The downfall of Rocket

Zoinkies

https://rocket.net/blog/rocket-net-joins-hosting-com-to-build-and-deliver-industry-leading-saas-web-hosting-platform/

In recent times I have seen on forums and social media that the quality of Rocket had dropped substantially as they grew, now to find out they're partnering up with hosting.com.

Personally, I have moved hundreds of customers from hosting.com and continue to do so, the biggest complaint being poor support and slow hosting.

I use to be quite worried as Rocket grew and people knew them more, and presumed a lot of customers would choose them over us, I was wrong to worry as it appears.

What's your thoughts? I see this as a massive win for me, I have been converting hosting.com customers for ages and now I think I can start converting Rocket customers now they're affiliated with hosting.com.

bgabler

That’s very strange you’ve seen that. We have a 98% satisfaction rate and I literally have not seen a single post where our quality of support has dropped, would love to know sources so I can have Jess look further.

In any case, this is the come up for Rocket.net. I’ve been in this industry 23 years and am beyond proud of what we’ve built.

I’m beyond excited for what’s to come as I step in to the Chief Product Officer role at hosting.com, where I’ll oversee all product and software development.

I’m confident that with the Rocket.net product offering now available on hosting.com, you’ll move those customers back.

We also have major plans to launch a Rocket.net “Lite” set of SKUs for sites that may not need Managed WordPress hosting, ultimately making it so any WordPress site on our platform is powered by Rocket.net.

Stay tuned, incredible things are coming.

Feel free to email me any time as well with any suggestions and/or concerns, I’m always ready to talk and happy to provide some free access to our product via hosting.com or Rocket.net directly. (Ben@hosting.com)

Zoinkies

bgabler Honestly just seen people comment about it when asking for hosting suggestions. I just think it's a bit of a sell out to see Rocket going from being fiercely independent to becoming intertwined with hosting.com.

As you said you've been in the industry for so many years but you aligned with hosting.com, a company that's dogged on by people who actually value good quality hosting as what Rocket provided for so many years.

In fairness too, everything you built which is top tier, is such a stark contrast to hosting.com, seems a weird cop out.

webnestify

bgabler What exactly is managed WordPress hosting? If customer broke website or plugin/theme break some code, would you be able to solve it? That's what I think when I see managed WordPress hosting...

Zoinkies

Zoinkies edit: you use to boast about your 10/10 benchmark scores, which was really cool and inspired myself and most likely others to strive for better, but now you've aligned with hosting.com where the best benchmark you'll see is the website loading full stop.

bgabler

Zoinkies I’m sorry you feel that way, but I’m here for a reason: customer success.

Looking forward to doing what I do best, which is building industry leading hosting products that drive real results for customers.

Whatever experience you may have had with hosting.com, that was yesterday, and I was not here yesterday, but I’m here today and I invite you to watch as we build the best platform in the industry.

JohnB

Zoinkies It always goes the same way:

Smaller provider that does everything better for years and then a large provider essentially buys them out in some form or another. The owners of the small provider likes the $$$ and promises that quality won't be impacted. Some even believe it because the large provider is very convincing.

In a year or two it loses most of what made it special (english speaking support, speed, security etc)

No business owner is going to say "yeah we know quality will be lower but they offered a good price" lol.

Its sad to see. Hopefully this time is the exception to the rule. But it won't be.

I do love moving sites from garbage providers though. Its so satisfying. With godaddy I even take care of closing the account for them and making sure they won't get billed again and getting a partial refund if they pay yearly.

jamess

Hello,

Thank you for sharing your thoughts with us. We understand that our growth and partnerships can raise questions and comments, and it's important to listen to the different perspectives from our industry. While no company is perfect, we are continuously working to improve our services and customer experience. Platforms like Trustpilot and Google Reviews reflect the progress we’ve made toward greater customer satisfaction, and we remain committed to raising that standard even further.

We’ve also strengthened our leadership team with the addition of Ben Gabler as Chief Product Officer, bringing valuable expertise to our support team and service performance. The goal of both Rocket.net and Hosting.com is to provide the best service and support possible; every piece of feedback helps us to improve, and we appreciate you taking the time helping us towards that goal.

Best regards,
Jameson, Customer Advocacy

Kosta

Guys while you here, can you share some tips on db tuning as big players with big servers…
Or vote to existing feature requests and suggest new features to make this platform even better…

Kind regards
Kosta

bgabler

Kosta absolutely!

Typically, I always start by making sure all of your tables are innodb and not myisam.

Next, you’ll want to run a db optimize which can be done several ways, but I like to use “mysqlcheck -o $dbName” from the command line.

Next, to tune MySQL directly you can download and run MySQL Tuner to look for any server side optimization opportunities: https://github.com/major/MySQLTuner-perl

Hope this helps 🙂

Zoinkies

bgabler Are you guys going to transition to Enhance from cPanel? Would be a massive win for Enhance.

8Dweb

webnestify Agree. We handle this 99% of the time for our customers and agencies. Frankly, Enhance has made this a breeze with the single exception of logs... 😉

JohnB

webnestify What exactly is managed WordPress hosting?

For me, I take care of all the security, optimization and updates side of things, constant uptime and performance monitoring. In other words the client doesn't even have to think about maintaining their site.

If the client breaks something that's 100% billed hourly.

Have one client that didn't want to pay for "managed" and said they would take care of updates.... I recently logged into to their site and most plugins were 6 months out of date... Eventually when they get hacked and have to pay for cleanup or finally click update and something breaks, we will revisit the topic 🙂

For nontech users managed is often cheaper in total than paying $$$ hourly when something gets really messed up + lost sales. For people like us, it feels gimicky because we have the skills to manage it probably better than the company selling the service.

Andrei

First, Rocket are not small and independent, they got a couple of millions from HostPapa when they started out. There's nothing small about a million dollars. Secondly, it's cPanel hosting (without email and without access to cPanel) behind Cloudflare edge caching. You can set that up yourself, they just made it easy.

That doesn't mean it's not good, it is a good hosting solution, but it's not God's gift to humankind. It's just sorta like the Labubu of hosting. WP Engine was the shit at its time, then Kinsta, and so forth. All good hosting solutions, but there's no need to glamorize them. It's just products and brands, they launch, live, get acquired, etc.

That being said, congratulations to Ben and the team for the deal with hosting.com.

salp

Andrei Secondly, it's cPanel hosting (without email and without access to cPanel)

Heh, where have you come across this and got the idea that they use cPanel? Ben clearly states in a podcast that they've built it from ground up and the first version was ready in 70 days.

Correct me if I am wrong but they don't utilise cPanel but have a fully custom panel created.

Zoinkies

salp Yes, rocket is cPanel behind the scenes. Granted it's really optimised and clean, but it's cPanel.

Zoinkies

salp Adding to this, they use WHMCS behind the scenes, too. Their panel is created utilising WHMCS API in parts. You can tell when viewing the URL, it's classic WHMCS wrapping. Especially in payment methods part of the control panel.

Just to clarify, cPanel and WHMCS are great products, no issues using them. I am sure Ben can clarify, if it's that important to anyone, personally, the only reason I moved to Enhance was the API, that's it, cPanel was great for us 90% of the time. Infact, most of our customers miss cPanel a lot for the functionality.

Also, the reason I know this is because I asked a while ago, when I was thinking of moving my agency at the time to rocket enterprise and when you use rocket and use benchmark tools etc a lot of php info reveleased /cgi-sys/defaultwebpage.cgi which is a cPanel error page.

salp

Zoinkies Oh interesting, nice spot. Furthermore, even if it's cPanel - they've done a great job in actually enhancing it to compete with Kinsta and WPEngine/others.

bdd

Zoinkies why didn't they use litespeed like all other providers then?

Zoinkies

bdd
Unpopular opinion, but I don't think LiteSpeed is as good as everyone says.

Yes, LS is fast in most cases, and is ideal for bulk, commodity hosting where you cram 100's of websites onto an underpowered VPS. However, when you don't and use NGINX or the like with very powerful hardware, you get a better experience overall.

For example, we used LSE for a long while on 6 GHz CPU, 128 GB RAM, water-cooled top-tier colocated servers, and Fastly found our origin had lots of micro downtimes with LSE, and a high amount of 503 errors.

We migrated a single server from LSE to NGINX, and had an instant decrease in origin latency, 503s were nonexistent. The only downside for us was CPU/RAM usage increased; however, it wasn't really an issue. We just decreased the amount of websites on the server. Now, we just put 30-40 people on a single server.

JohnB

Zoinkies Yup not to mention LiteSpeed quality just isn't good. They aren't trustworthy, they endorsed Cyberpanel and they are only popular because cheap hosts can cram a bunch of sites on shit hardware.

Most large sites that actually need reliability and performance don't use litespeed.

That said, nginx has problems in mass hosting because braindead customers need their htaccess to make plugins magically work. Depends on your target audience.