iThemes Enters the Hosting Space

iThemes is getting into the hosting business after launching three plans that take advantage of its relationship with Liquid Web. The plans are finely tuned around the company’s products and come with free SSL certificates.

I reached out to Cory Miller, Founder of iThemes to figure out why they’ve entered the hosting space, what it means to be able to control the user experience of their products from the top-down, and how their plans compare to those from hosts that offer Jetpack Premium.

Interview With Cory Miller

What does it mean for you and iThemes to be able to control the user experience from the top-down?

In short, it means a better overall experience for our customers. For more than 10 years, we’ve dealt with most of the hosts, especially the ones offering catered WordPress offerings, and it has been a terribly frustrating experience for us trying to troubleshoot problems and help our mutual customers.

Additionally, we’ve long said you have to have two things to be our customer: WordPress and web hosting. Now we install WordPress for you, along with SSL, essentially with a click on our own hosting.

How would you compare iThemes hosting packages to hosts that offer Jetpack Premium services as part of their plans?

The thing that sticks out for me is having everything under one brand and team. But we think using iThemes Sync Pro as the hosting control panel gives us a significant edge for our customers to do more with their WP sites, in particular, our reporting features in Sync Pro.

Now our customers can get WP backups, security, site management and in-depth reporting all from one dashboard, along with their hosting. With our Business plan, they get BackupBuddy, our WordPress backup plugin; iThemes Security Pro, our WordPress security plugin & iThemes Sync Pro all in one. Plus they get an awesome team of WordPress pros for support if they need help or have any issues.

What are you most looking forward too offering these hosting packages specifically tuned for iThemes products and WordPress?

The actual implementation of the vision of offering the key essentials we think people want and need, along with a roadmap to do more, from our team at iThemes. It was one of the motivators for joining the Liquid Web family — the ability to finally do what we’ve always wanted to do for our customers, offering a more complete experience for them, from us.

Were there any challenges that you overcame when putting these packages together?

The main one that comes to mind is trying to ensure we offer what people actually want and will buy. But there was several months of hard work by our team and others to get this launched. Some long nights to pull all the pieces together in order to do this, with many more to come.

Prices range from $15 per month to $25 per month billed on an annual basis. New customers can take advantage of a coupon code on the site to purchase the Business plan, normally $25 for $15.