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Web Host Interview: Co-founder of Pressidium Hosting, Andrew Georges

Recently, WHSR had the honor and privilege of conducting an exclusive interview with Andrew Georges, Co-Founder of Pressidium. I also completed an honest review about this WordPress website hosting service, which you can read here. As with all our reviews, I thoroughly tested the service and offer my clear feedback on what works and what you should be aware of.

Introduction

andrew

Hi Andrew, how are you doing? I am honored to have you as our interview guest today.

Thank you Jerry, it is also an honor and a privilege for me to be hosted on your blog.

Let’s talk about yourself and your company Pressidium. How would you describe your role as the co-founder of Pressidium.

As a Co-Founder of a startup I get involved with every aspect of the business, from product development, engineering and technical innovation through to growth planning, sales and marketing.

We’ve created an enterprise class platform that enables WordPress websites to go beyond the cloud computing hype and actually gain real business benefits. We help to drive down customer’s costs, react quickly to changing business conditions and provide simplified management tools.

I love dealing first hand with clients, it’s great to learn and hear how their businesses work and how Pressidium can help (and has helped) them with my own ears. We really do see each individual client as a partner and work hard at building a strong relationship with them.

What’s the one thing that excites you the most to work at Pressidium?

I think it’s Pressidium’s impact on the hosting industry that really excites me the most. Pressidium’s low-cost/high-performance design gives everyone the opportunity to experience the benefits of Enterprise Architecture Hosting. It’s no-longer a premium priced service that only the privileged few can make use of.

With our model every single customer using the Pressidium® Pinnacle Platform, will experience what it means to have a quality, enterprise level performance and service without the astronomical price tag.

“I fell in love with my first 300 baud modem.”

Can you tell us one thing that most people don’t know about yourself?

Something many people might not know is that I was a techie from a very young age. I have been engineering and creating all my life, from experimenting with electronics and building my own ham radio at the age of 10 to discovering the wonderful world of software engineering and developing my first asteroids game clone on my Amiga 500 (at 12). My true love was the net, being connected to something larger and bigger than myself was always fascinating to me. I fell in love with my first 300 baud modem (you know the exact type from the ‘WarGames’ move) and dialing up the VAX/VMS mainframe at the local tech college. You needed a lot of patience back then, in the good old days.

Growing up however I realized that I’m actually a problem solver. I was always finding myself identifying a problem, analyzing it and coming up with a solution. This resulted in me landing my first tech job building servers and local area networks at the age of 15, and my career and passion for computing just continually evolved from there. It’s been over 20 years since then but my love of the discipline hasn’t diminished.

I brought that problem solving attitude with me to Pressidium and I constantly keep asking the team “What is the problem we are trying to solve?” Because without keeping the initial problem in mind, it’s pretty difficult to come up with a solution that works effectively.

You see, we're not just writing code for code's sake (although I've done that in the past and I admit it was fun). We’re trying to provide true value to our customers and we achieve this by using Pressidium's Services as our solution toolkit to their problems.

On Company and hosting services

What can we know about Pressidium? Please give us an overview on Pressidium hosting services.

Pressidium homepage
Pressidium homepage

Pressidium Pinnacle Platform is a fully managed WordPress hosting platform, designed from the ground-up to be highly available and scalable (with no single point of failure). Pressidium offers fast, robust, scalable and secure Premium Managed WordPress Hosting.

Our platform is built specifically to host professional WordPress sites by using webscale technologies and systems that are optimized to deliver incredible speed, unparalleled availability and uptime. It offers an amazing amount of control through our quick and easy custom built web based UI, so that at a touch of a button our users can experience great features, like instant backups, staging sites and so much more.

* Note: You can take a quick tour and learn more about Presidium service here.

“We focus on site performance not bulk.”

Pressidium Pinnacle Platform sounds like a dream-come-true for those who want extra stability and scalability. What can we know more?

pressidium portal

Most people today struggle with their hosting, they have to manage their CMS, deal with security, ensure that their software is up to date and if their site gets popular they have to scale their infrastructure to meet demand.

All this is usually too much for bloggers, businesses and WordPress professionals and will often lead to significant downtime of their site (at the worst possible time). Pressidium solves all of this. Our platform and service transparently handles security and scalability problems so you don’t have to. Furthermore in the event of an issue, our team will handle it for you.

In a nutshell our fully managed WordPress platform and beautiful management portal allows you to concentrate on your content without worrying about your website, everything else is left up to us – totally hassle free.

One of the really great things about our design is our scale-out architecture. Most conventional hosts concentrate primarily on bulk, which means they’ll cram hundreds, if not thousands, of websites onto one single pc-like server.

Pressidium Pinnacle Platform platform is entirely different. We focus on site performance not bulk. Each website is hosted in a grid or array of server farms, in a tiered architecture. This design comes from real time mission critical environments (used in the telco industry, stock-market and by NASA), where everything is redundant and capacity can be increased by simply adding more nodes to the tier that needs it.

pressidium-architecture-2

 

“Believe it or not, we have no quota enforcements.”

What happens if customers are taking in more traffics than their allocated quota (for example, 30k visits/mo is for Personal Plan users)? And, how do you measure visits?

Believe it or not, we have no quota enforcements. We don’t take a strict, rigid approach to how far over their plan our customers go because each set of circumstances is different.

Instead overage stats are used to track the overall usage of an account.  If usage is constantly much higher than the plan’s limit for over two to three months, then we will use the statistics to suggest that the customer should upgrade to a more appropriate plan. If the customer doesn’t wish to upgrade or doesn’t need to then we will suggest a fair overage charge to them first, before it is actually billed. The core philosophy behind this is to find the most cost effective solution for the customer, and definitely not to blatantly upsell. This is more about our customers getting the best performance and helping them succeed, rather than squeezing every penny out of them.

We have also made counting visits simple and try to keep it a true and fair representation of the actual resources a site uses during a given month. As a visit we will count each unique IP address that accesses a site within a 24 hour period, we will also filter out bad-bot and malicious activity from the count. What this means is that a single visitor may access a site many times during a day, this will count as only one single visit. Counting a visit this way very roughly equates to a Google Analytics Session, although a different methodology is used by Google. Customers are updated in real-time on their usage statistics via their Pressidium Dashboard and coming soon they will be sent a monthly usage report so that they can keep track on their site’s growth. We will however, as mentioned above, never take a site down if it exceeds the resources of the customer’s plan – we want our customer’s sites to grow and their businesses to succeed, there is no need in penalizing them.

On business and personal opinion

It’s been almost one year since Pressidium first launched. How’s business so far? What’s next for the company in coming six months?

We first introduced Pressidium at WordCamp 2014 in Sofia and WordPress community members showed a great interest in what we had to offer. This lead to an unexpected amount of users in a very short time period forcing us to scale earlier than we had planned. However, thanks to our Enterprise Architecture hosting design, our infrastructure scaled transparently so none of our users experienced any problems.

Looking forward we have a continuous development system whereby we develop, implement and deploy new features to our platform regularly. Our roadmap is based on our client’s input. As an example we put a vote out for the most asked for features and include them in our next release.

We’re also working on engaging more with the WordPress community, which we feel that we are members of. This includes providing solid, in depth articles on our blog, actively taking part in community discussions and collaborating with the core team, and of course by sponsoring meetups and WordCamps.

It’s cool to have a web host that focus solely on WordPress Hosting (I’m a WordPress fan!). But in the same time this means you are keeping your door closed to many potential customers who are not on WP. How has the strategy of solely focusing on WordPress users affected the business?

Pressidium Co-Founders John Andriopoulos, Filip Slavik, Giannis Zachariadis and Andrew Georges.
Pressidium Co-Founders John Andriopoulos, Filip Slavik, Giannis Zachariadis and Andrew Georges.

By keeping our expertise and our focus primarily dedicated to WordPress, we’re able to offer our customers something that’s not available at standard hosting companies. We know WordPress inside out, we’ve worked with it for years, we hire only the most talented individuals with a deep knowledge and understanding of WordPress, therefore we’re the best people for our customers to come to should they have a problem.

In comparison conventional hosting companies spread their knowledge over multiple platforms. We think doing this can weaken the quality of the information on offer. You don’t want to talk to an expert in Joomla or magento if your website is using WordPress, for example.

For business, this is far from a problem. Instead of looking at it as ‘keeping our doors closed to potential customers’, we see it as serving those people who really want to work with us, by offering the very best of what we’re good at.

That's all for my questions – I hope you enjoyed this online interview. Is there anything you'd like to add? Thank you very much.

Thank you so much, it has been awesome and I am honored by the opportunity to advocate our WordPress hosting revolution to your readers. We really do believe in what we are doing, we are incredibly proud of our platform and it is great when we get a chance to share our vision with others.

A Warm Thank You to Andrew Georges

I’d like to issue a warm thank you to Andrew Georges, co-founder of Pressidium, for taking the time to chat with WHSR about the inside processes at the company. You can learn more about Pressidium and other hosting companies in our hosting reviews section on this site.

 

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Article by Jerry Low

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