Rocket.net – Paving the Way for Massive Scale

At Rocket.net, we celebrated our fourth birthday on June 30, 2024. Over that short period, we’ve built one of the most admired and trusted brands in the WordPress hosting industry and seen incredible growth, arguably some of the fastest growth in our industry in a long time, without a significant marketing budget.

Since launching, we’ve shared quite a bit of information from behind the scenes. From revenue growth to customer support metrics, now I’d like to share how we plan to keep our 97%+ customer satisfaction rating for years to come.

This summer has been record-setting for our business, and we’re anticipating things accelerating even faster. So, I felt it was important to acknowledge this growth and trajectory to not only build confidence with our customers but also to help others who may be going through similar growth challenges as they scale.

So, without further ado…

How We Plan to Scale Rocket.net to $10mm ARR and Beyond.

As I write this today, our business is about to cross $6mm a year in annual revenue. We scaled from $0 to about $6mm in revenue in just four years, completely bootstrapped. There are no multi-million dollar marketing campaigns, no investors, just raw growth from building an incredible platform backed by passionate people.

If you’re reading this post, there’s a great chance you’ve been hosting websites for quite some time and have probably been with various hosting companies. What do they all have in common? At one point in time, they were terrific… but what happened? Growth.

Sadly, it’s very common (especially in the hosting industry) for companies to grow too fast and lose sight of the customer. We see this every day when customers migrate to our platform, and I constantly tell myself, “We can never let this happen to Rocket.net.”

I often hear our customers say, “Please don’t ever change” or “Please don’t stop caring like ______ company did; they used to be awesome too.” Heck, I even see us being compared to some of our largest competitors because they used to be amazing, like Rocket.net, which is extremely flattering but also a constant reminder to never lose sight of the customer.

To successfully scale a business, you have to be prepared for scale. That means hiring in advance, ensuring systems can handle growth, etc.

So, let’s break down exactly what we have done and what we are doing to handle our continued growth.

First and Foremost, It Takes the Right Team and Culture.

For any business to successfully scale, it must build the right team. It’s not uncommon for companies to do really well but fail to scale beyond the founder.

Over the last four years, we made very strategic hires, including what I like to call “hosting industry veterans.” From training hundreds of people in support organizations to booking thousands of sales demos, our team comprises individuals with extensive experience in the hosting industry.

We also built a very SaaS-focused CTO organization led by Dave Koston. Most hosting-related companies focus on infrastructure and reselling other products to customers, whereas our company focuses on building said products. With Dave’s history at cPanel, Cloudflare, and various SaaS businesses, he brings a world-class engineering strategy to Rocket.net.

To bring the team full circle, we continue to invest heavily in our support organization. From years of WordPress development experience to years of hosting experience at some of the largest companies, our team has collectively seen it all.

Our team is also part of the Five for the Future and takes great pride in contributing to WordPress core. Something we will continue to focus on and even double down on as we continue to grow.

Culture

What is the secret to a winning culture? In my opinion, fun! At Rocket.net, while we take our business very seriously, it’s no secret that we like to have fun. Whether it’s a dinner or party at WordCamp, we always want to make sure everyone is enjoying themselves and having fun… otherwise, what’s the point?

While staying focused on the business is very important, I strongly feel it’s just as important to have fun and enjoy what you’re doing.

Every single one of us will eventually suffer from some sort of burnout. It could be a bad day, a bad week, or just been a busy couple of weeks. Every quarter, I make it a point to get as much of the team together as possible to have fun and let loose.

A few weeks ago, I took some of our team on a team-building trip to the Bahamas.

During this trip, we got out of a conference room and really had some fun while we talked through strategy.

Our CTO and Director of Marketing devised a new technical content strategy for our blog while catching fish and soaking up the sun. I’ve always been a huge believer that the best meetings never take place in the conference room.

“If anyone told me that work involved getting on a boat in a place like this with team members that you care about and consider friends, then sign me up again because I love my job here.”
Jeff Trumble, Director of Marketing

We also spent a lot of time discussing different growth and partnership opportunities… but most importantly, we had fun. Having fun is nothing foreign to our team; we truly do have fun each and every day at Rocket.net.

“I cannot believe that we’re here in paradise with the Rocket.net team. This has been such a wonderful journey, but nothing compares to being together face to face as a team. Doing it here in the beautiful teal blue waters is unparalleled.”
Chad Beatty, Managing Director, WordPress Growth

Now, let’s get into what the team will focus on to sustain our growth to $10m ARR and beyond.

Building a Platform at Scale.

As a bootstrapped business, I had the Rocket.net MVP ready in 72 days. I took a bunch of existing systems from years ago and glued them together in a way no one had ever done before, with the goal of getting to market as quickly as possible to validate my idea.

I knew this MVP would only scale so far; in fact, I’ll give you an example. If you signed up for Rocket.net on day 1 and had five sites installed, every time you would load the dashboard, it would fetch your disk usage for all five sites in real-time from 5 different nodes… not scalable, but hey, they say if you’re not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you waited too long.

So, over the last few years, we’ve invested heavily in a proper control panel and API structure to support scale. From completely rewriting the API to building an entirely new control panel based on React and creating our own private cloud, we took a modern approach to solving a big problem.

Our customers rely on not just the hosting servers but also our control panel and API behind the scenes. We had to make sure we could handle hundreds and eventually thousands of customers logged in simultaneously, completing various actions, all while continuing to push updates and drive innovation on the platform.

We’ve also spent countless hours building what we feel is the perfect server deployment for WordPress. We’ve partnered with the best data centers in the world to provide a global footprint for installing WordPress on enterprise-grade servers without the fear of noisy neighbors.

So, let’s walk through the three big pieces of the Rocket.net platform and our commitment to each piece for the future:

API

In order to scale our business properly, our API has to be able to handle thousands of requests per second. The same API that powers our control panel also powers cache purges. So, as we continue to host 50,000+ WordPress sites, we need to be able to handle requests and management at scale.

Initially, our API was a set of server-side functions in PHP to power our legacy server-side rendered dashboard. This was fine in the beginning and allowed us to scale to our first $100k in revenue, but it was no secret that it would not handle much more.

So, we started to build a proper API, starting with cache purge functionality. Fast-forward to today, and I’d argue we’re one of very few, if not the only, Managed WordPress platforms that are 100% API-driven. You can open the network tab in our control panel today and see that it uses every API call listed in our API documentation.

This approach enables some of the largest companies in the world to effortlessly resell our product and allows us to move extremely quickly on product development.

But there’s one crucial part of our API that truly enables us to scale and sleep at night: testing.

With proper testing in our API, we know for a fact that each deployment will go off without a hitch (okay, I know that’s not realistic, but it’s close!).

We’ve also partnered with Datadog to implement an incredible topology for our API. From being able to trace each request to knowing our p75 response time of ~200ms, we have a full view of our API down to each request.

This not only helps us ensure an optimal customer experience with our API but also helps us optimize parts of it. For example, we had SQL queries taking 300ms to complete; we realized we could cut that down to 2ms with a simple index.

We’re also able to take this data and integrate it with systems like PagerDuty to alert our team within seconds of an issue on the API. For example, if cache purging at Cloudflare starts to fail, we’re alerted immediately, often discovering vendor issues 10-15 minutes before they acknowledge them on a status page.

We also get alerted to any broken functionality when the API tries to communicate with a WordPress Site—ultimately allowing us to resolve customer issues before they contact us. From broken plugins to malformed wp-config.php files, we’re able to remedy various issues before customers even notice them.

Our Commitment to the API
As we continue to grow, we are heavily investing in best practices for developing our API for maximum reliability and ease of use. From 85%+ test coverage to auto-scaling, our API will always be online and available. We will continue to build our platform with an API-first approach so every inch of functionality is available to customers through the API, just as Rocket.net consumes it in the control panel.

Control Panel

To properly scale our business, our control panel has to be readily accessible and easy to use, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

I’d argue that one of the most important things about SaaS, in general, is the user experience. You see, no one cares about auto-scaling 500 containers, RAM, CPU, etc. You may think that matters, but it doesn’t. What really matters, at the end of the day, is that you’re online.

Not only do customers care about being online, but they care about it being easy. In my career, I’ve always tried to make the user experience as easy as possible. No CTO in the world is going to log in and be mad about something being easy to use… but a marketing director can be easily frustrated by needing to interact with a hundred knobs and buttons.

At Rocket.net, I initially did a competitive analysis to see what our competitors had in terms of features and user experience. Then, I started narrowing down the common things like (S)FTP, PHP Selectors, Plugin/Theme management, etc.

I took all of the common things people do with WordPress hosting, built them with the fewest clicks possible, and tried to organize them in a sensible way. For example, if you want to change your PHP version at Rocket.net, it’s under the Advanced tab, the tab a CTO would look for immediately, but maybe the Marketing Director doesn’t need to see anything Advanced; maybe they just want to log in and start creating.

Over the years, we’ve built an incredibly robust control panel powered by React. Fun fact: one of the engineers who wrote Visa Checkout… wrote the first version of our control panel.

But we don’t have just any old control panel; we took a very SaaS approach. Did you know you can embed our control panel anywhere in the world with just a few lines of HTML/Javascript? You can even customize it to your liking! Thanks to this, we are able to provide our customers with WHMCS and WooCommerce modules to make it easier than ever to offer hosting to their clients, all while maintaining the same seamless experience they have on Rocket.net.

However, to keep up with the scale and new features like site templates, site cloning, and enhanced staging functionality, we had to go a step further.

In just a few weeks, we’ll be introducing an all-new control panel experience:

As you can see, this is not a huge drift from what we have today. It’s even using the same code we’ve had in production for years—just a nice facelift.

In addition to making things a bit easier on the eyes, we’re also introducing task/notification management. I’m super excited about this, as it will streamline some of the powerful features like templates, cloning, staging, and much more.

We’re also introducing a new global search feature that will make finding anything and everything inside your Rocket.net account easier than ever!

As we launch this new control panel update, it will be hosted entirely at the edge.

This means the control panel application will be delivered to your browser from the closest location on our network. Since our control panel is a single-page application rendered in your browser, it communicates directly with our APIs, which are also routed through our global edge network.

With this update, we’re also introducing dark mode and complete color customization. For our customers embedding the control panel in their own control panel, we’ll have a super robust set of new customization options; more details are coming soon.

Our Commitment to the Control Panel
As we continue to grow, our new control panel will make it easier than ever for us to keep up with customer demand for day-to-day operations and new feature development. We will continue to listen to our customers and provide them with the features they need to maximize the success of their WordPress business.

Private Cloud

To properly scale our business, our servers and hosting platform must be online and operating at peak performance, providing as close to 100% uptime as possible.

Initially, Rocket.net was built on bare metal. Every competitor I looked at was doing the same thing: “Google Cloud, 20% faster than everyone else, Google Cloud”.

Google is a great platform, but like all public clouds, I knew our competitors suffered from noisy neighbor syndrome, not to mention the egregious costs that went with it.

While our bare metal worked great, we knew we had to find a way to reap all the benefits of the public cloud while maintaining maximum performance while keeping it cost-effective.

In 2023, we built our private cloud and deployed our own VMs on bare metal. This approach not only allows us to be vendor agnostic and migrate VMs at any time to any data center, but it also gives us full control over every resource on the node and enables the most advanced disaster recovery strategy I’ve seen in my career.

At Rocket.net, every WordPress site has two backups in two completely different data centers. One set is available 24/7 in our control panel and is taken daily, while the other is taken every 1-5 hours, depending on the service plan.

The second set of backups is known as our disaster recovery backup. We can restore an entire node in minutes to any data center worldwide. This is extremely important for our enterprise customers, who must ensure maximum uptime. While “automated failover” is excellent, it’s expensive and typically resides on the same backbone/network. With Rocket.net, we snapshot our enterprise clients every hour and can restore them on any network within minutes.

Another significant benefit of managing our private cloud is that we’re constantly testing new hardware. With our virtualization layer, we can migrate VMs to any hardware worldwide. Today, we leverage Dual Xeon Gold 6536 chips for most of our deployments, but we’re also testing various AMD chipsets, along with the Intel i9s that can burst up to 6GHz!

Our Commitment to the Private Cloud
As we continue to grow, we will continue to test and invest in the latest and greatest hardware for our customers. We will ensure our customers are always running on the most optimal servers, resulting in maximum business success.

Customer Success

Outside our platform, I’d like to touch on customer success, or what may also be known as Customer Service. This is one of the most essential pieces of the puzzle. You can have the fastest delivery, fastest servers, most accessible control panel, and most robust API in the world, but if you can’t support it, you’ve got nothing.

Today, Rocket.net is widely known for its top-notch customer service, something I’m most proud of. If you look at any Facebook group or WordPress community, it’s not uncommon to see our customers or partners praising us for our quality of customer service.

Whether you have one site or ten thousand sites on our platform, we’re here for you 24/7/365, and our team will always do whatever it takes to help.

In 2023, we did over 45,000 live chats, with a sub-minute response time and an incredible 97% satisfaction rate.

Now, the challenge? Sustaining this incredible 97% satisfaction rate and sub 1 minute response time.

As I mentioned before, It’s not uncommon for hosting companies to grow too fast and then decline in quality of support. As any business grows, more challenges are introduced regarding managing your customer service team.

From multiple layers of management to managing various shifts for 24/7 coverage, it gets harder and harder as you grow bigger and bigger.

The good news is that we’ve been there and done that in the past. To avoid that from ever happening at Rocket.net, we not only staff appropriately, but we invest countless hours and dollars into our internal tooling.

Over the years, we’ve taken all the most common requests and automated them completely or built point-and-click functionality for our staff to assist customers.

With the proper tooling in place, we can solve problems for our customers consistently and efficiently. Outside of the tooling, we’ve made the platform so easy to use we rarely hear from customers after the initial migration.

With that said, we also know we need to improve the support experience from the customer’s point of view.

Today, our helpdesk is entirely separate from our platform. This can take a few extra clicks for our customers to get help, so we’re fixing that with our new control panel:

Customers will now be able to interact with support directly from the Rocket.net control panel, making it easier than ever to get to the bottom of an issue.

In some cases, customers will submit a ticket and may forget to include the domain having the issue. Now, they’ll be able to select the exact domain having the issue, cutting down on our reply time and ultimately allowing us to solve their issue even faster.

Our Commitment to Customer Success
As we continue to grow, we will heavily invest in our customer success/support team. From continued development of internal tooling to hiring new staff and continuous training, we’re committed to providing our customers with the top-notch service and support they’ve come to expect.

New Product Development.

Initially, our unique selling proposition was our edge-first approach with the always-on, no-configuration-required enterprise CDN and WAF, which delivered WordPress as fast and secure as possible to your website visitors.

While a considerable part of our growth today is our customer support, we know to keep growing, we have to keep building.

As we continue to grow, we will invest heavily in new product development. If you look back through some of my older posts, you’ll see me say, “We’re never done” or “We’re just getting started.”

As we continue to scale and grow, we listen to our customers. Customer demand has influenced some of our platform’s best features.

Outside of listening to customer feature requests, we’re always looking to drive innovation for our space. We have some incredible new security features coming very soon for Rocket.net customers and all WordPress users.

We also have a jam-packed roadmap of new features and functionality ranging from site cloning to enhanced staging functionality to enable selective pushing and syncing. We’ve also doubled down on our engineering team and hired additional front-end and back-end developers.

Our Commitment to New Product Development
As we continue to grow, we will always be focused on new product development. We promise to always be confident in our feature set and stay ahead of the curve regarding industry standards and innovation.

In Closing

Everything we discussed today plays a crucial role in our success and future at Rocket.net, as well as our customers’ future.

I think it’s extremely important for our customers to know we’re not losing sight of them and their business. More importantly, we have a plan to continue to support them and their business, as well as the fact that Rocket.net is run by humans. While we are not perfect, we definitely strive to be perfect each and every day, and our customers are never just another number.

Over the next few weeks, months, and years to come, we will continue to release new features, launch new products, invest in faster hardware, and do whatever it takes to ensure our customers receive the best possible service and support money can buy.

At Rocket.net, we all truly appreciate your business and look forward to growing together for many years to come.

Sincerely,
Ben Gabler
CEO, Rocket.net