If you need a web hosting provider for your WordPress site, we highly recommend you read this interview.
Bulletproof WordPress Hosting is a company providing web hosting services for WordPress websites.
They have taken years of experience hosting massive WordPress sites and applied that knowledge to their hosting products.
We had the pleasure to speak with Mr./Mrs. Jon Berry, and learn more about their company.
Please tell us when your company was founded and what was the idea behind it?
Bulletproof Web Hosting was founded in April 2014. The principal involved in its formation (myself) had been in the managed server hosting business since 2002 and had many years of managing many different servers. Still, during this period of growth for WordPress hosting, we saw the formation of companies like WPEngine and took our experience in managing WordPress-centric servers, and launched a new company to cater to the managed WordPress hosting market.
What were the challenges that you were facing at the beginning? How did you overcome them?
Marketing a smaller managed hosting company was and continues to be challenging. Up against players like WPEngine at that time, and now pretty much all the mass-hosters have gotten into the managed WP hosting game, even though to what degree they ‘manage’ the product is up for debate. Quality of service is difficult to market, and while we pride ourselves on providing the highest level of service, conveying that it is a marketing campaign will always be a challenge.
Can you give us an overview of the products and services you offer?
Bulletproof Hosting provides a managed shared hosting product. This means we provide a higher level of support than an unmanaged hosting provider. So if a site is hacked, we assist in the clean-up. In addition, we offer better than normal server security and monitoring, keeping performance at the forefront. We do not overload our servers to maximize profit; we ascribe to the theory that maximizing performance and safety leads to fewer problems for our clients overall and lowers our total cost of support, which is always more than the cost of the infrastructure, at least when done correctly.
Can you share more details about your Cloud Server Plans?
Our cloud servers are deployed on our own bare metal servers, we are not using a large cloud provider. They are essentially a managed server product wherein we not only provide site based support but also support and management of the cloud server itself with extensive monitoring and proactive tackling of problem issues like zero-day patching, load spikes, etc.
There are more and more eCommerce websites every day. What about your eCommerce plans?
eCommerce has become ubiquitous. With the ease with which one can get a merchant account through vendors like Square and Stripe and the multitude of eCommerce plugins for WordPress, we are shying away from marketing plans as ‘e-commerce’ any longer. There are some vestiges of this in our web site, but they are slated for removal.
Who are the customers of Bulletproof WordPress Hosting? What are your plans to expand to new markets?
We are offering hosting to any web sites, it does not necessarily need to be WordPress though that is our main thrust. Given the explosive use of WordPress pretty much anyone who wants a web site is a potential customer. We already have customers from all over the world. Increasing our marketing efforts is a goal for 2022.
A company needs to be prepared for sudden spikes of traffic. How do you handle this part?
By never overloading our servers. We do not believe is using 90% of a server’s resources in steady state. The only way to ensure there is sufficient server resources for everyone is to really only use about 50% of a server’s real capacity in daily steady state operations. Also, our security measures we take filter out attacks very efficiently, so attack traffic doesn’t normally factor in to capacity.
Customers are one of the most important things for a company. So how are you handling customer satisfaction?
We are very personal and hands-on. Our support people are US based and available by phone, ticket, email, and chat. We are a smaller company, so our technicians are pretty familiar with our client base, and clients are happy because our problem resolution time is very low, typically under 20 minutes.
What is the most important thing that a hosting provider needs to have in order to be successful?
Good marketing, a good product and a way to connect with their clients.
Where do you see Best Hoster in the next five years?
I don’t have an answer here.
