A website rarely chooses a convenient moment to misbehave. It stalls during a launch, buckles under a traffic spike, or discovers a plugin conflict just as its owner goes to bed. Somewhere between the blinking server lights and the person refreshing a blank screen, web hosting stops being a commodity. It becomes a promise made under pressure.
Scott Stapley built BigScoots in that uncomfortable gap. He and his friend Justin Catello started the company in 2010 while they were still in college. Catello knew infrastructure and systems administration. Stapley gravitated toward sales, operations, and the unruly collection of chores that appear when two people decide they own a company: accounting, vendors, forecasts, and every question no job description has claimed.
The name sounds playful. The work was decidedly less so. Their early business included managed infrastructure and colocation for companies in the Chicago area, including large enterprises. The pitch was not merely space in a rack. It was attention. Hosting had plenty of providers willing to rent capacity. Stapley believed it lacked partners willing to understand what customers were actually trying to keep alive.
A science student finds a different system
Stapley had entered college at 23 with a biomedical future in mind. At Binghamton University, he studied molecular and cellular biology and spent time doing research. Yet the company was not a post-graduation detour. BigScoots began during those university years, making his chronology look briefly backward: founder first, graduate later. He completed his bachelor’s degree in 2013 while the hosting business kept running beside it.
The leap from biology to servers is less strange when viewed as a preference for living systems. Both punish vague observation. Both reward people who notice interactions rather than isolated parts. A WordPress site can fail because the server is weak, because the database is unruly, because a plugin objects to its neighbor, or because a sudden audience arrives all at once. Stapley’s company learned to inspect the whole organism.
He also learned the common founder trick of becoming whatever the day required. Catello concentrated on the technical foundation, sometimes in basement-level seclusion. Stapley worked the business side and became the translator between customers and machinery. Their division of labor was practical, complementary, and not especially theatrical. The servers did not care about origin myths. They cared about being maintained.
“I learn better by doing it rather than reading about it.”Scott Stapley
WordPress grows up, and the job gets a name
In 2010, managed WordPress hosting was not yet the polished category it would become. BigScoots already managed WordPress installations, but it described itself more broadly as a managed hosting provider. As WordPress expanded from blogs into storefronts, membership products, publisher platforms, and enterprise sites, the company’s work became easier to name.
Stapley calls the approach “site-specific management.” The phrase matters because it moves the boundary of responsibility. BigScoots staff do not stop at the server door. They enter the site, inspect plugin configurations, watch for stuck processes, tune databases, and investigate the peculiarities of an individual installation. The service aims to spare a publisher or shop owner from quietly becoming the head of an accidental technical department.
That enlarged responsibility can sound inefficient to an industry trained to celebrate automation. Stapley regards it as the source of value. If a support conversation exposes a recurring problem, it can become a feature. If an onboarding step creates avoidable mistakes, an integration can remove them. The queue doubles as a research lab, with considerably more punctuation and occasional panic.
Owning the metal, renting less ambiguity
BigScoots also made a choice that runs against the weightless imagery of the cloud: it owns and operates its infrastructure. The practical advantage is control. Bare metal lets the team decide how resources are allocated, how capacity is expanded, and how the network behaves. It can offer abundance without passing through every layer of somebody else’s rental model.
Control does not eliminate dependence. Modern hosting is a chain of specialists, and BigScoots works with Cloudflare for performance and protection. The partnership produced a useful proof point when a volumetric attack exceeding one terabit per second was absorbed without disrupting the customer experience. Stapley’s preferred result is almost comically uneventful: the crisis nobody notices.
The same collaboration automated parts of customer onboarding through Cloudflare’s APIs, reducing manual work and configuration errors. It is automation in service of attention. Machines handle the repetition, leaving people more time for cases that resist a checklist. Stapley has been clear about the boundary: artificial intelligence may help his team internally, but BigScoots does not plan to substitute it for human customer communication.
“BigScoots is all about our service and constantly asking ‘what can we do better?’”Scott Stapley
The CEO in the queue
At many companies, growth carries the chief executive steadily away from customers. Information arrives summarized, charted, and relieved of its inconvenient texture. Stapley has resisted that drift. He remains involved in support chats and tickets, and he expects leaders across the company to stay customer-facing. The practice is partly cultural theater, but it is useful theater: rank does not excuse anyone from the place where promises meet reality.
It is also product research with the lag removed. A customer struggling now is more informative than a quarterly slide about customers who struggled three months ago. The immediate conversation reveals the language people use, the workarounds they invent, and the moment where a supposedly intuitive tool becomes baffling. In Stapley’s model, listening is not a soft skill appended to operations. It is one of the operations.
That philosophy shaped the company’s growth. Stapley has described word of mouth as BigScoots’ central growth driver, but he treats it as an effect rather than a strategy. Service creates the story a customer tells. Marketing may distribute a claim; a solved emergency gives somebody a reason to believe it.
For years, Stapley seemed comfortable keeping the public volume low. In one interview he good-naturedly admitted to being a CEO without a newsletter about how to run a business. He preferred, he said, to remain behind the scenes and keep the machine running. There is something refreshing about a hosting executive who declines to become a lifestyle vertical.
Eventually, quiet competence needs a way to meet new customers. In 2024, BigScoots began appearing more deliberately at WordCamps, sponsoring events and telling its story in public. Stapley framed that visibility as another feedback channel. Community involvement could introduce BigScoots, but it could also introduce BigScoots to problems the company had not encountered yet.
Capital arrives, the promise remains
In July 2023, Stone-Goff Partners made the first institutional investment in BigScoots. The plan included faster development of services, formal channel partnerships, team expansion, automation, and the possibility of complementary acquisitions. At the time, BigScoots reported more than 9,000 customers, a net promoter score of 90 from an April survey, and 35 percent annual organic growth since 2019.
Institutional money creates an old managerial puzzle. Capital is supposed to accelerate a business, but acceleration can flatten the peculiarity that made it valuable. For BigScoots, that peculiarity is expensive in human terms: knowledgeable people taking responsibility for individual customer problems. Stapley’s task is to scale the habit without turning it into a slogan laminated on a conference-room wall.
The company’s recent moves suggest an attempt to extend the operating model rather than abandon it. BigScoots formed a partnership with Mediavine aimed at independent publishers, pairing hosting performance with ad-management expertise. It developed new caching tools for logged-in users on stores, membership sites, and learning platforms. The work is technical, but the product logic remains legible: find a recurring customer constraint and remove it.
Stapley’s career offers no tidy tale of destiny. He did not spend childhood announcing a mission to manage WordPress databases. He started down one academic path, encountered a business problem, found a collaborator with a complementary talent, and kept revising the solution as the web changed around them. The interesting constant was not hosting. It was responsiveness.
A server is easy to describe with numbers: processors, memory, bandwidth, latency. Trust is harder to put on a spec sheet. It accumulates when an expert answers, when an attack passes unnoticed, when a migration works, and when the person holding the chief executive title is still willing to read the ticket. BigScoots sells infrastructure. Stapley’s longer project has been reducing the distance between the infrastructure and the person depending on it.