I fell in love with WordPress around 2015 (about 7 years ago) and always suggested it to my friends/family and worked on a few projects for clients also. Although it was very easy to work with WordPress, getting started was still a pain. 

I always felt a need for a launcher tool which can quickly launch a WordPress site for testing & building and then somehow go live within a few minutes. So, the engineer in me started working on it. 

I built cmslauncher.com which had a nice UI to launch WordPress sites and in the backend it launched sites on a cpanel reseller account. Good… but not great! I sold that service after 1 year of operation. Round 1. 

Two years ago, I started tempress.com (terrible name, I know). I discussed this idea of “temporary” WordPress service which can do instant launch with friends but didn’t get many head nods. However, I went ahead and tried it anyway, I used Kubernetes + Docker + <insert a fancy new term here>. Failed miserably as the docker overhead was outweighing the cost of running a temp site. Round 2.

Last year, I finally figured out a way – why not just use nginx + apache + php + mysql age old combo and host multiple sites on a single VPS – and that worked! I could host 200+ sites on a single $20 VPS machine. Round 3 was it. 

I first wrote about this on PostStatus slack ground and then it was picked up by WP Tavern and other media outlets and finally InstaWP was born. 

I started building this in public and posting on Twitter regularly and got amazing responses from people around the world. I started getting a lot of feature requests and a roadmap was chalked for the next 2 years! 

A few months into the development, I started to believe that InstaWP was not just a disposable WordPress service anymore, it was much more than that. I wanted this to become AWS for WordPress. 

I wanted to see if someone would be interested to fund this and help make the dream a reality crossing my fingers, I emailed a couple of people, including Matt from Automattic!, expecting no response. 

To my surprise, after a week, Automattic’s team replied back saying this sounds interesting and we got into several rounds of discussions. They listened to the whole thing very patiently. 

Last week, I finally got the news that they are going ahead with the funding. So… Here I am. Super happy to announce that Automattic has invested a seed round in InstaWP. This is definitely a dream come true. 

With the help of this funding and many other WordPress friends I have made along the way, InstaWP will be a great gateway to WordPress for service providers, freelancers/agencies, product authors and hosting companies. 

Thanks again to Matt, the Automattic team and many early adopters for their trust, we will do our best!

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