West Palm Beach, FL, April 2, 2025 – Inc., the leading media brand and playbook for the entrepreneurs and business leaders shaping our future, today revealed that Rocket.net is No. 9 on its fifth annual Inc. Regionals: Southeast list, the most prestigious ranking of the fastest-growing private companies in the Southeast, which includes South Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, Arkansas, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Florida, and Puerto Rico. An extension of the national Inc. 5000 list, the Regionals offer a unique look at the most successful companies within the Southeast economy’s most dynamic segment–its independent small businesses.

“It’s truly an honor to make the Inc Fastest-Growing Private Companies list, and it has been a long-time goal of mine. Rocket.net achieved an astonishing 1000%+ growth rate from 2021 to 2023, placing us in the top 10 fastest-growing companies in the Southeast region. I’d like to thank our amazing customers who continue to trust us with their business and our team for going above and beyond every day to make this growth possible.”

The companies on this list show a remarkable rate of growth across all industries in the Southeast. Between 2021 and 2023, these 192 private companies had a median growth rate of 114 percent; by 2023, they’d also added 11,493 jobs and $8.1 billion to the region’s economy.

Complete results of the Inc. Regionals: Southeast, including company profiles, can be found at https://www.inc.com/regionals/southeast starting April 1. You’ll also find an interactive database that can be sorted by industry, metro area, and other criteria.

“The honorees on this year’s Inc. Regionals list are true trailblazers driving economic growth in their respective regions, industries, and beyond. This list celebrates their achievements and tells the stories of remarkable companies that are fueling growth and adding jobs in local economies throughout the country,” said Bonny Ghosh, editorial director at Inc.

About Rocket.net

Launched in 2020, Rocket.net empowers SMBs, enterprises, and agencies of all sizes to accelerate, protect, and deploy WordPress websites worldwide. Serving over 30 billion requests and 1 PB of traffic a month, Rocket.net’s SaaS platform enables customers to deliver their WordPress website securely within 50ms of website visitors. Rocket.net’s unique and easy approach to hosting WordPress is backed by 24/7/365 support with a 98% customer satisfaction rate. Learn more at Rocket.net.

More about Inc. and the Inc. Regionals

Methodology

The 2025 Inc. Regionals are ranked according to percentage revenue growth over two years. To qualify, companies must have been founded and generating revenue by March 31, 2021. They had to be U.S.-based, privately held, for-profit, and independent—not subsidiaries or divisions of other companies—as of December 31, 2023. (Since then, a number of companies on the list may have gone public or been acquired.) The minimum revenue required for 2021 is $100,000; the minimum for 2023 is $1 million. As always, Inc. reserves the right to decline applicants for subjective reasons.   

About Inc.

Inc. is the leading media brand and playbook for the entrepreneurs and business leaders shaping our future. Through its journalism, Inc. aims to inform, educate, and elevate the profile of its community: the risk-takers, the innovators, and the ultra-driven go-getters who are creating the future of business. Inc. is published by Mansueto Ventures LLC, along with fellow leading business publication Fast Company. For more information, visit www.inc.com.

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

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.

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.

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! 

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.

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.

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

Internally, we’ve invested heavily in our operational growth, ranging from staffing to API improvements, ultimately paving the way for ultimate scale.

Externally, we’re proudly a part of five for the future and were fortunate enough to sponsor several WordCamps around the world. I am beyond proud of the work we’ve accomplished to help give back to the wonderful WordPress community.

With that said, we will be doing our biggest WordCamp sponsorship ever this year at WCUS in Portland, Oregon September 17-20th, 2024! We’re going to be unveiling some amazing new updates and features at our booth, you won’t want to miss it! 

PS. If you’re heading to WCUS, reach out to us for a spot at our Rocket.net WordPress Appreciation Dinner (more details coming soon). 

As we jump into a recap of our fourth year, I’d like to take this time to sincerely thank all of our wonderful customers and the entire Rocket.net team for continuing to make Rocket.net an industry leader.

Customer Service Success

For the last twenty four years, I’ve learned that the most important thing in any business is your customer. In the early days of Rocket.net, we were quickly gaining traction for our lightning fast and secure WordPress delivery, powered by Cloudflare Enterprise and Enterprise hosting servers.

Today, I’d argue we’re widely known for our top-notch customer service. At the end of the day, anyone can integrate with Cloudflare, procure Enterprise-grade servers, but the one thing our competitors can’t recreate: passion.

At Rocket.net, we are all extremely passionate about customer success. Our entire team goes the distance every single day for our customers and it does not go unnoticed.

In the last four years, we’ve had thousands and thousands of interactions with our customers. At Rocket.net, it’s always quality over quantity, which is why we proudly stand by our 97% customer satisfaction rate, a rate that we’ve maintained since the beginning.

Last year alone, we handled over 45,000 conversations with a sub one minute response time, backed by our 97% satisfaction rate. So it’s not just about taking a chat within one minute, it’s truly about providing the ultimate solution for our customers, no matter how long it takes.

Rocket.net Platform Improvements

In 2023, we appointed Dave Koston as our CTO, which has had an incredible impact on our business. Dave’s extensive background in software development, architecture, and overall business has been crucial to our continued success in year four.

Every company in the World has tech debt and typically does whatever it takes to get to market in the beginning. As Dave joined the company, he heavily focused on building out our stack and engineering team to handle the growth of our platform. 

Along with our massive API improvements, we released several crucial features in year four:

• Enterprise Disaster Recovery
• Lock My Site
• Enterprise Identity and Access Management
• Site Templates

This may not seem like a lot of features at first glance, but the first half of year four was largely spent on platform improvements behind the scenes to enable future feature development and scale. We were also able to relaunch our affiliate program on a new and improved platform that gives publishers even more options to generate commissions by referring customers to us.

What’s next for Rocket.net?

With the foundation we’ve built over the last four years, it’s enabled us to not only build out our engineering team, but it has also enabled us to double down on our staffing.

From a staffing perspective, we will continue to add the best of the best to our team (we’re hiring) and continue to scale up as needed for our growth. We’re also heavily investing in our internal tooling with our engineering team to reduce support load and better service our customer needs. From bug fixes to automating migrations, our team has been working incredibly hard to streamline customer needs on our platform.

When it comes to our product and platform, as we enter year five of Rocket.net, we have some incredible features lined up. While I can’t mention all of them just yet, here are some things you can expect to see in the near future:

• Site Cloning
• Managed DNS
• Transactional Emails
• Enhanced Staging Functionality
• All-new Manual Backup System
• Site Snapshots
• SAML integration for Enterprise SSO

and much, much more!

With all the development effort and investments we’ve made into our platform this year, this means that we can deliver on some massive product announcements that will be coming your way. Stay tuned!

As the Director of Operations, I’ve been at the helm of a very dynamic and successful startup, navigating through challenges, redefining support structures, streamlining billing processes, and charting a course for success. In this extended blog post, I’ll delve deeper into the challenges encountered and the strategic solutions we’ve already implemented as we prepare for the next phase of growth.

1. Support Team Redefinition: Striking a Balance for Maximum Scale

In the vast expanse of a startup’s early stages, organizational structure is typically very flat. It’s not uncommon to see the entire team working in various parts of the business to ultimately achieve the same goal – customer success.

As your startup continues to grow, reshaping the support team’s operations is crucial when it comes to sustaining growth especially when your customers  need quick responses and nimble problem-solving.

There’s an old saying “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” which if you’re not able to plan ahead, this may very well seem relevant… but I promise you it’s not. The reality is, a flat organization can only scale so far and as your business grows, you have to adapt.

“One of the keys to success, is being able to stay ahead of your current state by anticipating growth and planning ahead of time before it’s too late”

Danielle Hardy, Director of Operations

As I joined Rocket.net, our CEO Ben Gabler was well aware of this need, in fact sometimes I think he has a crystal ball! In any case, I knew exactly what we had to do; scale.

In order to properly scale our support team, I came up with a strategy that involved  a slight restructure of our support organization with a new role: WordPress Engineer, Team Lead. By introducing an official leader on each shift, it allows us to empower our WordPress Engineers with comprehensive training and autonomy in resolving issues swiftly. 

As you can imagine, this is a very delicate situation and new concept to a team, not to mention I’m the newest member of the team, so I had to be extremely careful on how we started implementing change.

With full support of our CEO, I was ready to implement the first part of our new structure, but first I wanted to get to know the entire team, not only to help provide comfort during some of these changes, but to get to know the team as best as possible since I was relatively new.

As I got to know the team better, it was very clear to me that I was surrounded by some amazing individuals with some incredible experience and a common passion for our customers. In fact, before joining Rocket.net, I worked for a competitor and I knew how great their customer support was at Rocket.net, so it came to no surprise that we already had members of the team naturally executing the majority of this role. 

For me, this was huge as it made what seemed to be a big change, not so big… just official. Fast forward to today, we’ve successfully implemented our WordPress Engineer, Team Leads and things couldn’t be better. As expected, this approach not only enhances our customer service but also fortifies our team for future challenges.

2. Billing Challenges in a Bootstrapped Startup 

When it comes to billing in a startup it often involves grappling with manual processes and ever-evolving systems.  For most successful bootstrapped startups, it always starts with an MVP, including how we bill our customers. For example, “We don’t need to worry about auto-suspensions yet, we don’t have any customers, let’s launch!”, this is not a bad thing at all, in fact it’s amazing, the goal should always be get to market as quickly as possible to validate your product.

So as you can imagine, when I first joined Rocket.net, there were a lot of manual processes in place. With that said, our team has years and years of experience not only in hosting, but in business, so while there were a lot of manual procedures in place, there were also a lot of things already in place that you wouldn’t typically expect at a startup… but there was one major thing missing; documentation.

As Rocket.net continues to grow, it’s crucial to have as much billing automation and documentation in place as possible. From service suspensions, to account cancellations, we’ve had to implement many different solutions to ensure a smooth billing operation.

When I first started here, many of the processes in place were brought to my attention. As I was accessing the billing situation, I began documenting every process to properly cover how billing is handled at Rocket.net. 

As we are nailing down these processes and workflows, it is showing us the many ways we can automate these processes further and is providing us with a clear pathway of what all will be automated next year, for a smoother experience internally, and externally.

3. Solo HR Navigator and the Startup Culture

As the solitary HR figure in our company, aligning HR practices with the incredible growth of Rocket.net has presented a unique set of challenges. Balancing employee needs, fostering a positive company culture, and ensuring compliance demands strategic navigation through the vast expanse of human resources.

We are in the process of Implementing an integrated HR management system that allows for efficient employee onboarding, streamlined performance reviews, and simplified leave management. This upgrade not only enhances overall HR efficiency but also ensures that our growing team remains connected and aligned with Rocket.net’s mission to provide the best possible experience on the planet.

When working with a start up and joining an already bonded team, introducing new internal policies and procedures is not always easy. Luckily, the team at Rocket.net knows that some change can be a good thing! With slight adjustments to how we all take our breaks, our time off, and our scheduled shifts, we are able to operate a bit more comfortably and ensure we are not understaffed during the higher volume times in Support. Not only does making adjustments like this help keep a nice response time for our customers, it helps the team remain stress-free with the amount of customers they are talking to.

One of my favorite things to say is: “You can’t provide good customer service if your employees aren’t happy”. As the company grows, new policies and procedures need to be put into place to help things flowing well internally and externally. Many people feel uncomfortable with the terms “policies” and “procedures”, but it’s really not the words that make people feel that way; it’s the implementation of them. That is the biggest thing I have focused on here at Rocket.net; Implementing changes smoothly, slowly, and compassionately.

4. Continual Exploration: Propelling Through Challenges

Like any industry and business, improvements internally are an ongoing effort. At Rocket.net, we’ve learned that innovation and adaptability are a necessity  to ensure the best possible experience for our customers and our employees. By addressing challenges head-on and implementing strategic solutions, we not only become better as a team but also stay ahead of the growth curve to sustain the massive success we’ve seen thus far. 

The journey may be challenging, but the rewards are astronomical as we continue to propel Rocket.net to new heights in the WordPress community; Always reaching for the stars to take our teammates and customers to the next level.

Celebrating our anniversary back in June as a 3 year old hosting company, we spent the majority of the 2023 focusing on supporting our growth and planning ahead for the continued scale of Rocket.net.

From implementing massive API enhancements to restructuring our support team, we’ve prepared for what we feel is going to be the biggest year of our careers – 2024.

Before diving into our 2023 review, I want to thank our entire team for continuing to go the distance for our customers. In 2023, we maintained an impressive 97% customer satisfaction rate across over 45,000 interactions with a sub 1 minute average response time; beyond incredible.

I’d also like to take this time to thank each and every one of our customers for their support and trust. Every single staff member understands the importance of your business and we are beyond thankful for the opportunity to work together and promise to continue to deliver every day.

2023 Rocket.net Highlights

As we reflect on 2023, I wanted to highlight some of our achievements that we’re extremely proud of.

• 97% CSAT – In 2023, we maintained an industry leading 97% customer success rate in over 45,000 conversations. 
• 151 Five Star Reviews on Trustpilot – We received our 151st five star review on Trustpilot in 2023. As always, this really hits home for us as we do not ask for these reviews, customers find the time to do these completely on their own and it speaks volumes to our team’s hard work.
• 7.2PB Bandwidth and 84B Requests – In 2023, we served over 7.2 Petabytes of data and a whopping 204 Billion requests! That’s over double the delivery we did in 2022.
• Executive Expansion – In 2023, we announced the addition of our CTO, Dave Koston. Since joining, Dave has made an enormous impact contributing directly to our overall platform stability and scalability. 
• Profitability – As one of the very few bootstrapped businesses in our industry, we continued to stay disciplined and maintain a very cash-flow positive business.
• $4.5mm ARR – We officially hit $1 million in annual revenue in August, 2022, and closed out 2022 at $1.8mm ARR. In 2023, we closed the year at an impressive $4.5mm ARR, making 2023’s growth rate 150%!
• < 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.

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.

2023 In-Depth

Now, let’s dive into some nitty gritty details behind some of these 2023 highlights.

Revenue Growth

In 2023, we almost doubled our business ending at an impressive $4.5mm ARR. This is an incredible testament to our hard work and dedication to our customers here at Rocket.net. 

While it’s not all about the money for us, I like to share these numbers to not only build confidence for our customers and team, but to inspire others with our journey.

We are one of the very few bootstrapped companies left in our industry and we take great pride in customer success. In the end, our customers are largely responsible for our continued and impressive year over year growth and we will continue to do everything we can for their business.

Continued Customer Success

At Rocket.net, our customers are our top priority. While it may sound obvious, companies can tend to scale and forget about just how crucial the customer relationship is.

Everything we do at Rocket.net always has to bubble up to customer success. Whether it’s launching a new feature or implementing a new policy, we always ask ourselves “How does this impact our customers?”

In 2023, our team did an incredible job handling customer support. With over 45,000 conversations in Live Chat at a 97% customer satisfaction rate, our actions speak far louder than our words:

One thing I’m most proud of is how well our support is able to scale alongside our revenue growth, creating a $201,000+ Revenue Per Employee factor. 

We never want to have our staff under pressure, so we’re never afraid to hire when needed (In fact, we’re hiring now!), but thanks to our staffing policies and structure, internal tooling and enterprise-grade API and control panel, we’re able to keep support at a minimum as we maximize our growth.

Make sure to read the post from our new Director of Operations, Danielle Hardy all about how we’ve had to scale our support organization internally.

Product Development

In 2023, it may seem like we were a bit quiet on new feature development, but it’s for great reason.

We spent the second half of 2023 preparing our platform for the growth we’re anticipating in 2024. From implementing 90% end to end test coverage on our API to completely rebuilding our deployment process, we spent much needed time stabilizing things and preparing a foundation for what’s to come in 2024.

Some of the things we accomplished in 2023:

• API Improvements – We made massive improvements to our API when it comes to our testing and deployment processes making our API the enterprise-grade our customers deserve.
• Platform Analytics – We integrated datadog at an incredible level allowing us to trace a click in the portal directly back to the API to ensure we’re always running in optimal state. 

While we have some BIG things coming in 2024 that I can’t share just yet, here are some of the new features already in flight:

• Site Templates/Site Cloning – The #1 requested feature on Rocket.net is the ability to clone a site. To take this a step further, we’re going to be launching what we call “Site Templates” so customers can deploy a WordPress site, install the necessary plugins and/or themes, then quickly create a template that can be used on future installs.
• Improved Authentication – At Rocket.net, we take security very seriously. In the beginning, we wanted to get to market as quickly as possible to validate our platform. Since then, we’ve grown at an incredible rate and recognize it’s time to take it a step further. We will be implementing an all-new identity provider to support SSO with various providers, including SAML integrations for Enterprise. This will also enable 2FA on all Rocket.net accounts.
• Enhanced Backup Retention – We will be pushing from 14 days to 30 days on all of our daily backups. This will come at no additional charge and be available very soon to all customers.
• Improved Staging Functionality – If you asked me today, I would tell you that the thing we could improve the most is our staging functionality. While we have made massive improvements to the current system in the last few weeks, we are working hard to completely rewrite our staging system.

These are just some of the things we have in store for 2024, but they speak volumes to how we are continuing to service our customers to provide them with maximum value.

While we continue to iterate on the existing feature set, we do have some very big things we’ll be announcing in the next few weeks, so stay tuned!

Looking Ahead Into 2024

While 2023 was a great year and put us in a phenomenal position, our entire team is incredibly excited for 2024. In 2024, we will be sponsoring more WordCamps, contributing more to WordPress core, and providing the most incredible and unique experience in the market.

In 2024, we will remain committed to our customers to provide them with the best possible experience for their business. We will continue to go the extra mile and do whatever it takes to make our customers successful as well as our team here at Rocket.net.

With that said, if you’re heading to any WordCamp or events this year, we would love to meet! Listed below is a current list of places to catch us in 2024. We have an all-new events page coming very soon as we’re constantly adding more and more events!

• WordCamp Nepal – January 12-13, 2024 in Nepal
• WordCamp Phoenix – February 9-10, 2024 in Phoenix, AZ
• Cloudfest – March 7-9, 2024 in Europa-Park, Germany
• Wordcamp Asia – March 7-9, 2023 in Taipei, Taiwan
• Tastemaker – March 13-16, 2024 in Chicago, IL
• Cloudfest US – June 5-8, 2024 in Austin, TX
• WordCamp US – September 17-20, 2024 in Portland, OR

As you can see, we definitely have a busy 2024 ahead of us, but we’re thrilled! More events, more features, and more success.

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!

Dave has not only been in the hosting industry for over twenty years, but he was a critical part of building and scaling the world’s largest control panel – cPanel. On top of that, he played a crucial role at Cloudflare in the early days where he helped build features for the world’s largest network… also something we use today at Rocket.net.

Over the course of my career, I’ve learned a great deal about software engineering and architecture from Dave and truth be told… it’s a very big reason why Rocket.net is built the way it is today.

In the beginning, Rocket.net stood out with our SaaS approach to WordPress. We were one of the only companies at the time that actually had an API! With Dave’s vast experience in building API’s and systems at scale, I’m excited to take the Rocket.net platform to the next level.

Read more about Dave joining Rocket.net from our Press Release below:

Rocket.net Appoints Dave Koston, of cPanel and Cloudflare, Chief Technology Officer.

Experienced Startup CTO and Engineering Lead. Delivered products used by millions of businesses. 

West Palm Beach, FL. July 19, 2023

Rocket.net, Managed WordPress Hosting Platform, announces the hiring of Dave Koston as its Chief Technology Officer, where he’ll oversee all things Engineering and Infrastructure. 

Koston brings over twenty years of experience in enterprise technology to the growing platform. Former VP of Operations and employee number 3 at cPanel, Koston helped grow the business to 75 employees and high double digit MM revenue while also helping cPanel become the leading web hosting control panel software in the world. 

Koston also worked at Cloudflare where he led the TLS team, which was responsible for managing SSL Certificates for millions of customers including enterprise customers in banking and other fields. He also led a team at Cloudflare to build the API that powers Cloudflare’s joint venture with Baidu, Yunjiasu (su.baidu.com​).

More recently, Koston was an Area Architect at Coalition, a cyber security startup valued at over $5 billion, where he helped build products to secure and protect businesses across hundreds of different industries.

Dave Koston on his new position, “Joining Rocket.net is one of the most exciting choices I’ve made in my career. Ben and the team have created amazing value for their customers by focusing on pushing the boundaries of content delivery and security through development of new technologies, and most importantly, by being relentlessly passionate about their clients’ success. I can’t wait to help Rocket.net continue to create new innovations and deliver delightful experiences for consumers.”

“Hiring Dave was something I’ve been banking on since the beginning of Rocket.net.” said Ben Gabler, CEO at Rocket.net. “I’ve successfully worked with Dave on various projects over the last twenty years and his experience across the hosting, edge, security and overall SaaS space is invaluable for the future of the Rocket.net platform.”

With Dave leading up engineering, Rocket.net will be heavily investing in new product development, including its all-new Intelligent Edge Platform that leverages AI to balance traffic across multiple CDN platforms around the globe.

About Rocket.net

Rocket.net, based in West Palm Beach, Florida, is a SaaS Platform initially designed for WordPress websites of all sizes. Since its launch in early 2020, Rocket.net has provided an all-in-one solution built on top of the world’s most Intelligent Edge CDN and WAF, providing each WordPress website with an enterprise-level delivery and security experience in 665+ points of presence around the globe. At Rocket.net, edge services such as CDN and WAF (traditionally hard to configure and out of reach for website owners and agencies alike) require zero configuration or advanced knowledge making it possible for website owners to focus on what really matters most: growth.

Beyond what the spreadsheets say as we blew past $3.1mm ARR in Q2, I’m most proud about the values we collectively stand for as a company.

Not only does our platform power some of the largest WordPress sites on the internet, even more important is that we’ve built such an amazing culture inside and out of Rocket.net with integrity.

With that said, I’d like to look back at our three year journey to celebrate our success with the hopes of helping other entrepreneurs as they embark on their own adventures, but also want to sincerely thank all of our customers and my team for making this such a rewarding personal experience that has hopefully made a positive difference in many peoples lives.

Humble beginnings with a vision: A recap on how Rocket.net started

In 2020, as we all know the world was an interesting place. Outside of Covid-19, I had just spent the last few years at Stackpath launching the world’s first fungible compute platform at the edge for VM’s and containers, all while getting my PhD in CDN and WAF. 

I saw a massive gap in the market as we had a large churn issue with our WordPress users. WordPress website owners were coming to our CDN services in hopes of better performance, but not totally understanding how to configure it. This was all before the dawn of core web vitals and all that stuff – People simply didn’t know what to do, if we’re being honest. It was no easy task back then.

2020: The WordPress hosting industry had zero interest in ‘the edge’

Initially, I tried reaching out to some large players in the WordPress space and there was no desire whatsoever to integrate with the edge (funny enough they copy us today). Instead, they were all happy with Google Cloud and thought it was good enough.

It was at this moment that I decided to venture out on my own to change the WordPress world forever.

So, in February, 2020 I decided to officially take the leap and hit the ground running. I officially started “project Rocket” on February 4, 2020 when I was able to secure the domain “onRocket.com”. I figured “hey, all the startups are doing it this way, let’s see if we can get some traction”.

Valuable lessons learned while bootstrapping a hosting company. It wasn’t easy!

Development officially started in March, 2020 and the MVP was launched quietly in May, 2020. From development to first customer was about 72 days and $26,000. The old saying “if you’re not embarrassed of your first version you waited too long” couldn’t have been more accurate for Rocket.

It was May 13, 2020 and we got our first customer, J2 Global. Shoutout to Nick Nelson and team for really believing in the platform. After about four weeks of perfecting the platform and a few more quick wins from friends and family, I decided it was time to announce it to the world.

June 30, 2020: The day my life would change forever- Rocket was officially announced and open to the public.

Initial growth and traction was very tough. I was no stranger to this industry having launched successful hosting companies in the past, so I knew it was going to take a lot of work to earn trust.

We started by doing outreach to invite users to test the platform and this worked a little bit. We had a few folks test, lots of ignores, and lots of skepticism. I mean let’s face it, we built something that didn’t exist anywhere else.

Rocket.net: The hunt for a new domain, logo and identity

One day, I decided to sponsor the Palm Beach Tech Association (now known as South Florida Tech Hub) and they gave us a profile page and our logo as ROCKET. It immediately occurred to me, if I was in this to win it, onRocket.com had to go… so I started the hunt for a domain.

I reached out to a domain broker and said “I need Rocket.com”… he laughed and I said “no I’m serious”. We couldn’t get any calls returned on the .com so he said “What about the .net?”… I thought about it and said “you know that could definitely work.”.

At the time, we were at about $14k ARR, and let’s just say that Rocket.net was not a cheap domain name. It was a huge gamble at the time, but it was one of the best bets I’ve ever made.

After rebranding to Rocket.net, things really started to pick up with some big influencer wins in early 2022. In one month we more than 10x the size of the business and got beyond the first 100 customers. This is crucial because this was now 100+ people talking about Rocket.net. 

Ben Gabler, CEO

Rocket API: Agency, Reseller and Enterprise WordPress hosting

As we continued through 2022, things really took off and I was able to start expanding the team. As I started to hire and train some crucial roles, I heavily invested in our portal to rewrite everything in React as well as completely rewrite the API into a new micro-service, paving the way for the growth to come.

Having a modern architecture powering Rocket allowed us to eventually launch innovative products like white-labeled WordPress reseller hosting in a brand new way that agencies were very interested in.

By taking a modern approach with our portal and API, we were able to do things no one had ever seen before in this industry.

Did you know with just a few lines of code you can fully embed and customize our control panel anywhere in the world?! If you really want to, you can completely recreate our entire control panel by using our API... it’s been done and is in the wild today!

Now hosting hundreds of high profile websites with tons of traffic, our customers needed even more horsepower, so we officially launched our Enterprise WordPress hosting product line in June 2022 which BTW is our fastest growing solution at Rocket today.

Rocket.net continued to launch a flurry of new innovative features that nobody else has to meet the modern demands of our customers.

• Smart Caching
• WordPress Activity Logging
• Access Logs
• Enhanced Backup Restores
• Site User Roles
• Edge Analytics
• Private Cloud
• WHMCS Module for Resellers
• Intelligent Edge

Why Rocket.net shares revenue results publicly

Forget cash flow positive… one of the most difficult things of starting a business is getting to break even. I constantly see new companies launch and just build so much tech before they ever validate the actual end-result/brand to the market that usually results in disaster.

To this day, Rocket.net spends wisely with the idea of always operating as a bootstrapped company.

As a bootstrapped company, we don’t have any investors, Rocket.net runs an intelligent cash-flow positive ship with a low burn rate.

Our three pillars of success continues to fuel the formula that’s worked for us since 2020 and allowed us to reach cash flow positive in the first 18 months.

• strive to always be the best product on the market
• obsessive customer support
• best place to work

Behind the scenes on our growth… or build in public?

There’s always a debate on whether or not you should publicly share your revenue. For me, I share our revenue to not only help build confidence with our customers and team, but also to help inspire others on their journey.

At Rocket.net, we do not run any PPC or direct marketing campaigns, nor do we run any outbound sales campaigns at this time. Instead, we focus our efforts on community involvement (WordCamp, Cloudfest), content creation, and ultimately customer success. 

Our growth has been heavily driven by word of mouth, organic search, and our affiliate program, with the absolute strongest pipeline being word of mouth. 

Today, Rocket.net is doing an impressive $3.1mm in Annualized Recurring Revenue and is continuing to grow with record setting quarters. However, you won’t find any lambo’s parked here! We continue to reinvest our capital in the platform and our people to ensure maximum customer success.

The incredible and passionate team behind Rocket.net

Growth and success aren’t just about revenue. Earlier I mentioned the importance of scaling yourself…

In order to successfully grow this business, we needed a world-class team. You see, our success is not just based on speed and security for WordPress, but ultimately the support that we provide our customers with for WordPress. 

Today, we have a team of nineteen, with years and years of hosting/WordPress experience across various parts of the world.

Thanks to our modern API first and large amounts of internal tooling, our support team is able to effectively provide our customers with response times in seconds and solutions within minutes beyond that.

Outside of our incredible CSAT scores, we’ve been able to achieve a 5 star rating on Trustpilot over the last three years:

Over the last three years, Rocket.net has helped cover expenses for birth, moves, health, and many more critical things in the lives of our team and their families. We truly are one big family here at Rocket.net and nothing has ever given me as much joy in life as watching this company take care of others.

We all show up every day to give it 110% for our peers and customers and every single day we do it with a gigantic smile on our face.

Did I mention that we’re hiring? Head on over to our careers page and reach out if you would like to join an amazing team of people that share a common passion for customer success. 

Some quick lessons learned along the way

As I stated earlier, a big part of this post is to help other entrepreneurs on their journey. Starting a new company can be extremely scary and stressful, but you’re not alone!

I definitely made my fair share of mistakes along the way with Rocket.net and I wanted to quickly outline them to help anyone else that may be in the same boat. Below, I’ve summarized some of what I learned along the way based on real-life mistakes.

Patience. The biggest challenge for me was going from a big company with tons of peers to a company of two. It was a much slower pace, not a lot of customers, and basically just starting from scratch. You absolutely have to be patient and allow the market to accept your brand and product. It takes time, but just be patient.

Discipline. It’s extremely important to stay disciplined. As a founder, you are responsible for finances, morale, customer service, and ultimately the stability of everything around you. Maintaining financial and mental stability is vital to success.

Trust. One of the most important things about building a business is scaling yourself. In the beginning I constantly heard “Ben this has been amazing, but you can only do so much… what happens when you get really big?”. Being as I’ve done this before, I had a plan from day one – hire the best of the best, starting with someone that has training experience. I had been on the frontline of support since day one and still to this day continue to help with support every day, so I was able to really help train and lead by example with how we help customers at Rocket.net.

What’s next for Rocket.net?

As you may or may not know, I always say “we’re just getting started” and it’s because I live in a world filled with constant innovation. We’re always pushing the envelope with our platform and are continuing to step the game up with new features and products.

One of our most recent announcements was our Intelligent Edge which is going to change the game forever by leveraging every CDN provider on the planet. Not only creating failover options in case of an outage, but fine tuning the best possible route for website visitors even if on multiple providers, down to the city. 

Throughout the rest of the year you will also see various improvements on our platform covering some of the following features:

• Managed DNS
• Site Cloning
• Site Templates
• Snapshots
• SMTP Transactional Emails
• Object Cache Pro automation

There’s so much more in the product pipeline I can’t talk about quite yet, but stay tuned as we’ve just begun this journey!

My name is Ryan Flowers and proud to be Rocket’s Manager of Customer Success, I’ve been in the hosting industry for 24 years now and seen just about everything over my career.

In this blog post, I’m going to take you through a bit of my own history in the web hosting industry and share with you some of the lessons I’ve learned along the way. You’ll also learn how Rocket.net has applied the lessons learned by myself and my colleagues and what that means for our customers.

Humble Beginnings

The year was 1999. I was in my early 20’s, and I had just entered the web hosting industry, which at the time was only a few years old. Linux was less than a decade old, processors were still single core, and 256MB memory was considered a lot. Google wasn’t a word, and Amazon was a rainforest. 

Most hosts were using Bash or Perl scripts to manage their hosting. If there were any control panels they were fully proprietary and took deep pockets to develop. The small web hosting startup I worked for used paper files to keep track of accounts, and account management was fully manual. If a customer signed up a new account, we’d run their credit card with a phone based merchant where we had to enter their credit card number manually.

 Early servers were powered by Intel Pentium II’s and Celerons with SCSI 1.2GB hard drives. They lived in mini tower cases on garage shelves in our office.  New accounts had to be created using the “useradd” command. Adding a website meant editing Apache configurations by hand. Email addresses, SSL certificates, and even the most basic add-on features were all done The Old Fashioned Way.

To say it was time consuming would be an understatement. Even worse, it was incredibly error prone. A simple typo could render a server offline until it was found and fixed.

Even though there were so many differences between web hosting then and web hosting now, with its fully automated self-serve account management, there were lessons learned early on that still remain fully relevant today.

Lesson #1: Customer Service ALWAYS Comes First

Early in my career, before I had even heard of web hosting (and before it existed) I learned that Customer Service was the foremost part of any product. And I learned that it has to be genuine, not some contrived version of sincerity aimed at pleasing customers. 

Through the years, I have done my best to instill customer service values into hundreds of people from every inhabitable continent. What I learned as a result is that good customer service doesn’t start with good training: It starts with good hiring practices. It is far more important that somebody has the right attitude than the right skill set. Skills can be taught, but almost no amount of training can cause somebody to care. 

At Rocket.net, we’ve applied these lessons to great effect. It all starts with hiring people who genuinely care about their customers. They are equally passionate about taking care of Rocket.net’s customers and propagating our company culture both internally and externally.

Although we received some serious early traction in the WordPress hosting community because of our unmatched speed and performance, it’s always been our customer support that makes Rocket better than all the other hosting companies out there.

The results stand on their own. Rocket.net’s Customer Service and Technical Support is a leader in our space, as reflected in our Trustpilot reviews and countless independent online reviews. Our customers always come first.

Lesson #2: Do One Thing Very Well

Diversity is as important as any of the other qualities that a company might possess. A strong team is made up of diverse people of various cultures, backgrounds and levels of experience. But when it comes to a company’s core competencies, diversity is an enemy. 

I’ve personally seen the ill consequences of too much product diversity at more than one company. In the case of my first hosting job, we attempted to make use of unused bandwidth by selling dial-up services, back when dialup hadn’t yet gone the way of the rotary phone. Consultants were hired, equipment was purchased, and some customers were gained. In the end we shut down the service and resold for a nationwide dialup ISP. It added to our pocketbook slightly, and bolstered our services portfolio, but didn’t add to our value and to our core competency: Web Hosting.

Years later, I witnessed a company overreach their expertise when they forced themselves into a specialized niche in the Web Hosting industry all for the sake of an extra buck. Unfortunately that ended in absolute disaster, hurting both the company and the customers who were affected.

For these reasons, it’s important to do one thing very well, and stick to it. I’m proud to say that at Rocket.net, we’ve done just that. Early on, we rejected the idea of even offering DNS or email hosting. Why? Because there are already companies that are doing great work in those spaces: Why duplicate the effort if it doesn’t add value for our customers? 

This has allowed Rocket.net to do one thing very well:  Provide the World’s fastest WordPress hosting.

Lesson #3: Having The Right Web Host Matters

When you work in the web hosting industry, there are certain things that become normal, even if you don’t like them. Take email for example. Email hosting is very hard to do right, and almost every hosting company out there will admit that. That isn’t to say it’s impossible to do right, but it’s hard, and there’s a reason that there are companies who specialize in only email hosting. This is a legitimately normal view.

But there are other “normal” views of hosting that I learned over the years that aren’t legitimate. The first of these is “your host’s security doesn’t matter as long as your site is secure by being up to date” and the second is that “hosting doesn’t matter when it comes to site speed: If your site is slow, it’s your fault.”

At the extreme ends of the spectrum there are some elements of truth to both of these assertions, but these aren’t nearly as universal as I expected. And what’s interesting is that I’d never have known the difference had I not started working at Rocket.net. What do I mean?

What Rocket.net has taught me is that a fast site is going to be slow on a slow host. We regularly see customers with sites that they’ve optimized endlessly with no real results until their site is migrated to Rocket.net. The moment they move it over, the site is faster with TTFB’s under 100ms worldwide, and they are instantly getting much higher scores on various web tests. Hosting matters.

The other thing that Rocket.net has taught me is that if your site is getting hacked, it might not be your fault. Most hosts don’t have the high level of protection that our Enterprise WAF, coupled with Imunify360 on the nodes, can provide. Instead, they resort to victim blaming and perpetuating the myth that “you’ll have this problem at any host until you fix it.” 

So yes, having the right host matters especially when it comes to speed and security. And for WordPress, Rocket.net is the right host.

Trust Your Business With True Web Hosting Industry Experts!

These are not the only lessons I’ve learned in the last 24 years, but they stand out the most to me. And what’s more, they’re the lessons that have been baked right into Rocket.net. Our customers rave about our outstanding customer service and technical support and what that’s meant to them in times of need.

And we’re well known for proving our point: Your WordPress site is in the right place at Rocket.net for all the right reasons.

BTW – Looking to start your own journey in the web hosting industry? Make sure to visit our careers page for open positions available at Rocket.net!

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!