#43: Demystifying Site Hosting Solutions w/ Jeff Matson

Hello, and good morning and good afternoon and Good evening, everybody. You’re listening to the drunken UX podcast. This is episode number 43. And we’re going to be demystifying all of those weird and confusing words that surround everything related to hosting tonight, we brought a special guest on with us to help us with that. I’m really excited to share all of that stuff with you. But first and foremost, I need to make sure I remind you all that I am your host, Michael Fienen.

I’m doing all right. I’m almost through my first class of scotch already. So I’m getting a quick start this evening. And I’m gonna have to with what we’re going to start off talking about so I think that’s only fair. Folks, if you want to check us out, be sure to dig in over at Twitter or Facebook at slash drunken UX or on Instagram at slash drunken UX podcast. If you’re really really interested in us you can come and talk to us on slack just hit us at drunken ux.com slash slack and you can get right in there like an instant invite Let’s EN I don’t check anybody at the door. Publishing card them though, right? The card me I did card you and I’m

I you’ve got this little like little kid goatee so I’m not entirely convinced you’re of age yet. Oh, keep hoping one day

That’s scary but okay.

and it’s it’s my brand. What can I say? What do you got your nice frosty glass there, sir.

Right I’ve got some gin in my bar. I think it’s Bombay. The blue bottle is that Bombay Bombay is good. I hate Jen. I hate gin.

I know I tried to mix it with nothing because I hate it. I’m drinking a open tonight. I picked up a fresh bottle of that and cracked it open. It’s pretty much my go to it’s a Highland scotch. It’s beautiful. It’s like the perfect middle of the road scotch. You can drink it in the evening. You can drink it with a meal. You can drink it for dessert. It doesn’t matter. It’s just good all the time. That’s drink it with breakfast. I mean, yeah, but I don’t admit to that.

So Aaron, Aaron, you heard the news.

I didn’t plan on killing him this quickly. But apparently that’s how it works. So

Well, if their vision of the future of web design is anything like their pizzas, I think we might be in a little bit of trouble. But hey, go them. Yeah, if you haven’t seen the news, I think most web circles have shared some iteration of this story, if not recently, then in the past few months as well, because this is the continuation of a story that’s been going on since 2016. As happens, dominoes being a big brand, they got sued by a blind user who couldn’t order pizza through their website or through their app. And they sued them under the ADA saying you’re a place of public accommodation. And I’m public and you aren’t accommodating me. And dominoes. Originally, the case was not thrown out isn’t the right word. But like they, they didn’t do the case. Basically, whatever, whatever that word is. The the back end, Joe January, January. The ninth circuit, I think took up the case and said, Oh yeah, no dominoes, you are a place of public accommodation. Just because your website isn’t a physical location. It’s still accommodating the public as a business with a brick and mortar presence. So you need to apply those same basic standards and said you have to make your site compliant. And Domino’s said, Yeah, but we hate people. And we don’t want them to give us money. So we’re going to fight this. And they want the Supreme Court to now decide if the ADA applies to websites.

so there’s a lot to unpack there. It’s a you know, I mean, it’s a fight that’s been going on for a while, right. Like we’ve we’ve seen variations on this lawsuit for years now.

So good example, Amazon got hit with this 2018 there was a class action against amazon for not accommodating blind people for for purchases. And that lawsuit never saw the light of day because it was settled.

Um, yeah, I’m sure we probably did. And Amazon’s also got an interesting case, because originally, Amazon would have had the argument that because they don’t have a physical location, that the public accommodation standard doesn’t apply to them. But now that they own places like Whole Foods, right, it kind of actually changes the dynamic in a very strange way.

So I’ve got it I got to read from this is an article at Fast Company, there are several others, The Verge and a couple others had carried it as well. It says websites and mobile apps do not become public public accommodations, simply by virtue of providing access to the goods and services of a brick and mortar enterprise. The pizza chain argues the ADA does not demand full accessibility for each and every means of accessing the goods or services the public accommodation provides to the public. What they’re effectively saying is, yeah, the websites not accessible. He could pick up a phone, though. That’s, that’s the underlying argument of that they’re making their that, yeah, we make our brick and mortars accessible, the websites aren’t and they don’t have to be, because we have taken steps to make it available elsewhere.

Right. And it’s a very I mean, this is this is an argument that has been made the world over if you go and I caution you, if you go to any like non tech website and look up the story, don’t read the comments, you will absolutely lose faith in humanity because of in general, don’t read the comments that the comments are always just kind of gross and make you feel ugly. That is an argument, though, that you hear a lot that well. And I’ve made that argument. And I’m I’m as guilty of that, as anybody of saying, you know, I’ve tried to take something as far as we could in one area, we have other means until such time as we can catch something else up. Usually, though, I’ve made that argument in cases where like, I was the only web person on a site that was 100,000 pages. And so it’s like, it really was a case of I can’t get to that stuff. Unless somebody looks me hire more people or whatever. So there was a legitimate argument to say we we have other means Domino’s does not have that excuse as far as so that they this article, or I don’t remember this one or another one. But the the basic consensus was that it was going to cost Domino’s $38,000. To make their site accessible. They throw away $38,000

I’m pretty sure they throw away that much pizza.

this this area, because it is it’s one of those things and people say well, dominoes retains lawyers. So because people are like, well, don’t they? Isn’t it going to cost them more and that and they say dominoes remains lawyers for this stuff? Yeah, they do. Those aren’t constitutional lawyers. Those aren’t lawyers that go before the Supreme Court, they’re going to have to hire those lawyers to do all that. And they’re going to definitely cost more than 38. Grand. And it’s a weird argument because it’s it’s that kind of argument that they’re basically saying, this is a bad example, because of course the ADA does apply. But if I’m going to build a three story building, I’m not going to put an elevator in it. I shouldn’t have to because wall carry somebody upstairs if they need it. Like that’s a real asshole way of putting it.

Yeah, I know. Pizza Hut used to I don’t know if they still do, but there. Now a lot of them would did that originally, especially to get people to use the mobile apps. Like I’ve noticed. Donald specials aren’t nearly as good as they used to be. Not that I use McDonald’s a lot. I don’t ever eat a McDonald’s. What are you talking about? I’m a healthy guy. I work out like every other day. Come on, man. What don’t accuse me of this. This is not a fair. I’m going to talk about web development.

the weird argument that Domino made to and this this is the one where I’m just like, yeah, these guys literally don’t have a clue what they’re what they’re trying to do is they they made a comment about how the moving target compliance standards make it difficult to make a an accessible website at their scale. To which I just want to make sure everybody knows we had 2.0 came out in 2008 11 years ago, we take two point O was released. And granted, we got two point O is not you know, it’s not a panacea. It’s it it does not solve all of our problems. And it definitely is falling behind 2.1. week I do point one came out in 2018. It took 10 years for that update to happen. So I don’t know what they are talking about when they say these, the standards move too quickly. Yeah, the web moves quickly. Yes, it does. But the standards don’t.

I want to frame some good out of this. Because maybe there is some weird, good guy approach that dominoes is taking maybe at the end of the day, they’re saying, you know what, we’re going to fix all this stuff. It’s going to take us some time, we’re going to spend the 38,000, we still want the lawsuit to go forward. Because underneath it, the question is a valid question that they are saying, which is that there the ADA does not clearly apply to websites. And in a legal sense, it’s questionable. Only the courts have ruled it both ways. And and so what they’re saying is, hey, we need the Supreme Court to say whether or not the ADA applies to websites. It’s it’s something there’s a

Sorry, I tried. I I wanted, I want to give them the benefit of the doubt. I do think, though that I think it is a good fight. Because a they’re gonna lose. I mean, they’re gonna lose. If they don’t, even if they

And it does, underline again, this idea that we are behind. Yeah, Congress needs to step up, Supreme Court needs to step up, we need to update our rule set, you know, there, everything hinges on this definition under Title three of public accommodations, places of public accommodations, and what that constitutes, because there’s a list. And it’s a finite list. And it gets interpreted by the courts to either mean, your physical place, or a place in an abstract sense, like a website, a website is a place. But even in that sense, the ADA is very vague on what accounts for, you know, quote, unquote, reasonable accommodations under the law. And so even though we can absolutely sit here and say, just make your your damn site accessible, section five away gives you you know, the basic outline how the federal government does it, that’s all you have to do double a standard week tag, it’s easy. Do it, spend your money, do the work, you’re fine. They can do it or not do it. But I think we do need to catch up our infrastructure as a whole at the same time, because we need to remove some of that ambiguity.

I think you will see a move to update the ADA.

suppose. I think that and that’s why I say like, there, there is good to come out of this. I think even you know, not not even tongue in cheek, like there’s good to come out of it. Because it will motivate a large group of people who yet maybe dominoes won’t care. But it will motivate a group of people to go to Congress people and say, accessibility generally gets good support across the board. And this is one of those things, areas where and we’ve said this on the show many times. Accessibility isn’t hard, good. Accessibility is just good web design.

right. Have a plan. You know, when somebody raises the question, if you can say, yeah, we know about this stuff, here’s, here’s how we’re playing, approaching it. And understand, you know, these are problems that existed for five years, and it’s going to cost us time, money, etc. But we’re committed to it. That’s enough to make a lot of people happy.

That is, yeah, that is like the wrong answer. That is the ultimate Wrong answer to that question. Oh, good. Catch your breath. You probably heard another voice chiming in there. So I want to introduce you guys all the way from our eastern coast of Virginia. Although Virginia isn’t all on the coast. I don’t know which part you’re from actually. But we have Jeff Mattson coming to us. Just been working in as a hosting and education evangelist since 2012. He currently does community management for North stack and is one of their leads for education and documentation at page Lee. He’s a super smart guy that’s going to help walk us through all things posting related. Everybody say hello to Jeff Mattson. Hi, Jeff. I was first first thank you class.

So that is on the coast. So you just hear about

Nice. How far are you from Asheville?

longer. It’s pretty close to the border between North and South Carolina. I know I asked. cuz I’ve got that’s my whole office is is in Asheville. So that’s where all the people who I sit. So

So tonight’s topic is all about hosting web hosting, specifically. Because there are a lot of words that surround this stuff. We’re going to talk about managed and managed hosting, we’re talking about shared hosting, VPS, cloud, all of these things, to help you get an idea about the different types of hosting that are out there. And which ones are right for which use cases and what the challenges are between some of them at different points. So that you know, you know, what you should be thinking about using for, you know, your next project or whatever the case may be. Because that can be challenging at times, there’s a lot of variation, there’s a lot of overlap in some cases. So we wanted to kind of like break it down and help establish sort of what goes into that decision making process. So I thought, Jeff, would be a good kind of addition to this. He’s kind of you’ve been embedded in the hosting world for God, what, seven years now?

So let’s start with I want to go through their two words. And the end, these two words are directly opposed to each other, but you hear them a lot. And that’s managed and unmanaged. I want to start with those, because you’ll hear them applied to the rest of the things we’re going to discuss in different contexts. And so I think it’s good to kind of kick that off, when it comes to the words I think are fairly self explanatory in that managed means the company that you are paying is taking care of a lot of the background stuff for you. That’s updating things like, you know, if you don’t ever want to worry about what version of a boon to you’re on, you don’t have to worry about it because they worry about if you don’t have to, or don’t want to worry about whether or not encrypt has been updated and patched for the latest security patch, you don’t have to worry about it, because they’re going to worry about it. That’s what managed means in the so it’s like

It’s taking all of these things that make a website go whether that’s Apache, PHP, at CGI bin, you know, Python, any of these things

I use, I built my very first website and it is still out there and still running and it is all CGI based. unmanaged, on the other hand, basically means self service. And that can be self service at sea panel or can be self service, like complete server DIY. But unmanaged basically means if you have a problem, it’s your problem. And you know it. And I also kind of lumped in with when we’ll talk about shared hosts, a lot of shared hosts are unmanaged, you can submit tickets, and they will occasionally help you with some of that. But generally speaking, you’re getting like tier one support that the they’re not helpful. They don’t Okay, wait, wait.

It’s a very sort of white glove approach? Right? Oh, I like that idea of having that person who is there to cater to you and, and take care of all the things.

So that’s, that’s at a high level. And there of course, like you said, Jeff, there variations kind of on those approaches. The next section about this, it breaks it down, as you’ve kind of got a almost a life cycle of a developer. So a lot of developers will start out on shared hosting, it’s the first thing they get into, usually, because it’s very cheap. And then they’ll start looking at VPS hosting, because it gives them sort of that next tier of power. And then somewhere in this mix, also, Cloud Hosting comes into play, which is sort of a blend of these. So we’ll start with shared hosting, you’re going to know the names as host gator as dream host as Blue Host as in motion. You know, GoDaddy does it unfortunately. It these are the folks that you when you jump on their site, they’re like, yeah, we can get you a website up for $4 a month, we’re going to give you your domain, we’re going to give you SSL this, and it’s unlimited everything.

Shared hosts that you know, they are cheap. And it feels like when you look at one, you’re like, man, $4 a month and I get unlimited everything. And they’re giving me all this, it sounds like a good deal. So people start there, and that’s fine. It’s perfectly fine. And we’ll talk about why exactly, you would use shared hosting. Generally, the the other sort of telltale sign of shared hosting is it’s a you’ll when you go because I said earlier, you know, when you do like shared hosting a lot of it, or if it’s unmanaged hosting, you tend to have a lot of self service. And so the way shared hosts do this is they go install see panel, which is a piece of software that basically is designed to house web services and list them out and make it so you as the user can go in and with a button, click and do something, whether that’s look at a database, install WordPress, you know, set up DNS for a new domain, whatever the case may be, but it’s designed to make you do everything. And that’s what shared hosting looks like when you’re on the inside.

Yeah, I started out I don’t even remember the name of the company now. First company, I went with dollar 99 a month. At I got 10 megs. It was fine. it you know, it did its job, at least at that point in time. And that’s, that’s why I was I was a kid basically, I could afford them. And that’s and for a lot of businesses to you’ll end up there for that reason. So that’s that’s what shared hosting looks like shared hosting is all about offering cheap hosting, because they have a bunch of servers, and they’re going to try to get as many people on them as they can think of it like an airplane right? Or coach or Eve or an apartment building. Economy Class. Yeah. Economy like,

when you show up to the airport, and you’ve got the the whitelist you know, the people who are on. That’s what happened. And that’s, that’s what shared hosts usually do is they will tend to over provision their sales for the servers that they’re on. And that’s why they say, well, everything’s Unlimited, because they’re counting on 90% of the stuff that’s on them doesn’t probably get any traffic.

kind of getting into last moment that I was really glad we brought Jeff on tonight show. You’re like a shark. The the next step up from there is VPS. This is virtual private servers. This is similar to shared hosting in the sense that your host has a big server farm and they are carving out pieces of it for you. This is what shared hosting does VPS Generally, if you have a good reputable host, there are less reputable ones that will push this but a good VPS host is going to say you’re renting, you know two CPUs and eight gigs of RAM and 500 gigs of storage. And that’s yours. You’re paying for it and it isn’t provision for you.

this in motion. And whoever wrote that training, Aaron’s yelling at me because he sees me waving my hands and getting exasperated as if something is going on with the conversation. The reality is I’m watching my new kitten trying to jump from guitar to guitar hanging on my wall. We’ve entered the terrible twos phase of kittenhood.

yeah, so we’re ready. So the thing about VPN hosting Is it the nice thing about at least for me, so I use Digital Ocean, I run a few droplets I’ve got I use spaces, I do all this stuff. The thing I love about VPN is it is almost as cheap as shared hosting. A droplet starts out at five bucks a month for Digital Ocean. And so you’re only you’re you’re barely a step up from shared. And I should point out when you see those like 395 a month, that’s introductory pricing, it’s like the cable company, that’s 395 to start, that’s not what you’re paying next year, when you re up just yeah, just be aware, at five bucks, five bucks a month, you get a your own server on Digital Ocean, it’s not big. It’s not great for anything huge, but it’s a starting place. And they can make it that cheap. Because at that scale, and you’re you’re literally doing everything yourself. So whereas shared hosts, part of what you’re paying for is you do have access to see panel, you do get one click application installs, you have one click access to PHP, my admin, all of these nice things. On a VPS you get a server, that means you’re installing your operating system, you’re installing PHP, my admin, you’re installing Apache, you’re doing all of that yourself.

Yeah, it’s it’s a higher ceiling, certainly, because the other thing about VPN is is you can usually scale them up. So as your site grows, now they’re dynamic usually like, again, when you sign up for them, you provision so many resources. Yeah. And that’s yours. They are more than happy to say, do you need more CPU? Do you need more RAM? Do you need more storage, they can always scale them up, scaling down is usually harder.

Now that’s a little bit of a salesy talk, for the most part, they won’t, but not necessarily for technical reasons. But it is it’s It is designed to be able to scale with you. And we’ll talk here in a little bit about some other options that do scale with you. But for VPS, if you are building something that is designed to start small, and you think you’re going to grow over time, you can start with that $5 a month plan. And then when you get bigger, you get bigger, go to the $10 month plan, go to the $15 month plan and make your server bigger over time as as your needs dictate. At that point,

Rackspace, easy to Yeah,

some of them I’ve noticed like with Digital Ocean, this has happened to me where I’ve had a server running for a year. And it’s like one of those things like you set it and forget it, the servers just been there running doing its job. And I noticed that, hey, I can just up the resources on this box. And it’s not going to cost me anything because they have updated their whole pricing model. Yeah, by that point. That’s happened to me a couple of times, but happened to me, what you’re also going to realize is a lot of shared hosts offer VPN services as an upsell to, which can be nice if you have a site already hosted on somebody like Host Gator, and you want to move it up, you know, you realize you start seeing what we’ll talk about some of the pros and cons of this stuff. If you start falling susceptible to some of the problems of hosting. For them, it’s you know, a button click basically. And you can migrate that over to a VPN and grow it that way, which can be a nice, different avenue of growth, but it is an option to keep in mind. And it’s partly why they offer that. For what it’s worth.

Yeah, that’s a very good metaphor. Everybody’s doing great with the metaphors this evening I array. And I presume Jeff, too, is that partly also what you handle a lot of in terms of documentation, education and things like that? Is that what’s in your wheelhouse there as far as helping people learn how to do these things? And how to figure out what, what tools to use four different applications?

if your stuff goes down,

There’s a one in between state and I won’t dig real deep into this. But there’s what they call cloud hosting. And I don’t I don’t love this term, especially in the world of VPS hosting, because to me, what we used to call VPS hosting was or was cloud hosting, that was kind of the way it was viewed.

sure what. So Cloud Hosting is sort of this weird hybrid between shared and VPS. In that you generally end up with the benefits of VPS. As far as having some scalability and power with regard to access to tools and resources. You can go up and down as your needs require occasionally, the one that I go to, and I’m going back, I’m digging into my my history here. So if they don’t do this anymore, I apologize. But I used to host some sites with media temple and the way media temple they had the service called grid. And what you did was you bought into the grid, and you paid for GPUs, which was sort of this abstract idea of how much power you were getting with this system.

yet. I don’t love the phrasing or the model, because I think it does it, it gets into weird gray area. And I think I would, I would rather advise people to either say you shared hosting or use a VPN, those are very black and white and fairly clear, Cloud Hosting gets weird, because the feature sets can be very different between hosts, yeah, your your access can be different.

you pay for eight gigs of RAM. And, you know, two CPUs and all this with cloud because they abstract all that away. And they say, well, like it with media temples case, GPU is a calculation of how much server time you utilized over a certain, you know, factor, how much RAM you were using all this. So it made it very hard to know like, where you are. Now, it’s, it is a weird kind of metered approach, like you are, in some cases, paying for a metered approach to it, which can be very beneficial at low scale, at high scale, it can not be great, to say the least,

whereas VPS you are buying resources. This is this is Yeah, what you get in like Digital Ocean space, you go up, you don’t go down. The cloud hosts usually go up or down.

I’m not sure they know anymore, you know, a lot of these places, they’re so big now. And your own machine can move around from, you know, physical place to physical place without you noticing? Honestly, I, I don’t know, they can know, you know, Amazon. And if anybody wants to go look it up. There’s this really, there’s some neat articles on how Amazon does a lot of the AWS infrastructure, they bring in shipping crates that get shipped over from China or wherever, that are fully integrated inside the shipping crate. And their server farms are just those shipping crates plugged into each other. It’s wild and incredible to see how they do it. But they’ve got

yeah, US East one goes down at least once a year and takes half the internet with it. So figure that one out.

So there’s another type. And this one’s not worth spending a lot of time on, it’s dedicated hosting. Dedicated, is very easy, because it’s at the high end of the market. And it’s literally what it sounds like, if you go to racks space, this used to be Rackspace, his business model basically was and why they’re called Rackspace, quite frankly, if you went to them, and you said, I want to rent a machine from you. And that’s what you do with dedicated hosting, you are literally renting a physical box and that is your box that sits in a rack somewhere. They build it out the way that you know, some of them do it by you know, very specific build out, some of them let you customize it. But you are getting a dedicated machine that is all yours and is taken care of. It’s in the area of also, and I’m not gonna we don’t talk about this in the episode. But colocation is kind of similar that that with colocation, it is technically your hardware in their location, but it’s still you’re talking about physical hardware is now yours, as opposed to virtual, as opposed to a container, as opposed to something that sits on amorphous hardware, but represents a real amount of capacity.

And it’s the datacenter going down. And it’s the difference between 395 a month, and like $150 A month ago, there’s a giant amount of scale there, you know, when you’re getting into dedicate, and that’s why I don’t wanna spend time on it, because most people won’t deal a lot with that. Now, Jeff, when we were planning out this episode, you threw one out there that I’d hadn’t anticipated that was great. Which gets into this, this word that people here that I hate, I hate this name, server lists server list, because it’s not server list.

fun back then a good thunderstorm, you actually get bandwidth of something like 14.8 terabytes a second. That’s crazy.

one hit a month,

no. verification, there’s nothing you have to do except write that check.

We’re building a tool right now that is going to have an API associated with it. So as we sat down, we were talking about infrastructure. We were trying to think, how do we deploy the API, because we need to be able to post it, we need to be able to get from it, we need to do these things, it has to talk to the database, we didn’t want to have to manage the operating system, all the packages, all you know all everything that’s involved in managing a server, we just wanted a simple API, and lambda was our solution for that. And so we’ve set up you know, we’re setting up our CI and everything, we deploy all the stuff to lambda, and it runs these little tiny micro services that just say, here are all the endpoints you can hit. And it handles all of that, you could get a VPS and install Node and make all that happen that way too. But this just lets us write our JavaScript, send it to lambda, and just say, hey, pointed over here, and it just works. And I don’t have to think about the server piece of it at all. So how

it gets into this idea that when you talk about shared hosting, VPS hosting, you’re really talking about putting a whole website up, whereas several this architecture is more about making it possible to do the individual tasks, you want something bigger to do, which, in the old days, we would build a hold server for we would build a server that handles all of the requests and does all the things server list is great, because you can make it do the individual thing. So unlike in my case, we’re looking at this API, we’re building an each individual piece is one lambda function. And each one of those if if, if we get a million requests, but we only put 20, it scales that entirely appropriately, appropriately for those needs and charges us as a consequence, as opposed to thinking about, you know, well, I need to have a server, you know, I, I don’t know how many put or gets I’m going to get

Server This is where you go, when you get to that really next level of saying, I need to build something that does a quantifiable number of certain actions. But I don’t know what those will be. And so I want to be able to know that this apple always working always, you know, be there available to my users, that’s where that really goes, as opposed to just saying, I need to put a website up that just serves a page.

So as a whole, most folks will generally deal with two of these out of most of them. And that’s the shared hosting and VPS hosting. That’s where most people will land at one point or another. So let’s start digging into a little bit of that detail to sort of round out all of this discussion. I want to jump in first to the shared hosting. And while it sounds and we kind of Pooh poohed on it a little bit in the first half of the show, absolutely has use cases, it has a place. There’s a reason why it has existed for the last 20 years, and why it will exist long beyond us. It’s

First off, it is cheap. Mm hmm. You know, that 395 a month and I joked about it earlier, you have to watch it because it will go up. That’s generally the introductory price. And so it goes up to like 695 795

And what sucks is that what they do is at 395. That’s a great promo price to convince you to pay for the year up front, so that when the next year comes up, they charge you that full price for the entire year of hosting, and then you’re stuck. And you can find it you can try to get prorated refunds and whatnot, but it’s a pain in the ass.

If you know what you’re getting into it, you pay attention to that, make sure you look at the pricing. And know if you’re getting a promo pricing, it is a cheap way to get a site launched and set up very quickly. The domain will be included in that you can take that domain with you when you leave if you choose to leave. It’s a pain in the ass as well. But you don’t do it.

Yeah, yeah, no, the thing is like what I set up and I said having an account with Host Gator, I still use them for some small stuff, because I’ve had them forever. And it’s a great place for me to throw a bunch of just small stuff that, you know, I’ll charge a client, you know more than what I’m paying. And it’s to them, it’s still not much, it’s enough for me to keep it running at that point. But it is generally a good place to throw stuff. Like if you’ve got client work, if you got something like that, that you that you’re taking care of. for them. It’s a perfectly good place to throw a lot of that. Generally speaking,

It generally speaking like a shared hosts habits, habits problems, but they are good, a good starting place, usually. And it’s just a matter of paying attention. And as long as you do a Google search, type in best hosts for 2019 best shared host 2019 somebody who’s written an article, go look it up and pick somebody that has a decent record. pick somebody that’s been around for a while. I generally I have no problem recommending you know, green host Blue Host Host Gator. These folks are have been in the field for years. They generally have good reviews, they don’t try to like beat you up on the cells too hard. So they’re, they’re worthwhile. Con number one, it your your stuff gets mashed together in a very strange way that I would never recommend anybody ever like yeah, like that’s that’s not how you run websites.

The other side of shared hosting is a lot of shared hosts will market themselves as managed. But that’s not true. By any normal sense of that phrase. Like they they are only managed in the sense that they manage their own hardware and and server infrastructure, but not necessarily to your benefit. Like they only throw stuff up in the panel, and then you are in charge from that point forward. And I had said earlier like you can put in a ticket if your site goes down. But you may or may not get actual service in some cases.

The next part of shared hosting that you need to watch out for is depending on again, and all these like some of these cons very much depends on who your host is. But a problem I’ve ran into is backups are very limited. They will backup based on nodes or entities. And they will say Well, yeah, we backup your account up to say 100,000 entities, which sounds like a lot. Unless you’re running a caching plugin and have three sites door there, in which case, you’re three times over that limit between all the little fragments because it that’s backing up everything that includes all of your email folders that you may have stored with them, all of the additional images and and when you upload something to WordPress, upload one image and it renders three thumbnails, that different sizes, all of that stuff adds up and you’ll discover that that number erodes very quickly.

That this is getting weird.

The next day thing to keep out for that we talked about already a little bit is unlimited. Isn’t unlimited. That’s a lie. Like, yeah, that’s that’s one of those things nice. I use that phrase carefully. Because I don’t know how they can even really get away with it. Except that, you know, how many times have we looked at cell phones and internet service plans and all this where they say, Oh, yeah, that you have unlimited stuff. But

there are 17 asterisks next year.

an arbitrary number. It is 100% arbitrary. If you start

everybody’s ran through this once when you’ve been looking at a new site. And you’ve seen an article that you’re like, Oh, that looks great. And you click on it, and you hit the page. It’s like this account has been suspended. Contact, blah, blah.

Technically, alcohol. That’s like, I was thinking I was right there with you. Which, but is a good point. Because one of the things with any kind of shared host is anytime speed or performance, our needs of whatever you’re building, shared, hosting is not a good way to go. Because they aren’t built for speed or performance. They’re built for packing as many people onto a server as they can get away with. Most people are serving low enough traffic that if it takes three or four seconds for a page to load, they don’t care. That’s true for a lot of mom and pop pop shops, but for other people milliseconds matter. And we’ve seen the research on that.

The last thing that I’ll focus on with shared hosting is limited access, limited access to debugging tools, that’s logs. That’s anything that helps you figure out why something broke. And it’s limited access to tools, shared hosts love throwing WordPress up, or Drupal up or simple and PHP, and not at all weird and interesting. asked him to host a Ruby app asked him to host a Python tool. Yeah, man, good luck.

Yes, I see. two very distinct risks. One is that when one user is compromised, it potentially compromises every site on that server. And I say that as somebody who suffered from it with a website,

that there was somebody was hosting a website on our shared hosting, their site kept getting compromised, and we kept getting notifications from our host. Hey, by the way, check out whatever on your site, look at this stuff. And I spent months cleaning up time after time after time, because somebody else kept screwing up. And it was giving a user access to our files.

the reality is, if you’re paying under $5 a month for hosting, you don’t know, it is the bargain basement, hosting, and you have to be ready to not know what you’re getting in those cases. The other side of it is badly optimized scripts, if somebody upload something to their website that is written badly. And not even that on purpose. Like it could be a plugin or something that they just don’t know. But it starts chewing up resources on the server at that impacts you because you’re all sharing those resources. And so if their script pegs 98% of the CPU, and there are 50, websites shared on that 49 of them get 2% of the CPU to share until somebody shuts Sit down. So that’s all of the the pros, the cons, the risks of looking at shared hosting. So let’s do the same thing for the PS hosting. First and foremost, when you think about VPN hosting, you can get it managed or unmanaged, which is really nice. If you want to do everything, you can do that if you want to find somebody who will handle all the stuff, but just load your app on it, that’s also a thing that you can do. And so it’s just a matter of knowing what it is you’re after. And there is somebody out there willing to do that model for you. The real thing about it is, it’s a lot of affordable power, though. You get into you think about easy to you think about Digital Ocean, you think about line node, any of these folks that offer good high quality VPS, you know, it’s relatively affordable for the amount of stuff you get out of it, where I shared hosting, you’re fighting with your neighbor for the scraps of meat, bps is guaranteeing you a certain amount of of infrastructure that you know, you can use and utilize. And that gives you a lot of overhead if you’re actually trying to build, you know, a real website or real tool at that point.

there’s definitely a lot of VPS is all about do it yourself. It is it is that evolution of I want to become better at all the things I’m doing. And so if you like that great, but it is definitely the kind of thing that most folks aren’t prepared for, I think from setting up your own SMTP server to making sure Aaron you mentioned you know, get failed a band installed, know how to set up things like Sudoku and all of these things so that you’re not logging in as root. There’s so much that goes into that that is a very, it’s not even that it’s hard. It’s just that it’s a lot more than I think people are prepared for. And in some cases, a lot of them are unknown unknowns. They don’t know to do private key authentication, because they’ve never used private key authentication in their life. So it’s just not a thing they’re familiar with. And we would advocate for that, if that’s what you’re going to do. But it the the learning curve there. And there are, I think great resources in terms of how you make that move and how you figure it out.

you still have to you have to know that the known unknowns, yeah, you have to know the questions to ask Yes. And make use of it. That’s that’s what I was looking for. Yeah,

their docs are good, even if you aren’t a Digital Ocean customer.

What and security brings us to the risks early, which is one of the things that I keep trying to tell people is, you are not as good at security as you think you are. I mean, there’s no, no two ways about this, that figuring out you may be the greatest web developer in the world, you are not a Server Admin, you are not a DevOps person. And you can learn those skills. I have no doubt when most folks go into that very unprepared for what that actually means. We’re not as good at security as we think we are. If you’re a web developer, you aren’t committed full time to dev ops and somebody who is is good be better than you. Yeah. And you have to decide if that is worth the trade off. If that’s the route you want to go for hosting. We talked about this a bit on episode 12. with Chris, we’ve been we’ve been Wakeman.

All world

And regardless of if it’s WordPress, if it’s a memory leak, if it’s an attack, if you run into a problem, you are completely on your own. From a support standpoint, if you’re doing pure VPS type hosting, you have been granted access to a server and that is your server. And unless you are paying a lot of extra money for support, that problem is yours. And if you break your

Good for you. I hope you have backups. Go for it.

Yeah. Do your own backups, do all the things and that’s true. There’s no better advice and always backup your own stuff. Don’t trust the host. Don’t trust your your manage server, don’t trust your VPN. Trust yourself to backup your own stuff. I

So the last area and and I didn’t actually list this earlier. But I want to talk about things like managed application resources. And I’m going to bring up the phrase managed WordPress because you see this a lot. Managed WordPress is a, a niche that you will see. And you see it with others. You’ll see it with Drupal, Aqua does it with Drupal, there are certainly other platforms as well, where you’re getting sort of this hybrid solution, where folks are giving you managed services that are higher end that are application specific and give you access to both a lot of resources you wouldn’t normally use and ability that you don’t maybe have on your own. And I’m going to say I’m really glad to have Jeff on tonight because of this exactly. So whether you’re looking at WP Engine, whether you’re looking at Pantheon, you’re looking at page Lee, these are all folks who have basically made their mark is saying, we are going to set up a server infrastructure that is designed to host your website, in the tool that you want to host it in. And we’re going to do it better than anybody else. You can go out there, you’re not going to go to host gator, you’re not going to go to Digital Ocean, you’re going to come to us because you want to use this tool.

But and where you guys come in, and like these folks who do manage, whether it’s WordPress, or Drupal or any other application, that the real trick is, you step in where shared hosting would shut you off, if there is a spike in traffic. Most managed services are like, No, we can accommodate that. Like it, there are buffer zones. And I think there are still caps in built in there in some cases, but usually like that, they’re going to just cut you off, if you over, you know, go over 10,000 hits a month or something like that, like, if you go over your limit, what they’ll do is they’ll serve the pages, and then send you you know, one of those notes that says, hey, you maybe consider upgrading, there’s sort of, there’s a much gentler hand that goes towards the provisioning of resources, where if your site is bigger than the plan you’re paying for, how they manage getting you, you know, through that process,

the other thing they’ll do and from my experience they’ve with like WP Engine, for instance, I’ve had good luck with them on security scanning. And not just like the the proactive stuff in terms of making sure that the plugins you’re installing, you know, meet certain bars victory. But also, you know, we have internally certain security measures. And, you know, we have to run pin tests, occasionally, things like this. And they’re able to meet all of those needs just by saying, Hey, we’re going to run a pin test, you’re going to see a surge of traffic from this IP address, and just know what’s happening, and they will whitelist it for a certain period of time and take care of it. And also on the backup side, we said earlier, like in terms of shared hosting, most shared hosts limit the backups you get. And that can be limited by file size by package size, whatever that may end up being. With most managed WordPress, backups, they say, well, we will save 30 days of backups. And it doesn’t matter what size it is, they back it up every day, you can do automatic backups, whatever the case, may be that you need. And those are where you start seeing those real differentiators. And when you need that kind of availability when you need that kind of resiliency in your website scheme that makes all the difference in the world in terms of knowing if that’s worth it or not. That’s real turnkey WordPress.

So I hope that was useful. I hope we helped folks understand the difference between all these different things. I know there are different use cases. And the best thing I can offer everybody is if you’re still confused, or you want some feedback or anything, send us a Tweet. Let us know if you have a question. We’re happy to answer that. Go move that over for a minute. We’re going to take a quick break and we’re going to come right back after our sponsor message and we will wrap things up right after this. The drunken UX podcast is brought to you by our friends at New cloud. New cloud is an industry leading interactive map provider who has been building location based solutions for organizations for a decade. Are you trying to find a simple solution to provide your users with an interactive map of your school, city or business? Well, new clouds interactive map platform gives you the power to make and edit a custom interactive map in just two minutes. They have a team of professional cartographers who specialize in map illustrations of many different styles and are ready to design and artistic rendering to fit your exact needs. One map serves all of your users devices with responsive maps that are designed to scale and blend in seamlessly with your existing website. To request a demonstration, or to view their portfolio, visit them online at New cloud.com slash drunken UX that’s in you cloud.com slash drunken UX. Jeff man thanks for sitting down with us. I know that it’s getting late in terms of Virginia time because in Kansas we don’t believe in clocks. We don’t believe in electricity most of the time as it turns out. So take a second you’ve got the microphone tell us where you’re at where we can find you and if you’ve got anything going on that you want folks to know about

with we all have that website.

That Are you sure that’s the right the right address?

Okay. Making sure.

so weird out true. I’m gonna let you get away with it though. Folks, if you’re listening to us, I don’t care if you’re on I Heart Radio on Apple podcast, Google podcasts. If you’re on Stitcher, wherever you are, make sure to hit the like button, hit the share button, do the things. let folks know that you enjoyed us leave us a review if you feel the need. If you don’t want to, you know, let us know you are going to fill out the form at our website drunken ux.com. And we will take your anonymous information as well let us know if we’re doing good or bad or if you want to hear a topic covered. Otherwise. Jeff, thanks for spending night with us, Aaron, I think you should need a nap because Boy, you sound a little bit weird. Otherwise, the only thing that I have left to tell all of you kind folks out there and this is one of those things is nothing to do with hosting. It has nothing to do with anything except making sure that you’re doing the best job you possibly can. And I hope that you’re keeping your personas close and your users closer bye bye