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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)
back to the WP Minute today, joined with CTO of Scala hosting, one of our fantastic foundation plus sponsors here at the WP Minute, Vlad. Vlad, welcome to the show.
Vlad Georgiev (00:12)
Hello, hello, and thanks for having me. Very glad to be here.
Matt Medeiros (00:17)
obviously hosting changing at the same pace as WordPress and AI these days, or more like AI. WordPress we're waiting for these things to catch up, but the hosting world definitely changing. and I I would you know imagine that hosting companies are sort of on the forefront of how a lot of us are going to, you know, experience the web.
Moving forward, it's always been the case, but now it's like, wow, how are hosting companies going to adapt to what might be a new web as AI continues to evolve? We're gonna get to all of that stuff, of course, in a minute. But for folks who don't know who you are, who are you and what's the day to day like as the CTO of a growing hosting company?
Vlad Georgiev (01:04)
Well, it's been a very nice journey. I've been in this in the hosting industry for like twenty five years now. So I have seen a lot from shared web hosting to building clusters with multiple tens and hundreds of servers in there working as one. regarding my role, I have always been a technical per person.
I've tried to help with marketing, to help with sales, to help with whatever. I'm trying to wear many hats, but at the end of the day I'm a technical person and that's what I love doing most.
Matt Medeiros (01:49)
Yeah. How d how did you get started in the hosting world? I'm always curious to find out how folks get started in the hosting world. I I used to work at a retail store, just to give you a background, really quick. I got my first technical job was at a hosting company which was local to me. We're like a local internet service provider. We were selling dial ups and T one lines back then and hosting was a thing that I I learned. But I I got into it because
I worked at a retail store called Circuit City here in the US. And there was we used to sell software on a shelf, and there was Mandrake Linux, there was I think Red Hat Linux was still free at the time, like they were still distributing it for free. And I bought one of those books with Mandrake Linux in it, and I was like, what is this? And I learned about Apache web servers and I was building it at home with a used PC that I bought from Circuit City.
That's how I got into my technical world. How did you get it in in yours?
Vlad Georgiev (02:50)
Same story. Well traditional same story. Started
Matt Medeiros (02:53)
I think.
Vlad Georgiev (02:54)
with Red Hat 7.3, those like 25 years ago. It was free for sure, otherwise, I can't afford it. I was at school at that time, that's how everything started, and that's how my passion about servers was born. And some years later.
Basically, started the first hosting company in Bulgaria, and then from there started Scala hosting some years later, five years later, started Scala hosting, and that's how everything grew over years. I've been so happy that I found
what I'm passionate about because I can say that I didn't have to work a single day in my life. Everything was great fun, lots of learning, lots of working with people from all over the world. Fantastic.
Matt Medeiros (03:59)
Yeah. There's some magic in this. And the reason why I asked this question is there's some there was some magic back then, and maybe there's some magic for you, and that's what I wanna still today and that's what I wanna unpack. But that ability that you and I probably both shared, like I had the Linux Bible and I was reading seven hundred pages of like how to, you know, use the Debian inst package installer and learning all of that stuff and compiling code and all of this.
And it was a learning experience, like sitting up to the late hours, you know, putting together this server, everything being open source, everybody like sharing in this in this knowledge. I'm kind of worried that we start to lose that experience and that curiosity as AI solves everything for us and just goes out and does it. What are your thoughts on losing that sort of? I don't want to go as far as to say like,
How do we lose open source and all of this stuff? But if you feel like that's in danger, I I'd love to hear more about your thoughts around that.
Vlad Georgiev (05:00)
I feel 100% the same way this day exactly what you what you explained. This is what it is in in reality. What I see is that people are stopping to think and relying too much on AI. And I'm using AI as well, but maybe I don't believe it so much.
And because the the code it produces, yeah, everything works, everything it produces it works, but what I have noticed so far it has significant security gaps. And people who never developed anything, never wrote anything in in some programming language, no matter what it is, they think they are now programmers.
Because they don't know that this is a specific profession. For someone, like you can be a surgeon, you work many years to become a surgeon. It is the same with programming. And someone talks to AI and tells, okay, build me an application or a website which does XYZ, it builds it and it works.
But you don't know what exactly is behind the code. And what I've noticed is there are many security gaps, and you really don't want to you really don't want to put such a huge risk if that is how you you earn your money. let's say to to to fire your developers, because we have seen this a lot.
And many companies are talking about it. They are laying out people, developers, and we are replacing them with AI. I can tell that it won't be too long before those companies want to get their people back. But we'll see. Time will tell.
Matt Medeiros (07:17)
Yeah. I I wanna hold that thought 'cause I have a question there, but there's a a a real world experience where I'm sort of at I don't know what the best phrase is here. It's like a t a tug of war. There there are people that have come to me that have no coding experience. It this person knocked on my door the other day and was like, Hey, I'm built this app. I know you're an app guy, you're in the tech space, it's gonna
I I think if we partnered up, we could make a lot of money together. And this person is a real estate agent. And I'm thinking to myself, you've already gone down the wrong path. Number one, like if you're leading with, I'm going to make a lot of money with this, you've already lost. Like you're already going down the wrong path. If that's your first outlook on this stuff. And and second, y AI has has tricked you to believe that you have built like this.
massive solution to a problem. Now, the other half of me is like, it's awesome that people are able to learn this stuff. Like that that's the tug of war that I'm at right now. Like I I I'm afraid of some people doing things that they shouldn't be doing with code. But on the other hand, I I do like that it is empowering people to build things. I don't know if you f feel that as well of like where do we stop of
you know, Matt and Vlad from twenty five years ago with a book Linux Bible learning how to do this stuff versus somebody who's using Chat GPT to start to to build websites. Like where do we draw the line of like it's okay to learn this stuff this way, but you also have to know what the impact is, if that makes sense.
Vlad Georgiev (09:00)
Well yeah, at the end of the day you must know what you're doing. Because if you just rely on something else to do the work for you, you have no control. You can't support whatever was built, whatever was developed, you don't know how it works, you have no idea. And you become a slave to AI. Because tomorrow, if tomorrow somehow, let's say
AI becomes too expensive. How you will support your project? It is gone. If you created it yourself and you know how it works, how each piece in that software works, whatever happens, you will be able to support it and fix it and improve it. So if I have to compare, I think.
The oldest way is the better way because you gain knowledge, you gain skills. With AI you just see the final product as if something gives you a a gift and lets you use it. But you can't measure how much this gift costs, how it was developed, and if tomorrow something happens with it, you have no control to to fix it.
Matt Medeiros (10:24)
Yeah. we're talking to Vlad from Scala Hosting, Scalahosting.com, fastest hosting, real humans, perfect score. We're gonna talk about your WordPress hosting stack in a second, but you're making this sort of segue for me about this unrealized cost of of AI, and it's something that's always on the back of my mind. You said that maybe some companies are letting folks go, replacing them with AI, and then maybe in six months to eighteen months, we're gonna see those.
Those companies go, you know what? Come back and work for us. We actually need humans now because I'm seeing the cost of tokens rising, and we're still living in this excuse me, this subsidized world of you know, clawed code and codecs. And believe me, like I am falling into that trap as well. I'm like, look what I can do with a few hundred dollars a month with AI to things I could never even dream of.
And I'm like cautiously optimistic building this stuff, going if what once this thing is like real I'm really having to pay for this, it's gonna be impossible for me to do what I'm doing as a solo person. how how what's the runway you think? Like what what do you gather is the runway of these subsidized plans? And and when do you think the real cost is gonna is going to go up, if at all?
Vlad Georgiev (11:49)
Well, I think the cost is going to go up in the next maybe one or two years. And at that time, people will understand that the projects they built some years ago are now very expensive to support. Because all the new models that come up will be pretty expensive to use. And then it may happen that supporting their
AI written project will down the road, down the the time, it will become more expensive than if it was built by humans who can support it and who you pay salaries, but they they can actually know how every piece works and whatever happens they can quickly fix it while with AI.
Also, with AI, it's not stable all the time. What I mean is there are days when AI works very well, but there are days when it is like as if as if you're talking to a newbie and it does all sort of mistakes. AI is great for a programmer who has
Experience and skills and is an expert in programming, then AI can make that person much much more efficient in times more efficient. But people who have no experience with coding and use AI to produce different kinds of software, and they think that software is secure and is stable and is
Book free, that would be a pretty good lie because they can't catch it. They can't see the books, they can't see the security issues, and the security issues and everything is in there because I also use AI and I'm not very happy with the code it produces. Yeah, it helps a lot when especially with smaller things to automate, and you need to write
a quick script and instead of writing it like thirty forty minutes AI writes it in a minute and it works. It works. You can use it. But for a more complex system for a more complex system it is it is not it it it doesn't work well.
Matt Medeiros (14:32)
Yeah. There's the devil's advocate to this, and I'm curious to get your thoughts, and then we'll start talking about obviously WordPress hosting. is the open source side of this argument where I've heard and watched a ton of content about okay, if this cost does rise inevitably in a year or two years, the or some of the thinking that I've that I've consumed is, well, we'll have open source models that are
you know, not as good, but pretty good. And those will sort of, for lack of a better phrase, pick up the slack from, you know, the stuff that our f the frontier models have. So you'll you'll eventually be spending thousands of dollars a month on what you're using now and subsidized cost of Claude Code, but maybe by then we'll have some kind of open source leader of the pack that is going to pick up the slack. one, I'm curious your thoughts on open source
models in in this context, but two, you still need to power them. Like they still need compute. And and and honestly, this is where I think maybe hosting companies start to go. And I'm also curious your thoughts on that. Like maybe a year from two years, maybe your revenue generator is powering the open source compute because somebody doesn't want to pay open AI or anthropic thousands and thousands of dollars a month.
maybe they can go and get us a an open source model from you. So your thoughts, open source L L Ms and or AI models and and and maybe how hosting companies like yourself might go in that territory.
Vlad Georgiev (16:13)
Yeah, that's absolutely a great step for businesses down the road. And we have we have such AI machines which we are currently using and basically running our own models which we train, we have all the data and the setup and so on. So down the road we have an internal internal model. for example.
The S Shield, which is the security system built in S-Panel and protecting websites in real time, it now sends data with to our internal model, which we run on our own servers, not on a public AI model, so that our data is is exposed. We are running an internal model and basically that that system
It checks everything that happens on all servers powered by SPANL in real time. If something happens like a compromise, we know on the second. It is really real-time monitoring, and here AI helps tremendously. It's a huge help for tasks like this one, it's irreplaceable basically. So AI will help all industries.
Become very very efficient, much more efficient than what they have been in the past, but AI won't replace people. Especially people who are experienced and experts in what they are doing. AI will never, never replace them.
Matt Medeiros (18:00)
Yeah, one hundred percent. let's talk about that S panel. You started to mention that and what goes on behind the scenes at Scale of Hosting. S Panel, lots of folks in the crowd are probably used to hearing about C Panel, which is something that when I started my hosting career, I was like one of the very first customers when that package rolled out. I was able to one click install things. And back then I was like, Whoa, this is amazing. fast forward twenty five years later, I think we're all accustomed to that. why have you gone in in
and built out your own experience and explain more about how scale of hosting differentiates with s Panel versus maybe the competition.
Vlad Georgiev (18:41)
Well we also started with cPanel in early 2000s, and then I was even talking to Nick in the the the founder of of cPanel in IRC that it was popular at at that time, and we were fixing like scripts easy Apache, not not completing successfully and
failing in the middle, so the whole server is down. That is how it was working at that time. And Nick applying a patch at 3 a.m. at night and giving back to me and saying, okay, try it, try with this. I I fixed it. It was very nice, very funny. But at some point cPanel stopped stopped developing what people needed. Let's say the Nginx integration, the feature that was most wanted for like seven plus years at that time.
And no attention was paid to that thing, and there were thousands of votes in their system, people asking for it, many hosting providers and and so on, including me. So at that time I decided we need to build our own thing so that we have 100% control to deliver what our customers ask for. That is how Espana was born. And since then, till today.
And still going on, that's how we plan it for the future. What this in spanel was actually requested by the people using it. We have features.spanel.io, which is a public system allowing anyone using S Panel to suggest features what they want to see next available in S Panel, and vote for what other people suggested. And basically we
Implement the features that have the most demand. This is really what people expect from us, and they are very happy that it is happening in practice because if you look at it, you will see that all of the features, all of the suggestions people asked for with the most demand, all of them are implemented and available in production for people to use. They are happy that their voice is heard.
And basically S Panel is driven by the people using it, not by us or by someone else who is deciding what to be what to happen next in S Panel. Basically the people using it, they decide.
Matt Medeiros (21:21)
Yeah. And that I mean, do you set up like like going back to the days of IRC, like do you give how do you give your customers a voice in that development? Just like a sort of like product board where they get to vote, or is it like built in where they get to vote, how they want to to use it and experience? How do you gain that customer, I guess, interaction or buy-in to help develop that product?
Vlad Georgiev (21:47)
Well in S Panel there is there is an icon in their interface which they can click and get to the that system which is public features.io and there they can see all the features, all the suggestions of other people, and they can they can enter their own suggestions in there, they can submit and see what happens. If many people vote for them, then it will go.
go straight to the development, planning, development and they will see it in S panel. Really most of the features in S panel go there in in this way, in in d in this path.
Matt Medeiros (22:28)
That's awesome. That's awesome. Do you have I mean, I know you you all host more than just WordPress. do you get a lot of like integrating WordPress with the S Panel? Like do you have I guess are WordPress customers needy? Are WordPress customers needy and always asking for things in S Panel? Or is it more just like I just gotta get this WordPress site set up and run? Like where do those customers fall in line with asking for features?
Vlad Georgiev (22:55)
Well, like over forty percent of the websites nowadays are using WordPress, so it is a significant amount. So we paid special attention to WordPress and we built a WordPress manager which has tons of features in it, not only quick installation and removal of WordPress, resetting password and stuff like that, but also significant features that help secure WordPress in a way that not that WordPress is not secure.
It is secure, but when people start installing additional plugins, themes, and so on, and maybe the code behind is not as secure, and there may be some vulnerabilities, we have automations in place in our WordPress manager in SPANL that allows people to secure and lock the WordPress installation in a way that even if they have a plugin that is
Insecure and vulnerable, a remote hacker cannot exploit it and cannot compromise the website itself because of these nice features we built in our WordPress manager in
Matt Medeiros (24:10)
It's been a while since I've heard people talk about Dash, the alleged spiritual successor to WordPress. And one of the things that or like core technologies to Dash, and I understand it's obviously a Cloudflare project and Cloudflare is massive. but one of the things that they were trying to hit home about was security, and how they were gonna try to differentiate how you could execute plugins and code inside WordPress and and I'm just
paraphrasing here, but like you could it you could execute code safer, let's call it that. is what they alleged against against WordPress. But I I mean I haven't heard anything about dash in a long time. I haven't seen that security aspect lead the charge. And I think most people when put in good practice of WordPress, like like you said, it's still secure. You just have to do it right.
and if you start to, I guess, lock it down in a way where you start to lose those freedoms of WordPress of like I can install any plugin, I can install any theme, which yes, brings in security risk, but also like that's part of the customization. That's why we love WordPress, is because we can do that kind of hot swap of plugins and and code like that. any any thoughts on like how WordPress competes against other CMSs like an dash at that security level?
Vlad Georgiev (25:34)
Well I think with the latest improvements in WordPress allowing AI bots to communicate easily with it and allowing allowing the person, the website owner, to automate lots of stuff using AI communicating really well with the WordPress core, that is a huge advantage. That is a huge advantage and WordPress
Is written in a good way, as to say. It is written well, it is secure. That is very important nowadays because with AI it is very easy to find security issues in software and then people with malicious with malicious intentions.
They can use it and cause damage to many sites. That's why it is very important in these days every business website, every website that earns money to have its own server. That is really critical and is becoming a base requirement for every business website. Because with those security issues, if you look at the Red Hat portal and their
security announcements and disclosures of what they find, you will see that on weekly basis they discover like between 20 and 40 root exploits. They don't they are no public exploits so people can use them but they they find those security issues and start working on fixing them. So in terms of security the best thing
A website owner of a business can do if they're not yet using their own server to move their website to their own server, because if they have multiple people using the same environment, it becomes very easy, very easy to hit a security issue and to hit a compromise. And then the data exposed and so on, it becomes very, very complicated.
Matt Medeiros (28:00)
Yeah. Your I want to talk about speed and performance. Your partner, Chris. I had long, many long conversations with him that he was talking about performance and how you all focus on performance. And he says, Matt, we gotta get you on scale of hosting. I'm gonna tell you it's so much more performant. now to be fair, the WP Minute has a lot of hosting sponsors. It's part of how we are able to survive as as publishers in this world anyway.
And everyone tells me performance is what they do. so I'll give you a chance. How does how do you do performance that might be different? Well, you don't have to give away the secret sauce, but like how how does Scale of Hosting think about hosting performance and maybe how do you differentiate from the crowd?
Vlad Georgiev (28:49)
Well, how we differentiate from the crowd in terms of performance? There are actually two things that are the most important ones. First thing is the hardware, second thing is the stack, the optimization of the stack that runs on that hardware. So we spent lots of time to optimize the stack, and that's why I haven't seen
A company that I tested, and I saw better result than what I see in what we use under our setup, both hardware plus software. In terms of hardware, we buy the fastest AMD Epic CPUs, highest frequency CPUs, they don't have so many CPU cores, so density is not that high.
And here is the the biggest problem that that I see with other companies, they try to make density as high as possible, and that's where they lose in performance. Because what I see is companies try to purchase purchase processors with as many CPU cores as possible, but the manufacturer, if you put more CPU cores.
Then the frequency will be lower, and the performance of a single CPU will be lower. So you need to be somewhere in the middle. We try to be at the top. So we always buy the fastest processors. We may have less clients per cabinet in a cabinet, but that's not what matters for us. For us, what matters is the customer to be happy.
And the customer too when they come to us and they'll say, Whoa, I have never seen my website load load so quickly.
Matt Medeiros (30:54)
Yeah.
Vlad Georgiev (30:56)
That
is how it is. That is how that is how what stands behind performance. It's hardware, it it's the stack, the software stack well optimized.
Matt Medeiros (31:05)
And one of the things that Chris pointed out to me when when we were chatting is that that also means that you're not going to lead with, hey, we're the cheapest web hosting company that's out there. Like and and I think that's a I think that's a a good thing, right? To like to maybe not have to lead with that. I I worked at a company called Pagely, as many people know that that follow the show.
I worked at Pageley before they sold to GoDaddy and I was a a accounting executive and I had to sell hosting. And it was never easy to talk to somebody, you know, this is almost 10 years ago. It was never easy to go up our con to to our competition to a customer and go, Pageley starts at five hundred dollars a month and WP engine started at fifty. So it was just like
Tell me why you're ten times, you know, more. Right. And that was always a fun challenge as as a salesperson. When, you know, easier when you get the right customer. But so that that is all to say is like you're also not leaving with, Hey, we're the cheapest, you know, four dollar a month for this kind of hosting. Like you're gonna pay, but you're gonna get what you pay for kind of thing.
Vlad Georgiev (32:09)
Well, we try to be useful. We try to meet the expectations of our customers. Maybe over 85 or or like 90% of our customers are businesses. They expect from us high performers, they expect technical support, quality technical support with real humans. They expect that when they contact us and have a problem.
They won't talk to a bot. They will talk to a real human who can help them adequately. And that has a specific price depending on all the costs involved. But our pricing, I can't say if it is cheap or if it is expensive. I can say that the price is set in a way to allow us to meet the expectations of our customers. And that's what they expect. Highest performance.
Quality technical support they can rely on, and real humans. So we manage to do it with the prices that we have, and that's our philosophy, that's how we operate.
Matt Medeiros (33:25)
Yeah. I wanna wrap and and talk about sort of like what you see as the future for for WordPress, or at least maybe even just the short term future for WordPress. every month, every quarter, every year that goes by, I feel like I'm saying to my I'm saying to guests and saying to myself, like, we're almost there. We're almost there with our favorite CMS, like just one more thing, and it will be okay.
I feel like that now with AI, we just need like the MCP or maybe the ability stuff to just round the corner. And a lot of the stuff that I'm seeing in Facebook groups and Twitter timelines and other places where people like WordPress is losing it. Like I can go and I can just chat to Astro and it'll build the website and I'm off to the races. I feel like we're we're just almost there. and I think we'll we'll see a resurgence of people come back and go.
Okay, now that I can just speak plain English to this thing and have it build a website for me, I'll choose WordPress again, or at least that's my my hope. W what's your thoughts on the on the future, either short term or long term of WordPress and and what do you think it needs, I guess in the short term to kind of like round that corner for people to say, okay, I feel comfortable using this thing now?
Vlad Georgiev (34:42)
Well many of the projects that are developed with AI nowadays, especially related to web applications, most of them are like Next.js and such technology, it's not it's not PHP, it's not WordPress. But as I mentioned, many of those people they don't know what security stays behind. WordPress is secure.
I think down the road there will be surprises to some of those people. it really depends on how complex applications they build. Some small ones will work as expected, it won't be there won't be big drama in there, but with more complex websites they will hit issues. And here WordPress is an ecosystem that has been in development for ages now.
And I think if WordPress heads in the direction to make the communication and use of AI with what is already in WordPress, that will be more than sufficient to continue to grow and be a very useful platform for people who want to build a website that has lots of features, e commerce stores or whatever they want to build, WordPress has everything.
Matt Medeiros (36:10)
Yeah, a hundred percent. scale of hosting, s-c-a-la hosting dot com. You'll find that in the show notes wherever you're watching or listening to this episode. Vlad, it was a pleasure to meet and connect today. we could talk a lot more. There's still stuff we can talk about, like WooCommerce and what the future of that looks like. but we'll have you back on the show to cover that. I'm sure Chris will be emailing me saying, Hey, there's some other topics that we want to discuss.
Vlad, anywhere else you want folks to either follow you online or any website you want them to go aside from scalahosting dot com?
Vlad Georgiev (36:45)
Well, we also are behind by behind by spanel.io, which allows anyone to basically turn any unmanaged server into a fully managed server with a control panel with bankers and everything in there. So maybe look at www.spanel.io and see that potential freedom you can have.
with what we have in there.
Matt Medeiros (37:16)
That's awesome. SPanel.io, be sure to add that to the show notes. Vlad, thanks for hanging out today, everybody else, the WPminute.com. The WP Minute.com slash subscribe. It's the number one way to stay connected. And we'll see you in the next episode.