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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: Hey, Chris, welcome to the program,
Chris: Thank you.
Glad to be
Matt: senior director, product
management at blue host.
I should also mention at the
top of the show, blue host is a
fantastic pillar sponsor of the
WP minute without their support.
The WP minute, couldn't
happen quite frankly.
So all of our pillar sponsors,
thank you so much for supporting.
The WP minute, we're going to take a
look at the inside of what's happening
at Bluehost for WordPress, their prop,
their products, how it impacts WordPress,
how it impacts WordPress customers,
the usability of WordPress, etc.
Bluehost cloud solution
was just announced.
So that's what Chris and I
are going to talk about today.
Senior director of product management.
Chris, what does that mean?
What's your day to day?
How
Chris: It's really working on
hosting products, enhancing them,
expanding them to meet our customer's
needs, making sure the product that
we deliver is what the customer
needs and what the customer wants.
And as customer's request comes
in, we work to make sure we
get the end of the product.
Yeah.
Matt: releasing any secret
sauce that Bluehost has, with,
with how you do your job.
What are the fundamentals
of gathering that feedback?
Because I say it a lot.
Hey, we're going to listen to customers.
We want customer feedback.
And then we want to bake that into
our products because of course.
We want.
Our customers to be happy and we want
what they're looking for to be in the
product, but that's easier said than done.
what does that look like in your world to
absorb that and then actually relay it?
To the engineering teams
and marketing teams,
Chris: It really comes from the customers.
Our marketing team does a
tremendous job of communicating
with and from the customers.
So, you know, we, we survey
and we interview new customers.
We also survey and interview
former customers, right?
Why did you leave?
What did we do?
Why did you pick us?
What are we missing?
So there's a lot of that going
on for this product here.
Since it's tiered, it's, Towards and for
professionals, freelancers and agencies.
Last year we actually went out and
interviewed a lot of agencies and
understood what is it that you need?
You know, what, what does Bluehost
not have today that you need?
What do agencies demand?
What do professionals demand?
What is it that you do and do not like
about your current hosting provider?
So we did a lot of that to really
design and lay out the, the path
for the Bluehost cloud product.
Matt: I'm hearing a lot of
unscalable things, talking
to people, scheduling time.
I think a lot of us are stuck,
you know, cause we're in tech
and we automate everything and
we zap this and we zap that.
And we, Do integrations all the time.
So we're like, Hey, customer feedback.
I should be able to just
get this perpetual funnel
happening with this stuff.
Just it just comes to us and it
automatically goes into the product.
You're talking to humans.
I mean, you're setting up calendars.
You're putting people in front of other
people who actually use the product.
it's probably unscalable,
but it's worth it.
I assume at the end of the day.
Chris: It is, it's, it is a lot of
work and parts of it aren't scalable.
You know, we, we have raw data.
We have this.
We call the voice of the customers.
We track all kinds of data.
You know, what kind of customers call
in, how often, often do they call in?
How quickly does a cu a new customer
publish their first website?
all this data, but the best
input is talking to a customer.
Right.
And okay, you answered, you
know, you picked C on a survey,
but what did you really mean?
Why did you pick C and elaborate more?
So it's a lot of work.
It's not highly scalable, but it
is completely You know priceless
Matt: I mean, I talked to so many
WordPress product companies, people
who are making WordPress plugins,
themes and services, stuff like that.
And yeah, they just have to be able
to open up to their customers more.
I know a lot of folks who,
who started their product
business in the agency world.
And.
I don't want to talk to customers anymore.
I just want to do this
product thing and sell stuff.
I'm sorry, it ain't going to happen.
You're still going to have to talk to
people if you want the best, you know,
outcome for, for your organization.
Chris: yeah, there's just like
this difficult wall that sits
between the key people making
the product and the customers.
It's like, I want to talk to customers.
How do I talk to the customers?
But at the same time, I have a customer
of like, man, I'd love to talk to the
product manager for this one, because
boy, would I have some feedback for them?
And it's not always easy to get that
connection made, but it is very important.
Matt: Bluehost is having, Banner a
year, a lot of products, a lot of
new features, functions coming out.
not only does blue host
support and sponsor the WP
minute, I'm also a customer.
I signed up my son for a website.
He's only seven and I tried to
get him into starting to blog and
he has a little digital camera.
So I'm like teaching him the basics of
here, take a photo, upload it to your
WordPress website, write about it.
So I'm starting to like stretch his
muscle of, you know, the creator side,
like we're all used to, but you guys
have a lot of products coming out.
this one in particular is, we chatted
earlier, maybe like a partnership
slash collaboration with the WP
cloud solution, which is an automatic
product, most notably through my
friend, maybe Jesse Friedman, who
you might've worked with before.
How did, from what you can share,
how did that relationship come about?
And how did you start to think
about baking it into Bluehost?
Chris: Yeah.
So the first thing was the
product need, the customer need,
what do we, what do we need?
And we, we blow blue host, have
a wide product selection today.
We have shared hosting, you know,
very inexpensive, great to get your,
you know, your business business
card out there on the online
and to get your online presence.
And you can scale up from there to VPS.
And we have dedicated servers, but we've,
we've not really, Targeted the agency,
the professional freelance market, and
we've wanted to get there for a long time.
So we've, you know, thought about,
well, you know, we go design our own,
cloud platform, but automatic, as
you all know, you know, one of the,
you know, the founders of WordPress.
Great partners with ours.
They've got a product that would be cloud.
It runs some of the largest WordPress
websites in the world today.
It's a proven product.
It can't be beat and we could
not beat it in performance.
and so let's say, well, rather than
spending several years building
our own product, let's take theirs,
merge it with the experience of
Bluehost, our support, our brand.
And offer that and allow us to go
upscale into these professional
freelancers and agencies.
And so that's what we've done.
Matt: How's the cloud solution?
How do you define cloud solution?
I used to sell, this is a
little, I'm going to show my age.
I used to sell a web hosting for a
company called Pagely acquired by GoDaddy.
Back to, at that time we were selling
EC2 instances from Amazon, right?
And it was always this big thing about
elastic cloud computing, where the
thing would just scale and we bring on
more virtual CPUs and shrink it down.
And everyone was just in awe.
kind of technology.
Is that the essence of this?
It can scale up and down
infinitely at one price.
How do you define it?
Chris: it, you know, it's, you could
talk to 10 marketers about the finding
cloud and you get 20 different responses.
you know, and we had a lot of discussions
internally about what really, you
know, what do we want to call this?
And it is a cloud.
So we decided, yeah, we'll call it,
Bluehost cloud, but it does, it allows
that flexibility to first off, very high
performance, you know, you mentioned,
you know, another vendor, a lot of these,
competitors are built on the public cloud.
Right where you go out and get
these resources, but those resources
aren't optimized for anything, right?
They're available for everything.
You want a warehouse, public
cloud, we got that, right?
You, you want a, an iOS app.
Sure.
You know, they've got that, you know,
and it's, it's, you know, you can do
anything with it, but it's not really
optimized where with Bluehost cloud
and with the automatic WP cloud, it is.
From the ground up, every component
is strictly for WordPress, right?
And so there's been a lot of performance
tests done on it and it's really
hard to beat An environment that
is built strictly for WordPress.
So not just from a performance
perspective But also the cloud
piece, it is scalable, right?
You want two virtual
CPUs or two PHP workers?
Fine.
You want to scale to 10?
Fine.
You want more storage?
Pure, add more storage.
So that's really the
cloud scalability of it.
But it's also global, right?
We've got the global CDN, so we can
cache your content closer to your
customers wherever they are in the world.
Data center selection, which we
have four origin data centers.
Which data center do you
want your primary location?
And then automatic failover
to another data center, right?
So all of the pros of a public cloud, all
that availability, all the scalability,
but also the optimized for WordPress.
Matt: I'm just looking at the
landing page right now bluehost.
com slash hosting slash cloud or go to the
top of the primary navigation of Bluehost.
Go under WordPress and there's a
new cloud offering special early
access pricing at the time of
this recording in late March 2024.
The promotional price starts at 30
a month, but then it will adjust
to 80 a month for one website 109 a
month for 10 web websites and beyond.
Obviously.
The value here, the way
that I see it, if, if.
If I'm a, agency or even a small
freelancer and I have a handful of
customers, I'm just starting out, you
know, obviously the cloud for 10 sites
is the one that makes the most sense,
you know, to me, 10 websites, 125 gigs
of storage, 20 virtual CPU compute power.
Is that all isolated for that customer?
you
Chris: It is dedicated.
It's dedicated to that customer, but
the customer does the allocation, right?
Again, talking to her, you know,
about some work in competition, the
way they do their infrastructure.
Sure.
You get 10 sites.
And here's 10 CPUs and
they're shared, right?
So by the way, you know, if customer
A, client A has a big sale this
weekend, a big social media, explosion.
On Monday morning, you got to explain
to customer B why they were slow
because customer A was successful here.
They're dedicated, right?
You have 10 sites.
Take those 20 CPUs and dedicate them how
you want to do those to those 10 sites.
And if you give one customer
five sites, those are his CPUs.
Those are his PHP workers.
So it's it is assigned that you assign
that pull out each of your sites.
If you want 10 sites, great.
Or if you want to put all
the resources into one or two
sites, you can do that as well.
Matt: We used to do a thing, called, I'm
actually forgetting the phrase of it.
I think it was like burst.
Burst compute or something like that
was probably just a marketing term
back when I was selling this stuff
where we would ramp up customers.
Perfect example would be
a black Friday's coming.
We have e commerce customers
obviously using WooCommerce.
Hey, you got that big sale coming.
You can allocate that stuff ahead of
time and you're kind of giving that
power back because you know, a lot of
freelancers who get into this game, they
don't, the game of selling websites,
they don't realize that, you know,
the technology, the reliability, and
it's not just a one size fits all.
And I do like that approach because
you could isolate your e commerce
customers know, we're really
going to hit the system hard.
cause even a baseline e commerce
site is using much more resources,
memory, and CPU, power than, I don't
know, your small business accountant.
You know, you built her a
five page portfolio site.
It's not really doing much once it's cash,
it's cash unless she changes something,
but an e commerce store transactions going
into the car, adding stuff that's not
cashable, or, you know, from the front
Chris: Just logging
Matt: Yeah.
Just logging in, right?
7, 000 messages coming up from
all the plugins you've added.
yeah, it's very smart to isolate
those types of stores and good
practice for an agency owner.
Chris: Yep.
Yeah.
You know, and you mentioned bursting.
We do have, we do offer bursting.
So it's, it's not marked in front of site,
but if you assign 10 sites 10 CPUs to a
site We give you burst of capabilities,
which is basically take advantage of
all the unallocated CPUs that machine
Alright, so we we under provision every
server And if you need the burst, you
know, if you have a big surge and you
got 10 there We'll give you what you
need That's available on that server.
So you can actually
handle a very large load.
Well, the 10 CPUs are, you know,
there's a, these are very high
frequency, you know, top line CPUs.
They'll handle a lot of work, but we'll
also allow bursting to take advantage
of even more capacity that's available.
Matt: Is that, does that go into
like a different pricing structure?
no, no pricing structure.
Chris: nope, nope, nope, nope.
It's, it's, if you get the 10 CPUs in that
site and they're available, it's there for
Matt: Could you
Chris: And that's the other big thing.
Not now.
It's, it's, you know, we may do
some more work down the road again.
We're talking to customers.
What do they, you know, what do they need?
is this a feature we want to be
able to, you know, buy it, right?
Give me, give me bursting
for 48 hours, right?
Or, you know, this is going to be a
big month for this particular client.
Let's give them bursting for a month,
24 seven, those, those types of things.
But that's, you know, One of the, one
of the approaches we had here when
we mentioned earlier, talking with
agencies was the, was the pricing, right?
A lot of times it's, well, add on for
this, add on for that, add on for that.
This is one price, all inclusive.
SSL certificates, backups, real time
backups, fail over, the, malware
scanning, all of it's included.
You're not going to get all this,
you know, ad here, ad there.
And the price you see on
the screen at bluehills.
com is the price you're going to pay.
It's not going to be, Oh, by the way, at
the end of the month, you exceeded your
bandwidth or you exceeded your visitors.
There is no extra charge for
extra, you know, exceeding the
bandwidth visitor limitation.
Matt: I mean, age as a, again, as a
recovering 10 year agency owner, being
able to predict your, obviously your, your
monthly hosting bill is very important
and I can't only imagine what it's like
to run a Agency these days, I think, I
think hosting, you know, for agencies
is a smart thing, or at least being
the point person, as long as you're
being transparent with your customers.
I remember in the early days, I was
just like, Oh yeah, we're hosting
it, you know, and every, okay, fine.
Here's the money.
I wasn't hosting it.
I, you know, I was reselling it or I
was probably back then I was using,
you know, Linode or digital ocean.
I can't remember when, when I
first started the thing, but.
As soon as I started getting more
customers, I was like, you know what?
I'm not going to tell that lie anymore.
I'm just going to be transparent with
everybody that here's my hosting partner,
whatever I, you know, verbiage I came
up with, you're paying me, you're
paying me the monthly hosting plus the
service because you're not, they're
never going to contact the vendor.
you're going to pay the premium
to have me, you know, deal
with the hosting essentially.
And I think it's still smart
that, that agencies do that.
Have you all built in like a white
label invoicing or pricing to allow
agencies to do something like that?
Chris: we have not.
we do have the what we call the cloud
one plant, which is a single site.
And so what, you know, if if an
agency doesn't want to manage a
customer's building and site and
they want to, the customer do
it themselves, the cloud through
themselves, there is ability to do that.
spin them off onto the cloud one plan
and allow them to have their own billing.
You'd still have access to WP
admin and manage the account, but
then gives you your customer, the
client, the ability to do their own,
Matt: And they, they'd have
like access to it, like a sub
account or something like that.
Chris: right?
Matt: That makes sense.
I like that.
You mentioned backups
and malware scanning.
Is that powered by Jetpack
or is that Bluehost's own?
Cool.
Chris: No, it's Jet.
It is Jet Pack.
Matt: Does the end user also have
to sign up for a Jetpack billable
account or that's all encompassing?
And that's one of the values
of WP Cloud, I think, right?
Chris: Right, right.
So that's what we packaged.
It is, you know, just, you know, it
was really targeting at the agency.
We don't want to worry about, did
we get backups automatically there?
It's on jetpack backup.
You've always got real time backups.
You know, you want to go back an hour.
You go back three days.
It's it's there.
It's included malware.
They're included.
You know, it's all, you know, don't
have to worry about, you know, Go
back and add something else later on.
And it is jetpack.
So the security piece, the
backup piece, it's just native
within that cloud platform.
Matt: Alright, so now let me, let
me drill in just a little bit here.
There's a magical Number you have on the
landing page that I'm sure everyone in the
room was like should we really say this?
100 percent guaranteed
Network uptime, correct?
Infrastructure, the servers, the probably
the, the CDNs around the globe, right?
Failover, all of this stuff doesn't
necessarily mean if somebody
nukes their own WordPress website
that that is accounted for.
But the 100 percent is I had, I didn't
see that in any other, Bluehost offerings
is specific to this cloud product.
Chris: It is.
And there was a lot of discussion
about that, you know, and the legal
team was, it was very involved, you
Matt: of red lines on that contract.
Chris: back and forth and back and forth,
but we want to stand behind it if you
wanted it It was like this this is you
know, we have the multiple data centers.
We've got the automatic failover We
believe in this right so it's there
and we're backing it up So if you
experience the downtime you contact
us and we will give you that refund
Matt: Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, peace of mind.
you know, the, the, agency, again, like
that, when you're, you're picking a
solution like this from an agency, I mean,
let's pretend that you're interviewing me
as the agency owner, because I get a lot
of ideas for hosting for, for agencies.
You don't want to, you don't want.
The call on a Saturday afternoon,
you know, you're at your kid's soccer
game and your customer calls up
and they're yelling at you because
their WordPress website is down.
when I started my agency before I had
kids, I was out late the night before.
I don't want to be woken up early in, in
the morning, having a customer yelling
at me that their website is down.
So.
These are choice features or values
that, you know, an agency owner should
be looking for, you know, when they're,
you know, when they're making the right,
the right pick for their hosting company.
Chris: Yep.
You know, if I pay, you know, three bucks,
five bucks a month for shared hosting,
you know, maybe I don't expect it to
be up, you know, 24, seven, 365, 100%.
Right.
And you should maybe expect that your
noisy neighbor is going to cause your
performance issues for your shared
hosting, you know, basic website.
But when I move into this
professional realm, your clients
expect not only fast performance.
You know, they want the high rankings,
everything else, but we don't want to
see an error that sites not available.
You want it to always be available.
And that's our promise here.
Matt: Let's just talk about staging sites.
That's always a thing that comes up.
How does staging work with the cloud
and does a staging site also take
up a seat in somebody's account?
Chris: Yeah.
So we have the cloning
capabilities and we have staging.
Staging does not count against you.
So for each production site,
you get one staging site.
So a cloud 10, you get 10 production
sites and 10 staging sites.
Matt: That's fantastic.
And I assume it has all of the same
sort of like deployment mechanism.
You can copy over a live site to a staging
and then just push the whole site back.
Chris: Yes.
Yeah.
Today it's a, it's a simple
cloning process, but we're also,
you know, as part of the pipeline
as we're adding more features is,
creating that full development
life cycle that's on the roadmap.
Matt: that's very cool.
All the AI onboarding features, is that
all baked into each individual site?
The wonder suite that Bluehost has,
is that all part of this as well?
When somebody spins up a
site on the cloud hosting?
Chris: so as an onboarding, no.
Right.
So, you know, this is
professionals agencies, right?
They typically, again, talking to them,
they don't want their handheld as if
they're a brand new person or a brand new.
So we give them the base WP
admin functionality, but all
the AI, wonder blocks, wonder
suite, all that functionality is
Matt: Oh, that's cool.
Yeah.
That makes sense.
Yeah.
There's a, I don't know how much you've,
you publish in, WordPress in general, but
I publish a lot and there's a, there's
a default setting, at least in the 2024
theme where every time you create a new
page, it always brings up the pattern.
Selection every single time.
It's like, man, I don't need that.
I don't.
Chris: We're that expert option.
Yeah.
Get out of
Matt: me just dismiss this forever.
Once it's fine.
Okay.
And then I can just opt out of it.
But man, every single time a lot of
people say, Oh, it's the big deal.
It's because like, when you're, when
you do this a lot, like you're just
whipping around the backend of WordPress,
like I just need to add this page.
Cause I'm going to do something else
and you're moving on to another thing.
And it's like, Oh wait, wait
for these patterns to load.
So, yeah, that cool.
That's cool.
That, that makes sense.
Do you work with sort of, you
know, uncovering a little bit more
of the internal Bluehost process?
Do you guys work with the
cloud products specifically?
With the core contributor team that
Bluehost sponsors to see how they can sort
of maybe optimize this solution a little
bit more, or are they kind of like, Oh,
you know, we don't really need to see
this because we're backed by automatic.
Chris: no, we're actually, we
actually use, interact with them a
lot and we take their input a lot.
In fact, you meant you mentioned
staging in the promotion capabilities.
you know, we're taking a lot of their
feedback as well because, you know,
all their time they spend development,
they work with agencies a lot.
They work with a lot of the
other contributors a lot.
And so we really, take a lot
of their feedback and how does
this, life cycle, how do we, you
know, automate this life cycle.
And so yes, we've had a lot of
involvement with them, with that team.
Matt: fantastic.
You'll be hosting a webinar with Devin
Sears, community point of contact
for me here at the WP Minute and
for a lot of folks in the community.
This episode will air after that,
but I assume folks will be able to
get a recording of that webinar.
If you want to learn more, I'll also
link that, webinar in the show notes
because I'm sure there'll be like
a Q and a section, in that webinar.
And, if you want to listen
to, Chris and Devin talk about
that stuff a little bit more.
I'll link that in the show notes.
Chris, it's been fantastic.
learning a little bit more
about what blue host has been
up to with this cloud solution.
really interesting to see it all come
together with the WP cloud solution.
I'll also link up my interview with
Jesse Friedman in the show notes below.
Chris, where do you want folks to go
to say thanks to learn more about you
or learn more about the cloud solution?
Chris: Well, you can find me on
Twitter, TallKidsDad with a Z.
so feel free to reach out to me there.
and, yeah, we would love to, have
some interaction and, see you there.
Matt: Awesome.
Chris: One, one other thing I didn't
mention, you know, one of their,
hallmarks of the blue house code,
Bluehost cloud product is support.
You know, there's, one thing that brings
Bluehost front and center with a lot
of people, people with WordPress is the
experience we've been with, automatic.
We've been hosting WordPress
for a very long time.
When we rolled out this Bluehost cloud
product, we wanted to be different.
We wanted to be head and
shoulders above the rest.
And so we built a dedicated support
team specifically for this product.
Right?
So if you using Bluehost cloud, you
have a question, you call that number
or you chat, you'll go directly to
a WordPress expert team rather than
the typical tier one support team.
So that's really sets it apart from
all the others that are out there
and it's not, you know, well, you
don't have to, you know, pay extra
for it or only have like a top tier.
If you're a blue house cloud
customer, you get direct access
to this WordPress expert team.
Matt: Would this be considered this?
Actually, that unlocks
another question again.
Thinking back to my days in the
hosting industry, would this
be considered Bluehost like an
enterprise solution for customers
who are requiring a higher level?
Or is there even another step
above this that many of us
Chris: So we're, we're
going to great question.
We're going up market right now.
Right now we are not
targeting enterprises, right?
We are targeting, you know, the, the
agencies and the professional freelancers.
we expect to get there, right?
We will offer a, a la carte package.
Right.
You know, I'm a large agency.
I want 300 sites.
I want 200 CPU or 600 CPUs.
We will offer that.
But right now we're starting
here at the agencies and working
our way up and listening to the
customers and what they want
Matt: Yeah.
It's like choosing a data center.
Still a thing.
Or would this solution is just everywhere.
Okay, cool.
Chris: No, you choose
your primary data center.
There's four of them.
Three in the U.
S., one in Europe, and then you're,
you'll have automatic failover to another
data center in the event of a failure.
Matt: Fantastic stuff.
All right, Chris, thanks a lot.
Thanks for hanging out today and,
letting us explore a little bit
more about Bluehost cloud solution,
everybody else's, the WP minute.
com the WP minute.
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