Think Beyond Hosting with WebOps

Hosting is super important. Anyone who’s been there knows that if your website is having poor uptime or performance, it's really hard to see anything beyond that. A burning platform is an all-consuming emergency. If that's your situation, you should stop reading this and give us a call; we love to help rescue people, and our migration team can handle most of the legwork.

We can do this because hosting is a solved problem. There's a correct way to do it. I often say, "We've got the best damn hosting in the world," but to be honest plenty of vendors have solutions as well. Pantheon is best among a bunch of other perfectly decent options... assuming you’re only in the market for hosting.

Therein lies the real issue. Top grade hosting alone won’t give you what you need from the web. It's a textbook "necessary but insufficient" condition. If you don’t have it, it’s like not having oxygen, but just being able to breathe doesn’t equal success.

If you want to deliver results on the web, you need to be able to modify your website quickly, with confidence, and in more substantive ways than just by publishing content. Hosting cannot give you this. In fact, it might actually be getting in your way. That's why you need to evolve your thinking beyond hosting and embrace the emerging concept of #WebOps.

Stop the Insanity - Start Doing WebOps

You will not make the impact you want if your website is stale. Everyone knows this. Yet most leaders I talk to acknowledge that their website is well behind their vision, but they see this as a fact of life. Why?

Likewise, the discipline of agile software development has proven that greatness is achieved via constant iteration and improvement. So, how come most websites only meaningfully change as the result of some kind of big, crazy, bi-annual refresh or redesign?

When you think about it, the status quo of the "big relaunch" is insane. Burn through all your budget, burn out your team, and then grit your teeth and just live with whatever comes out until the next cycle. Who wants to work that way? Nobody. Why do so many of us tolerate this? Madness.

Stop the insanity. Start doing WebOps. That means gaining the confidence to make changes to your website every month, or better yet, every week. This means putting the people accountable for the results of the website (not its uptime) in control of what it is and how it works.

If that sounds like something you’d love to do, but can’t even contemplate, then you’re ready for the WebOps revolution. Because here’s the truth: if you want to get results, your hosting might actually be the problem, even if it feels rock-solid. That kind of hosting wants stability. It prioritizes uptime. It usually has to restrict access, lock things down. Rock-solid hosting sees change as risk.

That doesn’t make hosting a villain. The perspective is understandable. Most businesses don't have the luxury to "move fast and break things," especially when it comes to their public face to the world. The fear of crashing has been a driving force for hosting as an industry since its inception. "Can you handle the hits?"

WebOps is past that. WebOps assumes hosting is solved, and can politely get out of the way. 
WebOps is in the business of getting stuff done. 

WebOps is marketing shipping on their own schedule, controlling their own roadmap. 
WebOps asks, "what would you do if you weren't afraid?" It's a game-changer.

Your website cannot go down, but it also can’t stay the same for months at a time. If this is the case, there’s a zero percent chance you’re doing the right things online. Sometimes big investments in new technology are warranted, but the launch is just the start of the process, where you collect your first data. That’s when the real work begins.

Embrace WebOps with Pantheon

The web moves fast and so should you. Embracing WebOps is a people and process change. Much like #DevOps, from which we draw inspiration, "it's a culture." But it's also impossible to adopt without the right tooling, without a platform.

And that’s Pantheon! Teams that embrace our way of working are up to 4x more productive, and they apply that productivity to deliver a superior digital product to the world. With Pantheon, you can more effectively put the people who are accountable for the website in control of it, and more quickly experience bigger and better results.