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Market For Wordpress Hosting?
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Market For Wordpress Hosting?

JeffreyJeffrey Member
edited June 2014 in General

Hello, after seeing many professional VPS host's come and go, it seems to me that this VPS market is very SATURATED. I am looking into getting in the hosting business, but I am not wanting to provide VPS servers, specifically. I see multiple hosts that provide managed Wordpress hosting, with free domain names, similar to what Wordpress.com offers. Just take a look at Wordpress's prices, don't you think they're a bit high? Why are people still purchasing it?

Is the market for Wordpress hosting higher or less than CPanel Shared Hosting/VPS Hosting? Is it worth it?

Wordpress
  1. Would You Purchase Managed Wordpress Hosting For Your Blog?81 votes
    1. Yes
      19.75%
    2. No
      80.25%
«1

Comments

  • You might get some bias statistics coming here. Most of the LET community would rather have the enjoyment of setting up their own systems.

    On another note, maybe offer other blogging platforms like Node.js Ghost. Ghost is still hard to find in the market.

    Thanked by 1Steve81
  • ElliotJElliotJ Member
    edited June 2014

    Your 'research' on here is flawed - You're asking the wrong people.

    Generally, those who frequent (and who will vote on your poll) are able to set up a web stack on their own and optimise it to their needs.

    The people who upgrade their WordPress.com blog to the premium version are not able to, and appreciate the knowledge that the people they're hosting with know WordPress back to front.
    Other WordPress only hosts like WPEngine and Pressable are geared towards higher end clientele, who want their blog to 'just work' without much effort and are willing to pay for that to happen.

    Unless you're exploiting a niche market, or you're offering a superior service to WordPress.com and the likes (highly unlikely) then you'll probably find it difficult to break into.

    Thanked by 2luissousa Steve81
  • @ElliotJ @Silvenga Sure, I might be asking the wrong audience, but the question is, is the market for wordpress specific hosting greater or larger than unmanaged VPS servers or CPanel Shared Hosting?

  • NekkiNekki Veteran

    Jeffrey said: Sure, I might be asking the wrong audience, but the question is, is the market for wordpress specific hosting greater or larger than unmanaged VPS servers or CPanel Shared Hosting?

    But you're still asking the wrong audience, aren't you?

    Thanked by 2Pwner Steve81
  • larslars Member

    There is no advantages to dedicated WordPress hosting.

    For less experienced customers, what is wrong with normal shared hosting, which someone can run WordPress on?

    Most people here would rather run it on a VPS.

  • mikhomikho Member, Host Rep

    I would see it as "managed shared hosting". Someone who takes care of updates and do simple tech tasks for the end user.

    I'm sure there is a market for it, I have no idea where to search for clients however. Perhaps start local? Team up with a marketing firm who creates wordpress themes and make the sale together?

  • MikHo said: I'm sure there is a market for it, I have no idea where to search for clients however. Perhaps start local? Team up with a marketing firm who creates wordpress themes and make the sale together?

    That's exactly what I was thinking. Advertise around local Wordpress communities, blogging communities, make T-Shirts, make business cards, pass around business cards at local Computer shops, coffee shops, and local restaurants, perhaps?

  • JeffreyJeffrey Member
    edited June 2014

    Liam said: So they can pose on instgram with your company name? Don't waste your money bud.

    Only I would be wearing the T-Shirts, but, passing them down to potential clients does sound good. Know of any web conferences in Florida, that are hosting related?

  • Liam said: McDonalds or something - don't go wasting all your salary on another business venture.

    If you want to sell managed wordpress, then you need to be able to design/build sites and have a knowledge of plugins and be able to adapt them.

    I believe you're cs2 certified or something - so I'm sure you can make sites to a degree.

    Ha, no, I don't work at McDonald's, they only make minimum wage for such a stressful position. I am a sales rep for a local company here and I am employed somewhere else at a pharmacy. I have two sources of income, and plenty of money saved up for projects I've been planning to do after I graduated, it's time to move on with my life. And, I'm Photoshop CS3, CS4, and CS5 Certified, I wish I was Dreamweaver certified.

  • I think it's a good idea.

    Your best market is local -- people you can reach out to, establish a personal relationship with trust. So they can call you up and chat about their website.

    Establish what you're going to do. IMO it should be all the technical aspects including Wordpress updates. You control the Wordpress environment, they control the content. So the site owner is an 'Editor', not 'Administrator', in Wordpress. Standardize the environment, have a staging/test area where you can checkout the impact of plugin updates, theme updates, etc. prior to pushing them to the live site.

    Build a reputation for high-performance, secure, fully-managed Wordpress hosting and personalized service. Charge for it, and don't undercharge. It's impossible to compete in the "cheap" market. Deliver quality of service and people will pay. And you don't need huge numbers....

  • squibssquibs Member

    @Liam said:
    Nobody uses Dreamweaver in their right mind, especially when selling their services. All you need is notepad + Photoshop + browser and you can make the most amazing sites in the world.

    I don't use Dreamweaver myself, although I have the creative cloud license, but it's a good code editor. Using notepad would be perverse and masochistic given the availability of cheap and free editors and IDEs. For what it's worth, I find Jetbrains' IDE outstanding (I have the PHPstorm variant). It blows everything else I've tried out of the water.

  • You're thinking along the right lines, but your audience isn't on LET. There's definitely a market for managed hosting. Look at WPEngine, Pressable, Synthesis, Pagely, etc etc etc. Even MediaTemple and parent company GoDaddy are in the managed WP space now.

    You need to provide a unique offering with a service level greater than the competition, or an experience that is 100x better/easier. I run a bunch of my own boxes, but I still use managed hosting for some stuff because it saves me time, and I prefer an experienced person running my more important stuff.

  • DH22DH22 Member

    I would think there is a big opening in the market if you can significantly beat the pricing of the popular managed WP hosts. They are very expensive and the worst part is you usually can't get a dedicated IP for SSL on the lower, still very expensive plans.

  • Any market that's known to mankind is already saturated. That's life. If you want something not saturated think of something new. It'll have to be a new concept that's not done.

    VPS providers have always came and close all these years. It hasn't happened today.

  • hiphiphip0hiphiphip0 Member
    edited June 2014

    I'm doing managed wordpress hosting bussiness. I have clients because I make wordpress sites for living. I have 200+ talked clients on IM, more on other websites.
    But it's still not easy to sell hosting to them.

    The good part is once they tried managed hosting, they never want go back.
    Some of the clients are using Linode old 512 plan, their website use less than 1GB bandwith per month, yesterday after Linode published new 1G plan, I told them they could downgrade to save money, but they said "Don't need it, it's working now, downgrade is inconvenient"

  • Liam said: Nobody uses Dreamweaver in their right mind, especially when selling their services. All you need is notepad + Photoshop + browser and you can make the most amazing sites in the world.

    I 100% completely agree, I have Dreamweaver installed on my desktop, but I do not touch it, just plain old Notepad+. :)

  • While we're offtopickin, I must say Sublime Text all the way!

  • colacola Member

    Damn what prices has WP.com.. 5k/month.. LOL, and they are giving you their wifes too for this kind of money?

    Offtopic: Is a great ideea to start a services for people who don't know to install/manage WP. Anyhow way more cheap.

  • jcalebjcaleb Member

    said: Just take a look at Wordpress's prices, don't you think they're a bit high? Why are people still purchasing it?

    Non techy people would most likely buy from house hold name companies.

  • Yes this product will only work with non tech peoples which are building their first WordPress site. Even intermediate users will not look at this product and they will prefer to go for the VPS.

    Thanked by 1Jeffrey
  • @cola said:
    Damn what prices has WP.com.. 5k/month.. LOL, and they are giving you their wifes too for this kind of money?

    Offtopic: Is a great ideea to start a services for people who don't know to install/manage WP. Anyhow way more cheap.

    The price is not ridiculously high if you are extremely popular. You can focus on your content, and the cloud hosting is even cheaper than a full time IT, let alone you have to manage all the infrastructures if you insists to self-serve.

    Scale-up is always expensive, I read some shop pay 200k to heroku.

  • I think the wordpress hosting still makes sense:

    • WP is the most popular CMS
    • WP is quite user-friendly and Ops-friendly
    • WP is highly customizable and extendable

    However, I am afraid you may lack the credibility to convince the customer you can handle the complexity of the wordpress. WordPress sacrifice the performance for the extensibility, you need the expertise to operate it right. Automattic has much higher credibility in this arena than us.

  • thesuppOrtGuy2 said: Yes this product will only work with non tech peoples which are building their first WordPress site. Even intermediate users will not look at this product and they will prefer to go for the VPS.

    This is spot on, what type of clients I am looking for.

  • SandyKSandyK Member

    What I'm finding is there isn't a mid-market WP solution. It's either all managed with zero customization possible; or, bare bones and do it yourself and with the host mindset to go with it.

    As a web designer there isn't time for all the server management itself as your time is in building the frontend. But if you get the fully managed plans designed for front end builders, you're stuck with presets -- and for designers that's being in a straightjacket. The "take it or leave it" bare bone plans aren't meant specifically for WP (the host wouldn't know what WP features to lock down or open via default so it's not a hair pulling exercise to get APIs working for popular services), and service is just as generic.

    So a happy medium would be nice to find, especially on initial setups.

    The reason people are using these tiny virtual servers these days isn't just to learn hacking and cracking, it's to get more environmental control of content, too. Generic hosts don't understand the WP community needs. WP specific hosts (the true variety, not just marketing) are there to help content creators get to work on content creation specifically for that platform, not server management. This is something I believe the industry itself isn't understanding and stumbling over, as they treat that customer base as "n00bs", and forcing the customization content creators to the bare bone "DIY" server market, and it's ill suited for their needs as it's too generic and time consuming (have to be a Jack of All Trades, and master of none to even get the DNS setup deal).

    So, if you're looking for a market NOT being served, it's that mid-market, and designed for the web designers and SEO types, not programmers nor grandma.

  • The problem with aiming for any low or mid-level markets in the service industry is that once you start having to provide support your profits really do start to dwindle. How many people buying not just shared hosting but VPS hosting are going to be able to prepared to do the technical bits of their website? Most people after WP hosting are also after managed solutions.

    Minimum wage support for one hour in a lot of countries would totally wipe out a monthly fee for a lot of hosts.

  • People want wordpress hosting that they can easily setup, and easily install their own mods without any restrictions. They also want a little support when things don't go so well, although most people seem to know what they are doing and WP is kinda foolproof...

  • SandyKSandyK Member

    @AThomasHowe said:
    The problem with aiming for any low or mid-level markets in the service industry is that once you start having to provide support your profits really do start to dwindle.

    While true, the fully managed market won't be looking for low or mid-level service, either. They can afford dedicated servers at Rackspace, some with tier3 tech support even. They're more managers than content creators.

    The rest of the Joes are still working on their site brand and marketing, and need server setup help.

    The ideal WP provider can serve all WP users, from the startups coming off the WP site; to the SEO heavy multi-domain bloggers with over a million views a month. And well versed in the "must have" features and security.

    Can't just market a WP service (Godaddy is finding that out), the provider has to know the platform and needs of the community.

  • raindog308raindog308 Administrator, Veteran

    Jeffrey said: Sure, I might be asking the wrong audience

    You are definitely asking the wrong audience.

    Jeffrey said: This is spot on, what type of clients I am looking for.

    Then why are you asking here? This is like going to a dive bar and saying "what do you guys want in a luxury automobile?" LET readers are people who want to self-manage a $5/mo VPS, not people who'd sign up for hosted WP.

    Your market is more like the $40/month people who want hand-holding wordpress.

    They're not going to just come to you, though - prepare to get on the phone and look for customers. And of course, provide 24x7 premium support (that is, someone answers the phone 24x7, responds to tickets in a few minutes 24x7, etc.) There's a rich market for these kind of managed relationships but (a) they're not run by one-man shops, (b) they're not run on some resold VPS.

    BTW, these kinds of premium WP hosts already exist in abundance. You're way late.

    If you want to go midmarket, you're competing with wordpress.com and the legion of mid-market WP hosting companies.

    You could do hosted Ghost, but there you're competing with Ghost itself as well as Ghost's insanely resource-hogging/nonscalable architecture (one NodeJS per blog).

    Thanked by 1Dylan
  • There are hundreds of managed WordPress hostings already.

  • SandyKSandyK Member
    edited June 2014

    @raindog308 said:
    BTW, these kinds of premium WP hosts already exist in abundance. You're way late.

    But not mid-level hosts. That gap is under served.

    As it sits the WP host market is too high end and too low end. And those asking $40/mon these days don't even offer $40/mon service customers saw 15 years ago to be worth it.

    Think about how web hosting has changed in but 15 years. That dedicated I rented in 2003 at The Planet for $250/mon (and no RAID), low enders now are getting for $7/mon with RAID 10 (and don't even need to be an admin to dabble in hosting sites).

    Price point has come down as the hardware is cheaper overall as there's more competition. The WP service market will face the same competition, and that's what folks are waiting on -- expertise and services at a smart price point ($40/mon, that account has all the custom DNS available; at least 2 IPv4; secured for WP and staff that speaks the language).

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