WPTavern: #213 – Malcolm Peralty on Managed WordPress Hosting and AI Innovation at Pressable
Transcript
[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.
Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case managed WordPress hosting and AI hosting innovation.
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So on the podcast today, we have Malcolm Peralty. Malcolm has been immersed in the WordPress ecosystem for 20 years, starting out as a full-time blogger and working his way through tech roles in project management, agencies, and even a stint in the Drupal space. These days, Malcolm is bringing his experience back to WordPress, serving as a technical account manager at Pressable, a managed WordPress hosting company.
Malcolm shares how he found his way from early forays with WordPress to managing large scale hosting environments. He talks about the lure of the Drupal world, and why he’s ultimately returned to WordPress and Pressable.
We discuss what technical account management means at Pressable, how his role differs from sales and support, focusing instead on long-term strategy for clients, performance optimization, and bridging the gap between customer needs and the underlying WP Cloud infrastructure. We hear how Pressable proactively helps clients, sometimes even advising them to downgrade their plan if optimizations mean they need fewer resources.
We go behind the scenes in Pressable, getting into how hardware considerations, plugin bloat, WooCommerce or LMS sites, and customer handholding, all come together inside one company. Malcolm gives us a candid look at performance challenges, the way hosts interact with infrastructure teams, and why education around WordPress performance is so tough, even as competing platforms prioritise speed at all costs.
We also look into the future. What are the cutting edge trends in hosting? Like database replication, virtual clusters, and especially the rise of AI within the hosting experience. Malcolm explains Pressable’s upcoming MCP, an AI powered control panel that promises to let you deploy, and manage, wordPress sites using natural language.
We explore how AI will impact everything from customer support to site deployment, potential pitfalls, and the challenge of balancing automation with human relationships.
If you’re curious about the state of managed WordPress hosting today, the interplay of tech, support, and AI, or just want to know what’s happening behind the curtain, this episode is for you.
If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.
And so without further delay, I bring you Malcolm Peralty.
I am joined on the podcast by Malcolm Peralty. Hello, Malcolm.
[00:03:55] Malcolm Peralty: Hi there. How you doing today?
[00:03:56] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Very nice to have you with us on the podcast today. Malcolm’s got a really interesting story. He’s done a lot, a lot of it kind of maps to things that I’ve done in my life. But it’s a tech podcast, generally we talk about WordPress, but I think we’re going to talk about hosting, AI, and possibly other CMSs.
But before we do, a moment for you, Malcolm, just to introduce yourself and give us your potted bio, I guess centering around your relationship with technology, WordPress, CMSs, that kind of thing.
[00:04:22] Malcolm Peralty: Yeah. So first off, I like to always say that I’m Canadian. I think that actually kind of gives us some insight into a little bit about how I think. And I live just outside of Toronto, Ontario, Canada right now, and I’ve been in the WordPress, around the WordPress space for going on 20 years.
I started with WordPress 0.72, so before the 1.0 release. And I was a full-time blogger, talking about WordPress for several years, and kind of stumbled into using some of my tech skills to work in and around technology with WordPress, and then project management. And because of project management, I’ve been able to work with agencies that build like smartphone apps and other CMS systems, and custom CMSs for customers. But I’ve always kind of kept a toe in the WordPress world as much as possible.
[00:05:11] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, and you firmly landed back in the WordPress world working for Pressable, which we’ll talk about in a moment. But you had a bit of a foray in the Drupal, Acquia world, I think. The word Acquia may not mean a great deal to people listening to this podcast, but it’s kind of the equivalent, I suppose the best mapping would be Automattic over on the Drupal side. What was your experience with Drupal? How come you’re not still fully on the Drupal side of things?
[00:05:35] Malcolm Peralty: Yeah, so that was kind of a strange one for me. I didn’t expect to have a position in the Drupal world. I had done some like Drupal project management before, a lot of like moving Drupal sites to WordPress or like revising a Drupal site, or adding a smartphone app to a Drupal site. But that was mostly, again, as like a project manager or a site builder, not as like someone who really understood the engineering behind Drupal.
But a long time friend of mine reached out and said, hey, would you ever be interested in a job at Acquia working at the Drupal mothership, so to speak? And the position was a technical account manager, which thankfully leans more on my skills as a project manager and someone who understands web hosting than someone who understands Drupal. So I was able to use the combination of 20 years of skills in the space to actually make a good go at it.
And I think one of the big reasons why I was so enticed and interested by the position is, honestly, Drupal jobs pay better than WordPress jobs. And it’s horrible and sad to say, but I think it was a really important factor in my determination on where my career was moving. If it wasn’t for the fact that Pressable came along when it did, and basically offered me a similar kind of pay scale, I’d probably still be in the Drupal space and who knows for how long.
[00:06:55] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s really interesting. I was a big Drupal user for many years but just found it was, there was a lot of things that I didn’t need that Drupal did, that WordPress could do. And so I firmly moved ship away from Drupal. Well, I think it was when Drupal finally went to version eight, so many, many years ago. Something like 2015 or something like that. And I certainly haven’t looked back.
So Pressable, you may need to go and Google that if you’re listening to this podcast. You may have heard that name before, but it is a hosting company, I guess managed hosting, dedicated hosting for WordPress websites. My understanding is they don’t do anything else. Pressable simply work with WordPress. But what’s your role over there? Let’s begin there.
[00:07:37] Malcolm Peralty: Yeah, so I’m a technical account manager. I’m the second technical account manager that Pressable has hired. They’re trying to build out a technical account management discipline. For those that haven’t heard the term technical account management before, you might think it’s like a sales role or something like that with a technical bent, and that’s not it at all.
We’re basically, you know, like WordPress and WordPress hosting strategists, right? So we’re thinking about like, what does your website look like a year from now, two years from now? What technologies do you need to be aware of? What end of lifes will come up that you might need to develop against? What plugins and tools are you using and how performant are they, and are there more performant options in the mix that might work for you? And so that’s really kind of the role that we take at Pressable.
Right now a lot of it is also kind of the pre-sales, right? Like which tier of service or product will your website fit into? What kind of customisations or optimisations might you want to make in moving over to the Pressable platform? And so we kind of go through all of that with customers of kind of a certain scale and size.
[00:08:36] Nathan Wrigley: So do you, as part of the job description then, do you monitor existing websites that are on the platform already and look for, let’s say things like bottlenecks, where something’s going wrong? The client may not be aware of it, but you can then sort of inject yourself, begin a conversation and say look, you’ve got this suite of plugins, that’s great, but we’ve noticed that improvements could be made here, there, and the other. And here’s a suggestion for something that maybe will get rid of that problem.
[00:09:02] Malcolm Peralty: We do get to do a little bit of that, not as much as I would like. My long-term hope would be that, much like Acquia, much WordPress VIP, TAM would be like a subscription service that customers of a certain tier would be able to sign up for, and have like that consistent access and that consistent monitoring where, like on a monthly basis, you know, we’d go through our client list and like double check all of them.
Right now we’re sometimes a point of escalation for support if need be, where they’re like, this problem’s going to take more than an hour to solve. Maybe the solutions team and the TAMs can kind of take a look at this and dive deep into it. We also kind of monitor the data coming in from our server instances. And, yeah, we’ll sometimes kind of cherry pick some of the ones that are standing out as not working as well as they should be, or using more resources than they should be, just as a point of like general optimisation, right?
It’s funny because our role helps both the customer because, again, we don’t care about the money side, right. So we’ll come in and be like, here’s the optimisations you need to make. Now you don’t need even as quite a big a plan as you have maybe. Maybe you need to downsize your plan now because we’ve helped you optimise your website.
But from a resourcing perspective on the Pressable side, it’s also advantageous because one, it makes the company look good to be proactive in that way. And two, it helps for server resources, right? We have our own cloud, WP Cloud, which is our own server stack. It’s not AWS, it’s not Google Cloud. And so optimising resources can allow us to have resources available for other people who maybe are bursting because of a big sale or front page of Reddit or something like that. So we’re always looking at those optimisations as an opportunity on both.
[00:10:37] Nathan Wrigley: Do you, as part of your role, get to sort of interface somewhere between the customer, the people who pay you to have hosting and the hardware side of WP Cloud? Because presumably on the WP Cloud side of things, there’s a hardware layer. There’s literally people putting boxes into racks and putting the cables in and what have you.
Because my understanding is WP Cloud is owned, well, it’s not AWS, let’s call it that. It’s not Google’s Cloud infrastructure. It’s not any of those other things. It’s managed, known by whom, you can tell us in a moment. But do you get to have a conversation, say, look, we’ve noticed that this bit of hardware isn’t as performant as maybe something else? Or, look, here’s some new thing that’s been released onto the market, can we get a dozen of those and try that out?
[00:11:17] Malcolm Peralty: For sure. And as Pressable continues, try to move towards the higher end of mid market to try to acquire customers that are using WooCommerce or learning management systems, we’re finding those platform opportunities where we’re providing like, here’s what we’re seeing, you know, here’s all this data that we’re collecting. Here’s what we think this means. Here’s what maybe our competitors have done, or what our customers have noticed on competitor platforms. How can we either like negate the advantages of other platforms? Or how can we find ways to make ourselves even better than them? Or, here’s what we’re already doing, great, is there any fine tuning that we can do to like eek out that extra little bit of performance?
We try not to be too prescriptive with the WP Cloud team because they really are the experts in the hardware. But we bring a lot of that WordPress knowledge to bear and say like, this is what we’re seeing from a WordPress perspective, what can you do on a hardware and software on the server perspective to kind of make this work even better?
[00:12:12] Nathan Wrigley: It’s a difficult juggling act to perform in a way, isn’t it? Because on the one hand, we’re always talking about how performant WordPress can be, and on the other hand, we’re always talking about plugins and themes and the fact that amassing those will slow things down. You know, you throw in an LMS or WooCommerce or something like that and suddenly the website is going to be a different animal, let’s put it that way.
And so on the one hand, trying to pitch WordPress as performant, and then on the other hand, there’s this whole bit that you are dealing with where the performance is somewhat under question. I’ve always thought that’s a difficult challenge. And certainly in terms of marketing that and making the public understand that, okay, there’s the performance on one side, but we can manage that on the other side. I think that’s a really difficult thing to do because you’re trying to communicate something incredibly technical to presumably a whole load of people, some of whom aren’t technical at all.
[00:13:03] Malcolm Peralty: And even worse, a lot of other competing hosts will hide a lot of issues and faults and sins that customers have made on their website through like heavily used Redis setups that like just make it seem like their website is so much faster than it actually is. Or they’ll buy hardware that is, you know, has like the fastest CPUs. And so from you as a single user testing your website, you might say, wow, my website is so fast on this other platform, but when I move it to this company, now it feels slow. But you’re not doing a test at scale. You’re doing an individual test, right?
So you go on that hardware and you put like 25, 100, 1,000 users going through a checkout process, and all of a sudden your website is slow as molasses and starts falling over. Whereas on the platform that quote, unquote, seems slower, it’s so much more resilient and able to handle that load.
So there’s so much nuance here and so many things that we’re dealing with and a lot of the job ends up being at customer education because it’s very easy in the commodity hosting space to be like, I’m going to move to this other company because they seem faster. And that really shouldn’t be your single goal. It should be understanding your website. But a lot of small business owners, medium sized business owners, even large business owners don’t really necessarily want to understand how their website is built and how their pages are built and these kinds of things.
And it’s funny you mentioned about the WordPress performance thing because sometimes I want to be like, just do this one thing for me, right? On our platform, turn off all your plugins, go back to the default theme, tell me how fast your website loads because guess what, it’s probably going to load pretty darn fast, right?
The problem I have is the customers that have 50, 60, 70 plus plugins, and two of them are different like builder tools, which is unfortunately the bane of my existence. No offence to like Elementor and Divi and Beaver Builder and all these companies that are making these tools to help people have their dream website on the internet. But man, are they ever heavy and slow when you’re trying to create a performant website these days?
And so, you know, I’m often having these conversations about, what is most important to you? And understanding as well that search engines like Google, and search engine companies believe that performance is a big deal because that’s how they manage their own infrastructure, right? If a website is slow, then they can’t really crawl it effectively and understand what’s going on with it. So that plays into a lot of the conversations that I have as well. And it’s never easy.
[00:15:23] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I imagine it’s not. I mean, I don’t know if the goal of Pressable is to make it such that you show up with your website, pay your monthly subscription, whatever it may be, and kind of that’s it. We will take it from here. I don’t know if that’s the goal. Or if it’s more of a, we will have a conversation with you, we will make recommendations and over a period of time, we will come to some sort of happy medium where, you know, what you’ve got is what you are happy with and it’s also performant from our side.
So I don’t know how much of a conversation is there. Any website that I’ve ever brought to Pressable has been fairly straightforward. I’ve installed it, it’s worked exactly as I had anticipated, and so I’ve never really had to get into it. But, you know, a website with 10,000 SKUs, and a million visitors a day, presumably there has to be some handholding going on there.
[00:16:09] Malcolm Peralty: Yeah, I think the big point of delineation is the cacheability of a site, right? So the ability for us to serve it without building the pages from scratch. If you have a brochure site, if you have a marketing site, if you are, you know, the only thing on your website that’s like a real user interaction is some buttons and maybe a form to submit, like a contact form or a marketing related form, your website is going to run perfectly on Pressable without any kind of handholding, without any kind of consultation. You’re going to be able to upload it and know it’s going to be resilient to whatever traffic you receive, and even like power outages in entire halfs of countries won’t bring your website down.
If that’s the kind of experience you want, those plan tiers exist and they work great. And we have agencies that throw thousands of websites on Pressable’s platform in that kind of umbrella without any kind of issue or concern or question.
I think the consultative part comes in when you’re starting to do things like I mentioned before, learning management systems, e-commerce systems, merch drops, custom contests. If you’re doing anything that basically has a different user experience based on adding something into a cart, or like completing a module of learning that needs to be tracked and following the user, typically this means that it’s going to be uncached, which means that it’s going to rebuild that page from scratch, and that requires a fair bit of resources.
We’ve optimised a lot of things to make sure that we can do that effectively, but again, the conversation comes into play, if you add in Facebook for WooCommerce plugin that breaks cache on every page load, then we have to work with our customers to understand like what that means, and what the trade-offs are, and what replacements might exist to make it so that we can cache the majority of sessions so that they can stick within their resource utilisations that we expect them to use.
Most companies, including Pressable will sell on like the number of visits to the website, but also another piece is the amount of workers, right? So these are the little pieces of software behind the scenes that actually complete all of the things that users are requesting, right? Serving up images and web pages and shopping carts and stuff like that.
We have a really cool model where we have one worker per one VCPU, which basically means you get your own dedicated highway for that worker. He’s his own little car on his own little highway lane. Where a lot of companies will do like 40 workers to one VCPU. So imagine 40 cars on one lane highway, versus five cars on a five lane highway. So the way that we process things is a little bit different as well, and so that requires a little bit of education on our side.
[00:18:32] Nathan Wrigley: I think there’s this whole mysterious scientific laboratory kind of impression to hosting, if you know what I mean? I’m imagining a room, a laboratory, sort of white walls and everything, with a bunch of people wearing white overalls with pens neatly lined up in their top pocket, and obsessing about these acronyms. Well, this isn’t an acronym, but you mentioned workers.
But you’ve got things like Redis, you’ve got things like edge caching and all of this kind of stuff. And honestly, to me, a lot of that is a bit of a puzzle. And I don’t know how you educate the public about those things other than just saying, just don’t worry about it. We’re here for you. We’ll deal with that complexity.
But also, I’m curious to know what kind of innovations are there still to be done? Now obviously we’re sort of crystal ball gazing a little bit here, but I am curious about where is the bleeding edge of server technology and hosting technology? What are the things which are just a little bit over the horizon, but are of interest, which may drop in the next year, two years, three years, something like that?
[00:19:34] Malcolm Peralty: Yeah, I would say we’re seeing a lot of web assembly type efforts, which is kind of interesting, which is, yeah, I don’t know if anyone’s ever seen, there’s a WordPress Playground site where you can have like WordPress basically running in a browser. You don’t have to install it anywhere. It just exists in your browser as like this ephemeral install of WordPress that you can play with and do stuff with, and then export to a real install of WordPress if you’re interested.
I think that is a super impactful and interesting technology, and we’ll see probably more of that in the next little while, and how hosts can kind of play into that. I think that we’ll also see better caching technology, better database technology, but also I think better replication technology. So everyone knows that a lot of WordPress kind of exists within the database, and so if you want to have high availability, you need to be able to have that database exist in multiple places. But if you’re doing transactions on your like primary database for like e-commerce, you’re like buying products and you have, Malcolm bought a t-shirt from my website, he wants this size and he wants it shipped here, we need to now replicate that to any other like high availability databases that we have. That replication right now is very old technology in a lot of ways, and it’s not as optimised as we would like it to be. So there’s a latency that exists there in replicating that to other places.
Acquia and some of the other companies I worked for, that latency could be really high or really low depending on how it was configured, right? How long do we kind of keep that data there before we send it over?
We try to do as much real-time streaming at Pressable as possible to make it so like, you know, within like two seconds, the data is now in that replication. And so if your primary goes down, you’ve lost maybe a second or two seconds of data. On some websites, even that can be really bad, right? Because if you, let’s say you’re doing a big product drop and you have 10,000 people wanting to buy tickets to your concert, and you lose two seconds of data, that could be hundreds of transactions that just evaporate into the ether. So better ways of syncing that data across, and managing that relationship between multiple servers I think is going to be a big transition that we see in the marketplace.
We’re already seeing the idea of virtual clusters. So multiple data centres pretending to be like one local server. So then we don’t have that same feel of migrating or syncing data between locations, it just pretends it’s all kind of in the same place. So I think that will be kind of interesting to see because again, that adds more resiliency. And I think, everyone that I’ve ever talked to, if you say like, how long are you okay with your website being down? Even if it’s not a moneymaking website, you’ll hear them say something like, I don’t know, maybe an hour at most, right? So finding ways to make websites more resilient is going to be important.
And then I think just a better understanding just from top to bottom on what’s happening with a website, right? So we have a lot of logging, but it’s not necessarily the best at auditing. So, for example, if Nathan came on my website and got access to it and deleted a plugin, I might not have the best tools right now to be able to say, oh, it was this IP address at this time, he logged into this user, he did this action, and have that complete picture to be able to kind of quickly and easily reverse.
We kind of depend on backups right now a lot of the time, and I hate that. Or we depend on like trying to fish through logs and make those connections using our human brains. All of that is just a really poor solution and I think AI will hopefully help with some of that, and I’m looking forward to having more of this like very specific picture of every action that has on a website without, again, adding a whole bunch of load to the server environment or a whole bunch of data storage requirements that makes it really impossible for organisations to kind of have all this information, right?
Because if I start auditing every action that I’m taking on a website that I have access to, and you think of Pressable having multiple thousands of websites, hosting platforms, you can imagine the amount of data we’d then need to record, right? So data compression becomes super important, or the ability to kind of infer things based on data that we’re seeing becomes important. The amount of work that I do in like looking through logs would make your eyes kind of pop out of your head. It’s brutal sometimes. And logs have never been very user friendly.
So again, another area that AI has been helping us with is like, okay, pull out the things that are potentially the most impactful, the most interesting, the things that stand out over like a statistics, probability kind of system.
[00:23:48] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think what’s really curious about everything that you’ve just said is, so there’s this kind of impression for people who are just casual users of WordPress that you go to a hosting company, it’s a bunch of files and it’s a database, how hard can it be?
And then you’ve just given us a bit of a window into, well, this is how hard it can be, because there’s so many scenarios. And the typical mom and pop store where, like you said, an hour’s downtime might not be the end of the world, and most of the things can be cash and all that kind of thing. Well, that stands in real contrast to the, I don’t know, the gigantic megacorp .com company that’s doing 8,000 transactions every couple of minutes and there’s millions of dollars going through. And there’s just a whole other layer of things going on there.
And so you see the word Pressable and you think, hosting company, pretty straightforward. And I think it’s really interesting that you get an opportunity to come on and say, well, actually, no, there’s this other layer. There’s all this stuff going on in the background. There’s all of this technology. We’re thinking about the future. You know, we’ve got different geographical locations where things are housed, and we’re trying to speed that up so that there are all these different clusters. It sounds complicated, essentially. I’ll boil it down to that.
So I am a Pressable customer and when I go into the Pressable admin, I sort of log in and, you know, I’m presented with the usual array of different options. I would say that there’s more than probably somebody like me is requiring, but there it is anyway. You know, there’s lots of different options for tweaking this, that, and the other thing.
What I’m trying to sort of draw an analogy to is that it can be a little bit overwhelming if your day job isn’t to deal with a website. You log in and, what is this? What does this menu even exist? There’s probably ways of Googling it and finding it out. But I know that in the near future, Pressable is going to be launching sort of like an AI component to the hosting side of things. An MCP, you’ve described it as Pressable’s MCP. And then in parentheses, get AI to do things related to your hosting, whether that’s WooCommerce or WordPress or performance optimisation or whatever it would be.
So this is interesting. And I’m just curious as to how deep are you going to allow the AI to go? We all know that the AI, any AI can hallucinate. So I’m curious as to know what kind of things are you unleashing for the AI? Is it just a case of, okay, I would like the light theme now, please? Or does it penetrate much deeper than that?
[00:26:10] Malcolm Peralty: So it’ll be in phases over the next little while, we’ll unveil these features and what connections that we have. But eventually the expectation is, anything that you could do or click on as a user in the control panel, an AI could also act on and do as well. So a great example that we’ve been giving our agency partners is if you, let’s say, are working on code for a customer’s website, you could say to the AI built into your Visual Studio Code or your GitHub or whatever, hey, spin up another sandbox site, push this code, update the database, pull from production, all the files, and let me know when this is complete.
And the MCP will go and it will spin up a new sandbox site, a new WordPress install, with a new domain name attached to it. It will grab your code and push it up to that website. It’ll go to production and grab the files from the wp-content uploads folder, and sync it over to this new staging site or sandbox site that you’ve asked for. And then it’ll say, hey, by the way, it’s now ready for testing.
And you’ve done this all with natural language as a command behind the scenes. Or, let’s say you’re running a thousand sites, tell me all the websites that need like a Gravity Forms plugin update. And it will go and it’ll check all of your websites in the Pressable platform and give you a list of like, hey, here are the ones with Gravity Forms updates. And you could say, okay, update them for me please. And it’ll go back and it’ll do that job.
[00:27:24] Nathan Wrigley: So I guess the goal is to make it straightforward to use natural language to do a variety of tasks. Now obviously there’s got to be some serious guardrails around this because, you know, it would be very easy to inadvertently type, delete all of my, that’s a bad example but you get point. You know, what are the contraints?
[00:27:43] Malcolm Peralty: Yeah, please don’t use dangerously skip permissions, for example. So a lot of the AI tools that already exist have some human in the loop questioning. Are you sure you want me to do this? Are you sure you want me to do this kind of thing? And kind of seek their approval. We’re also talking about what, if anything, we’re really going to do on our side about that? We have pretty solid backup solutions put in place. So maybe if you, you know, accidentally said, clear out all of my platform, and it deleted all of your websites, you could then hopefully say, can you actually restore from backups all of those sites and have it restore from backups all of those sites.
So, you know, we keep hourly backups of database, daily of the WordPress file system, so there is that. Also our main WordPress install is simlinked, which means that you can’t actually change any of the core files. So even if you told it to delete WordPress, it can’t actually do that piece of it. So your WordPress install would still exist, but all your plugins and uploads and database would all be gone. But you could just restore them again using natural language.
So there are some guide rails that we can put in, but at the end of the day like, you’ll be able to connect whatever AI tool you’re using. Maybe you have Ollama with a local AI tool on your computer. Maybe you’re using Claude or Codex or something else. You’ll be able to use any of those AI tools. And so some of it is really on the person using it to put in some of those guardrails and those human and loop things. And I would recommend having a like system prompt that basically says like, before you do anything destructive, check with me first. Not that it won’t automatically do some of that, but it’s just good to have a secondary layer.
[00:29:13] Nathan Wrigley: And how are you exposing these capabilities to, let’s say Claude or whatever it may be? So what does that interaction look like? How is it that certain capabilities are available, but others are maybe not, and so on.
[00:29:25] Malcolm Peralty: Yeah, I mean I like to think of an MCP kind of like USB/API for AI. So we’re basically just making those kind of endpoints available to the MCP, or making like those API endpoints available to AI, so that it can undertake things on your behalf. So like our whole control panel is basically APIs all the way down, so to speak. So it’s not very hard to kind of hook those things up.
I think the harder part is making sure that the AI understands what these controls, what these APIs do, what they expect to receive, what they expect to give back, and what that all means. And once all of those kind of definitions are in place, then it’s pretty easy.
[00:30:05] Nathan Wrigley: I think one of the curious things for me is being inside, let’s say the Pressable UI where I’m navigating with a mouse and I’m clicking on things, everything is very intentional. You know, I go to a thing, and I do a thing, and I get a prompt to say, are you sure you want to do this thing? And I say, yes. And so it goes. And so every single thing that I do requires an interaction with me.
I suppose, with an AI, you could concatenate a variety of things. Maybe the AI has some sort of misunderstanding along the way, or you type things in such a way that it’s not entirely clear. And then kind of unpicking, okay, what just happened? It’s really easy to unpick that in the UI because you can say to the support rep, well, I did this, and then the site died. Okay, we know what happened there.
Whereas with this cascade of things, which is done with natural language, presumably this is where your logging, that you described earlier, comes in. There isn’t really a question there, but I’m curious as to what that process is. The capacity for many dominoes to fall from just one simple prompt, I suppose as a point of concern for you guys, because you are going to have to be unpicking all of this on the backend when things, which they inevitably will, go wrong.
[00:31:16] Malcolm Peralty: For sure. And I mean this is one of those areas though where we’re ahead of the curve. I think a lot of companies will be adding these kinds of things. But from an AI perspective, I mean, since October or November of last year, we’ve seen the skills and abilities and understanding of the top tier AI tools just jump exponentially. So the number of mistakes or concerns that we have have gone down in that same vein.
Our support team has also been trained up in a lot of these. And we’ve been testing a lot of these MCP pieces for a long time now. So we feel pretty confident that those that enable this and that have a good understanding of what this means and how to use it won’t make too many mistakes or have too many concerns or issues.
You know, again, we’re targeting a lot of our agency partners that are developers that already kind of live and breathe this stuff. So they’re also used to being able to untangle and knot if they tie themselves in one. So I don’t expect someone with their like first WordPress website on Pressable to enable MCP and start using it.
I really think this is most valuable to agencies or companies at scale. You know, if you’re running one website, you probably don’t need this, but if you’re running like 10, 100, 1,000 websites, then this tooling becomes very helpful. Because you can have like a, maybe do it on one site and now then replicate that same thing you just did across all of the sites I manage.
[00:32:33] Nathan Wrigley: I don’t really know how to phrase this question, but I’ll give this a go. At the moment, presumably you have a fairly solid relationship with your customers. You know, if something goes wrong, you log in, you enable the chat widget, you have that conversation. There’s this backwards and forwards, okay, great. And maybe there’s lots of clients that you get that you never have that interaction with.
But I’m just curious how that relationship over time might change with the advent of AI. And what I mean by that is, it’s almost like you’re not talking to humans anymore. And because of that, you start to have a different impression of the company that you are dealing with. Okay, it’s just some sort of AI entity, I don’t need to worry about it so much. Maybe loyalty starts to come into question because there’s no humans there anyway.
So again, it’s very hard to encapsulate what I’m saying, but presumably from a marketing point of view, there has to be some moment at which you say, okay, there’s too much AI now. We’re no longer a bunch of humans presenting ourselves to the world. We just look like a bunch of robots. Do you know what I’m saying there? Does any of that land?
[00:33:34] Malcolm Peralty: It does. I will say, we have those conversations internally. The expectation is always going to be like, when we add a new feature, it’s going to be added for humans first and then added to our AI tooling. But the only way that you can compete in the modern marketplace is to take advantage of some of the tools and opportunities we’ve been given with AI. As difficult as it is, there’s probably a business case, you know, I’m sure there will be businesses that will target people saying like, we don’t use AI for support, we don’t have AI integrations, we’re a completely human business. But I think the difficulty will be like scaling and competing in the modern marketplace.
And like a lot of the agencies we’re talking to are expecting this. They’re pushing us towards this because they’re looking to reduce their time to delivery, right? They want to be able to sit in a coffee shop with a customer, get a brief of the business, give that brief to, you know, an AI tool that transcribes their voice to words, and then have it go through this whole system of setting up a hosting sandbox for the website, set up WordPress, select a theme that matches their expectations, set up the brand colours, and almost have like a proof of concept at the end of a meal with a customer, that was assisted by AI.
And if they can’t do that first step of setting up a sandbox or a staging site for the customer, then we’re not part of that conversation at all. They’re going to go where there is that feature and that functionality, and Pressable won’t be part of that conversation at all.
And as end users, I mean, having AI assist with the things that agencies or higher touchpoint customers need, gives us that flexibility now to be available for the $25 a month customers who actually need the handholding and support from a human that we just couldn’t do otherwise, right? It just doesn’t scale properly at that price point.
So I think this could be advantageous to both sides if it’s used right and done right. But I definitely agree, there’s landmines that we have to kind of be cautious of and avoid, and we have to be very careful about how we apply this. And I think the key thing is always making sure that everything that we do is human first, and then AI enhanced, rather than AI first and human supplemented. It’s just a hard line to walk.
[00:35:37] Nathan Wrigley: It’s so interesting that conversation you’ve just described in the cafe where, by the end of the cup of coffee, you’ve got yourself a website based upon a conversation you were having moments before. The collapse of the timeline there. You know, we used to think that this five minute install was a big thing. Now it’s like the five minute website that’s fully ready to go, you know, or at least some simulation of a website. May not be the finished one but, you know, you’ve got a staging site ready, with a theme that’s adjacent to what you want to do, with some content that might replicate what you want to do. And it all took place in less time than it took you to finish a single coffee. And that’s so interesting. And you have to armour yourself against that.
That raises another question of course, which is how far you, your tentacles go into the website itself. Because traditionally hosting companies really didn’t concern themselves with the website, apart from the fact that the website was available and, you know, we can see what your plugins are and yada, yada. But it does sound like we’re straying into theming, and possible content creation and things like that. So I don’t know if that falls into the roadmap a bit as well.
So maybe there’s a future where you can, with the AI sort of say, I’d like to swap out my theme. It’s Christmas time, give me a Christmas theme. But we’re doing that in the hosting environment. We’re not necessarily having to log into the website. Again, do you sort of see where I’m going with that?
[00:37:03] Malcolm Peralty: Yeah, and I foresee for sure, but the integrations with AI that WordPress 7.0 already has, and the discussions for 7.1 make me believe that Pressable’s MCP will be able to talk to WordPress’s AI integration and do that from end to end. So, I mean we could already do it with the MCP, like adjusting database values and stuff like that, but that’s not what I would consider an ideal way of doing this.
But like I said, with the changes that are happening in WordPress Core, I definitely foresee like a complete end-to-end solution. You know, one AI talking to another, who then carries that task forward, reports back to the Pressable MCP and lets us know that theme change is done, those plugin updates are done, the content change is done. And again, all from that initial prompt, you know, maybe in your Visual Studio Code, which is just crazy to me.
[00:37:45] Nathan Wrigley: I am so used to basically not going back to the hosting until there’s a problem. You know, I go to the login URL for the website in question, I log in, I move around the WordPress UI, create a post, publish a post, schedule something, whatever, upload some assets. You get the idea.
And the idea of that not being the modus operandi for everybody will be so interesting, because it’s going to shatter that experience of, you know, you could watch a YouTube video to figure out the thing because everybody does the thing in the same way.
But it feels like we’re heralding a future where no two people are going to have the exact same experience. You know, you may be creating content through a text editor, which then somehow gets uploaded, or the text editor merely creates a prompt, and then the theme is swapped or amended because you’ve typed in some prompt.
So, you know, my UI, my IDE, my text editor, my version of WordPress, maybe I might build my site entirely differently to you. So that’s fascinating and slightly worrying at the same time because, how do you support that? Not just Pressable, but how does the community support it when we’ve got an infinite number of ways to create a blog post?
[00:38:55] Malcolm Peralty: And not just a blog post, but everything.
[00:38:57] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, right, everything. Yep.
[00:38:58] Malcolm Peralty: Maybe you say you want this Christmas theme. Maybe it doesn’t select a theme and change the colours, maybe it writes a whole new CSS for the theme you have. Or maybe it writes a whole new theme, or maybe it writes a plugin that automatically switches it around Christmas time. Like it doesn’t have to pull off the shelf from the theme marketplace or the plugin marketplace that already exists. It can create something wholly new and specific for you.
Maybe it writes a whole new block for you, rather than trying to pull together three or four blocks to be able to create the output that you’re looking for. And some of these things for sure are not going to necessarily be super performant or super secure, especially initially, right? Maybe a year or two from now, once the AI is even smarter than it is today, or has a better understanding of WordPress than it does today. Maybe it will kind of think more about security and performance than it does right now. But you’re going to have these people deploying things that are not the ideal outcome, or ideal solution, or ideal anything. It’s just works for them right now.
And it’s funny, I always hear people talk about maintenance, right? How are we going to maintain all this AI code? We, humans are not going to maintain all this AI code. AI is going to maintain and update all this AI code. And so the joke of it is, if you come along and your host comes back to you and says, hey, your website’s running like a dog. You’re not going to spend half a day or a day trying to troubleshoot anymore. You’re just going to say, hey, AI, why is my website running poorly? Fix it or give me a list of things that need to be fixed, or what have you.
I at Pressable am already like using AI to basically write scripts that run through like two dozen WP-CLI commands, another two dozen like database commands, and some like full code searches. Give me a quick report on anything that needs to be optimised, right? So I didn’t write that script from scratch, I didn’t write that code from scratch to do that. I directed an AI to be able to create that for me. And now as the human in loop, I’m interpreting the data that it’s collected, but I can foresee a future very near where I say, hey, AI now interpret all this data you’ve collected and send a summary to the customer on what they need to change or do. Go and act on my behalf and make these changes.
[00:40:49] Nathan Wrigley: That’s so interesting. So there’s a couple of things. The first one is that it feels almost like we’re heralding in a future in which the WordPress UI maybe is not seen by everybody. So a good example would be, I have a Mac. I rarely use the Mac. I use things on the Mac. You know, I’m using a browser. I use a text editor. I use the application that we’re using to record. I’m not really using the Mac. I hope that lands, if you understand what I mean. I switch it on, but the Mac kind of just goes into the background and I use a bunch of things, which, they’re on the screen because I’ve got a Mac.
[00:41:25] Malcolm Peralty: And I would say like 90% of it’s probably a browser at this point, right?
[00:41:28] Nathan Wrigley: Right, right.
[00:41:30] Malcolm Peralty: It’s a website that you go to. You can do Slack in a browser. You can do what we’re doing today in a browser. Pretty much most things that I do live in a browser. There’s very few applications that I actually need to load on my machine day to day because everything can exist in a browser. I think that paradigm will just be for the next generation, or for the transition that’s happening now, the new paradigm will be everything just lives in an AI application. Whether it’s installing your computer or whether it’s also in a browser. It’ll just be AI.
[00:41:54] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, so it is analogous to that. It’s just this idea that the WordPress UI, that’s the only method that anybody has had, maybe that will be something that a bunch of people use, but it won’t be familiar to everybody because there’s no need for it.
And the other thing that you mentioned is, I suppose I would use any of the stuff that you’ve described, but there’s the one caveat. And the one caveat is I have to know that I can walk it back. I have to know that there is a way for me to undo every mistake that I just made because I got carried away. I sat down, got a bit carried away on a Saturday afternoon, made a bunch of tweaks. I really regret it. I want to know that I can go back and unpick that stuff and for it to be a seamless unpicking. So backups, I guess is the most straightforward way of doing that.
[00:42:40] Malcolm Peralty: And audit logs, right? So like one of the things that I’ve done is, in my system instructions, I do put, before you do anything else, backup the file system, backup the database and create a, like a markdown file that’s going to be step by step, everything that was done, everything that you thought so that I can then review it. And that really helps me kind of get an understanding of the tasks it took and maybe why it took them, to help me refine future attempts, right?
So going back to what we’re doing in hosting, like we’re always trying to think through, like you mentioned, everything is very specific and clickable, and we want to make sure that the AI understands exactly kind of what to click on, or what to select. And having that auditing is super important for that.
[00:43:19] Nathan Wrigley: And that’s the point, isn’t it? It’s a human readable or parsable log of everything. Something where, you know, you’ve got millions of data points in the audit log, but I can actually drill down into that in a meaningful way. Because it may be that I only want to undo a portion of what I did. I’m happy with some things, but I would like to go back. An audit log, as you’ve said, it’s fairly mind numbing stuff.
But we are going to be producing so many more amendments if all we have to do is speak because you can easily, you know, imagine it. I want the Christmas theme. No, not that one. Try something else. No, there’s too much red in that. Swap the red for the blue. And Father Christmas, I’d like him on the homepage but, no, a different one. In 12 seconds we’ve got thousands and thousands of things that have happened.
[00:44:06] Malcolm Peralty: I will say though, how much of that do you remember doing manually, right? Like I’ve gotten to the end of that kind of thought process and gone, wait, there was like a theme like two or three themes ago that actually was, a little bit of customisation could have been cool. What was that theme?
Even as a human, I’ve had lapses in memory when I’m quickly producing outcomes where I can’t necessarily roll it back so easily. So at least with an audit log, you’ll have a much better understanding of what was done and when. Human memory is also failable.
[00:44:30] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, and I guess it’ll be interesting to see how much of that burden companies like Pressable take on. Like, you mentioned backups, maybe it will become de rigueur for you every few seconds whilst there’s interactions with MCPs. Look, we’re just going to go belt and braces. Every time you do something, which we detect is fairly sizable, we’re just going to take a backup, even though you never asked us to just in case. You know, those kind of things.
And have a UI to surface information so that the audit log is readable and those kind of things. And that’s all ahead of you. So it doesn’t exist moment, but it’ll certainly be things that will need to be tooled and invented in the future, I would’ve imagined.
[00:45:10] Malcolm Peralty: I mean, one of the hard parts, this might be transitioning the conversation a little bit, one of the hard parts is, you mentioned that AI is creating all these artefacts, and now all these potential backups. AI is already like indexing all of these websites and creating a lot of web traffic, and a lot of load on servers, for example. We had a recent instance where an AI bot went to a website and kept on adding different products to the cart and removing them. Well, every time it added a product to a cart was now an uncachable session.
And it did this millions of times over the course of a day. So we were like, okay, we got to block this bot. This is crazy. So we blocked the bot and about like 10 minutes later we start seeing the exact same traffic pattern from a completely different IP address with a completely different user agent. The bot had figured out an end way around our block and was now doing that same task again to try to, I don’t know, understand this website better, right?
The problem is, as an industry, we don’t know how to pass these costs on to customers because they think it’s kind of unfair in a way, right? Like, why should I have to pay for additional storage for all these audit logs and all these backups? For more bandwidth for my website or more resources for my website, to host or send all of my pages to these different AI bots? And it all kind of comes on us where we either have to like comp all of this technical effort that’s existing, or we have to convince clients to be okay with paying for it. And that has been a really interesting change in the dynamic with a hosting partner.
[00:46:24] Nathan Wrigley: That is so interesting. All those hidden costs, all those hidden things going on. Maybe there needs to be a luddite toggle in the UI somewhere where you just disable all of it. I want the WordPress UI, I want to do things manually. This is my preferred way of doing things.
[00:46:38] Malcolm Peralty: Block ChatGPT. Block Claude. I don’t want any of them viewing my website. Forget them.
[00:46:42] Nathan Wrigley: But it will be curious to see if there’s a subset of people who are, as you’ve described, unwilling to pay for that stuff because it’s simply something that they don’t use. They have no anticipation of using. It will be interesting to see if there’s a subset of people.
And also how clever these technologies become to disrupt things like that. You know, malicious actors out there who managed to come up with a million different ways to circuit around the blocks that you put on. And it will be interesting to see if just the cost of being online does rise with the advent of AI.
I mean, certainly the storage of all of these things is certainly going to rise. The conversations with the AI is certainly adding a financial cost. You know, there’s lots of hardware being built at the moment and there’s a cost to that. Certainly isn’t cheap. But whether or not we can cope with that, and whether or not your price points can keep up with that, and whether customers are going to pay for it.
Okay, there we go. That is so interesting. There’s so much stuff to dive into there. We could probably talk for another hour or so, but there we go. So, Malcolm, if anybody wants to reach out to you or learn more about Pressable, I guess, where would we reach out to you? Do you do social media or whatever it may be?
[00:47:51] Malcolm Peralty: I try not to. For Pressable, it’s pressable.com. For myself, I’d prefer you go through my personal website, which is my last name, .com. So peralty.com. And if you do want to get me on social media, honestly, really the only one I’m ever on is LinkedIn and I only kind of connect with people that I actually connect with. And then Twitter or X or whatever it’s called, I passively view from time to time. But honestly, the best other places would be, you know, you could probably find me on one of the WordPress Slack communities, for example, if you’re really interested.
[00:48:18] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so Peralty, peralty.com. If you are driving a car listening to this and you can’t write it down, then go to wptavern.com, search for the episode with Malcolm Peralty in it, we will have all of the links that were suggested and talked about during this episode right on the episode show notes. So, Malcolm, thank you so much for chatting to me today and peeling back the curtain a little bit on the hosting over at Pressable. Thank you.
[00:48:42] Malcolm Peralty: I appreciate it. Appreciate it so much. Thank you for having me.
On the podcast today we have Malcolm Peralty.
Malcolm has been immersed in the WordPress ecosystem for nearly 20 years, starting out as a full-time blogger and working his way through tech roles in project management, agencies, and even a stint in the Drupal space. These days, Malcolm is bringing his experience back to WordPress, serving as a technical account manager at Pressable, a managed WordPress hosting company.
Malcolm shares how he found his way from early forays with WordPress to managing large-scale hosting environments. He talks about the lure of the Drupal world, and why he ultimately returned to WordPress and Pressable.
We discuss what technical account management means at Pressable, how his role differs from sales and support, focusing instead on long-term strategy for clients, performance optimisation, and bridging the gap between customer needs, and the underlying WP Cloud infrastructure. We hear how Pressable proactively helps clients, sometimes even advising them to downgrade their plans if optimisations mean they need fewer resources.
We go behind the scenes in Pressable, getting into how hardware considerations, plugin bloat, WooCommerce or LMS sites, and customer hand-holding all come together inside one company. Malcolm gives us a candid look at performance challenges, the ways hosts interact with infrastructure teams, and why education around WordPress performance is so tough, even as competing platforms prioritise speed at all costs.
We also look to the future. What are the cutting-edge trends in hosting, like database replication, virtual clusters, and especially the rise of AI within the hosting experience. Malcolm explains Pressable’s upcoming MCP, an AI-powered control panel that promises to let you deploy and manage WordPress sites using natural language. We explore how AI will impact everything from customer support to site deployment, potential pitfalls, and the challenge of balancing automation with human relationships.
If you’re curious about the state of managed WordPress hosting today, the interplay of tech, support, and AI, or just want to know what’s happening behind the curtain, this episode is for you.
Useful links
Pressable
Drupal
Acquia
WP Cloud
peralty.com
