Archive for July, 2010

Go Page.ly, it’s your Birthday. #pagelyis1

Posted on July 30th, 2010 in Page.ly News, Page.ly Service Updates, Press Releases, WordPress | 9 Comments »

Courtesy pinkcakebox.com and we have no idea who Baxter is.

First Birthdays Rule.

This August, page.ly is 1 years old. When we decided we were going to create a WordPress Hosting solution that would be easier to use and more secure then your average host; people looked at us like we were crazy. Who’s crazy now?

We have used this last year to refine, scale and expand our service.  Our customers tell us we are doing a great job, and enjoy that we add more value per subscription dollar every month. Every single line of code has been lovingly written by yours’ truly to make the system better, faster, and easier to use.

We are very appreciative of the welcome the WordPress community has shown us. We have given back what we can via cash sponsorship and participation at a few WordCamp‘s.  And of course a good idea does not go unnoticed.

Seems like the year has just flown by, lets look at some highlights; Roll the tape!

August

  • Opened for business with our first customer on August 10th, 2009 at 2:44pm
  • Hired the elves later that month.

September

October

  • CenterNetworks said we’re Awesome. (Thanks Allen)
  • TheNextWeb agreed (Thanks Alex)
  • Helped Raise ~$2000 for Breast Cancer Research

November

December

January

February

March

April

May

June

July

Business

Okay so now you are asking yourself well what about the business side and growth. Well I can say every single month has been our best month ever. We have grown anywhere from 20-50% a month, every month, with no end in site. You can peep a quick glance at a graph in this video. Page.ly is a very small company in terms of employees, family owned you could say. Page.ly is getting to be pretty good sized in terms of everything else. Automation FTW. We’re unfunded and bootstrapping this badboy for now. Pay-go-grow with profits.

  • 28% of Pagely customers are repeat buyers
  • 15% have more than 3 instances
  • Most number of instances by a single customer: 16
  • Over 100 Resellers
  • Over 300 Affiliates

So What’s next?

We are working on some pretty cool stuff, mostly on the scaling side. Our provisioning system is pretty slick if you ask me. We can provision a site on any node in the system with ease, and bringing new nodes online is fairly painless. More visible improvements coming are a major upgrade to the Reseller system, the launch of agent.page.ly, and other niche verticals, and further improvements and additions to the basic feature set.

We are also really excited about our growing Enterprise WordPress Hosting services crowned by the aptly named el Pollo Diablo; A WordPress hosting setup so aggressively powered, secure, and scalable that your momma will tell you to change your underpants before visiting a website powered by it. [Not even kidding]

A Thank You

Huge Thank you’s to all of our customers and friends. We are pretty lucky to have a pretty solid core of advocates and customers that quickly turn evangelists. It’s cliche, but we really could not have done it without you.

A Birthday Gift for You

Follow us on Twitter and check back at this blog for special birthday discounts, promos, and giveaways all month long… like:

Page.ly Stickers

Starting with..

35% off this Weekend only (31st/1st) with promocode PAGELYIS1

And just for you reading this right now, it’s a funky lizard doing the birthday dance.

YouTube Preview Image

WordPress 3.0.1

Posted on July 29th, 2010 in Page.ly News, Page.ly Service Updates, WordPress | No Comments »

WordPress 3.0.1 just landed. It will take about 1 hour for all page.ly nodes to update. Please see/contact Support at http://support.page.ly with any questions.

This is a good thing. Means your WP install has been updated.

Get Press75 themes on Page.ly

Posted on July 28th, 2010 in Page.ly News, WordPress | 2 Comments »

We are very happy to announce that the  ultra hip Premium WordPress themes from Press75 are now available on page.ly as a powerup.

Press75 has been creating WordPress themes since 2008 and the quality of the designs are on par with the best in business.

The $15.00/mo Press75 themepack includes all their themes and a membership to their support forums for theme customization and support.

We are happy to have Press75 join our other premium theme providers; StudioPress and WooThemes. Secure and managed WordPress hosting by Page.ly + a premium themepack by Press75 means your site is secure, up to date, and stylish.

A sample of Press75 themes

Page.ly staging urls and site preview.

Posted on July 18th, 2010 in Page.ly News, Page.ly Service Updates, WordPress | 2 Comments »

Well we did it,

The MOST requested feature; a way to preview and work on your WordPress site before switching your nameserver’s; is live. How about them apples?

What in the world are we talking about?

Before: A customer signed up on page.ly electing to use their own domain they had to change the nameserver’s or use a A record hack before being able to view and work on their new site.

Now: All new sites created with an existing domain get a sweet preview url mapped to their site so they can log in immediately and work on their site. When ready the user just switches to their primary domain and presto.

Note: The new feature is only available on existing domains/site transfers.  Fresh domain registrations resolve within seconds and therefore do not need a preview url.

Show Me

When you sign up for WordPress Hosting from page.ly with an existing domain a temporary url is created for your website.

Just login and work on your site… and then when you are ready Switch it Live. By doing so a script will change all references of the temp url, to your primary domain and away you go to internet fame.

However this is a 1-time/1 way process. So use the Temp Url as long as you need to and be sure you have changed your Nameservers and that your primary domain is resolving to the page.ly servers before switching to live mode.

Easy Cheezy eh?  Now what are you waiting for, Signup for WordPress Hosting from page.ly today and be the master of your domain.

New Payment Methods

Posted on July 7th, 2010 in On Business, Page.ly News, Page.ly Service Updates | 1 Comment »

We wanted to give our customers easier ways to manage their payments.

We now utilize the PayPal Adaptive payments API that makes handling PayPal payments a breeze. The new PayPal Method sends the customer to PayPal to make a pre-authorization for a maximum dollar amount. From then on we just bill your PayPal account every month just like a credit card. When the total billing nears the maximum pre-authorization you will be asked to renew it.

So what’s the benefit? Flexibility.

Since we can now treat your PayPal subscriptions similar to a credit card, users can add and remove services with ease under the same pre-approval.  We can also skip payments and change subscription dollar amounts much easier (Yes we discount services to existing customers from time to time) Creating payment methods is easy from within your Page.ly hosted WordPress website.

But wait, there’s more:

Payment methods can be assigned to individual domains under your account and all subscriptions associated with that domain will use that Payment method. Say you want 1 domain on your corporate credit card, and 1 domain on your personal PayPal… eazy peezy now. ;)

Finally, when purchasing addtional services you will be asked which existing payment method to use.

We’ll be canceling all old school type PayPal Subscriptions over the next 60 days and encouraging users to move to the new Pre-Authorization format.