Automattic, the firm behind WordPress.com and WordPress.org, helps power nearly a quarter of all websites currently on the web, serving about 16 billion pages a month. Its open-source philosophy means that it has spawned a vibrant ecosystem of WordPress specialists of all forms and shape. One of them is Pressidium, a webhosting company, and we’ve interviewed its co-founder, Andrew Georges, to find out more about the company’s philosophy and plans.
TechRadar Pro What does Pressidium do?
Andrew George Pressidium is a fully managed WordPress hosting platform, designed from the ground-up to be highly available and scalable (with no single point of failure). It offers fast, robust, scalable and secure Premium Managed WordPress Hosting. What this means in a nutshell is that owners & managers of sites built with WordPress can host their websites on our platform, and enjoy a completely hassle-free, care-free and easy service, allowing them to focus on their business and not on running their websites.
TRP Why choose WordPress?
AG WordPress is the world’s leading and most popular Content Management System (CMS), used by almost one fourth of all websites on the internet today. As an open-source project the software is free for anyone to use and has a huge global following of developers who have advanced the framework to such a level that it is now the de-facto standard in website development.
Additionally publishers are accustomed to the user-interface, making it very easy for one who is familiar with WordPress to publish content on almost any site which has been built with it. This has also impacted the enterprise arena who no longer want to waste precious resources, time and effort in training their user base on custom or proprietary CMS, many of which have ugly user interfaces, and are now switching over to WordPress even for large corporate websites.
TRP Tell us more about your collaboration with Automattic?
AG Well there is not much I can say, other than we are in touch with them, they have expressed interest from the very beginning and they have been actively testing our platform. In general we are open to all collaborations, especially with companies that drive the industry, like Automattic, as we feel this will in-turn make WordPress even better by further driving innovation and therefore further improving industry standards.
TRP Why would a company go WordPress way?
AG As previously mentioned, the true value of a truly successful and popular open-source project such as WordPress cannot be compared to commercial proprietary variants, and among open source projects such as Drupal and Joomla, WordPress is far more mature, stable and popular. The magnitude of digital marketing & web design agencies now focusing exclusively on WordPress is just overwhelming. This “battery” of expert know-how is no match for any other solution, that, in combination with the fact that almost all publishers and online professionals are familiar with the WordPress UI just make it the best and simultaneously the most cost-effective solution when choosing a platform for your company’s Website.
TRP Why would a business choose Pressidium rather than WordPress VIP or indeed any other enterprise grade web hoster with WordPress?
AG With the launch of our “Pressidium Pinnacle Platform”, we believe that we have the bar and started a revolution in the managed WordPress hosting market! Industry-leading speed, robustness, scalability and security are now within the grasp of every WordPress website owner or manager around the world.
With our webscale technology, any of our customers sites can now grow and scale from only a few thousand visits per month to millions and millions, all this ‘magic’ takes place transparently and behind the scenes. We have taken technologies used by Google and Facebook in conjunction with our significant enterprise systems engineering experience and have applied them to commodity systems, thereby deploying enterprise-grade architecture and design to more optimal and efficient infrastructure, tuned specifically for WordPress and for the web and thus dramatically reducing costs.
The Pressidium Pinnacle Platform offers all our customers the benefits of a true Webscale, Fault-Tolerant (FT) and N-Tier (Scale-Out) Design at only the fraction of the cost of corresponding solutions. For example the entry level pricing on WordPress VIP starts at $5000.00 per month (about £3300, AU$6200) this is an order of magnitude more expensive in comparison to our entry level enterprise architecture.
In conclusion, Pressidium’s Pinnacle Platform has no single point of failure and offers by contrast to hosting industry standards extreme levels of reliability and uptime, highly available architecture on every layer, automatic scalability, full server management, and automated backup standard on ALL plans.
On the security side, managed auto-updates, end-to-end managed security, malware monitoring and removal, managed web application firewalls, bad bots filtering, expert WP support, and a full chroot environment are also provided as standard. All these features combined are simply just not offered by anyone else in a similar price range.
