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.
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