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.

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.

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.

I started reading The Referral Engine by John Jantsch and within the first 20 pages, I was hooked. John is considered a guru in the small business industry and has a wallstreet journal best seller titled Duct Tape Marketing. On page 15 of The Referral Engine John writes:

I receive offers for cheap Web hosting almost daily. While the cost of the service in question is almost insignificant, the cost of having my site off-line or hacked could be catastrophic. I choose my service very carefully and put a great deal of stock in the recommendations of others I trust, even though it’s a relatively low-cost item.

Well said sir! (John is not a customer of page.ly) We could sing this from the rooftops but it matters so much more when it comes from wildly successful people who know the dangers of choosing cheap hosting. The old adage is true in regards to hosting, “You get what you pay for”. Unfortunately, we’ve heard horrible stories of poor costumer service, hacked sites, 6k sites on one server, slow load, continuous upsells, etc. These sad stories come from wonderful people who thought they were getting a good deal. Little did they know they would pay with frustration, angst, and confusion. Enough of the bad hosting. As we’ve posted earlier, here is our promise to you:

We will never confuse you with products and purchase options you don’t need or that only serve to pad our bottom line and offer little or no value in return. We will never oversell our server infrastructure at the expense of your website performance. And we will strive on a daily basis to improve our service and support to increase your value per dollar invested with us.

To show how awesome the universe is, check this out- Small world! We might work together.

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?

We all love stickers.

Send us a self addressed stamped envelope (An envelope inside an envelope) and We’ll send you a handful of page.ly stickers + a promo code for a discount when signing up on our service. Analog marketing FTW!

Page.ly
250 S Arizona Ave
Chandler AZ, 85225

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

Please review our policy on WordPress 3.0 Multisite feature