Bringing Complete WordPress Hosting to Life with WP Cloud and PanelAlpha

Background

ModulesGarden, founded by Konrad Keck in 2011, is a trusted partner of tens of thousands of customers worldwide. The forty-person team, based in Poland, earned their customers one-by-one by providing expertly coded custom modules and integrations for WHMCS, the billing and automation platform widely used by the web hosting industry. 

While working closely with hosting providers, Konrad and the team identified a significant gap in the market. While cPanel, Plesk, and DirectAdmin dominated the control panel space, none of these solutions were specifically optimized for WordPress websites. This optimization is critical for maintaining speed, security, and ease of use. And with WordPress installations accounting for more than 43% of the web, this was a significant market share left on the table. 

So, in 2024, the team launched PanelAlpha: a control panel built from the ground up to make WordPress site launch and management as intuitive as possible. Unlike traditional control panels that can overwhelm users with technical options and unwieldy interfaces, the team at PanelAlpha designed their interface to provide simple, seamless workflows specially designed for WordPress environments. The goal was to go head-to-head with site builders and platforms like Wix and Squarespace, which offer users a simple website design experience, but are closed-off platforms rather than the open-source WordPress. 

To achieve their mission, PanelAlpha adopted a two-pronged approach: offer their solution both through established hosting providers and directly to developers and businesses who run WordPress on their own servers or VPS infrastructure.

The Challenge

In March 2024, as the team prepared to launch the stable version of PanelAlpha, they evaluated multiple infrastructure options for the product’s backend. While AWS and Google Cloud offered robust capabilities, PanelAlpha’s team was prioritizing customer experience above all else and their analysis showed that none of these mainstream cloud platforms provided the WordPress-specific infrastructure necessary to deliver the stability, scalability, and speed they wanted for their customers.

“Providing a platform that has a set of tools reducing the customer’s hassle with such a popular solution as WordPress is essential for a web hosting business. It offers much more than just a hosting service – a well-designed product that goes beyond the customers’ expectations and takes their experience to the next level.” – Konrad Keck 

The team’s assessment identified several specific hurdles with traditional cloud platforms:

1. Integration Complexity: Creating a seamless WordPress experience would require extensive custom development work, significantly diverting time and resources.
2. Economic Considerations: The cost structure of traditional cloud services would make it difficult to maintain competitive pricing, especially for smaller hosting providers and developers.
3. Performance Engineering: Achieving optimal WordPress performance would require building additional layers of optimization on top of standard cloud infrastructure.
4. Development Focus: The team wanted to concentrate on enhancing PanelAlpha’s user experience rather than solving infrastructure challenges that weren’t central to their value proposition.

During CloudFest 2024, where PanelAlpha moved from production to stable launch, Konrad met with Jesse Friedman, head of WP Cloud. Their conversation included a presentation of  WP Cloud’s WordPress-specific infrastructure – in a way that aligned perfectly with PanelAlpha’s goals, offering built-in solutions to many of the challenges they were preparing to address. 

The integration process began almost immediately after CloudFest. PanelAlpha’s developers worked closely with WP Cloud’s team to ensure seamless communication between the control panel and WP Cloud’s infrastructure. The integration leveraged WP Cloud’s API to automate provisioning, scaling, and management of WordPress sites directly from PanelAlpha’s interface.

In October 2024, the PanelAlpha team launched a version of their product with full WP Cloud capabilities.

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The Solution

WP Cloud’s infrastructure offered several key advantages that directly addressed PanelAlpha’s mission to simplify WordPress hosting. WP Cloud’s purpose-built infrastructure provided specialized caching, security, and performance enhancements – right out of the box. Their API-first architecture made API integration easy, allowing PanelAlpha to connect its control panel without extensive development resources, thus improving cost efficiency. WP Cloud’s pricing model also provided significant savings compared to AWS and Google Cloud, with a cost savings of 28% to 63%, and with additional feature sets including free CDN services. Finally, with WP Cloud handling server maintenance, security updates, and core WordPress optimizations, PanelAlpha could focus on support and development to continue improving the product for customers. 

This resulted in some significant service benefits for PanelAlpha, including:

• Simplified Management: Hosting providers could now offer WordPress-specific features through an intuitive interface without building their own control panel.
• White-Label Capability: PanelAlpha’s white-labeling features allowed hosts to maintain their branding while leveraging WP Cloud’s infrastructure.
• Competitive Differentiation: The combined solution enabled small and mid-size hosts to offer enterprise-grade WordPress hosting features that were previously only available to larger providers.

The integration worked so well that WP Cloud is now the exclusive solution for PanelAlpha.

We’ve seen such overwhelming enthusiasm from our user base for the WP Cloud integration that we made the strategic decision to focus exclusively on WP Cloud.

– Konrad Keck, founder, PanelAlpha

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The Results

The partnership between PanelAlpha and WP Cloud delivered many immediate and long-term benefits to PanelAlpha.

PanelAlpha users gained advanced WordPress capabilities without having to engage with complex server management, lowering the barrier to sophisticated panel implementations. According to Konrad, 22% of their clients are already using WP Cloud, a number that is steadily increasing. 

Site performance for PanelAlpha users also improved dramatically, with better loading times and enhanced user experience across devices. These customers also benefited from significant cost savings and reduced development time.

“WP Cloud’s WordPress-specific optimizations paired with our management interface created a dramatically better experience for both hosting providers and end users,” says Konrad, when discussing the direct impact of the partnership. “Our partners were seeing higher performance, fewer support tickets, and faster client onboarding, leading to happier customers and stronger growth.” 

The partnership also resulted in more customers. One unique use case of this cascading win-win was AleForge. A hosting company focused on hosting game servers like Minecraft, Aleforge had recently expanded into WordPress hosting, initially selecting cPanel. 

But, existing solutions didn’t offer enough flexibility AleForge to create varied hosting plans across different price points without compromising user experience. Small and medium-sized businesses using AleForge needed enterprise features like real-time failover, CDN, WAF (Web Application Firewall), and dynamic autoscaling, but couldn’t afford enterprise pricing. Additionally, many business owners wanted to control their WordPress websites without needing to understand the complicated aspects of website configuration.

After reviewing PanelAlpha, AleForge decided to switch platforms. By implementing PanelAlpha as their customer-facing interface and leveraging WP Cloud’s infrastructure, Aleforge built a solution that addressed key challenge points in the WordPress hosting market while maintaining their competitive pricing.

According to Aleforge’s leadership, “WP Cloud and PanelAlpha allowed us to iterate on our design and functions to build a better product for our customers while providing a sustainable service. This also allows us to offer a premium service compared to the competition, normally only found on enterprise-level WordPress hosting plans.”

Companies can now launch or expand into WordPress hosting without these extensive resources, allowing them to focus entirely on what drives business growth: sales, marketing, and customer support. This isn’t just an incremental improvement, it’s a complete reimagining of what’s possible in the WordPress hosting ecosystem. We’re seeing partners achieve in weeks what previously took years of development and millions in infrastructure investment.

– Jesse Friedman, Head of WP Cloud