We Actually Use WordPress!
Do you ever check to see if a company uses their own products? I sure do. Whether its a local coffee shop whose staff only seems to drink coffee from the Starbucks located across the street, or a web hosting company who seems to “sell” technology to their customers that they don’t even use themselves… well, I tend to notice it.
Managed WordPress hosting is no different. In fact, the reason I launched LittleBizzy’s managed WordPress hosting service is because after several years of migrating from web host to web host, I was tired of dealing with over-priced, under-performing web services whose own support teams didn’t seem to understand WordPress very well. Take for instance, companies like GoDaddy, Liquid Web, DreamHost, Media Temple, WP Engine, Synthesis, Pressable, Pagely, FlyWheel, and Lightning Base (the top 10 managed WordPress hosting companies according to Google search results).
Guess how many of these “WordPress” hosting companies actually use WordPress for their own website?
The answer? Exactly ZERO.
“Selling something only to steal it back to sell again is not only dishonest, but highly profitable.”
― Jarod Kintz, This Book is Not FOR SALE
While a few of the companies mentioned above do seem to maintain a basic WordPress frontend (in case anyone checks?), absolutely none of them actively use WordPress for their website backend. In its place, they’ve clearly spent several thousand dollars developing a custom environment, while at the same time “selling” customers on the dream that free, open-source software like WordPress and WooCommerce are “good enough” for their businesses to use.
Now, I’m not here looking to make enemies, and clearly most of these companies have done something right if their steadily growing annual profits are the “measuring stick” of success. But to me, at least, something doesn’t really add up when the coffee you are selling isn’t quite good enough for your own employees to drink.
Here at LittleBizzy, we are obsessed with WordPress and WooCommerce. In fact, during my short oDesk experiment, I was ranked the #1 WordPress expert on their entire network out of more than 3 million total freelancers (although, whether that is accurate or not, I suppose we will never know!). My point is that we are here to prove that WordPress and WooCommerce are not only amazing, enterprise-capable softwares that are “good enough” for our clients, but that they are also “good enough” for us to use on our own website, too. In fact, LittleBizzy.com is hosted on one of our very own Standard plans, outperforming the competition on Pingdom for just $20/month (and that’s with WooCommerce + SSL enabled):
LittleBizzy.com – 92/100 – 0.50 seconds
GoDaddy.com – 76/100 – 1.77 seconds
DreamHost.com – 79/100 – 2.06 seconds
MediaTemple.net – 75/100 – 2.32 seconds
LiquidWeb.com – 66/100 – 1.82 seconds
WP Engine – 71/100 – 1.82 seconds
Pagely.com – 77/100 – 0.96 seconds
Pressable.com – 84/100 – 60.00 seconds
GetFlyWheel.com – 78/100 – 1.46 seconds
WebSynthesis.com – errors – 0.71 seconds
LightningBase.com – 58/100 – 1.96 seconds
Update 12 May 2015: There are a few “self-building” website tools in the news lately, let’s take a look:
TheGrid.io – 62/100 – 3.97 seconds
SquareSpace.com – 76/100 – 2.09 seconds
Shopify.com – 86/100 – 1.11 seconds
Without any further ado, please consider this our “soft” opening. Clients who sign up at LittleBizzy before the end of March 2015 can use the following coupons: FREESFTP will get you a 100% discount on SFTP Access (unlimited sites). GRIDDY will get you a 50% discount on your first SendGrid installation. Please don’t forget to add those products to your cart during checkout (you can order a monthly hosting package at the same time that you order such products).
Question before ordering? Please contact us via email. While our hosting system is 100% ready to go, our website is still working out a few janky items (i.e. mobile version, and My Account page, etc)… so, thank you for your patience!
Please note: due to high volume, our team may need up to 48 hours to get your VPS 100% up and running.
This is literally the dumbest shit I’ve ever seen. I don’t know if you bothered to actually do any research, but both WP Engine and Pagely run their main sites on WordPress, and I didn’t even bother to check the others because last I checked, two is already more than exactly zero.
I also don’t appreciate getting an unsolicited email to bullshit like this.
Don’t fucking spam me again, assholes.
Hey Ryan, thanks for stopping by. I don’t know who you are, but I checked our records and you are not listed in our email database. Your knee-jerk response shows you didn’t understand the article, but I believe in transparency and will not be deleting your foul comment in any regard. Have a good day! :)
Hey Jesse,
Thanks for the reply! I’m not commenting here with the same email address that you spammed, and I already unsubscribed, however that’s entirely not the point: it never should have been added in the first place. Hence, one of two things: 1) you found my email address and decided to start spamming it (unlikely, as I don’t publish that address), or 2) you bought an email database including my address. If the latter, I’d certainly appreciate finding out where you purchased it.
As for the article itself, I completely understood the article. The phrasing of the article implies that none of the hosts use WordPress, and hence have no experience with it, then it backs out of that statement with a tiny note. It’s almost entirely intended as bullshit clickbait.
I also disagree with the premise of the article. Just because you can run something on WordPress, doesn’t mean you should. A hosting platform is one of those places where specialised infrastructure and software already exists, so you should probably use that instead. In fact, it’s probably a better indication that the host understands how to run a hosting service if they know when to use industry-standard tools instead.
The article is dumb entirely because it doesn’t understand this, and tries to be “edgy” instead by insulting the talent of the other hosts by insisting “something doesn’t really add up”. This is clickbait, and poor clickbait at that.
I hope you reconsider before you decide to start spamming people again, and actually write an article that has a clue.
Hi again Ryan, I finally was able to track you down in my Gmail history. It looks like you were CC’d into a conversation I had with a client in Australia, and I must have mistakenly added you to my clients list. I apologize for this grievous error and I hope that you can forgive me for it.
Regarding your view of the article, I wholeheartedly disagree with everything you said. Nowhere did I imply these hosts “have no experience” with WordPress. I’m simply trying a unique approach in the marketplace, which is actually using WordPress/WooCommerce for our own hosting backend.
But if you think using Microsoft’s proprietary ASPX makes more sense, or believe GoDaddy can provide you with better performance, no worries and I wish you all the best.
http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/eHYZYS/http://ryanmccue.info/
But if you’re interested in getting your load time down from 2.33 seconds to 0.5 seconds, gimme a shout :)
Thanks for removing me from your list.
My own site is of course terrible, because it’s hosted on shared hosting and I don’t care about it.
Pingdom’s testing also includes front-end assets as well, so it’s disingenious to quote their times when talking about server performance. I could have static assets living on a server I’m directly connected too, but images and CSS on a page will bump the time simply because of the limit of the speed of light. Using the same Pingdom testing gives this website a load time of 1.86s, for example.
Just looking at pagely.com. They are using WordPress on their site. However, the hosting packages they offer pale in comparison to what you’re offering.
(https://pagely.com/plans-pricing/#compare)
Hey Lavi, if you check the backend of any of the sites mentioned above, you will see they aren’t WordPress i.e.:
– https://atomic.pagely.com
– https://my.wpengine.com
– etc
Thanks for clarifying.