[00:00:21] Nathan Wrigley: Hello there and welcome once again to the WP Builds podcast. You've reached episode number 461, entitled from support to CEO Jon Penland's journey at Kinsta. It was published on Thursday, the 19th of March, 2026. My name's Nathan Wrigley, and before we chat to Jon, a few bits of housekeeping.
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Okay, what have we got for you today? Well, today I am in the lucky position of chatting to Jon Penland. Jon is the CEO of Kinsta, and I'm sure that you've heard of Kinsta. If you haven't, go Google them. K-I-N-S-T-A. They are a hosting, and more, company in the WordPress space. They've been growing for many, many years, and have a really credible reputation, I would say.
So today we're chatting with Jon, who has risen from the very lowliest position in Kinsta through hard work and diligence. He's risen right up from support into the CEO position. So we talk about his journey. We talk about how he got his foot in the door at Kinsta. How working hard has proven to be the exact route that he needed for success. We also talk about the company culture, leadership, how they give back to the community, what the outlook is for WordPress hosting in the future, and of course, the usual product and roadmaps that Kinsta have got for your dilatation in the future.
I hope that you enjoy it.
I am joined on the podcast by John Penland. Hello, John.
[00:03:15] Jon Penland: Hello Nathan. Thank you for having me on the podcast. You are so welcome. John's joining me. I've just found out, oh, and I'm gonna get it wrong, I think from the mountains of, I want to say, oh, I've forgotten what you said.
So my, yeah, I had mentioned that, my ancestry, my grandparents, a lot of my family comes from the mountains of North Carolina. That I have since moved about two hours south. So I'm in the, I'm in the mountains of Georgia, the northeast corner of
Georgia. Yeah. Okay. we're gonna be talking today a little bit about the company that John works for. We're gonna be spending most of the time I imagine actually talking about John, which is curious 'cause we don't often do that. But I think there's this other as a story, a, an interesting story to be told here.
[00:03:56] Nathan Wrigley: And we'll spend quite a bit of time talking about Kinsta, which is the company that John leads now completely leads. I think that's true. We'll find out in a moment when John does his. Bio. So that's me. Segueing beautifully into John. Will you just tell us a little bit about yourself and you know how, come you're on a WordPress podcast?
Basically.
[00:04:13] Jon Penland: Yeah, so back in about 20 10, 20 11, I decided I wanted to work in technology and I underwent a process of very intentional self-education in the areas of H-T-M-L-C-S-S, JavaScript, PHP, and WordPress. And my goal was I wanted to equip myself. with sufficient skills to be able to move into technology, either in sales or in marketing or in operations, or even as a junior developer.
That was my goal. And I was just, I was in a completely different industry. I was working in a manufacturing industry. I was at a desk in a little gray cubicle, for about nine hours a day. And I wanted a different type of life. I made the decision. I wanted to be in technology. I wanted to be in technology.
Really, I wanted to be. Working for an internet-based company because I felt like that was gonna be the most meaningful industry of my. Career of the time that my career encompassed that this was gonna be the space that mattered. And so I wanted to get into technology and I also wanted the flexibility of working in technology.
And so I went through this multi-year process and it eventually led to me working as a freelance. Website creator and more so a freelance content creator in the WordPress space. So I was writing for websites like WPMU, dev, like Kinsta and others in the space. I was a editor for some content creators in the space, and that's really how I became familiar with Kinsta and with the entire industry.
And something I had learned years before is that. The most important element in your career trajectory is working for the right company, more so than having any specific position. And when I became exposed to Kinsta, this was early days, this would've been. Late 2015, early 2016, and I just saw Kinsta from a content perspective, highly visible.
And I saw them testing really well on website, on WordPress performance benchmarks, and I just felt like this is a company as. If you think back to 20 15, 20 16, there were a lot of companies in the space, but I just felt like Kinsta had something unique going for it. And so I was already writing for them and I just started looking for opportunities to go to work full-time for Kinsta.
And again, my thinking was I'll do anything if I can get my foot in the door because they foot in the door at a company that's growing will produce opportunity over time. And so I was able to get that foot in the door in the form of a support engineer position at the end of 2016. This was about six months of trying to get to work for Kinsta full-time.
And I finally got my foot in the door as a support engineer. And when I entered the company, it was a small company. It was actually smaller than I thought. It was only about 15 people. I thought it was about 40, and it was only about 15 once I actually got into the Slack workspace. But I just, I put my head down and said, this is, what opportunity looks like, right?
Opportunity looks like hard work. I'm in a place that's growing rapidly and where there are going to be needs that develop, and I am going to lean into those needs that I am able to service to address. And I think it's important to state. Like when I joined Kinsta, I had 10 years of professional experience prior to that in a role in roles where I was dealing with.
A complex product, trying to communicate it to a less technical audience and where I understood the full scope of how that business operated. And so I, I just brought that way of thinking to Kinsta and it was like, I'm, gonna be able to break down this product in a way that. Non-technical or less technical users can understand, and I'm gonna understand it from one end to the other.
I, am going to be an expert on what is happening in this product and in this business. I'm gonna be an expert. And over time, that just led to opportunity. And so. I joined at the right time. I, did work hard. I did bring, that desire to understand, to grow to the table, but I always think it's important to acknowledge the role that good fortune being blessed, whatever your preferred term is, that plays a part in anybody's success journey, whether they want to acknowledge it or not.
And I think I joined the company at just the right time where. Where they were really entering an era of explosive growth. And when you're in a time of explosive growth. Managers are desperately looking for people that they can trust with responsibility. And if you are somebody that they go, I can trust this person with responsibility, I can give them something and I know I won't have to think about it again.
they're going to address it. They're going to address it as well as I would. They're gonna own that. Responsibility. Managers are dying for people like that when you're in an era of rapid growth. So I just made that my goal. I was like, if something is my responsibility, yeah,
I'm gonna
[00:09:32] Nathan Wrigley: was just gonna say, so, so firstly, I would go with the word serendipity there
[00:09:37] Jon Penland: Yeah, that's a great one.
[00:09:39] Nathan Wrigley: but also I'm glad that you brought that up because you were kind of setting yourself up there for, oh, this, all this random stuff just happened. like, I'm, I just got this job.
I decided to do this thing. But then you started to drill down in what, the, fact that there's hard work and what have you. So it sounds like you've been very intentional. It sounds like there must have been a period of. Your life where you were burning the candles a bit at both ends.
[00:10:03] Jon Penland: goodness.
[00:10:04] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. And then, and then you mentioned hard work. So what does that mean to you? what is your sort of definition of hard work? is it like the number of hours you clock in a week? Is it the ownership of the problem? Is it keeping going until that thing is over the line? what do you mean by hard work?
[00:10:21] Jon Penland: Yeah, that's a good, that's a great question. So, to answer the first bit of that question, I, burned the candle at both ends. I, have burned the candle at both ends in different times of my life for a period of time to accomplish a specific set goal. there was a time pre Kinsta where I burned both candles.
I burned the candle at both ends. We had just had our firstborn. Son. I had started a new career and I was earning my MBA at the same
time, and
[00:10:52] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, that's all the candles burning right there.
[00:10:55] Jon Penland: Everything was burning, right. I and my wife got pregnant right as I was starting. My wife got pregnant with our second, my first was like a year old.
My wife got pregnant with her second. I just started the MBA. She was terrified to tell me. She was like, 'cause John will quit his MBA if I tell him this. Right? And she told me and I was like, why would you think that? Like, I just won't sleep. I dunno, I don't see a problem here. Right. And, to bring that over to Kinsta.
When I joined Kinsta, again, my goal was to really understand everything. And so it wasn't so much about, yeah, it wasn't so much about like logging a specific number of hours. I was always doing stuff around the outside of my role to understand what was happening. An, example would be, when I joined Kinsta, I knew WordPress well.
I did not know the Linux hosting environment. I didn't know it. I, had interacted with it a little bit as a hosting user, but I had never been a cis admin, that type of person. And I signed up for Linux Academy, which has since been acquired by others. And I, took courses. I learned about Linux, I learned about Git, I learned about Nginx, I learned about, PHP and all of these different technologies, and I became.
Really a junior CIS admin because I needed that level of knowledge to take the next step in my career. So I've done that repeatedly over time. educating myself either directly through the work itself or if I needed to spend time outside of the work. I'm doing that right now, right? I just became a CEO and I've got, books on my desk where I'm sitting here and I'm going, how do I make sure that.
I am developing the competencies to excel at my role. Right. I'm going to take the time to do that.
[00:12:43] Nathan Wrigley: It sounds like, again, I conjured up the word serendipity earlier. I'm gonna go for the word curiosity now. It sounds like maybe a, desire just to learn what's around you just to be curious. And is that something that, that you. Okay. There's, multi, multiple parts to this question, but can you ascribe that?
Do you think that's why you were successful and finally rose to the very top of Kinsta? Because could your managers, the people that were senior to you at the time, could they see that in you? Do you think that, you were curious, that you weren't just clocking in and doing the work and going home and what have you?
It was more, look, John did this thing and he's been curious about this thing that nobody told him to be curious about. Do. Do you think that's a feature of your. Precipitous rise.
[00:13:31] Jon Penland: I, I, do. So I think one of the skills that you're, again, I had mentioned earlier managers are always hungry for people who will. Take on responsibility and really own that responsibility. A part of that is being somebody who knows what you don't know, right? So I think being self-aware about, I. I don't know this thing.
So yes, you can give me that responsibility and I will make sure it gets addressed. But I also recognize I don't have the expertise to do this myself. So whether that means I'm gonna educate myself, whether that means I'm gonna pull other people into the process, I need to go find an advisor, I need to find a service provider, whatever I'm gonna make sure it gets done.
But I recognize I don't have the expertise. So two things are gonna happen. One, I'm gonna make sure that we get the expertise to do this, right. Two, I'm gonna learn. Because the next time this comes up, I'm gonna be more expert than I am this time. So I do think when I became Chief Operating Officer at Kinsta, which happened, I'd have to look at my LinkedIn, but I think it happened around 2018, going from memory, one of the first things that our CEO mark one of the founders did at the time, and for a variety of reasons, he said, we need to set up a, US company.
Whether it's a subsidiary where it's a parent, I don't know, John, you go figure that out. And I had never created a company before and so I, I knew I didn't know how to do it. I knew I didn't have the expertise. And so what did I do? I went and found the expertise. The first thing I did is I got on calls with probably two dozen lawyers and accountants.
Just trying to find the right combination of advisors who could help me do this in the right way. And over time I identified it, identified I needed tax counsel in the UK and the US and I needed legal, counsel in the UK and the us. I had no idea at the start that's who I even needed. But I went through the process of talking to enough people of taking steps, one.
After the other. That made sense, finding that expertise and then developing a plan for how to do what needed to be done. So I think, that's, it's important if you're gonna be somebody who's aspiring to more responsibility to not feel like. You have all the answers because you're going to be put into positions where you don't have the answers.
And pretending you have answers you don't have is a guaranteed recipe for failure. And, I've seen that unfortunately, where somebody is put into a position that is intended to be a stretching position and they come into the position with the expectation, I know what needs to happen here and, it doesn't work.
You need to come into that position with humility and say, I haven't done this before. I don't know what I'm doing. I'm not an expert. I can learn, and that's the one thing I can guarantee is that I'm gonna work hard and I'm gonna learn.
[00:16:21] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it's curious when you see politicians on the telly and the rare thing in a politician. The one person that can say, I actually don't know the answer to that. It kind of makes you sit up in the chair. what did they just say? That's so refreshing and kind of interesting. do. So looking back, you, mentioned that you joined Kinsta when you did, and you were intentional about that.
So with that benefit of hindsight, do you think Kinsta offered. Like a series of leg ops for you because of that personality type and because of the way you work and because of your curiosity, obviously you can't speak to, had you have worked at a different company, a rival company perhaps, but was there something which looking back, you think, do you know what Kinsta was just made for me, this said it was just ideal.
[00:17:06] Jon Penland: I think so, yes. I, do think, Kinsta was in a position when I joined. I joined in that support function. We had somebody who was one of the original founders who was leading support, who had moved into that leadership position and pretty rapidly said, I prefer to be a high level individual contributor.
I don't wanna be a manager. And so after being there just for like two months, suddenly we had no support manager. Right. And so I was in a position suddenly after being there just two months where there was this leadership void and they needed somebody to fill it, and I wasn't immediately given that position.
It was left open for like two more months, but after like four months, they said, okay, you've been here for four months. You've proven yourself sufficiently. We need this position filled, we're a cash strapped. Startup. We can't go hire somebody else. We need to fill this internally. John, are you interested in this role?
Similarly, early on we had somebody at Kinsta who was handling inbound sales inquiries. And that person left after they, I had been there about three or four months, and again, I just, I put my hand up and just said, my hands are pretty full with support, but I, the volume of inbound inquiries at that point wasn't overwhelming.
It was, five to 10 a day. So it was like, I can do that. I can handle five to 10. It's not gonna be a robust professional sales process 'cause I'm not that person. But can I take an inbound inquiry, somebody asking about our hosting plans or whatnot. Get on the phone with them and tell them about Kinsta.
Sure, I can do that. Right. And so I do think, that element of I'm gonna learn, I'm gonna develop expertise. That was a part of it. But a part of it was just serendipitous, as you said, where it was like I joined and these opportunities. Presented themselves, and I was a person with the right combination of skills and mentality who was there, right?
And so I had the opportunity to level up into those positions rather
rapidly.
[00:19:00] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that, I mean, what a, I mean a stroke of luck. Let's not, c characterize it quite like that because that doesn't give you any opportunity to have been brilliant, which no doubt you were. and you may not admit that to yourself, but there must have been moments where the people that were senior to you, looked at John and looked at various others.
Let's go with John. So, presumably we can't discount entirely your, your capacity to, be good at your job, although it does seem like your humility won't allow that. So I will do it for you. So the next thing to say then is on this way up, presumably there was always somebody feeding you, John.
Tasks to do things to things, to be busy with areas of growth and what have you. And now that you've managed to get to the giddy heights of CEO, I dunno what the company structure is. I don't know if you report to anybody in any way, shape, or form, or if the ideas have to come entirely out of you. So just tell us a little bit about that.
How Kinsta work at this sort of more senior level? Who's feeding the ideas? Who do you report to? Or is it all just coming out of John's head?
[00:20:05] Jon Penland: Yeah, so, we're a UK limited company, so the standard UK structure, we have a board of directors and so I do report to the board of directors and we do have a formal and official board of directors, and it's made up of myself, a couple of the original founders, and then one outside board member and.
That does, that group does provide strategic oversight where it's like I take the budget to them and that gets approved and I, am part of the board, but I also report to the board. And so they do provide that high level strategic oversight. I If we get into things that are more interesting, like what are we gonna work on next?
What are the initiatives, what are the marketing initiatives? Those types of things, those are developed very collaboratively. And so from the product side, we have our VP of, I believe his title is VP of Engineering, but Andres, he's the number two under our CTO. He owns our product roadmap and it's a highly collaborative process where he's.
Taking input from our customer support team, from sales, from marketing, from myself, from other sources, from customer feedback. And he's developing our product roadmap for where we're gonna go. and then, I'm a part of that, but, It's, contribution and then final sign off. I'm not developing the product roadmap myself and the same across the organization.
Right now we're a company that has been in business going back to 2013, and at this point we have a very strong executive team and. My, I view my job as CEO. A big part of my job is mentoring all of our executives to be the true owners of their areas of responsibility. And so I don't, do a lot of dictating, I don't do a lot of saying, this is what we're gonna do, that's what we're gonna do.
It is a very collaborative approach because we've been very intentional. About either elevating or bringing in really strong talent into these different leadership positions. So that's kind of a long-winded answer, but it's effectively, it's a very collaborative process. We've brought in really good people and I try to trust them.
[00:22:16] Nathan Wrigley: I like it. That's amazing. So the industry that you're in, obviously hosting, we'll get into whether there's other, parts to the company itself in a moment, but, very, competitive industry and all that goes with that. So I can imagine that there are a lot of things that you're working on, and again, we'll come to the roadmap in a moment, but I just wanna lean into the more.
I don't know, philanthropic side, the community side and what have you, because that's something that our audience are very, interested in. what do you do in the WordPress space? I get myself to WordPress events quite a lot. So, meet ups and word camps and things like that. So I know that Kinsta makes its presence felt at those things.
Sponsoring and what have you, many people may not know that maybe you've got contributions into the more hidden areas of WordPress, like contributing to certain contributors. Things like that. what do you do in order to pay back? we're in an interesting period where that is very much in the news for reasons we don't need to go into.
But, I'll lead, I'll just lead you there and, let you go with that.
[00:23:18] Jon Penland: Right. So Kinsta our. Primary business. And as you alluded to, we do have other parts of our business, but the primary part of our business, the lion's share, is around managed hosting for WordPress websites. And so the WordPress project, the WordPress ecosystem, being healthy and vibrant is, critical for the health of our business, right?
If, the WordPress ecosystem suffers, so too will our business. And so there are different. Phases as a business where you may or may not be able to give back in, in different ways. We're at a, we're at a place financially where we can, and so we made the decision a couple of years ago that we were gonna be intentional about trying to support the health of the WordPress ecosystem and doing that in ways that are clearly commercial.
Such as, sponsoring word camps and these types of things as well as ways that are really not purely commercial, such as supporting, contributors to WordPress. And I know it, it doesn't have quite the buzz around it that it used to, but if you look at the five for the future [email protected], you'll find kins to pretty high on that list.
And that's intentional. It's because we've. Literally assigned a budget and said, to our partnership managers, our community managers, go out and find people who are contributing in real and valuable ways to the WordPress project and sponsor them. And do we expect all that money to come back to us?
No, not directly, but indirectly, yes. Because if the WordPress ecosystem is healthy, then that's, good for kin stuff. Over the long term. And so we do want to put some of our resources to supporting the health of the WordPress ecosystem. and I dunno, we just think that's important. we're not completely altruistic.
We, we rely on the WordPress industry and so we want it to be healthy. Right. We want it to grow and be healthy 'cause that's good for
us.
[00:25:15] Nathan Wrigley: I, always think that must be a very difficult circle to square for somebody in your position because the, the turn up at events and have a big booth and there you are. There's a, there's, I'm, and we, I'm sure we both know that the ROI on turning up to those events is. Probably not that great, but nevertheless, the exposure is enormous.
But then when you sponsor, I don't know, a contributor who's involved in this tiny aspect of one facet of the WordPress community, the ROI on that is, is very hard to, there's no through line there. And in many cases it may be that it's entirely silent. You know nobody, apart from somebody who goes out to find out that information will ever discover it.
So there's. I just think that must be an awful, awfully difficult decision. you've got, a hundred beans that you've got to distribute over the course of the year. Where do you put those beans and, how do you decide that this one bean goes to this person who silently, diligently, doing all the work that they need to do?
But kinal never, ever get anything back from that, that I just think that must be really difficult.
[00:26:19] Jon Penland: Yeah, so the budget that you're specifically referring to, which is that individual contributor that's coming directly through one of our partnerships managers. So each of our partnerships managers, Alex, Marcel, and Roger, they each have a budget and they go identify contributors and they, have to run them through an approval process.
We wanna make sure that, we have, we maintain a really high quality bar for the folks that we're sponsoring, but, I don't wanna say that no return is expected. we recognize that the return from that investment is going to be difficult to measure, difficult or impossible to measure. And that a lot of that return is really just supporting the health of the ecosystem as opposed to, say, driving specific revenue.
And I think it's important to acknowledge, as I, mentioned early on, there are different phases as a business. If as a business we were in a place where it was like. We're really squeezing to get, $10,000 in marketing budget this month. Like we were really, doing everything we could to get that budget out.
Then it would be very difficult to justify both the investments in things like word camps and the, contributor sponsorships. But we're in a place where we have a healthy marketing budget and we can make the choice to allocate a portion of that to things that we recognize are not going to come back.
Directly, but we believe we'll support the health of the overall space.
[00:27:42] Nathan Wrigley: do you wish that there were A system, so this wouldn't be confined just to Kinsta, but it would be more WordPress? Generally, do you wish there was more of a system of kind of, I don't know, being able to pin a badge on whatever it is that you are doing? So let's say for example, that one of your three marketing, people goes out and decides, okay, we're gonna give it to this person over here.
If there was a way for not only that person to get kudos because they're doing that hard work, but also for there to be some backwards and forwards, like Kinsta gets the kudos for that. So, you mentioned five for the future. Yes. But something where, I don't know, let's say for example, you sponsor something like, I don't know.
The first thing that comes to mind obviously is a podcast. 'cause that's what I do. That's never gonna get you, kudos anywhere. But, people listen to podcasts and things like that might be a, thing where. I get a badge, you get a badge, the community gets to know and there's this sort of more central repository of where those con contributions end up and everybody can see them.
All that. I dunno if you've got any thoughts on that. I've, often thought that would be a good idea, but who the heck would run it? I dunno.
[00:28:50] Jon Penland: Yeah. So again, my thing is I, can't overemphasize how much we believe that the health of the work. WordPress ecosystem is critical to kin's to the WordPress part of our business. And so if such a system created pressure or rather than pressure, I'll just say opportunity for other businesses to boost their own visibility by investing in WordPress, then I would say absolutely because it would create more of a mechanism.
Where it would be easier if for a business that insists on tying ROI to every dollar of spend, if that would create more visibility for them, more ability to tie ROI to that spend, then I would say absolutely because it would make it easier to justify investment into the space. But as far as I'm concerned, again, I'm happy for us to the, I would love for there to be more ways for there to be.
Rewards for investing in WordPress so that it would encourage greater investment into the ecosystem.
[00:29:55] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, you've summed it up beautifully there. Rewards to encourage investment is a really nice way of describing it, so that rather than Kinsta having to write on their own blog that they've invested in this person. and people may read that or they may not. It would be nice if there was a way of making that reward publicly available to everybody.
Okay. we'll park that one, but that's such an interesting, thing and I, think maybe this next topic will, lean into that a little bit as well. We've had a, we've had a few, months of backwards and forwards, legally we've had community disruption and things like that.
We are not going to stray into that particularly, but I'm, the question that comes off the back of that is. What's the landscape like for a hosting company these days are you still seeing that, broadly speaking, WordPress adoption is going? I don't know. Is maintaining staying where it is or perhaps even going up, or is there a bit of belt tightening going on?
From where I'm sitting? It feels like belt tightening, but you'd be in a much better position to know than I.
[00:30:57] Jon Penland: So I do think the number of new entrants. Let me back up a step. I think it's important to note who Kin star's customers are. Rarely are we the first host that a WordPress user tries
[00:31:13] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, that's
[00:31:14] Jon Penland: We are rarely that first host, so having said that, we are not, I do not think we are seeing a huge influx of new entrants into the WordPress space.
Having said that, I, WordPress is a deeply established technology. I, think the, long-term trends for. WordPress, whether whether you're a plugin developer, a theme developer, a hosting provider, if you have figured out how to have a subscription revenue based model, if you figured out subscription revenue, then I think you're in, you're, you have the potential to have a healthy business for a decade or decades because the existing install base is absolutely massive.
And if you think about the average. WordPress user or the average WordPress website. Maybe it's a, small business website, maybe it's a small publisher. It takes a lot of pain for them to want to invest the time and the money in switching
platforms. So as long as WordPress continues to meet their needs, they're gonna stay on WordPress.
And so I, do think we will see this massive install base be. A place where we can have healthy businesses in the WordPress space for a very, long time. Now, is, WordPress growing the way it was? When I joined WordPress? No, when I joined WordPress, I think, going purely from memory, 2016 WordPress, the statistic was probably something like 25%.
Of all sites on the internet world, WordPress, and now it's low 40%. Right. and we seem to be stuck in that, sort of range. So I don't think, just purely looking at the trends, I don't think we're seeing a huge influx of New Year's users, but I do think within the ranks of true professional use of WordPress, that there is gonna be stability for a long time.
[00:33:16] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:33:17] Jon Penland: because WordPress continues to meet needs, and so without pain and a reason to change, I think folks will. I think it'll be a healthy place for a
long time.
[00:33:25] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think if you could rewind the clock and tell the 2016 version of yourself that WordPress would get to 40. You probably would've seen that as, no, that's very un Like how can a, how can any platform get to
[00:33:38] Jon Penland: That possible?
[00:33:39] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And so I think sometimes we're a little bit unkind to ourselves when we see that.
Okay, well it's, why aren't we at 48 now? And why aren't we knocking on the door of 50? Well, because 50 is totally unrealistic. That's why,
[00:33:51] Jon Penland: a wild
[00:33:52] Nathan Wrigley: 40 anything is insanely good. So maybe we just have to. ride out this storm and, just weather the AI battle and see if we, can get through it.
How, do you, I'm gonna pivot a little bit again away from community, I think, we've touched on that quite, quite a lot. So the next series of questions really are all about the platform itself. And now that you are at the helm, how are you, I mean, I know you've got your board of directors and what have you, and I obviously don't want you to.
Tell me anything that you shouldn't be telling me, but I'm just curious to know what's in, on the roadmap for the next year, two years. I dunno how far you spread that out. what are you imagining are the trends and the things that you are gonna have to be keeping up with and what have you over the next year, two years, something like
that?
[00:34:36] Jon Penland: Yeah, so I'll hit on three different platform things that are coming. two are ones that we're working on right now and, have either come out in part or will be coming out over the rest of this year. the first would be a significant improvement in the traffic controls and visibility that we give our customers for them to be able to identify.
AI bot traffic, non-AI bot traffic, human traffic, and to be able to manage those buckets separately. So giving them, so, yeah, giving folks tool sets to be able to say, I wanna block bot traffic. I want to enable. A, are you human type of test on my website to make sure I only get human users or I wanna allow all bot traffic.
So to give folks more visibility so that they can see what's happening. And then second control. So that's, a key feature area we're working on. Another one is API Enhancements. So we have seen an increasing drive for companies who wanna build on top of. Mike Kinsta. And so we've invested heavily in our API over the last year.
One of the really exciting things, a lot of times when you think about API, it's, I'm gonna use the API to take some sort of action in this piece of software. And in our case, the piece of software is Mike Kinsta. It's our control panel, right? And so you can do different things. Maybe you can, list out your sites, you can list out your users, you can understand permissions, you can do these different things.
One thing that we have launched recently is the ability actually to access W-P-C-L-I within a site container over the API, which I think is really cool because what that, what it then means, yeah. What it then means is then a third party who runs their own interface for their customers can actually enable actions within the container itself over the API.
So I was pretty excited about that one. There are more enhancements in that direction coming. We have a lot of. Agency type customers who manage hundreds or thousands of sites on our platform. And so giving them that tooling to be able to not just interact with our platform, but we've gone to where they can actually interact with individual sites and do things within the site itself over the API, I think is an exciting development, especially for agency type customers.
And the third, place I would highlight is thinking about how can we use LLMs, these AI tools to make. The user experience better for our customers. So I think about things like all of the different logs that we provide. We provide an access log, a cache performance log, and an error log for every site, right?
And presently, if you. Running into some kind of an issue. You need to go look at those different logs and try and figure out what's going on. We also layer on top of that, we have an application performance monitoring tool. You can enable that and it'll trace different transactions and figure out what parts of the transaction are slow to try and help you troubleshoot.
You need to be a developer or pretty darn close to a developer to, be effective with all of that data. Right now, there is a challenge with the size of context window that an AI tool can. Grab all of grab complex data sets like that and interact with them and think about them. But someplace I do want us to go as the context window, the ability of these tools to take in more and more data intelligently is to give folks an interface within our platform where they can just.
Talk to that data and say, here's what I'm seeing on the front end. And then for that AI tool to be able to look at the access logs, the cache logs, the error logs, the a PM data and say, oh, here's what's going on. Here's what you need to do to make that a lot more accessible. So that's the sort of thing where we're looking at how can we use these tools to make our platform more powerful.
and, there's no, what I just described is. like future vision for the product. I'm not providing any sort of, timetable or anything on that right now, but that's the third big area where I'm thinking right now is how do we bring these tools into our platform to make the user experience
better.
[00:38:56] Nathan Wrigley: I was, quite a lot younger than I am today. I used to work for a travel agent, and it was just when the internet came around, and so the moral of this story will become apparent. But I, worked there and all the companies on earth that were in the travel business tried to sell holidays online, but the company that I worked for refused to do it.
[00:39:16] Jon Penland: Hmm.
[00:39:16] Nathan Wrigley: no. We're gonna be bodies on the ground. This is what we're doing. We're steady away. They're now the biggest travel agent in the uk. They just stuck to their guns and did what they did and did it well. And it turns out, yeah, some people wanna buy over the internet, but a lot of people wanted to buy from a human being.
It was an important component. And what I'm picking up from you here, these three things, this, the bot traffic, the API, the sort of LLM to put to poll and manage the data is kind of an interesting. you're definitely not where a lot of other hosting companies have gone, where they're dropping in some sort of AI solution to, I don't know, build the website for you in three seconds flat.
it's more about the, people who you've already got who are presumably fairly, in many cases, fairly technical. It's not, as you said earlier. Their first WordPress website. So I hope you can see the sort of through line there. You've kind of decided that the bits that you are gonna do, the roadmap is more about your core audience, not trying to, use the AI to be the all encompassing thing to do everything to build the website in a heartbeat and all of that kind of stuff, which I think is quite interesting.
You are leaning into those people who. Know what you do and wanna leverage the things that you can give back to them. I dunno if I've misspoken there or
[00:40:33] Jon Penland: No, you're, absolutely right. So this is gonna be probably the spiciest thing, I would say. I do think that LLM based site builders, that sort of a solution is a viable solution for a hobbyist or a beginner, but it's not something, a professional site builder is probably
super
[00:40:51] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. Interesting.
[00:40:53] Jon Penland: And so our platform is for serious businesses using WordPress. And for the most part, those folks are, not interested in using those tools and in many cases are significantly opposed to using those types of tools. And so I, I don't see a huge opportunity for somebody like Kinsta to be like, build a site builder using ai.
[00:41:16] Nathan Wrigley: that, but that's really interesting that you've made that strategic decision. I'm imagining your customer wants op time, beyond anything else. They want. Speed, op time, security, reliability, tick all of those boxes, how to build it. That's somebody else's game, we'll do that.
We'll do that with our agency partners and what have you. okay. That's really interesting. And the AI piece, the bot traffic one, the first one that you mentioned of your three. That's really interesting to me as well, because that tells me that you must be getting heuristics from somewhere. Telling you that there's a proportion of the people who don't want bot traffic,
[00:41:51] Jon Penland: Well
[00:41:51] Nathan Wrigley: that as, some, I'm
not necessarily opposed to it, but equally I want to be able to turn it off if I feel that my content is unique to me, and I don't think anybody else should just have an immediate access to it forever and ever arm and,
[00:42:07] Jon Penland: Correct. Some people might wanna turn it off, but I think to me, more importantly, it's about having that visibility. It's about knowing, because the, thing that we've observed over the last year, if I, and I, didn't look at data before this call, so I'm gonna speak from memory, but these numbers could be off if we were to look two years ago.
Something like 30 or 40% of traffic across our platform was bought traffic and the rest was human traffic to the best of our ability to discern, which it can be difficult today. Bought traffic. I believe is more than human traffic to our platform. So it has grown exponentially and that's created a whole set of
challenges for our
[00:42:49] Nathan Wrigley: I'll bet.
[00:42:50] Jon Penland: it's caused us to, I mean, I don't know if you've noticed, we now offer bandwidth based plans, which we had switched entirely to visit based plans. We also offer now bandwidth based plans because it was creating pain points for customers who were saying. You say, I'm seeing more visits, but none of my tooling says I'm seeing more visits because it's a hundred percent an increase in bot traffic.
Right.
[00:43:12] Nathan Wrigley: So you build the tooling to enable them to make that decision.
[00:43:16] Jon Penland: To understand. Yeah. What
[00:43:17] Nathan Wrigley: bot so that we don't get charged for that traffic, right?
[00:43:20] Jon Penland: or I'm gonna switch to bandwidth because what's happening here is I'm getting
overwhelmed with bot traffic. Yeah. We just, we, view, our role in this process. WordPress website owners are all trying to navigate this transition where AI traffic is, there's more and more use of ai, which is taking people away from their website potentially.
And we view our role as giving folks the tooling that they need to try and navigate that transition over the next couple of years. We're not gonna dictate what anybody does, but we want to give folks the tooling that they can make those decisions for themselves. And so a piece of that is you can turn it on, you can turn it off, you can see what's happening, and that gives you the ability to make decisions about how you want to
navigate.
Yeah.
[00:44:06] Nathan Wrigley: So hopefully dear listener though, you got out of that what, John was trying to explain or what? I think I intuited, it's not the sort of shiny new AI building tool. It's more rock solid platform and all of those kind of things. So
[00:44:19] Jon Penland: The other.
[00:44:20] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, last.
[00:44:21] Jon Penland: Other thing that's, I wanna, hit one more thing that is critical for our AI strategy. I have to say this. it is important. We believe it is important at Kinsta for it to always be easy for you to reach a real human being. That doesn't mean that we will never have AI as one of your options.
One thing I have found is AI is really powerful at finding good
information in
[00:44:47] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, knowledge base is pretty good.
[00:44:50] Jon Penland: we have excellent documentation, but there's a lot of it. And if you are looking for specific instructions, AI can be excellent at finding those specific instructions. But there comes a time when you want to talk to a real person.
And at Kinsta, we are going to make that easy for you to do. You are not gonna have to jump through a whole bunch of hoops and make it really difficult. Human support is gonna remain a core part of our strategy and our offering.
[00:45:14] Nathan Wrigley: Do you know what? I think this is gonna become like table stakes at some point. I think the, the, straw will be broken. It's like there's only. So many things that I can do on a chat. Please just give me the human
[00:45:27] Jon Penland: Give me a human. Exactly. Yeah.
[00:45:30] Nathan Wrigley: Give I'm paying you, give me the human, it just makes perfect sense.
Okay, last set of questions then are to do with things that are nothing to do with WordPress. Again, forgive me for this bit 'cause I don't really have any background knowledge, but I do know that WordPress is not your whole thing, although you did say it is most of the thing. What are, what is the other aspect of your business?
Is it like an app platform or something like that? I seem to have memories of.
[00:45:54] Jon Penland: So we have a separate platform called savala, which offers application hosting, database hosting, static site hosting, and object storage. It gives you all of the building blocks that you would need to build a non WordPress web application or not even a web application if you wanted to build a backend for a mobile application or some sort of, any sort of web enabled application database system you can build using Sava, under the.
Under the dashboard, it is. The application hosting piece is a Kubernetes platform, so we're doing all of the Kubernetes orchestration for you. You can do vertical scaling, you can do horizontal scaling, you can spin up pods of different sizes, you can set them to auto slumber. It's, a full featured, very capable platform.
We built this because it's the platform our developers wished they had when they built Kinsta or my Kinsta kids stay. back 10, 12, 15 years ago. Like, it's the, platform they wish that they had. And so that's, really where it was born from, is our developers giving our developers the freedom to say, build the platform you wish you had.
So that's the idea there. and,
[00:47:05] Nathan Wrigley: you have a unique set of challenges because, if you're in the WordPress space, and obviously Kinsler has been for many years, that name is now, it's burned into everybody's head. I'm guessing in the wider app space, you've got more of a, you have to be a bit more of a scrappy startup when
[00:47:20] Jon Penland: a hundred percent. a hundred percent. Yeah. we're basically starting from, ground, just the base floor there with Savala establishing our, bonafides in that space as a reliable and a reputable player. Savala does, I mean, Kinsta does provide a bit of a leg up. It uses the same infrastructure behind the scenes, and so our SOC two.
Our ISO 27 0 0 1 for Kinsta covers all of that as well. So there is a maturity element that we bring to the table that most startups in that space would not have, 18
months, from launch.
[00:47:59] Nathan Wrigley: got the, Kinsta business, I guess to, to
[00:48:03] Jon Penland: Yes. The stability, correct?
[00:48:05] Nathan Wrigley: Curiously, the, app side of the business, who knows, maybe in a decade's time that'll be the. It could be, it, could be the big bit of the business. And, and we'll have John on another podcast to
[00:48:19] Jon Penland: If it happens, be happy
to come back.
[00:48:21] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Well, that has been an absolute pleasure, not just, from a technical point of view and finding out all about the things that are going on at Kinston, but just peeling back the curtain a little bit on your personal life as well. I really appreciate it. John, where can we find you?
[00:48:35] Jon Penland: Yes, probably the best place to find me is LinkedIn. I'm not super active on social media, but you know, linkedin.com/in/john penland. then to find me professionally, of course, Kinsta.com is the
place go. I.
[00:48:50] Nathan Wrigley: In which case I will bury those things into the show notes. Go and check 'em out on the wp builds.com website. Search for the episode with John Penland, P-E-N-L-A-N-D, and you can discover all of the goodness there. John, thank you so much for chatting to me today. That was a pleasure.
[00:49:05] Jon Penland: Yeah. Nathan, it's been a lot of fun. Thanks for having me.
[00:49:08] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. That's all we've got time for today.
Don't forget, we'll be back next Thursday for a podcast episode. We'll also be back on Monday for This Week in WordPress, packaged up as a podcast episode on a Tuesday.
To keep in touch, head to wpbuilds.com/subscribe. And if you're interested in inserting an ad into our podcast to get your product or service noticed, head to wpbuilds.com/advertise. Or send me an email, [email protected].
Okay, that's it. I'm gonna fade in some cheesy music and say stay safe. You have a good week. Bye-bye for now.
