Announcing MyZippyKid – The best way to host and manage your WordPress sites.

Posted by & filed under blog, business, wordpress, wordpress hosting, zippykid.

Almost one year ago today, I signed the first ever term sheet in my life. Basically, I took money from investors, in return for equity in an idea I had, which seemed to have some legs, and the investors believed I was crazy, yet capable enough of making it grow. Thank you Gabriel Weinberg , and friends, for trusting me with your money. Since then, we’ve built a team of 6 awesome individuals, with one goal.

Our goal then, and today is the same. To build the best environment for businesses to build and host their websites.

We introduced some new concepts to the hosting industry, we were the first to stop using bandwidth and disk space as a means to pick a hosting plan. I always found those metrics confusing, more so, I used to get a lot of calls from people who had no clue how much disk space their website took up. It’s an internal metric for hosting companies, not website owners.

So, we came up with a plan that everyone would understand. I looked at the wedding industry, and borrowed from it. The more people that attend your wedding reception, the more you’ll end up paying for it. Hence, visitor based pricing was born. It seems obvious now, but go look at hosting plans prior to 2010, no one else did it. This idea took off, we were able to
deliver on our promises, and make people very happy. As we went from less than 100 sites, to over 4000, we noticed how people worked with their sites, and our system. Overall people are happy, but there’s always ways to make people happier. Today we’re launching something that will make existing, and new customers happier.

Announcing “My ZippyKid”, it’s a new way to work with WordPress sites, it’s the result of analyzing over 7000 help desk tickets, emails, phone calls (pre sales and support).

Here are some highlights of what’s coming.

  • Single sign on- If you want to, you can now sign up with your Facebook or Google account (Twitter and LinkedIn coming soon). 
  • Collaborators – We borrowed this from Github, and other code repository sites, if you need to invite a programmer to work on your site, just add him as a collaborator. No need to hunt for FTP credentials and other technical jargon he’s asking for. More importantly, you never need to send it over email any more
  • Zippy Clone – We see a lot of you building sites for specific verticals. We see the amount of time you put in to get each site up and running, with the same base template. Now, you’ll be able to take any site on our system, tweak it, and then when you’re happy with it, launch as many copies of it as you want. (Master templates coming in Q3 2012).

 

 

If you would like to joint the beta, go to zippykid.com/beta/ to get in line for the beta, we’ll be inviting people starting Tuesday, April 10th.

 

Managed WordPress Hosting Support – What you should expect from us and any other good WordPress host.

Posted by & filed under blog, business, Managed Wordpress, speed, tips-and-tricks, wordpress, wordpress hosting, zippykid.

This post explains some of the support options and level of support you can get from us here at ZippyKid. Whether you’re hosting a high traffic WordPress site, or a low traffic, but high value (City government) site, you need a way to figure out where the bottlenecks in your code are.

We can help you identify issues with your HTML, your database queries, and even calls to external services like Infusion Soft, or Facebook. While our competitors will give you a one page analysis of what’s wrong with the resulting HTML of your site, and tell you to use gzip, change expiration headers, and other low hanging fruit. We can actually tell you if your call to a Twitter feed, Facebook, or our database is the bottleneck.

Knowing this, enables you to make better informed decisions on how to optimize your website, rather than changing options in some poorly documented caching plugin, or viewing the results of some “page analyzer” that only looks at what you threw out 14 seconds after the request.

For example, the graph below, you can see that the server is done doing it’s thing in less 500 milliseconds, the network is done in less than 2.5 seconds. The rest is left up to the browser to process the javascript/html/css and render the page. Webpagetest.org gave this page a score of 95, because our system had already done the setting of headers, CDN, and image compression. But a browser that still takes 7.5 seconds to render? That’s unacceptable.

browser analysis
Uploaded with Skitch!

Now look at this analysis of the actual request.. less than 600 milliseconds, and the server is done, the rest is up to the network and the computer.

server-time-analysis
Uploaded with Skitch!

Check the external services analysis, now we can tell you how much time your site is spending talking to external services..

external service analysis
Uploaded with Skitch!

And lastly, we can analyze your custom queries, plugins and tell you where things are slowing down if at all.

Database activity - zippykid - New Relic
Uploaded with Skitch!

This analysis is available to our support staff 24×7, and available to enterprise customers ($250+/month), via the control panel at all times.

Nobody else in the managed hosting business, let alone in the Managed WordPress Hosting business is doing this, except for us. I hope the others step up their game and start offering this.. it’s not hard, and it’s good for the WordPress sites and the internet as a whole.

Worst Week Ever – Growing pains at ZippyKid

Posted by & filed under business, hosting, Managed Wordpress, php, rackspace, wordpress, wordpress hosting, zippykid.

I’m sorry for the worst week ever, in the history of ZippyKid, and it’s happy customers. We’ve been having slow downs and downtime across the board. We’ve isolated the problem down to a strained and maxed out Firewall, which is operating at 80% CPU capacity, and near full limits of it’s bandwidth capability.

We’re working very closely with Rackspace to get this managed device replaced, but due to the size of our network, doing so requires downtime, and coordination of the complex rules across the board. I’m really sorry for all the delays and not being able to give a good estimate of when things will be back to stable, we’re guessing by Friday night everything should be 100% stable, and zippy again.

Once again, I apologize profusely for this downtime, and my lack of communication throughout this, I’ve been busy trying to figure out the problem, and then working with Rackspace on a solution and procedures to implement it thoroughly.

I messed up, I didn’t see this coming sooner, I got caught up in the growth and dealing with new customers, but this is just a reminder to me, we’re a startup, we’re a small company and we need to slow down every now and then, and take inventory of where we are.

Once we fix these major issues with the existing network (we’re adding 3X capacity to the firewall), we’ll be able to introduce some of the major things we’re trying to introduce to the world of hosting.

The following two charts, are near real time graphs of the traffic being pushed through just two of our systems.. now imagine similar traffic across 20+ systems, and one firewall trying to manage it all.

Custom error messages for Rackspace Cloud Load Balancers

Posted by & filed under blog, rackspace, tips-and-tricks, wordpress hosting, zippykid.

If you use Rackspace Cloud Load balancers like we do, sometimes seeing the “Service Unavailable” message is annoying, and somewhat ambiguous to the visitor. In November Rackspace allowed you to upload your own error pages via the API, we’ve started implementing it for some of our Enterprise clients.

It’s a relatively simple process, once you go through the API and figure it out. Or you could use the python library and this Gist, by our latest team member Matt.

ZippyKid 2012 – Changes coming to ZippyKid

Posted by & filed under blog, business, Managed Wordpress, wordpress, wordpress hosting, zippykid.

In April of 2011, I decided to make ZippyKid a full time job and focus all my efforts into growing the company, my goal was to make a new kind of hosting company, that focused on WordPress and small businesses. I wanted to make the best WordPress hosting company, not just another company that manages updates to the WordPress core and plugins for you.

I realized back then, that saying “We upgrade your WordPress” as your only selling point, is like a restaurant saying “we wash your dishes when they get dirty”. We needed to do more than that, and we have.

Fast forward from April of 2011, when I only had 65 customers, to today, where we have several thousand, the company went from being just myself and Kai part time, to 6 full time employees. We are trusted from small mom and pop shops in small towns all over the world, to larger names like Reuters, and even a forward thinking government agency. Starting in February, we’ll be a team of 7. We’ve learnt a lot, and we know what we need to do to continue to be the best, and better than anyone else.

Originally, this post was going to be a list of 7 things we’re about to release in 2012, then I realized I didn’t want to be a vapor-ware company, so here are somethings we have either already launched, or are rolling out in the next 30 days.

The biggest one is that our base price will increase to $35/month starting February 29th 2012. If you sign up before February 29th 2012, your prices won’t go up.

  1. SSL for all. Because security is not an add-on. I had written a blog post in September talking about the need for this, I wanted to get this done, we know what to do and how to do it, but large scale implementation wasn’t/isn’t easy. You have to order SSL certs, you have to get certs validated, and you need to get a unique ip address. Currently we charge extra for SSL, but it’s something that should be offered standard.
  2. Email (already active) You’ll get 10 email addresses and unlimited aliases included with the base plan. It doesn’t make sense for you to have us host your WordPress site, but you go elsewhere for e-mail. We’ll either setup Google Apps for you, or set you up with Rackspace Email.
  3. Malware Scanning (already active) An independent third party (Sucuri) is scanning your site 3 times a day for malware and vulnerabilities, in the small chance you do get hacked, or are running an insecure version of WordPress or a plugin, we’ll be notified and we’ll fix it.
  4. SAS 70 Type II Compliance (already active) We’re the only WordPress hosting company that offers SAS 70 Type II compliance, basically, it means we take your data seriously, even if you’re just hosting pictures of cute kittens. They’re your cute kittens and no one but you has access to them.
  5. Quarterly Security Audits and Results (first one scheduled for February 2012) Everyone claims to have a secure network, who wouldn’t? We’re going to get audited by a third party (Trustwave), and we’ll post the results on the web quarterly, for all to see and judge for themselves.
  6. 30 Day Free Trial We’re so confident in our product, that we’ll give you 30 days to try us out, if you’re not happy, you can cancel without paying a dime. You’ll even be able to take the SSL certificate with you.

There are some other changes that I haven’t mentioned yet, as we’re still perfecting them. Our goal at ZippyKid is not to be the first with features, but the best. Keep an eye out on the blog and our newsletters, and you’ll find out about them shortly.

ZippyKid and RePress plugin

Posted by & filed under Uncategorized.

Hi Everyone,
I hate writing this post, but this is the first time we at ZippyKid will be actively blocking your ability to do something that is technically, well within your rights as a human being. The RePress project has released an interesting plugin that lets your WordPress site become a proxy for sites that are banned. This ban is due to governments, whether we agree with the ban or not is irrelevant. This plugin can end up costing us tons of money in bandwidth charges, costs that we would not be able to recoup, so this is a purely business decision, to disable the use of this plugin.

As of now, this plugin will not work on our systems. So, please don’t try it.

The Ghost of TimThumb – Battling insecure plugins and hosts 4 months later

Posted by & filed under blog, business, security, tips-and-tricks, wordpress, wordpress hosting.

This weekend, I realized that I had stopped our auto-updating script for TimThumb about two months ago. What this script does is look for files named timthumb.php, thumb.php and replaces them with the latest secure version from subversion. What this means to you is that if you’ve modified your copy of timthumb and it’s new, we may overwrite your changes, unless you send in a help request. This script runs every 12 hours.

We’re using this hammer fist for two reasons.

  1. Security for you and your website, you may have added a plugin or theme that still uses Timthumb, and it may have the older version of Timthumb.
  2. We’re migrating hundreds of websites every month from other hosting places, we need a sure fire way of ensuring that we’re not bringing over malware, or vulnerabilities.

If you host a bunch of WordPress sites, you can use the code here as an example for your systems as well.

https://gist.github.com/1293079

This is also a reminder, that a lot of our code is always available on Github, for review and use by others. We welcome feedback and issues.

WordPress 3.3 and ZippyKid Sites – Upgrade plans and procedures

Posted by & filed under blog, business, wordpress, wordpress hosting, zippykid.

WordPress 3.3 is out. A lot of you are wondering what and when you’ll get the new hotness on your systems. Here’s the official answer.

1. It’ll take 7 days for us to start rolling out our automated updates, we want to make sure we don’t break your site, so testing is key.

2. You can skip the line, by upgrading yourself, but if it breaks your site, we’re going to restore your site from our nightly back up, not trouble shoot the upgrade.

3. Brand new sites, for existing customers and new ones, will be on WordPress 3.3 as of tonight.

In case you’re wondering why we’re not rushing the upgrade for all the customers, it’s simple. This is a feature upgrade, not a security upgrade. Means, it’s a major upgrade, but there is no compelling reason to upgrade, apart from “new shiny toys”. This means, your site is not at risk for running at 3.2.1.

ZippyKid difference by the numbers

Posted by & filed under blog, business, Managed Wordpress, wordpress hosting, zippykid.

We had a relatively slow weekend, not a lot of work, got some christmas shopping done, oh and a client of ours received 7 times more traffic in a 24 hour period, than they normally do. Our systems held up, and we didn’t even notice the increase until we got an email from the client saying how awesome this was. I figured I should share some of the anonymous statistics from Google Analytics, to help people understand the benefit of our service, and also show, that unlike GoDaddy or other shared hosting companies, we’re not going to shut your site down because you finally got the recognition you’ve been trying to get.

The first graph is just Google Analytics for a 24 hour period. 208,000 unique visitors is not a lot for a 24 hour period, we have some larger enterprise clients that get this all the time.

The second graph, compares the time period for the 4 days prior to this spike, that’s where you see the awesomeness of our service. The customer experienced a 7X growth for about 24 hours, and his site didn’t slow down, or crash.

Google Analytics 24 hours for a customer

24 hrs in Google Analytics

traffic comparison

So, again, when you’re wondering about switching to ZippyKid, consider the following:

  1. Can your current web host handle a 7X increase in traffic?
  2. Will you get charged for overages?
  3. Will your current host just tell your visitors that you reached the limits of your plan?

With ZippyKid, we’ve demonstrated we can handle the surge, we’re not going to charge overage fees, and we never told his customers that he had gone way past his monthly plan.

We’re a startup, and we know how important stuff like this is, so we do what we would want for ourselves. So far, it’s been a winning combination for all.

ZippyKid is giving away 1,000 t-shirts

Posted by & filed under zippykid.

The holidays are about family, thankfulness and to some, the exchanging of gifts. Luckily, nothing feels better than giving…

So we are giving away 1,000 ZippyKid t-shirts!

You can win a shirt by either:
     1) completing the form below OR by
     2) following @thezippykid and by sending a quick

In case you’re wondering, these are not the cheapy, wear once and add to the ‘painting’ drawer kind of shirts. These are soft, comfortable, well fitted, ‘I want one in every color’ kind of shirts.

Here’s the shirt, as tweeted by @MrCippy himself:

Read more »