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.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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.

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.

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.

Plug it in baby

So we are about to implement a new feature at page.ly: System wide plugin updates

Just like we keep your WP Core install up-to-date we can now do the same thing for your all your plugins. Of course you have always had the ability to update your own plugins (Tools > Upgrade .. have you done this lately? you should!), but we can now update any plugin on any site on our service.  So this brings up a couple points I was hoping our customers and readers could help us with.

Sometimes a plugin update will “break” WordPress, and sometimes a WP Core update will “break” because of an outdated plugin.  So the nature of the page.ly WordPress Hosting service is that WP will always be updated on our service regardless, and we figure the latest version of plugins will be compatible with newest versions of WordPress as the majority of plugin authors plan for new releases.

So this begs the question. Do we force plugin updates system wide, or allow customers to opt-out of automatic plugin updates and do it themselves?  The way we see it, since WP will always be updated on our system.. it makes sense (and better security) to ensure that all plugins are as well.

Planned Implementation: Every couple weeks our system will upgrade all plugins on every site. If a forced plugin update nukes a site (a whitescreen) we will deactivate all plugins, and re-enable the half dozen or so we know work and then send you an email that there was an issue with one of your plugins (hard to tell which one) and you can turn them on one-by-one to find the culprit. This whitescreen/compatibility check will be automatic at the time of upgrade.

Are customers willing to trade a the possibility of 1 or 2 of their plugins being disabled if they are not working for the ease of  never having to manually upgrade them + the added security of the entire system being up to date?

Am I rambling, or making sense? What do you folks think?

WordPress 3.0 will be released very soon as the core team is working on the final details.

Page.ly will auto-upgrade all customer accounts shortly after. Likely 1-2 weeks after the official release. We wait to push big upgrades like this for 2 reasons:

1. To allow more time for plugin developers to update their plugins which limits breakage
2. The pattern of past releases shows there is typically a .1 (like 3.1) release shortly after a major release to address any last minute issues.

We would like to allow some time until the .1 release to further ensure a smooth upgrade for all customers.  If no .1 release is forthcoming after a week or two we will go ahead and push the 3.0.

Customers may update their own site at any time by using the built in WordPress updater.

Our Upgrade Procedure:

All customers will be notified by email, and this blog before an upgrade. The upgrade should be transparent to customers as were all the past upgrades. We will push the upgrade late at night and then test the sites to make sure everything seems to be working. When you login next you will see a “WordPress Database Update” screen where you simply need to confirm yes on.

If for any reason there is a problem that we do not detect first (likely caused by an outdated plugin) you may use our Whitescreen Eliminator to disable all plugins or request a roll back of your site to a previous backup. We maintain 7 days worth of live backups we can restore immediately, and older backups we will access if needed.

A reminder:

Page.ly will not support the MultiSite option in 3.0 on our base ($14.98/mo) service. If you require MU/MultiSite please look into our Enterprise plans.

Specific notes about 3.0 and the page.ly MultiSite policy can be found here.

In Real Estate?

Heard about WordPress or currently use it?

Need a great website you can maintain yourself that includes MLS/IDX data, property search, lead capture, school and neighborhood data, excellent design, social media integration, SEO, and a blog to boot?

Coming this Summer… a complete website and blogging solution for Real Estate Agents and Brokers.

Powered by WordPress, Brought to you by page.ly. Register to be notified when we launch.

Recently we moved from our old provider to the ultra secured hosting environment at Firehost.com. Besides the fact we were growing so fast that our old iron could not keep up, we specifically chose our new provider for their reputation for security. They secure us, we secure you.. it’s like our own private party inside Fort Knox.

Firehost security boss says: You on the list?

All servers that host websites are subject to being pummeled by malicious bots looking for vulnerabilities. The trick is to stay ahead of the malicious attempts. FireHost specializes in secure environments. We like to think that we are very proactive in regards to your security and will go above and beyond to ensure the health of your site. Thanks to our growth and the fine people of FireHost we were able to extend the best secure servers on the market today to our clients.

This graph below was taken from our weekly security report (you know how the President gets a daily security briefing by his Generals and the CIA, it’s kinda like that) and illustrates the events logged and blocked by just 1 (of the many) security layers on just 1 network node, in just 1 day. Over 30,000 nefarious events stopped before they even started.

Just think about if your site is not protected like ours, and then do something about it. Of course we recommend you give us a try, but you may also read up on best practices below. And for all that is holy, use a strong password. It all starts with a password.

• 5 minute WordPress security Audit
• WordPress Security Tips and Hacks
• 20+ Powerful WordPress Security Plugins and Some Tips and Tricks
• 10 Practical WordPress Security Tips

Last night we moved our entire operation to Firehost.com (read about here).

Everyone is settling in, the kids are choosing what color to paint their rooms and the dog has found a new favorite spot in front of the fireplace.

Ahh, the sweet smell of new servers..

Thank you everyone for your patience. All sites are up an online.. if you are getting an old “site not found page” just give it a bit more time for the DNS changes to make their way around the internets. Please contact support with any questions.

New Signups will be online later this evening after everything settles down.

We’re Movin on up.

Our customers have told us we are the best thing since sliced bread when it comes to Managed WordPress Hosting and we are about to get even better. We are happy to report we have been growing rapidly this Q1 and with growth has come a few growing pains. We had planned a datacenter move for mid-summer but are accelerating those plans and found the perfect partner to help.

Our good friends at Firehost.com have built their business by providing unparalleled server security and reliability to some of the web’s biggest websites. Our customers have come to expect the best from us so we found the best datacenter provider to manage our server iron.

What does this mean for Page.ly customers?

A bucket full of awesome!

• The BEST security available.
• Much Faster website performance and response times (vs. our current environment)
• Mucho Grande Better up-time (vs. our current environment)

We do not expect any significant downtime while we make the move, yet please be patient as there may be intermittent outages on a per site basis as we migrate it and the new DNS resolves. Please check your email midweek for more information. And of course a big thank you is in order to our current customers for their trust they have shown in choosing page.ly, and for their patience as we have had a few hiccups in the last week.

The move is tentatively planned to begin Friday April 2nd and finish by the evening of April 3rd.