Story of InstaWP and Investment by Automattic

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. 

Can’t download InstaWP’s Chrome Extension? Use this download link to get it manually. Read this blog post to know why it’s unavailable.

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!

Use the code “SEED20” to get 20% discount on all our plans.