Interview with Liquid Web’s John LoBrutto

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  • Are you looking for the ultimate managed web hosting experience?

  • How does Liquid Web take WordPress hosting to a new level?

  • Want to find out the best kept secret in Cloud Hosting products?

If the answer to any of the above questions is even remotely close to “yes”, then you’ve got to read our interview with John LoBrutto. John is the Director of Affiliate Solutions and Partnerships at Liquid Web. He has extensive experience in the web hosting industry, having also spent some time at 1&1 Hosting among others. And it was great to get to hear all about what Liquid Web is up to these days. If you’re not familiar with Liquid Web, they specialize in Managed Web Hosting solutions for Dedicated Servers, VPS, Cloud Services, and WordPress.

Questions and answers have been edited for the format of this article. For the complete interview, be sure to listen to the Web Hosting Cat Podcast.

Web Hosting Cat: Can you tell us about your background and your role at Liquid Web?

John LoBrutto: Well, I’ve been in the affiliate space for a long time. I’ve been working in the web hosting vertical most of that time. I worked for 1&1 Internet some years ago. I was their Director of Global Affiliates. And now, I’m working with Liquid Web as also the Director of Global Affiliates and Partnerships.

Liquid Web is a great managed web hosting company. We have amazing customer loyalty and support—very high NPS [Net Promoter Score] scores (over 71% in many cases) for the past year, which is higher than Apple and Amazon and some of the retailers that people love. Our customers really love our product. They really love our service. And, they really love our support.

So if it’s a mission critical site, if you’re making money on it, if it’s something that you want up 100%—we have a 100% network guaranteed uptime—this is the product and services that you want to follow through and purchase.

WHC: In your opinion, what distinguishes Liquid Web from the competition?

JL: Well again, it’s that white glove service. We, in most cases, have free migrations. We have a situation where, we pick up our phones; it’s in the U.S. call centers, U.S. support. For many cases, for our U.S. customers we have U.S. database centers that we own—wholly owned by Liquid Web—so we’re not farming out to other companies doing first level support. We’re doing full level support for the customer. The folks that are working for us are touching our equipment and getting in there and fixing things for you. So, it’s that level of being able to hand hold a customer and make sure that they’re up and running and all of the features are working properly.

WHC: Managed WordPress Hosting is really important to a lot of people. What are some of the benefits you get with Liquid Web’s Managed WordPress Hosting?

JL: A lot of the little things that we do, for example in our managed WordPress, if you look at all of the features that we offer and compare it to the competitors—if you look at the starting price, maybe a little bit higher, but all of the features that are available as part of that first price are much more than other providers. We have something called iThemes Sync on managed WordPress—the customers love it! You know, people focus on managed WordPress product. They’ll go ahead and hit an update when it’s necessary and many providers go ahead and update that for you. But what about all the apps? You know, you’re in a situation where you’re not necessarily updating your apps frequently, and all of a sudden you come up to a situation where there’s a plugin that’s not available because it’s not current. Well, we’re doing that for you at night. Everything’s current, right on the fly—nothing that you need to do other than just use your site and update it [the content], and make sure that it’s selling for you.

WHC: Liquid Web is ideal for agencies and developers. In terms of individual website owners, is there a particular area or industry that you think is an ideal fit for Liquid Web’s hosting services?

JL: Well, you know we talked about the wide birth of product lines, so we started managed VPS services, and that’s kind of in the $50 a month range. But again, it’s a mission critical site, you have access to a number of plugins—yes, that’s focused more on small business and business development and designers and agencies. But on the higher end, we have enterprise level servers. We have a number of very big customers that you can see on our website that love our product. And in addition to that, there’s a very big focus on our HIPPA Servers—that’s the medical industry. There’s a specific level of compliance that has to occur on the data center side. We are compliant and certified for that particular product. And these are very high end and very intense server packages that are available for purchase from us.

WHC: Cloud Hosting is another huge part of Liquid Web. Can you tell us about the Cloud Sites product that you offer?

JL: There’s a lot of different things we have unique like our Cloud Sites product. This is a $150 package that you can pick up that has a very generous level of bandwidth and usage that’s included in that package. But, it’s unlimited data and unlimited websites! It can be scalable on the fly as being used. Many people are purchasing this and they’re actually reselling portions of that particular site as shared hosting. So we’re actually selling this in many cases as a reseller product—and, you have people that are setting a brand new concept of selling shared hosting on a cloud platform. Personally, I think that’s the future. It’s not relying on one particular server. It’s not reliant to the resources on one particular dedicated server. It’s spread across a huge cloud and stable network that’s unlimited scalability. It’s really a fantastic product and something that we’re really focusing on this year to get out and give options to customers.

WHC: What else can we expect in the future from Liquid Web?

JL: Well, there’s a lot of neat things coming up. There’s going to be a very special eCommerce product that we’re going to release this month. The key here is, you buy from Liquid Web, within 24 hours you’re up running, selling, and ready to go—and that’s everything.

Exclusive Discount on Liquid Web Hosting

Here’s a special promo code just for our readers! Use the coupon link below and enter code WHC35OFF to get 35% off your first three months with Liquid Web. This is a rare and outstanding opportunity to get a discount on Liquid Web’s top quality, true managed web hosting.

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