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For long-form interviews, news, and commentary about the WordPress ecosystem. This is the companion show to The WP Minute, your favorite 5-minutes of WordPress news every week.
Matt Medeiros (00:00)
Welcome back to the WP minutes special guest today Metodi Drenovski from Jethost. Welcome, sir.
Metodi Drenovski (00:08)
⁓ Thank you
Matt Medeiros (00:13)
Let's do all the legality stuff out of the way first. Jet Host is a fantastic pillar sponsor of the WP Minute. Without their help and without their encouragement, we couldn't get the content done that we need to get done for the WordPress community. So round of applause while you're listening to this, except if you're on a treadmill. ⁓ Round of applause for Jet Host for supporting the WP Minute. ⁓
Metodi Drenovski (00:33)
You
Matt Medeiros (00:39)
I want to dive in to the world of hosting, WordPress hosting, is fascinating to me. I started my professional career in hosting at a local ⁓ ISP, Internet Service Provider. Back then we were doing things like dial up and ISDN lines and T1 lines, the good old days of the internet, where you had to kickstart a server to get things going. ⁓ So fun. So hosting has always been near and dear ⁓ to my heart.
I want to start about Jet Host and where you see Jet Host in the market of so much hosting and so much, I'll call it noise, but you might say something else, so much noise in the WordPress hosting space. Where does Jet Host slot into ⁓ the options that folks have these days?
Metodi Drenovski (01:31)
⁓ That's a very good question and ⁓ not with an easy answer. In fact, our first hosting experience started back in 2002. Back then we started with a few friends ⁓ who were working in a hosting company and they said, ⁓ you know, it's very easy to run a hosting company. You put a server, you install the control panel, the customers are coming and...
You are doing almost nothing and we have no experience and we say, okay, let's try, let's see how this work. It appears that there is nothing like this. In fact, it is completely different. In fact, it is very easy to put a website that say that he offers all the fancy things you can copy from all the other hosting companies. So they're putting on their website.
And ⁓ the difficult part to prove that you are a real hosting company is when you start to have real customers and they start to have real problems that in one moment you are not sure that you understand in the early days. For example, we have a conversation with the customer and he said, I'm doing all the changes on my website and ⁓ nothing is changing. And we say, how is not changing? Refresh the website.
And he said, how to refresh the website? We said, hit ⁓ F5. And he said, I don't see F5. And we say, how you don't see it? And he said, I see file, edit view. So he was looking at the menu in the computer. So you have to understand the customer. So we believe this ⁓ is the key. And from then on, we focus on understanding better the customer, understand their problem, understand where they're coming from. And that's
Matt Medeiros (03:05)
I
Metodi Drenovski (03:27)
They want to have a real solution, person, a real person that understands them, not redirect them to some ⁓ good articles that explain them everything with all the terminology that they have never heard.
Matt Medeiros (03:43)
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, throughout my professional ⁓ WordPress career, ⁓ from going even back all the way to the ISP days to running my own agency, I worked at a hosting company called Pagely before they sold to GoDaddy. ⁓ Even to my time in the audio industry with a capital A in I, but not the AI we all love to talk about. ⁓ Even in the audio industry, it was always like this challenge of
Metodi Drenovski (03:44)
So we are focusing on this.
You
Matt Medeiros (04:13)
trying to educate the customer. Like we thought that, well, okay, if the customer comes to a problem with us, like the customer you were just talking about, if we do hand them some knowledge-based articles or say to watch this video, there's this hope that, well, they're gonna get educated, maybe that person will never come back. Like maybe they'll know now, like how to solve. But that's not the case. You have to roll up your sleeves and keep doing the hard work, even in today's age.
Metodi Drenovski (04:37)
Yeah, yeah, right.
Matt Medeiros (04:39)
Yeah.
How does, how do you try to, ⁓ you know, not to put you on the the hotspot, but how do you try to solve that with real humans these days? Like everyone's adopting some form of automate. I say everyone, but you'll correct me. Everyone's adopting AI and like not even AI, but like automated response chat bots like the the machine learning ones. just say, if you typed in this keyword.
it's going to just spit you these three documents or whatever. How do you try to get the human in the loop as fast as possible so that the customer will get the support that they're looking for?
Metodi Drenovski (05:20)
⁓ First, the foundation of our team is built entirely from people that have, we all have more than 20 years experience in web hosting and in fact also in web development and in hardcore programming. In fact, before I started ⁓ being in the hosting business, we were really a hardcore programmer, Java enterprise and things like this.
⁓ So ⁓ we have some very fundamental knowledge about how the technology is working. during the years we start to understand better how to understand better customer and translate this technology understanding into ⁓ helping customers. And then we start to build a very, ⁓ how can I say, process that we enter person.
into our team. So yes, we are using AI because the technology is changing very fast, but we have a very, very big foundation of knowledge that we are putting in an AI so we can easily onboard new customers, new ⁓ people in the support team. We don't expect the AI to solve a customer problem because
Usually he will say do this, this, this, and this and the customer might not understand. Sometimes we need to do this for them. In the moment, is ⁓ dangerous to say that the AI, okay, ⁓ delete his files and create them a new one or to give whatever read, read, write access. Read, yes, but write access is dangerous to give to a production environment. There are cases where it appears to do some.
things not as expected. So ⁓ we are working on the foundation that we have ⁓ as a knowledge and put it in the AI so it will be easily accessible to the new people that are onboarding in our environment and telling them how to work. And everybody who is coming in the team is working with some senior staff that is helping him to understand better what the process and how to work better.
from our perspective of course.
Matt Medeiros (07:47)
Yeah.
Yeah. One of the biggest challenges that I found, and I think anyone who sells WordPress services or WordPress hosting is again, same thing, going back to that same customer that couldn't see F5 to refresh the page. They also don't understand like when I hit limitations with WordPress, that could be ⁓ bandwidth, it could be ⁓
It's been a while since I've been in hosting, but I'll say PHP workers, could be CPU, could be memory. Customers don't realize like, okay, my site's growing, I'm adding more content, I'm doing more with my business. What do you mean like I'm running out of memory? Or what do you mean the site is running slow because I'm on an entry level plan and now I have to go up? mean, Jet Host has a range of products, which we could talk about. I you're doing WordPress hosting, of course, you're doing WooCommerce. How do you help?
the customer understand, okay, you started out on a value plan, but now it's time to upgrade. It's time that you just need more resources, your business is growing. How do you smooth that part over? Because I always find that to be the challenging part in hosting is to get the customer to jump from one plan to the next, because they just simply don't understand what's happening behind the scenes.
Metodi Drenovski (09:09)
There is no straight way formula that can describe how this is going to do. ⁓ The first thing is that if a customer is making money from his website, he understands that if it is ⁓ one of the examples that we use, in fact, is like a store. If you have a small store in a shopping mall and you are running a big advertisement, the customers cannot enter into the shop.
Either you have to stop the advertisement or there will be a big queue waiting to enter into the shop and might be that your working time will end and you will close the shop and some of these customers will not be able to buy anything. Or you have to rent a bigger shop and all the customers will enter. Yes, you will have more sales, but you need a bigger shop. Physical shop is the same when you are online. You need a bigger space for your website.
to work properly and to be able to handle every person that is coming. For more technical people, sometimes it's more easy. In fact, yesterday I was on an event speaking with a customer when we say about PHP. He was showing me his e-commerce website and he tried to look in and it gives internal server around saying, look, you have a problem where you are hosted. You have a problem with the PHP max execution time. And he was, ah, what is this? And I say, okay, I can help you.
Not exactly here in the moment, but when we see the problem, we know how to identify it. When you have to tell him if you are on a plan that needs more PHP workers or PHP execution time, we don't exactly use this. But we say that you need more space because it's like a real shop. Or if you have a restaurant, we try to frame it with how the customers, what is the customer of the business.
what is the business of the customer so he can better understand us because if we talk with ⁓ technical jargon we lose him. He might think even that we like him for some.
Matt Medeiros (11:16)
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's funny before. Yeah, before I left for ⁓ for Presconf, in fact, I was getting my ⁓ that was to my sport coats, getting dry clean before I before I left for the for the trip. And I went to go pick up from this dry cleaner. This dry cleaner next to me also does tailoring. Right. So alterations like tailor your suits and whatever. And the place was booming like the
Metodi Drenovski (11:20)
It's true, we can't happen.
Matt Medeiros (11:46)
The store was booming. was like, I went to you last time I needed dry cleaning, it was nothing. I come in now, the place is booming. And actually one of the other customers in line, because the line was ridiculous, I'm like, I come here often and it's never like this. And one of the other customers said, what's going on? You having like a two for one sale or something? And the store owner ⁓ said that he started running Google Ads for the first time.
And nobody around him does Google ads, like in this particular area, in this particular business. He's like, I put like seven, $800 worth of Google ads in and he's like, I have, he's like, I had to shut them off. He's like, I was getting so much business that I had to shut it off. And I'm, I'm picking up my clothes. I'm like, boy, what a freaking problem to have where you have to shut it off because you're doing so good. ⁓ But I want to pull on something that you said. You said you were on the phone with a customer. Now I don't want people to.
think that you'll promise you'll be on the phone call with all of their tech support. But you're still doing that kind of service today? You're still hopping on to deep dive into technical stuff?
Metodi Drenovski (12:53)
⁓ Sometimes it happens. Yes.
Matt Medeiros (12:57)
We're not
promising you're going to do it. Let the world know. I'm not promising that you're going to get the CEO's time, but tell us about that.
Metodi Drenovski (12:59)
We're not promising yes one thing that
I personally believe is ⁓ that if ⁓ we want I Think this is also in other industries and new practices if you want to teach how the people do The work you have sometimes to go on the front line and listen what the customer is saying What is what are their problems because otherwise we might start to hallucinate like any AI that
If we do this and this and sometimes our team said, look, but the customers are a little bit different. So you have to go back to the earth and understand what is really they're talking about, to understand their language.
Matt Medeiros (13:44)
⁓ What did you do before hosting that taught you that lesson?
Metodi Drenovski (13:49)
⁓ I was in programming, but before programming, ⁓ in my teenage years, I was in martial arts. And I became an instructor and had ⁓ about 100 people that I was teaching. And ⁓ in fact, when you're in front of people and you have to teach them,
you must be able to show them what you want them to do. And whether it is something physical or verbal or mental, you must understand the thinking and the problem so you can teach them. first to understand them. When you start to teach them, you start to understand it better, but first you must be able to do it by yourself, to understand it by yourself.
Matt Medeiros (14:43)
Yeah, or you get punched in the face. And then you learn that lesson real quick. No, that's great. mean, that's, it's these lessons that compound before like all the technology that really, you know, it's great to hear because there's a, you know, there's a lot of people that just like build things to build things or run businesses for the sake of running business. Nothing wrong with that, right? You run the business, you love the business, but.
Metodi Drenovski (14:45)
Yeah, so true, so true. Yeah.
Matt Medeiros (15:13)
I, you know, it's always good to have some someone that has like the like the fundamental work ethic that I find ⁓ so few people, you know, instill in themselves or in the team. So that's a that's a cool story to hear. ⁓ When it comes to the opportunities for WordPress, a lot of folks these days were all worried about WordPress, worried about WordPress itself, worried about AI against WordPress, worried about the competition against WordPress, whether that's
Cloudflare launching M-Dash or Webflow doing a Super Bowl ad and like all these other CMSs. There's always this constant pressure on WordPress and agencies and service folks are trying to find their clients. They're trying to like make a living building websites for people. Where do you see the opportunity for those types of people to still win with WordPress from your vantage point? Like what are the agencies that you
the ones that you host for, like how are they surviving and what advice might you have for those types of folks?
Metodi Drenovski (16:20)
⁓ Today we had a conversation with a partner of ours, with one of our partners and he said that currently he's building mostly, ⁓ he's using WordPress like a headless CMS and this happened for the ⁓ couple of few months it started to change. ⁓ But ⁓ so probably this is one direction. There are a few things.
When we started back in 2002, was this saying that there was an ICQ, if you remember, and other things, and then Skype. The email is dead. So I think these strong apocalyptic ⁓ sayings never happen. In fact, email now is more important than before. ⁓
But we have also other examples. think Robert Jacobi said about Joomla. It was one of the biggest CMSs, but then it shrank a lot. ⁓ So how WordPress will transform depends on how the community will adapt to the new requirement of the business, because the business is the one who is paying money. Currently,
If we speak about the agency, we have a lot of agencies that their business and they have ⁓ people in this agency, they have skills and knowledge how to build good websites in WordPress, how to build good stores, web stores using WooCommerce, how to integrate with different suppliers. There are a lot of plugins to integrating with ⁓ payment processors, with how can I say, with... ⁓
suppliers like DHL and other. In fact, if we... ⁓ the straightforward process is you put a WordPress website, you have a VooCommerce and you have Stripe integrated. But for example, in other countries, Stripe is very expensive. It has the commission in, for example, ⁓ here we have ⁓ payment processors that have commissions three to four times less than Stripe, but there is no...
particular plugins. So there are plugins built especially for vCommers. So the people that want to use a local payment processor or delivery courier, they will implement on vCommers because on the other platforms there are neither integration nor sufficient people with skills that can build with new platforms. I speak with people that is using ⁓
I don't remember exactly the name of the CMS and he said, I cannot use it. It is a new one based again on TypeScript and other like Astro. But he said there is no integration with any local payment processor on Coolio. So I can build it. And I say, but if you build it, then put it as a plugin because with this will help other people to adopt it. ⁓ but currently if you want to build fast a store.
Matt Medeiros (19:37)
Yeah.
Metodi Drenovski (19:42)
he will use WooCommerce because there is a community, there is the agency, there are the skills, there are the plugins, and this is nothing that can be replaced very fast. This is also with Cloudflare ⁓ Yes, they're very far ahead in the AI integration. They are doing a lot of things, but it needs time, traction, and the business to adopt this. Otherwise, I remember Ruby on Rails when it became every say, this will be the killer of WordPress.
nothing like this. Few gigs, play with this, yes, an interesting technology, but then it just was not adopted by the business. So I think it depends how the WordPress and agencies will adopt the new technology and how AI will be integrated into WordPress, whether it will make sense for the business. And if some other platform make it better, this might start to shake the world for WordPress.
Matt Medeiros (20:22)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, it's a lot of those, ⁓ you know, the boring workflows that we're so used to, like the boring, hey, WordPress is in a zip file and you just download it and install it. But like I've been saying on this debate of AI and other competition, that's a that's like a reliable thing. That's something that an agency can count on. That boring zip file that is the same every time you extract it.
That's the value because when you're just vibe coding stuff, it's coming up with some new routine every single time. And how do you build around that? I mean, I'm sure, yes, you can, but what's the cost and how unique and how custom is that workflow? Especially when you deal with ⁓ agency turnover, like you're trying to build a team, you're trying to repeat this process to build websites for customers. WordPress has a nice, reliable workflow.
Yes, some of stuff we don't like, and yes, some of it is old and clunky, but it is reliable in the sense that you can train somebody on your team how to develop, how to build, how to support this WordPress website, and that becomes a healthy business of process. ⁓ And sure, these toolings will get better with an M-dash and all this other AI stuff, but right now it's still very cutting edge, and how can you just shift to that just because it's cool to talk to the chat system and have it build a website for you?
There's a lot of challenges in there and I think for like a bigger medium even a medium-sized agency ⁓ to a big agency ⁓ it's hard to just like You know rip WordPress out of what we already do and just throw in AI for the sake of AI ⁓ Yeah, I want to talk about ⁓ WooCommerce for a second we were hinting at that a little bit still the
Metodi Drenovski (22:22)
Absolutely. Absolutely. You're absolutely right.
Matt Medeiros (22:35)
I call it the elephant in the room, 800 pound gorilla, whatever you want to say. Like, it still seems like we haven't seen WooCommerce in the same conversation as the Shopify. I mean, let's just say Shopify. We haven't seen much of like everyone going, man, am I doing WooCommerce or am I doing Shopify? It always seems to be like a real hard critical decision that people need to make to choose WooCommerce. Or they say, you know what? ⁓
I'll pay the Shopify tax and just go with Shopify. What's the opportunity that you see from your vantage point with WooCommerce, ⁓ know, for people to start building and servicing customers in WooCommerce? Like, what's the hurdles that we have to get over to make WooCommerce a more attractive product?
Metodi Drenovski (23:25)
I think ⁓
Shopify, ⁓ it's a very good question. So let's think a little bit from the perspective of the customer first. Shopify what? Shopify promise. It promise that you start your shop with one click. And you can really go and test and click and it can show up.
⁓ one of the things that I discussed, in fact, in press conf is that there is no such experience for the customer. think it was a discussion about. VooCommerce about making a showcases where the people can see real websites and so on. So I think the biggest customer base of Shopify was, I'm not sure in the moment, whether it is like this, but it was a one abyss that just want to start very fast. Because if we look from the business perspective, if you want to build a good store.
man, it doesn't cost. ⁓ It's not cheaper. It's not just the cost of Shopify. It might cost you even more than building a website on VooCommerce. But the promise that Shopify succeeded to do is that it will be very easy to start and cheap to start. And I think this is one thing that must be more better maybe communicated about VooCommerce because
most of the things in WorldCamps are related to WordPress.
Even WooCommerce is part of... But it's a plugin that you have to install. So it's like in one moment it becomes like a separate talk, but it must be more integrated into the communication with WordPress. not, you either build website on WordPress or shop on WooCommerce. What is WooCommerce? It is a WordPress plugin. So it must be...
Matt Medeiros (25:26)
Yeah.
Metodi Drenovski (25:31)
You can use WordPress to build either your site or your ⁓ e-commerce website to go in this direction. So people understand that this is one and the same platform, not too different. And the idea with showcases with simple sites ⁓ is also something that I think will help.
Matt Medeiros (25:59)
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I was talking to somebody the other day and ⁓ I mean, he's sort of, you know, far on the cutting edge of like AI and he's like in love with AI and I he's technical background. He's not a pure developer, but he definitely knows what he's doing and he can do things with, ⁓ certainly with AI to help him build stuff. And he like put out a message like, I want to build a...
a simple, you know, shop so I can, I don't know, maybe it was to sell like merchandise for some other stuff that he's doing. I forget what it was, but it was very, like a very simple product. But his path, and I know this is just him and this is just one example, but his path was he was just going to go code it himself, right? Like with AI and like, you know, send it off to Stripe and all this stuff. And he was asking for like, if anybody has like done this before, looking for examples. And I just sent him a DM. I'm like, hey man, why even waste your time? Like just...
Metodi Drenovski (26:41)
You
Matt Medeiros (26:54)
use WooCommerce and WordPress and you don't even have to spend any tokens. You can just install the thing and like, I'll say like I said five minutes, it might take a little bit longer, but you can install the thing in like five minutes. And if you're just gonna sell a handful of things, why not just use this? It's already done for you. And he's like, oh, this is in DMs. He's like, why would, he's like, I'm never touching WordPress again. I think one of the things that's gonna happen,
with this, this is a bit of an aside, but I think one of the things that's gonna happen because of AI is people are gonna spend all this time, air quotes time, using AI tools to build stuff and then sit back and go, oh God, I don't wanna have to, now I gotta maintain this thing, now I gotta think about features, know, I spent, you know, whatever, 30, $40 in my tokens to build this.
why don't I just use WordPress? It's already done for me. Like it's already done. I don't even have to waste time. And it's almost like this inverse thing that I think will happen is everyone's so attracted to AI and like pushing WordPress away until they spend six months with the thing that they built with AI and they go, ⁓ yeah, coulda, I shoulda just done this right over here with WordPress. It woulda been done already. I think that's one of the, I don't know if you have any thoughts on that. Like I think actually WordPress comes out,
maybe as in a better light after people have tinkered for six months with their AI project and just said, I'll just use WordPress.
Metodi Drenovski (28:21)
Yes, I think also this is one of the ways that it will go. First, about building. I think people are just fascinated that they're able to build something that they don't understand. Like for them, it's a magic. Just write something and it builds for you. But I think that this, and sometimes they build it just for the sake of the possibility to build it by themselves. ⁓
And when they start to use it, they will very start to understand the limitation of what they have built and that it is not easy to make it work because building something you can build. If you are not a builder, you can try to a house and when you enter it will fall, but you will understand it a little bit. And then you will hire a construction company to build the house for you. But ⁓ this is something that is happening and they will hit the wall.
Matt Medeiros (29:13)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Metodi Drenovski (29:19)
and they understand, man, is not so easy. So I think this is what you... And they will say, yes, it's better to use WordPress with the WooCommerce where everything is ready and I have a stable environment where I can add my products and start selling and not to try the two things that I don't understand. But it will take probably time. It's time.
Matt Medeiros (29:41)
Yeah, yeah. You know, I think it's also I'm also very fascinated with the ability to build something myself. It's what I've always wanted to do. You know, growing up and tinkering with computers and then being in high school and, you know, taking like my first coding classes and just like not being smart enough to do it, but always like wanting to build this stuff. And now with with AI, it's like, wow, this is amazing. But.
you start to quickly realize that, man, this thing is just going to agree with whatever you want. Like, I was having a discussion building this thing I'm working on the other day, and it's just like, hey, I need you to evaluate comparing these two things, and it was just like, yeah, let's just take this one. This is the smarter route, and I'm looking at it going, this is not the smarter route. This is not the, this is not the, and I'm, I don't even know this stuff. That's not the smarter route, and then like, I think I was using Claude.
4.6 and it was like, oh yes, you're right. That's not what we should do. We should do this. I why didn't you tell me that the first place? Like what's happening with this stuff? And you know, I'm not just asking these one liners. I'm feeding it context of doing all the stuff and it's still not 100%, which is crazy.
Metodi Drenovski (30:53)
But
I think this is because you understand how it works and you have this background and you know what is it generating. yes, for people like you, it is very different. imagine a person that don't know. The first thing that he receive, this is the right way. He say, yes, this is the right way.
Matt Medeiros (30:57)
Right. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah,
yeah, yeah, it's wild. ⁓ I want to talk a little bit more about you have ⁓ two, well, you have a plugin that you offer ⁓ for Jet Host that your customers can use. You have an AI website builder. I want to talk about those two products, but I do want to I want to ⁓ wedge in a more hot seat question. And in the news as of yesterday, we saw a lot of ⁓
true pushback, not pushback, we saw a lot of anger towards Liquid Web folding in the well-known plugins and products from the WordPress space. GiveWP, ⁓ Cadence Theme, Event Calendar, LearnDash, you know, these are beloved products and I think ⁓ in the WordPress community, so many people knew the founders, know the founders of those softwares and it's just like, how could you do this?
And with that argument aside, because I think that's a different argument, my question is, what do you think? Do you think hosting companies can have a plug-in slash software business? I know you have a plug-in that augments your customers. I know you have AI site building. But standalone products like a LearnDash or a Cadence, what's your take on a hosting company trying to do products like that as well?
Metodi Drenovski (32:49)
plugin that we have is built to simplify the smallest customers. ⁓ The small SMBs that want to have ⁓
the confidence that when they install it, they will ⁓ not happen something that they are not familiar with that might get hacked their website. So they don't have to ⁓ check it every time and things like this. It is not replacing other plugins. is not a product that can...
replace the commercial products that are used by our customers. Whether a web hosting company wants to build a product of their own...
My perspective and our vision is that in fact, we want to work with people like this that are building this software. And we always for the last 25 years work with the community and the people that are building software. And ever since then we were asked why you don't build websites? Why you don't do? And I always answer because we are doing web hosting. Yes, but
To use web hosting, you need to be the website. And I said, this is completely different businesses. Building a software is completely different business, completely different project organization, complete skillset. Company structure is different. So yes, we have a software team and it is working on our internal systems and things that are improving the user experience and better integration with different products.
AI Builder on the other hand, I think is helping the agencies. Our AI Builder is ⁓ built on WordPress. It's using Accentify the background. So it's based on Accentify. why I like this product? Because when a customer builds a website using this, he has a working WordPress website that is completely portable to any other solution where he want to move it, whether he upgrade it.
and is able to go to ⁓ when he see that he cannot do anything more, he can go to a WordPress agency and say, look, I have this website, it is built on WordPress and I need to build on top of it, can you help me? And this save tremendous amount of time because the customer already has built his ⁓ prototype because this is not usually a working website, but it's a prototype that he can show to the agency.
he was thinking about because most of the time the first time users cannot explain to an agency what they really want and I see that more experienced agencies don't want first time users. If freelancers are watching they can say, but we want them. Yes, most freelancers are wanting them but experienced agencies and this is the opportunity for the freelancers also. They can build also with AI better, faster websites.
because they have the experience after the initial setup to tuning it. So it is, I think it is helping in fact the industry and the WordPress community.
Matt Medeiros (36:20)
Yeah.
Yeah Yeah, I've recorded an episode a podcast episode about a lot of the reaction that happened yesterday the problem is and you know I don't know if I'm going to release it because the problem is is I know it's so it's such an emotional emotional event for folks that you know lost their jobs and as liquid web restructured, it's a very hard thing for folks to
comprehend and ⁓ you know deal with I've been let go twice throughout my professional career I know what it's like to all of sudden be like hey you don't have a job anymore you know and find another job so I get that side of it but I I'm saying like listen a web hosting company's job is to do web hosting like that's like you were just saying like that's the core business people are looking for a place
to put their website or whatever website, e-commerce store, application, whatever it is. They're looking for a place to put this because what they want is they want this thing to run without fail, right? That's what the customer wants. They want it to run without fail and if they have a question, number two, I want to be able to talk to somebody, get some support. That's the meat of it right there. Then can I get a good price? Can I get a good price after that? Like that's three, right? So it's the...
Metodi Drenovski (37:41)
Exactly.
Yeah.
Matt Medeiros (37:48)
And I would say, this is an unpopular opinion, this is why don't know if I'm gonna publish the episode, but we'll talk about it here. And if I haven't published the episode by the time this episode comes out, knock on my door and maybe I'll send it to you directly. ⁓ I think Liquid Web, hey man, they didn't kill the products, the products still exist. You can still go to Liquid Web and see the five or six plugins, whatever it is, ⁓ and buy them. ⁓ So they didn't die, they're still there.
Metodi Drenovski (38:00)
Okay.
Matt Medeiros (38:18)
And they gave five years to reconfigure this. That's a long time in WordPress world, as hard as this business is for selling plugins, for a hosting company, in my opinion, to let that run. I would say that most businesses, if this thing ain't working, hey man, time's ticking. We gotta figure out what we're doing with this thing. And if it's not working, because this is an accessory product to the business.
We're get it out of here. I don't care if it's private equity, I don't care if it's publicly traded company, I don't care if it's a small business. At some point somebody's gonna go, this isn't working, what are we gonna do with it? It just doesn't make business sense anymore. So that's where I stand with the whole thing. I don't know, if you have further comments you can comment, if not, it's totally fine.
Metodi Drenovski (39:15)
then
I think that the hosting company has to focus on what it is doing because there is a lot of stuff that has to be done in the hosting environment, especially in the demanding ⁓ environment that the people want to build their things and try and experiment and ⁓ there are new frameworks and things like this. ⁓
I also think that this is the right direction. Otherwise you become a software company from my perspective, because I've been in the software business. It's just a different company. They don't know how to handle communication with small business. Usually they're B2B. ⁓ It is completely different communication, completely different business, completely different structure. But if somebody see that ⁓ for them the way to
Pivot is there.
Matt Medeiros (40:17)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because you just, know, if you're a hosting company and all of a sudden you're trying to integrate those types of products at that, at that layer of the customer, well, then you just start like, you almost feel like you're a SaaS based business, but then you're like, all right, you got your hosting fee, you got your licensing fees, and then the customer just starts demanding things and they're like, I don't even know what another like learn.
Metodi Drenovski (40:17)
Okay, they can,
for it.
Matt Medeiros (40:47)
learning SaaS businesses, I forget, Udemy, think, or something like that. Like Udemy only charges $59 a month. Well, Udemy is a software business. We're a hosting company who sells work. And then you get into that conversation and the customer's like, what do you mean? Like, I came to you to build this learning site. These guys sell it for 59 bucks. You want $59 just for the hosting and $500 a year for this. And then it just becomes very messy. So it's just like, yeah, focus on one thing and they're still doing it.
We'll move on from that topic. We'll start wrapping up because I can go on a soapbox rant. Yeah, I can go a while on that. Again, feel bad for everybody who lost their jobs and all that stuff. And that's just an age old tug of war that all of humanity deals with, with every industry ever, not just WordPress. Okay, jet host. Back to jet host. Wrapping up. What?
Metodi Drenovski (41:19)
We can go a lot.
Matt Medeiros (41:43)
Agency owners that are out there, they're always looking for a great place ⁓ to host their client websites. ⁓ What do you think your best fit is for agency owners to come to you? Where do they slot in in the Jet Host Stack? ⁓ And how could they find out more? If they're an agency they want to host, I love the idea about the AI website builder. Great place to point them and say, hey, customer, go build your prototype of your WordPress website here and then we'll take it.
the rest. an awesome entry point. What else? Where else should agency owners ⁓ think about jet host in their stack?
Metodi Drenovski (42:20)
From a technical perspective we are built on a light speed enterprise for all our hosting plans which gives incredible speed improvement. We have Immunify 360 and all the other things that are important for a modern hosting company to have a secure and fast environment for their clients.
But I think that these are the things on the shelf. Everybody can take them and put them. And ⁓ what I see that we are building and I'm proud of is that we are fine tuning these to work in the best possible way. our, what is the biggest nightmare of, and I experienced it by myself because the people can explain it to me how they feel.
a web agency owner that was wake up literally in 2 a.m. and asked them why my site is not working and they cannot do anything. And I think this is a big nightmare for all the agencies, all owners, especially for the smallest one because they must have more clients, ⁓ they are not in some high-end enterprise environment. So it has to be very fine-tuned and...
they must know that the hosting company will handle properly the configuration, the management, the monitoring. And if there is something, they will react professionally because I have a conversation with people that ask me, okay, what you, I know you will promise me that everything will be okay. And I say, look, man, I cannot promise this. It is a technology. If somebody promise you this, I don't know why, how he can do it, but this is a lie.
Matt Medeiros (44:18)
Yeah.
Metodi Drenovski (44:19)
So what I can promise you that we have a team of professionals that will act immediately and professionally whatever will happen and will help you in every step if something happened and you can rely on us about this that we will act on your side professionally and we will help you with everything. And sometimes it goes beyond hosting sometimes it is ⁓ even ⁓ some ⁓ really about some
WordPress integration, sometimes it's even goals in helping them with real programming stuff sometimes just to help them with their client. They are having some issue with something might be related ⁓ to some configuration. The server might be related with something else, but we go deep with them. Sometimes it's even ⁓ indexing a table that makes the files, the website 100 times faster. It is something that we really...
Go deep and try to understand the technical stuff and the business of the customer and try to help them and they can rely on this. Jet, Jet Host will stand behind them.
Matt Medeiros (45:26)
Yeah, yeah, that's great.
Yeah, I mean, as again, as somebody who ran an agency, I took all of the knowledge I had. started my agency after I left the ISP, where I was managing like one of the first like when cPanel first came onto the market and it was a cluster of servers. And I was like, started my agency. I'm like, I got this. I can do this myself. And then, you know, it's like when you're on the hook as an agency owner.
doing hosting, now again, is friggin' many years ago at this point, but ⁓ when you're on the hook, trying to do the hosting yourself, a lot of people still do it. They'll just get some bare bones VPS, try to throw some clients on there and start from there. Okay, fine, great place to start, okay, I get it. But as soon as you get to a certain threshold of like, okay, this is a chunk of money that I cannot ⁓ bet against. I can't be...
on a weekend out with my family and suddenly the server goes down and nobody's here to fix this thing. And I got customers that are down and they're calling, you know, the office and nobody's there to help. You need to be able to lean on somebody. And I think that's the number one thing agencies should look towards when they evaluate web hosting companies is what does that support look like? What does that support message look like? Like, Jet Host will stand behind you and work with you.
and truly understand those values. It's the number one lesson that we teach in the web hosting course here at the WP Minute is have these conversations and don't just evaluate on gigabytes and bandwidth and price alone. You're going to have to look at that support ⁓ and try to have a conversation with folks. I'm glad that you brought that ⁓ to the table. Matadi, anywhere, anything else you want?
folks to know about Jet Host before we sign off. Anywhere you want to send them so that they can say thanks to you.
Metodi Drenovski (47:24)
For a hosting company it's very difficult for me to say something that somebody else probably never said. But I will be happy with whoever tries it can easily find me even on LinkedIn and whatever and he can give me an honest feedback or if he wants to learn more I'm open for...
directly to connect and ⁓ share with him other things ⁓ or information that he want to know or just to chat because ⁓ I believe the honest conversation is the one that is building trust. And this is something that ⁓ we want to show to people that we are ⁓ real people first, human beings, and ⁓ we are people that
understand what we are doing and whoever give us a chance we understand that they can really trust us and rely on us.
Matt Medeiros (48:32)
Yeah. And get in now because the price of humans are going up.
Metodi Drenovski (48:38)
We don't know the price of AI. For the last two weeks I always read, look I have at the max plan for $100 but it consumes $2,600. So we don't know how we will go with AI.
Matt Medeiros (48:40)
Yeah.
Yeah, yep.
Yeah, yeah. And guess what? You have no idea. Like you have no idea about like how those tokens are being used. Like did I really, did it need to use that? It's like the craziest business where there's like you just, it's obscurity. You just send out the message and then it comes back and it just says, yeah, it took me, I don't know, it took me 4,000 tokens to say hello. And you're like, wait a minute, 4,000 tokens for that? What hap-
Metodi Drenovski (49:13)
You
Matt Medeiros (49:17)
Here's another thing before we sign off. So I tried jumping on ⁓ the open claw bandwagon, right? Like I think there's, maybe you'll agree with me, like I think there's, especially in AI, there's like bleeding edge, then there's cutting edge, and then there's like AI which is already fairly, like even the chat of AI is still not something a lot of people do. And agents like an open claw, that's like, to me that's like bleeding edge stuff. That's still.
way out there. Like it's not as ⁓ stable ⁓ and as, ⁓ you know, as smooth as if you just logged into Clodcode. Anyway, so I finally I set it up. I got it set up and I got busy and I totally forgot about it. Right. I just totally forgot that I had set it up in like four or five days past. And I was like, I got to finish setting up my open client or service. And then I
connected it up to OpenRouter, my OpenRouter API for the API. I wasn't using Claude Codex or anything like that. And just idle, the thing just sitting there, use like eight million tokens over those four or five days, just with like its heartbeat, just like sitting there doing. Now eight million tokens sounds like a lot, it's not a lot, but it's just sitting there doing nothing. If I started to chat with it, try to configure it, try to get it to do things for me,
I mean, clearly, that API usage would have gone to like a few hundred dollars a month for me to just like, what am I getting out of this thing? I can do a lot of this stuff with quad code or codecs or whatever. Like, people are start jumping on these things so fast and the prices are gonna get ridiculous. And I think that a lot of people don't realize that yet. Anyway, just wanna throw that out there before we sign off. Nobody realizes it.
Metodi Drenovski (51:08)
Nobody realized it.
Matt Medeiros (51:14)
Fantastic conversation. Can't wait to do it again. Jethost.com, folks who are listening to this, this episode will definitely be out before they can meet you at WordCamp Europe and WordCamp US. So if you want to say hi and say thanks and learn more about Jethost, look for the Jethost brand at any of these events, and I'm sure they'll be happy to talk to you. Thewpminute.com slash subscribe, number one way to stay connected.
We'll see you in the next episode.