Rocket.net Announces Edge-First Private Cloud for WordPress

Today is a very big day at Rocket.net. In 2020, we launched the World’s first edge-first platform leveraging a global network in front of every hosting server.

As you may or may not know, Rocket.net does not leverage any public cloud providers, instead we leverage bare metal providers all over the World; ultimately allowing us to manage every bit of CPU, RAM, and Disk on our servers.

In the beginning, we launched with very powerful servers, but we were leveraging SSD’s. While SSD’s perform well, we quickly realized NVMe was the way to go. While we’ve been using NVMe in production, we still have quite a few legacy servers running on SSD’s.

As we started thinking through how to properly upgrade these servers, we tried a few different things like cloning our RAID setup onto NVMe, migrating sites, etc. Then it hit me: why don’t we just throw a shim virtualization layer on our bare metal? Not only does that make our platform extremely portable, but it comes with a great deal of significant benefits. 

Today, I’m happy to officially announce the Rocket.net Private Cloud. Comprised of many vendors around the globe such as Performive, PhoenixNAP, OVH, and ServersAustralia, we have a true vendor agnostic Private Cloud, globally.

Having our own Private Cloud allows Rocket.net to stay far ahead of the competition with incredible features such as Live Migration. Live Migration allows us to instantly migrate an entire host node to a brand new underlying hardware with zero down-time or customer involvement!

Along with hardware refreshes, we also benefit from proactive monitoring to prevent failures. While hardware reliability has come a long way, nothing is perfect. If we detect a hardware failure of any kind, we can simply live migrate to a brand new node, once again benefiting our customers with zero down-time or involvement.

How is that possible? At Rocket.net, the hosting server’s IP simply does not matter. Many believe Cloudflare Enterprise to just be a CDN, but the reality is it’s much more than that for us: It’s the gateway to our entire platform.

With one simple update on Cloudflare, we can immediately swing traffic for customer websites anywhere in the world. Even if you’re logged in, updating a post, we can seamlessly move a site or entire server from one continent to another without causing any interruption.

I’m thrilled for what this new approach enables for our company and am beyond excited for what’s to come in 2023 and beyond for our platform.

For a full copy of today’s press release, please see below:

Rocket.net Announces Revolutionary Edge First Private Cloud for WordPress

Highly available, durable, vendor agnostic platform built for ultimate scale and portability.

West Palm Beach, FL. February 9, 2023

Today Rocket.net, one of the World’s most innovative Managed WordPress Hosting Platforms, announced the release of the Rocket.net Private Cloud, a revolutionary platform that is built to power WordPress websites of all sizes.

“Since the launch of cloud-based computing, the World has been under the impression that ‘the cloud’ is the simplest answer for their problem. The reality is that for Rocket.net’s highly performant Managed WordPress Platform, every millisecond and byte matters.” Said Ben Gabler, CEO at Rocket.net. “While Public Cloud is an amazing evolution from on-prem bare metal, there are many scenarios where problems such as noisy neighbors, high costs, and vendor lock-in come into play, as well as problems that are just out of your control as a service provider. Our new Rocket.net Private Cloud solves these problems.”

In 2020, Rocket.net launched the World’s fastest and most secure WordPress SaaS platform, leveraging Cloudflare Enterprise to provide an unparalleled experience. For Rocket.net, Cloudflare is far more than just a CDN for WordPress. It’s the gateway to the entire platform, enabling Rocket.net to innovate in ways that have never been seen in the hosting industry.

Combining the world’s most advanced and performant edge network with fully self-managed bare metal, Rocket.net has been able to create a breakthrough platform resulting in arguably the fastest growth any WordPress platform has ever seen.

Today, Rocket.net is taking their product a step further by unveiling the next evolution of their platform: the Rocket.net Private Cloud. The Rocket.net Private Cloud leverages industry leading virtualization on each WordPress hosting node, making their platform even more powerful and resilient at the origin while continuing to deliver industry-leading speeds through Cloudflare’s Enterprise edge.

By running their own vendor agnostic nodes behind Cloudflare Enterprise, Rocket.net simplifies and protects the customer experience by managing the entire stack powering WordPress. Not only can the Rocket.net Private Cloud be deployed at any data center in the world, Rocket.net can seamlessly transfer all production traffic without requiring any DNS changes, and most importantly, with no downtime.

During the initial testing of their Private Cloud platform in late 2022, Rocket.net helped one of the largest petroleum companies in the US to weather the traffic of a massive promotion. As the advertising gained traction and traffic continued to scale, the server needed more resources to cope. With the all-new Rocket.net Private Cloud, they were able to instantly scale up from 32 to 96 CPU cores with zero downtime, allowing the promotion to be a huge success on all fronts.

“I’ve been hosting WordPress since 2007 at every host under the sun and when I found Rocket.net, I can honestly say it’s not only the fastest and most secure platform I’ve ever used, but what I love the most is their never ending innovation.” said Scott Ellis, CEO and Founder of pixelterra. “When our fortune 500 clients need immediate scale, we are able to get the resources we need within seconds, all with no downtime. Rocket.net’s Private Cloud truly is game changing for us and our customers.”

Rocket.net Private Cloud enables the following capabilities, providing the ultimate experience for WordPress:

• Global Traffic Management: By leveraging Cloudflare’s Enterprise Edge, the Rocket.net Private Cloud can shift production traffic anywhere in the world from the edge with zero downtime.
• Immediate Disaster Recovery: With daily off-site backups living within the Rocket.net Private Cloud, Rocket.net can deploy a new instance from backup in seconds. Nodes are back online in a totally different data center than the failing node.
• Auto Balancing: The Rocket.net Private Cloud auto balances each host node to ensure they’re always healthy. Production WordPress sites can be live migrated from node to node or datacenter to datacenter without any customer involvement or downtime.
• Zero Performance Loss: Unlike public cloud, Rocket.net only hosts one instance per machine, allocating the full resources to the instance just as if it were running on bare metal while retaining the flexibility and resilience of the cloud.
• Vendor Agnostic: By adding a virtualization layer on bare metal, Rocket.net can move entire host nodes from data center to data center with zero downtime, even on dissimilar CPU’s.
• Instant Scale: Enterprise customers can now upgrade their resources within minutes. Going from Tier to Tier is now done with just a click of a button.
• Bring Your Own Hardware: The Rocket.net Private Cloud is purposefully designed to be vendor agnostic. Rocket.net Hosting Partners have the option of providing their own hardware and have it fully integrated into the Rocket.net Private Cloud infrastructure.
• Public API: Rocket.net’s API-first SaaS approach allows customers and partners to manage deployments, features, and WordPress all through the same public API that powers the Rocket.net UI and platform.
• White Label: Rocket.net offers a fully white-labled solution enabling partners to easily resell the industry leading WordPress product, strengthening their brand without exposing Rocket.net to their customers.

“We’ve spent over twenty years to get where we’re at with our bundled solution and I’m beyond excited for this next evolution of the platform”. said Gabler. “At the end of the day, we make sure everything we do bubbles up to customer success and our Private Cloud is going to enable some pretty amazing things for our customers”.

Rocket.net’s core functionality in their Private Cloud is immediately available on all new WordPress deployments in all US and EU locations on all plans at no additional cost and is available to all partners in their custom locations. Existing sites and locations will be migrated to the new Private Cloud infrastructure over time.

Inquires can be sent to hello@rocket.net.

About Rocket.net
Rocket.net, based in West Palm Beach, Florida, is a SaaS Platform designed for WordPress websites of all sizes. Since its launch in early 2020, Rocket.net provides an all-in-one solution built on top of Cloudflare Enterprise, providing each WordPress website with an enterprise-level experience with prioritized traffic routing and caching in every Cloudflare location. At Rocket.net, Cloudflare Enterprise (traditionally hard to configure and out of reach for website owners and agencies alike) requires zero configuration or advanced knowledge making it possible for website owners to focus on what really matters most: growth.