During August and September 2021, we made a bunch of short videos to tell the WPX story in a visual way (for Facebook and Instagram basically).
As you will see below, the best actor in the videos is Cookie, the Australian sheepdog, who was amazing and amazingly patient on the day of the recording. Cookie is featured here because of WPX’s longstanding commitment to helping unwanted dogs here.
When it comes to the on-screen performances of the WPX founders, Georgi Petrov and myself, let’s just say that we won’t be giving the Academy Award judges any difficult decisions for the next ceremony.
What we are trying to convey here is that WPX is pretty different to most companies and certainly most companies in Web hosting, so let’s dig in and check ’em out:
Video 1: No Mediocrity
Having used Web hosting since about 1998, I have used pretty much every hosting company out there.
Twice, at least.
And my universal experience was terrible – mediocre support, broken promises of “unlimited” plans that turned out to be very mediocre and overloaded, mediocre servers struggling to cope with normal traffic loads.
So in December 2013, co-founder Georgi Petrov and I set out to offer something very different, something much better: WPX Hosting.
The following videos and brief explanations will cover the How and Why we did that!
Video 2: The 30 Second Rule
Before creating WPX in 2013, Georgi and I were always really frustrated with the slow support of hosting companies (most still are).
Not only were hosting companies slow to respond in the first place, but there would usually be huge delays in their answers to our questions during a support conversation.
We vowed that WPX would be different, so we heavily invested in live chat support as our main medium and for many years, we have averaged 30 seconds or less, according to the independent chat software provider we use: Live Chat Inc.
This is how we are doing, according to Live Chat Inc. (hint: we averaged 25 seconds last month):
You can see how some of our customers feel about the speed of our support response here (view over 1,500 real WPX customer reviews here):
Video 3: The Importance of Being Independent
At the time of this post in late 2021, most hosting companies now belong to large corporate groups, namely EIG (they own Bluehost, Hostgator, and many others) or Silver Lake, who own GoDaddy, WP Engine, Flywheel, and a bunch of others.
That’s significant because companies in those huge mega-corporations have one drive: profit. And often that profit-centric approach means that the customer experience is terrible and you can see that in the Trustpilot.com reviews for those big hosting brands.
However, WPX is completely independent, bootstrapped, and is owned by Georgi Petrov and me, nobody else (you can learn more about our origin story here).
That matters when it comes to things like:
– over-resourcing our support on live chat so that we maintain our sub-30 second average response time (we have had that for years)
– innovating with our Fixed For You Guarantee where we fix any technical issue, fast and free, if a WPX customer’s site goes offline
– not charging for malware removal, which can run into hundreds of extra dollars a year per website at most other hosting companies
– not charging for moving new WPX customers’ sites to us within 24 hours, 7 days a week
– not charging extra for customers to use our own custom, high-speed CDN (Content Delivery Network) with 26 global endpoints – a platform that gave us the global speed average victory in all 3 entered categories in Kevin Ohashi’s independent, annual WP tests in 2021
– not raising hosting prices at all since 2013
– not charging for site speed optimization to improve Google Core Web Vitals scores for WPX customers
– and being free to pursue our own change mission projects like our no-cage, open-yard dog sanctuary, and animal foundation, Every Dog Matters (EU), regardless of the cost.
In a typical hosting company owned by a large corporation, those initiatives wouldn’t be possible and would likely be quickly rejected on the grounds of being ‘unprofitable’.
It turns out though that WPX customers also value their independence and most have left ‘normal’ jobs behind to build online projects to support a higher quality of life, such as having more time to spend with their family, instead of being stuck in a horrible corporate cubicle.
Video 4: The Seeking of Change Seekers
When something is horribly broken, it needs to be changed.
That was the state of Web hosting in 2013 when we launched WPX and we have been innovating in the WordPress hosting area ever since (they are discussed above).
It is also how we have attracted a loyal community of solopreneurs, webmasters, digital agencies, online project managers, and bloggers since we began. You can see their thoughts on the WPX experience here.
On our journey, we have expanded our change mission to also help unwanted dogs (and some cats) here and we have our own non-profit foundation and no-cage, open-yard dog sanctuary to change the lives of thousands of animals.
More importantly, you are probably on a change mission with your own Web projects as well, changing your life by:
– spending more time with your family
– traveling the world
– launching ambitious new projects to impact something important for you, and/or,
– gaining financial freedom
Hopefully, WPX can join you on your change journey and contribute to its success in a small but meaningful way.
Video 5: Speed as a Way of Life
Speed is a core value of WPX.
Speed when it comes to page loading velocity on our brand new, high-spec servers (we won all 3 entered categories for global speed average load times in these 2021 independent tests).
Speed when it comes to how quickly we respond to support requests, under 30 seconds on average on live chat, 24/7/365.
Speed when it comes to how quickly we move new WPX customers’ websites from their old hosts to us – within 24 hours (and it’s free).
In fact, we were obsessed with speed long before Google started making a fuss about Core Web Vitals and penalizing slow sites in its search results.
That’s why we launched our own custom, high-speed CDN (Content Delivery Network) back in 2018 – something that is free for all WPX customers. To my knowledge, WPX is still the only hosting company with its own hand-built CDN (most use 3rd party providers).
Why do we care so much about speed?
Because we are all getting more impatient these days and expect instant delivery with pretty much everything – your website visitors want that, you want that as a hosting customer and we want it for a high-quality customer experience for you.
Video 6: One Team, Many Friends
Our goal with everyone on the WPX team is to fully unlock their potential and change their lives for the better. We hire based on character and personality, not skills, as we handle training internally.
We realize staff potential through ongoing training, team building (including crazy stuff like skydiving), and detailed performance reviews.
Our ambition is to not only provide a great user experience for WPX customers but also for all WPX staff.
That’s why we’re not into corporate hierarchies, fancy titles, corner offices (we have none), or formal dress in our dog-friendly HQ.
If staff does eventually leave WPX, we want them to recognize that they learned many great professional skills at WPX, knew awesome people, and had many fantastic experiences here. In short, we hope that they feel that their time at WPX was really valuable and possibly the highlight of their working career.
And if we expect WPX staff to treat WPX customers extremely well, then WPX must also treat its staff very well.
Not sure why a lot of companies haven’t figured that out yet but it’s a no-brainer for us.
SCREEN CREDITS: Though they may seem like professional actors in the video above, these charismatic performers joining Georgi Petrov and I are actually WPX-ers, namely Vladimir Nenkovski (Support Manager), Yoana Genova (Deputy Support Manager), Hrisi Ruseva (Affiliate Manager), Svetlio Todorov (Team Manager), Dimitar Kozhuharov (Goodvibes Director) and Julieta Jeleva (Brand Manager).
Video 7: Our Higher Purpose
Coming soon.
