I am Tom Fanelli, the CEO and Founder of Convesio, a company focused on hosting high performance, scalable WordPress sites. I have a long history in the WordPress space that eventually led to our unique take on WordPress hosting.
The Journey Began
I started working on the web way back when — way before WordPress was even a thing. Originally from Fort Myers, Florida, I made the drastic decision to join the military right after graduating and ended up in the Army during the tail end of Desert Storm.
When I returned, I went to school and quickly realized out of the things I was good at, I was really good at tech. So I taught myself a lot, from many different angles—from freelance design to getting things on the web during the mid-‘90s, as the whole “internet” thing was really taking off for the general population.
From there, I co-founded an agency and was able to grow it to a seven-person operation before I took a position with one of our customers at the time—a struggling software company that needed help getting turned around. By that point, I realized that not only was I good at tech-related products and services but that my DNA is really pointed toward products, technologies, and marketing.
After seven years, I had a great opportunity to get on board with a startup in San Francisco. With a roll of the dice, I moved my family across the country. Though the startup was small (as most are, to begin with), within a few years that company had made the full start-to-exit run with an IPO.
I stayed on for a few additional years, leading a team of 200 global marketers. Then joined Deluxe, one of the largest hosting and marketing services companies in the United States, and got to see hosting at scale. While I was there we were acquiring an average of one hosting company every quarter.