Ben Gabler is the CEO & Founder at Rocket.net, where they’re on a Mission to Accelerate, Protect, & Deploy WordPress at the Edge. Ben has over twenty-two years of experience in the hosting and SaaS fields and previously held notable roles at StackPath, GoDaddy, HostNine, and HostGator.

Key Moments

[05:35] WordPress users struggle with CDN, website availability.

[08:51] Debugging WordPress sites requires consistent critical path.

[10:51] Efficient team, effective customer service, minimal stress.

[14:59] Disaster recovery implemented, 5-hour snapshots taken.

[18:52] Constant focus on the customer in business.

[19:28] Making WordPress management proactive, less failures.

Find Ben Online

https://rocket.net

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Transcript by CastMagic.io

Seth [00:00:00]:
Entrepreneur’s Enigma is a podcast for the ups and downs of entrepreneurship, to the wins and the fails that we all face being entrepreneurs, how we learn from adversity. Every week, I talk to a different entrepreneur with a story to tell. I’m Seth Goldstein. Come with me on the journey. This is Entrepreneurs’ Enigma. Let’s get started. Hey, everybody. Welcome to another edition of the Entrepreneur’s Enigma podcast.

Seth [00:00:35]:
I am your host as always for more than 200 episodes. Seth, today, I am here with Ben of rocket.net. They are my host of choice. They are amazing. I’m not just saying that because he’s on here on the podcast and all that, but, no, they’re they’re really fantastic. Ben is the CEO, chief fire washer, founder of Rocket.net. He has done all kinds of stuff in his Short time on Earth, making him sound younger than he probably is, but, you know but Rocket.net is a WordPress optimized host. They are fantastic.

Seth [00:01:12]:
I I mean, they are fast and zippy. Their response is fast and zippy on their support calls when you have an issue, which doesn’t happen very often. And the best part is Ben jumps in every once in a while. The CEO jumps and answers the support questions. I’m like, oh, hi. How’s it going? So how’s it going, Ben? How are you doing?

Ben [00:01:28]:
Good. Thanks, Seth. Doing great. I really appreciate that, heck of an intro. And, as always, Appreciate your support in business. You know, we’ve been doing this about three and a half years now, and we’re heavily, you know, invested into the WordPress Community and and our customers. I mean, that’s where we met. Right? We met at work camp US.

Ben [00:01:46]:
I think I needed a phone charger, and we just happened to

Seth [00:01:49]:
start phone charger. We’re in the we’re in the lobby.

Ben [00:01:51]:
Yeah.

Seth [00:01:52]:
And we had a phone charge, and we just started chatting. I’m like and I was looking to get off another host because they were, like, they were they’re bought out, and we’re gonna leave who they are alone. Does Naomi know who it is? But they’re bought out by a bigger conglomerate. The the personal touch wasn’t there, and and it’s like, well, I answer support call Messengers. I’m like, well, that sounds good. Mhmm. So it’s so literally, we started out with I said, I’ll move 3 sites over to you. Within, like, 3 days, I moved all my sites over to you.

Seth [00:02:18]:
I was like, this is great. Let’s just go. Let’s get this over here. So so yeah. I mean, migrating sites is never fun, but guess what? They helped me move everything, which is very helpful. So I really appreciate that as well. So how does this whole thing get started? I mean, you’ve been an entrepreneur for a while now. You you had I’m looking at your LinkedIn right now.

Seth [00:02:34]:
You had help.com. You’d you’re a friend of help.com, easyrent.com. You did work for GoDaddy way back in the day and host Gator says, like, it’s not your host nine. So this is not your 1st rodeo when it comes to hosting. So Yeah. Let’s get started.

Ben [00:02:50]:
Yeah. So, you know, I started out in hosting in the early 2000, I just fell into it. You know, I was delivering pizza at the time, and a friend of mine on IRC was like, oh, I sell web hosting and make, like, $1200 a month. I’m That sounds incredible. So

Seth [00:03:04]:
They’re in pizza delivery.

Ben [00:03:05]:
Yeah. And, you know, I got my 1st server. I think it was cPanel version 4 back then, and, you know, the rest was kinda history. I started a little company, and then I realized this huge, you know, company, HostGator, was right down the street from me in Boca Yeah. In South Florida. So I Julie ended up just kinda merging that little company in and worked for HostGator for a while, saw some early scale. And when they decided to move to Houston, I wanted to stay back In Florida, I had just turned 21. So I just didn’t really wanna leave the nest yet.

Ben [00:03:35]:
You know? So, you know, I basically started host 9, completely bootstrapped it out of my parents’ house. And,

Seth [00:03:44]:
I’m sure they love that.

Ben [00:03:45]:
Oh, yeah. No. You know? It was great. Luckily, host night took off when I was out of there pretty Quickly. But, you know, I, built the business to probably I think it was around 1,600,000, 1,800,000 in annualized revenue, and I sold it to HostGator 2010 and took on COO. COO, PostGator. Then when I realized Brent wanted to sell the business, I didn’t really wanna kinda stay on board. I wanted to take a break.

Ben [00:04:08]:
I’ve been grinding for four and a half years with Host 9.

Seth [00:04:11]:
Yeah.

Ben [00:04:12]:
So I took some time off, moved the back to Florida because in the time I was in Austin, Texas. And Oh. I did some consulting work for a couple different hosting companies, so I got bored pretty quickly. And then GoDaddy reached out and, you know, Probably not the most popular name in the hosting space, especially back in 2000, 13, but, You know, they wanted to change that. They hired a whole new team, and, I was the 2nd round of of hires ever outside of inside of GoDaddy. So GoDaddy would only promote within. Yeah. Like, if you didn’t start in the call center, you you weren’t working at GoDaddy.

Ben [00:04:49]:
It was really interesting. So, you know, I I took on a senior product manager role. We we relaunched every single product that GoDaddy in the hosting space. That’s when we launched deep in the end. That’s how we launch, manage WordPress, and all that fun stuff. You know, and then, you know, similar to what, Schrebel From Paige Lee, it’s saying that, you know, corporate was a little too corporate for me. So I left Hostgator or GoDaddy. Sorry.

Ben [00:05:12]:
And, you know, did a couple startups here and there and then, took on a chief product officer role at StackPath, and that’s actually where I started learning about CDN and and delivery at scale and the web application firewall at scale. And one of the companies we bought was a very popular company in WordPress space, which was maxed CDN.

Seth [00:05:33]:
And I remember that. Yeah.

Ben [00:05:35]:
What I saw was a lot of these WordPress users, we were churning at, like, 94 percent because nobody could figure out how to properly use the CDN. And, you know, we’re going through this evolution of content where, You know, Netflix and Hulu and all these things are starting to come up. And if if Netflix is spinning for 2 seconds, Alright. Netflix is down because you’re used to it being immediately available. So the same thing happens to websites. So, you know, when I saw that, I kinda pitched this idea to the board at StackPath, and they’re like, oh, that’s cute. We’d rather go out for Disney. And and, you know, funny enough, Disney’s a customer of Rockets.

Ben [00:06:10]:
But, You know, the, the the I

Seth [00:06:12]:
love it.

Ben [00:06:13]:
They didn’t see the value in it, and they were so focused on enterprise delivery. So I I left Stackpath, and I launched Rocket And, you know, completely bootstrapped the business, almost took an investment on, but decided not to. We saw some incredible growth. So I still own a 100% of the company. You know, we finished last year, just under 5,000,000 in ARR. And, Not

Seth [00:06:36]:
bad for 3 years then.

Ben [00:06:37]:
No. It’s really good. No. It’s been great. You know? I mean, we we had a 160% growth rate year over year. You know, we operate at a 50% EBITDA, so it’s a very healthy business. And

Seth [00:06:48]:
Yeah.

Ben [00:06:49]:
You know, we have some really amazing things we’re doing this Dear to reinvest that capital into the community. Right? So

Seth [00:06:58]:
Yeah.

Ben [00:06:59]:
We we have some exciting announcements in the next, You know, 8 weeks or so, some really big products we’re working on. Oh. But, you know, we’re just really excited. You know? For me, our strategy for growth in 2024 is really Just supporting our customers as best as we possibly can and then getting out of that. Yeah. The communities. You know, like, work camps, We’re actually at WordCamp Nepal. We have 2, team members that are core contributors that went to that.

Ben [00:07:24]:
Tons of Oh, wow.

Seth [00:07:25]:
That’s that’s a heck of a trip.

Ben [00:07:26]:
Oh, we’re

Seth [00:07:27]:
gonna take a quick break, Hear from our sponsors and get right back to the show.

Ben [00:07:30]:
Oh, yeah. Yeah. They, then they’re heading to Work Camp Asia. We’ll be at Oh,

Seth [00:07:34]:
you’re out. Might as well stay there. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Ben [00:07:36]:
So we’ll be at WorkCamp Asia. We’ll be at WorkCamp US, of course. We’re we’re sponsoring WorkCamp Phoenix. So, you know, we’re we’re trying to Sponsor as many community events as possible even if it’s just lunch, even if it’s, you know, providing some kinda, you know, value back to the community. You know? We we have competitors that are, you know, 10 times the size of us that don’t even contribute a single minute to core. Right? And

Seth [00:08:00]:
Yes. It’s

Ben [00:08:01]:
just a huge part of what we’re doing at Rocket. We’re even gonna start incentivizing some of our staff to, you know, be part of The core contributing team at WordPress. So, you know, a lot of really exciting stuff, but, you know, I think you know, I did a podcast last week at the very beginning of the the the New Year, and And, you know, what we really focused on, I’m on WP Product Talk to discuss as well, is is really not losing sight of the customer. Right? Like you Yeah. Seth. Right? Like, I don’t mind jumping in and helping Seth. It doesn’t matter what day. You can email me.

Ben [00:08:31]:
You message me on Slack dot on post status. It doesn’t matter. I’m there. I’ve never, you know, I’ve never got one of them.

Seth [00:08:36]:
Weird ones. I also send you some pretty weird ones too. Like

Ben [00:08:39]:
But we always laugh. You know?

Seth [00:08:41]:
It what was it? It was a it was a it was a Space Yep. On p got a lot of PHP went to space. Yep. It screws something up, and it depends like it’s right here. Yep. Like, god bless you. I never Found that.

Ben [00:08:51]:
Yeah. Plug in, basically, trying to read a invalidated time zone, and it had a space in time zone. So Something that just kinda you know, when you we’re in about 30,000 WordPress sites, and and, you know, because of of the market we’re in, we see a lot of the The busier, slash enterprise sites on the platform. So you’d be surprised what we see, and you learn the critical path to debug. You know, the the beauty of us just focusing on WordPress is debugging WordPress is typically the same steps. It’s not a different system that you have to learn and keep track of. So It’s been exciting. You know? I I I really attribute a lot of our growth to the team and and just how, you know, they share the same passion as me for customer success.

Seth [00:09:32]:
Yeah. Your team is amazing. I mean and they get back to you. I mean, they’re like, oh, we’ll get back to you within an hour. No. They’re back to you in, like, 5 minutes. And then 5 minute and the 5 minutes is actually long for them. Yep.

Seth [00:09:42]:
I mean and sometimes it’s sometimes, like, it’s too long for Ben. Ben jumps right in. He’s like, I’m in. I’m in. I’m in. I’m digging this one. So I always appreciate it because I like I know who is running the show. And, you know, I appreciate, you know, you are a small business.

Seth [00:09:56]:
I mean, as much as, you know, you take on the big dogs or handlings like Disney and other projects that you are a small business. And I like the small and nimble companies.

Ben [00:10:06]:
So what so I think I I think I’d agree to that because it’s Defining the small business, I think, is an operational, blueprint slash outline. Right? So when you define a business

Seth [00:10:18]:
mentality. Yeah.

Ben [00:10:19]:
Correct. Right? So we we have full test coverage on our APIs. We our React portal was written by the guy that wrote Visa Checkout. You know, we’ve got all of these enterprise grade, traits at the business, but we don’t have the politics and let’s Run the business like a spreadsheet. You know, my goal is is not to have to have a 100 people at Rocket. Right? Like, we we grew by over a 160 percent in 2023, and we added 5 heads. That’s it.

Seth [00:10:48]:
Wow.

Ben [00:10:49]:
And, like, that’s not

Seth [00:10:50]:
But efficiency.

Ben [00:10:51]:
This is as being efficient with our And we are not stressing our team out. If the team was stressed out, we would have hired 10 if we had to. But with the tooling that we have and the platform that we’ve built, We’re able to effectively service the need of the customer whether we’re in support or not. You know? Like, there it’s usually An inbound of migrations and help getting on the platform. And then from there, it’s usually just some of our customers spend 1,000 of dollars a month. We haven’t talked to them in a year and a half.

Seth [00:11:19]:
I know. And then there’s then there’s Seth, who you hear from on a weekly basis. What do I do? What do I do? That’s all

Ben [00:11:24]:
we’re here for. We enjoy it. But then more importantly, what I love, Hosting can be tricky. Right? You know? Over the years, I’ve seen customers that are not pleasant to work with. Right? So when the team sees Seth right in, Nobody’s doesn’t nobody’s thinking like, oh, we just talked to Seth. It’s like, cool. It’s Seth again. Right? And everybody is just excited, you know, because our customers are just amazing.

Ben [00:11:47]:
And, you know, it’s it’s like a breath of fresh air for the team that we’ve hired that, you know, has been in hosting for so long. Like, Ryan was at a two hosting for, You know, I think it was 5 or 6 years, and he’s on the role of a 2. It’s just he saw a much different persona than what we see at Rocket.

Seth [00:12:04]:
Yeah. Because you get, you know, who you’re aim for, your your your, what’s the term? Who’s I literally just lost the term, but your your, you know, your your Value proposition. Your people you’re going for is higher caliber. You know, as you you’re not trying to go it’s not a race to the bottom. It’s like, this is what we provide. This is our price. We’ll work with you if we have to, but, like, this is what the caliber we’re looking for for our customers. You almost interviewed me as much as I interviewed you.

Ben [00:12:31]:
And it’s, you know, it’s like the humanity. Right? Like, we want people to treat us the way that they wanna be treated. Right? So when somebody comes to chat, they’re flying off the handle, And it’s just like, wow. Like, we haven’t even gotten 2 words in yet, but it’s just usually, it’s it’s almost like a beat dog syndrome. Like, from some of the bad support experiences in the past, it’s like, Hey. Like, that’s that’s not us. Right? Like, we are real people. Yeah.

Ben [00:12:53]:
You know, and, like, one of the compliments I think it was even you on our last call that you had said, It’s always a breath of fresh air to recognize Darcy in chat or Maria. You recognize. Right? And and and it doesn’t mean we’re a tiny company. It means we’re, you know, Personable. Right. We’re personable. We actually have the the humanity side of the business, but, You know, we are we’re a very well optimized, you know Yeah. Company that, you know, is able to to keep that face to name along with growth.

Ben [00:13:23]:
Like, what company goes from, you know, a little under 2,000,000 year in revenue to almost 5,000,000 in 1 year, but you’re still maintaining that Same strategy and and approach.

Seth [00:13:33]:
You’re doing something right. So here’s a question for you. What because you’ve done corporate ish, and then you’ve done corporate, and then you’ve also done your own Saying, what’s the best thing about being an entrepreneur in your mind?

Ben [00:13:44]:
So I think I think the best thing about being an entrepreneur is you’re changing You’re you’re changing the world whether it’s at a mass scale or a a little scale. Right? So, like, what Rocket has done has changed the world for all of our customers. Right? And Yeah. It’s the speed. It’s the security, and it’s just the overall experience of working with WordPress. So, you know, I think one of the one of the coolest things about being an entrepreneur Entrepreneurs, you are doing something. Yes. Everybody works to make money, but, you know, a a real entrepreneur is Also, doing something that has a purpose because

Seth [00:14:21]:
Mhmm.

Ben [00:14:21]:
You know, other not everybody wants to be involved with snake oil and and crazy sales stuff. Right? This is This is a real solution, and and you’re able to make an impact because you are solving problems for other people.

Seth [00:14:34]:
Amen. So on the on the flip side, what keeps you up at night, or do you sleep like a baby?

Ben [00:14:38]:
No. I don’t. You know, what keeps me up at night is Server reliability, uptime. You know, things have changed in the last 10 years. Right? People expect a 100% uptime. Unfortunately, that’s not Realistic. I don’t care if you’re Google, Amazon. Doesn’t matter.

Seth [00:14:54]:
Definitely not Amazon. Definitely not Amazon. Because literally, when Amazon goes down on the East Coast, the whole Internet

Ben [00:14:59]:
Right. So what we’ve implemented, and it’s we haven’t posted about it yet, but it’s we’re gonna talk about it probably next week, is behind the scenes, we actually have disaster Recovery back snapshots taking place every 5 hours. Right? Oh, wow. So we still have hourly backups that are or, I’m sorry, daily backups that are Customer facing, that hasn’t changed at all. But what we’ve created is an actual 5 hour snapshot of every, you know, VM running on our private cloud. God forbid something happens. Let’s say a data center catches fire or there was just a disk failure. Right? The maximum exposure right now is 5 hours, And it takes us about 2 hours to restore a full 1.2 terabytes.

Ben [00:15:42]:
Right? Not bad at all.

Seth [00:15:42]:
Not bad at all. No. It’s too fast.

Ben [00:15:44]:
No. Where it gets really is in the next couple of weeks, we’re actually gonna move it even further and do 1 hour snapshots. And it’s completely unnoticeable to the to the workload. It happens The block level, and it’s just it’s something that nobody else in the world is doing. And quite honestly, if we had a failure, we would have 2 work streams. Some of our engineers what focus on fixing it, and then we would have another engineer doing a resource. Because at that point, we’re sub 1 hour, you know, difference on the data integrity. Right? That’s what

Seth [00:16:11]:
where mostly, we’re not updating every hour. And if they are, they can survive.

Ben [00:16:16]:
Correct. Correct.

Seth [00:16:17]:
Even 5 hours, you can survive. You can most likely go back to your Google Doc and grab it and throw it back in real fast.

Ben [00:16:22]:
Exactly. So, you know, that’s the main thing that keeps me up at night. In the very beginning, it was scaling support, but our team has just been so incredible. And, you know, like, I don’t I don’t lose any sleep over our support. It’s just amazing. Same with, you know, Chad, like, on our sales side. In the very beginning, I was obviously doing all the sales stuff, but I I I don’t have anymore because we dollars. That’s all.

Ben [00:16:45]:
Yeah. That’s great. That’s awesome. So, you know, it’s

Seth [00:16:48]:
He’s free.

Ben [00:16:48]:
That’s what keeps me up at night and then constantly and and I guess at the end of it, You know, really, it’s just all of that bubbles back to the customer success. Right? Like, we host some very, very large websites that are responsible for putting food on on people’s tables, including you. Yeah. So that’s that’s not something we take lightly, and we’re very appreciative of the trust every day. And, you know, I think that’s what keeps our support where it is because we all just truly do care about our customers’ businesses. And, I know that. Yeah. I remember, you know, I remember when we first, we first got hannity.com on board.

Ben [00:17:21]:
I’m not political or anything, but it was a very big win for us. And I remember that night not sleeping. My wife’s like, what’s wrong? Like, what if something happens? She’s like, it’s gonna be fine. I’m like, what if something happens? You know what I mean? And what

Seth [00:17:31]:
if? You don’t know Yeah. If that accidents happen

Ben [00:17:34]:
We’ve come a long way for years since that day. So but, yeah, it’s, you know, it’s definitely the customer, and I think that’s super important because it should keep you up at night. Because there’s a lot of our competitors that it doesn’t. And, you know, it’s

Seth [00:17:47]:
I’ve had an unnamed, host Lose my sight completely before. Like, how do you lose a sight? Like, no backups, no nothing. How does that happen? Yep. It does.

Ben [00:17:58]:
Well, the best, you know, the best part is we’ve had we’ve seen that, and other customers have that too. We’re not perfect. We we’ve had to roll back to a backup in some cases. Like, it Happens. It’s part of the business, but we’re also using a complete rollback. We’re using a completely separate system for the disaster recovery backups. So we have all of our daily backups going to an s three bucket, you know, Wasabi, right, through a different system. And then we’ve got another cloud Product called Acronis that’s doing our snapshots every couple of hours now going to their storage.

Ben [00:18:29]:
So we now have data looping. Encrypt it in 3 places, on the server, in object storage, and on this backup cloud.

Seth [00:18:38]:
That that’s what you’re supposed to do with all your stuff. You’re supposed to keep it local, local in quotes, you know, and then 2 other spots are not next to each other.

Ben [00:18:46]:
Correct.

Seth [00:18:47]:
So here’s the final question. What is the most important thing to carry with you all the time?

Ben [00:18:52]:
The customer. Right? So so I learned this from Lance Crosby at StackPath. In every conference room, we had a chair, and it said the customer chair, and you are not allowed to sit in it. Right? And the and the the reason that was there is so every single meeting you had, you would have the customer there in that chair. So it reminds the team to always be thinking about the customer. So to me, the most important thing to always take with you is the customer. Whenever we we do something, it’s, You know, how does this affect our customer? What is the customer result? Right? And that’s where things like we’re we’re re changing the game on how we monitor our notes. Right? And I had this idea.

Ben [00:19:28]:
I wanna do a blog post about putting the managed in managed WordPress and and going in-depth of what we do and what we’re monitoring. Like, right now, I could tell you which Node on our platform has the highest CPU usage, and I could tell you how many MySQL requests we’re doing per second across our entire platform with this new monitoring system. So, you know, I think every but but what does that mean for the customer? Less failures, less outages, more predictions on failures, and, you know, be ability to be more proactive. Right? So so, yeah, never leave home without a customer.

Seth [00:20:00]:
I love that. I love that. So, Ben, so people can find you at rocket.net, a great domain name. I have to say, you know, it’s it’s it’s, like, to the point, you know, great logo. And then where where do you hang out the most? Where online. Where do people find you the most?

Ben [00:20:15]:
To you know, I’ve been on, x lately. You know, I’ve just been kinda

Seth [00:20:19]:
You you have to think about the name. You have to think about the name

Ben [00:20:21]:
of the I was like, listen to Twitter again. I’m like, no. No. No. It’s 2024. Time to move on. You know, I I like x because there’s a lot of creators on there in the sense of, agencies and freelancers, and I and I just I I kinda like Keeping up with, like, Cloudflare and some other vendors. But I don’t I don’t do too much social media.

Ben [00:20:40]:
I I’m on LinkedIn here and there. It’s hard to weed out some of the spam.

Seth [00:20:43]:
Post app. Post status wise.

Ben [00:20:45]:
Post status. Yeah. So I would say the number one place that I pay attention to community wise, definitely post status. I’m always around in there. And then, of course, you know, my email, ben@rocket.net. I’m I’m always available, and it’s always open.

Seth [00:20:57]:
Yes. It’s scary. He’s he’s always available. Like, man, what did I do? I blew something up. He’s like, you there’s a space there. I’m like, ah, Ben, this has been great. I’ll let You run and then you have to go be a busy man and do some more stuff, but thank you so much for being on the program.

Ben [00:21:13]:
Thank you, Seth. I really appreciate it. And, again, thank you for your business, and looking forward to Continued, success together in an an awesome 2024.

Seth [00:21:22]:
Amen. And we’ll see everyone next time. That was a great show. If you’re enjoying Entrepreneur’s Enigma, please view us in the podcast directory of your choice. Every review helps other podcast listeners find our show. If you’re looking for other podcasts in the marketing space, look no further than the marketing podcast network at marketing podcasts .net. Gold’s theme, I hope you have enjoyed this episode.