[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Hello there and welcome once again to the WP Builds podcast. You've reached episode number 416, entitled Exploring Rapyd Cloud's Hosting for WordPress. It was published on Thursday, the 3rd of April, 2025.
My name's Nathan Wrigley and I'll be joined by my two guests, Wes and Mike, to have a chat about their new-ish hosting platform, Rapyd Cloud. But before that, a few bits of housekeeping.
The first thing to mention is that if you're in the WordPress space, I have an event for you. It's an event that I've been running, well for many years now with Anchen le Roux. I'm joined by Dan Maby, and Paul Smart on the organization team for the second time. It's version eight of the Page Builder Summit. Head to pagebuildersummit.com to find out more. Whilst you're there, if you scroll down, you can see the list of confirmed speakers, and I'm sure that you'll agree there's a whole ton of really interesting speakers there. Those speakers will no doubt be bringing their wealth of experience directly to you.
The event is running from the 12th of May to the 16th of May, 2025. Hit the pink button, it's marked, join the waiting list. And if you do that, we'll be able to keep you up to date as and when the Page Builder Summit is coming around.
You'll also notice underneath that little button is a section which says, interested in sponsoring the summit, find out more. Click the link there if you have a product or service. Basically, if you're in the WordPress space and you would like to help us put that event on, there are some sponsorship options there, and you'll be joining many notorious WordPress companies who have already done that.
Once more, pagebuildersummit.com. Click the button, join the wait list. It's on May the 12th to May the 16th, 2025. Stick it in your calendar.
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Okay. What have we got for you today? Well, it's a new, new-ish company in the WordPress hosting space. They're a little bit different. They're not your normal host in that they really are drilling down on really hardcore dynamic websites. So think things like LMSs, WooCommerce, that kind of thing.
I'm joined by Wes and Mike from Rapyd Cloud today, and we go over, well, we introduce them. Then we get into an overview of what Rapyd Cloud can do.
We also talk about why they thought the market needed something like this, and how they differentiate.
The technical stuff is obviously important if you're a hoster, and they mention that along the way. As well as what you might get in terms of support and user experience.
And then we drill down into things like reliability, pricing, the environment and the technology stack that they're using, security and so much more. And I hope that you enjoy it.
I am joined on the podcast today by two guests. First up, I've got Wes Tatters, but I'm also joined by Mike Eisenwasser, how are you doing both of you?
[00:05:10] Wes Tatters: good to be here.
[00:05:10] Mike Eisenwasser: Good morning. from my side.
[00:05:12] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, thank you so much for joining us. I had the, sheer blind luck of sitting next to Wes on a bus in Manila the other day. Why would I be doing that? because we were both, in fact, all three of us, I believe were at, were Word Camp Asia in Manila.
And and I just started chatting to this. Chap next to me, and it turned out, to be, Wes, who then told me, yeah, of course, we're having a podcast in a couple of weeks, and here we are. So it's a, it's all working out. We are here to talk about a product today because although this product is not brand new, I think there's a high chance that you, dear listener, may not have heard of it, and it's about time that you did.
Because it's maybe something that you want to get yourself involved in. I'm gonna call it like high-end hosting, but maybe that's maybe that's not really pitching it It is called Rapyd Cloud. And pause this podcast and go to the following, U-R-L-R-A-Y. Sorry. RAP. Y d.cloud. So it's like a, strange spelling of Rapyd RAPY d.cloud.
Go and check it out and then come back on, pause it, and you'll be able to see exactly what they do. Let's just do a quick intro from both of you. So first off, Wes, just tell us who you are and what your background is and all of that.
[00:06:28] Wes Tatters: Hi, I am, Wes Tatters. I am the managing director at Rapyd, and the infrastructure architect. I was, had been. Responsible for the, development of the infrastructure itself, the underlying hosting technology behind how Rapyd Works.
[00:06:45] Nathan Wrigley: Nice. Thank you so much. And Mike.
[00:06:49] Mike Eisenwasser: Yeah. I am Michael Eisen. I'm the co-founder of Rapyd Cloud with my business partner, Tom, and. I'm also the Chief Product officer. I manage, everything related to the product development and especially the interface and the user experience. and Tom, my business partner is more on the marketing and sales side, and we worked together, Tom and I, for over 10 years.
Our last company, buddy Boss, some of you in the word process ecosystem, may have heard of it. super popular, community platform for WordPress. So we built that company together over the last 10 years, I. We sold that company last year and launched Rapyd Cloud together, and we has worked with us, in Buddy Boss.
Also, a lot of our team, in Rapyd is a continuation of Buddy Boss. We'll get into it, but Rapyd Cloud is really solving a problem that exists broadly in the Word Pros ecosystem, and was a huge pain point for our previous customers.
[00:07:42] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that kind of leads me nicely to this. And, it is about now about two minutes in that people drop off. Podcasts don't drop off. Because this is interesting. and you may say to yourself, okay, it's a hosting company. I know what's. Coming? maybe not. I think there's something different here.
So if you go to Rapyd Cloud, the, UVP, right at the top, hyper speed performance, even at peak traffic and read a little bit further, and really it seems like you are pitching into the marketplace of not year, $5 hosting because you've got a simple brochure site with five pages and you've got no expectation of a great deal of traffic.
Your pitch, it feels to me. Is we have a serious website. We've got a real business. And because it's, bolting things in LMSs Body Boss, that kind of thing, data driven, high query websites, that's where you, that's what you are solving. Have I basically summed that up?
[00:08:42] Mike Eisenwasser: Sites that are scalable, high, resource websites, dynamic sites. So traditional WordPress hosts are built around the traditional needs of WordPress, which is what you think of, blogs, marketing sites, brochure sites. Those are easy to host. Because the content does not change very frequently, even if they have a, a large audience.
So most of the hosts are using older infrastructure and they rely on very aggressive page caching to achieve performance. And we'll talk more about the technical in a while, but at a high level, our entire infrastructure is designed around a different use case. Imagine you have a site, like a buddy boss site where you have a community newsfeed, notifications messages, or you have an e-commerce site.
Every person in the checkout has different stuff in their cart. Or even e-learning site, everyone's taking different quizzes and different course progression. You can't just cash that content. Everyone's viewing unique content, and then when you put that at scale, it becomes exponentially more difficult to host.
I can tell you I ran Buddy Boss, actually myself since 2010. Tom joined me in 2014, together until last year for 14 years. I watched customers with their, struggling to find adequate hosting, having 20, 32nd page load times. Bouncing around between hosts asking us, who can you recommend? And we couldn't offer a good provider that would work for them, when their sites would get to scale.
The, host I'm talking about, big ho, big name hosts that you've all heard of, would start shutting down services. Telling them you're using up too many resources for our infrastructure, pushing them to bump to the highest tier plans that are prohibitively expensive given the actual size of the site.
And I would just see, and, it was the number one complaint people would have for our customers. And broadly, in, the, if you look at the 2024 annual WordPress survey, performance is ranked as the number one issue in WordPress. People who leave WordPress and they like WordPress, they like being able to build custom features.
Often people leave to SaaS products purely over performance. It's a major pain point. And as the ecosystem is evolving, like nowadays, AI is being infused into all the plugins. the resource usage is just, the demands are getting higher and higher. These word pro sites are not like the sites of five years ago.
And Rapyd Cloud is built around this. So our, performance has insane at, even at scale, even with tons of database queries, we can handle it. WP Lyft published an article I. about a week, maybe two weeks ago, a week or two
[00:11:14] Wes Tatters: two weeks ago.
[00:11:15] Mike Eisenwasser: they did, their own independent testing. and what they did is they had 5,000 concurrent users.
They, ramped up to 5,000 to see what would happen. And on all our competitors, big, competitors, all the ones we've heard of, on average, the sites slowed down by 300% or higher. And on Rapyd Cloud by 11%. So that is just a, it's a massive difference. So the customers who come here who have these, types of sites are finding that they have 300, 400% boost in performance, often a reduction in cost, and even sites that aren't experiencing problems quite that bad still will have a performance boost.
Our infrastructure is crazy fast.
[00:11:54] Wes Tatters: I think one of the,
[00:11:56] Nathan Wrigley: carry on please. Sorry.
[00:11:57] Wes Tatters: Yeah, sorry. I think one of the challenges that people don't understand with WordPress is it doesn't take that long for that to happen. it's not, oh, a million users, most shared or on most hostings, shared hostings that even on some of the larger managed hosts, if you are over 50, a hundred concurrent users, you're in trouble.
Um, It'll start to stall, primarily the number of PHP workers, the amount of physical dynamic pages that, that, WordPress. server can generate in real time. so we're not talking necessarily, fortune 500 companies. We're talking buddy boss sites that they might have a thousand members, but everyone of those members logs on at 7:30 PM at night to just check their, check on their, their group's day.
or, log on for their to complete their learn dash course. LearnDash courses in particular, have been developing this following, since Covid around the concept of cohorting. it's, they, artificially create cohorts and say, we're going to start our next round of training on Monday morning at 9:00 AM.
It means that they can develop their content, launch the content, and then start the cohort on a Monday morning, and that works fine for their cohorts of 9, 10, 15 people. All of a sudden they've got a hundred user cohort and their site doesn't work, and they've got everyone complaining.
[00:13:32] Nathan Wrigley: it's it, there's some irony here, isn't there? In that the, you, you've got a successful thing, you've got a successful learn site, you've got a successful body boss site or, what have you, and the success. Becomes the failure because the, you've got all of these people who want to use your fabulous thing and presumably are paying you a monthly fee or what have you, and then all of a sudden the thing becomes unusable because you are successful.
And that seems in some ways really unjust. And we know what the modern internet user is like. Basically two seconds is one and a half seconds too long. even half a second in all honesty is a little bit much these days.
[00:14:16] Wes Tatters: and Buddy Bos, one step went one step further with this. So Buddy Bos is a social platform. Obviously it looks a lot like Facebook. A lot of Buddy Bos customers were going. It looks so much like Facebook, that what we really want is it on our mobile phone. We want an app in the Android and, play saw.
And that's what Buddy Bos built. Buddy Bos built an entirely React native, entirely headless WordPress, experience for Buddy Bos customers. Of course, what then happened same problem.
[00:14:49] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:14:50] Wes Tatters: if you think about how a person uses an app, and it's flipping and swiping and scrolling and tabbing and Every one of those actions is a WordPress page request,
[00:15:02] Nathan Wrigley: Mike, quick question for you. Sorry. Wes, just quick question to Mike. It must be fairly soul destroying if you put your heart and soul into this thing, body boss. So we are just going backwards in time a little bit, and you build in all these features, these wonderful features, and then the failure point is not.
You. The failure point is something else, and presumably then you get a ton of support requests. It's like it's not working yet. It is working. It's really working. It's just the hosting that's
[00:15:27] Mike Eisenwasser: Yeah, we've been itching to build a hosting company for a very long time, because we've seen this problem, yeah, the, it, it was the, I don't know if I would say soul destroying, but it was, I. it was frustrating because customers would see the performance issues and blame us all the time.
They would say, it's, buddy boss is so slow. It's so slow. And it's you're trying, you have a, there's a live messenger in, in, in the product. There's a newsfeed in there. There's a, there's so much a happening and the hosts that are out there are not built for this. And Facebook is not running on GoDaddy or whatever, it, it requires a certain type of hosting to make this possible.
And there wasn't a solution in the market and. There's no amount of, improvements. Yes, buddy Boss had areas that needed improvements for making it more efficient. and we worked on a lot of that. And, I know Buddy Boss is in good hands now and the new ownership and they're continuing to improve it.
but 90% of the performance issues came from the hosting and that was just out of our control. And, it's nice to be able to be in, in, a different position where we're providing that solution because it's not just buddy boss customers, it's. Buddy press, customers, peep. So all the other social networking platforms, it's all a community platforms.
LearnDash Lifter, LMS Tutor, LMS Academy, LMS. It's e, it's WooCommerce. Sure. Cart. all these situations to, WP Job Manager. There's so many platforms, that have the exact same problem. And, we're, very passionate about this 'cause we've seen the problem for so long. And, when we met Wes, Wes is an absolute genius and has been doing server infrastructure related things in the WordPress ecosystem for, really as long as WordPress has existed and doing other tech related things for decades.
Prior to that, when Wes was very active in our, group, in our community, we had a really popular Facebook group, still exists for Buddy Watson and was, people would always be posting their server issues, their performance issues. Wise would go in and, fix it for them. He would create custom setups on AWS and stuff.
And it was happening so often, that we brought Weis into the company and, built a team around them and, worked on this. And it's been a very exciting path. I'm really happy we're doing
[00:17:47] Nathan Wrigley: We all need a w in our life, don't we? We all need something like that. So I think we've established, basically dynamic, like high traffic, lots of database queries, dynamic data on every page, that's what you are offering. Okay, so over to w. How did you do it? And I know we've got unlimited amount of time and obviously we can only describe a certain amount on the audio.
Just give us the top, top tier things that you think separate you from all the other companies. I.
[00:18:17] Wes Tatters: very specifically. one of the things that we identified very early on is that. Sites like Buddy Boss sites like LearnDash sites like WooCommerce sites are heavily shaped. What that means is that they aren't busy a hundred percent of the day. They aren't busy a hundred percent of the week or the month.
they may only be busy for two hours in a morning, so may be busy for a couple of hours in the evening, but in all of these cases, once they get successful. They start getting billed for the maximum amount of processing power that they need for the month,
[00:19:01] Nathan Wrigley: I'd
[00:19:02] Wes Tatters: even though they, may only need it for one day a week or for a couple of hours a day in the morning.
So we started with a very different premise. We said, what if we can work out a way to help customers when they're really busy? And conversely. Not penalize them when they're really slow. So we built a dynamic infrastructure and that's what un, that's, what underpins, Rapyd. It allows us to say to customers, Hey, you can be busy and we'll be there for you.
You can handle that super heavy traffic event where there might be. A thousand people slamming the site in, in, in a minute. and we'll also be there for the rest of the week when you're not busy. So we built a very different sort of infrastructure and that's what underpins Rapyd. It's this, we took the concept of dynamic infrastructure and made it a feature of Rapyd.
That means that we can manage our customers differently to a traditional WordPress hosting. You don't come to us and buy one CPU call or. 10 PHP workers. We have a scalable infrastructure that says you need a thousand PHP workers at 9:00 AM on Monday morning. It's there for you. You need 2000 PHP workers.
it's there for you, but we aren't gonna charge you for that for a month.
[00:20:29] Mike Eisenwasser: Can you, touch on, can you touch on was the amount of PP workers that are typically available from the other word process.
[00:20:36] Wes Tatters: a, a typical WordPress host will probably be 5, 10, 15 PHP workers. scaling up to maybe 40 or 50 PHP workers,
[00:20:46] Mike Eisenwasser: If you was, if you, have 10 PHP workers. And you have, the site is not all cached. You have concurrent users viewing different content. How many concurrent users could 10 PHP workers handle? in, in a second? In, in, in, that second
[00:21:03] Wes Tatters: in most cases. Only 10
[00:21:07] Mike Eisenwasser: 10 Because one one PHP worker is effectively one process,
[00:21:11] Wes Tatters: because at the same time. Those PHP workers, unfortunately the nature of Blue Press, let's just add another 30 plugins. Let's, oh, I've got WooCommerce, I've got lifter LMS, I've got this, I've got that 150 plugins later. Every single page request has to load all those plugins, do all that processing, get the result out.
so the bigger the site, the longer that window of time that it takes for the actual page to render. So they're the things that we addressed, render it as fast as
[00:21:41] Nathan Wrigley: if I'm like, let's go for LMS. If I'm an LMS owner, I've got a successful course that I run online. My thing is the course, right? I, really want to be in the course. I dunno, I'm a yoga teacher or something like that. I'm interested in yoga, basically. I don't care. At all about hosting except that it works.
Do I have to make lots of decisions? Because from all of the things that you said, there's obviously a lot of moving parts and cogs moving in the background. If I'm in the, if I decide to go to Rapyd and I sign up for a month or what have you, I notice that you've got a free tier and what have you.
[00:22:14] Wes Tatters: Yeah.
[00:22:14] Nathan Wrigley: do I need to make decisions about those kind of things? Are there technical things that I need to know or understand, or is it literally, you will just take this off my hands? Yeah.
[00:22:22] Wes Tatters: Yeah. It's entirely managed WordPress.
[00:22:25] Mike Eisenwasser: Lemme take that. we, don't have a free tier, we have a free trial,
[00:22:29] Nathan Wrigley: I misspoke.
Correct. Yeah. Thank you.
[00:22:32] Mike Eisenwasser: we, alright. First off, if you come over to Rapyd Cloud, our migrations team will assist. They do a performance audit. They look at your site and make sure everything's ready for our infrastructure, and they'll advise you to upgrade some things to, to get it, in a position where it's ready, to bring over, and they'll help.
And then they'll do a free migration. And bring the site over for free on it. Once we have all the information from you, on average, it takes us about two hours to migrate everything over. They'll help configure everything. And then once you're in there, we have incredible customer support. We have live chat support.
average re average timed response is under a minute. People rave about our support. You can look up Rapyd Cloud on Trustpilot and see that. so we will be there all the time for you with whatever questions you have. And then within the dashboard, we have an incredibly intuitive. I would say minimalist, but powerful user dashboard with all the tools you could ever need.
we've seen all the issues people have managing WordPress sites with Buddy Boss, and so we've made sure to include that stuff in there. So you can update plugins in the WordPress admin or in, in our hosting dashboard. You can roll back plugins, you can roll back to backup points. you can manage your security, everything within the dashboard.
[00:23:46] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, so it's the, it is the, complete package of managed, you we've gotta be careful what we say now.
[00:23:54] Mike Eisenwasser: Yes.
[00:23:54] Nathan Wrigley: are managing WordPress websites, whatever that phrase that we're allowed
[00:23:58] Wes Tatters: Manage, host, manage dynamic managing for WordPress. Yeah.
[00:24:02] Nathan Wrigley: the one we're allowed. Yeah. so the, full gamma, I can do backups in there.
I can do, I don't know, roll back a particular plugin. I can, go from, live to staging, fiddle with that, go from staging to live and what have you all in there. and multiple sites, presumably, not just like one site.
[00:24:22] Wes Tatters: In our current infrastructure, we optimize for single sites per environment. The reason for that is the dynamic staging, sorry, the dynamic infrastructure. it's highly optimized to allow us to do this bursting and boosting power when they need it. we are releasing a new product, in the coming months, which will, change how that operates, to allow certain.
Types of sites to run together in the same infrastructure. but the focus is always on high performance. It's always on highly dynamic and highly scalable. so we, try to manage, and create a balance.
[00:25:02] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.
[00:25:02] Mike Eisenwasser: Yeah, I'll, lemme touch on that for a moment. if you have a site that's super high resource, it's best off on its own environment to get the maximum power. And so our infrastructure is built around that use case. However, as was said, very soon we're launching a new product that's gonna allow multiple sites per environment.
so we'll have, if you have a big site and you have a bunch of small sites also, you'll be able to, have both people that have a big site in, a dedicated environment. And you can have a bunch of small sites. In a, multi-site environment. Very soon we're, in the final phases of wrapping that up.
[00:25:37] Wes Tatters: So effectively Rapyd is, effectively Rapyd is the best. Of managed WordPress in a extremely user friendly dashboard, but with the power and performance of a dedicated high performance virtual private server or VPS.
[00:25:55] Nathan Wrigley: I think everybody would like to view their site as mission critical. I've got a, I've got a tiny little website with, no, actual traffic. But to me it's mission critical. It feels like the kind of sites you are pitching are. Toward, at least anyway, they, really are, you've got this social network or something like that, LMS or something.
It is your business. It needs to be ticking over whilst you're asleep. Do you offer any kind of, SLA kind of thing, do you offer some sort of guarantee that yes, whilst you sleep, your site will be up and if anything seems to go wrong whilst you're asleep, we are gonna step in, we've got 24 7 monitoring support stuff.
We'll have you back in the, eight hours that you are not around, those kind of things.
[00:26:37] Wes Tatters: Hundred percent. 100%. our, support team are all trained developers. a number of our support team came across with us from Buddy Boss. They were working in plugin development and working in, WordPress space for many, years. So we have the ability to, monitoring real time every site now infrastructure monitor, not just that it's up, but we actually can also monitor the performance and load and we can actually.
Our, cis o and DevOps team monitor that in real time, 24, 24 7.
if they see
a site that's busy, we address it.
[00:27:17] Mike Eisenwasser: can you also touch on Monarchs and Patch Deck as that's related to this too?
[00:27:21] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, you have partnerships with them. Interesting. Okay.
[00:27:23] Wes Tatters: One, one of the, one of the biggest reasons why sites have problems is either malware attacks or bot attacks, or denial of service attacks. the big challenges in the WordPress space. so we partnered and built on a very powerful security stack, which starts at its base with, latest versions of, Elma Linux, latest versions of monarchs, realtime malware security in the service stack itself.
Enterprise Lightspeed, latest versions of Mariah DB and Redis, all in the same stack. With patch Stack sitting on the front of it. so at each step, monitoring performance, monitoring malware, monitoring, security, and then completing that with a Edge powered, CDN infrastructure that does the same thing again with a high performance wat ad edge, in, the cloud.
completing
that stack.
[00:28:25] Mike Eisenwasser: hey, was, if, your site gets, attacked or hacked at the server level or at the plugin level, what does Monarchs do? What does Patch deck do? Can you explain that?
[00:28:34] Wes Tatters: So Monarchs, firstly, tracks and managers, in real time, everything that's happening inside your WordPress server. it's not like a, a word fence or a a scanner that's just sitting as a plugin. respectfully, the worst place to put a security plugin is inside the application. because it's the first thing that gets attacked.
It's just another plugin. So our security sits in the server. It looks directly into PHP. It looks into memory and monitors in real time. It's, it can, Catch using what's called a RAs, malware before anyone even knows it is malware. because it's actually looking at what's happening. It actually goes, that particular action looks suspect, and real time blocks and traps.
Those pla that security, or attack patched deck does the same thing at the other end. it's monitoring and trapping. All of those legacy plugin vulnerabilities that, people forgot to update their plugin and oh dear. malware's attacking that plugin this morning. patch stack is solving that problem at the front end by going, no, we are real time patching.
[00:29:49] Nathan Wrigley: And this isn't a another thing which I need to enable. It's not like I have to go and sign up for Patch Stack and Monarch. This
[00:29:56] Wes Tatters: It's
[00:29:56] Nathan Wrigley: just built in, hidden in the background if you like, but it's there.
[00:30:01] Mike Eisenwasser: when you
set up a site,
[00:30:02] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay.
[00:30:03] Mike Eisenwasser: when you add a site, it, there's a process where we deploy the server environment and install WordPress and we install monarchs and we install patch deck and all the caching tools, everything was talked about is all part of the deploy process. As soon as your site's ready, it's all there.
[00:30:18] Wes Tatters: and it's all managed in our dashboard.
[00:30:20] Nathan Wrigley: D
[00:30:20] Wes Tatters: It's the, you don't even log into your WordPress site to manage any of those tools.
[00:30:24] Nathan Wrigley: let's say I'm a real like server nerd. e everything that you've been talking about is like second nature to me. I just, love this stuff inside and out. It's my living, breathing love is to just configure servers and all of that, which by the way, it is not for me, but how, much control do I get over the environment that you offer?
Is it a case of Rapyd? we've just optimized it. That's, this is what we've got. Or can I go in and tweak the version of whatever it may be? How much control do I
have?
[00:30:54] Wes Tatters: it, is a, managed infrastructure and that allows us to optimize things. incredibly highly. but we manage and maintain that in near real time. again, because of our dynamic infrastructure. unlike a traditional WordPress site where it's set and forget it, our servers are manage managing and monitoring.
They're adjusting CPU loads, they're adjusting ram allocations. They're, adjusting database optimization configurations in real time. because we are monitoring all those things externally. And we're going, okay, this customer's added. The world's worst load plugin and there are some plugins, huge load,
and we know about it effectively the moment it happens, and because we're monitoring the server, we will, we might see a performance strike.
We might see something start to go, there's no extra user load 'cause we're seeing that as well. But all of a sudden their CPUs have just gone through the roof. So our DevOps and ops are in there within minutes going, what's going on? What's happening? And we'll then reach out reactively to the customer and say, Hey, are you aware that what you've just done. Has broken your site,
[00:32:07] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:32:08] Wes Tatters: and we have customers coming back, going, we didn't know that had happened. and in the traditional WordPress world. and unfortunately I was only talking to someone yesterday, who woke up to discover that we're commerce was gone on their
[00:32:23] Nathan Wrigley: grief. Oh, good
[00:32:26] Wes Tatters: WooCommerce was gone.
wasn't one of our sites. It was one of our competitors. It wasn't the competitor's fault. They had auto updates enabled and the version of WooCommerce had a tried to do an update, and the update had failed. And of course, the way installs work is, it goes, I think I've got a valid payload, delete all the old stuff, and now it's all the new stuff.
So it had deleted all the old stuff and
[00:32:48] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, yeah,
[00:32:49] Wes Tatters: But this guy's site had been down for eight hours
when he logged
[00:32:54] Nathan Wrigley: aren't they? The best days when you wake up to, you realize.
[00:32:57] Mike Eisenwasser: was,
[00:32:58] Wes Tatters: that.
[00:32:59] Nathan Wrigley: can I'd love to just spend like literally 20 seconds looking over Wesley's shoulder at the dashboard that he's staring at when he's looking at the Rapyd cloud infrastructure and what's happening with all the servers.
It'd be interesting. I bet you've got lots of flashing lights and updates and things like that. Yeah.
[00:33:16] Wes Tatters: we do. We and we see it in real time. we love Slack. And we use Slack infrastructure. and the whole platform is wired to start pinging events into Slack channels
from inside our
[00:33:31] Nathan Wrigley: Wes gets, a call, something's
[00:33:33] Wes Tatters: Off it goes.
[00:33:34] Mike Eisenwasser: the west is not a one man show, by the way. we have a DevOps team and
[00:33:38] Wes Tatters: we've got a dedicated sysops team there in real time.
We've got a dedicated DevOps team and as I said, our support team are also fully trained. Any one of our support team, pretty much to a, man or woman. Can go in and fix your site.
and they're empowered to do
[00:33:54] Nathan Wrigley: What about things like W-P-C-L-I, SSH,
access, that kind of thing? Debugging.
[00:34:01] Wes Tatters: W-P-C-L-I is built in, it's a native part of our platform infrastructure.
[00:34:05] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.
[00:34:06] Wes Tatters: SSH is available. again, because it's managed, we tend not to allow root access.
[00:34:12] Nathan Wrigley: Well
[00:34:14] Wes Tatters: um.
[00:34:15] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay.
[00:34:16] Wes Tatters: Yeah. because the biggest challenge is the moment you are managed, you have to establish a baseline. So if you're a managed infrastructure, you can't have people tweaking with the baseline when you are trying to optimize in real time that same baseline.
if, we're in there adjusting the configuration settings of mic, the, Maria IDB configuration file or the Redis configuration file. That could be happening any time of day. the customer doesn't know we're doing it. but it's all happening in real time. If the customer's going and going, oh, I went and tried to edit the configuration file, we're overriding it while they're trying to change
[00:34:55] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah,
[00:34:56] Wes Tatters: we have to manage that.
[00:34:57] Mike Eisenwasser: Wes. Wes, I, wanna, comment on, this about, about, customizability though. customers, we have wt, BWP, Deb Bug in there. They can turn it on and off from the hosting
dashboard. they can upgrade their WordPress version from the hosting dashboard. They can upgrade plugins and themes from the dashboard.
If they have a problem, they can roll back to a previous version of a plugin and theme from within the hosting dashboard, which is great 'cause sometimes the site will, if you update a plugin and there's a conflict, you can get a white screen and you can't go into admin. So you can do it from the hosting dashboard.
They can switch their PHP version, their Lightspeed version from the hosting dashboard. they can edit php dot ini configurations from within the hosting dashboard. Other hosts, often you have to email support to do
[00:35:40] Nathan Wrigley: Yep. Yep.
[00:35:42] Mike Eisenwasser: they can do all that and then they can also change their plan. They can increase storage on the plan.
They can bump to a higher tier to increase resources. And it hap they can do it in the dashboard without talking to support and there's basically no downtime. It's instantaneous, the, changes.
so
[00:35:59] Nathan Wrigley: gi, given the time constraints that we've got today, we're
closing the window a little bit, but just a couple of things. so Rapyd Cloud, it feels to me as if you are pitching yourself. Towards people who are serious about having a WordPress website. They've got a serious property, they've got serious expectations about op time and performance and so on.
So the next question is the pricing question. I'm guessing that with serious resources comes serious pricing. Talk us through that. What are the, and caveat, mTOR, we're recording this at the beginning of March, 2025, so this will be a movable feast, I'm sure over time. But where are we at the moment, apart from the free trial?
where does your baseline price start? Let's go there.
[00:36:44] Wes Tatters: So our pricing starts for most customers, with what we call a developer plan. there is also what we call a light plan. they started about $25 a month. and a developer plan is about $50 a month, but for most of our customers, their entry level is around that 89 to 9 89 to $90 a month. 'cause they are getting a full VPS, they are getting $350 plus of object cash, pro relay patch stack and monarchs in every environment.
they're not getting a $5 hosting. they are getting live monitoring, real time support. so what we are selling is a managed service, but, and, that scales from there. it scales up. we have customers spending considerably more than that. but they're also making, massive, millions and millions of, potentially, page requests per day in
[00:37:47] Nathan Wrigley: Do you know
[00:37:48] Mike Eisenwasser: The question is how much I was gonna, the question is how much performance you're getting per dollar. So many of our customers. Save money when they switch to us. So we're at the higher end of hosting, you could say, but our, infrastructure to be very efficient at scale. So a lot of customers will.
Who, are maybe spending a hundred here, we're spending 150 at a another host and they switch here and they, can drop to a lower price point for better performance. so we're very competitive there, but we are on the higher end 'cause we're serving the higher end, customers. And our pricing varies whether you're, we offer monthly and to annual plans.
So we give a nice discount, for
[00:38:27] Nathan Wrigley: And something I've never seen before, which is b biannual. You appear to be offering two years hosting, and the nice gimmick there, which I love, is that if you go for two years, you get six. Basically you get two years for the price of 18 months. That's how I'm reading it. Is that right?
[00:38:43] Wes Tatters: Yes, that's
[00:38:44] Mike Eisenwasser: we, offer a, really nice discount if you buy a multi-year plan. So you, get that for the first, if you buy for two years, you get a, really nice discount for the first two years. And then after that it will roll into an annual
plan, which still has a discount again on
[00:38:58] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. But nice
[00:39:00] Wes Tatters: and
[00:39:00] Nathan Wrigley: try at the beginning. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:39:02] Wes Tatters: This is modeled around a, how a lot of these enterprise type businesses tend to think, we have, buddy boss customers that were going, I've got two and a half thousand members. They give me, $10 a month. And you're going, hang on a minute, that's real money.
[00:39:24] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:39:24] Wes Tatters: that's that's your side gig and they're going, yeah. I've, got, 20 5K in revenue, per month from my side gig. I'm quite happy to go. I'm in this for the next 12 months or I'm in this for the next two years. I'm quite happy to commit upfront. To high performance. The other big differentiator, we guarantee our performance.
we guarantee that by partnering with some of the highest, powered, cloud infrastructure currently available. and as we grow and scale, as you performance infrastructure becomes available, our customers get it automatically. they're not locked into a, oh, you bought a host in 1943. and, it's still running at the same speed and it's still running on that, it, it's got two hamsters in a wheel still.
From that point, every time new infrastructure's available and we update our infrastructure platform, all of our customers will get the same uplift.
Um, so if they're locked in now, they get a performance
[00:40:31] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, I think there is a, a.
[00:40:32] Mike Eisenwasser: No, with no real downtime. They don't even know. Have to think about
[00:40:34] Nathan Wrigley: Just gonna say, I think there is a real bit of the WordPress community, which is, nervous of talking about money. and like when you get into three figures, a hundred plus dollars for anything it feels like, that's a lot.
But then actually pull back the current a little bit, prize the lid open and see what you're getting and what, you will get off the back of that, the, and in this case, a serious website, which will hopefully be generating you revenue. Even before you, you come to them. So migrating over, all taken care of and, you can check it all out at Rapyd Cloud.
Like I said, the URL is spelled RAPY d.cloud, and if you want to go straight to the pricing, it's forward slash pricing. You can go and check it out. I, we've run outta time, I'm afraid to say, but that's been a really interesting conversation. Both Mike and Wes. Let's start with Mike first. Where can we find you if we've got any curious questions based upon this?
[00:41:35] Mike Eisenwasser: if you wanna reach out to me, I'm very active on LinkedIn, so Michael Eisenhower, you can just look me up on LinkedIn and send me a message.
[00:41:41] Nathan Wrigley: Nice and Wes.
[00:41:44] Wes Tatters: I'm on LinkedIn as well, will also be at Cloud Fest, in a couple of weeks time. and we'll be at Word Camps. we've got Boost this year. and I don't know for anyone that was at Word Camp, Asia, they might've met our giant Peregrine pecan, Flynn, who, was lit, sorry, fleet, who was literally everywhere.
at WordCamp, it's a six foot tall, giant bird. and, fleet is the fastest land animal GaN Falcon.
[00:42:18] Nathan Wrigley: like it. It's a good gimmick.
[00:42:20] Wes Tatters: he's, he chose to join with us.
[00:42:23] Mike Eisenwasser: that's the other thing. If you wanna meet in person, we, sponsor and go to the big events. So we were, just mentioning, we're in Word Camp Asia in Manila a couple weeks ago. We'll be, at Word Camp US in Portland, and we'll be at Word Camp Europe in Switzerland in June. So those are all good opportunities to, to come to our booths and talk and meet in person
[00:42:42] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. And just a little thing from me. Love the website. I really, like the design that you've got going on there. Yeah. Yeah. Really it just, it resonated with me right away. Really nice. so thank you so much, Wes. Thank you so much, Mike. good luck. I hope that the platform was incredibly successful.
Take care.
[00:43:01] Wes Tatters: our
[00:43:01] Mike Eisenwasser: Good luck to you as well. Thanks, Nathan.
[00:43:04] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. That's all we've got for you today. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, if you've got something to say about Wes and Mike's offering, head to wpbuilds.com, search for episode number 416, and leave us a comment there. We'd really appreciate it.
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Okay. Truly, that's it. I'm gonna fade in some cheesy music. Say stay safe. Have a good week. See you soon. Bye-bye for now.
