Hey folks,
Jumping in to do give some general clarifications and answers.
Our man @SpaceStockFootage pulled out his red pen and went to town on the landing page I took them to the Envato Hosted Team, their reply:
As we’ve noted above, this is a soft launch that’s still very much in the early stages. We have a lot of learning to do around all aspects of Envato Hosted and we’re excited to work with our initial group of authors and internal product teams on the best flow, ui, ux and everything in between.
You’ve brought up some good insights and these are all things we’re hoping to learn and test and gain data about as we move Hosted forward. Keep the insights and experience coming!
At this stage we’re aiming to run some experiments and establish a fair and scalable model for how Hosted will operate. Once we’re through this phase, we’ll look to invite more and more people to be a part of the program. When we do scale, we’ll be looking far more closely at the quality of an author’s products than the amount of them that they’ve happened to sell.
We’ve partnered with a company to do the hosting
Under the current model, Envato Hosted is taking care of theme and hosting support. We’ll be working with authors to ensure we understand their themes and ensure they are getting feedback about their themes. This means authors can spend less time on support and more time developing great new features and products. We’ve built a new team for this model who have some serious WordPress know-how.
We want to give our client’s full control of their hosting, with the caveat this is still managed WordPress so we fully manage and protect WordPress itself. Our team ensures that WordPress is working 24/7, and handle the entire core upgrade process. A user receives sFTP access after your third payment. Client access to backup and a staging system is coming in the next few weeks, and PHPMyAdmin will follow after that
Honestly, it’s too early to tell. There’s some interesting ideas here, but we’re still learning how this model is going to operate, but we’re certainly not taking anything off the table.
Whilst the idea is to ultimately build something that scales, we’re certainly not planning on forcing anyone to do anything.
Finally, on the topic of revenue…
The ultimate aim here is to produce something that’s a win for authors and for Envato. To that end, Envato and the authors involved are having a lot of conversations to help us understand the costs of providing this new type of service. Setup, ongoing support, installation- the hosting itself. All of these are things we need to understand to if we’re going to decide who gets what.
The only way that this project will be successful is if it’s a win-win for all the different parties involved. We’re working together here, If one group wins at the cost of another party failing, then we don’t really have a sustainable offering.
I’ll be jumping in to provide some clarification and answers as required.