2022 – The Year That Set the Stage for Rocket.net

In 2022, Rocket.net took the WordPress hosting industry by storm. From launching several new customer-driven features, a control panel refresh, epic revenue growth, strong partnerships, and a complete rebrand, we had an amazing year.

Before I dive into our 2022 recap and 2023 crystal ball, I have to give some very important shoutouts.

First, I want to thank each and every one of our amazing customers. Without you, none of this would be possible and we truly appreciate your business and support as our company continues to blossom.

Second and certainly not least, I want to thank each and every one of our Astronauts at Rocket.net. In 2022, our team grew to seventeen full-time WordPress experts and I’m beyond thankful that we all share the same passion for customer success.

One of the main concerns customers had in the beginning of Rocket.net was “How are you going to scale yourself?!” as I was working non stop to handle support in the early days. But I had a plan! The plan was to surround myself by people way smarter than me with the right experience. People that have spent years training, solving problems, and working with customers.

Over the tail-end of 2021 and in 2022, our team grew from three to seventeen. Making strategic hires like Ryan Flowers, our Customer Success Manager made it all possible. Prior to Rocket.net, not only has Ryan been in the hosting industry for twenty-plus years, but he’s trained hundreds of people, something vital for Rocket’s success.

Pairing Ryan with our amazing team of seasoned engineers, developers, and hosting technicians has been amazing for Rocket.net, but the real secret to our success is passion. We all equally share the same passion for ending each interaction with a happy and satisfied customer.

2022 Rocket.net Highlights

As we reflect on 2022, I wanted to highlight some of our achievements that we’re extremely proud of.

• 98% CSAT – At Rocket.net, everything we do bubbles up to customer success and our Customer Satisfaction score is a true testament of that.
• 105 Five Star Reviews on Trustpilot – We received out 100th five star review on Trustpilot in 2022. This is really exciting for us as this is purely self-driven by customers. We do not run any campaigns at Rocket.net to fish for reviews.
• 3PB Bandwidth and 84B Requests – In 2022, we served over 3 Petabytes of data and a whopping 84 Billion requests!
• Value-Driven Partnerships – In 2022, we made some amazing partnerships with companies such as Atarim to provide real value for our customers. Feedback so far on the Atarim partnership has been incredible.
• Profitability – We achieved profitability as a bootstrapped business in our second year — a true rarity in the SaaS industry.
• $1.8mm ARR – We officially hit $1 million in annual revenue in August, 2022, and closed out 2022 at $1.8mm ARR, more than quadrupling our top line revenue in just 12 months.
• < 1 minute response time – As you start to scale your business, keeping up with quality customer service can be challenging. I’m happy to share that as we more than quadrupled in size, we maintained a sub 1 minute response time on support.
• Enterprise WordPress Hosting – Rocket launched a new product line of Enterprise hosting for our biggest customers that need the best performance possible.
• Feature Development – At Rocket.net, we’re never “done” with our product. Over the last year, we continued to release valuable features driven by customer demand.
• Re-brand – At the end of 2022, we re-branded Rocket.net to a more modern look that fits our platform better than traditional hosting look and feel.

2022 In-Depth

Now, let’s dive into some nitty gritty details behind some of these 2022 highlights.

Revenue Growth

We spent the first two years really perfecting our platform at Rocket.net and building amazing relationships. It was a true grind involving 18 hour days and countless amounts of blood, sweat, and tears.

In September, 2022, I spoke at the Founder500 conference in Austin, TX about our journey from $0 to $1mm in annualized revenue. It was an incredible opportunity to share what worked and what didn’t work.

Just three quick months after speaking at Founder500, we surpassed $1.8mm in annualized revenue. This is super exciting as it enables us to continue down our bootstrapped path with plenty of cash flow to invest back into the development of our platform and people.

Customer Success

At Rocket.net, every single action we take has to bubble up to Customer Success. Whether its a new feature, new website, new policy, I always ask myself “what does this do for our customers?”

At the end of the day, we work for our customers, not the other way around. It’s why you won’t ever see us doing things like killing a PHP version days after it’s EOL. That may sound like a security issue, but we’re able to provide secure legacy PHP support through tools such as HardenedPHP so that our customers can continue without being needlessly disturbed by back-end changes.

To match our revenue growth above, you can see the support volume climbing. Now, this is an obvious graph when correlated with revenue growth, but what’s not so obvious is “can they keep up quality support as they scale?”

The answer is, yes, but don’t just take my word for it, take LiveChat and Trustpilot’s:

As outlined earlier, this is all thanks to our incredibly seasoned team continuing to scale alongside our 98% CSAT score.

Product Development

In 2022, we shipped some amazing features. Some were driven by customer demand, some were driven by our own internal team. One of the best parts about our modern platform… we can move fast.

How fast? Take our Activity Logging feature, for example. We were able to build that feature within just one week and ship it to customers the following week. Thanks to automated test suites and senior developers, we can do this all while getting a good nights sleep.

Some other notable features we released in 2022:

• Site Users – This one was really exciting for us. Our Site Users feature allows customers to invite a user to a single website at a time. Need a developer to help? No problem, simply invite them to your site you need help with. The best part? It’s completely white-labeled! Are you an agency with a customer that just demands control panel access? No problem, send them an invite!
• Enhanced Backup Restores – This was a much needed feature. After a few years of collecting data, we realized there was no need to simply restore/rollback an entire site. Nine times out of ten, the fix was simply restoring plugins. Now, customers can choose exactly what they would like to restore on demand.
• WordPress Access Logs – We stream hundreds of GBs of logs from Cloudflare for analysis. When our customers said they wanted access to the same logs, we listened. As a direct result of those requests, Cloudflare logs can be seen right in the Rocket.net Dashboard.
• Smart Caching – For large publisher websites, sometimes you have things such as a Latest Posts widget on every single page. Cloudflare has a limit on how many pages you can purge at once, so we introduced a sophisticated approach to separating out HTML, CSS, JS, and images in the cache to ensure HTML can be purged as needed site wide without affecting other assets.

These are just some examples of the work we did in 2022, but they speak volumes to how we are continue to innovate and push the envelope in our space.

Speaking of which, we have a pretty incredible platform announcement coming in the next few weeks. Stay tuned!

Looking Ahead Into 2023

Our entire team couldn’t be more excited for whats to come, in 2023. From individual growth, partnerships, and new feature development, we’re extremely excited for the next twelve months and beyond at Rocket.net.

One of the main reasons for Rocket.net’s 2022 success and beyond is our commitment to our customers and the WordPress community. In 2023, we will continue to provide customers with world-class support and we will also continue to be involved in the community.

Speaking of which, we’ll be at the following events (and more) in 2023 so if you’re in the area, come say Hi and get some Rocket.net swag!

• WordCamp Birmingham – February 4-5, 2023 in Birmingham, AL
• Cloudfest – March 21-23, 2023 in Europa-Park, Germany
• Wordcamp Phoenix – March 24-25, 2023 in Phoenix, AZ
• Cloudfest US – May 31-June 3, 2023 in Austin, TX
• WordCamp US – August 24-26, 2023 in National Harbor, Maryland

We will also be sponsoring several meetups in West Palm Beach, FL, including one this month on January 24th, 2023 at Lost Weekend in downtown West Palm Beach. Free drinks, food, and seven of our astronauts to help with your WordPress needs.

We have an epic roadmap framed up for 2023. To kick it off with a bang, we’re having our first team on-site of 2023 in just two weeks to collaborate and prioritize the next quarter for all departments. We cannot wait to start delivering some of these new features and platform improvements to provide our customers even more value.

In closing, I would again like to thank our amazing customers and astronauts, as well as wish everyone a Happy, Healthy, and Prosperous New Year!