Obox has launched Instant: white labeled, seamless hosting for their WordPress themes

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Written By Brian Krogsgard

9 thoughts on “Obox has launched Instant: white labeled, seamless hosting for their WordPress themes”

  1. I hope this goes well for Obox. It makes sense to offer hosting to theme customers. What a great opportunity to make things easier for the user and build a stream of recurring revenue.

    But, hosting is hard. That’s probably why only a handful of 300+ theme shops are providing it after all these years.

    I would love to see a host like WP Engine go after theme buyers via theme shops by setting up a turn-key solution similar to Obox Instant. The host would handle all of the hosting details and gain more customers. The theme shop would gain a certain amount recurring revenue. And everything would be easier for the user.

    Thoughts?

    • Pagely had a white-label thing for a bit that a couple theme shops somewhat discreetly offered. But this is the first one where someone is really attacking it in my opinion.

      As Ryan notes in the comment below, StudioPress launched their own hosting company — probably for similar reasons — but their marketing tactic is different in that it’s a different brand and product, not strictly for Genesis customers.

      • I think that involved the theme provider handling hosting support? I can’t remember but something about it didn’t look attractive to me. I think Graph Paper Press used it. Is it gone now?

        • The Cart66 Hosted (http://www.sellwithwp.com/introducing-cart66-hosted/) solution was one in which the “front” company (Cart66) handled support. This bundled the site + hosting (Pagely) + eCommerce, though I think it’s killed now.

          I think theming is a more natural fit for this anyway, as users tend to shop “look” first. It’s more intuitive to say, “Like the way it looks? Click here and we’ll set up the whole site just like this,” rather than to make users start researching hosting, then eCommerce, then themes, etc. Very interested to see where this goes!

    • Thanks for the positive comment Steve! We are trying different ways to solve the once off purchase problem that many theme co’s are experiencing. We are aware that hosting is hard which is why we spent so much time finding the ideal partner who was close by and on call at any time.

      As we learn more about the nature of this business we hope to share those learnings with the community.

      Dave

  2. Really interesting move, with the potential to make user experience much more seamless.

    To expand on Steven’s thoughts, hosting is really hard and bothersome. Can you be a really good host and a really good theme/plugin developer at the same time?

    I still haven’t seen a WP specialized hosting service that fits into what I’d like out of a hosting deal. I’d love something like Digital Ocean but with some managed aspects and easy staging/production/backups without paying excessive amounts of money or unnecessary limitations.

    • This type of service is aimed at customers who are new to websites altogether, they are not entirely sure of the difference between a .com theme or a .org theme. Let alone staging/production.

      Instant does offer daily backups though… that’s pretty critical!

      🙂

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