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.

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

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.

Woot!

All page.ly websites will be auto upgraded next week sometime after the 3.1 release likely. You may of course upgrade your self through the admin panel now.  Be sure to read our policy on 3.0 Multisite.

Before you upgrade on your own you should:

• Update all your plugins
• Disable all your plugins
• Upgrade WordPress
• Enable plugins 1by 1 and check the site to make sure it is not whitescreened
• It’s not WP3.0 fault, some plugins are just slow to update to new features
• Use our Whitescreen Eliminator to reset plugins if you get locked out.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Here is a good post describing what’s to come in WordPress 3.0.

Please review our policy on WordPress 3.0 Multisite feature

Holy WordPress Batman!

We are pretty stoked to head out to SF this weekend for the 2010 WordCamp in San Francisco. Our folks on the inside tell us this is the WordCamp of the year.  Page.ly is proud to be a sponsor of what is shaping up to be a pretty awesome event. Our hosts for the event, Automattic are of course the folks behind the great WordPress.com service and their leader Matt, kinda invented the WordPress software we use here on page.ly.

We picked up a few extra tickets for the event and ran a little contest to give them away, so congratulate the winners if you meet them.  We look forward to seeing old friends and meeting new ones. Please please please make an effort to come meet us. We really want to get to know our customers and fans, and yes even our frenemies.

See you there!

PS: We will have a very (I mean very) limited number of the ultra soft and rare page.ly T’shirts on hand, come say ‘Hi’ and hit us up for one.

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.

First let us say that we are very happy and proud to be a sponsor of WordcampSF(2010) which will surely be one for the books. We are very thankful to the WordPress community and to all our WordPress Hosting customers for helping our young company grow.

What is a WordCamp you ask?

WordCamp is a conference that focuses on everything WordPress. WordCamps are informal, community-organized events that are put together by WordPress users like you. Everyone from casual users to core developers participate, share ideas, and get to know each other. WordCamps are open to WordPress.com and WordPress.org users alike.

As of today, 348 people have registered to attend. I’m not sure what the cap is but I am sure it will sell out soon. Well… we have a few extra tickets just for you.

Announcing The *AMAZING! Page.ly digital essay contest!

Tell us why you love WP -> win stuff.

We love WordPress, she loves WordPress, he does too, and that guy, and her over there, even the kids love WordPress, but we want to know how much and why you love WordPress.

How do I participate?

Tweet, blog, youtube, tumblr, facebook, write a message in bottle, or etch into stone why you love WordPress and how it makes your job easier, makes your life cooler, made you grow hair on your chest (sorry if you are a girl), pwns the competition or whatever other reason you think the world needs to know why WordPress is the best.

We’re going to have to locate your manifesto’s somehow. So to make it easy just tweet the link to your entry with a short message if you like and include the official hashtag. The Officially official hashtag: #pagelywordcampsf

Examples of win worthy entries may include but not limited to:

• a heart felt and passionate blog post about how WordPress saved your job
• a youtube video of your best Matt Mullenwag impression
• a tweet haiku regarding hooks and plugins
• a WordPress logo treatment in obey-propaganda style
• a comic with WordPress as the super hero

You can start now!

What do I win?

3 winners will be chosen by our panel of judges using the official rules from the boy scout handbook 2nd edition (not really) and will be awarded:

• 1 ticket to WordCamp San Fransisco (just get yourself there and find a floor to sleep on if need be)
• 1 FREE-4-Life WordPress hosting account at Page.ly + 1yr domain reg
• 1 super comfy ultra fashion forward Page.ly T-shirt in your size
• Some sweet page.ly stickers
• An adult beverage on us at the after party (our lawyers say we can only buy you 1 cause if you pass out on the trolley tracks & get rice a roni’d we’ll be in trouble) or all the tap water you can drink.

When does the contest end and winners announced?

Contest ends Sunday April 18th at midnight.
Winners announced Tuesday April 20th. (Still time to get yo butt to San Fransisco)

So what are you waiting for? Get out there and tell the world why you love WordPress!  Just remember to tweet the link to your media with the hashtag #pagelywordcampsf.

Legal Stuff:

• Must be 21 to take advantage of adult beverage
• Does not include travel, food, airfare or earthquake insurance
• If a current page.ly customer, your account will be comped-4-eva for 1 domain
• Whatever else comes up we have to put here

Thanks and we look forward to seeing you at WordCamp.

Ever activate a WordPress plugin and it “breaks” your website where you are unable to login to deactivate it.  Or activated a theme and get that “white screen“. Yeah sooner or later it is going to happen.  Fortunately the fix is pretty simple for the technical user; just open the database and reset a few settings. Well on page.ly, clients do not have access to the database (for their own good) and we were getting support requests of the occasional white-screen problem so we built a little self service system to fix it.

(Announcer Voice) Announcing the The White Screen Eliminator….

This is how it works. Page.ly customers must first verify their account and may choose from the 3 reset options.

1. Reset the site blog/home domain.
   Ever done this? You go under Settings > General and change the blog home url thinking it would just modify the url structure and instead you bork the site? Yep. That setting is confusing.. what you are actually trying to do is related to permalinks or reading subpanel.  This selection just resets these two fields back to proper defaults.
   
2. Deactivate all plugins.
   Sometimes upgrading a plugin (or not upgrading it when you upgrade the core) break things. Just how it goes. This is the most common reason for “white screens”.  This selection just deactivates all the plugins, so you can re-activate them 1 by 1, skipping the suspected broken one.
   
3. Reset to default theme.
   Again sometimes a theme creates the white screen scenario where you are unable to login.  This selection just sets your theme back to the default kubrick theme so you can login again and choose another custom theme.

That’s it. Choose 1,2, or all 3 selections to reset a few defaults on your site so you can get back to work. Note: Rest easy, This will not affect your posts or content, or any other settings..

The White Screen Eliminator can be found on the right side of the Support page