Meet Michael
I’m Michael Eisenwasser, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer at Rapyd Cloud. I’ve been in this industry for 15 years, working with customers in the WordPress ecosystem. I was the co-founder of BuddyBoss, which created the most popular community platform for WordPress. I ran that company for over 10 years with my current business partner, Tom.
What inspired you to create Rapyd Cloud?
Our customers at BuddyBoss, had 30,000 customers when it was acquired last year, and their number one challenge was that they could not get adequate hosting.
What are the primary benefits of using a managed cloud hosting platform like Rapyd Cloud?
Traditional WordPress hosts focus on the traditional needs of WordPress, which usually means blogs and marketing sites, content-driven sites that can easily be cached for better performance. Most of the hosts out there focus on these types of customers and use very aggressive page caching.
But for a customer like a BuddyBoss customer, where all users are logged in and seeing unique content, imagine in a community, your profile is different from mine, your messages are different, your notifications are different, in that type of dynamic site, traditional hosts struggle. The sites stall and crash quickly and can’t handle high amounts of concurrent users.
It’s not just communities that have this problem. It’s also a website for e-learning and e-commerce. Some people don’t know that 20% of all online commerce is done on WordPress, mostly with WooCommerce. All these types of platforms slow down with traditional hosts.
So we built Rapyd Cloud, an incredibly scalable platform for dynamic sites. If you’re running those types of sites or have a high-resource or high-power site, Rapyd Cloud will give you much better performance, especially at scale, for a competitive price.
What customization or scalability options are available for users who want more control over their hosting environment?
Rapyd Cloud, out of the box, almost all plans, whether you’re on the lower plan or the highest plan, come with dynamic scaling. We scale the CPU and RAM up and down throughout the day as needed.
We also have an insane amount of PHP workers, hundreds of times more than any other host, which allows us to support many parallel processes.
When you’re looking at Rapyd Cloud pricing, each tier provides higher amounts of resources. All tiers are super scalable, depending on your concurrent users and traffic needs. As long as you’re on the correct plan for your usage, your site will be incredibly fast.
Unlike other hosts that market a specific amount of CPUs and RAM, we offer dynamic resources. We scale up and down throughout the day, allowing us to average your usage and charge based on that.
With other hosts, if you have a traffic spike, you need to buy enough overhead to handle that spike, even if your site is mostly dormant during off-hours. With Rapyd Cloud, it’s all dynamic.
We also have an incredible number of PHP workers, so we can handle huge amounts of concurrent users.
Later this year, we’re launching a feature called Performance Boost, where you can pay in advance and schedule a period of time with a huge amount of resources.
What are some common challenges users face and how does Rapyd Cloud address them?
I’ve already touched on performance, it’s the number one issue in WordPress. In the 2024 annual WordPress survey, performance was the top issue reported by business owners and developers.
With my old company, BuddyBoss, the number one reason people left the platform was performance issues. Rapyd Cloud solves this.
Another challenge is security. Some people get their sites hacked, which can damage their reputation, slow the site, and hurt search rankings. Rapyd has best-in-class security built-in. We have Monarx scanning the server for malware and automatically patching it. We also have Patchstack, which scans plugins and themes for vulnerabilities and patches them.
Support is another challenge. Some hosts have poor support. Rapyd Cloud has some of the best customer support in the industry. Our Trustpilot rating is nearly 4.8 out of 5, and our first response time is under a minute.
We also offer an easy-to-use dashboard with all the necessary tools: rollback plugins, restore backups, manage PHP.ini, clear caches, and more.
How do you differentiate Rapyd Cloud in a highly competitive web hosting market?
We’re targeting a specific audience, people with dynamic, high-resource sites that face performance issues.
When I say we’re faster, I don’t mean 1–2% faster, I mean hundreds or even thousands of times faster in some cases. We’ve benchmarked against major hosts and are significantly faster in every metric.
I won’t quote our benchmarks; I’ll reference WP Lift, which wrote an independent article. They simulated scaling up to around 5,000 concurrent users. All the major hosts had a 300–400% slowdown, but Rapyd Cloud had only an 11% slowdown.
So, if your site is really slow, it’s existential to your business. It hurts your search results, makes people leave, and kills conversions. Performance is the number one thing many customers care about when choosing a host.
What impact do emerging technologies like AI have on the future of web hosting?
We’re already integrating AI throughout our business. We’re using AI to help with coding to produce features faster and with higher quality.
We also use AI in our support system. It’s trained on our knowledge base, so it can answer many customer questions, free up human support for complex issues, and improve response times.
In the future, I expect AI to assist with metrics, data, load balancing, and virtualization on servers as well.
What advice would you give to entrepreneurs looking to innovate in the SaaS and web hosting space?
For SaaS: Learn AI and integrate it into your whole business. The industry is changing fast. Small teams are now able to build SaaS products quickly with AI, and that’s only going to accelerate.
If you’re building a pure software SaaS product, it will get harder to compete unless you’re creative and ahead of the curve.
In web hosting: Partner with Rapyd Cloud. We have best-in-class infrastructure, an awesome affiliate program, and an agency partner program in development. Hosting is the backbone of the internet. If you’re building a SaaS product, let us be your hosting partner.
Did you enjoy our interview? Do you have anything to say to our community?
Loved it, thank you.
Yes! If it’s the WordPress community, we’ve been part of it for 15 years. I go to WordCamps all the time, and I’m well connected in this space. I love the people and the companies, and I appreciate all of you.
