Seb de Lemos CEO of Fixed On How The #1 Problem With All Web Hosts

Website Planet interviewed Seb de Lemos, CEO of Fixed, to learn how their unique approach solves the problem 90% of WordPress sites owners face – bridging the gap between web hosting providers who can’t address security manually and web agencies that refuse to take on website maintenance.

What you will learn in this interview:

• The security problem with all web hosting providers
• The Fixed approach to WordPresss security trusted by 15,000 agency clients
• How web hosting providers can enhance their security offer now and in a scalable way

What problems are you solving for your customers and audience?

I have run web hosting businesses for a long-time, and in those hosting businesses 60% of our customers run WordPress. It’s the go-to software and hugely powerful because of the amount of plugins and themes that are available as well as how accessible WordPress makes website development.

But there were some many consequential problems that our customers were experiencing which is why we started Fixed.

Security is the first and foremost issue with WordPress. WordPress is open source and it’s not uncommon for a site to be made up of dozens of different plugins, all from different developers. Some may be maintained and some might not…

Those sites need to be kept up to date to keep them secure, because the code bases are available to all and WordPress is so widely used that if a vulnerability is discovered in one plugin it could affect tens of thousands of websites. Keeping websites malware and phishing free is a constant headache in a hosting business, and it’s also a headache that website owners shouldn’t have to worry about.

So hosting companies sell all sorts of security software which either acts as web application firewalls or clean up hacks after they’ve happened.

We at Fixed.net keep the site secure in several different ways:

• Staying on top of updates
• Set up and configure website backups, which we take twice a day
• Scan for potential vulnerabilities or unexpected file changes
• Removing and changing discontinued plugins.

Lots of our clients come to us because they’ve had a hacked site, then we’ve cleaned it and they’ve stayed with us to maintain the site.

Second, we fill the gap between a standard hosting business and a web developer. Often a business owner will have a website built, but then not take a WordPress maintenance service. Then, one day they need something changed (or fixed), but they don’t have a web developer at hand and the fix is too small for a new developer who prefers to focus on building whole new websites.

Last but not least, not many developers are really experienced with the entire WordPress hosting and security stack. All of our team members (40+) are fully employed (no outsourcing heere) who work in our three offices in London, Bali and Sofia, and they know both WordPress and hosting inside out.

What makes people eventually choose you over your competitors?

Our experience, our speed of response, our price.

We’ve just celebrated our 5th anniversary, and are approaching 15,000 clients. Those clients range from small businesses up to multinational corporations. Over those five years we have been completely consistent in the high quality of service we have offered.

We are laser-focused – we just offer WordPress hosting and maintenance as one package – we don’t do web development, and we aren’t trying to upsell to anything else.

Our initial average response time is a few minutes, 24/7/365. We can offer SLAs on request. For more complex tasks, we assign one or more team members to work on the issue until it issolved.

And our pricing is competitive and risk-free. Because we built our own system and because we have a scale of 40+ full-time staff, we can do things efficiently and keep our prices very low. In fact, our prices are fixed – we don’t quote or have hidden fees – and there’s no minimum subscription period, so you can cancel at any time. Moreover, with our maintenance plans you can create unlimited website tasks with (no limits on the working hours).

What is the current techstack you use to run your online business?

We’re largely a service business, but our client area where you can manage your websites and tasks, and invite team members to collaborate, is a bespoke platform built atop Firebase, using Vue JS.

If we provide hosting we do that on our own infrastructure using Enhance, but everything is fully managed.

Since you started, what helped you grow and retain your audience?

Purely quality of service – We rarely lose clients. Once a client is with us, by far the main reason they leave is because they no longer use WordPress.

When we first started we tried not to offer web hosting at all, but we ended up including web hosting ourselves (at no extra cost) because we could offer it so much better than many other web hosts.

We are very proactive in our management, so we even monitor all websites we maintain every minute through our 24/7 NOC in case of any issues.

What’s in the roadmap for your future?

We are looking into partnerships with other hosting businesses that might want to offer malware cleanups and maintenance plans to their customers. *

We are also planning some M&A of WordPress maintenance clients from agencies who do not have the size to offer this themselves. Because we do not compete with agencies in web development it is a win win.

What do you see in the future of your industry?

WordPress is here for the long-term but there are a lot of better tools that site owners and web hosting providers can use to keep WordPress sites secure and updated.

Business owners are becoming much more aware that their WordPress sites need to be maintained, and also about the risks and prevalence of WordPress hacking attacks. Web hosting companies and web developers will have to start offering WordPress maintenance or partnering with companies like Fixed.net in order to offer a quality service.