How DigitalOcean increased a partner’s success through collaboration

Plesk/WebPros is the leading WebOps platform to run, automate and grow applications, websites and hosting businesses. Plesk is running on more than 384,000 servers, automating 11M+ websites and 15M+ mail boxes. Available in more than 32 languages across 140 countries, 50% of the top 100 service providers worldwide are partnering with Plesk. Plesk is part of the WebPros group that also owns cPanel, WHMCS and many other products that simplify the lives of web and IT professionals. WebPros powers more than 900,000 servers and over 85M domains across 2,500 partners globally.

Plesk is one of DigitalOcean’s technology partners focused on simplifying the lives of web professionals.

“The classic, and now competitive, service provider landscape has evolved, and the modern service provider needs to help SMBs to scale and add differentiation in the market. Agencies and other service providers have an overload of complex infrastructure and choice – together DigitalOcean and Plesk help to achieve that. We make extremely hard things extremely easy,”- Lukas Hertig, SVP of Business Development at WebPros.

Needing to provide the best user experience

Users are onboarded to Plesk through a one-click application in the DigitalOcean Marketplace, so improving the user experience was important. They spent a lot of time bridging the gap from the DigitalOcean control panels, bringing the user into the web interface, and ultimately getting the user’s first website up and running. Often these websites are based on WordPress®, a custom website or even a self-developed application with the Laravel Framework or .NET on Linux.

“DigitalOcean focuses on user experience and that’s even more important than revenue. They allow simplicity, flexibility and opportunity for partners to build their own business model and support them in doing so,” says Hertig.

“They listened to our requests and we continue to jointly optimize the user journey to make all users more successful faster.”

The benefits of a good partnership

In just over two years, over 20,000 virtual machine instances have translated into seven figure recurring revenue growth for Plesk, just from their DigitalOcean partnership.

According to Hertig, “Through the continued collaboration with DigitalOcean to improve the User Experience to get to the first website hosted on Plesk or cPanel, we were able to significantly reduce churn in the first month and enable our customers to achieve their goals much faster. Compared to other hyperscale cloud providers, DigitalOcean is by far our best partner in terms of these topics.”

Learn more about DigitalOcean’s Partner Pod on our webpage.