Table of contents of the article:
Today a new WordPress Hosting has been released, yet another Hosting.
Probably a couple of willing guys who have realized that Hosting can be a business.
They hired a server from OVH and mounted cPanel, which they will resell to their customers. 100 euros of expense, between server and panel that will make if they are awake even 2000 euros by reselling smoke to fools.
There is not even a VAT number at the bottom of their site, there is no PEC, there is no adequate documentation in legalese and bureaucratic about GDPR, Cookie Policy, Privacy.
We could simply postpone these aspects although we all know that they are obligations and not discretion of those who created the site, we could postpone and focus only on case studies, customer portfolios and numbers.
Yet none of this , no case studies, no noteworthy customers, no important numbers regarding tens of millions of unique visitors per month, traffic peaks of hundreds of thousands of users per minute, none of this.
Just a few logos from some small, unknown clients: A tobacconist, a car dealer, a barber, and a beauty salon offering tanning beds with 3x2 promotional packages.
Regardless of the bureaucratic shortcomings that we might call formal, and the technical and technological ones that we might call formal, we do have the SLOGAN. "The best WordPress Hosting." They haven't forgotten that. No. That's as beautiful as the sun on a gloomy December day just before Christmas Eve.
But God forbid they didn't write it.
Have you ever seen any company write, “The worst WordPress hosting”?
Seriously. Have you ever seen such a slogan?
Or driven by the intellectual honesty that prevails over entrepreneurial sense, have you ever seen someone write “A mediocre WordPress Hosting”?
No. They are all the best.
- Established companies with turnover of tens or hundreds of MILLIONS of Euros per year to whom we usually take demanding customers who are always Down with them? They're the best.
- Established companies and consulting firms that guarantee the same service with 10 thousand euros per month of infrastructure that we provide with a tenth of the cost? They're the best.
- Consultants who until yesterday sold printers and toners and today rent a Server, Do they resell it to you with CPanel and present themselves as the best Hosting? Obviously, they are the best. That they later discovered PHP-FPM in May 2018 doesn't matter. Basically you don't know what PHP-FPM is for and why we have been using it for at least 5 years, or since PHP 5.3, but the Slogan works. The best.
If everyone is the best, then we decided to suck. You read that right, suck.
At least we stand out, we're different, we attract attention, and you, who are reading this, drawn by the title, will probably also think that early-morning whiskey isn't exactly a champion's breakfast.
But we agree with you, and we are not prey to the fumes of alcohol (rather than good coffee) and we are perfectly sober. After all, what is wrong with being black sheep in the midst of a uniform white flock?
Or purple cows as Seth Godin would say?
What's wrong with saying you suck when everyone else undeservedly claims to be the best?
What have they done ? What numbers? Which customers? What case studies? What event with hundreds of millions of users per month did they manage?
Does selling 1 million hosting packages to local delis and bakers mean you're the best hosting provider? Or maybe it just means you're the best in terms of revenue?
Because if you look at it that way, then McDonald's is the best restaurant in the world, Swatch and Casio are the best watchmakers in the world, and Tavernello is the best Italian wine.
What do we care about Chefs like Bottura and his Osteria Francescana twice elected best restaurant in the world, what interests us about the Swiss Maison Patek Philippe, if after all Swatch bills more by selling plastic watches? What are we interested in Sassicaia with an average cost of 150 € per bottle if after all the Tavernello sells much, much more?
At least in their sector there's intellectual honesty; no one puts on airs with the slogan "The best." Not even established brands like Carlsberg, which in the beer world has revamped its slogan, changing "The best beer in the world" to "Probably the best beer in the world." That "probably" says a lot, in fact, says it all , and we won't even attempt to explain it, because it's clear, eloquent, self-evident.
In the hosting industry, this doesn't happen; they're all the best. Without any paperwork, without any numbers, without any facts. All the best. The best.
So as we have specified, and we want to reiterate we suck.
We sucked when we followed the launch of Quizdee (a popular quiz game on Facebook with tests) which made 100 million page views in a matter of days, monetizing numbers from AdSense that we won't say for confidentiality.
We sucked when we covered the launch of a well-known brand of gummy candies from the 80s associated with the world of football, managing the advertising campaign that aired between the first and second half of the European World Cup when the Italian national team was playing, with a peak traffic of 200 users per minute.
We were disgusted when Interior Minister Salvini published a news article first on his Facebook wall, then on Twitter , reaching 2 million unique visitors in the space of 10 hours for approximately 5 million unique page views.
We've sucked, and continue to do so, ever since we helped a client run a website with 90 million unique users per month (with peaks of over 50 million). We came from a difficult situation, having spent three times as much on BEST WordPress hosting services, with no satisfactory results and, above all, very frequent downtime. The alternative to another Best WordPress Hosting service was to spend $9 per month. That's $100 per year, in short. You can read the story in detail here.
We've sucked every time we've managed online advertising campaigns. From those that air immediately after Forum, to those that air on Sky, to those that air in prime time or, as mentioned above, between halftime of the national football team.
Or those times when we did not go on the air with commercials, but holding up the site of a well-known adult actress aired on Ciao Darwin (the program with Bonolis and Laurenti) in prime time on Canale 5.
A brief appearance of 2 minutes, nothing special, which in any case meant about 300 users online in a matter of minutes. Site online, no crashes although we were only notified of the event a couple of hours earlier.
If everyone else is the best, selling hosting to bakers and butchers, then we suck.
We suck even when they ask us for uncomfortable collaborations that with a smile on our lips and the paraculaggine of some envious colleagues in fact collaboration is a politically correct way to seek training and steal the know-how.
We suck when they install Apache and MySQL for you, and we go with our stack with NGINX, Percona Server and so many other things that we prefer to remain in our knowledge than that of so many self-styled best smoke hosting vendors.
We prefer to say “Thank you but let's continue on our way”, and then take the best customers from him.
We suck when they who sell hosting to butchers make 10 or 100 times more turnover than ours. It 's appropriate to say this time ... we suck.
But maybe it's just a provocation , maybe just a kind of game in which by playing someone else's role for the time it takes to write this post we have reversed roles, and the meaning of the words.
Perhaps, in truth, there really is no best hosting or best WordPress hosting. Maybe we all really suck, no one excluded.
Who sucks, and who does his job grossly well.
