Customer Story: Q&A With A Prospective Multi-tenant Customer

As you might suspect, we answer questions from prospective customers on a regular basis. But recently we received a request for a 1-on-1 walkthrough from what had to be one of the most perfect potential customers we’ve interacted with this year.

The potential customer’s situation is this:

• They currently use a well regarded multi-tenant solution from GitHub that was further customized for them.
• Even with the customization, deploying a site requires a lot of manual work, including SSH into servers, manually configuring Runcloud parameters, manually creating new databases and so on.
• The customer has hundreds of existing sites.

Updates to each site require even more manual work and frequently involve a two week period where they put out fires from sites that didn’t upgrade cleanly.

We simply could not have asked for a more perfect potential customer. WPCloudDeploy’s multi-tenant solution is tailormade for this situation.

So, our 1-on-1 discussion & demonstration session went something like this:

• Initial introductions, business scenarios and disclosures about their current workflows and processes.
• With that background, we walked the prospect through the purchase of a multi-tenant site from the perspective of their end customer – all the way from the pricing table through the checkout process.
• We then illustrated how we would push updates to all customers without leaving the WPCD environment (no SSH necessary).
• At that point we discussed template sites and the significant differences in updating existing sites vs new sites based on the template (mostly how to handle any custom additions to existing databases.)
• We then discussed rolling updates, how splitting up customers onto multiple servers can help reduce stress and improve up-times and how updates can be setup for only existing customers while new customers continue to receive an older, known stable version.
• Finally, we discussed other misc. items such as ease of configuration, possible tweaks, outgoing emails etc.

Ultimately, we hope we demonstrated that it was possible to accomplish everything they needed from a single console while saving a ton of time and gaining a ton of additional capabilities – especially around rolling upgrades, managing versions and dealing with Git.

Billing

Ironically, the prospect doesn’t require our subscription integration. They have a different pricing model more suitable for their business that is already being handled in an efficient manner. It’s efficiency in getting the sites up and running, maintaining them and upgrading them that’s the underlying challenge that they’re looking to address.

They are used to running their own infrastructure and doing a TON of work manually. This alone makes them a perfect WPCD customer because they can still run their own end-to-end infrastructure while saving oodles of time and reducing aggravation by a significant amount.

Pricing Surprise

This is one area where we were significantly surprised. One of the questions we always ask a prospect is who else is being evaluated. We did an off-the-cuff pricing comparison with one competitor on the list – it turns out that we are greater than 50% less the first year and more than 70% less in subsequent years!

After the walk-through was over, we sat down and compared our pricing against other folks for this particular use-case. Even with a full-service SaaS where hardware is included, the all-in costs for WPCD would be at least 50% less, especially after the first year.

(We get the feeling we’ll be looking at our Multi-tenant pricing for 2024 – the differences are just too stark here!)

Wrapup

Of course, the prospect still has many other options to evaluate – with more than a decade of WordPress experience under their belts, they have a firm idea behind what they’re looking for. Whether they’ll choose us as their final solution we have no idea. But, dang, there’s no doubt that their requirements and current situation is just tailor-made for WPCD. If they do become a customer we might be able to do a case study after they’re up and running.