SSL on WP-Admin for all customers

Posted by & filed under business, security, wordpress, zippykid.

WordCamp San Francisco 2011 is under way, and I’d like to the the opportunity to make some announcements for our customers, with upcoming features, and releases.

The first announcement is security related. We’re going to be turning on SSL for the WordPress backend for all customers starting September 15th 2011.

What does this mean in english? All of our customers will log in to their WordPress admin back-end, over HTTPS, this is a security benefit. It ensures that when you’re at Starbucks, at an airport, or that hip new joint with wifi, your password won’t be sent in the clear.

New customers will get this feature first, and older customers will be transitioned shortly there after. The process will be transparent for everyone, from CSR generation to actually installing and configuring the certificate.

As far as I know, we’re the only WordPress Hosting company that will be providing this by default, to ALL customers.  I hope other hosting companies, will join us in this effort, and offer this solution to all WordPress users. If anyone wants to discuss the technical obstacles, and implementations for it, find me at WordCamp SF, or discuss it below.

I’ve been traveling, wheeling and dealing, on behalf of all our customers, I’m excited to finally start sharing some of this stuff with you.

This does mean that pricing will be changing too, more details on that coming very soon.

The ZippyKid difference or "How are you different than so and so"?

Posted by & filed under business, rants, wordpress, zippykid.

I’ve been traveling a lot for the past 2 months, when I meet people, the conversation usually ends up in a “who do you work for? what does ZippyKid do?”. I am after all doing this for business. Usually people haven’t heard of us, or the other players in the WordPress Hosting niche, some people have, so they ask: “What’s different between you guys?”. I’m guessing a lot of people who don’t get to ask me this question in person want to know as well, so here goes.

1. Attitude – We’re committed to helping our customers reach their goals. I am a strong believer of the paradigm, that the only way for me to make money, is to help someone else make money.

We all understand how important a website is for our customers, and we make sure their website is up, loading fast, and secure. We take outages and downtime very seriously, and do our best to prevent it. We all take it personally if something causes a site to go down, in about 15 months of operation, 1500 websites have been trusted to us, we’re very grateful for people putting their trust in us, and we work our butts off for it. When a customer sends us a help request, we don’t bitch about it, we’re fully cognizant of the fact that this person is putting food on our table. We jump to it, sometimes you’ll actually see two of us respond to the same ticket, I know operationally it’s inefficient, but as a user of our own service, knowing that we’re all eager to help, gives me a warm fuzzy that I just don’t get from other hosting providers. Everyone else seems to be focused on getting the most profit out of each customer, our focus is on helping our customer first.

This is probably why we’ve only had 7 customers leave us.

2. The People – We’re working on a redesign of the website, it’ll have a proper “About Us” page, which will have cute pictures of everyone, or their dog, or something cute, to show we’re hip and funny and all that crap. But, until then, I’d like to just take this moment to thank everyone who agreed to work with me, I’m frankly humbled every day that they decided to work with me, they’re awesome people, and ZippyKid is awesome because of them.

Kai Armstrong (@phikai) – His official title on the business cards will say “Director of Happiness”, he’s awesome, if you’re a customer you’ll probably interact with him. You’ll notice he’s scary fast with resolving tickets, right, the first time. I was initially going to make his title “Support Ninja Assassin” or something hip, but then I realized he literally does make our
customers happy, sure, he’s resolving tickets, and if you play the ticket resolving metric game in ZenDesk, he’d be #1, but we don’t measure that, all we care about is how happy our customers are.

Roberto Villareal (@iamrobertv) – His original title was going to be “The Pillar of Support”, if you’ve ever worked with Rob, you’ll know what it refers to. His new title is “Happiness Delivery Guy”. I don’t know who would win in a fight between Rob and Kai, but it would suck for us.. so umm yea we won’t try it. Rob is more resilient than the Black Knight , and a lot more effective.

John Gray (@wopr42) – John is our CTO, he’s been in the industry a lot longer than it looks like when you meet him. That’s until he starts talking, I’ve had the privilege of working with him on and off since 2003. He’s a visionary, together we’re building some of the best architecture that will make the life of Kai, Roberto and all our clients much simpler and happier. I just left HostingCon 2011, and I can say with absolute certainty, that we’re the only company using the same deployment tools as FaceBook, Twitter and Zynga, as opposed to the rest of the industry that’s still stuck on bash scripts, and re-inventing the wheel. We’ve been prototyping a lot of cool things internally, which we’re going to announce soon.

Heidi Gerhardt (@heidigerhardt) – Heidi is the Boss. She tells us what to do, and when to do it. We’d be completely lost without her. She coordinates meetings with clients who need more than just a simple WordPress site, she coordinates our daily huddles, and makes sure none of us are overloaded, which in turn ensures customers are happy.

Erin Luther - She’s not on the payroll, but she’s my wife, and she’s the best wife a man could ask for. She’s supportive, she’s helpful, and she puts up with my crazy schedule, she’s the one who encouraged me to go out on a limb and start the company, she’s the one who helped make the final decision on which investor to go with (I was fortunate enough to have multiple term sheets), and she’s the reason why I’m doing this.

I am thankful to have all these people in my life, who are helping me with the vision for a world where small business owners only need to focus on their content, not how to manage their content management system.

Look around, or hell try and call around, you won’t find another company with people like us, and that’s the biggest ZippyKid difference. Our dedication to our customers is not something that can mimicked, it can’t be taught, and it can’t be acquired.

How to host your WordPress blog alongside your Ruby on Rails app.

Posted by & filed under php, tips-and-tricks, wordpress, zippykid.

We’re starting to see a lot of startups from the different accelerators needing solid hosting for their WordPress blogs, the easiest solution is to just use a sub-domain (blog.mystartup.com) but most of our SEO friends recommend against it, as Google sees the content on the blog as a separate site and doesn’t necessarily relate the two sites to be of the same domain.

With that in mind, here’s a simple method to let you host your WordPress blog, and maintain the /blog link.

If you’ve written a ROR app, chances are you’re deploying it using nginx and passenger. Assuming you’re using the default nginx package, all you need to add to your server directive is the following

location /blog {
proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8080;
proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
proxy_set_header Host $host;
}

Where, 127.0.0.1 is an instance of apache2 running PHP and WordPress. If you decide to become
a ZippyKid customer, you’ll need to replace 127.0.0.1 with a different ip that we’ll provide
to you.

Announcing network wide SendGrid integration for Faster WordPress Hosting

Posted by & filed under business, php, plugins, Services, speed, wordpress, zippykid.

We’ve grown quite a bit in the past 36 days, to be specific, we’ve doubled the number of websites we host, and quadrupled the bandwidth we use every month, in fact, according to Chartbeat stats, at any given moment, there are about 2000 people on our network*. What’s even more interesting, is that about 20% of those people are “writing”. Basically, what this means is that our customers have engaging web sites, that foster a lot of commenting/discussion. This is great for our customers, bad for our servers.. email is a pain. Handling email directly within our infrastructure would’ve meant that’d we be responsible for:

[list type="tag_stroke"]

  • SPF/Domain keys per cluster
  • RBL/Brownlist management
  • Upkeep of dedicated SMTP servers

[/list]

This wasn’t something I wanted to be responsible for, so I turned to SendGrid. I had written a post a few months ago where we were evaluating SendGrid for our higher traffic sites, along with a custom plugin. In theory and practice, the plugin worked, but it also turned out to be a bottleneck.

Turns out having WordPress/PHP contact the SendGrid server for every single notification of a comment/subscription added 700-800ms to each page load. That’s a small amount, but during peaks, this would escalate to a few seconds.. I realized this was dumb.

Just like I’m not a fan of all-in-one caching plugins, having this all-in-one SMTP plugin turned out to be a dumb idea performance wise, so as of this morning, we’ve disabled the custom plugin on all our sites, and instead made a server wide move, to integrate with SendGrid.

What this means is that no matter what plan you’re on, your comment notifications will go through our account at SendGrid, which gives you:
[list type="mail"]

  • dedicated IP
  • SPF
  • DKIM
  • Whitelisted with Yahoo, Hotmail, and AOL

    • [/list]

    In a nutshell, this ensures your visitors get notified of comments they’ve subscribed to, password resets, new user notifications, and all that interaction that’s so important these days.

    It speeds up our servers, as we don’t need to handle the email any more, and overall makes everyone look more professional, your messages don’t end up in the spam folder.

    * : we only install chartbeat on our medium and high traffic customer sites, so the number doesn’t reflect ALL our customers

Give Away for Photographers who use WordPress:: WooThemes Statua

Posted by & filed under Managed Wordpress, Photography, plugins, themes, wordpress.

WooThemes just announced Statua their latest theme for Photographers. I’m in love with it, so I wanted to share the love with all aspiring photographers. It’s simple..
[list type="arrow_right"]

  • Sign up for a hosting plan with us.
  • Use the coupon code – STATUA
  • Get a site with the Statua theme installed

[/list]

[styled_box color="red" title="The Fine Print"]
<fine print>
We’ll purchase a standard license for you ($70), it will not include the Photoshop files. Due to a technical limitation currently in our sign up process, coupons can only be used with a credit card, not paypal. You’re signing up for a no contract hosting plan, so if you’re not happy with us at the end of the month, you can pack up and go to a different hosting provider, and keep the theme we purchased for you.
This offer ends July 5th, 2011.
<fine print />

Check out a demo of the theme

[/styled_box]

In case you’re wondering what the benefits of WordPress hosting with ZippyKid are..:
[list type="star"]

  • 3X faster page load times than any other WordPress hosting provider
  • Automatic updates and back ups
  • Support from a dedicated team of WordPress experts
  • Built in content delivery network (images load even faster)
  • Unlimited storage
  • Unlimited bandwidth
  • Lossless compression of your images on our servers

    • [/list]

    For the photographers who want to keep control of their work, we also offer the ability to prevent people from directly linking or using your photos, this makes sure that people aren’t passing around your images as their own.

Memorial Day Sale

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

The long weekend is upon all of us here in the USA. Usually, this means sleeping in, crazy sales and movies. It’s also a perfect time to do some things you’ve been meaning to do all year.

So, we’re going to help you with the most important thing for your business. Make your website load 3 times faster by monday morning, just sign up for ZippyKid.

We’re waiving the $150 setup fee, for anyone who signs up all weekend long. No coupons needed, just sign up and you’re done.

You post, we host it’s that simple

ZippyKid – One year later, history, reflections, and future

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

Today is a milestone for us, and I’d like to invite you all for a  trip down memory lane. According to my records, yesterday was the one year anniversary of the ZippyKid website and company name.  I purchased the logo and domain name from Brandstack, on May 22nd 2010.

Technically, the company started at SXSW 2010, after listening to Dave McClure and Eric Ries at the lean startup smackdown, which was graciously hosted by the folks at Chargify.  I realized that I was out of excuses, and the worst thing that would happen, was my suspicion that this idea of a WordPress hosting company would be proven false, even then, I’d be right.. so I made some calls.

The first name of the company was “PSD2Live”.. it was a play on PSD2HTML, I never understood why they didn’t just offer hosting the site after developing it, I still don’t, if you work for one of those companies and want to white label WordPress hosting now, please get in touch.  Anyway, the name was cryptic, and didn’t really resonate with customers. Most of them wanted to know what a PSD was, even the ones who would email me the PSD from their designer had no idea what a PSD was. Secondly, there are just too many ways to spell “psd2live” the wrong way: psdtolive, psd2live, psdtwolive, psdtoolive.. etc.

Some customers had already  mentioned how much faster their sites were loading after they left GoDaddy to go with us, quite a few of them used the word “zippy”, so I think the name was stuck in my head, alas, zippypress.com was taken already, so I was back to square one.  Then, I was going through the weekly summary blog post from Brandstack, and I noticed “ZippyKid”..it made perfect sense. I negotiated the price, paid, and had control of the domain and the logo. So.. that’s why the name of the company is ZippyKid.

The next thing was, the phrase “managed wordpress hosting”, I wanted to show people how we were different from GoDaddy and other one click installs, having being a former Rackspace employee, and being big on customer service, I wanted to make it clear that I was building the “Rackspace of WordPress hosting”.. my lawyer/legal fee sense kicked in, and I knew I couldn’t use that before a team of lawyers descended upon me. So, I went the same route as Rackspace, with the term “Managed WordPress hosting”, I noticed Page.ly was already ranking for that term, and I figured since they’re bigger than me, this must be a term that converts well. Yay, I was right. Thanks to the help of my friends at Pear Analytics, I was able to lay the ground work to start showing up on page 1 for that phrase and some associated phrases very quickly (less than 30 days actually).

A little bit of SEO, a lot of happy customers, and word of mouth kept us growing in 2010. I hired Kai as a part time support tech while he was still finishing school, to help me keep up with the basic questions about WordPress, this allowed me to focus on marketing, and provisioning. So, people could find us now, and they’d get to the home page and wonder “what is managed wordpress hosting”.. when I tried to explain it, the terms “Fast, Secure, and Stable ” came to mind, it meant that we updated your WordPress core, and plugins, and we handled all the security need of the server better than the different shared hosting providers, as we only needed to specialize in WordPress installs.

All of this made us grow, in fact in the past 3 months, we’ve doubled our revenue month over month. I raised an angel round, and things are looking up. Over the past few weeks, I’ve been thinking about the messaging and how it could be more effective. I came to the conclusion that telling people that we “automatically update your core and plugins” for you, is the reason you should host with us, is dumb.

In the words of Chris Rock, “What do you want a cookie? You’re supposed to you dumb m…. “. 

The more I think about it, the more I realize, that any company that sells the fact that it “automatically updates the core of WordPress for you” is solving the wrong problem, you don’t hear GoDaddy talking about how they update PHP, Apache, and the Linux kernel on their boxes, or a restaurant telling you to eat there because they clean the dishes regularly. I’m not going to sell the fact that we do the things we should be doing as a reason to trust us with your business.

ZippyKid is a WordPress hosting company for businesses. Our customers are small businesses/enterprises that are self employed, all the way up to some multi national corporations with revenues in the hundreds of millions.

If you make money from your WordPress site, you need to host with us. 

You won’t find a more dedicated team of WordPress professionals who are committed to helping your business grow, and stay online. My friend John decided to work with me, and this is what he had to say about the core team we have here.

“The sysadmin/scalability notions are great for other nerds, but what sets ZK apart for me is three employees and a founder who all come to work every day with the singular purpose of helping customers achieve their goals. How many companies do you know of that consist entirely and completely of people who give a shit? Yeah, some of us are socially awkward, but we are absolutely committed to finding out what the customer wants and delivering it. That’s different. (Saying it isn’t different, but doing it is.) And that’s what you do naturally, what ZippyKid is built on.”

I’m working with a designer from Brandstack Custom on a new look and feel for this website, we’ll be launching that very soon, stay tuned.   Please also stay tuned for a birthday coupon and celebration news I’ll be sharing with you later today.

Announcing the Zferral WordPress plugin with Chargify

Posted by & filed under blog, plugins, wordpress, zippykid.

I’d like to announce the beta availability of our Zferral + Chargify WordPress plugin. Let’s describe why the plugin was necessary.

We had a client, who wanted to credit any of their affiliates for a sale once a customer had purchased something from the hosted payment page at Chargify. Normally, this can handled pretty easily with Chargify as they’ve already integrated things, but this client had more questions to ask the customer, once they paid with their credit card. Here’s where the plugin comes in.

Once Chargify sends the customer from the payment page to the “thank you page” back on our clients site, we needed to make sure:

  • If the customer id in the request string was indeed a valid chargify subscription id
  • who the affiliate is, so we can throw up the right image for zferral to track
  • depending on which page they landed on, the zferral tracking pixel needed to show the right campaign id
  • make sure we only show the image when someone comes from a chargify.com hosted page.

We’ve verified this plugin works, but I’m sure there are bugs, or it’s missing some other nice to have functionality. You can download the Zferral Chargify plugin and test it. Feel free to discuss bugs, and feature requests in the comments below, once it matures, we’ll submit it to the WordPress plugin repository so people can download and install directly from there.

the Zferral Chargify Integrator

Click activate once you've uploaded the plugin

Options to configure for the plugin

Accessing the remote ip of the user via Rackspace Load Balancers

Posted by & filed under blog, php, rackspace, wordpress.

Rackspace recently launched their load balancer service to the public, it’s an awesome service/appliance. It’s easy to setup, and works out of the box for most things. One thing we noticed that changed was that the REMOTE_ADDR of the visitor was no longer visible, most comments were being posted from the ip address of the load balancer, instead of the visitor. This also causes issues when you have IPS/IDS systems in place, that deny access based on X number of brute force attempts.

So, I did some research and found that Rackspace uses X-CLUSTER-IP in the HTTP header to send the ip address of the visitor.

We use the excellent mod_rpaf module with our apache installs, so we just had to change the setting from

RPAFheader X-Forwarded-For

to

RPAFheader X-CLUSTER-CLIENT-IP

This allows PHP to see the right ip of the visitor for REMOTE_ADDR, so you don’t need to change your PHP code/plugins etc to work.

Security Update – WordPress 3.1.2

Posted by & filed under blog, security, wordpress, zippykid.

The WordPress foundation has released a security update for WordPress, we’ll be performing upgrades for our customers between 2AM CST and 5AM CST on April 27th 2011. We’re not expecting any downtime for any of our customers, this is just a heads up. If we forgot your site in the mass update, please e-mail help@zippykid.com and we’ll get to it immediately.

You can read more about the update here.