800 WordPress Sites Under Maintenance: How Marc Nilius Built a Niche Business with WP-Wartung24
"Happy Bootstrapping" Volume #60
Marc Nilius is the managing director of Webwisser GmbH and runs WP-Wartung24 from Wissen in the Westerwald region of Germany. With ten employees, his team takes care of around 800 WordPress sites in ongoing maintenance, plus roughly 400 more that come in irregularly. This makes WP-Wartung24 one of the largest independent providers of WordPress maintenance in the German-speaking market.
In episode 172 of Happy Bootstrapping, Marc shares how a serious phishing hack of his former company’s website back in 2012 eventually grew into a maintenance business that today employs ten people.
This is a summary of Episode 172 of the “Happy Bootstrapping” Podcast (German).
The Phishing Hack as the Entry Point
Marc’s journey into the WordPress world didn’t start with a business plan, but with an emergency. In 2012, the website of his former company was hacked. Tens of thousands of phishing emails were sent through the server, with the consequence that the domain was on blacklists for years and Marc was unable to email German government agencies for a long time afterwards.
“That was the point where, for the first time in my life, I started looking into what WordPress security actually looks like.”
What started as “how do you even repair a site like this?” turned into a blog in 2015, then a repair business for hacked WordPress sites, and finally a maintenance service that grew through word of mouth. What Marc says today about WordPress security sounds almost unspectacular: keep things updated, do backups, follow a handful of security basics. Those exact routines became the business model.
The €50,000 Switch into Full-Time Self-Employment
Until 2018, WP-Wartung24 was a side project. Marc had set himself a rule: he would only switch full-time once the business reached the same size as his earlier self-employment, specifically €50,000 in annual revenue.
“I told myself: if you do €50,000 with WP-Wartung24 on the side, that’s the point where I’m sure that once I do it full-time, it’ll grow into a proper size.”
In 2018, he hit the mark. Marc resigned and went full-time. In 2019, he founded the GmbH, triggered by a large hosting deal that ultimately fell through. The non-disclosure agreement from the potential client had left a lasting impression.
“I thought to myself: their legal department probably has more employees than my entire company.”
The deal never closed. The GmbH stayed. Today, Marc’s team of ten manages 800 sites in ongoing maintenance. Pricing starts at €35 a month, moves up through a mid-tier package around €80, and goes all the way to individual contracts for larger clients.
In-House Monitoring Plugin and the April 2026 Plugin Scandal
At some point, off-the-shelf solutions weren’t enough. Marc’s team developed an in-house monitoring plugin that runs on all 800 sites and centrally tracks what changes — at the code level, with plugin activations, with hosting status. How important these tools are became especially clear in April 2026.
That month, 30 WordPress plugins were sold to a new owner. The new owner injected malicious code into every single plugin and shipped it through the official WordPress update mechanism to every site using those plugins.
“It didn’t happen through some security hole. It happened through the official update mechanism.”
For WP-Wartung24, that meant going on alert. Marc’s team checked all 800 sites to see which of them used which of the 30 plugins. Thanks to the in-house monitoring tool, it quickly became clear that nothing more serious had happened.
Audience Shifts, Diversification, and the Road to WordPress 7
What clients expect from maintenance has changed completely over the last ten years. Maintenance used to mean updates plus backups plus security monitoring. Today it’s about holistic care — including legal aspects, proactive measures, and solid monitoring. That changes the target audience as well: away from the small hair salon with a website, toward agencies who need this service for their clients, and toward Mittelstand companies whose IT department can’t take on the topic and whose marketing department won’t.
For 2026, Marc names diversification as his most important goal. WordPress remains the core system, but the service portfolio is meant to broaden thematically. The next webinar, for example, focuses on email phishing — a side topic that clients keep asking about anyway. Marc also hinted at a new data product, which he is teasing publicly here for the first time. In parallel, his team is watching the rollout of WordPress 7 with its new AI connectors arriving in May 2026 — including the last-minute removal of the collaboration feature from the release.
What I learned from the interview
Niche operations can be a full business. Maintenance gets underestimated because it sounds like “just clicking update buttons.” Marc’s model shows that you can build a ten-person team with 800 contracts out of that routine — if you take it seriously.
Linear growth is enough. Marc never went after hockey-stick growth. Many small contracts, long-term relationships, growth via referrals. That works just as well — and tends to be much more resilient.
External events can build trust. The April 2026 plugin scandal could have been a reputation problem for the entire industry. For WP-Wartung24, it became proof that their in-house monitoring works.
The full episode is now also on YouTube (German only):
Learnings for founders
Set thresholds before you make the jump: Marc’s €50,000 mark was an objective criterion for going full-time — and gave him confidence in the decision.
Recognize a crisis as an opportunity: A brutal hack of a company website turned into his own business 14 years later.
Build your own tools when the market doesn’t fit: Marc’s monitoring plugin wouldn’t have been affordable as an external product — in-house, it’s the most important lever in his operation.
Audiences evolve with the offering: If you offer more depth, you naturally attract different clients — that’s good, but it has to be communicated intentionally.
Doubts are part of the journey: Marc’s open words about the exhaustion phase in 2019, before the first hire, show that even linear success stories have their turning points.
Happy Bootstrapping is a German podcast where I interview bootstrapped founders, indie hackers, and solopreneurs about their startup journeys.
Over the years, I’ve connected with many successful entrepreneurs who have built e-commerce shops, SaaS platforms, mobile apps, content businesses, or hybrid models.
Furthermore I am a bootstrapper myself and growing my DevOps-as-a-Sercice and Web Operations Company “We Manage”.