Rocket.net – Fiercely Independent & Fiercely Yours

In August 2024, we shared our plan and strategy for achieving and sustaining massive scale as a bootstrapped and independent business.

As our business matured, we started seeing the natural growth progression, commonly called the “snowball effect.” We felt it was essential to be transparent with how we plan to handle such growth in an industry where growth can deteriorate a business.

I’d like to touch briefly on our revenue and cash flow, as they’re important later in this message.

As mentioned above, when we shared our plan and strategy to achieve $10mm ARR and beyond, it was to build confidence around our ability to scale our business to keep up with growth while sustaining our world-class customer support experience.

We are thrilled to share that we’ve contracted just under $1mm ($976k, to be exact) in annual net new revenue over the last 90 days, putting our year-over-year growth at an impressive 100%.

True to our word, we have maintained a 98% customer satisfaction rate, with over 15,000 customer interactions and thousands of migrations.

So, we are progressing on our plan and focusing on our mission to deliver the best product possible to our customers.

That said, it’s also been a busy few months in the WordPress community, with many significant changes and moving pieces.

Still, I want to reassure you that Rocket.net continues to stay independently focused on our platform and customer success while continuing to be hyper-focused on supporting the WordPress ecosystem, which I’ve genuinely enjoyed since 2007 along my hosting journey.

In the middle of chaos, we will continue to be the source of calm. We will continue to operate harmoniously, fiercely independent, and fiercely yours.

Commitment to Core and WordPress Community

We continue to go all-in on WordPress contributions; this is where our cash flow comes into the picture.

We are in a strategic position where we can put our money where our mouth is, so in 2025, we will double down on WordCamp and our core contributions as proud members of Five for the Future.

Today, we have 8 contributors pledging 75 hours per week across 10 teams. That puts us in the top 20 Pledges in Five for the Future. Now, it’s not a competition; this is not bragging, only a sign of our commitment and passion for WordPress.

That said, we are immediately opening full-time community contribution positions at Rocket.net and have already made a few hires that start in November, 2024. These roles will be 100% focused on WordPress core/community development, both code and no-code, during regular business hours at Rocket.net.

We want to help steer the ecosystem’s future as best we can from a performance, security, and overall usability standpoint. We know that our customers directly feel every improvement to WordPress and feel it’s our duty to help drive that as much as possible.

We still plan to hire many more positions, so if you are interested, please contact our dedicated community team at community@rocket.net.

Rocket.net Platform and Feature Development

Over the last few months, we’ve made incredible improvements to our platform and have many more in store.

We also launched an all-new Agency Partner Program with a simple all-you-can-eat 15% recurring commission structure to support agency growth and success for agencies not looking to manage hosting.

Our portal redesign is coming along very nicely and is nearing completion. From much-requested features like enhanced reporting and site cloning to usability requests like dark mode, this update will make day-to-day interactions with Rocket.net much more convenient for our customers.

Under the hood, we’ve also built new proprietary tooling in Golang to improve the platform experience for our API, paving the way for much-needed improvements in features like staging and manual backups.

Golang has enabled us to change the game for everyday operations with its speed and built-in concurrency.

For example, we’ve improved search and replace speed with our internal tooling by over 10x, a crucial part of our go-live process, and created the ability to clone files and the database simultaneously, reducing the time for tasks like site cloning and staging.

Outside our portal and API, the CDN and WAF are a big part of Rocket.net’s platform, which delivered almost 1PB of traffic and mitigated over 2.27 billion unsafe requests last month for Rocket.net customers.

It’s no secret that we have been partnered with Cloudflare Enterprise since our launch in 2020 to power the enterprise CDN and WAF. Their platform has been a massive help in driving the evolution of WordPress delivery with our edge-first approach and global sub-100ms TTFB.

On October 24, 2024, our CTO, Dave Koston, and I met with the Cloudflare team in Austin to discuss the market landscape, Rocket.net’s continued growth, and, most importantly, establish joint workstreams to maximize success and innovation in the WordPress space.

Did you know our CTO Dave Koston used to work at Cloudflare in the early days before joining Rocket.net? During our meetings, we learned some of his code is still in production!

During our discussions on the 24th, we discussed several opportunities to extend the Cloudflare platform further to our customers and the WordPress ecosystem. We look forward to taking this next step together to drive innovation and scale, following their lead on building a better internet.

I don’t want to give too much away, but this wouldn’t be a normal post of mine if I didn’t share some teasers; we’re working on some powerful security-related features that will benefit WordPress users on the Rocket.net platform (no plugin required) and non-Rocket.net hosted sites (free and lightweight plugin required).

We are also working on extending more configurable à la carte options on Cloudflare to Rocket.net customers, making the Cloudflare component of our platform more flexible to handle more unique WordPress site-specific needs.

Exhilarating times ahead!

Continuing to Drive Forward On Our Mission

We will continue to focus on serving our customers as best we can in a professional and courteous environment while devoting significant free cash flow to our community’s future and the overall customer experience at Rocket.net.

We are excited about continued innovation and growth as we nurture and build upon relationships with our partners and customers.

We look forward to serving our existing customers, future customers, and the WordPress community for many more successful years as we strive to be the world’s best SaaS driven managed hosting platform.

Sincerely yours,
Ben Gabler
CEO, Rocket.net