zippykid

In April of 2011, I decided to make ZippyKid a full time job and focus all my efforts into growing the company, my goal was to make a new kind of hosting company, that focused on WordPress and small businesses. I wanted to make the best WordPress hosting company, not just another company that manages updates to the WordPress core and plugins for you.

I realized back then, that saying “We upgrade your WordPress” as your only selling point, is like a restaurant saying “we wash your dishes when they get dirty”. We needed to do more than that, and we have.

Fast forward from April of 2011, when I only had 65 customers, to today, where we have several thousand, the company went from being just myself and Kai part time, to 6 full time employees. We are trusted from small mom and pop shops in small towns all over the world, to larger names like Reuters, and even a forward thinking government agency. Starting in February, we’ll be a team of 7. We’ve learnt a lot, and we know what we need to do to continue to be the best, and better than anyone else.

Originally, this post was going to be a list of 7 things we’re about to release in 2012, then I realized I didn’t want to be a vapor-ware company, so here are somethings we have either already launched, or are rolling out in the next 30 days.

The biggest one is that our base price will increase to $35/month starting February 29th 2012. If you sign up before February 29th 2012, your prices won’t go up.

1. SSL for all. Because security is not an add-on. I had written a blog post in September talking about the need for this, I wanted to get this done, we know what to do and how to do it, but large scale implementation wasn’t/isn’t easy. You have to order SSL certs, you have to get certs validated, and you need to get a unique ip address. Currently we charge extra for SSL, but it’s something that should be offered standard.
2. Email (already active) You’ll get 10 email addresses and unlimited aliases included with the base plan. It doesn’t make sense for you to have us host your WordPress site, but you go elsewhere for e-mail. We’ll either setup Google Apps for you, or set you up with Rackspace Email.
3. Malware Scanning (already active) An independent third party (Sucuri) is scanning your site 3 times a day for malware and vulnerabilities, in the small chance you do get hacked, or are running an insecure version of WordPress or a plugin, we’ll be notified and we’ll fix it.
4. SAS 70 Type II Compliance (already active) We’re the only WordPress hosting company that offers SAS 70 Type II compliance, basically, it means we take your data seriously, even if you’re just hosting pictures of cute kittens. They’re your cute kittens and no one but you has access to them.
5. Quarterly Security Audits and Results (first one scheduled for February 2012) Everyone claims to have a secure network, who wouldn’t? We’re going to get audited by a third party (Trustwave), and we’ll post the results on the web quarterly, for all to see and judge for themselves.
6. 30 Day Free Trial We’re so confident in our product, that we’ll give you 30 days to try us out, if you’re not happy, you can cancel without paying a dime. You’ll even be able to take the SSL certificate with you.

There are some other changes that I haven’t mentioned yet, as we’re still perfecting them. Our goal at ZippyKid is not to be the first with features, but the best. Keep an eye out on the blog and our newsletters, and you’ll find out about them shortly.

Hi Everyone,
I hate writing this post, but this is the first time we at ZippyKid will be actively blocking your ability to do something that is technically, well within your rights as a human being. The RePress project has released an interesting plugin that lets your WordPress site become a proxy for sites that are banned. This ban is due to governments, whether we agree with the ban or not is irrelevant. This plugin can end up costing us tons of money in bandwidth charges, costs that we would not be able to recoup, so this is a purely business decision, to disable the use of this plugin.

As of now, this plugin will not work on our systems. So, please don’t try it.

This weekend, I realized that I had stopped our auto-updating script for TimThumb about two months ago. What this script does is look for files named timthumb.php, thumb.php and replaces them with the latest secure version from subversion. What this means to you is that if you’ve modified your copy of timthumb and it’s new, we may overwrite your changes, unless you send in a help request. This script runs every 12 hours.

We’re using this hammer fist for two reasons.

1. Security for you and your website, you may have added a plugin or theme that still uses Timthumb, and it may have the older version of Timthumb.
2. We’re migrating hundreds of websites every month from other hosting places, we need a sure fire way of ensuring that we’re not bringing over malware, or vulnerabilities.

If you host a bunch of WordPress sites, you can use the code here as an example for your systems as well.

https://gist.github.com/1293079

This is also a reminder, that a lot of our code is always available on Github, for review and use by others. We welcome feedback and issues.

WordPress 3.3 is out. A lot of you are wondering what and when you’ll get the new hotness on your systems. Here’s the official answer.

1. It’ll take 7 days for us to start rolling out our automated updates, we want to make sure we don’t break your site, so testing is key.

2. You can skip the line, by upgrading yourself, but if it breaks your site, we’re going to restore your site from our nightly back up, not trouble shoot the upgrade.

3. Brand new sites, for existing customers and new ones, will be 3.3 as of tonight.

In case you’re wondering why we’re not rushing the upgrade for all the customers, it’s simple. This is a feature upgrade, not a security upgrade. Means, it’s a major upgrade, but there is no compelling reason to upgrade, apart from “new shiny toys”. This means, your site is not at risk for running at 3.2.1.

We had a relatively slow weekend, not a lot of work, got some christmas shopping done, oh and a client of ours received 7 times more traffic in a 24 hour period, than they normally do. Our systems held up, and we didn’t even notice the increase until we got an email from the client saying how awesome this was. I figured I should share some of the anonymous statistics from Google Analytics, to help people understand the benefit of our service, and also show, that unlike GoDaddy or other shared hosting companies, we’re not going to shut your site down because you finally got the recognition you’ve been trying to get.

The first graph is just Google Analytics for a 24 hour period. 208,000 unique visitors is not a lot for a 24 hour period, we have some larger enterprise clients that get this all the time.

The second graph, compares the time period for the 4 days prior to this spike, that’s where you see the awesomeness of our service. The customer experienced a 7X growth for about 24 hours, and his site didn’t slow down, or crash.

24 hrs in Google Analytics

traffic comparison

So, again, when you’re wondering about switching to ZippyKid, consider the following:

1. Can your current web host handle a 7X increase in traffic?
2. Will you get charged for overages?
3. Will your current host just tell your visitors that you reached the limits of your plan?

With ZippyKid, we’ve demonstrated we can handle the surge, we’re not going to charge overage fees, and we never told his customers that he had gone way past his monthly plan.

We’re a startup, and we know how important stuff like this is, so we do what we would want for ourselves. So far, it’s been a winning combination for all.

The holidays are about family, thankfulness and to some, the exchanging of gifts. Luckily, nothing feels better than giving…

So we are giving away 1,000 ZippyKid t-shirts!

You can win a shirt by either:
     1) completing the form below OR by
     2) following @thezippykid and by sending a quick Tweet

In case you’re wondering, these are not the cheapy, wear once and add to the ‘painting’ drawer kind of shirts. These are soft, comfortable, well fitted, ‘I want one in every color’ kind of shirts.

Here’s the shirt, as tweeted by @MrCippy himself:

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We ran into this issue for a client today, where we kept running into an infinite loop when the visitor went to a page that required SSL. After a lot of tracing, it turned out that the is_ssl() function in wp-includes was passing a false, even though the site was using SSL. Turned out we ran into a perfect storm of mis/non-standard configuration. The internally bound port for the site was not 443, but something else, after a few hours of inappropriately cursing the function, I decided to take a break and tackle the problem again. Discussed the issue on the #wordpress channel on irc, and fortunately Sivel was there, who pointed out my fallacy, I just needed to pass the HTTPS on; parameter via the nginx configuration.

So to avoid others pulling their hair out like I did.. triple check if you have the line

fastcgi_params HTTPS on;

Make sure it’s there in your server_block for the secure virtual host, and you’ll be good to go. It’s kinda embarrassing to admit that I didn’t have this.. but sometimes this level of public self-shaming is necessary..

With the ability to add tasks to Remember the Milk using Siri, I’ve started using RTM quite a bit more than I used to. My issue with task/list managers was always the cumbersome nature of inputting data. Native apps sucked, or got in the way, and adding tasks via iPhone was just cumbersome.

Now, I can just hold my phone up and say “remind me to take over the world tomorrow at 3pm”, Siri does her magic, and I’ll get an alert tomorrow at 2:30 that I need to take over the world.

Now, imagine if I’m not in a quiet place, and I don’t want to look weird reminding my phone to take over the world.. I can add a task to RTM by going to the website, or emailing a message. Or, I could just use the rumember gem chain it with Alfred.app and do the following..

cmd space r2 remind me to take over the world tomorrow at 4pm

To do this, it’s simpler than you would think, just do the following:

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Due to the Thanksgiving holiday, I’ve asked everyone in the company to take the weekend off. That means it’ll be me alone who’ll try and answer tickets, and solve issues if and when they arise. So, apologies in advance, if the level of support goes down, or sucks, I know with between Kai, Roberto and Heidi, expectations are very high.. this is my warning for the next 5 days. What follows is a bit more detailed explanation of why I’m doing this.. and how do I expect to run a world class hosting company, by reducing support levels for 5 days.

It’s been a great year for ZippyKid. As founder and CEO I have a lot to be thankful for. To recap, I started off 2011 with ZippyKid as a profitable side business.

• Started January 2011 with the goal of making ZippyKid my primary business/work by end of 2011.
• Was convinced to raise some money two weeks prior to SXSW 2011
• Had 2 term sheets in a matter of hours after the initial conversation/pitch
• Raised money (April 2011)
• Hired Kai, Roberto, Heidi, and John .. no longer profitable (May 2011)
• Had about 80 sites hosted on ZippyKid back then

Fast forward 6 months

• Profitable. Again
• Over 1300 WordPress sites hosted at ZippyKid
• Growing at an average of 60% month over month
• Donated over $2100 to SNIPSA (Animal Shelter) as part of the ZippyKid Team that ran a 5K

So, with that in mind, I think it’s obvious, I have a lot to be thankful for.

None of this would’ve been possible without the support of my wife Erin. She had plenty of occasion and reason to throw my phone across the room, when a customer called at 3am, she put up with me and my crazy schedule. She gave me the strength to keep doing it, and more importantly, a reason to not just give up and get a high paying job at some large company. She’s sacrificed a lot, and she knows this is just the beginning, we’re going to have a crazy 2012, and my schedule is just going to get worse.

Apart from Erin, I have Kai, Roberto, Heidi, John and Wes to thank, they’ve made me look so much better than I am. They’re the reason 80% of our new customers come from word of mouth, they’ve made being a customer of ZippyKid such an awesome experience, that customers have called us the Zappos of WordPress hosting.

How can I not reward my team with the deserved time off? I hope you all have had a great year like I have, and I hope you all get to enjoy Thanksgiving day as much as I will.

Oh, and for the people wondering if I’m looking for side work or available for contracting.. no I’m not .

This post is about the bill called the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). It’s a bill with a very friendly name, pirates are bad, and we’re going to stop them, politicans can even show it’s a sign that both parties can work together, as it has bi-partisan support. Except, that it was drafted without the input of voters that elected them. It was drafted by the organizations that paid for the political ads.

To help illustrate my point, let’s take this very likely scenario.
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