Good morning and happy Monday! Ready to get movin’?

I am. In more ways than one. Because, there was a BIG Cloudflare outage last week that caused a lot of delays on some moves I wanted to make last week. More on that below, though. 🙂 So need to make up for some lost time this week.

Got some announcements and new stuff coming soon. But, for now, let’s jump into this week’s issue.

Coming up…

Moving away from Cloudways?!

Concerns about Thrivecart

The joke of WP Beginner

Lots of cool updates to our favorite plugins

Featured This Week

Why I’m Leaving Cloudways

This might be a little surprising, but after 3 years of being a customer of Cloudways hosting and managing a lot of clients on Cloudways…. I am moving on.

Yeah, frankly I’m a little surprised as well.

I want to be clear. I’m not here to bad-mouth Cloudways. I still like them. They haven’t done anything bad here. But, I have decided to make a change.

I thought I’d have a full video and post available by now to explain everything, but a big outage with Cloudflare late last week put a wrench in the works. It delayed migrations even of my own site. So, stay tuned. 😇

I have been pondering a switch out of Cloudways for a little while. But, last week, one of my clients decided to try Rapyd (the new hosting offer from the BuddyBoss people). She was on Cloudways before and she and I did have some performance issues with her site in the WordPress admin.

Now, I am not switching to Rapyd, although they do have an interesting offer. But, this decision by this client happened on the same morning while I was personally working on updating some posts at the Blog Marketing Academy. And, I was getting database failures while attempting to save posts.

The short version is this… I have been seeing periodic server slowdowns, performance issues, and even temporary server outages with sites on Cloudways. It comes and goes and certainly isn’t the norm, but it happens.

The issue is more pronounced with sites running a lot of plugins. But, some times that’s just a necessary evil.

Do we just throw more money at the problem and scale the server up again and increase the bill? While I could, I don’t know if that would solve the issue due to how their software stack is set up.

When you combine these performance issues with some annoyances about their admin panel, the lack of Vultr support, the pricing increases, and some of the issues that come with working with clients and running an agency… Cloudways was beginning to get in the way.

So, to cut to the short, I am switching to Rocket.Net.

This is a fully managed WordPress host. Incredibly fast because the servers are WAY more powerful, plus they work directly with Cloudflare so you have all the benefits of Cloudflare Enterprise. Not the half-baked Enterprise add-on with Cloudways, but the full enchilada.

Rocket.net has rock solid support and they are the fastest support I’ve ever dealt with. I feel like it is talking with a co-worker, not a foreigner. While I’ve been happy with Cloudways support, Rocket is just better at it.

Rocket is also based right here in Florida. While they do have remote staff,, their headquarters is right here in my home state.

I could go on, but you’ll get the full story just as soon as I post the full video and blog post on why I’m doing this. Like I said, last week’s Cloudflare outage got in the way of some things, soI didn’t publish it this morning before this newsletter went out.

While I will be hosting my own stuff with Rocket, I am also setting up to host some of my Concierge clients as well. I feel this will be a big upgrade over Cloudways hosting and is likely to save a ton of money for my clients. I’ll be in touch.

Be Careful About ThriveCart

Keeping with the theme here of “things change”, I also want to encourage care to anybody who might be considering ThriveCart.

I’ve been seeing more reports of issues with the software and more complaints in general in their Facebook community. The problem is, they try to hide it because the group admins keep deleting anything remotely negative. Like this one…

I took a screenshot of this one because I figured they’d delete it. It is almost a running joke now. If you complain, they delete your post.

This is not a good look. Plus, the reason a lot of people go to the group to post is because they feel like support is ignoring their concerns.

Things haven’t been all great with Thrivecart. Also concerning is that the same company also now owns ConvertBox. What this means for the future of these two applications, I do not know.

They’re both great pieces of software. But, if they’re starting to fail round the edges and not communicating openly, that’s a red flag.

My review of Thrivecart has been updated…

I Thought This Was Funny…

A tweet from Jack Arturo, the creator of WP Fusion…

Hey @evilmotive maybe you can suggest a few more plugins that interact with the database? 🤔

— Jack Arturo (@verygoodplugins)
Nov 2, 2023

He’s pointing out the sham that is WP Beginner. This from a post on the 12 Best WordPress Database Plugins. But, at the bottom of this post, they just HAD to cram some stupid way to link drop a bunch of their own plugins.

And what a weak way of doing it… by pointing out plugins that “interact” with the database? 🤡 News Flash: EVERY plugin does that.

WP Beginner is a useful resource in some ways, but just be aware that the entire site is one huge content marketing brochure for plugins that Awesome Motive either owns or has financial interest in. In MOST of their posts, they are just disguised promos for their own plugins.

I think they even lead people astray for the sake of money. They still promote Bluehost, for crying out loud. 😨 Bluehost is one of the worst hosts in the industry, if you ask me. But, no doubt, they will promote it to people who don’t know any better because of those fat commission checks.

I was also happy to see the @evilmotive account on X. 😉 LOL.

WordPress Quick Bits…

Lots of updates from my friends at WP Manage Ninja last week. Those include…

FluentSupport was updated to 1.7.4. Several useful changes were made, but my favorite is the new Gutenberg block so you can easily drag and drop the customer portal into a page and customize the look and feel.

Fluent Forms was updated to 5.1. This version includes full integration with FluentBooking even in the free version. The Pro version includes an integration with Notion, a personality quiz, a new internal global search for all of your forms and entries, and more. A great update to the best forms plugin, if you ask me.

FluentBooking is now at version 1.1. The big news on this release is official integration with WooCommerce so you can now use Woo checkout to take payments for scheduled appointments. But, there’s a lot more to it, so check it out.

FluentCRM was updated to 2.8.33. They improved the email editor, improved the global/custom footer, and fixed an issue with the recurring email report screen.

Last week, it was announced that WooCommerce is changing it’s name and will now simply be called… Woo. Now, this applies to the name of the brand and the company. The actual WooCommerce plugin we use will maintain it’s name. Thank God, too, because that’d be confusing if they changed that. Frankly, I think this is a good move on their part.

A new tool called OMGIMG has launched which looks like it is designed to make more effective feature images for your blog posts. Plus, apparently you can create the image right inside WordPress without having to go make one separately. Could be handy. Never tried it, but just letting you know. 😎

The folks behind Astra Theme (which also includes Adam Preiser) have invested in LatePoint – a scheduling plugin for WordPress. I’ll be honest… I never heard of LatePoint until Adam mentioned it. Adam was teasing a new scheduling tool… which I found interesting given the recent launch of FluentBooking. Well, they didn’t create a new tool… they’re simply investing in an existing tool. And sure enough, this inevitably means that it is going to be integrated with SureCart and SureTriggers. We’ll see what happens, but frankly, I’m a way bigger fan of the “Fluent” tools.