News

2021 – The Year of the Rebound

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As we approach the end of the year there’s growing optimism that the new normal is not far off

With vaccinations rolling out, the light at the end of the tunnel is starting to shine through. Confidence and hope are returning, and that’s good for business.

We must count ourselves lucky. Our team is distributed and has been working from home from day one, so it has been business-as-usual for us this year. A privilege that many others have not enjoyed – we must not forget this.

Looking back at 2020

Just a brief look in the rear view mirror:

We hit a number of technical milestones and came out of beta

The year was capped off by being recognized by G2 for performance, ease of use and support.

This is testament of all the hard work the team has put in this year but also a reflection of our vision: to make high performance hosting very easy to set up and use.

We’re particularly proud of the great feedback we’re getting on G2, Trustpilot and the kind words our customers share with us on Slack.

What’s in the pipeline for 2021

I’d like to share four initiatives that are on our roadmap for 2021, starting with a very exciting development of our platform.

Convesio 2.0

Codenamed (internally) “Niharika”, after our Chief Architect and Co-Founder Dyutiman Chakraborty’s baby daughter. A very recent ‘major release’ for him and his wife!

The focus wasn’t so much on the platform itself but adding options and tools for customers to better manage hosting.

For example, setting the points (as a percentage of resources used) triggering auto-scaling – – see the screenshot below. This is an industry first, I believe, and something a SysAdmin typically needs to set up.

FYI – we’re very close to shipping this release. Stay tuned.

Pro Services

We never set out to offer professional services but we’re often helping customers with some tricky work: complex hosting setups, advanced optimization and configuring the ‘edge’ to lighten the load on our servers.

Every request is different and we’ve been quoting on each piece. We describe what we do on our WordPress Professional Services page but we need to better articulate each service for clarity and consistency, and set pricing too.

Bearing in mind, though, that hosting remains our core business and we also refer work to our agency partners.

Partnerships

We offer an affiliate program – a generous one too, I would say – but partnerships play a much more strategic role than that. Starting with solution providers that further boost performance and security of our platform: SiteLock, Human Presence and Cloudflare.

But also our partnerships with infrastructure providers such as Steadfast that have solid tech in place. We found that sites run significantly faster on their servers compared to ‘big box’ providers. When we can we prefer working with independent businesses too.

We’ll be looking for more of the same but we’ll also be working closer with our agency customers to help them deliver better outcomes from their clients.

Look out for a revamped Partners page.

Re-design of our Blog

We’ve crowdsourced the design and renaming of the blog and we’re just about ready to rebuild it.

The idea here is for a publication that is less about our product and covering more about the things we care about. It will be a mixed bag of technical and business-focused content, so one week we’ll cover Cloudflare Workers, for example, and the rest the future of WordPress.

We’ll report back from the WordPress community too and invite folk to share their experiences and ideas too. Get in touch if you would like to contribute your own.

Contributing to the rebound

We’re confident that Convesio will continue to improve and grow in 2021 and hope our customers will do the same.

I also think it’s important that we help those that have been hit hard by the pandemic to rebound and get back on their feet. This could be contributing to WordPress via their Five for the Future initiative or maybe using that time to help a local business. Or donating to an initiative like the Big Orange Heart.

Any amount of help will go a long way, which is the philosophy that drives WordPress and its ecosystem.

Wishing you a great holiday season and a happy, healthy new year.

Tom Fanelli
CEO