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

• Announced the Reseller platform
• Sponsored our first WordCamp

October

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

November

• Added WooThemes as our first premium Theme vendor/PowerUp
• Added StudioPress a few days later
• Applied our first 0 day WordPress Upgrade system wide
• Launched our Affiliate program

December

• Launched the Reseller platform

January

• Sponsored WordCamp Boston

February

• Pushed the MultiEdit Plugin live
• Announced the StudioPress Support packages

March

• Released the one-of-a-kind Magic Whitescreen Eliminator in Early March [Support ticket volume dropped 95% overnight]
• Signed a deal with Firehost.com to manage our infrastructure [This was huge.. Every current and future customer gained this major security benefit]

April

• Announced our Real Estate Industry WordPress Hosting [In the works still]

May

• Sponsored WordCamp San Fransisco
• Stealth released our Enterprise service

June

• Announced and launched system wide Automatic Plugin upgrades [these run automatically in the background]

July

• Moved offices from Gangplank2 to Gangplank3.0 [We sit on the board of this 1-of-a-kind collaborative workspace]
• New flexible Payment methods
• Sponsored WordCampBoulder
• New Staging/Preview URLS
• Press75 premium themes added to the PowerUps
• Updated every site across all nodes to WP 3.0.1 in about 1 hour. [over 2.5 million files changed]

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:

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.