I went car shopping not too long ago. We test drove several models and they all had a similar set of options. Leather, A/C, Navigation etc. They were all in the same price range and essentially all did the same the thing, move people and things from A to B. However there were a few differences between them worth noting.
- A ‘sport’ model had additional bolstering on the seats. This was designed to keep you from sliding around the seat during spirited driving.
- A ‘family’ model had extra rear side airbags as standard equipment.
Even within the same model line you had various trim lines, like Base, Mid, and Luxe. Essentially there is a car experience suitable for nearly any buyer.
In our hosting business we offer plans for various use cases: Low traffic, or high scale geo-replication, or developer friendly deployment tools. In some respects we have a solution for everyone. However we’ll be the first to tell you some of our plans are missing the ‘glossy’ features some customers may be looking for. This is not a defect in our eyes, but a choice towards product specialization.
Product Specialization
A formula1 race car is designed to go really stinking fast, handle like the tires are made of glue, and protect the driver in a 200mph accident. It does not have Air conditioning or streams Pandora through the radio. It is a purpose built machine.
Our VPS and Enterprise tiers are built to scale and support mind-boggling levels of traffic. The plans are also designed to ‘get out of the way’ when it comes to deployment workflows be it Git or SVN. Our staging system is built in the same vein, rather than force a single way of doing things we provide a tool that allows developers the flexibility to work as they see fit. Some of these tools are not wrapped in UI elements, but are command line tools with selectable parameters.
A one-size fits all approach means a watered down product that works okay for a lot of customers. We hope our products work exceptionally well for our narrow target audience of developers and Enterprise users that require the benefits our scalable WordPress Hosting solutions provide.
That being said, there is always room for improvement and we are excited to share in the coming months some of the things we have been working on.