- Aug 08, 2024
0- by Cory Miller
Hosting used to be just a space to house your website. Today, it’s about ultra-fast web servers, performance optimization, and fast, easy-to-use content management systems like WordPress.
Like most hosting companies, A2 Hosting once focused on integrating existing solutions to improve our products. But what do you do when a solution isn’t available?
I recently sat down with founder and CEO Bryan Muthig and CTO Justin Mazzi to discuss the evolution of hosting and the changing role A2 Hosting plays in that space.
Over the last decade, we have shifted from integrators to innovators – creating custom solutions to meet our customer’s needs. The result? Fast, safer, and overall easier hosting solutions for everyone.
You can see this innovation in tools like A2 Optimized and TurboHub and in our commitment to a range of affordable hosting tiers, from Shared Web Hosting to Dedicated Server Hosting.
Bryan, Justin, and I talked about how they got started in hosting, where A2 Hosting is today, and how we plan to continue to lead the industry with innovative new technologies and tools.
How Has Hosting Changed?
Hosting was originally a technical solution, merely space on a web server. Whatever you wanted to see, you had to either code yourself or hire someone who could. But that has changed over time, especially over the last decade.
Coding servers has been a lifelong passion for Bryan, but it’s important to remember that hasn’t always been easy.
Sharing some of his early experiences, he said, “I think back on how many blue screens of death I got. It was all hard. It took time. You really had to learn.”
“It was mostly engineers, technical people fiddling around with this stuff in those days.”
But he acknowledged that the landscape has shifted, with A2 Hosting keeping pace. Not only are the hardware and software more stable, but we are thinking about the user experience and user interface today.
It’s not just about making things work but making them more elegant to match the growing mass-market appeal.
“Having that technical background, I realized we needed to make it easy for customers. Even though we have made huge advancements, we continue to have this conversation. How do we make things easy for both the technical folks and those who just need it to work?”
Adding his perspective, Justin said, “When I think about the biggest technological innovations, I focus on the open-source communities that have evolved.”
“As a result, we have much more advanced software that is accessible for free in a lot of cases, or at least has a nice community behind it… That’s made the experience of using it much, much better,” he added.
How Has A2 Hosting Remained An Industry Leader?
Evolution is inevitable. I asked Bryan and Justin to think about how A2 Hosting will continue to lead the hosting industry with more innovations.
They both said that the key is listening to our customers and developing solutions that fit their needs. Initially, most of those solutions involved integrating pieces from other companies. But that only got us so far.
“At the core, we’re still integrators setting up the base platform. And we have great tools for that… But we have seen over the years that there are limitations to what is available.” Bryan said.
Continuing that thought, Justin added, “At some point, the tools that we need to take us to that next level don’t exist. We know our customers want faster-performing websites, we know it’s difficult to optimize for Google. But since no tool out there does that, we decided we were going to build it.”
“It’s not just the people and knowledge we have, but also the relationships. It’s being able to work directly with a vendor like LightSpeed to not only integrate but to actually build something together that gets us to that next level,” he said.
This is what led A2 Hosting to develop TurboHub, our exclusive control panel for our WordPress Hosting plans.
Talking about TurboHub, Bryan said, “We wanted to make WordPress easier, faster, and more secure for our customers, but there was nothing we could buy that would do that. So this is a custom layer above our integrations, above the platform.”
How Will A2 Hosting Continue To Evolve The Industry?
Looking at the next steps for A2 Hosting, our goal is to continue to evolve and innovate solutions that make things easier for our customers.
Bryan said, “Nobody needs to know how the iPhone works. You want to hit a button and have it do what you need it to do. Similarly, that is what I’m passing along internally here at A2 Hosting.”
“Our customers just want green Google PageSpeed scores and to pass core web vitals. And our focus is to make it easy for them to do that. That’s what I find exciting right now.”
Justin added, “I’m very excited about being in a position to be able to build these kinds of tools. It’s a problem I personally wanted to solve for a long time. I even tried it at another company and ran out of runway there. So I’m glad to pick up that work again, to be deep in WordPress and solving those problems again.”
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