Tackling the NGINX Challenge
NGINX is the force behind a wildly popular open source project that now powers more than 400 million websites around the world, including major brands such as American Express, Starbucks, Bank of America, Buzzfeed, and Comcast.
Originally launching in 2004 on their own web server, NGINX made the executive decision to partner with Pagely to provide its managed WordPress hosting needs. As reported in the Case Study, Alice Oh, Website Manager at NGINX said ,
Knowing that the Pagely team is there for us 24/7 has been invaluable, not to mention the reliability and visibility they provide. These have been extremely important factors in helping us meet our marketing needs for NGINX.com.
Pagely CEO and co-founder, Joshua Strebel is a 15 year veteran of the web industry, so he understands that every business has differing hosting needs and challenges to overcome.
Speaking exclusively with Scope Weekly, Strebel said, “We were the first-to-market in managed WordPress hosting, creating what is now a multi-billion dollar channel. We’ve grown to skillfully manage some of the largest WP sites on the internet – all while founder controlled and revenue-funded. This allows us to focus on our employees and customers, not investors.”
“We’re also more flexible than the other hosting options at this level, working with clients who run unique WordPress setups that others do not support.”
Pagely is where WordPress sites grow up to be. They may start life at some other hosting company and if they are successful they tend to find their way to us sooner or later as they move up the value stack of providers.”
Behind Pagely’s Success
In 2006, founders Joshua and Sally Strebel had a simple idea that WordPress could be better than it was. That idea blossomed into the first ever Managed WordPress Hosting Platform that totally refined web hosting.
Pagely is a Managed WordPress Hosting Platform designed to exceed the needs of the media, business, and Enterprise customers alike. Their goal and primary focus is to help website owners to successfully scale WordPress to suit their individual needs.
Since its inception, Pagely has grown from strength to strength. Taking on the challenges associated with providing a full-service managed WordPress hosting platform for some of the world’s largest and most recognizable brands, Pagely focuses primarily in the B2B market space.
To date, the company has provided a full-service managed WordPress hosting service for such iconic brands as Virgin Atlantic, Visa, Disney, the City of Boston, and Unicef, along with many others.
However, the addition of providing a service to the NGINX brand concretes Pagely’s reputation as being a dominant force in the managed WordPress hosting space.
When asked what he thought the secret to Pagely’s success is, Strebel told the Scope Weekly,
It might sound cliche, it is cliche, yet it is so often used as a throwaway corporate value statement: We value our employees and customers and proactively serve the needs of each. We live it everyday at every interaction.
The Pagely Difference
In a world where the vast majority of tech start-ups rely heavily on endlessly procuring the next round funding to help keep them afloat, Pagely stands out as having received no external funding at all. In fact, the Pagely website clearly states that the people behind Pagely are not interested in dealing with investors. Pagely remains a revenue-funded company and Strebel monitors the company’s cash-flow closely to ensure they remain in the black.
Strebel is a firm believer that old fashioned work ethic is far more important than running his business based solely on securing a round of funding. After all, with no investors to appease, the company is able to remain entirely focused on providing the highest possible customer service levels.
Strebel said, “Choosing to remain independent, revenue funded, and customer focused has allowed us to create and nurture the company culture we wanted – the price we paid in return manifests in speed and scale. We move a bit slower and are pragmatic about decisions that impact growth. Bigger is not always better.”
The level of customer support provided is also intended to exceed expectations. Strebel said, “Our support team is tierless, meaning that customers never see entry-level techs that require escalation for more complicated issues. This concept (which is rare in hosting support) combined with our ticketing and optional Slack support have allowed us to provide amazing support experiences without a phone option.”
Another point of difference that really makes Pagely stand out from its competitors is that the company doesn’t operate from one central headquartered location. Strebel said, “Pagely is a distributed company, with employees located all over the world, but we do have a small office in Phoenix, AZ, at the Downtown Phoenix location of Galvanize (co-working).”
Effectively, Pagely maintains a globally-based remote team operating in a range of different locations and time zones. When asked about how the company copes with ensuring such a remote team remains efficient, Strebel said, “Communication is key. We use Slack for day to day chat, Zoom for weekly team video meetings and try to get together in real life twice per year.”
What’s the Future Hold for Pagely?
Despite being the first to bring managed WordPress hosting solutions to the b2b market, the team behind Pagely still have big plans for the future of the company.
So what’s next for Pagely? Strebel told us, “We’ve recently doubled down on our commitment to leveraging AWS as our IaaS provider – deepening our partnership with AWS is increasing our market exposure as well as giving us an advantage on leveraging new technologies sooner.”
“It’s been about 10yrs since we started “managed WordPress” and this year we hope to reinvent what that means as we begin to roll out a few new products we’ve been incubating.”
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