9 – Website Hosting for Web Designers – The Good, the Bad & the Ugly

[00:00:00] What’s up y’all? Welcome to the Web Design Empire where we share stories and strategies to help you build your web design empire from a little side gig to multiple six figs. I’m John, and this is Kelly. We’re full-time freelance web designers who’ve escaped. The real world broke up with our jobs, our bosses, our exes, our cubicles, and our commutes over 15 years ago, and we haven’t looked back.
We’re also course creators, web design, business coaches, web design store owners. Kelly owns Airbnbs. I’m a touring, professional, musician. All that to say, we are building our empires. Today’s episode is titled hosting, the good, the bad, and the ugly. I don’t, nowhere, all that. How are you, Kelly? How’s it going?
I’m doing okay. the inspiration behind this [00:01:00] episode was the fact that I just recently moved 150, well, technically 148, websites, to a new host. So. It brought up all kinds of feelings and, 148. So right, right before mm-hmm. We hit the record button, we were talking and, and you and your hu you and your husband are watching 150.
Yes, that’s true. Sci sci-fi movies. But you don’t say sci-fi. You say, I say sci-fi. I got that from, it, it’s from the kids movie. Uh. Sing 2, which is fantastic. But anyway, Portia is the wolf’s daughter and she calls them Sky fi. Oh my God. Is this a sky fi? Um, so for every, for every site, every site you move, you watch a site, a sky fi.
That wasn’t the original plan. No, we started these movies like. Uh, well over a year ago, and we’re, I mean, we’re not even close to halfway. Like we finally crossed off the first page of what? Eight pages of screenshots. So, so your husband comes to you and says, Hey, we got, here’s this list I found. [00:02:00] Now, do you get, we’re still talking about this.
Do you get to pick the next list, like after these one 50 or three? I, I mean, in, in 2030 when we’re done. Uh, sure do. Do you get to find like a new romantic comedies? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. A lot of good ones though. I mean, he would Okay. So that would be torture for him. Okay. So, so we’ll dive right in.
Kelly. Kelly is experiencing one of the, one of the hardest things to experience as a web designer. Oh God. Business owner is. Is moving your, moving all your sites from one hosting company mm-hmm. To, to another. Not so bad when you have like 10, 15, 20 sites. Still a pain in the butt though, but you’re moving a hundred and let’s call it 150 of them.
Yeah. Basically. When did you start this process and where are you at now? I started, gosh, I could look up my calendar, but I’m just gonna guess like two and a half weeks ago. I don’t think it’s been a terribly long time. Maybe three.
I don’t do anything like [00:03:00] half-assed, so it was, you know, 10 sites a day for the first, oh. gosh, more than that. Like the first weekend. Oh yeah, that’s what I did. The very first weekend. I knocked out every single one that I had delegate access to, which was probably.
Like 50 to 60. So it was a good chunk, but then that meant I had a whole bunch of others. Mm-hmm. More than that, that I didn’t have delegate access to. So that took a lot longer. And those are the ones that I pieced out. either it was like between five and 10 a day that, I did the rest. And that my goal was of course, like my deadline was to.
To get it all done before I got billed again. I each gotta have a deadline, right? So, um, that’s, that’s why I set that deadline, which isn’t the, oh, I got charged anyway. because it turns on he needed a 30 day notice. which is absurd, but. Anyhow, so we’re gonna, speaking of movies, we’re gonna tarantino this.
So that’s, that’s, that’s, that’s today. Today. Oh, well, how’s, who’s getting you at now? How, [00:04:00] how many sites do you have left? Oh, sorry. Yeah, that was the rest of that question. I have one, one left. One last one. technically it has been migrated, but it’s, the domain isn’t pointing to it ’cause we’re having trouble.
And by we, I mean, uh, me, uh, I’m, I am, I cannot access the domain and I cannot, get a hold of the client. So it’s kind of a double whammy there. They’re ignoring me. Whoa. Like, oh, it’s no big deal. Whoa. We’ll, creed there. Um, yeah. So just, just one left. Okay. So that’s where we are, yeah.
Right now. But maybe we, maybe we should go all the way back to the beginning. I think we should. Yeah. We can both talk about early on, early on, what did we do now? Fun fact. Fun fact. Kelly and I, like I said in the intro, we’re web design coaches. we run break into web. I got the little logo up there, break into web.com where you can learn how to start a web design business but a big thing that we preach in our coaching and in our building, [00:05:00] a web design business. And why should you do web design? Why not do photography or videography is, of course, recurring revenue.
There it is. and the main way we make recurring revenue is off requiring every client that we do websites for, now they have to host with us and we upcharge the hosting. You know, to $59 a month, $99 a month, whatever it might be. And that’s like the thing, that’s the thing that give us the thing, like I think both of us could stop taking on new client work and we’d be fine.
We’d be more than fine. Yeah. So it’s an amazing, thing. , and then I think, kind of where I’ll turn this over to you is, we preach that now, but we both initially. Started offered hosting and then stopped offering it. Yeah. And that’s, and then why offered it again, that’s why when you say, gosh, one of your biggest mistakes was you wish you would’ve done it sooner.
And it’s like, you know what? I think there was, you did, there was like a window, there was like a happy time where the host. Finally got their crap together and [00:06:00] situated in a way that it was actually doable and manageable for designers. I think maybe we could have got in, you know, maybe a year sooner or something,
And you were so anti hosing for such a long time. Oh, I was, but when I started way back in the day, it was with, a local host in Lincoln, called Binary Net. I don’t know if you’re familiar with them. Sounds old.net. Ooh yes. Binary net. So I, I did an internship with them, a hundred years ago when I was in college. , my brother I think was part owner in it at the time or something. so that’s who I used when I started. but they didn’t even have a c panel.
They still don’t have an interface like their, that wasn’t their jam, you know? they were a data center and so that’s what I started with. And the billing is what became a headache for me. I don’t know what, why you stopped orig. Oh, I do know why you stopped and it’s such a good story.
That’s what did it in for me. This was before FreshBooks was offering, you know, recurring. Invoices. It just became an absolute billing train wreck, and I just kind of gave up. It just decided it wasn’t worth it. And again, at that point I had what, maybe [00:07:00] 10 websites and I wasn’t charging, as much as we are now for, mm-hmm.
For maintenance plans. So it just wasn’t worth it. And I just kind of gave it all back. Well, I think, an issue most web designers run up against at first is how can I get away with charging 49 59 $99 a month
when my client can just go to GoDaddy and see that they can pay it for five bucks, five bucks or whatever, and to find out the answer to that question, you have to sign up for our course anyway. It’s pretty easy. You get what you pay for the answer there. Short answer is you’re providing much more than hosting , and there’s a correct lot more stuff that you’re adding in there.
But early on I decided, to host websites and the first company that I used, I made a grave sin. I used GoDaddy for hosting initially, which I think every web designer now says, Hey, GoDaddy’s fine for domains. And that’s like it, that’s nothing else. And they try to upsell you 29 things on the way to that cart.
And, uh, God, just say [00:08:00] no to all of ’em. Just say no. So I started with GoDaddy with having, well, we are not sponsored by GoDaddy, by way. We’re definitely not. Oh man. Okay. And then, the band I was in at the time, the manager of the bands outta Nashville, he had a buddy that started this web hosting company called 11 two.
And , they’re still running, they’re still around. They’re probably fine, but mm-hmm. I stuffed 25 sites on one account on 11 two. And this is back when, the whole, each site gets its own bucket. That wasn’t a thing yet. Right. And you had all like this, you know, hackers would use this cross scripting stuff to, and you know, if one site got infected.
Other sites were gonna get, they all do infected, they spill over. So I had 20, about 25 sites on this platform. And, it was the day after Valentine’s Day. And my wife and I, we didn’t go out on Valentine’s Day for some reason. I think I came back from tour that day or something. But the next day we were at this outlet mall on our Valentine’s Day date.
I know super, super romantic, but it’s where she wanted to go. [00:09:00] And I remember we were walking outside, going from store to store, just having a great time. And then my phone starts blowing up with text, phone calls and emails. All my sites had gone down and because I’m a nerd, I had my computer in the car, so I go back to the car.
You do? Yes. And I, and I grab my computer and I told my wife, Hey, I need to figure this out. And I spent like an hour at a scooter’s coffee shop there while she just shopped by herself. And I made a decision on the drive home that day is, I am not doing that anymore. I am not gonna, and I’m over. I’m an overreactor.
So, yes, yes, he’s, so I immediately, told them all to go get their own hosting and they could get their own 11 two count. They could get a GoDaddy count. I didn’t care where they went. But what I did do though, is I started offering. Just a maintenance plan without hosting. Right. And about seven to eight outta 10 clients would take me up on it.
It was $29 a day. Under a dollar a day. A day. [00:10:00] 29. A month. A month. Damn. Under a dollar a day. And it was like your basic, WordPress plugin theme updates. I was doing backups in Dropbox, which I don’t do anymore. ’cause it just gets too hefty and installing word friend security with some settings.
And that thing was 29 bucks a month. What was not great about it? It was somebody could turn it off and their site would stay alive. So, it wasn’t like a necessity. That’s, but what was nice about it was if they were on it and their site went down, it was like, yeah, reach.
It’s your, there’s not, not my phone. There’s host. So even though you’re gonna get blamed for it anyway. That’s true. And then when Jake and I partnered up eight or nine years, however long ago that was. He was like, why are we not hosting? And he’s like, dude, trust me, they’re better now.
Whatever. And so we found a host that we liked and we’ve been with them ever since. . So, so who you start with? Binary net. Dot net. Oh yeah. After that and then gave up again. Just blew it all up. And then I think I was sending my clients to like. Blue host [00:11:00] at some point. I think I, you know, the, the one job that I had for.
A fraction of time, that’s where they hosted. So that was the only other host that I knew in my brain. and so then when I decided to do hosting and maintenance again, the time was right, I had recurring invoice options and in my accounting software I. I found a new host that I fell in love with and that made the, maintenance plan thing kind of come to life.
Like I, I was their target audience. They only existed for designers. The interface was gorgeous. It was the polar opposite of any other host at the time. and I’m talking about Flywheel, which mm-hmm. Some of you are probably familiar with. And I was also excited ’cause they were still kind of local.
They were out Omaha when I was in Lincoln, like an hour away from us. Yep. And I was excited, to support this cool new local host. And I was early with them. they have since blown up, but I was really early with them and I was one of their superstars because I had so [00:12:00] many sites with them.
I’m sure I wasn’t at their top a thousand by the point that I left. But anyway , I was a fan girl, super fan of Flywheel. still am a little bit of flywheel. Yeah. Let’s talk about some of the problems that Flywheel solved and why they spoke to you. I’ve worked with so many hosts, two cows, remember two cows? Uh, of course. Okay. Two cows. Yeah. GoDaddy, one in one. Blue host, 11, two host, gator, host, monster. You know, all. All kinds. Okay. A bunch. And back in the day, all of them used this thing called C Panel, this hideous Windows 95 looking thing of icons of crap.
That, that, that if you were a designer, there was only like four of the things that you use and the rest are like, I don’t even know. I’m scared. I’m too scared to even go into that and mess with that. I don’t even know. It’d overwhelm you. And you’d be like, I have no idea. In fact. We had a advanced course on breaking into web for a while demystifying [00:13:00] control panel and half the icons.
I’d be like. You don’t need to go in here. One thing Flywheel solved was they got rid of cPanel, didn’t they? They did. And it, their interface was beautiful, which was really refreshing because as web designers, especially as John and I like, we’re hardcore core, like web design-o-saurs we’ve been around a long time.
We used to do the coding, , from scratch and so. , people like us , are unicorny where, we can code and , we can design, but as it’s evolved, people have tended to go one way or the other, right? There’s just designers, or there’s just the devs, and the devs just don’t have design brains, at all.
And so you can always tell, with the hosting companies who was in charge , and so it was all devs and then Flywheel came around, obviously put some designers in charge of the interface , and knocked it out the park. It was, it is just very beautiful. So intuitive, which again was super refreshing.
. And then they had some real, like, my favorite, favorite things that I [00:14:00] miss now that I’m away from them are the one click cloning. you could just take any site and clone. They gave me a free site so I could have my demo site, had Divi installed with my license.
Key attached, had gravity forms. Yep. Had all of my favorite plugins, had my CSS chunks already in there. had my homepage wire frame in there.
This is, Hey, I am starting a brand new project, right? I want to clone my little quote unquote template site that I have it all ready to go. So yeah, I would just go to, I wanna move it to. To a, a temporary domain that I can actually name. That I can pick. Yeah, those, the two things. The clo, the one click cloning, and then.
The temp domain that I could pick what it was. I didn’t realize that was special until that was taken away from me. So yeah, me neither. Me neither. Those two things were awesome. And yeah, they had a lot of other bells and whistles that I didn’t, news collaboration. They were like one of the, they were one of the first on to have an easy collaboration team.
That’s true. [00:15:00] That’s true. Yep. It was really easy to add collaborators. So if some programmer gets involved somehow and they’re like, Hey, I need FTP access. You don’t have to, play, here’s my password games. You add them as a collaborator, they can set up their own FTP account. And the other, the other thing that they did that I think a lot of places do now, but I think they were probably one of the first, was free site migrations, which was great.
I used that all the time. Well, and they had real humans on support. It wasn’t just like, yes, here’s, here’s a super technology developer that’s gonna talk down to you because you don’t know. How much memory you have or who knows what. so a lot of pros there. What were the cons of site of, of Flywheel early on?
The only con, , like from the very beginning was that it would’ve been more expensive than more expensive. A site ground or , a general host. It was, it was known as a right. It was known as a premium host. It was WordPress specific. I mean, they had had their niche, and so you were paying for that, very customized [00:16:00] service and the kind of, you know, this is probably more of a.
Feature not a bug. Because if I would’ve had my 25 sites on flywheel, they all wouldn’t have gone down. you can do one site per account. That’s true. One site per account on flywheel. You can’t shove 30 websites on one account, and get your hosting down to 50 cents a month per site.
Yeah. Okay. So you’re humming along with flywheel, everything’s great. But then like every relationship. You know, the wheel starts, the grocery cart shopping cart wheels. That one wheel starts, starts going wonky. Yeah. So before, the straw that broke the camel’s back, what were some of the things that you were experiencing and you know what, and at side ground I’ve experienced too Side ground.
When they first came out, they were amazing. In fact, they were so amazing that their customer support would, like, I remember one time, I don’t know if you remember launching WordPress sites where you’d have your site in a sub folder and then you wanna move it out of slash V two to the main site, and so you’d move the baby.
I haven’t done that in a hundred years. [00:17:00] I haven’t either. I haven’t either. But back when I did it one time, I messed it up and site ground support went on there and. Did a search replace in the database and got it all working and in like 15 minutes. And I was like, this is unbelievable. Yeah. and I would never wait longer than five minutes to talk to somebody like, well, I never called, I’ve never called side ground, I’ve called.
That was, that was a GoDaddy call out, right? That was, that was, I’ve been on hold with them for. Oh yeah. And then slowly over time, , as they’ve gotten bigger and bigger, their customer support’s still great. I think it’s still probably the best in the hosting thing.
It’s, but it’s not as good as it used to be. Cracks in the armor, let’s say some cracks in the armor. so what were some of those cracks in the armor that you started noticing with flywheel over the last few years? Yeah. Honestly it was, I believe, I guess I shouldn’t say it was, but I assume, that once they were purchased by WP [00:18:00] Engine, that’s when I started noticing issues.
Not immediately, but pretty quick. I noticed things . Like resources just kind of dwindling. Most of my sites are quite small, between five 10 pages. Mm-hmm. No crazy bells and whistles, just pretty straightforward small sites.
And then all of a sudden they would be super slow or getting errors and they’re like, oh yeah, you know, we need to, we need to move it up. Plans. There was one time, and this site wasn’t even on WooCommerce, like it was small, by any standard. , obviously something was going wrong with it, but it was not.
Over the top website and they had suggested that I move it. I was paying $7 a month for almost all my sites. they had suggested that I move it up plans to a $400 a month plan. And I was like, are you for one site kidding me for one site? Wow. Like, God, this is the amount of resources it’s using. You need to move it to this plan.
And I’m like. How about we find out why it’s using all these resources. That’s a tough email fix. Fix the [00:19:00] client right there. Problem. Oh man. So that really loved the bad taste in my mouth was this crazy suggestion where I’m like, why don’t we find the problem? And they were not concerned with helping me find the problem, which was super annoying.
because something else I’ve learned since moving to site ground that, I so appreciate now that I didn’t know. What I didn’t have, at Flywheel was,. Kind of this dashboard of, I mean, flywheel does provide statistics per site. Mm-hmm. But you have to go into each site and look at the statistics.
whereas on site ground, I can look at my entire plan of, a hundred sites and I can see exactly which ones are taking up the most space, where the resources are spiking. so that was like huge and eye-opening. And I feel like I got. Superpowers overnight with that. I just was like, holy cow.
I have a lot of control and knowledge now that I absolutely never had before, without knowing it. So I was, ignorant of it. So that was fine until it wasn’t. But anyway, that was a big problem , and maybe it was just the sites were getting old and bloated and may, it could have [00:20:00] just been that.
Yeah. but I just had a hunch that they were kind of squandering flywheel resources to try to get you to jump to WP Engine plans. Again, I’m making that up. Don’t take my word for it. That was just what it felt like, timing wise and then another big issue was I had a new account manager, like every month or so.
And so it, got really obnoxious to the point that I’m like, I don’t even know who I’m supposed to contact at this point. and at one point I was like a VIP with flywheels. So that just kind of sucked. Oh, and then, we had this whole like powow, me and the. Account manager and Super Smarty Pants, WP Engine guy who came in, they had this, come to Jesus meeting with me
I think it was probably two years ago. But they were like, you need to move all of your websites to WP Engine plans by the end of the year. And I was like, what?
Like why? And they were presenting me with these solutions like, Hey, we can move this plan to be this plan and my costs were gonna like [00:21:00] double. Essentially. Mm-hmm. And they were bugging me about it and every month they’re like, Hey, can we start getting going on this?
And I was like, this is a really bad month. Like fall’s, my busiest, whatever. I kept pushing it off and then finally I was like, guys, if you’re gonna make me do this, I’m just gonna move it to a different host because. They’re gonna charge me way less and I have to do all the DNS crap anyway. I might as well just do it for a new host.
And then all of a sudden they’re like, oh, nevermind. You don’t have to, you don’t have to, you. I was like, what kind of wishy-washy nonsense? What did you just put me through? It was so weird. Yeah. and it just made me question like, what is going on over there And mm-hmm. And then, , the. This final straw was, when, the updates got shut off for WP Engine customers with the whole WordPress gans going on.
And I was like, you know what? I just wanna get away from these guys. That was the final, but it had been building up, just things I had noticed over the last few years that I was like. I don’t wanna be here anymore. Yes. The, so the company that owns WordPress [00:22:00] Automatic, their CEO and WP Engine’s leadership have a major disagreement right now and major disagreement.
I mean, you say that professionally, they’re being, they’re fighting. They’re fighting. They’re fighting like teenagers, like toddlers. They’re, they are fighting like toddlers. It’s getting pretty funny. Uh mm-hmm. I mean, for, for those of us who aren’t hosted at a WP Engine company, which now, which now Flywheel is, , yes.
So that’s the whole thing that you can look up online, and why that happened and why they’re fighting and other folks are like, well, what the status is currently ’cause what hosting company, what it’ll be is safe. Then what hosting company is safe from being shut off from update?
And then. WP Engine did spin up their own repo to update all the plugins and stuff. Pretty much their own copies of them all. This is my basic understanding, but if I was a WP Engine customer or flywheel customer, I’d be like, Hey, this is great, but this a bandaid, is this permanent, right?
Like, you’re kind of in this, limbo area, and I guarantee you a bunch of folks who are like, [00:23:00] Hey. I trust that WP Engine is gonna sort this out, but I’m still gonna move now. This is the last, this is the last straw. And you know what? This has happened before, when I learned graphic design, back in the day there was this company called Macromedia.
. And they own Dreamweaver and they had this graphics program called Fireworks and I mastered this fireworks program. Like had an animation one. No. And then Adobe bought Macromedia and Adobe kept Dreamweaver and they killed fireworks. And it was a slow death. It was like, Hey, this is not getting updates anymore.
What’s going on? It was kind of akin to them telling you, kelly, you should switch your sites from Flywheel to the WP Engine. You’re like, why are you telling me this? Well, ’cause they’re giving you a hint that this thing’s going away and Right. We’re, we’re gently nudging you.
I assume. I assume. But we have a two year Right. Lead time or whatever, and I was a little worried that was gonna happen with Figma when Adobe and, and Figma were in talks. but those fell apart. So I was like, oh, thank God. Because we’ve all been, I think we’ve all been there years ago I would find like a [00:24:00] cool email client, like a super cool Mac based email client, that had these cool features and I would get all into that email client and then Google would buy it.
Go away. That happened two times on me, and so then I was like, that’s it. I’m, and even the client that I use now, it’s called Superhuman. They even put out a thing like, we will not be bought by Google. Yeah. Right. I mean, you know, everyone, you know, Unsplash got, got bought by Price is Right.
A photo stock company. Mm-hmm. Even though they were started as the anti photo stock, you know? Yep, yep. When the price, when the price is right, you’ll do it. Okay. so then you’re plunged into. Now I gotta find a new hosting company. and yeah, there’s all those ones that we listed but isn’t, there’s some new ones.
There’s like cloud ways. There are, there’s a bunch of, and some of them now are super developer friendly, where it’s like, oh, you just add features that you want. oh, you want PHP whatever, add that. It’s like, no, I don’t wanna deal with that. I don’t even wanna know. So, I guess maybe tell us, how that went where you were asking folks, Hey, what hosting company do you [00:25:00] use? and uh, stuff like that. I didn’t do a ton of research because I’m lazy. but I did a little research there. Too many of them. There’s so many, oh my gosh, there’s so many. and I mean, everyone has their favorite.
Mm-hmm. And so, and even if it’s like other designers I trust, I’m like, , I don’t know how you, what you like and you know what I mean? , I did a little bit of research, but ultimately I was like, you know what? I know Site ground has been working for John for a very long time.
And my question to John was, if you were in my situation. Would you go with site ground? and I don’t know what your exact answer was, but it was essentially I don’t see why not like maybe there’s some place way better, but as far as your experience has been like, why would you need that?
I did have a poor experience with SiteGround, with, a website a few years back, and so I was probably their biggest, biggest critic when it came time for this,, because I was still, I still had a bad taste in my mouth from [00:26:00] that.
It was a customer support thing, I would say. And ultimately I need to take some responsibility for that. ’cause I think I was asking ’em questions that probably were not part of their job description. I don’t remember exactly what it was about, but it was a plug and conflict kind of stuff.
with, with hosting mm-hmm. Server conflict. And, so I was skeptical, but, I have to say, since I have moved my sites, and I feel like I know half these support guys by name now, I have been blown away by how good their support is and, , it’s been a really good support experience.
So, so far, so good. They are great support and I love, and I love the analytics screens where . I had a site that was, again, this was one of my small, like small sites, five page sites. that was taking up the most amount of space on the server when I moved it over.
And I was like, what is happening? and so I could actually dig into that and find out why. And, remove, , really old uploads from, 10 years ago that were, just massive, , that I [00:27:00] never would’ve known about. , I mean, I would’ve had to dig a lot harder and further, in the flywheel system to be able to figure that out.
Anyway, it’s been a great learning experience and, . I’m still new, but so far, so good. Well, and your experience with seeing those stats prompted me to look at ours and it was like, oh yeah. Oh my gosh. , we have a lot of sites , going over there.
A lot of space , that we show on our hosting, , page, so we use this, this WordPress theme called Divi as a drag and drop page builder. And there are tons of drag and drop page builders, Divi. We, I’ve been using Divi, I don’t know how long we been using Divi, seven years, something like that.
Maybe eight, I don’t even know. Maybe a decade now. Yeah. now are there better ones? Well, sure there are better ones. There’s gonna be new kids on the block that have brand new technology that don’t have to worry about. Supporting sites that are seven years old, they can roll out with the hot new thing.
And, but they’re small. You don’t know if they’re gonna get gobbled up by a bigger one. You don’t Google if they’re gonna go away or not Google. You don’t know if they’re gonna go away or not. [00:28:00] And so, and that’s how I feel about hosting companies. Are there, are there, you know, like Kinta is probably another one, right?
Like there’s, there’s all these new hosting companies that pop up that, that folks will rave about, right? And then it’s like, okay. well, I know for example, site ground’s not gonna their support these days.
They’re not gonna go and rename that folder for me and do a search. They’re not gonna do that. I highly doubt they’re gonna do that for me now, without me paying them a little bit or something like that. Mm-hmm. But, you know, it’s like, I, I know it was early on, so I got extra care. It sounds like you did two at Flywheel.
Yes. And eventually as they get bigger, gr you know everything. Every business I most business, I get that big. Their customer service or, or the, the level of attention can, can go down. But if I took the same philosophy to using page builders, okay, I’m always going to use the latest, greatest page builder.
Well, we have 500 websites that we host with site ground, and if I just built every one with the latest, greatest page builder, I’d be, I’d be supporting [00:29:00] probably 10 different page builders right now, you know? Yeah, and I’d be like, oh, this site’s on elementary. Oh, this site’s on break dance. Oh, this site’s on oxygen.
Oh, this site’s on di, you know, and, and same thing with hosting. Like I don’t wanna, I don’t want to have. You know, 10 different hosting accounts from 10 different companies that I got different sites on, because I thought that they would be better than, than Site ground. And now I’m, and now just like I’m in, I’m too, too far in deep with Divi to change.
I’m, I’m too far into site ground change. Or maybe I’m not, I mean, you moved 150 sites in three weeks. That’s, that’s, uh, so technically I guess we could move our sites in like probably a month and a half. So not the, not the end of the world. Because I know some people are gonna be listening. It’s like, well, have you checked out this one?
Right. Have you checked out? What about digital lotion? I know that one came, digital came up. Lotion is another one. Yeah, man, I remember there was one that was huge for a while and they’re like gone now. I wish I could remember. Oh gosh. It, it was like one of the first ones where you could decide [00:30:00] how big, how much space you want.
Oh yeah. And I remember, uh, the guys from CSS tricks would, would push that one a lot and now they’re pushing something else and, yeah. Okay. So. That was a ’cause. That’s what someone’s gonna ask is, well, who’s the best hosting company? Right? And, and you can’t answer it. You can’t answer that. It depends on your needs.
it depends on how many sites, it depends on what your expectations are. What’s more important to you, customer service or. Picking how many PHP workers are on this one side. Like, there’s so many factors. For me at this point, , , it’s tried and true. It’s, longevity and sustainability, I don’t know, it’s like a, I’m sure there’s a car analogy in there somewhere for hosting companies.
Well, it’d be the same. What’s, what’s the best car for my family to own? It’s like, oh, good lord, you know? Right. I mean, you want a minivan? Do you want a SUV? And it’s like they’re probably all in the ballpark. They’re probably all in the ballpark and they’re just gonna be flavor at that point.
Yeah. [00:31:00] What flavor are you looking for? Are you more of a dev and you want command line control, or are you more of a designer , you don’t even want to think about that? Or , how does it play with get repositories? How does it, uh my developer voice is very, uh, pretentious. Sorry, developers, I’m sorry.
Anyway, but I’m part developer. You know, you’re right. The days , of people being a half designer, half the diviner as we used to call ’em, diviners. Diviner. , there are no we are now diviners. I. Well, I’ll say this too, so they’re not officially sponsoring this episode, but I’m gonna say, , sponsor of this episode is Site Ground.
We have a referral link that if you sign up for site ground, you’re gonna pay the same as everyone else does, but we get a little something, something for, it helps keep this podcast going. It’s what we pitch to our break into web students as well. What else on hosting should we talk about?
Oh, another factor that used to be, that used to be a thing with hosting companies , , that is not much anymore. [00:32:00] And I actually think Flywheel was one of the first ones to ditch this too, was hosted email. Oh yeah. Hosted like squirrel mail and hoard. Yes. What was it called? Binary Net. Had squirrel mail.
I remember like, like, uh. Eh, back in the day, the norm was if you had a company email, it’s all together. It was with your hosting company, which I just hated supporting email. It was the worst. Email’s the worst. It’s still the worst. It was ter. It was terrible. Now it’s like, you know what? Sign up for Google.
Yep. What do they call it now? I know what they call it now. Business Suite or Or Workspace. . Whatever it’s now, I don’t know. Yeah. So the no, the good, the bad. I’ll tell you what the good of hosting is. You can make recurring revenue off of it a thousand percent.
the bad of hosting is when it can go, when something outta your control can happen and it causes you to switch. And then the ugliest when the, two founders go at each other and it’s like. Oof. If you haven’t checked out some of the tweets from this battle between, oh my gosh, between the CEO of [00:33:00] Automatic and WP Engine, they’re worth it.
It, it gets pretty, , it gets pretty great. You gotta laugh. Yeah. It’s unbelievable that a community that touts. Open source and everyone’s included, that one person can decide something. Yes. Like it is such a paradox. Yeah. You think it’d be , a committee or a group?
I will say since hosting with Site Ground, , yeah, all the sites will go down if you don’t have enough memory and stuff. So there’s some things, yeah, there’s a couple things that you do have to watch that, that maybe, , with Flywheel, did all your sites ever go down?
Probably not. ’cause they’re not in the same bucket. Never. Yeah, yeah. Correct. or the server they were on. So , with site ground, and I’m sure most other modern hosting companies, the whole, like if one site gets infected, the other ones are going to, that’s not much of an issue anymore, but at the end of the day, it’s still
shared hosting, you know? Yeah. you’re parking your site alongside many others. Now, once you get enough sites like Kelly and I, you can get their cloud hosting and then you’re on your own server, but you’re still shoving [00:34:00] a hundred sites on that server, right? Yeah. So the other good thing about SiteGround is that it’s, they’re not the cheapest, but , they’re pretty solid.
Yeah. And your hosting cost is going down? How much, like percentage wise? How much per month? I mean, at this point it’s, it went from $7 a site to. Right at three right now. But I do expect that to go up. I’m gonna have them do a, I can pay, I can pay for their expert care services to do like an analysis of my settings because , I don’t super trust myself with that stuff.
I mean, I have auto scale set up. I feel like that’s step one. Mm-hmm. I have bumped the memory on both, but yes, I want them to look at it and make sure, comparing my month of stats to say, Hey, this is what we think, you should have these set at. And I do expect that to go up a little.
But yeah, right now it’s less than half, which will save me, between seven and $8,000 a year. So not bad. We’re so, we’re more designers than we are Tech spec. [00:35:00] Developers, and I remember telling you a couple days ago, I’m like, man, sometimes hosting can feel like a house of cards. You just don’t know.
Yeah. What spike , in traffic or what bot attack hack to come in and just wreak havoc where I know some developers that know every little thing about that, you know? Yeah. But they can’t, they’re not good designers, and I’m not a good developer. So it’s a trade off there, but man, it’s a huge part of the business.
Yes. The other good news is it is possible to move, it is possible to, it’s, you know, and. I mean, all things considered this went as smoothly as it possibly could for me. And it’s still just, it still just sucked. It just sucked. My whole family knew about it. My dog was feeling my pain. everyone just knew I was in a bad mood ’cause I was, my husband would come down in the morning, he’s like, how’s migrating?
I’m like, it just sucks.[00:36:00]
It was an ordeal, and I have a bottle of champagne that I cannot wait to dip into once it’s officially over. Once the one is done. So the one, once the one is done, I mean, there’s a web going on. Well, I’ll consider the official over once Flywheel shuts off my account, , they told me I had to give him a 30, 30 day notice, 30 day notice.
I believe that’s December 6th. Then once that hits, that site better be up by then. And then, , I’ll, , open that champagne,
man. Well, yes, that’s our episode on hosting. Yeah. Big part of our business. Massive part of the business. It’s best way to build recurring revenue on the planet, I think is Yep. Is selling. If you’re not selling, hosting, and even after all these stories that we have of sites going down or having to switch hosts or whatever, it’s all worth it.
It’s all worth it. ’cause of the recurring revenue you can make every single month. and which then you don’t even worry about client work. Like, I don’t know how much, how many sites will I get next [00:37:00] month? 1, 5, 10? I don’t know. I don’t care. Like it’s, you know, it’s just a, yeah, it’s a freeing feeling.
I remember during Covid telling folks that the revenue we make from hosting is a big security blanket. That’s wrapped around us in this time of everyone canceling their co-working spaces and canceling their gym memberships and who knows what else. But they, can’t cancel their hosting.
’cause now, more than ever, they need a website. They need a website online. If you’re not charging for hosting, you gotta get to. And if you’re like, well, I would charge, but I don’t know how much to charge. I don’t know, whatever. Break into web.com, we’ll tell you what to do. We’ll tell you what to do.
Or if you’re like, I don’t wanna deal with hosting at all. Well, we offer hosting for break into Web. We’ll do it. You can. We can do it for you. So, all right folks. With that,
thanks for tuning in and joining us today on the Web Design Empire. Also, be sure to check out break and web.com. Learn how you can break away [00:38:00] from your daily grind. Become a freelance web designer like us. Make that recurring revenue and create the empire you’ve been dreaming of. Cheers, y’all
freaking hosting, hosting, hosting.