How to Scale a LMS Website With Lots of Users and Traffic With Rapyd Cloud Hosting

LMScast with Chris Badgett

In this LMScast episode, Wes Tatters and Michael Eisenwasser present Rapyd Cloud, a hosting solution created to meet the particular requirements of high-concurrency, dynamic WordPress websites.

Michael Eisenwasser offers extensive experience in creating social networking solutions for WordPress, having co-founded and operated BuddyBoss for more than 14 years.

The infrastructure of Rapyd Cloud was created by Wes, a well-known server architect in the WordPress community, to meet the particular requirements of systems like BuddyBoss and LifterLMS, where users see customized content. With platforms like BuddyBoss and LifterLMS, where each user gets tailored information like unique newsfeeds, course progress, or quizzes, traditional hosting frequently falls short.

Significant computational demands, frequent site crashes during periods of heavy traffic, and the requirement for expensive over-provisioning of resources are the outcomes of this. By providing dynamic resource allocation that adapts according to demand, effective pricing based on average consumption, and state-of-the-art infrastructure with cutting-edge AWS technology, Rapyd Cloud addresses these problems.

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Episode Transcript

Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMSCast. I’m joined by two very special guests. We’ve got Michael Eisenwasser and Wes Tatters. They’re from Rapyd Cloud, which is innovating in the hosting space, particularly for sites that have a lot of dynamic content, have a lot of concurrent users. This is a big challenge in our industry.

They’re here with the solution at Rapyd Cloud. But first, welcome to the show.

Michael Eisenwasser: Thank you.

Chris Badgett: Thanks a lot. And Michael was actually a guest on the show, I think about nine years ago, a very early guest. So it’s really fun to connect after a decade. Before we get into the rapyd story, tell us about the history here.

Cause this came from the buddy boss world. So tell us, yeah,

Michael Eisenwasser: sure. So I had been running buddy boss with my partner Tom for the last 14 years. So we’ve been in this industry for a long time, and BuddyBoss was actually acquired just a little while ago in June. And and BuddyBoss also has been a good partner with LifterLMS for a lot of these years.

Many of our customers, when they want an LMS, they work with LifterLMS. And so BuddyBoss has social networking features, LifterLMS has the courses, and probably more than half the BuddyBoss customers were doing social learning. And that is really hard to host. So that was the biggest challenge that our customers would face.

And the biggest pain point for most of the customers was that they could not find adequate hosting anywhere in the WordPress world. And so they would either, if they got any level of success, they’d have, if you have a normal WordPress site, that’s like a blog, it’s pretty straightforward to host.

You can just do hard page caching, but if you’re trying to host a site where every single user is seeing unique content, that’s where it gets challenging. So on a buddy, while site you have a community, imagine you’re like Facebook, every person who’s logged in. As a different news feed, different messages, different profile, they’re effectively seeing a different website.

So if you have a hundred people log in at the same time, your server has to create a hundred websites. And then you add an LMS on top of it. And now every course, every quiz, it’s all unique. Not every course, but every their progression through the course and their progression to the quiz and all that.

It’s all in notifications. It’s all unique per user. So our customers couldn’t find adequate hosting sites would crash during launches. The only solution they had was to go to a traditional host and pay for like the top tier hosting plan, they were afraid that it might crash. So they’d be. Paying exorbitant amounts to have enough overhead all the time.

And so we, and we can go into it and tell the whole story, but basically we created a first party hosting solution that provides something that does not exist in the WordPress market. We provide hosting for sites that have a lot of concurrent users who are seeing different types of content rapid is built to ground up the service.

Those users. And if you have that kind of site that will you’d be shocked at how fast it is on rapid and how competitively priced it is for that customer base because it’s all around us. It’s very efficient at doing that.

Chris Badgett: Let’s just take a moment to celebrate the innovation in the room here. And what I mean by that is we took WordPress.

And then buddy boss brought Facebook to your WordPress website. What’s your LMS brought like you, Demi to your WordPress website. This is, these are incredible innovations in the space when you really think about it. And of course, when you think about it in the traditional software market, Like you, the way you described Facebook was great.

How everybody’s essentially getting a different website or somebody taking a course has unique things on their screen and unique quiz questions and progress and all this stuff. It’s heavy on hosting. And I feel like this part of the market has been underserved simply because I think it’s just a, in the grand scheme of things, it’s a smaller fraction of the where hosting companies get their customers from, but it’s an important piece of the internet that has special needs and attention required.

So take us into the tech a little bit. Like what, what has the traditional hosting industry. Just not been doing to really accommodate dynamic high concurrent user sites.

Michael Eisenwasser: Sure. So was can take over that. I’ll just introduce Wes. Although a lot, some people may know who he is, he’s pretty well known in the WordPress world.

Wes is a. server architect mastermind who has designed at a high level our whole server stack for Rapyd. And with that Wes can answer.

Wes Tatters: I think one of the challenges for dynamic hosting is that there’s no one solution fits all the boxes. Traditional hosting is a set of boxes. You have this size box, or this size box.

And for dynamic hosts, it’s the big box. It’s the box that’s not going to crash when their site has a new marketing campaign that launched on, or a product that goes viral in a WooCommerce platform or a new cohort starting of classes The traditional solution, once you’re in this dynamic spaces, you’ll initially be told you need a VPS or you need a eight CPU cores or 32 gigabytes of RAM.

You’ll be told specific, numbers that you’re supposed to meet to try and to to achieve what you need at that peak point in time. The problem is most of us don’t need that. 8 CPU cores or 16 CPU cores or 150 workers 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. But to achieve that in the standard hosting world, that’s what you have to do.

You have to go and buy a product, which is often very expensive or overpriced in terms of what you really need. Instead of a product that suits your needs. So we started from the ground up looking at what BuddyBoss customers needed. First, we realized that most BuddyBoss customers are shaped.

What that means is that at different times of the day or different times of the week, they have different user experiences. Some sites might have load in the morning. And some sites might have loads in the evening. Might only be busy on a Saturday. So that was our starting point, designing a platform that didn’t punish people or penalize people for the periods of time when they weren’t busy.

That was the starting point. It’s finding a way to even out or balance out or average out a customer’s utilization across a period of time. So at Rapyd, we don’t technically sell CPU cores. Yes, if you look at our site, you’ll find mentions of our plans are like to CPU cores or like for CPU cores. But what we’re actually doing is simply selling people processing resources.

So if you need a lot of resources or a lot of processing power on a Monday morning, you have availability and access to that when you need it. Providing you average out your load across a week, you don’t then get penalized for that spike where all of a sudden at Thursday afternoon, you need 150 concurrent users or a thousand concurrent users.

So it’s designing the architecture in a way that is different to a traditional hosting platform. To do that, we built it on top of some of the best infrastructure available. We use Amazon. We’re an AWS partner. We utilize their latest high performance resources at all times. So you’re not on a rapyd platform getting a small CPU core or a, an old, 10 year old, 15 year old processor.

This is the other problem we have with traditional hosts. If you look at the problem of hosting we have a term called race to the bottom and it’s been happening in the WordPress space for some time. How can we get it cheaper, how can we get it cheaper? And ow can we get it cheaper?

And the way hosting companies get their hostings cheaper is not to upgrade them. They don’t put modern CPU cores in, of course that costs money. So we’ll just run it on the CPU for the last five or 10 years. We don’t, we don’t improve our platform performance. We don’t improve our network performance because all those things cost money.

So what you wind up with is product that over time I’m running on infrastructure, which is incredibly old. Some of the hosting companies out there are running data centers, big data centers that to upgrade will cost a small fortune. So they leave them where they are. They’re sitting on first and second generation Intel CPU cores.

We’re now on fifth generation CPU cores. They will, being launched this week. In terms of server. Rapyd will always be on the latest. Product that’s available. Currently, we’re running exclusively on AMD fourth generation CPU in the service space. So it’s about choosing a platform and choosing a product that’s ideally suited to the dynamic space.

Latest technology, best infrastructure and best practices right across the board.

Michael Eisenwasser: Yeah, we’ll even upgrade the CPUs in the background for an existing plan on the customer, which we’ve done

Wes Tatters: since launching. Yeah, as new technology becomes available, everything updates. The customer doesn’t even know it’s happening.

We doubled our display, we doubled our disk performance in the last two months increasing all of our disk infrastructure. It just happened. The customers aren’t aware that anything’s happening inside the infrastructure. Um, that’s our sort of objective and that, that’s our guarantee long term.

We’ll always be there ensuring that what our customers get is best for their needs.

Chris Badgett: That’s great. And that’s a great philosophy to have from day one as you build the company. I think one of the challenges of the hosting industry for non engineering users, which is most users, is they hit a pricing page or a compare page and they get a little lost in the technology.

So just for a short spot in this interview, could you give us some high level education on, CPU, RAM, PHP workers? What does this mean? Like we’re supposed to, as a non technical buyer, we’re supposed to Oh I think I need this or that, but we don’t really know. So can we do a public service and level up some understanding of that?

Wes Tatters: Yeah. 100 percent

PHP is our underlying platform. It’s the software that ensures that WordPress runs. PHP is a very mature product, but also comes with its own set of problems. Every time someone requests a page on a website, it requires what’s called a PHP worker. So that’s a program that’s going to run to generate that page request.

Number of PHP workers that are available on your hosting controls the number of page requests that can happen at the same time. It’s that simple. If your site says you’ve got 10 PHP workers, then it’s impossible to generate more than 10 simultaneous requests because those PHP workers are single threaded.

They’re exclusive to that page request. So if you’ve got a site with 10 people visiting at the same time, then 10 PHP workers will be running every time that page request hits. Now, the problem is when we get into big WordPress sites might be a hundred concurrent users. So now we’re talking about something that might need a hundred PHP workers to generate all those simultaneous page requests.

On top of that, we have sites like BuddyBoss and Lifter that use Ajax or REST requests. Every one of those requests also needs a PHP worker. So in BuddyBoss for a number of years, BuddyBoss, to load the BuddyBoss activity feed used to take four page requests. So it would load the main page, it would then load the activity feed, it would then load a notification window, and it would load a message, messaging window.

That’s four PHP workers, four concurrent requests to generate that single page of information. Again, now you add a hundred concurrent users on the site, and all of a sudden you’ve got quite a lot of performance load. The other challenge with the PHP worker is that PHP workers need exclusive memory.

So while a PHP worker is running, it needs a little block of RAM that’s available to it and only it. Now on a small blogging site, it might be a simple blog, you might only need 20 or 30 megabytes of RAM. Exclusively allocated to that PHP worker. On a dynamic site with BuddyBoss, Lifter, WooCommerce, we have sites that need 250 megabytes of RAM to load that page, to do all the processing.

Similarly, in WP admin, we have sites potentially needing up to a gigabyte of memory. To handle all that background processing. When you’re in a block builder like Gutenberg, all of the juggling that’s happening requires a lot of extra memory. PHP workers are uniquely linked to two things.

The, a number of concurrent users and the avail of, and the amount of them available memory. Inside your hosting. So if your host says, for example, you’ve got unlimited PHP workers. It doesn’t make sense because to have unlimited PHP workers would mean you needed unlimited memory. And we all know that your plan only gave you 16 megabytes, gigabytes of Ram or eight gigabytes of Ram, or maybe 32.

So we get into a lot of. of marketing jargon that doesn’t necessarily match up with our technology needs. We then get into challenges about what that all means. The first question comes CPU. So a CPU obviously is a computer. We know what a computer is. And we know that our iPhone has a a CPU in it. We know that our computer and our laptop has a CPU in it.

The CPU is the processing unit that does all the work. No two CPUs, however, are created equal. It’s a bit like buying a four cylinder engine car or an eight cylinder engine car. You can actually buy two four cylinder engine cars, one that’s super powerful and one that’s incredibly slow. Of course, they’re different versions or different iterations.

So over time, most of the hosting companies have wound up in situations where they sell CPU cores at a price point. But not necessarily the latest CPU. So if we look at the CPU world in the hosting world, there are currently four generations of hosting service CPUs available from both AMD and Intel that work with WordPress.

Very recently AMD have just released their fifth generation CPU cores. Each time a new CPU core is released, the main thing that they’re trying to achieve is better performance. So which means that CPU, the new model runs faster now, for example, we transitioned during a beta from third generation to fourth generation CPU cores in our platform.

We actually delayed our launch by a month. We were working with AWS to ensure that we could launch on a new platform. Received a 30 percent page load performance increase by changing from a third generation to a fourth generation CPU. Now, in again, the dynamic world, 30 percent page load increase is a big win because the amount of time it takes to generate your page controls concurrency as well.

Chris Badgett: So

Wes Tatters: if your page takes a long time to generate, that means the PHP worker is allocated to that page request for a longer amount of time. So if we can reduce the amount of time it takes to generate that page, we can again increase the amount of concurrency in the

Chris Badgett: platform. A business and a technical question here is, as you all looked at developing Rapyd Cloud the market wants like high performance hosting at a great price, And this part of the market that’s really good at high traffic, dynamic content, concurrent users.

How did you what insight did you have where you had the aha that I think we can pull this off and create a way better product at a better price. And then how do you do that? Technically?

Michael Eisenwasser: Sure. The insight I had or Tom and I again for years and years, we dealt with seeing Buddy West customers complaining about performance constantly.

And often they would blame the product and say, the product’s not built efficiently enough, or has some performance issue. And we knew if they just were on really good hosting, it would work there. There’s just the nature of it. Was explained when you have, if you have a hundred people log in at the same time, it is hard to host that no matter what you do with the product.

People don’t realize something like Facebook, the amount of resources that go behind it to host it. So we wanted to. Build a solution for this for a long time, but servers were not our core competency. Our core competency was building software. But nonetheless, we did everything we could to improve the performance of buddy loss itself as make as efficient as we could.

And we had one year, a number, a couple of years ago, where I guess about three years ago, we pushed out an update to BuddyBoss where we spent months just trying to optimize all the code and make it as efficient as possible. Get rid of all the low hanging fruit, double queries and things like that, optimizing a lot.

And we spent a long time working on, I believe it was BuddyBoss 1. 9. 1. 9. Yeah, 1. 9. It was a good release. And we want to market that we’ve made the product much more efficient. And so we were trying to figure out how do we run benchmarks on this and prove that it’s faster. Because if you have one user logged in, it doesn’t really mean much.

You have to simulate huge amounts of concurrent users and run benchmarking as that. And we spent a couple months trying to produce all the data to prove that it was faster and write a blog post and a video about it. And so we finally were ready. We pushed the release live and published our results. And the same day, Wes is in our Facebook group, publishing his results.

He’s you’re right. It is faster. The stuff he was publishing was more sophisticated than what we had. Wes, and we were, that’s, we were shocked by it. Also Wes had been in our Facebook group for a long time. Anytime people did have these performance issues, Wes would be there like, Hey, DM me.

And then they’d come back later and post that their site’s running fast. Now that, Whatever was did fixed it. So when this happened, Tom was like, Hey, you know what? We got to hire Wes. We’re like, let’s hire him. Let’s finally do this. We had wanted to for a long time. Let’s, we’d want it to build something like that.

Once I’m like, let’s hire was take his recipe. And make it the best it can possibly be put resources behind it, build a development team behind it. Take everything we know from all these years at BuddyBus. We know how to do customer support and how to do software development. And so we took what he had created, which was working really well and made the best version of it.

And then we took all the stuff we know about software development and user experience and By the way, an extremely easy to use. Customer dashboard. So even though Wes is talking about all this technical stuff, customer perspective is not like that. The customer experience is super easy to use dashboard.

We’ve taken care of everything. Like you can update plugins. You can update themes. We have patch deck on there running, showing if you have security vulnerabilities and you can update the plugin there. And we have WooCommerce settings. We are not a lot of people know it yet, but we are the fastest host in the world for WooCommerce sites.

So we knew we could pull it off because of that. Then once we started building it before we even had the dashboard available, we had some customers who had apps, buddy bus app running, and we’re having really big performance issues. And some of these people were paying, thousands of dollars a month in hosting.

They were complaining and saying, we’re not sure if we can stay with buddy bus, cause we have all this performance problems and it’s getting expensive to host. We said, Hey, we have this thing. We’ve been working on the backgrounds. We want to give you private access to this. Dashboard’s not ready, but we’ll put your stuff on our hosting.

And they were just shocked at how fast it was. And the user, once we saw the feedback from the customers and then watching, you can go to love. rapid. cloud and see all our testimonials. It’s incredible. Once we saw the feedback from all these customers, one after the next thing, like you’ve transformed my whole website, I can’t believe how fast it is.

That gave us the confidence for okay, we’ve really done it. We’ve pulled it off. And we decided it was time basically to sell body boss. And focus all of our energy, all of our time, all of our effort on.

Wes Tatters: And part of that As I said, we’re very closely tied to BuddyBoss by being a separate entity.

It gives us the ability to open dialogues that possibly would have been harder to have. If we were just BuddyBoss we are here for every dynamic platform, every dynamic. So WooCommerce, Lifter, LearnDash, Tutor LMS Peepso the membership plugins, The membership we’re actively talking with the fluent team who are leasing a community product of a fluent community.

It’s in late beta now and will be public within weeks. Rapyd is ideally suited. To those platforms. The reason it’s ideally suited is that one of the things that communities do is get successful and it’s very different to have a blog. And I talk with people and say, yeah, a lot of.

People, when they start their WordPress site are really over the moon. When they hit that hundred visitors a month, I’ve started to get something credible when they hit that hundred visitors a week, they’re starting to go, this might be a, this might be a business, a hundred visitors a day, and they’re going, if I can keep doing this, I can, Give up my day job.

The smallest BuddyBoss sites, some of the smallest Lifter sites, are actually really quite sad if they’re only getting 100 visitors a day. Because their communities, they need people coming in, checking their Facebook feed, or checking their feed, looking at the, looking at conversations, visiting blogs. If it’s a Lifter site, they need people to complete the course.

They need the, they need them to do it. Do all the lessons and complete the course. It’s a cohort that’s joining. It might be a 30 person cohort. They need to get in and do those things. So in this space, the small numbers that people are excited about in a blogging site become quite rapidly. Oh, we’ve got a success problem.

I have a small customer that built a A social learning platform based on Buddy Boss to teach indigenous people in New Zealand, the Maori people, their own language. The like many languages, the cultures die. She built this little site just to teach the people in her local community.

Then last year was approached by the New Zealand government going could we like run this in every last room? She’s now got a buddy boss site with thousands of concurrent users at nine a. m. Every day. In classrooms across New Zealand that success is this same problem. Because what we do is different we need this dynamic server capabilities.

And next year, she’s told me only recently, she’ll have 30, 000 people trying to log on Monday morning on the second week of February. Can I handle this? And we can work it out for her.

Chris Badgett: I actually have a background in anthropology and cultural survival is a important topic to me. I also love New Zealand So that’s such a cool.

Cool story Let’s maybe you guys can help me answer a question that i’m sure you’ve gotten to particularly around buddy boss when people come in and they have questions they have big hopes and dreams they’re hoping they get a thousand ten thousand a hundred thousand sometimes even millions of users on their site How do you direct them?

Then they ask which, which hosting do I need? Like, where do I start? And let’s say they’re like, Oh, we just

Wes Tatters: say rapid, but yeah.

Chris Badgett: Like, how do you think about that scale? Like in the past, I’ve always first, it’s probably a good idea to pre sell and. Get some validation and just choose a host that can grow with you as your needs change.

But yeah, how do you answer that at rapyd, like in terms of somebody’s they’re coming in and let’s say it works like your New Zealand person, how do they, how does the relationship and the plans and the pricing. Particularly what people don’t want is for them to get a traffic spike and the site goes down or their launch is way more successful than they ever thought.

Like, how do you think about that relationship of kind of validating and getting started and then just scaling over time?

Michael Eisenwasser: So our starting plan. Is if you pay annually 29 a month, and that is a, not going to handle huge amounts of concurrent users, but that is an entry point. So people can get started on rapyd very inexpensively.

The smallest plan we’d recommend for a site that really has concurrent users as a production site, if you pay annually is a hundred a month. So, there is a inexpensive entry point into rapyd. And as you grow and as your needs go up, you can bump up to the next plans and to increase your tier in rapyd, the customer can do it in the dashboard themself.

And it’s instantaneous. It really is. It’s two seconds.

Wes Tatters: One of the things to understand, though, is that even on our cheapest plans, they’re on the same server. They’re on the same CPU cores. They’re actually getting the same performance regardless of which plan they’re on. What really changes as you increase plans is the amount of concurrency.

Or the amount of visits that you have access to within the platform.

Michael Eisenwasser: We can also speak to as performance boosts. So this is something that’s not live yet, but it’s working technically in the background. We’re going to build the dashboard end of it soon. And this will allow customers to increase schedule in advance, increasing their server resources for a temporary period of time.

So you could let’s say you have a launch on Friday, you could schedule in advance, starting Friday morning for the next 48 hours, I want the resources of the top tier plan, and the moment this that it begins. All the resources of the top tier plan will be dynamically allotted to your server. And when the period ends, it will drop back down.

So that’s coming early 2025, and that’s going to provide even more flexibility. But even now, because of the auto scaling nature of Rapyd, site’s very difficult for a site to crash on Rapyd infrastructure.

Wes Tatters: We we’ve done a few where we’ve worked with customers manually. We the the agile

Sorry, the Agile conference this year came to us and said we use BuddyBoss app. We want to run our BuddyBoss app as a community tool with inside the Agile conference. We’re going to have between three and five thousand people at the conference, and we want to use our BuddyBoss app to, to publish our calendars, all our session times, and let people communicate with each other.

And we did exactly this year. For them. They came to us and said, Hey, from Friday to Monday, can we have a big plan? So we did the boost. They didn’t even know what happened there their product and their their conference ran exactly the way they wanted it, but it was outperformed exactly the way they wanted it.

Their customers were thrilled. And on the Monday morning, they switched back down to their standard startup one plan, which they’d been using for development because their website. Is it really going to be used now for another six months until the next conference? So that’s the sort of flexibility that we provide to our customers already.

And it will be available in the dashboard, as Mike said, early in the new year as well. But we have a very active customer support and customer success team. One of the things that we knew when we were at wrap at buddy boss was the importance of support. So

Chris Badgett: how do

Wes Tatters: you think about support? Very differently.

We bought with us from BuddyBoss a number of BuddyBoss support team. Everyone at BuddyBoss who was in our support was effectively a PHP plugin developer. They understand PHP. And they understand WordPress. They understand plugins. That means that the support team that we bought in to Rapid. are actually skilled in building WordPress sites.

We will go the extra mile with our team to ensure that our customer sites work reliably. And we run free performance assessments. We run, free site evaluations. We’ll

Michael Eisenwasser: migrate your site to Rabbit for free, no cost.

Wes Tatters: And during that migration, we’ll fully assess the site. We’ll make a performance report analysis on, give them guidance on plugins that are causing problems show them how to improve site performance in the plugin level itself, help them with database optimization platform optimization.

We also deliver object caching natively in our product. Object Cache Pro is a native part of what we do. Tools, amazing products and relay his replacement for Redis that improves performance in factors. And again, for dynamic sites, object caching is the only caching that works.

Page caching isn’t available.

Michael Eisenwasser: I’ll mention one more thing about support. So our support system, it’s not like you send an email and wait two hours. It’s 24 seven live chat support with very fast response times. Customer satisfaction. If you look up Rapid Cloud on Trustpilot, or go again to love. rapid.

cloud, you’ll see the testimonials. The customers are really happy with our customer support.

Wes Tatters: We also built out a native AI based support platform that adds as an adjunct to our dashboard. So when you arrive at our at our, your site, you’ve got a button down the bottom, open the support. The first question you ask is instantly passed to our AI.

And we’ll respond with active answers from a massive knowledge base of information that we’ve been building and compiling, not just about hosting, but about PHP and about WordPress and about plugins. So on average our support response time is under 30 seconds. Did you,

Chris Badgett: Did you use Docspot for that?

Wes Tatters: No, it’s built. It’s built as a part of our with our with our support our chat system partners. It’s a product called intercom and, as I said, that average response time of 30 seconds from the person asking a question in many cases, they’ve in that time also received a set of information from our AI that gets them a starting point.

We find that about 35 percent of our support requests are actually answered successfully just by our AI.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And tell us more about the migration. Is it true, like hands off migration? If somebody is listening to this or watching this and they’re like, you know what, I’m ready to make the move.

I just want to like. Sign up and have them for

Wes Tatters: me. Is that the promise highly managed average migration times about an hour and a half, we can actually complete a migration. Often the impact of often the slowest amount of time in the migration is just getting the details that we need out of the customer.

We will do. everything. If a customer gives us access to their cloudflare account, we will even handle DNS mapping for them. We handle migration through a set of stages. It’s fully managed fully monitored by our platform and excuse me. And So much so that we actually do two migrations.

We do an entire test migration to make sure that a customer site is 100 percent compatible, 100 percent suited. I will say this. We don’t support older versions of PHP, for example. Some customers are still sitting on PHP seven point something. From for security technology reasons, we don’t support PHP.

So we assess all of those things before migrations and work with customers. We’ve worked with customers on their old sites, helping them to upgrade and ensure that all their plugins were PHP ready before migration.

Chris Badgett: That’s a great service. Another just public service announcement I wanted to make is that.

particularly for new people who are, have dreams for their online community, online learning platform. And you think about, you see these expensive hosting plans as an example, but the reality is like the agile conference that you mentioned they’re selling tickets. So you have to have real estate for your website to live on.

And the more people that need to get in the door, you need bigger real estate. So it transfers over to hosting. And so it’s really, Just baked into the business plan. You’re going to sell more tickets. Oh you’re on a higher end hosting plan that costs more, but you’re also selling, 10, 000 courses a month.

You’re making a lot of money. It’s just paying for Your real estate or your storefront or your school, which is part of it.

Wes Tatters: It is a bit of the disconnect with hosting. We see people that are running very successful six and seven figure businesses in buddy boss. Especially if they’re teamed with lifter or tutor LMS or other products that enable people to very easily monetize their products that they do sometimes skimp.

On the hosting. We’ve had customers that were losing their customers because their performance wasn’t adequate because their site, the customer going, this is great, but I can’t wait 30 seconds for the buddy was out to load my activity. And we’re looking at the site going, yeah, but. On rapid that same activity feed loads in under a second.

There are reasons to ensure that what you’re doing in the hosting space, especially in the dynamic space is paid for. And is recompense. I’ve got some small buddy boss sites that are still my old customers. They got a thousand members. They’re paid members. They pay 8 a month.

They’ve got real revenue. And they’re happy to contribute a percentage of that real revenue to the right sort of hosting, high performance, highly scalable reliable and delivering them what they need on a daily basis.

Chris Badgett: We’ve talked a lot about BuddyBoss, community stuff, LMS. You mentioned it, but could you just touch a little bit on WooCommerce?

A lot of Lyft or LMS users, as an example, also use WooCommerce. But how does a WooCommerce site perform on RapidCloud? And how do you think about speed on an e commerce site?

Michael Eisenwasser: Sure. E commerce sites face the same challenges as the other things that we’re talking about. Every user is looking at different stuff in their cart, different stuff in the checkout.

And if you run a campaign and you have a lot of traffic coming to your website and everyone’s trying to check out at the same time, your site can crash. And there’s nothing more heartbreaking than to have your site crash while everyone’s in a cart trying to check out

Chris Badgett: one Black Friday or whatever.

Michael Eisenwasser: Yeah.

And Rapid is the fastest hosting for WooCommerce in the world. It is. And we’ve, we have a WooCommerce settings page in there where we can talk to more about Elastic Search. Elastic Press, all the integration we’ve done from the live card. Yeah.

Wes Tatters: So one of the things that. One of the challenges for a big word commerce site is that as it grows, especially as their product base grows or the number of products in their cart, they have big performance hits.

One of the reasons for that is that WordPress search is not very efficient. It’s a slow product. So we partnered with Elastic, which is the a search infrastructure that pretty much takes all of what WordPress tries to do, you know, and this words and gives natural language search inside the WooCommerce dashboard.

It’s literally a drop in. So you drop it into your site, and from that moment when you start typing into the WordPress search bar, you are now using Elasticsearch. The Elasticsearch platform gives a 10 to a 50% performance improvement in search alone. It also adds native language and natural language search, which WordPress doesn’t really do very well.

In the dashboard. The other component that we focused very heavily on is caching of WooCommerce. Now it’s the one area where we actually say page caching is okay, if you do it properly. And we do it properly by page caching just the product pages and those product pages are always in sync and always active.

So much so that the customer doesn’t even know that it’s happening. If they go and edit a product inside their WooCommerce page hit save and changes. It’s instantly updated. The page caching is instantly flushed and reset for just that page. And from that point on, that page, the next time they visit, is going to be served with the latest up to date page caching.

We, we built our platform on Lightspeed Enterprise. It’s a web hosting server infrastructure. Designed specifically for very high concurrency. It’s very similar to Apache, which everyone knows. It’s like the product that everyone starts within the hosting business, but is 10 to 50 times faster at handling concurrent loads.

But again, On Rapid, the customer doesn’t need to know any of that.

That’s fantastic. It just works in the background. Same as WooCommerce caching, same as, Elasticsearch. They’re just features of Rapid that come same as object caching. They’re just there.

Chris Badgett: You guys have definitely been marinating in this problem. I say great businesses really build the business around their customer, not the product, right?

So you’re like looking at this customer that has this really needy website. That’s really important and connecting people and ideas and stuff, but it needs a lot of resources. And you’ve really designed this around helping that person. And then having a great business is just going to be a side effect of taking care of really good care of that person.

One of the things

Wes Tatters: we did do is look at the ways that sites get slowed down. And if we can identify something in WordPress. that actually slows your site down, we will work on ways to improve that performance. One of the actual classic examples that very people, few people understand is malware security.

We go and we install Melcare, or we install WordFence, or we install all in one, security. When we do that, we install a plugin on our WordPress site. That actually slows our site down. Everyone knows, oh you install WordPress, it makes your site run slower. But it is more secure. So we looked at that and went, there’s got to be a better way.

We partnered with a platform called Monarchs. Monarchs is a server level security platform. It’s not a plugin inside WordPress. It runs on the server. It has no impact on WordPress performance at all. Which means you don’t need a word fence plugin or a mail care plugin or a

Chris Badgett: backup all in one

Wes Tatters: security.

They’re all offloaded. Our backups are exactly the same. It’s all at the server level. So what that does is means that we’re continually optimizing the WordPress stack to be as fast as it can with just the things that it really needs, which is your theme, your plugins and your content. All those other overheads, be it security or backup.

Michael Eisenwasser: Cron jobs. We have the option to do, to run the WordPress Cron at the server level. Nice.

Chris Badgett: Oh, you guys have thought of everything. You probably hear that from your customers a lot, man. You guys have thought. And we will

Wes Tatters: continue to innovate. We’re talking about new products now. I’ll tell you, we may offer other things like SEO.

Michael Eisenwasser: Yeah. I see it with building SEO tools in there, but I can just tell you what, when we go too deep talking about all the technical stuff, customer can get confused, but at a high level you can go to our pricing page and see the benchmarks we’ve done. So we’ve benchmarked our startup one plan, which is our most popular plan against all the other popular managed WordPress hosts.

We’ve done a series of benchmarks and rapid is the fastest at every single benchmark against every single popular managed WordPress hosts that we’ve benchmarked against. And we guarantee it. If the customer buys, they have a 14 day refund period. If it’s not faster, we’ll refund them. We guarantee it’ll be faster.

Chris Badgett: Faster or it’s free. I love that. And I did notice that by the way, when I was on your pricing page, I’m like, I’m, I was really glad to see the benchmarking data. Cause it’s okay, now you’re helping people really understand.

Wes Tatters: And anyone that wants that data, the whole lot’s available. It’s a 150 page document that breaks down exactly how we benchmarked exactly the processes we used.

And people can go and replicate. Any of it. We’ve given them all the tools. So you want to replicate this on your own hosting? Here’s how to go and do it. So we’re very transparent about performance. We’re very transparent about being in the performance community active in the WordPress space, active in the make WordPress space in the performance area it’s something that I would say we’re passionate about.

Because impacts our customers.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, and they got to keep their sight up and growing and scaling and all that. Go visit RapidCloud. That’s R A P Y D dot cloud. Check it out. See what we’ve been talking about. Wes and Michael, this has been a great conversation. I love that you’ve married this problem and not just recently.

You’ve been working on this for years and you have all the history with BuddyBoss. And Lifter and WooCommerce and other more needy WordPress plugins. That’s awesome. I’m so glad you created this. So everybody can head on over to rapid dot cloud. Is there anywhere else you want people to connect or other things for them to check out?

Michael Eisenwasser: They can follow our YouTube channel. We’re publishing tutorials and stuff there. But yeah, rapid. cloud is the starting point. You can find everything there from the navigation in there. You’ll see access to our knowledge base and our benchmarks and everything.

Wes Tatters: As I said, we’re very transparent.

Take a look at us. We tell people to go and look at love. rapid. cloud. It’s our vanity page. All right. But it’s a lot of really happy customers giving us honest, Testimonials about what Rapid’s managed for their platforms.

Michael Eisenwasser: They can also go to feedback. rapid. cloud if you want where we publish a roadmap of future, everything that we’ve pushed live since the product went live is there.

The things we’re working on now, things that are planned. And we post updates just like we used to do a buddy boss. We’re really open about our roadmap and things we’re working on.

Chris Badgett: Nice. Thanks for coming back on the show, Michael and Wes, for the first time. Let’s not wait nine years, but I’m really glad to have you back on.

Thanks so much for coming guys. And keep up the great work at Rapid.

Michael Eisenwasser: You too. Our pleasure. We love everything you’re doing at Lifter and it’s an honor to com.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMSCast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you [email protected] slash gift. Go to lifterlms.com/gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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