Really kicked to see something from my neck of the woods with great potential out in the market. Congratulations on the launch.
I'm assuming it will take significant volume to make this profitable (should be easily doable).
I had noticed recently fibre now being strung from trees in Bangalore much like how ethernet cable used to be ten-years-ago and figured we're on to something big now.
Common mode of infection I have seen with Wordpress is through site owners downloading premium themes that have been uploaded into file sharing sites by malware authors.
The site owners can't, in most cases, poke around to see what is in the code. And the code often contains hooks that inject various things into the installation.
The other route in is through scripts like TimThumb, which is included in a lot of themes. TT has had some serious security holes in it, the last one being fairly recent that allows for remote file execution. At that point, at least the account hosting the file is a goner.
Kjellberg maybe the biggest personality, but there is a significant group of people who make a decent living out of doing this.
I do strongly believe that this will become a major genre in reality television/entertainment. And I am not taking into account the other universe called DOTA here.
RSS was never meant to be a product. It is a format and a spec. Products are built around the spec: apps that push it, clients that pull it. It has incredible value where machines speak to each other. Much of the 'dying' was fed by the deluge of RSS-as-product based companies that thrived at that time. Those companies and products probably are dead, but RSS is not. And that is not surprising; not at least for me.
It was also only a year ago I said “Automattic is healthy, generating cash, and already growing as fast as it can so there’s no need for the company to raise money directly — we’re not capital constrained.”
I was wrong, but I didn’t realize it until I took on the CEO role in January.
Find this to be really odd.
And it leads into this, which is at odds with the previous statement that they were growing as fast as they can. Did they discover any new avenues for growth that required a whole new raft of capital?
..and we realized we could invest more into WordPress and our products to grow faster
I love the company and Matt. Met him briefly in India many moons ago when he was attending a Wordcamp here.
I have kind of stumbled on to the same line, though I'm in the early stages of getting over the shock of it all as it was not something I was looking to do and considering where I am located (India), I never would have thought it would be possible.
I guess there is no one right way to do this. A lot depends on your own abilities, strengths and the terms in which you can get clients. If you have leverage and can deliver well, the timing is not an issue.
In any case, I'm glad there are more people doing the same :)
Bubble 1.0 was greed without the knowledge on how to value digital companies properly. This phase is greed even after knowing how to value digital companies properly.
You will come off looking really silly if an attempt is made to make sense of all these on actuals and fundamentals.
It has been quite easy for a few years now to put together your own setup on a VPS and run with it. IIRC, I started doing this somewhere around 2008, during the heydays of Slicehost. What has changed is that you now get pretty good and reliable VPS providers for cheap and in some ways it has kind of become a cool thing to do for everyone.
I would, though, add a few words of caution here.
1. It is one thing to put together a VPS to run a bunch of sites. It is another to handle major traffic on it. Some of you have done it, some of you will learn with time how to do it, but a large number won't. If it is critical for your site to be up 24/7 and Google is going to be your best friend in trying to understand which part of the stack is creating the bottleneck, you'll be in for some real trouble.
2. Do you know how to check for rootkits? Would you know if your server has been backdoored? These days attack vectors are so complex that even experienced hands (the main reason why I don't do this on my own anymore) have trouble saying for sure they are fully locked down. Wordpress on a public static IP represents one of the juiciest targets on the web for hackers and a big chunk of the phishing sites are hosted on servers with unpatched Wordpress installations or plugins/themes that have backdoors in them. Most of the site owners have no clue they've been owned till the hosting company takes them down. Please don't wind up being one of those site owners.
If you are going to do this own your own, at least get something like Wordfence installed, so that you have some degree of protection in place.
I run most of my sites these days on Webfaction. I believe they run Cloudlinux these days, which means you get pretty consistent performance from the server, even in the shared hosting environment. The sites with greater resource requirements are moved to Wiredtree, who provide beefier, managed VPS services at reasonable rates as long as you are OK with cPanel and don't veer too much from their standard stack.
Disclosure: I have no business links with Webfaction or Wiredtree.
Really kicked to see something from my neck of the woods with great potential out in the market. Congratulations on the launch.
I'm assuming it will take significant volume to make this profitable (should be easily doable).
I had noticed recently fibre now being strung from trees in Bangalore much like how ethernet cable used to be ten-years-ago and figured we're on to something big now.