Rocket aims to meld edge content delivery, security for WordPress hosting
This is a guest post by Phil Shih, Managing Director and Founder of Structure Research.
A new managed WordPress hosting provider called Rocket has entered the market. It is hoping to distinguish itself from other offerings in the crowded market by offering a wider than usual range of data centers from which to host web sites and a focus on user experience and performance, among other attributes.
Details: Rocket is a managed WordPress hosting service that packages infrastructure with performance-oriented capabilities such as content caching and security. The idea is to simplify the process of optimizing WordPress and moving it out to the edge. Rocket has built all the optimization tools into its platform and automated provisioning and management. To enable caching and security and to push these functions to edge locations on a global basis, Rocket has integrated Cloudflare on top of its existing data center footprint (which is built using Total Server Solutions). From the end user’s point of view, all they have to do is set up a WordPress installation and the CDN, performance and security services are automatically configured and ready to go – leaving them to focus on website development and content.
Founders: Rocket was founded by long-time hosting industry veterans Ben Gabler (CEO) and Aaron Phillips (CRO). Gabler was recently at StackPath in the role of chief product officer. He previously founded HostNine and sold it to HostGator, which is now part of Endurance International. Phillips has held executive positions at cPanel, Help.com, Layered Tech and FastServers. Rocket has been bootstrapped by the founders.
Asset-light: Rocket will not build out data centers but will instead run on the servers hosted by Total Server Solutions (TSS). TSS has 19 data center locations, with 14 in the US and Canada and five more in Europe and APAC.
Analyst Perspective
New company formation in the hosting industry continues to evolve. New entrants are not just in the business of providing infrastructure but are looking to solve specific challenges around widely used applications. There must be a layer of value-add and it often revolves around performance and security. Up and down from SMB to enterprise customers, solving these kinds of problems now needs to be done on a global basis and at the edge. Rocket has zeroed in and focused its resources on solving a subset of WordPress challenges while using trusted infrastructure platforms to scale without having to invest heavily in CapEx.
About the author:
Phil Shih is Managing Director and Founder of Structure Research, an independent research firm focused on the cloud, hosting and data center infrastructure service provider markets. (more)
DISCLAIMER: The views expressed in this contributed post are that of the author, and don’t necessarily reflect the views of EdgeIR.com. Contact us if you want to contribute a guest post.
Customer First – An Edge(y) Perspective
Article Topics
CDN | cloud | Cloudflare | edge content delivery | edge security | hosting | StackPath
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