admin looks different. The user interface is different for each one of them. The place where you go get support is different for each one of them. So in building out this onboarding, what we ended up doing was making the decision to say, "Do you have a physical location? If so, type in your address." And all we did was take their address, convert it into a map, put it on a page with hours, directions, and a contact form. Their time to completion reduced by 400% just from doing that one thing.
**Andrew Palmer:** That's huge.
**Jesse:** 400%. So I keep going back to this idea that if hosting companies could differentiate themselves on the WordPress experience, I think they'd be far more successful. I want to talk about onboarding because I think I have an idea on how we might be able to fix it as a community, but I'm curious if you've had any thoughts on how we might approach solving that problem.
**Andrew Palmer:** I do. And I have a product which I can't talk about right now, but it would change the way that people use WordPress as a builder and also how they onboard, and also data portability from proprietary systems. I can't say anything about it currently, but I'm helping people with that. And I've been working on it for five years, so it's not something from today.
**Jesse:** We'll just have to have you back on when you can actually talk about it.
**Andrew Palmer:** But AI has helped us. We built it in JavaScript before. It's something that will help hosts onboard. But the way I think would be most beneficial is for hosts to make an arrangement with Astra, or make an arrangement with Kadence. Kadence doesn't have to just be Liquid Web, right? Kadence WP is a great way to build your website out using blocks. Just license it to other hosts, let them install it, and then you can build your website using AI. It would help Nexus and whoever else. BoldGrid, you know, InMotion had BoldGrid years ago and they still have it. It was a licensed product that went out to other hosts. Bluehost used to use it. And effectively, if I was literally an electrician who wanted a quick website, it would give me a 10-page website with a contact form, and then I'd go in and use the grid system, replace the text with my own and my images with others. It effectively gave me a website, and that's what Shopify does for you. Gives you a website, and then you add your products and your images. That's what's missing from onboarding WordPress users currently, from the website side. Onboarding for domains and coupling them with your website and server needs to be improved, and I've got some ideas around that. But also when you're talking about registrars, like Namecheap or any one of them, they give you opportunities to do hosting as well, but it's still hard. You've registered your domain and then you have a plethora of information. Do you wanna use this? Do you wanna use that hosting? So decoupling and coupling the domain services, decoupling and coupling the email services. Everybody needs email. Make it easy to sign up for Google Workspace. Make it easy to sign up for Titan. Make it easy to sign up for your own email services without a 10 megabyte limit in cPanel or whatever it may be. Improve the interface. Web pros could help us with this as well, with improving cPanel. cPanel is used a lot, right? When you're signing up to a host, you're still looking at this thing that's got millions of things in it. Softaculous install. Do you wanna install WordPress? Do you wanna install Joomla? Do you wanna install Drupal? You've still got this massive confusion around what do I want to do in cPanel, and Plesk as well. So let's improve the UIs and what my choices are. Give me the minimal choices to get a website up as soon as possible. A lot of companies have done that. SiteGround built their own cPanel interface. Rocket.net built their own. They use cPanel but built their own UI and UX. It just made it easier, and that's the whole point. Let's think about who our customers are and make it easy for them to get what they want now. Because it's very much a now situation that we're in. Years ago, we could wait for a letter. Now, if somebody doesn't reply to an email or a text in 35 seconds, we think they're dead. "Why haven't you replied to me? You just messaged me." We want instant gratification.
**Jesse:** Right.
**Andrew Palmer:** I was reading something the other day about saying we're internet citizens. Net citizens. Because you and I have been in this business for a long time, and I've grown up in the age of the fax. If I mention to someone between 23 and 35 years old today what a fax was, they would look at me and go, "What are you talking about?" All those kinds of things have changed. From waiting for business cards to be printed, to instant gratification of presenting someone with a QR code with all your details that stays on their phone. It hasn't taken long for that to happen. We need to catch up to that in hosting. Sign up, get it done, and I want it done now. I've got other things to do.
**Jesse:** Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. One of the things I keep going back to is that there's a benefit for WordPress users, plugin developers, and people who are building on WordPress to have the freedom to choose how they want to make their product work within WP admin. But at the same time, I think there's real value in being able to put people on the same track, especially with onboarding. One of the biggest things we face is that every plugin seems to ask the same five questions. They ask a variety of questions, 10 or 15, but they all seem to ask the same five, and they don't seem to be able to borrow the answers from each other. What ends up happening is you get that cognitive overload like we said before, where this customer is just trying to sign up for WordPress, and all of a sudden there are all these plugins telling them it's time to set it up and configure it. They're all asking, "What kind of business are you running? What's your industry? Are you gonna be selling things online?" The same five questions keep coming up again and again, and you have to keep repeating the answers. To that end user, it doesn't always compute that these are different companies asking different questions. They think WordPress is just asking the same question over and over again. So I have this idea that what we could be doing is creating something like a railroad track inside WP admin, where plugins that have onboarding can essentially put cars on a train on the same track. If the cars are carrying the same question, you source the answer from a database where it's already stored. So if the first onboarding you go through is Jetpack, and Jetpack asks what industry you're in, that gets saved in the database. When Yoast asks you the same question, instead of asking again, it checks whether that question's been answered in the last six weeks. If it has, it doesn't ask. It just presents what it already knows about you and keeps going down the track. This gets me back to the idea that WordPress really needs to be thinking about how to create a more holistic view when presenting itself to new users. I think it's both from the wordpress.org and community side, but also from the hosting side. We talk about hosting companies being able to differentiate themselves on the WordPress experience. If they can provide an experience for customers that's far superior to what we see elsewhere, especially in that onboarding space, I think we start to solve how we can compete with closed platforms. You mentioned in the previous episode how with Shopify and others you can get a website up and running faster, and I don't necessarily think it's that the technology itself is so much easier to use. I think it's more that they set the stage differently. When you sign up for these platforms, it's basically like saying, "Hey, you have a house to build, and one part of that is getting this website up and running. Then we're gonna work on all the tools you need to add functionality to it." With agencies, they typically use that house metaphor. "We're gonna build you a website. First thing we need to do is talk about the framework. Is that gonna be a CMS? Is it gonna be WordPress? What technology are we gonna build it on?" That's the studs and the walls. Then they talk about all the other components, and eventually they get into style, fonts, and colors. That's the wallpaper. I've actually changed that metaphor a bit, because I think WordPress is still focused on building an entire house around a website, while these other platforms are thinking about your online brand, your online experience, the way in which you present yourself online as the house, and the website is just the kitchen. And most of the time when we move into a house, whether we're buying or renting, that kitchen is pretty much already decided for us. You might bring your pots and pans, you might put up different paint, but the functionality, the layout, the major appliances, those are all gonna be decided for you. You make smaller decisions, stock your kitchen, and start using it so much faster. I think we need to shift the momentum away from saying a website is like building an entire house, and toward saying your online presence is the house, and we're gonna build this website, but don't worry about all the details. Don't worry about starting from a blank canvas. Here are a bunch of things that will make it so much easier, and all you have to decide is what color you want your plates to be.
**Andrew Palmer:** Well, a friend of mine has sorted this out. He's got a company called The Media Site in the UK, and all he does is build radio station websites. For DAB radio, digital broadcasting, but also with a website. So you can do the presenters, the timeline. I introduced him to WordPress ages ago, and sadly he's built his own CMS. Just a little CMS in PHP. He's got 10 templates. The radio stations choose what they want. And for about 90 bucks a month, they've got their template and they just fill in the blanks. The CMS is so simple it's crazy. There's a button for this, change the radio times, change the broadcast times, change the presenter, add a presenter. Literally buttons. They go in, write their things, there's a specific place for the picture, and it's done. So it's almost a retrospective step of templating. Back in the day we used Dreamweaver templates, didn't we? Built a header, a footer, a whatever in Dreamweaver, attached our own little WYSIWYG CMS or whatever it was. And I think WordPress can actually learn quite a lot from looking back at how people solved for, one, non-technical users, and two, busy people. They don't wanna have to navigate a massive database of things. You've seen the sidebar in some of these WordPress installs and they are full of things to do, and you just don't know what's going on in the WordPress dashboard. You've got 47 plugins, 68 plugins. Guilty. I used to install a load of plugins. But now I limit it. When I build a website now, which is rare, maybe twice a month, it's about six plugins. I can build other functionality in with code snippets, but it's just six basic plugins. A backup one, a security one, a 2FA one, and that's about it. We have to make it easier. And maybe Automattic needs to look at this as well, because they're the biggest sponsor of WordPress. Without them, we'd be in serious trouble. We wouldn't have WordPress without the massive investment that Automattic makes. So we have to say to them, one of the best things that has happened in Core is that we have literally not put AI in Core. I love it. People say we've put AI in it. No, we haven't. We've put AI capability in it. You connect your own AI to WordPress through Core. Because I think if we rely too much on AI and MCPs, what happens when the price goes up? What happens when there's an inevitable failure of a big AI company? It's inevitable. I've been through three recessions. I don't wanna be the doomsayer here, but we have to be careful what we do with LLMs. We have to be careful what we allow them to do. And I love the fact that you basically just connect to WordPress through Core. There's no built-in AI. Because you can connect your own AI and ask it through MCP to do certain things. Atarim are really good at this.
**Jesse:** Yeah.
**Andrew Palmer:** The MCP on Atarim with the WordPress plugin is amazing. Just crazy good. But be careful what you wish for, because one day the machine may take over the whole thing and you might have a situation on your website. We have a duty, I think, as WordPress users, as community builders, to encourage people to use WordPress. Automattic and WordPress.org have a responsibility to look at onboarding with an open eye and an open heart and say, "Do you know what? This is too developer-centric." I've said it for years, and I've gotten slapped round the face by people for saying it. It's far too developer-centric. You kinda need to know what you're doing in WordPress. I don't want customers to have to learn how to use another thing. They've had to learn how to drive. They've had to learn how to cook. They've had to learn how to pay their bills. Now they're faced with, how do I make an index page in WordPress? It's as simple as that. So let's make it much easier to use WordPress, and with that, we've got another 20-plus years easily. And we have to do that together.
**Jesse:** I agree. I think WordPress, the community-built software, needs to continue doing what you're pointing out it's doing well, which is building the framework for you to add on functionality. And if I'm ever able to actually spend the time to contribute back and build this railroad track idea for onboarding, it's kind of the same idea. Instead of saying, "This is exactly how you do onboarding," it's more of just a track that people can build a foundation on top of. Then I think hosting companies really need to come in and figure out how to solve for their customers. Because one of the things WordPress has done brilliantly over the years is always been more of a universal solution to solving many different problems. Hosting companies go to market in different ways, so you can approach it and solve for niche solutions. One of the things I love about promoting features within WP Cloud is this idea of golden images, where as a hosting company you can make a perfectly curated, configured version of WordPress to sell to a very specific type of customer, and then with WP Cloud you can clone it instantaneously. So you're not selling a vanilla WordPress. You're selling a pre-built, fully configured, ready-to-go website, and the only thing the person has to do is upload a logo and change some colors, and they're off and running. I think in that way we can really help solve a lot of problems. Andrew, we're at time. This was such a great episode. I can't believe how fast 30, 35 minutes have gone by. I would love to have you back on, especially to hear about what you're working on when you can actually talk about it. Maybe we can do something in person the next time we're at an event. Sit down and record an episode side by side.
**Andrew Palmer:** If you're at WordCamp Spain, I think it is, Malaga, I'll be there.
**Jesse:** WordCamp Europe for sure next year. I've got WordCamp US coming up first.
**Andrew Palmer:** I can't get there. I'd spontaneously combust. I'm hot enough as it is. But I'm aiming to go to Serbia, looking to go to a smaller one. It's just been good.
**Jesse:** Nice.
**Andrew Palmer:** It's been an awesome experience knowing you, Jesse. Fantastic. Having sat and broken bread with you, had breakfast, had lunch, had great chats, got sunburned that last Sunday while we were waiting for the sun to come out. It's been fantastic to be on your podcast. It's a real honor.
**Jesse:** Thank you, Andrew. It's really great. And if I can convince you of one thing with WordCamp US, that location is probably gonna be the coolest place in the area because the AC is gonna be pumping hard. Maybe I can convince you to come out and see me there.
**Andrew Palmer:** It's not gonna happen. I'm doing a barbecue for about 120 people on the 6th of August, so I'm not going anywhere.
**Jesse:** Oh, nice.
**Andrew Palmer:** And WordCamp US is when again?
**Jesse:** It's the 16th through the 20th.
**Andrew Palmer:** So you're gonna have to find someone to pay for it.
**Jesse:** Yeah, I like that. All right. Well, great having you on.
**Andrew Palmer:** Cheers.
**Jesse:** Bye.
