All Hosting Plans Prices Slashed With More Free Features

Beginning immediately, all our managed hosting plans are drastically cheaper.

Over the past 4+ years, our prices have remained unchanged — until now. This was largely due to the sort of price-locking across the datacenter-infrastructure industry, but over the past year or so these prices have dipped noticeably cheaper. Because of this, and because of a few other changes we are making, we’ve been able to pass these savings onto our customers in an effort to bring you the best bang-for-your buck around.

Industry competition, cheaper technology.

Around a year ago, we eliminated our $20/mo Standard Plan as it had become unsustainable for us. This was mainly because we’ve insisted on including CodeGuard backups on every single website that we host, and we simply were unable to include CodeGuard on the Standard Plan due to pricing. We didn’t want to offer dedicated VPS plans that did not have the industry’s best remote backups in place, and so we eliminated that plan gradually. Plus, at this price range the server only had 1GB RAM anyway, which was not enough to ensure WooCommerce and other heavy plugins had enough memory to remain stable. It was too difficult continually explaining this to our clients, and asking them to upgrade if they wanted to launch a store (etc).

However, we are very excited about our new pricing model.

Our four main plans (Business, Premium, Superior, and Enterprise) are now $39, $69, $129, and $249 respectively. This is a big drop from the previous pricing which was $40, $80, $160, and $320 previously.

The main reason we are able to offer this better pricing is due to server technology continuing to get better and cheaper, and due to increased competition in this industry. During the past 2 years especially, the Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure have greatly increased their marketing. Our preferred networks, such as Linode, Vultr, and DigitalOcean, have all dropped their pricing. And we will soon be more focused on AWS Lightsail as our latest datacenter offering. There are a few other datacenter providers that have also caught our attention lately, meaning even more potential partners are now available. The cloud is everywhere!

SFTP and SSL setup are now 100% free.

That’s not all. Some of our customers have noticed than over the last several months, we’ve stopped charging for SFTP Setup and SSL Setup, which are now included 100% free with every single hosting plan we offer.

Not only that, but LittleBizzy is now exclusively an HTTPS-only web host, a reflection of the recent changes made in our open source SlickStack project to make SSL the de-facto standard of all WordPress websites on the internet.

Our SFTP Details plugin, which generates a small but very useful Dashboard widget in the WP Admin backend, now displays your server’s SFTP connection information in a very easy to use way. This feature is part of the MU Plugins that are built-in to SlickStack servers. Now, anytime a member of your team, or a new freelancer or developer needs to access your SFTP, they can easily find that information directly inside your WordPress meaning one less login/password you have to give them, and one less key piece of data you have continually write down somewhere.

CloudFlare still required, but you control it.

Lastly, the other big change we are making after the last few years of feedback from our clients is that CloudFlare will no longer be under the LittleBizzy agency account. Previously, we required all hosting clients except those on “higher end” plans to assign us control of their domain in CloudFlare. Thankfully, around a year ago, CloudFlare finally released the Team Access feature to all accounts, including free accounts, meaning that we can now be simply added as an “Admin” to your existing CloudFlare account.

In this way, LittleBizzy can still manage DNS records on your behalf when needed, such as during a datacenter move, or if you need our help adding a new DNS record we can still do that for you. But your team will also maintain its own CloudFlare account too, meaning less confusion and more control for your business. It also means that if your team wants to order premium features such as Dedicated SSL, CloudFlare Pro (WAF Firewall), etc you can now do that anytime from within your own account. These features will be much cheaper for you in this way, because you no longer have to upgrade your LittleBizzy plan to acquire these features. And likewise it means that we are able to offer cheaper hosting plan pricing because we no longer have to manage and pay for these premium CloudFlare features on your behalf.

We can scale better, and so can you :)

We will still require CloudFlare to be active on all hosting plans, because they are simply the fastest DNS service available currently, and their free (and paid) features are incredibly powerful and affordable. This might change at some point in the future, depending on what competitors like StackPath offer, but we expect CloudFlare to remain a critical part of our “stack” for several years to come.

Note: if you want to get a head start on this new approach, head over to CloudFlare.com and create an account, and then add [email protected] to your account as an Admin Team member. If you’d rather keep things as-is for now, and have LittleBizzy continue to manage your domain(s) in our own CloudFlare account for now, that is also fine for the time being.

Awesome, what should do next then?

Over the next few months we will be contacting clients who still need to make the changes mentioned above in regard to pricing and CloudFlare settings. This will not be done “overnight” so we ask for your patience and understanding to make this a smooth and seamless transition.

If you have any urgent questions, please contact us at anytime.

Also note that we are rolling out experimental “casual” support channels including:

• Facebook Chat
• Telegram Channel
• Skype Chat

The last several months have been super busy for us and we apologize for the delay in announcing and clarifying some of these changes. Thank you so much for your support and encouragement as we continue to achieve market-leading technical SEO and performance in the WordPress community.