Quitting WordPress Multisite to build a WaaS (Website as a Service) website builder

A CTO consultant tasked with providing scalable WordPress infrastructure

“wildcloud is a perfect description of what I was trying to solve. It was very easy.”

Hector Torres – CTO / IT Consultant

What they offer

Hector was hired by an agency in the US that wants to provide an alternative to Wix, but uses WordPress. The agency has an extensive customer base that often asks for help with website management and updates. WordPress has been their CMS of choice, and all their customers have their own WP installations, which made their job very tedious and time-consuming. That’s how the idea of building a Website as a Service (WaaS) started.

The agency enables them to provide websites that the customers can essentially manage and customize themselves with predesigned and preconfigured templates. On top of that, they’ve built a fully-fledged “business builder”. This is a sequence of questions and tools that help the customers decide the best design, content, and colors for their website. The tool builds the website for them and helps them design and organize their marketing. Of course, this is an excellent way for the agency to tie in additional marketing services.

It was immediately apparent that wildcloud provided the solution Hector sought. They were struggling with Multisite and its many limitations for a long time. They needed a solution that would spin up multiple instances of WP that wouldn’t share the same codeset the way Multisite does. They wanted the easy management of Multisite, without the scalability and security limitations.

Before discovering wildcloud, they had considered Multisite and cloud providers such as AWS. But they quickly learned they needed a large investment in time and expertise to build the project.

“Honestly, without wildcloud we would have had to build wildcloud ourselves. Which obviously we can’t. I cannot tell you how happy the customer is that you guys are out there. The fact that you guys exist is allowing them to continue with the project.”

Investment needed

Hector immediately saw the potential of the wildcloud platform. It was easy to start because we have a low barrier to start: no credit card is required, and it’s a monthly subscription.

API documentation was all there, which was important because they wanted to automate everything from sale to launch. We have a lot of videos and a template to start with. “It was all very easy with WPCS” (as wildcloud was formerly called), says Hector in the interview.

The goal of wildcloud is to cut down development and management time dramatically and it seems that Hector is no exception. Hector stated in the interview that without wildcloud, they would have had to hire a full-time IT operations manager.

Migration method

They imported a few templates using the All in One migration tool (this was before we launched our migration plugin) and started building the project from scratch, including all the automation. Hectors explains that they’re currently managing the entire project with just one part-time “IT guy”, which is common across most of our users.

The result

Hector states that wildcloud is a very easy-to-use platform for managing multiple instances of WordPress. Hector uses wildcloud to manage a WaaS, which is one of the common use cases of the wildcloud platform.

Given that they’re growing rapidly and have been able to maintain growth with just a part-time IT guy, we’re happy to help facilitate this growth.

Automate Your Business From Sale To Launch

One of the reasons that Hector has made his agency client so happy is that he was able to provide a solution that not only centralizes development and management but is also automated from sale to launch.