Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to within WordPress and this is your podcast for today.
Because you know, this is the, the podcast that touches everything WordPress within and outside of WordPress. And today with me is Wes, who hasn't been on the podcast before.
So for the people listening and who don't know who Wes is. Hi Wes, could you please introduce yourself? Foreign.
[00:00:33] Speaker B: Pleasure to be here. My name is Wes Tatters. I'm the managing director and infrastructure architect for Rapid Cloud. Rapid Cloud is a a new entrant into the WordPress hosting space, but it has an old legacy.
Rapid Cloud grew out of BuddyBoss. BuddyBoss is one of the most complicated, most complex theme slash plugin tools in the WordPress ecosystem. It basically allows a, a website to effectively be turned into Facebook, full social media platform and a full app based platform with headless WordPress running in Android and Apple Play stores.
The nature of that sort of type of application.
[00:01:35] Speaker A: Yeah, quite complex.
[00:01:36] Speaker B: Adds some amazing, amazingly complex challenges.
[00:01:40] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
[00:01:41] Speaker B: In the WordPress space, WordPress is fantastic. And I would say WordPress is fantastic at static websites, it's fantastic at building blogs.
It starts to struggle a little bit once you start getting into E commerce or you've got a small shop with a small number of products.
It does okay. As you scale up with thousands of product or thousands of visitors, WordPress starts to struggle. Similar in the e learning space. Learndash tutor, LMS lifter, LMS all those spaces.
Great products. But as the sites that are hosting them become successful, they start to encounter serious challenges in the WordPress space.
So much so that BuddyBoss team worked with the hosting community for about five years trying to find a suitable hosting infrastructure that could deliver the high performance and equally can equal to that the high scalability that these particular sorts of websites demand.
After a lot of tests, a lot of trials, a lot of complications, it became apparent that to do it properly takes a different mindset. Yeah, to do dynamic scaling, to do dynamic hosting, to do high performance hosting takes a mindset which is very different to the traditional WordPress shared hosting space.
And that's kind of where I came into the piece.
I was effectively a Buddy Boss customer.
I had Buddy Boss sites running in communities that were struggling.
So I reached out to the community and started to look at the problems they were encountering and decided to bring my skill set to the WordPress space.
I have 40 years experience, which just scares me some days when I say it. In hosting data center and server infrastructure.
I started in IBM computer systems and Wang Microsystems systems and Unix systems. And ZX systems and all of these sorts of names that we all hear but no one's ever really touched. I was one of those people back actually coding them in the early days with punch cards and then rolls of magnetic tape.
[00:04:16] Speaker A: Yeah, I was going to say you, if you're, if you're in this for 40 years, you must have touched punch cards.
[00:04:23] Speaker B: I've had only, ironically, only in my education when I was studying we were on the edge.
We had sort of pdp, IBM systems that, that had at least a teletype. My first assignment was on punch cards.
[00:04:43] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:04:44] Speaker B: You know, but most of my assignments after that were at least on some sort of a keyboard.
I was very lucky early on to be involved with Control Data. One of the companies which kind of no longer exists got. Has been absorbed and absorbed and absorbed as computer companies do. But they were one of the first, they were one of the first corporate focused computer platform systems. Control Data Systems were pretty much at the bleeding edge around the early 80s in terms of they sat on a desktop, they had a computer screen, they had a keyboard and, and were actually could be used functionally and similarly for Wang Microsystems where we had similar sorts of technology.
I worked on a lot of those systems in the early days. Learned a lot about that.
[00:05:35] Speaker A: Kind of puts you in the dinosaur category, doesn't it?
[00:05:38] Speaker B: Very much so. Very much so.
[00:05:39] Speaker A: I, I have a few, I'm 51 and I have a few older friends who are early 60s and they've actually developed with Punch Car.
There's a few that worked with the systems where an hour of computing time was allotted for a week of programming. So you would program the entire week and at the given hour you would upload it to a server. That server would run your code and then the output of that was then returned to you.
And they tell me of how that worked. You made one mistake in that entire week and the whole rejected was just done.
[00:06:17] Speaker B: Rejected. There was no software, there weren't options for mistakes back then. I was kind of at the edge of that. I'm not quite in my 60s yet, but I'm getting close to it. I started very young, I'll say that, but taught me a lot early on about the mindset of computing and the mindsets of technology.
But as I grew in that ecosystem, I have two passions in life. One is technology and the other is media.
I'm also a film and television producer and I produce television series, 3D animated series. I'm a broadcast journalist. I've produced TV shows, I've shot News stories, I've done all that sort of stuff. So I have this kind of bipolar world. Yeah.
[00:07:07] Speaker A: I read through your bio and I was like, that's an interesting one. Because generally in some, in one way or another, somebody just kind of happens upon building a site or they, they intentionally choose it.
Your bio read as somebody who's went in an entirely different direction and then went like, oh, but you know, you know what, this is also fun.
Yeah.
[00:07:33] Speaker B: Look, it was a set of bit. I was, I wound up in the media industry at a point where it and media collided primarily in 3D animation. I was the producer and series producer for the first 3D animated children's television series created in the Southern hemisphere. We produced 26 half hours of animated 3D children's television for Australian television networks and the US and BBC. So. But it was the same thing. It was still technology and we were building massive service centers.
[00:08:08] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:08:08] Speaker B: I was a part of, in my spare time, while I wasn't being a producer, I was holding together a 150 node render farm on Windows. Technology that would shake when the data centers would run.
[00:08:22] Speaker A: Not only were you doing these, these interesting things immediate, you were in deep.
[00:08:28] Speaker B: Yeah, we were, we were, we were deep in it.
[00:08:30] Speaker A: So most people don't even know what a farm is?
[00:08:34] Speaker B: No, I built one. In fact, I built one of the first ones. I built one of the first ones. But all those things set me in good stead for the next part of my journey.
While, while I was doing all this, the Internet was just on the edge.
It didn't actually exist yet as with a World Wide Web. So this is the mid-1980s.
I was working with CompuServe, if anyone knows what that is. It was a dial up modem that went.
And you got some very slow chat forums in the public space. Yeah, one of those chat forums. It is, one of those chat forums was a publishing forum. And I got started chatting with a few people in the, the, the forum and discovered that very few people in the technology industry had a clue how to write.
[00:09:30] Speaker A: Had a how to what?
[00:09:31] Speaker B: Or really had a clue how to write.
[00:09:33] Speaker A: Ah, yeah, yeah.
[00:09:35] Speaker B: Um, so.
And what they discovered was that I had a broadcast background and a writing background and a journalism background and reached out to me and said, hey, would you be interested in teaching the world how to connect CompuServe to the Internet?
And I went, sure.
Um, so I wrote, I, I, I, I wrote the, the, the book for CompuServe in conjunction with Sam's.net, which is a Macmillan, Schuster and Schuster print imprint, which was Navigating the Internet with CompuServe. It literally told people for the first time that this thing that they had called CompuServe could be connected to the Internet. And this thing called the World Wide Web.
[00:10:18] Speaker A: That's funny, because if that means I then show, you know, you. You would buy a computer magazine somewhere in the late 80s, early 90s, and it would have a CompuServe disk added to, you know, within the.
Within the plastic.
[00:10:38] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:10:39] Speaker A: I'm wondering now if at any of those instances I have potentially come across you.
[00:10:49] Speaker B: A lot of people have.
When I finished the book for CompuServe, America Online, AOL approached McMillan and said, hey, this book that you've just written about getting CompuServe connected to the Internet, we're about to do the same thing.
Could you also write a book for us?
[00:11:10] Speaker A: That's funny.
[00:11:11] Speaker B: Now, let me put this in perspective. I'm based in Australia.
America Online doesn't. Never actually existed in Australia, was never. Never really a thing. But we went, sure, let's write Navigating the Internet for America Online, the second book I wrote, again, teaching people how to connect to this thing called the Internet, all the while maintaining communities. Communities are something that has been very passionate for me my entire Internet life, be it bulletin board servers to CompuServe chat rooms, eventually American online chat rooms. Community has always been very important.
And this kept on going.
We kind of wrote a very small chapter in, in the. The AOL book about websites. Back then, World Wide Web, the World Wide Web really didn't exist yet. Tim Berners Lee was still basically in a, in a, in, in a basement in cern, sort of trying to work out what it really looked like while this is all happening. So there was only one web browser. And then Marc Andreessen and his friends went, we've got an idea. We're going to create a new web browser that was going to be called Netscape.
[00:12:35] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:12:36] Speaker B: And they approached me and I wrote all the books for Netscape on how to build web servers with Netscape.
[00:12:45] Speaker A: Oh, that's wild.
[00:12:46] Speaker B: One, make HTML2, HTML3, HTML4. We got right up to 4, 5.
During which time I think Netscape was acquired by AOL and America Online. Oh, sorry. And Amazon. Sorry. Microsoft Explorer had arrived and at about that time we sort of then merged all the projects together and it became Navigating the Internet. Oh, sorry. How to build Websites with HTML, primarily with Laura lemay, which was one of my co writers.
[00:13:19] Speaker A: I know for a fact now that I've read one of your books because one of the Netscape books I have read on HTML, I know that for a fact. That's literally the book that I read that ultimately prompted me in building my first actual HTML. I'm not going to call it a website because that'd be pushing the list.
[00:13:41] Speaker B: I've been told that my book reached about 1.5 million people.
And that's, that's in, that's, that's in, you know, actual sales and distributions. Where it went after that is hard to tell. I know it was rewritten and published in 15 different languages. It's very strange when a book. It's a very change when a book arrives in your. On your, on your door. In Korean.
[00:14:08] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:14:08] Speaker B: And you go, I can see the pictures are all the same, but nothing else means anything. So it's been an interesting journey that early part of my life. But yeah, the last part of that was interesting.
[00:14:21] Speaker A: I was gonna say the whole, the whole introduction so far is just one of the wildest in terms of, like, impactful ways, monumentally impacted on the, you know, the, the rise of the Internet. I don't think there's. There are many who can, at least on the high. I'm Wes. And then.
[00:14:50] Speaker B: Well, there's one more little bit that sort of. There's. There's one more little bit that kind of put the pieces all together.
[00:14:56] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:14:57] Speaker B: During the launch of, I think it was Netscape 3, I had a phone call from the devs at Netscape. I was basically writing the books as they were releasing each version and the devs were talking to me every day and said, hey, we're going to add this. And they went, we got this idea to stick some sort of a script thing in Netscape. And the conversation went, okay, you mean like cgi? And they're going, oh, no, no, no, no. We're. We're thinking of putting Java in the Netscape browser. What do you think of the name JavaScript?
[00:15:30] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
[00:15:31] Speaker B: To which I went, yeah, they had a few other names, the MCA script. And so I was there when they were, when JavaScript became a thing. And you'll find the last book that I had the energy to Write was the JavaScript Developers Guy version 2.0.
[00:15:49] Speaker A: Funny.
[00:15:51] Speaker B: And. And it was written literally in conjunction with the guys at, at Netscape going, okay, we're going to add. Just, we're going to put this in. And I. They write a bit of code, send me a new beta, and then we would try and work out how to explain how to use that bit in a book. So it was an early, interesting start to my career.
[00:16:10] Speaker A: What year is this again?
[00:16:13] Speaker B: Look, I want to say was around 95, a little bit before then. Windows 95 was sort of kind of where Internet Explorer arrived and the world changed. For the worse or the better, we'll leave that for a separate conversation. But yeah, it would have been around that point of time in the journey.
Not long before that, I had a couple of chance meetings with a few people and they started moving into the service base.
Worldwide Web Conference, um, which was kind of, kind of what Word camps are today, but for the World Wide Web. Back then, it wasn't that big. Um, you could, you could fit the whole World Word Web Conference in a, in a, in a, in, in an auditorium.
[00:17:03] Speaker A: Yeah, I would imagine.
[00:17:05] Speaker B: And, and it was actually staged in Australia.
Worldwide Web8 was actually staged in Australia in my hometown.
And needless to say, there were a few people there who I managed to take a.
Spent a lot of time with and developed a lot of understanding of where the Internet was going, including Tim Berners Lee, who was actually the keynote that we got to spend an hour with him going, what do you think of this Internet thing and this World Wide Web thing? And he's saying, it's ruining us. I hate it. I want it to be something entirely different. It's not what I envisage. Um, and even to this day, Tim still doesn't like the word Wide Web for what it is it was supposed to be. He's a scientist, He's a, he's a professor. He's a person who's really deeply entrenched in metadata and data consistency and all the things that our Worldwide Web days.
[00:18:01] Speaker A: If you look at the Internet from that perspective with that lens. Yeah, there's, there's, there's quite a few things where you go, like, let's not. Kind of not how I intended it. You said something funny. You said.
[00:18:11] Speaker B: It was a lot of that.
[00:18:12] Speaker A: You said something funny. You said something of, this is where it went wrong.
And we're not going to touch on it, but I, I kind of do. Because what it. Yeah, because that's mid-90s, 1995.
[00:18:26] Speaker B: Windows 95.
[00:18:27] Speaker A: Exactly.
[00:18:28] Speaker B: Microsoft released it. MSN pushed the Internet into people's faces.
[00:18:33] Speaker A: Yeah. But this is a thought I had yesterday. As in, where did the world make a turn? I arrived at the same two, three years.
Yeah. But from a very different, very different perspective. Because I was thinking the time that cars went from glass headlights to plastic headlights is pretty Much where we I think went south and I, I arrived at this is around 94, 95, 96 is when cars start making this switch. And as you were explaining this I was like going, I was going, oh, that's interesting. There's a, from two very different perspectives arriving at this.
Basically the same conclusion which is a very interesting one.
Just needed to throw out, throw it out there because I literally had that conversation in my head yesterday.
[00:19:27] Speaker B: It was a very pinnacle change.
Now a lot of the industry at the time thought it was the Antichrist coming to take over the, the pure and amazing Internet that created by DARPA and universities and colleges for, for the sharing and well meaning distribution of knowledge and education.
Microsoft had some different ideas.
[00:19:55] Speaker A: Yeah, they did quite.
[00:19:57] Speaker B: And change, change, change, change the Internet to much more like what it is today.
And then we saw the rise of Google.
[00:20:10] Speaker A: Yeah, if you look back now you've done, you know, I would say foundational stuff in terms of whatever the Internet became. And obviously there's different versions of the Internet. Right. So I think, I think we can also say that not only did Microsoft change it, but it also started splintering into different versions of the Internet.
What would you say? Because that was. We're going to call it 95 for, for the sake of the comparison because from 95 to 2025, where we are now, not only your particular role has changed and, and you know, enriched and all that.
What would you say has, has been the, the red thread for you to stay interested in the Internet for the last 30 years?
[00:21:08] Speaker B: I think to a certain extent is the fact that it keeps evolving.
You know, it's the fact that it does keep changing. It's the fact that it does keep my interest, if, if that makes sense.
You know, it's sort of, there are very few industries or careers. I would say that you can walk into every day and go what just happened?
You know, and, and, and that can happen on an almost daily basis even up to today where you know what just happened. You know, something changes, something new releases, something evolves. We've seen it in the last week with Deep Seq being launched by the Chinese and the, the value of shares in Nvidia plummeting and you know, all the, all the OpenAI people panicking because something they thought was theirs. Someone else has now released something that's cheaper, faster, more efficient to train and less resource intensive. So the Internet and technology in general has kept evolving. I was talking to someone recently about my Netscape journey writing books and they went, how did you do it. And I said we wrote one every three months.
[00:22:32] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:22:33] Speaker B: Netscape, where you literally released five or six versions in under two years.
[00:22:40] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:22:41] Speaker B: And every one of those was these major changes.
[00:22:46] Speaker A: If you look at the impact of the, the first releases versus the last release, basically every single one had a huge impact because you had so many more features and possibilities and options and all that.
[00:22:57] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:22:58] Speaker A: Yeah, I remember.
[00:22:59] Speaker B: And JavaScript appearing in the later ones. Just this, these things. And every time they change, it was a complete mindset change.
[00:23:06] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:23:08] Speaker B: Anyone working in the world, in the Internet world today, appreciates that JavaScript is really now the glue that holds most websites together. Be it people that are just using a bit of jQuery to people using whole platforms like React and, and TypeScript.
[00:23:26] Speaker A: It's still just none of those.
[00:23:28] Speaker B: It's JavaScript. Yeah. It's the impact and changes that, that decision by a couple of developers that at Netscape has just, you know, been astounding. So from my perspective, it's those changes that keep me interested and kept me attracted to, to the industry.
[00:23:51] Speaker A: I think I, if I, if I bring this back to how I am still hooked. I think it's roughly the same.
I started programming when I was really young, 10, 11, and then lost interest for quite a bit. Just like, had no, like, purpose of application. Right. There's nothing I wanted to write specifically like, and also was very young. So, you know, playing football outside was also very interesting.
But it wasn't until the Internet came and I started being online that programming and playing with code basically became interesting again.
And it's never changed. It's not the, the, the, the sentiment of, hey, there's something new that's never changed because like you said, whatever, you know, now, six months from now is just not up to date anymore. Now you can either be deterred by that or you can actually embrace it and enjoy it, which I think you have. And I know for myself I have as well, but that's, it's very much.
[00:24:56] Speaker B: Is that.
[00:24:58] Speaker A: Yeah, but that's wild to think of something that holds your interest for, for 30 years, 40 years, like.
Yeah. So let's look at the last part where you said, oh, actually you started with this. So the BuddyBoss Buddy Bus as an extension. Would you call it an extension or a version of BuddyPress? Or how do you see that?
[00:25:31] Speaker B: BuddyBoss was a fork of BuddyPress. So BuddyPress.
[00:25:36] Speaker A: But you have the scene, you have the core code and you have, you know, there's a whole bunch of components there.
Sorry. Yeah, I was gonna Say I've been using Buddy Press for since the beta and I built a bunch of sites with it, like 30, 40, quite a few.
And then you know, Buddy Boss at the time was still a theme I think.
[00:26:05] Speaker B: Yeah. So Buddy Boss, Buddy Boss was an agency and it was an agency that was building Buddy Press sites and every time they build a Buddy Perez site, sometimes hard to say.
[00:26:21] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:26:21] Speaker B: Always felt like they were starting from the ground up.
Building a Buddy Press site wasn't what I would say something for the.
A new person to the WordPress world or a new view person to online construction.
A lot of the people that were coming into the space were coming from places like Facebook which was oh, I've got a Facebook group. Ta DA.
Hitting the WordPress space, then attempting to understand WordPress, then understand BuddyPress, then understand a theme and how it all plugged in together was quite a daunting task for someone who really just wanted a one click button that said I just want Facebook on my website, on my, on my WordPress site.
So Tom and Mike who were the co owners of Buddy Boss decided to build a theme and platform integration that basically made Buddy Bro Buddy Press a one click installation.
Removed all those complexities and BuddyBoss grew from there.
As it grew it got a lot of interest from people that were going this is all great but what we really need is, is these communities to be as good as Facebook. And that means we need it in the App Store, we need it available on an Android phone, we need it available on a Apple device or an iPad or a tablet and we need it to be identical to our WordPress site.
So the team started exploring headless WordPress before it was really a thing looking at how to build WordPress sites and have them intimately linked to a fully re. A fully native, fully native app in the App Store that went through many cycles to get it right and they eventually released the Buddy Boss app now about four years ago, four and a half years ago, yeah, which was a game changer. No one had released a, a native tool that someone could deploy own themselves, deploy it themselves in their own App Store under their own app IDs and have it natively linked to with React based tool sets. Native linked to their, their product and not just to the Buddy Boss product.
Also natively linked to learndash full learndash implementation at app level. Natively linked more recently to tutor LMS. Natively linked more recently to MemberPress All In in, in in React.
So yeah it's a, it's a pretty in terms of technology.
[00:29:32] Speaker A: I think there was one other company, App Presser, who did similar things.
[00:29:35] Speaker B: AppPressor is a different sort of product, but it wasn't and it's still there, although it's kind of not on the radar as much as it was.
Appreza wasn't releasing native components.
[00:29:49] Speaker A: Correct, correct. But you could turn your site into an app, but.
[00:29:53] Speaker B: Oh yeah, but it was really just a. It was really just a browser wrapper inside. Yeah, these were true React native components. So much so that the learndash component could actually take an entire learndash course offline. So someone could sign up on their WordPress, sign up on their WordPress site, buy their learndash course, hit take it offline, please do the entire course offline, including pre streamed and downloaded HP5 video and all of that.
Complete the course, come back online and submit their. Submit their results.
[00:30:37] Speaker A: That's a really sweet integration.
[00:30:39] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. So you couldn't achieve that without true platform integration.
[00:30:46] Speaker A: So you were a user. You mentioned you were doing a lot with communities and stuff. Did you run communities on your own or for other people?
[00:30:55] Speaker B: Yeah, both.
I started in the Microsoft world and in the Microsoft space as an ASP developer. This is prior to WordPress focused on. NET Nuke, which was Microsoft's version of WordPress.
[00:31:15] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:31:18] Speaker B: It was open source CMS. It originally was called IBuySpy Portal when it was released by Microsoft at the day they released ASP. Net.
[00:31:30] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, I remember that one. I've had that installed.
[00:31:35] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, that was the, that was, that was the. That was the proof of concept project for asp. When Microsoft released their ASP platform and therefore a inter servers and online, you know, programming and what became now, you know, their dominant C Sharp language previously was Visual Basic but C Sharp became their, their premier language.
I was very deeply involved in that community space. I was actually one of the MVPs for the. NET community for many years and very heavily involved in the community itself as a. As an organizer and a contributor and a source contributor and, and before I was very active in managing their forums and communities.
So I stayed in that. I was. And I was still in that space at the point where we originally moved into WordPress largely because not unlike what's happening a little bit now with Matt, there was a. Somewhat of a schism in the. In the. Net Nuke space. Net Nuke, the original product was de. Open sourced and turned into by Scott.
Lovely guy, spent a lot of time with him but he decided to. That he was going to make money out of it and basically did it automatic created DNN software which became the owner of the product.
BNN as a open source community product still exists, but they went very, you know, very all in on agency and government and data centers and government infrastructure which kind of soiled and soured the community. It's look, the community still exists and I know a number of them still, you know, but it's not the hundreds of thousands of people interacting in a platform anymore. It's, it's like the die hard still hammering away, going, you know, so, so we were actually looking for communities for some of our customers and we were exploring WordPress and at that stage exploring BuddyBoss. And that was sort of around the time where I'd built a few WordPress sites before for customers. So I knew what WordPress was, but hadn't really spent a lot of time in the space at that level and then started to look into it and went, wow, interesting products. But has anyone actually worked out what happens when you get more than 10 users on a site?
[00:34:19] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:34:20] Speaker B: And the reality is, and the reality is nobody had.
[00:34:26] Speaker A: So that is basically the birth of, of, of rapid cloud.
[00:34:31] Speaker B: Yeah, the edge of the booth. Yes. I spent, before we started rapid cloud, I actually, I actually spent about two years working with buddybox customers and learndash customers and Tutor LMS customers. This was my own agency business.
Basically they'd come to me and go, my buddyboss site or my learndash site or my tutor LMS site is great until some great until 10 people log in. And then, you know, by the time I get to a hundred people, people are canceling their subscriptions and, and all those horrible sorts of things. So we looked at the platform, looked at the infrastructure and started to develop a technology understanding around what dynamic sites need, which is substantially different to a traditional WordPress site. The things that a shared host doesn't offer.
[00:35:24] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:35:24] Speaker B: The things that even most VPSs don't truly offer.
There's some VBS products that are adjacent to things that we do, but we think about things a lot differently.
One of the things that I realized very, very early on is that almost all community type products, learning products, tutorial products, woocommerce products are run on sites that are incredibly shaped.
And what we mean by that is they might have no one on their site for five days and then they might have a thousand people.
[00:36:10] Speaker A: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:36:12] Speaker B: And then they might have, then they might have no one on this site and then they might have a thousand people. Others have people between 6am and 9pm, 9am crazy busy sites, then crickets for the rest of the day. Yeah. You know, others have one really big event once a week with 20,000 people all trying to log on.
[00:36:35] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:36:36] Speaker B: And then nothing. They're all, all incredibly different and incredibly shaped. And that's what the WordPress, and not just WordPress, but the hosting community in general in what I call the managed space, really doesn't cope well with.
You get into a scenario where we just keep upgrading you, we just keep upgrading you, we just keep upgrading you and you wind up buying the largest plan box VPs, take your pick that you need for that maximum point in time at the end of the end of the day, week, month or period.
So what you said challenge.
[00:37:17] Speaker A: I was gonna, yeah, I was gonna say the, the, the, the thing you set out to fix is exactly that challenge. Right. So there's. As soon as you have a higher concurrency where the people actually are logged in versus just visiting. And for those of you listening who don't know what the difference is, if you're not logged in, the entire experience can be cached and optimized and all that. As soon as somebody logs in, you obviously don't want to see somebody else's course, you obviously don't want to see somebody else's cart. So the entire experience is uncached, which requires a very different setup from what your server can do.
[00:37:59] Speaker B: And, and, but, but more complicated and more, but, but worse than that is that to achieve that with most hosting infrastructure you just have to keep buying bigger and bigger boxes. Yeah. Bigger data center.
[00:38:11] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:38:12] Speaker B: To, to cope with that, might be once a week, might be once a month. So the net cost is much higher. People are spending a lot of money on infrastructure that if you look at the course of the entire week or the entire month, they may be using 10 or 20% of in true resource time.
[00:38:31] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
[00:38:33] Speaker B: And for BuddyBoss customers, that was part of our agenda. How do we address those sort of things?
The other side of it is that data centers and hosting in general, it's an expensive business to get into. Yeah, it's a lucrative business once you're in it, but it's only lucrative if you don't have to upgrade your hardware.
If you have to keep upgrading your hardware or improving your platforms or improving your input performance, then that obviously eats quite aggressively into your, your profit centers. So we wind up with two problems in the WordPress space. One is called race to the bottom, which is all your shared hosts, you know, being forced to get cheaper and cheaper and Cheaper and cheaper and cheaper.
And the only way they can do that is just by continuing to run the same box that they bought 10 years ago or 15 years ago and just using every trick they can in the book to try and serve those sites up. The biggest trick obviously caching. Stick it at the edge, stick it at the server level, stick it in a plugin. We just cache everything and, and they won't really notice that their site if they logged in is slow or they just accept it. Oh yeah, look it takes me 15 seconds when it to load go to WPA Min.
I've had people that thought that's what WordPress is 30 seconds to go into the plugins page. Oh yeah, it's gotta load a lot of stuff so I understand that.
[00:40:15] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:40:17] Speaker B: You know that's just what, that's how WordPress is. So it's not. But yeah for, I mean we've got, we've got 850 million, pick a number WordPress sites, you know, out there in the ecosystem, probably 99% of them are running on those sort of data centers.
[00:40:35] Speaker A: Yeah yeah, I think that's running on.
[00:40:36] Speaker B: Data centers with 10 year 15 year old technology. First generation CPU cores from, from probably from intel that they've amortized out of existence the entire data center probably you know, five years ago and the only thing they're really costing them now is the, the air conditioning and the electricity. Keep the thing running. Yeah and some guy. Oh no, they stick solar panels on the roof and, and some guy to run around with a soldering iron occasionally to you know, broke another box, you know, replace it for. But yeah, yeah in the space where.
[00:41:12] Speaker A: We'Re in there's quite a few hosting companies.
Yeah that just aren't just not innovating, just, just keeping the status quo as, as low maintenance as.
[00:41:24] Speaker B: But the race, the race to the bottom is for sale online.
[00:41:27] Speaker A: I think, I think we've departed from that ever so slightly though. I think there's, there's, there's been some changes in that in the last couple years but I think there has but.
[00:41:38] Speaker B: The Godaddies, you know, good platform for people to get started on.
You can pick up a WordPress site for five bucks and share your blog with your family or you know, but where it hasn't really advanced still is in the managed high end space.
It's still an area where the costs ramp up exponentially and often with actually no true output in terms of performance benefit.
I intimately know pretty much every hosting company I work in the make community And I interact with a lot of the other hosts, you know, at least a WordCamp basis. But, you know, we, we, we all know each other and so we, we're not, we're not, we're, well, competitors obviously, but, but we understand each other's, you know, needs and challenges. And we know that most of them are still on probably second or, you know, third generation server core technology.
Because the move to fourth and fifth generation server technology is a $20,000 per box cost. Yeah, yeah, you know, 192 core AM, you know, 192 core AMD, you know, Zen 5 CPU core, you know, with two CPUs on the motherboard and you know, these things are real expensive boxes at that stage. So the race at the bottom makes it very hard for people to go, sure, we'll invest and we'll put our prices up because people push back. Oh, we don't want to pay anything more.
So we had to find a balance. And that's what, you know, that was part of the other challenges. How do you find a balance between. What we do at Rapid is we're running the latest server technology always. Currently we're on Zen 4, about to move to Zen 5 processes in all our data centers. Because regardless of how the way Rapid looks at things is, regardless of what plan you're on, you actually get the same performance.
It's actually the same speed data center, it's the same speed server, it's the same Internet connections. What our plans actually only really changes the amount of currency.
We want to know how many visitors you can get at any point. So we have to think differently in this space where if you look at a lot of other plans, you'll find that, oh, you're down on that $5 plan, you're probably on a, might be on a, you know, Xenon 1 processor in a, you know, in a, in a rack somewhere with a cPanel control panel with a 500 other sides or squeezed into it. You know, and you might step up. You know, we've got some, we've got some really good, good, good, you know, hosts in the VPS space who are still on old technology.
You know, spent a lot of time with the Cloudways team, worked really closely with them.
But their fastest processor currently on their Amazon space is the Amazon C5 xenon cores which are, which are series 2 xenon core, which is now five years old.
[00:45:08] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:45:09] Speaker B: Or more so even at the VPS level.
And there's reasons for that. There's cost pressures and those sort of things that, you know, make people go, oh I want to, I want an 8 core CPU with 16 gigabytes of RAM and someone goes here it is, it might be a Z. It might be a, it might be a Z. Yeah, yeah, I was gonna.
[00:45:32] Speaker A: Say that whole discussion of how many CPUs do I have, how many cores, how many this, how many that it is for, for, for all intensive purposes, that is an antiquated way to measure the performance of your server, of your machine. Most people don't realize this, but what you're, what you're explaining here is there's different generations.
[00:45:54] Speaker B: Yeah. But the only thing that the number of cores really changes the amount of users you can handle simultaneously.
[00:46:01] Speaker A: Yeah, but then it still matters on which generation you are.
[00:46:04] Speaker B: Yeah, but doesn't change the underlying speed. So if you're on a first generation core and your page physically can't load process through. I mean I've seen buddy boss WordPress sites with 150 to 200 plugins installed.
[00:46:18] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:46:19] Speaker B: You know, and you sort of go do really? Oh yes. Every one of them. Everyone's, you know, we were talking to a guy the other recently I was talking to a guy who goes they need a 512 megabytes of PHP worker RAM to log into WP admin.
[00:46:40] Speaker A: Oh wow.
[00:46:42] Speaker B: If you don't have that, you can't get into WP administration because there's just so many plugins and so much code and so much going on. Every time you hit WP admin it just sucks all this memory out of the system and we just go oh well sure, we'll work with you. But that's the nature of the bigger big end of town which rapid was built to try and help service.
You know, it's, it's the people that aren't quite. Not.
I could actually host NASA. But that's not our core customer base. It's the people that have become successful. Who is our core customer base? We've got Buddy Boss customers on six figure revenue per month, seven figure revenues per year running online courses and communities and you know, and then branching those communities out into you know, public forums, you know, site. I've got a site that's in beta at the moment that, that's doing thousands of dollars in, in memberships while it's in beta. So these are sites that have gone from a side gig or a side.
[00:47:58] Speaker A: Hustle to many on this is my work, this is my job.
[00:48:01] Speaker B: In many place, this is now my job. Yeah. And they're the ones that get get into trouble or they just keep throwing money at it and hoping that those solutions will fix it. We have to design a different or we came and designed a different philosophy.
[00:48:17] Speaker A: I like the I like the change of philosophy.
Breaking away from the mold.
One of the things I I so every now and then I I post about performance and performance related stuff either on X or you know, wherever.
One of the things I I say that always gets a lot of question is like if you solve your performance by throwing caching at it, you haven't solved performance. Caching doesn't solve performance in no way.
[00:48:50] Speaker B: Shape or form Types of.
[00:48:54] Speaker A: Sure, but not the actual raw performance. So whenever there's no caching available in whatever scenario you're working in, you are then rendered. You know, what is, what is my actual computing power that I have to my availability.
[00:49:11] Speaker B: The only exception I would say to that are two sorts of cache. First one is OP cache which half the WordPress world truly doesn't understand and a lot of hosts don't.
And the second one is object caching.
Both of which have a relationship to perform.
[00:49:29] Speaker A: Sure. In particular there's some internal optimization I would call them.
[00:49:34] Speaker B: Yeah. 100 yeah but, but yes. Dynamic sites can't be caught more people.
[00:49:40] Speaker A: Added and it's still going to be an issue if your hardware can't cope with it. So.
[00:49:44] Speaker B: 100% yeah.
One of the other challenges that the WordPress space faces is complexity.
In the in, in the real world when we build a an application we employ data optimization coders. We employ people with data or enterprise, you know, structural experience and they lovingly carve data structures and they build optimized platforms for databasing.
WordPress is the antithesis of that.
WordPress has this monolithic EcoStruxure built around WP meta, WP post meta and WP user meta which which was. Which is a wonderful little tool designed to. To make it easy for someone to just add an extra field and all those sorts of things.
[00:50:46] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:50:46] Speaker B: But it comes with a architecturally again it's great for five users.
Architecturally horrible when you hit 5, 10, 15, 20,000 users. One of the reasons the biggest source of problems with that is actually the the post meta table.
The post meta table is pretty much used by everyone for every custom post Type in the WordPress space.
[00:51:14] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:51:28] Speaker B: Users to build these complex ecosystems of, you know, structures and custom post types and taxonomies and and categorization structures all built around these metatables. The problem is that the way they do it is by inputting data into the value column of the WordPress metatable now thought it was designed.
[00:51:58] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:51:59] Speaker B: Except that the view table isn't indexed in any way, shape or form.
Now what that means is that good old my MariaDB and MySQL can't optimize or accelerate any query that does something really simple. Like I've just used, I've just created a meta field which is called business type.
And in that business type field I put small business, large business, agricultural business, whatever.
If I'm in my checkout I want to be able to go look at that meta type, find all the queries in that meta type, then output or users or people that match that search. Works fantastically for 10 users.
Doesn't work as well when someone goes I need to be able to all a couple of those together. So I'd like this, this product or this category or this category or this category and this category and this category and this category.
100,000 users.
Well it's even worse than that. They indexed joins.
[00:53:13] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:53:14] Speaker B: And the net result is we've seen sites doing table walks of potentially millions going to walk the entire meta table to manage two records, 500,000 records that it walks every single page request to try and pull up simple information.
So architecture of WordPress is your scale works horribly against you. We see the same things in user metatable service recently where they come to us and said it's really good except our checkout checkout keeps crashing.
Okay, we'll have a look at that for you.
We found that they had a plugin somewhat lovingly written for them that did this thing where it looked at all the products that a person had purchased and compared that with all the products that other people had purchased and then attempted to match all those products together and give them some recommendations on other things they might like.
[00:54:13] Speaker A: Yep, yep.
[00:54:14] Speaker B: Because it was all breeding these taxonomies and metatables it was taking 40 to 50 seconds and this massive SQL queries taking 45 seconds that we're just crashing the server.
[00:54:27] Speaker A: Yeah, that's a very common problem inside WordPress when you scale. So options table and the meta table are for me are default tables that if they don't have an index yet, when I start optimizing, that's the very first thing I do. And a vast majority of really weird database related query issues just, just valid like snow in front of us, they just go away.
[00:54:55] Speaker B: 32 character sub index, 32 character sub index on the meta value column and huge numbers of the problem disappear. But there are WordPress sites out there that are just living with that day to day today because they just assume that's how WordPress is. I thought you heard. I'm thinking, of course I'm thinking of going to Spotify or Shopify because my WordPress sites too.
[00:55:20] Speaker A: Yeah. And then they read somewhere you need to clean up your, your tags and clean up your options. Sure you do.
But really the gain is in optimizing the data. Yeah. No, it's interesting. I like the whole approach of how you, you, you actually wanted to solve the problem you were seeing.
Yeah, I think, I think that's journey all along.
[00:55:49] Speaker B: I've always been looking to solve problems that I'm seeing and solving problems for communities of people.
[00:55:56] Speaker A: Yeah, there's plenty of people who want to solve problems. That's. I don't think that's the issue.
I think what the problem is for the vast majority is they don't necessarily want to solve the problem at the root.
They want to just look at the, the thing that they see and then just kind of fix the thing that they see. But as with, you know, if for your personal health, if you have an issue somewhere in your body, you can, you can say, okay fine, I'll, you know, I have some skin rash. Let me put some, some ointment on.
[00:56:29] Speaker B: That and a little bit of cream on that.
[00:56:33] Speaker A: Exactly. But have you solved the actual issue of why you have that problem? Right. And that's a long journey and that's, you know, have you need to figure it out. Am I allergic to. I discovered when I was, I think I was 11 or 12, I discovered that I was allergic to chrome, nickel and cobalt. As in metals inside. So I was wearing a cheap watch and I get like red blisters and I got, yeah. Rashes and blisters and everything. And like it's, it's the same thing. Right. You can just solve that by taking off the watch. But why, why do I have it? What is the issue underneath? And yeah, what I like you hearing explain in many different ways is that you, you actually dive deep into the great, here's the problem. But I actually want to solve the root of this problem. So I, I need to be searching for the problem behind the problem and then come up with that solution.
[00:57:29] Speaker B: That's a little bit of a philosophy that we built at Rapid.
You know, as a company, I'm a big fan of that from the when when we designed the concept of the company as an architectural concept, its performance was peak building a support host hosting infrastructure that unlike most hosts, a lot of our Support team are actually developers.
We, we migrated a number of our Support team from PlayBoss Plugin developers with plugin experience, which means that we actually empower our support teams to say, go and find out what's the real.
[00:58:13] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, that's good, that's good.
[00:58:15] Speaker B: Work with the customer. Just go. As I've heard so many times in the past, this was, as a customer, you got too many ambject calls.
That was the biggest complaint that I used to get from my hosting companies with Buddy, was too many AJAX calls on your site. You're gonna have to. We're gonna have to turn. We suggest you turn AJAX off and you sit it there and you go. Let me tell you how headless WordPress works.
[00:58:42] Speaker A: Yeah, it's like we kind of need.
[00:58:46] Speaker B: It's kind of the underlying magic source of the whole platform. We can't just turn off AJAX for the want of a better word.
That also comes down to, you know, being intelligent about things like a center options, you know, sort of. Probably 90% of the WordPress world is still on Apache.
It really shouldn't be in most cases.
You know, Apache is great for statics, it's great for certain sorts of hosts. It's really not that great for WordPress sites with PHP sitting underneath it, because at the end of the day, you know, PHP is this pretty much legacy monolith that doesn't play well with strangers unless you've only got one person on your side at a time. The moment you get concurrency, the moment you get loads, you get all these resources happening.
Which is why platforms like nginx and more recently, Lightspeed Enterprise are becoming much more attractive in that WordPress space because they handle concurrency so much better.
[00:59:56] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Nginx as a base web server for anything that scales is where things need to be. I agree.
[01:00:06] Speaker B: My challenge with nginx, you know, is it, for most part still needs a data engineer somewhere attached to the Pro, the platform for configuration. It's more complicated. Yeah, yeah, for sure, for sure.
Which, which, which is detriment. Which is a detriment for most people.
You know, I mean, I had a conversation with CEO, one of our partners recently, and we were Discussing the perfect WordPress site. The perfect WordPress site of a hosting site is a dashboard designed for soccer moms that only has enough buttons to get this site running and keep it running.
And that's not a negative, it's just a reality. They don't want all that technology, they don't want to think about all those questions about data centers. And configurations and all of that, but still want to run Buddy Boss, learndash and everything else and, and run a, run a online community for their, you know, thousand closest friends.
So what they want is simple, one click, but they still want all that underlying technology. So they sort of kind of want iceberg mentality. They just want to deal with that little bit of. They want to only have to worry about the little bit that's above the water, everything that's underneath it. Can someone else just make sure that.
[01:01:32] Speaker A: Yep, yep, very true. I think there's the whole principle of developing software that is simple or that least appears to be simple. It can be very complex what it does beneath. But it should be simple, it should look simple, it should work work simple. And a lot of the thinking it needs to be. Indeed.
Yeah. Removed, obfuscated or at the, at the very least turn it into a simple mode and a developer mode. Right. So if you, if you need it, sure, it's there, you can access it this way, but if you don't need it, just please present it Simple. I do like where Project Gutenberg with the new dashboard interface as it's being developed in. In Project Gutenberg accessible by installing the Gutenberg plugin.
I do like the direction we're moving into because I feel like this message is something we're seeing right now and it's been a while we have that.
[01:02:44] Speaker B: You know, we're on version 200 of Gutenberg I think last release.
If I remember rightly, I was at.
[01:02:52] Speaker A: The 20.1, 20.2 have just recently.
[01:02:56] Speaker B: So 200 releases.
It's still not quite there and it still has as many detractors that has people who love it, but it's a good journey.
That doesn't mean there isn't space for Elementor or isn't space isn't space for new products like Etch and things like that that are coming downstream in the next 12 to 18 months. But it's a framework that at least stepped the regular person out of the old version one.
You know, editor love that. Write a bit of HTML in a text box and hopefully I check that it works.
You know, if you wanted to build a seam, if you wanted to build a seam of your own employer, a team of developers, or just rely on, you know, insert name of theme seller here. You know, I think Gutenberg gives a level of accessibility out of the box. It's not quite there yet. The page flow builder is still not quite.
[01:04:14] Speaker A: No, no. It still needs a lot of refinement, but it's at least something that's high on the, the list of priorities that they're working on. So yeah, I'm, I think, I think in general I'm still quite excited about what WordPress currently is and especially what it is in the middle of becoming.
Yeah, I think, you know, we've had a, a rough quarter.
Sure. But I'm still bullish on where we're going and what we're doing. And I think in that context, I think what you're building with, with Rapid Cloud, I think that's another example of there's still a lot of room for innovation. There's still a huge market for different and better interpretations of things that are quite, you know, normal or default. Like everybody understands hosting, everybody understands they need it. But the way you can produce your hosting stack and have it do XYZ versus how somebody else does, there's a huge room for innovation there possible.
So yeah, I want to, I want.
[01:05:28] Speaker B: To believe, yes, we certainly believe so. Yes.
[01:05:33] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. And, and, and it shows in, in both how, how you explain the things you do that and, and you know, the whole philosophy behind it is, is quite different. And I, I, I, I like it, I like the let's solve problems at the root again. That's one of my, my, my main drivers of how I look at things. And it's always nice to see that being reflected.
I want to thank you for this conversation, Wes. I think it's been a lot of fun, certainly also on the, the, I don't know, the, the memory lane trip we took. Because it's been a pleasure having been on the Internet in the early 90s myself as well. And then know as you go through, there's a lot of stuff that's changed and, and, and, and improved. Some of them maybe less, more than others. But it's fun to hear your version of it. Certainly as someone who's been very close at the heart of the expansion of the Internet, I would say.
And yeah, again, thank you so much for this conversation.
[01:06:39] Speaker B: It's been a pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Happy to chat anytime. And for anyone that may or may not be up around, you know, say hi at wordcamps as well.
[01:06:51] Speaker A: Cloudflarest and wordcamps, I heard.
[01:06:54] Speaker B: Yeah, 100%.
[01:06:56] Speaker A: All right, thank you so much.
