[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the WP Builds podcast, bringing you the latest news from the WordPress community. Now, welcome your hosts. David Waumsley and Nathan Wrigley.
Hello there and welcome once again to the WP Builds podcast. You've reached episode number 306 entitled Application and Database Hosting at Kinsta. It was published on Thursday, the 1st of December, 2022. My name's Nathan Wrigley, and just before we begin, a few bits of housekeeping. The main thing to say is our Black Friday deals page is still going strong, although Black Friday has been and gone as has Cyber Monday.
Loads of the deals run right into the heart of December. Some of them actually don't finish until January, but only a few. So the URL for that page, if you're still keen to find some Black Friday deals is WP builds dot. Slash black. One more time. WP builds.com/black. Go there and search for your favorite WordPress plug.
The other thing to mention is our masteron install. When I started talking about masteron, I had to explain what it was. Now I feel Mastodon is in the common vernacular, so no explanation required. If you fancy joining our instance of Macon, you can find [email protected]. That's WP builds.social, and come and join up and make that your Fed diverse.
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Okay. What have we got on the show for you today? We have two fine people, Marcel Bootsman and Maciek Palmowski. They are both here from Kinsta and they're telling us something new about Kinsta.
It may well be that you've heard of Kinsta as a managed WordPress. Hosting company. They've been doing that for years and years now with a very good reputation while they've decided to stretch a little further. And today's episode is, as I said, entitled Application and database hosting at Kinsta, and that tells you everything you need to know.
They've decided to move out of just serving WordPress customers into serving any kind of application at all. Marcel's been working there for a while. Matt Check has recently joined and brings his expertise to the service, and so you're gonna hear today about what that move means. What's happening to the old.
Kinter. Is it changing? Are they putting WordPress into second place? No. They make it pretty clear that's not the case. What kind of things can you add over there? How's it going to be done in the future? What kind of events are they going to be involved in? And for a company as important as Kinser in the WordPress space?
I hope this makes entertaining listening. I am joined on the podcast today by Marcel Botsman and Makowski. How are you doing? I'm great. Great. Thank you Nathan. Firstly, Marcel and Maek. Did I get your names correct?
[00:03:56] Marcel Bootsman: Yeah, you pronounce this pretty good. Marcel Botsman. That's how I say it. You match that.
[00:04:02] Maciek Palmowski: And I can also say that you are doing better and better with every time I'm on your show. .
[00:04:08] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, this is good. It's definitely an improvement, right? The guys are here today to talk to us about the company that they work for. They're both currently working at Kinsta. We don't really need to describe what Kinsta has been doing in the past.
I'm sure that you're familiar with the company. It's very. You're always at the WordPress events. People are always talking about kinser and so on and so forth, but essentially it's a managed WordPress hosting company. We're gonna talk today a little bit about something new that they've got involved in.
Before we do that bit of orientation about who you are, I think we'll go to Marcel first. Just for the benefit of the listeners, will you just give us a little bit of a rundown about your background in tech, WordPress hosting and all of that? You can go as far back as you. Okay, let's
[00:04:53] Marcel Bootsman: start in 1975,
Oh, okay. That was the year I was born. I'll skip a few. I started my professional career at IBM as a developer, a Java developer, basically. After about, I'm gonna go through this very quickly, after about nine, 10 years I had the feeling I needed to start my own company to be like free and flexible in where I work and when I work.
So I started my own company, started building WordPress websites, doing maintenance and those kinds of got involved into the workplace community, helped organize work camps in the Netherlands, in Europe in Rotterdam, and. After about nine, 10 years, again, I got itches again about my professional career.
What do I do with my company? Do I start hiring people to grow? Do I start well how do you say that? Hiring other people to do projects for me. I wasn't sure and at a certain moment I thought, okay, maybe I'm ready to start working for a company again, but. Like the way I operated my own company, flexible work times, flexible work place and Kinsta was a great match.
So I decided to contact Kinsta and that's been two and a half years ago now. And I'm a marketing manager for the Dutch market.
[00:06:24] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you. Can you just tell us before we move onto match check, what is it about the kins, the way of doing things that is, is flexible. What flexibility they give you that made them the right fit.
[00:06:35] Marcel Bootsman: The flexibility Kinsta gives me is as I stated a bit, work when you want. , as long as you get the job done work where you want. And basically Kinsta is a, what I've known now for two and a half years is a very good employer, as in they take. Of their employees, they make sure you have the right equipment to work with.
They make sure you follow courses to upgrade some skills or learn new skills. And they basically just take care of their employees. Very good. And that's what I really appreciate. Plus it also gives me it I still have the idea. I'm working for my own company. I'm flexible. I work whenever I want just doing different jobs than when I was running my own company.
And it, it feels great. And also the atmosphere between colleagues, we are all skilled. We can learn a lot from each other, and that's what we do, and that makes us serving our clients even a better task.
[00:07:45] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you. That's really interesting to learn. Now, obviously, the Kinsta, whatever it is that they're doing at Kinsta it's having the right effect because Match X's been on the podcast a number of times, especially on the show that we do on a Monday, the, this weekend WordPress show and very recently, Matt Check announced that he was, Moving over to Kinsta.
I can't honestly say how long ago that was. It feels like it would've been about three months ago or something. Matt, check. But you are now over at Kinsta. How are you enjoying it?
It's
[00:08:15] Maciek Palmowski: really amazing. I'm constantly surprised how how well everything works. I had the chance to work at at different companies and.
Right now I'm in the middle of let's call it a cultural shock. Everything is so well organized and it's just amazing.
It's
[00:08:39] Nathan Wrigley: amazing. Aw. I'm really pleased that it's working out for you. That's great. I. Can you do the same thing that Marcel did? Go back to 1975 and tell us, , go tell us a little bit about your background and whatnot and how you ended up in.
[00:08:53] Maciek Palmowski: So I will skip. I will skip already 10 years because I was born in 85 So that's the first thing. But to be honest, my, IT career started quite quickly because one long time ago, my dad during those hard communism years bought that spectrum and he was trying to learn it and I was just a small child that.
That, that could only just sit on his lap and well do nothing because I was a child. But I was watching what he's doing on the monitor. It was probably this green monitor as back then, and I knew going to, to primary school, I already knew I will work at it. I just wasn't sure where, and at some point it just got clear that I will be a developer.
I learned about something called PHP at some point. I, of course tried to build my own cms. I think every developer has the stage. And then I learned there that there is something called open source and there are already made CMSs like WordPress. It was so greatly documented and it was so easy to learn, and I started using.
Later I learned about it also has a community, which is so great, so open and. At some point I also helped organizing a world camp in, in my home, in my hometown. It was World Camp, which in 2019. And yeah, for most of my career I was a developer. I was a developer. I was writing different things for WordPress plugins, themes.
Some other weird stuff. But at some point I decided to make a small change and I went into this devil thing. So I am this link between developers of multiple companies. First I work as a devil at Buddy. And when I saw that there is a chance to go to Ssta with, to, to do a similar thing.
Yeah. I just made a switch and they wanted me, so here I am.
What's
[00:11:12] Nathan Wrigley: your role now then at at Kinsta Match?
[00:11:18] Maciek Palmowski: This is a funny thing because I have such a long title, I always have to open my slack to, to read it because I always introduce myself. Hi. My name is Patrick POVs. I work as a devil at Kinsta, but my full title is Development Advocate Analyst.
[00:11:37] Nathan Wrigley: That's good to know. So you've completely derailed me on this podcast now because you said the word XX spectrum and that's it. Same. So same here. . I had a XX spectrum. I had a xx. 80. I had a X XX 81. I had a ZedX spectrum and I used to love, I mean I surprising you imagine that thing had 48 k I was showing my son the other day some images of a game called night law, which you could play on the spectrum.
It was the first time I'd ever seen 3D on a computer and I showed it to my son and he literally fell about laughing. I was. Pleased that somebody had got a YouTube video of night law on the spectrum and he just thought it was hysterical how things have moved on. Now. Anyway, we won't talk anymore about the ZedX spectrum cuz that's not what we need.
Oh, I know. I'm so sorry. We're gonna talk about because,
[00:12:30] Maciek Palmowski: sorry, I just wanted to brag that I have. Also a floppy disc drive. , if I can brag about something about it. So yeah, I have a floppy disc drive. Do
[00:12:40] Nathan Wrigley: you remember in the day there's that spectrum, you had to actually use a cassette and it would load a game, which would typically take about three or four minutes.
And, if there was anything, any imperfection in the cassette or the connection was broken, the whole game would fail to load. And honestly, children nowadays, they don't know they're born.
[00:12:57] Marcel Bootsman: They don't know the struggles we had. That's And the noise. The noise. I can I still hear that noise? I had Is that a spectrum to played a lot of games on it.
Yeah. Had a lot. And it
[00:13:09] Nathan Wrigley: was like background interference, wasn't it? And there'd be these little sort of beeps, which would indicate that it was about to load something. And then you'd These crackly
[00:13:17] Marcel Bootsman: noise. Yeah, the crackly noise and the crackly screen. Like with all these stripes and colors, that's okay.
[00:13:23] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Anyway, let's talk about Kinsta. As I said, at the top of the show, Kinsta has been in business for a very long time, manage WordPress hosting. Supports the WordPress cause a lot, I would imagine Kinsta, although I obviously don't have access to the books, I imagine Kinsta is very successful because you don't do what Kinsta is about to do and you are gonna learn about unless things are going well.
So in the very recent past, match X's joined Marcel's, been there for a while, but you've got a new product. A new arm of the business, if you like. Application and database hosting at Kinser. That's the broad title. I hope I've got that right. You've got that right? Yeah. Let's go to Marcel first and ask, why the move away from purely WordPress and when did this begin? How long has this been in development? Is it fully mature yet? So just give us basically an overview of what application and database hosting is at.
[00:14:23] Marcel Bootsman: Sure I can. Okay. In 1975, , sorry. This is great. Sorry about that. . When it, when exactly did this start?
I first have to clear something up. We are not moving away from WordPress. Not at all. Thank you. WordPress. WordPress is. Currently probably 99.9% of our customer base. Because we just launched the new service. We are not moving away to taking away that concern for people that are listening.
We are expanding and as Nathan said, we are expanding to application and database hosting because we see from a business perspective you, you wanna. And if you wanna keep growing, you need to be able to grow your customer base. And the number of sites you run are application and databases in, in the last case.
And we are seeing like how do you say that the growth of WordPress is declining? It's not market share of WordPress is not declining, but the growth is declining, decreasing. And that's been happening. A few, years maybe. And our management really saw, okay what are we gonna do if we want to keep growing as a company?
What do we need to do to be able to support that growth? And if you bet on one horse, What we did, of course, in the last almost 13 years there is a risk and the risk was taken away by so many people that are doing so many wonderful things with WordPress. And so many people are running a website on it.
But in the case, people are moving away from WordPress. That would mean that we would have less potential clients. So then, A few years back, management already talked about this and we're thinking about, okay, what do we do next to WordPress to be able to grow our company more than what we're doing right now?
And application and database hosting was born. There was a, we had a code name internally, which I cannot share, but , that was talked about a lot. And a lot of people in the company were invited to, to help brainstorm what do we wanna do. We talked to clients about it, do you host anything other than WordPress?
What would we need to do to have you host that on our systems? And that really gave us. Material to start building. And we hired a lot of people to start building this because it was not only a redesign of our Mike Insta dashboard our management dashboard for for company owners. But it was also a complete new stack, a complete new pro product next to our WordPress stack.
We we have built on top of Google Cloud. So we actually had external funding for this, which was the first external funding we had. With a lot of strict rules around it and we could use that funding to hire a lot of people and start building and designing application and database hosting.
[00:17:46] Nathan Wrigley: That's really interesting. So was that a round of funding that Kinsler went through in order to build this platform? In other words, the money that has gone into creating the application and database that's come from elsewhere, it hasn't been siphoned out of the, let's say the WordPress managed hosting pot.
It's a different pot altogether. No, exactly.
[00:18:07] Marcel Bootsman: Yeah, you're right in the past, like all the the profits we made went back. Innovating new stuff on the WordPress platform. And what we have done right now is if we wanted to launch this new application and database hosting service fast.
We didn't wanna wait three, four years before we would launch it, because then we would probably be too late. And in order to do that, you need a lot of people. And of course you need a lot of money. To pay those people to do what we want them to do. And that's what we did. So we used that money.
I'm not sure how many we used, that's not important right now, but we used it to support the people that work on the new product and to make it possible that we launch it within an acceptable term.
[00:18:56] Nathan Wrigley: For us. That's really interesting. Yeah. So on the inside of Kingstone, you may be able to talk about this, you may not, and there's maybe constraints about what you're allowed to say.
I don't know. Is there a real division between the people that are working on the application and database side and the WordPress side? Or is there a complete, overlap? For example, could you sell and you match check. Could you be moved into WordPress for a little while and then back into the.
Application, database hosting side of it. That's a good
[00:19:23] Marcel Bootsman: question. Machi, do you know anything about that in your short time that you've joined us?
[00:19:28] Maciek Palmowski: From my perspective it looks this is exactly the thing that Marshall mentioned at the beginning. We are not going away from WordPress.
It's still a big part of us. So every time we think about something, we think about it in general. So there is no division between it. Our application and database hosts is just another product. So whatever we think about anything new, we always take in account everything also WordPress because Yeah, it's
important.
[00:20:04] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I guess if if you've got customers of Kins that listening to this, they, that's the kind of thing they like to know, isn't it? How much. Of the staffing, how much of the revenue, how much of the everything is gonna be going into this new venture. Because I've come and I want my managed WordPress hosting side of things.
I want to make sure that's as it's always been. And yeah, so that's interesting. I, interesting conversation about the fact that you've received some venture funding for that. That's good. Exactly.
[00:20:35] Marcel Bootsman: Yeah. Nothing is going to change on the WordPress side. Sorry. And what we, we are pretty known for our.
Support, which is fast and helps you to get to a solution pretty fast. And we want every service we launch, we want every service to have that kind of support. So that's why we also needed new people to support our application and database hosting stack and to get to the same level of support people.
Used to in the managed WordPress area. .
[00:21:09] Nathan Wrigley: So the idea of application and database hosting is not really a new idea. That you could Google that exact term and I'm sure you'd probably end up with a very long list of companies that you could go to. There's two things to that.
Really, the first thing is you're entering into a space which probably already has a fair degree of competitiveness attached to it. There's rivals out there that you've been able to look at, view their product and think, okay we like that bit, but we don't like that bit.
This is good. We enjoy using that, but not so much that. In other words, you've come in at a time when the industry has already matured to some extent. But it's competitive, so you know where this is going. The question has got to be, what is it that makes you different and different is maybe the wrong word.
What is it that makes you something worth looking at? Maybe there is no difference. It's just that you think that there's a, an mvp that you know that there's some reason why people should choose kinser over the rivals. What is it that, that you've got to say? I
[00:22:17] Maciek Palmowski: would say that there are there are a few things.
So first of all, , let's remember that yes, there are many companies already who are on the market longer than us. They have they, they're in a bit better position when it comes to experience when it in the cloud. But Still when I was comparing us with with them. I see few main differences.
First of all we also have workplace hosting. This is also something because there are many companies that are interested in. Hosting everything in one place. And when you look at how easy it is to host WordPress websites on Kinsta, this can be probably one of the things that will lead the clients to us.
So they will have everything in one place. Another thing is the support part. Because while maybe we are not the cheapest when it comes to pricing, we include many things within the price, for example. The support I don't think there are many companies that also have this. 20 24 per 24 hours per whole weekend.
It's support for free, just included in in, in the hosting tier. So this is another thing. And the database hosting it's also a thing that not everyone provides. So with all of those three things I. Those are the biggest differences. Those are the things in which we stand out from the crowd.
Okay. Thank you. But also it's because it's also worth to say that at in some point, technically most cloud hosting companies are similar because we all are using similar Similar technologies, for example, build packs are used on many clouds, and that's normal.
It's, I think that we are at this point of cloud hosting where it'll be much more difficult to stand out in technical terms. But in everything non-technical like support like having a bit broader list of things we can host and so on. Yeah.
[00:24:59] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I understand. Yeah, that's really interesting.
I like the piece about the word press. Being a great way of drawing customers in because they're in your dashboard. And it may be that they wanna, expand not away from WordPress, but expand into some other thing. And and it's all there. So that leads me to the question, how do I actually view all of this?
Where are my applications held? Do I have to have a separate KINSER account for. Other things that are not WordPress or can I access everything just with one username and password? In other words I'm really just after describe how the UI works from now on. Do I need two accounts, one account?
How does it work?
[00:25:42] Marcel Bootsman: You only need one account. We are used to having a dashboard that makes it easy for our clients to use it. So having other credentials or another system to manage this was never on the table. The first, the, from the first conversations, we talked about this internally, we already knew we had to integrate this in Mike Instein.
That's exactly what happened. Mike Instein got a major over. I believe last three weeks or a month ago to support the move or the expansion, I have to say to application and database hosting to be just another option in another section in the mic, in the dashboard. So now, instead of looking at sites you look at WordPress sites and you look at Applic.
Which also has the databases under it. So
[00:26:35] Nathan Wrigley: there's a real clear demarcation between everything, WordPress and everything that's non word pressure, we say. Okay, that makes sense. Yep, exactly. One database and following the sort of UI. That people have become familiar with in, in Kinter.
Okay, that's great. Exactly. Yeah. That's lovely. Okay, so question Dawns upon me and it is to do with the nature of Kinter as a company and how the data is stored and what have you. They will know you everybody as a hosting company. But they may not know about the tech stack, which is behind that.
When you say hosting company, you typically imagine that they have computers of their own in racks in data centers, and those computers are owned by them, operated by them, and that is their hosting. That's not really the case with you, is it? You are all in on Google's cloud. I.
[00:27:24] Marcel Bootsman: That's correct.
Machi, can you dive into this one? I can also, but I'd love to share the, how do you say that? The time we talk? Yeah. .
[00:27:34] Maciek Palmowski: Yes. Yes, we are hosted on on Google Cloud. We have access to . How many. How many, oh, we have about 24 data centers. So it's a lot of it's a lot of them. And yes, we are using those fastest C2 machines.
So they are one of the of the best available there. And in wild way I could say that yes, that's it. What to say, because. The part about hosting right now is yeah, that most companies are using other vendors that support those enormous clouds that are over the world.
And yeah, we don't have any racket, our company Okay, so
[00:28:28] Nathan Wrigley: it's all held on Google's cloud. So that was the WordPress side of things is the same true on the application and database side of things, in other words. Exactly. So everything Google. Okay, good. Exactly.
So there is
[00:28:43] Nathan Wrigley: no change.
Yeah. Okay. Do we know, do we have any insight in, so this is obviously going back a long time when Kinsta started. I'm gonna guess that Google was the choice then as it is now. Maybe that isn't the case. Maybe over the years. You moved into Google and are happy there and that's why you're over there now.
But I do wonder what is it about the Google Cloud that makes it compelling for you guys to be with them? Is there a sort of difference that, is it just you've got a nice relationship with them? Is there a particular piece of tech or is the hardware different? Do they update their stack of things periodically?
Why Google's cloud over all the other myriad? I can think of a handful off the top of my head, but why?
[00:29:26] Marcel Bootsman: Yeah, there are a lot of competitors in the cloud hosting region. We picked Google, not basically because Google offers us fast machines. Like Maik said, we use those C2 machines with our, which are the fastest machines people can use.
We also use Google Cloud because they have they have their own premium network infrastructure, which makes it faster. For the bits and bites to move from one place to another, and of course, at a certain point. If you go into the physical layer of the network, you go to to a country's network.
So then it's out of Google's hand. But the first piece is Google Premium Network. And that also helps getting well data as fast as possible from A to B. And those are basically the strongest arguments that we that we picked Google Cloud for. And also it is the amount of data centers they have because we I wanted to say we all know, but I'm not assuming that we all know.
But if you have multiple data centers spread around the. You offer your clients the possibility to host their websites sometimes in their own country sometimes in a neighboring country, but as especially, which is especially important to get a website as close to the visitors slash clients as possible.
Also to make it possible for the fastest loading times.
[00:31:04] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, so essentially Kinser is a layer between the complexity of Google's cloud, because whilst you could set. Your WordPress website on Google's cloud. Good luck with that. You're gonna be, it really is gonna take you a quite considerable amount of time.
And honestly, if you've got the technical capability to do that, then you go for that. But Kinsler's promises, we will deliver you this bleeding edge technology spread throughout the world in data centers, close to where your clients are actually viewing the pages. But you don't have to trouble with any of that.
You just click some buttons, fill in some fields, and we're off to the races. That's what Kinsta does. Yeah,
[00:31:43] Marcel Bootsman: that's basically it, and exactly what you say, if you are technically able to launch your own stack on Google Cloud, go ahead. But it's not just the setting up part, it's also the managing it and keeping up with updates and keeping your platform updated.
Yeah, that's, those are a lot of tasks that you need to do as a. As a systems operator in that case. Yeah. And we do that for
[00:32:08] Nathan Wrigley: you. Yeah. I'm gonna direct this question at Marcel because you mentioned at the beginning of the show that you are specifically looking at the marketing piece in Kinsta.
I guess I wanna ask you who, who are the, these new customers? What kind of things are they doing? What, so in, in the past, Kinsler's target audience was very defined. It was basically anybody that needed a WordPress website. We can handle that for you and we can do it easily and in a nice, beautiful ui.
Now, your role, is to reach out into a much bigger pool of potential customers, not just WordPress people, but you're gonna have to be. All sorts of other customers as well. Who are these people? What are they doing? What are they installing? What are they hosting? Hopefully
[00:32:52] Marcel Bootsman: what? Actually the launch of this new services at Kinston has also launched a lot of extra new work for me, which is great because I get to discover.
New leads slash clients who want to host their applications or database at Kinsta. And basically it starts in my role as a marketing manager here in, in the Dutch market. So that's Netherlands and a piece of Belgium. Because it's geographically well small if you compare it for instance to the US or Canada or whatever I get to visit our clients.
And because it takes me a half hour to an hour to, to reach our clients and I can just sit at their, in their offices, talk to them about how they experience Kinsta. And one of the questions that I have been asking them like the last year, because of course we knew this launch was coming, is, what do you do besides word.
And then a whole lot of applications came up. Like the ones we probably all know, like PHP applications, note go, whatever, Python, maybe those were applications people are also running. And so in, in the first few months I think the focus is on agencies that have a d. Stack next to their WordPress stack, which is already hosted at Ssta.
And that enables us to onboard these clients onto our new platform and to learn from them to tailor it. And and then afterwards, or actually during this process, we are also expanding our, how do you say that? Our tentacles like to. Communities because we were mainly focused at the WordPress community, which is well logical because we focus on WordPress.
But now we need to broaden that and maybe Machi can tell you something more about that.
[00:35:02] Maciek Palmowski: Yeah. This is also a bit why I was hired the company because for this long time it was a bit maybe not that it was easier, but we had one target. It was WordPress developer, WordPress user.
And right now we had to like change everyth. Because it's not only about adding new servers, it's about how to announce it, how to talk with those people. Because for example Me and Marcel are part of the workers community. We know it, we know how it works. We know it quirks and everything.
It's, we are like a big family, right? Because oh yeah. We are all meeting at the same world camps, also together with Nathan . So we are more of a family and right. We don't know all of the communities. We don't know all of the people. We are also learning about this learning how to how how each community reacts to different things.
So yeah, this is This is going to be something very interesting for us.
[00:36:24] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. It strikes me that not only is it a different crowd of people I imagine it over the last, let's say 10 years or so, it was fairly easy for Kinsta to decide which real world events they would've sent their staff to that.
Top of the list is probably anything that starts with WP or Word Camp. Those are, yeah, they really are the target. Whereas now there'll be all sorts of cloud conventions that you need to attend and all sort, all manner of different things. So there's that side, the sort of industry side of things.
But also I'm imagining that there's just end users that you're gonna have to learn what they want. So the promise. Previously was dead simple, come to Kinsta, and once you've got an account and you've clicked a few buttons, there's your website, it's all taken care of. Now it's gonna be a whole myriad of things, a soup of different things.
Do you want this particular application? Are you gonna be using Docker? Are you gonna be using Node? There'll be a thousand different questions to ask. And yeah I imagine it'll become a bit more of a bit more of. How to describe it? More of a challenge to decide who your target market is.
It's gonna be great soup.
[00:37:38] Marcel Bootsman: That's true, by the way.
[00:37:39] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, can. Oh yeah. I've just cried the new name, .
[00:37:45] Marcel Bootsman: No you're right, Nathan. It, it opens up. A lot of new questions and a lot of new processes both for us as Kinsta, but also for our clients. And our mission is to make it at e as easy as possible for our work best clients, but also for our application and database clients to be able to host what they want at Kinsta and to have a hosting stack they are familiar with.
And an administration like our Mark, my Kinsta dashboard. That enables our clients to host everything at one place. And I've talked to a lot of clients here in the Netherlands and they really appreciate having things on one roof. Yep.
[00:38:31] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. If we. Talk about what's happened so far. The product is, has launched where we had a little chat before I click record and we're not exactly sure when the beater label is coming off.
It may be off already. We're recording this podcast towards the very end of. 2022. So things said, now, if this podcast is actually add in 2023, there may be slight variation on pricing and variation on the products that are available. But I'm guessing that you already have some customers, there's some people who are currently using it.
What sort of things are they actually doing? What applications are they using? So we know WordPress, that's a given, but on the application of database side, what things are people actually implement?
[00:39:16] Maciek Palmowski: We see that first of all, they are trying a lot to when it comes to different jump stack frameworks.
So we've already prepared some starter kits so we can try Just install Astro Gadsby, the Zas just by a cloning one one GitHub repository. We also are trying and testing more of them. Even right now, we have some talks happening with other frameworks about some partnerships.
So for sure jumps stack is one of the one of the things that users are playing around with. Also thanks to the fact that users can use our database hosting. Just a database hosting. And this is this is something that is quite useful for many people because they they are hosting their application somewhere else, but they just need a database.
That's where we where we come in they can use either my SQL Maria d. I think we also have postgre. So this is this is also the thing we see that people are are using and for sure we are. Constantly looking at new options. This is one of my favorite weekly tasks to try to install something new, try to play around with something new to check if it works, how it works, and what can we do to make it simpler to install, for example.
Right now I'm playing around with how to use Dino on on our application hosting end. I can say that it works
[00:41:22] Nathan Wrigley: nice. The target market, I'm guessing for kin, I could be wrong about this, but it feels to me that the target market until now has very much been. Obviously WordPress users, but also WordPress users who just want things to, to work and for things to be easy.
You come to Kens state, you click some buttons, there's your website. You don't need to worry yourself too much with the complexities in the background. I guess that's maybe shifted a little bit because the things that you are talking about there, match check, they're not necessarily the domain of the non-technical Are you gonna be heading towards non-technical implementations?
I'm gonna use the words one click. So the ability to do things, one click. In other words, is this gonna be just for technical, technically minded people who work with technical things that they need to achieve? Or are you gonna be hopefully heading towards things where non-technical people can just come and say I'd like to try this out.
Click some buttons in the dashboard, and there is. I dunno. Master on install there is my, whatever it may be. Install,
[00:42:29] Marcel Bootsman: I think we can make sorry, Machi, I just have one thing to add. I think we need to make a distinction between technical people and technical people that wanna know everything about their hosting stack.
Because if you are technical as in building applic. You don't necessarily need to be aware of what would be the best platform to run your application or how to configure that. So that's the task we take away from them. And now back to you. Machi. .
[00:43:05] Maciek Palmowski: Yeah. This is this is the, also the thing that I want, wanted to mention that I see that Kinsa is going to be like the easiest way to.
To host things that are more difficult than WordPress. So for sure. Playing around with many of those application will require more knowledge than just to install WordPress. But we will try to get rid of everything. That is complicated when it comes to installing it in the cloud. Even the fact that we are this layer between Google Cloud and and the client.
I played around with Google Cloud at some point. I consider myself as a person who knows how to do things when it comes to deploying application. And for some reason I would never, ever want to do it on my own. I really always would prefer to use service like, Ssta for example, because I have really much more fun things to do rather.
Fighting with with setting up the cloud, all the privileges and everything.
[00:44:29] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And also you've gotta imagine that people who are bringing applications and databases to bear with you, there's definitely an incentive to have it. Working 24 7 without you needing to work on it 24 7, if your job there is to refine the tech stack or develop the application or whatever it may be, not to worry about the database. So it's curious. I do think it'll be an interesting journey over the next 18, 24 months, whatever it may be, seeing what the, what these new clients look like, what their expectations are in terms.
SLAs in terms of the kind of documentation that you've got to provide, the kind of blog posts that you've now gonna be writing in order to get the SEO and all of that kind of stuff. It feels like Kinser is about to undergo some, yeah. Really interesting change in the near future.
[00:45:21] Marcel Bootsman: Yeah, I think we are.
And we're happy to talk about it within 18 or 24 months. Again, Nathan, if you would like that. Nice. Let's
[00:45:27] Nathan Wrigley: see how it's gone. I think I've asked all of my questions. I don't want to dwell too much on your time, so I'll just ask firstly, is there anything that we dramatically missed that you think we should have targeted?
Let me ask that first.
[00:45:41] Marcel Bootsman: No, I think we gave a nice overview for our listeners. Introduce our new services. Yeah. And of course they can find everything on kinsa.com and check it out. Yeah, that was
[00:45:53] Nathan Wrigley: my smart plug here and added bonus. We got to talk about spectrums as well, which was, that's made my week.
Oh yeah. Marcel, I'll do you first. Where can we find you online? What's the best place? Social platforms. Twitter,
[00:46:07] Marcel Bootsman: or you can find me on my website, Marshall mont.nl. It has all my social media profiles on there. Also, my must have done profile, which is gaining a lot of traction right now.
Oh, okay. So Marshall Mont Pinnel, that's where
[00:46:20] Nathan Wrigley: you can find me. Okay. Thank you. On Match check, you can find
[00:46:24] Maciek Palmowski: me either on Twitter, I'm on Polymac fp or on my website, Maki dot.
[00:46:35] Nathan Wrigley: Match. And Marcel, I really appreciate you talking to us all about Kin's New Horizon on the podcast today. Thanks so much.
Thank you very much. Na,
[00:46:44] Marcel Bootsman: thank
[00:46:44] Nathan Wrigley: you so much. Glad to be. Okay, that's it. I hope that you enjoyed the podcast today. Very nice to chat with Marcel and Match. Check all about what's happening over at Kinsler. If you've got any comments about that, feel free to head over to wp builds.com. Search for episode number 306, and from there you can leave a comment.
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Okay. That's it for this particular show. Don't forget, we have our this week in WordPress show. It's live every Monday. We repackage it and send it out as a podcast episode on Tuesday. If you want to subscribe to the podcast, wp builds.com/subscribe will enable you to do that and join us for that show on Monday. Like I say, it's live 2:00 PM UK time.
I'll be back next Thursday and I'll be chatting to David Walmsley in one of the final. Of our WordPress Business Bootcamp series. Okay. I have some rock cheesy music for you this week. I hope that you enjoy that. All that remains for me to say is I hope you have a good week. Stay safe. Bye bye for now.
