 Ac ydych yn cael ei ddweud o'r bwysig am ymgyrchu amgyrchu am ymgyrchu mewn ffath gydag yma, rydych chi'n ddweud y gofyn a phaith o ffath yn rhan o'r rhwyng. Ac ydych yn ffath bwysig i'w ddweud, rwy'n gweithio'r ffordd, o'r ffordd o LL, o'r ddweud i clywed o'r ddweud o'r cyfnodol o'r cyfnodol, The one I want to talk about in a minute, that R&W gets up to 30 million visitors a month. I am kind of a full stock guy, I do DevOps, I play with servers, do tech need and also CTO advice for companies, work with startups and corporates, wow, you may have just met that just about, but I would like to work in the non profit sector because I had to feel that I am doing something that is, Well, good. I think it's the best way to say it. Llywydd, I've been on the Facebook group for WordPress hosting and that's about 10,000 people there. Of course, I'm from Cormor. You might hear my voice and I've been here for 18 years. That means I can speak Dutch. So, as a notification, you can hear a flag in the Netherlands doing. It's Langeshammer and I've been about your door. I work a lot with R&W. We're radio-neglands world on group, as it was. And they've changed from being the world service to being a charity now, an NGO. And they focus on two major things, and that's Citizens Voice, which is democracy and good governance. And those guys on the left, they risk their lives, literally risk their lives, by blogging about things they want changed in their respective countries. So, Jagazin Brundi, the poorest place in Africa. Pembres Mali, Havadi is in Congo. The one that's bottom left is actually Libya. Then we've got Yemen that's got the slowest internet in the world. And lastly, China. There's one there for problems with migrant workers and getting sexually assaulted and stuff. So, we try and deal with these things. And then on the right is Love Matters, which is a pleasure-positive kind of approach to sex and trying people out, teach people how to do it well, how to behave towards your partner, and of course all the sexual health things with STDs and whatever, or STIs, if you're Dutch. OK, so, for the next bit of time, think of me as your new CTO and you are the management team. So, you get to ask me questions about anything you can think of and I'll just come up with it. And please join in, because it's going to help both staff a better time. And yes, I will be mentioning companies for our... and showing people's names and faces. I have no affiliation with any of these, so I'm not getting any kickbacks, unless they buy me beer later. Thank you. So, first things first, you do get what you pay for. I'm sure it's got a Dutch one as well. So, what is a hosting provider? It's somebody that looks after the software and the hardware and creates the internet links for you so that you can have your website. They're not necessarily responsible for your themes or plug-in and probably they're not, and they might not be responsible for WordPress. So, just a global thing to start with, things to watch out for, is first year pricing. Most hosts offer something that's cheap, get them in, lost leader, whatever you want to call it, and then they'll ramp it up maybe two or three times as high the following year. Anybody that promises unlimited anything, they're probably lying to you or hiding it somewhere in the terms of service, there's a fair use policy or something. There's always a limit, always. Certain organisations will charge you a lot for SSL. Even though if it's free, they'll charge you for let's encrypt. Hidden cost of puddle jumping, that's where you choose a new hosting company every year. You're wasting your time. For the 20 or 30 years you're saving on hosting, you're losing 20, 30 hours to do it. So, don't bother. Find a good one the first time. The biggest thing to watch out for is you really should choose your hosting to be near where your client base is. That's going to be difficult if they're global, but if you can choose somebody that's local to you. OK, so, who are you? Is there anybody here that's a blogger by trade? No? Good. Business owners? That's most of the people in the room then. OK, and hosting companies? There's one down there as well. He's hiding. OK, so we've got a decent cross-section. Is there anybody here that, apart from the hosting companies now, deals in really high numbers of visitors? I mean, I'm talking millions plus. OK, cool. So we'll focus on those a little bit more. The options for you guys. So, first things first, before you buy anything, you make a shopping list. There's lots of questions you've got to ask, not just of yourselves and your organisation, but maybe of the developer you're working with. Find out as much information about what you need. So, you know, where are your customers? What sort of content do you have? Are you, like, really image heavy? Are you on a video site? Are you a portfolio site for your photography? What kind of data space do you need? Do you need e-commerce? All these other questions will help you come down to who you really need. And if you take this shopping list with you to everybody that you're coming into contact with, you're going to make a better choice. It's as simple as that. If you have a free one, this will be with bloggers, so there's never been the room. If you just started, yeah, why not just put it on WordPress.com. There's some pros, it's free, it's good. You get your choose your own domain name. But it's really limited for so many different reasons. And, of course, they are put advertising on your website. So, the advice really is only do it when you've got any risks. No one else. There isn't anybody that you should, as a business, be creating their website on that. I mean, I've done it before just for fun, but it can be lots of really easy and quick set up. Okay, cheap shared hosting. There's a lot of organisations, companies around the world, who try and sell you the $1 a month hosting. So, it's like $12 for the year or something like that. While it's better than the free one that you're going to get from WordPress, don't do it unless you absolutely have to. How can they possibly offer that is the question you would ask yourself. They must have really cheap employees. They must have really cheap administration systems. They must not be able to upgrade their servers. They must, all these other things, to be able to offer it at that price. It's just logic. You can't pay people, I know, $20, $30, $40, $50 an hour to maintain stuff if you're only making $0.10 an hour. So, if you consider the electricity alone for a server might cost more than $12 in a year. So, you're not really going to get the best support. You're not going to get anything super with that. And of course, they're going to upsell you whenever possible and that will become a pain in the ass really quickly. However, if you ask Matt, who runs the hosting at Namecheap, he'll tell you that they can do it and they've put a ridiculous amount of technology into it. It accumulates and all sorts of other stuff. It's really interesting. There's a link to an Ask Me Anything we did in the WordPress hosting where he tries to describe it all. And yeah, he's willing to offer you something for a year for $12. Still, it has limitations. You only have three gigabytes of data space. Strato, I'd say they're Dutch. They're actually in Germany, I believe. They have Dutch offices. And they will offer you a $1 a month hosting. But as we said earlier, the second year pricing, it's $60 a year. So, big jobs. Okay, yeah, target audience. People who don't want to invest in their business. Really basic web presence. So, less said about them, the better. I mean, just don't do it really. Okay, professional shared hosting. This is where most of you are going to be looking, to be honest, either shared or will come onto the other ones. This is the start of the interesting bits. Thanks. So, we have some pros and cons to this. Usually they offer free SSL with let's encrypt. Often there's free domain name in the package and quality support staff and good administration tools. Everybody's got a C panel or something similar or a Plesk. But it also has other problems. The biggest possible is this one here. Possible they'll be out of action for a long time because something else on the server, somebody else's website, it's causing a problem with your website. Some companies will put thousands and thousands and thousands of websites onto one server and just try and make it work. And that's how they make their profits. And so, you've got to try and talk to the agency first or to the company first to try and find out how they work. So, you find out will you get screwed if somebody else is causing a problem. OK, and you also might not have SSH access. That's a secure way of logging into the server. If you're really into technology, you might want that. So, have it on your shopping list. Make sure of what you're buying. And again, of course, the upsell for a fix. OK, starting price, probably around $20. $15 or so. And yeah, it's people that value their stuff. It is suitable for a business, but it's still lower tier. Yeah, if you get like a really high amount of traffic, your post goes viral or something, it could just fall out of the water really quickly and the company is telling you that you've got to pay more money or something. So, yeah, you might need to work with them if you're doing a marketing plan where you're getting a lot of new visitors. You need to let them know what's going on so that they can maybe create a burst capability. OK, so this is the usual suspects for the class-leading web hosts. Now, Histo at the left there, he's done a great AMA. You can also go and have a look at that. He's from SiteGround. He's in the web processing group, probably recommended the most. Next is Flywheel. They also get a lot of recommendations. Riggs also did a lovely AMA. David, I think the point out here is all of these people will take the time to speak to you. You don't have to just go and look at what offerings on the website. They'll chat with you for however long is needed just to make sure that you are happy. They want to have good customers as much as you want to have a good thing. Really try and take the time to do it well and you won't be upset when it comes to that second year or third year or whatever. Then there's Hamlen at the end there for Panthenon. We have our WP Engine guy down here who knows everything about hosting ever. OK, self-managed. There is self-managed VPSs where they're really cheap, virtual private server. It's kind of like a shared server, well, shared hosting, in the respect that there's one big server that's chopped up into many pieces and you get a piece of it. So you could still suffer problems when that's done. OK, anyhow. Oh, you start at $6 with per month, with digitalisation. That's cheap. Very, very cheap. You're the one that has to install it. You're the one that has to set it up. You're the one that owns the security. You're the one. If you don't have time to do that, it's going to be a real pain. Of course, if you have lots of customers all on real pain. Extremely fast. They're in good locations. If you look at digitalisation, Linnode or any of the others, they have plenty of locations. You can choose where you want it to be but, like I say, you own it. You manage it, you secure it. An ownership takes a lot of time and my advice is unless you're really desperate to save money and are technical, don't do it. Even if you're technical and know what you're doing, consider it twice because you can probably make more money doing other work than fixing your own websites. OK, so that's like a bunch of jargonia terms. You know, PHP, varnish, engine apps and patching, readers, memcash, postfix. If you know them, great. Crack on in. Have a go. If you don't, don't do it. OK, so the ones on the left are the really cheapy ones. They'll start at $6 or $10 for a month or a thing. The ones on the right are the ones that get expensive and are also much more difficult to understand their product offering. If you're not an expert in, I don't know, AWS the Amazon web services you can end up spending a lot of money you don't need to spend. So it's really worth considering for any of those ones on the right to try and find an expert to help you if you're going to do that. One of the experts I've worked with before when I was working with an organisation we went through myself and Rackspace did this where they had, I think there was 230 line items we had going through AWS. Rackspace came in and worked out that only 120 of those were needed. 110 things were being paid for each month that just didn't need to exist or could have been moved into one. So really consider getting the expert in if you're going to go down this route. OK, and of course to be a proper web host you could have enough people available 24 hours a day to do the support. So that's a minimum of six people every day and then you've got weekends as well because you've got two people for eight hours three times that every day. It's a lot of people you've got to have. So consider it twice before you jump in now. OK. Managed VPSs. This is probably the sweet spot at the moment in hosting of where people are making the most advantage of their own money in hosting. You can grow quite quickly with it. You know, you don't have to support it of course. It's things that have a proven track record. So for example, a company that is doing managed VPS they will work out the best platform, the best stack that they can have. So what version of PHP what version of readers, what. All these are the little bits and plug them all together for you and they will also control the security which is a big thing you don't want to be responsible for. Big thinking. OK. Some of them don't offer you SSH access because if you can log in as a root you can break it within. You can't always install everything you want. There's an example there, failed to ban which is a thing you can use at PHP level to ban people by IP addresses. Yeah and I could say you have to be a bit savvy when making the purchase to spec it out properly. So you still might want to speak to your developer a little bit extra and say OK, how much memory do I need? How much disk space do I need? What's it going to be in two years time? How big is it going to be? And start to look at things on that level. OK. Managed starts at about $10 a month. I think that is Cloudflare and Moncloud and the same thing there. But the big thing to recognise is that if you really want to use this kind of thing you're going to have to pay more for support I think is the best way to put it. So even though it's there for $10 if you want to get great cracking support you're going to pay more money. Yeah. This is probably where most of you are going to be looking right now because it's not a little hosting that can grow and you don't have to employ your own support stuff. So the two on the left are very much in their own sort of $10 realm and the one on the right there, Kinster they're on the kind of more $60 a month realm. OK. Both of these although it was on my screen weird. Mr Sun I've done an AMA on the group so you can have a look at that. So you can also look at that. Runcloud are based in Malaysia so it can be difficult if you want to speak in our time to them. Cloudways are based somewhere in the east in the Arabic countries I can't remember where exactly and Kinster are based out of America. Kinster give amazing support really will go above and beyond they'll try and look into your problems, your niche, your theme and your plugins and whatever. They're not going to rewrite your code but they'll tell you where the problem is. Again, you can find these people on Facebook and you can talk to them and they'll be glad to speak to you. So, recommendation first of all always check out that the company will do what you want to do. So if your developer has done something special then you want to know it and you want to talk to them first and if you want great support pay for it. Okay, managed hosting. This is can be on shared, it can be on your own server but it's just general managed hosting. There's some companies some in the room that work in this sphere then they do it really well we'll come on to the list of the best ones while the class leading ones in a minute but where they really focus on is providing a platform where you can work and forget about it. It's not that you have to ever think about what's happening on the hosting. So this is a really interesting one for people that maybe had a website designed once and don't want to touch it again in future. It just needs to work. It needs to be online. Most of these will gladly put on WooCommerce and all those sort of other stuff really well. Biggest problem I've found with managed hosting is the account management. Often is American time. So if you're looking for the class leading one you might find yourself having to talk to them at 7 o'clock at night and for me that's not good and so I'd rather choose something that's more local. The European engine does have European presence. The guys here European presence well, Hilverson presence. There is others but if you're panthenon for example if you really want to speak to an account manager it's really late at night for us. So you've got to really want their help to be going down that path. So price. Variable but always expensive. I think that's just the best way to put it. You pay for what you get. It's free of large business. Digital agencies. They also want to be resellers. You want a comprehensive solution that's always going to work. Really secure, really really fast. Really great. It's where to aim if you already have a successful online presence. If you're already live if you're looking to go that next step up these are the people to talk to. Okay. Here's a bit of a checklist of all the stuff that they might possibly ask you to be able to join them. This is a checklist I had from a combination of the European engine and TRU and they're looking to see how big your databases are how big your files are so you might still need somebody technical to go out and find this information for you so you're able to buy the right stuff. Again, it's to save yourself money long term. Rather than looking at I can buy the thing for 400 euros a month when you can actually afford so you might have to pay for the one that's 600 or you might only need the one that's 200. Okay. Don't pay engine so anybody else? No, unfortunately. Page 3 Joshua there he maintains that he invented the managed hosting way of working and everybody else is a copy. The guys down the bottom there WPX they say that they will bend over backwards to make anything happen on hosting that you need so they're an interesting proposition so if they say that they have the fastest hosting on the planet and they're willing to let you test at any point in time I put in there Kinster although they're using the infrastructure of other people just because they really do put the time to be a managed situation they're really going to try hard for you and not just for them unlike some host Okay. Dedicated hosting. This is where you want your own service to yourself and no one else can share it or touch it or whatever. It's going to be so fast it's going to be blistering with speed You're never going to have contention that's one of the problems with VPS or with share hosting there might be contention for processing or disk or memory or whatever some hosts are really good at it and don't have that problem but some aren't so good. You're going to get good support because you can put as many websites as you want on it Well, I say as many as you want obviously the thousands and you're going to need more dedicated machines Okay. It's going to get expensive, really expensive and upgrading can be an absolute pain in the ass. For example, if you want to upgrade the memory the whole system's going to be shut down somebody's going to take it out of the rack put some new memory in if you want a bigger disk so it can be very expensive and time consuming to do that kind of thing whereas other types of hosting will take that into account and they can do the upgrading and work around these problems Okay, so price, variable they're really expensive fast performance of the hardware if you're into e-commerce something like that, it's a good choice it's just higher tier really kind of you're looking almost enterprise I would think if you're doing something like a successful online anything this is a really good place to be in and yeah, of course like like VPS is you don't have to use the hosting company in this country but if you put one in this country and your audience is in the Netherlands it's going to be faster for the people in the Netherlands Okay, so, oh yeah you're going to have support in your prime time that's a big one I was with Paisley a couple of years ago for hosting and I could never get support during the daytime because they were only working banking hours of America time so pain in the ass be very careful of that one Okay, co-location that's where it's your hardware somebody else's computer room I need to be honest with you it's a really bad deal all the benefits that you could have by having a great hosting company by slapping your stuff into a computer room I once made a start-up in this country price-wise price-wise now it's called and we did this at the time we made our own servers and put them there and the amount of times I had to cycle from one side of Amstam to the other to turn on the servers again or to reboot them properly it was just stupid okay yeah no one's going to support you but yourself and you're really in control so it's just a bunch of risks so really don't do it and I think this is the best thing to say you don't buy a dog and bark yourself I'm sure there's a Dutch translation somewhere but yeah you don't want to be your own garden dog okay, yeah, don't do it don't really don't do it pain, heartache, stress yeah, real pain in the ass and if you're the one that has to go and reboot it push the button you're constantly on edge because people could phone you your pager could go off your telephone could go crazy at any point in time okay, a high-performance cluster this is for the people that get the millions of visitors a month this is where you're at a different level altogether you really want to find somebody that you can talk to and get great account administration so they are there at the end of the telephone but you can also just go around to their offices for a coffee because you're working at the high end you really want to make sure that you're best mates and you've got the same intentions towards the future in hand it's not about just paying somebody money it's about having a relationship and this is where you've got to have a good relationship with your account manager, with the hosting company with your developers and everybody's got to work together to work at this it becomes very difficult the difficulties of having a cluster of service to do a job is exponentially more difficult than having one server doing the job because you have to deal with the way that caching works you have to think about all these other problems that are just introduced and so if you're going to be going down this route you've really got to have friends on all sides so if you're finding that your hosting company is not working with you then, yeah seriously consider moving I did this for R&W last year because they were with a hosting company where the account management was taking three weeks to respond from my email and they were getting paid I don't know how many thousands a month but it was in the region of 40,000 euros a year for hosting costs so you would expect somebody would reply it's not always the case because of course there are also dealing with companies that will have 80,000, 100,000, 200,000 a year to spend so, yeah you can be a small fry in a big pond okay ebfen gets a price service level agreements can be incredibly costly if you want somebody to to fix something in an hour or be on top of it in five minutes you've got to pay for it and that can get big in the way of pricing just as big as employing a whole team of people okay, it's going to be around 40,000 so let's say 36,000 euros a year to get a decent cluster so that'll be a pair of database servers a pair of web servers a pair of varnish and a pair of load balancers and have them all seen together and working and yeah that will get you up to I don't know say 30, 40 million visitors a month no problem at all once you get over that you've got to start looking a little bit differently maybe just adding more hardware maybe having different locations we can maybe talk about that later if anybody's got questions I can say really have somebody that's close enough to visit the company that I said that we were sending emails to and they were responding they were in the UK we were in help with some problems so we're going to show somebody in Amsterdam instead very simple okay so we actually chose True and they're the ones that also do Alba High and a bunch of others if I was going international I did check up Panthenon and that's what I said about the account management being American time only IBM yeah they will say they'll do it there's some company that took six are down in 9 major I hope I'm pronouncing their name correctly I know their workers from interactions and stuff and they're very clever people so I would honestly investigate them in the future as an option they do what they would call matwork so they'll make whatever you need at whatever scale so it's an interesting company but right now I would say True is probably one of the bigger ones in the Netherlands okay hosting purely for developers for people like me Panthenon, Flywell and WP Engine are all providing lots and lots of tools so that it's really good for a developer so we've got staging sites and all those other kind of capabilities Flywell has invested a lot of money in having a capability for developers to develop locally on a machine much better WP Engine I believe does stuff like that maybe in the future yeah and in the Netherlands TransIP gets a lot of positive press I've never worked with them myself but a lot of people say they're very good True I've been genuinely pleased and these guys in the front almost in the front row also apparently very good with the developers because they come well well if I read the stuff that Ireland writes it's clear that they're able to talk on a technical level to other people so that's a good company I would say sorry I'm bigging you up too much I'll stop that Resellers yeah these all offer extra tools to do reselling in better ways the ones on the left there so Flywell has like an agency type thing where you can work out all the costings for all of the several people Panthenon does something similar Cygrand also WP Engine so you can work out from all of these ones on the left how your different things that you're reselling how much they're taking up in the space once on the right TransIP I'm told are really good I've never used them I must say and the guys at Favida are in the whole way you can talk to them about it they are not really providing many tools but what they do do is force a situation where they're forcing you to resell properly and preventing you from if your company goes out of business that your customers are screwed that's their kind of viewpoint they're going to try and maintain that the end point customer is always catered for no matter what now personally I'd never be a retailer again I've done it before and I find it just an absolute pain in the ass because you've got so much to do you're constantly the one stuck in the middle and for me personally if I was going to go forward again and start trying to connect up hosting agency hosting companies and people I probably would go down the affiliate route and try and make money that way more or less every hosting company has an affiliate option and yeah I would ask WP Engine but they seem to be taking you guys you've got an affiliate thing going on and I'm right in thinking that once you get something you get in you pay the affiliate returns year on year or is it just a one time thing one time thing and that's the great thing about New York being that's the thing if you're the reseller you control all that administrative tasks if you're just an affiliate partner you don't have to deal with that and I think that's an absolute benefit one of the guys we had to do an AMA he's a gold affiliate for Siteground and he turns out to be an affiliate an affiliate an affiliate for Siteground and he turns over around about $150,000 on recommendation only so yeah if you want to look him up online media masters is Tom and yeah he sorry and so yeah if you want to look him up you can see what he's doing he makes very long detailed posts makes great recommendations people click through and he makes money I'd say 150k a year WooCom is focused there's only two that absolutely say they're WooCom is focused at the moment and that's Serpo who have an offering on Liquid Web who have an offering all the other companies I've said today will do WooCommerce but they're not saying they're focusing on it it's like it will work but these guys say they're really focusing on it okay just some cleanup which server should I choose Lightspeed to be honest it doesn't really matter but if you choose a patchy you're probably going to have less problems if you're the one actually having to maintain it Nginx it's the new kid on the block that's taken over but all of the old development has all been done against a patchy or the testing all that HT access stuff it's all a patchy Nginx it gives great visibility number so you get more bang for your buck Lightspeed I'm going to say that it's no better than the other two and the other two are free okay really small common questions should I buy my domain name from my host nope nope because they can hold you to answer I had it should you have email on your server no definitely not because it can become an absolute nightmare yeah there's four or five different ones that are really good same grid man drill mail gun you name it there's several send emails for you and they have better capability than you to make sure it gets delivered because all of their sending servers have been recognised for a much longer time should I get an SLL certificate from my host I'm going to say yeah because otherwise you have to go and get all sorts of things sorted out from them go and do all sorts of man in the middle of bullshit where you're involved in so just let them do it should I buy a CDN or host with a CDN maybe we'll come on to that a bit more in a minute and should I use a web application for anything you can do to increase security is a good thing okay CDNs why use it it reduces the overall traffic because your stack files your images go from another thing and yeah hopefully it puts bits and bytes closer to the user possibility of added security like Cloudflare puts their IP address into the show your service IP address so it's hard to be here possible better DNS but you've always got to check where your customers are for example as we've paid you before R&W has a global customer base and they only had CDN for America pointing as part of the process you need to look somewhere else and yeah sometimes a CDN can slow things down if you sorry your two minutes if your customers are in let's say Amsterdam and your CDNs in Germany then clearly if your hosting was also in the Netherlands it would be faster just go back to your hosting okay anybody here doing with China then I shall skip this one because it's quite involved quickly GDPR everybody's got to have a processing agreement make sure that you understand it I personally set up my time to forget when somebody has to be removed to be the equal of the backup retention period also consider where you host because the NSA can touch you if you're anywhere in America so that can be a problem if you're an NGO that goes against governments avoid EIG companies there's a full list just avoid them American dumpster fire as they like to call it they have a very long history of buying good companies taking away all of their funding not upgrading anything and having very poor support and they do this time and time again but they're a billion dollar company so they keep on buying up more and more and more okay thanks for listening you can find me on WordPress on Facebook there's the hosting group you can always come and join and ask questions you're always welcome version of the presentation that you can read anytime and if you have any questions feel free to ask me now or after the presentation over a coffee thank you okay any questions I'm sure we can do a minute or two alright if not 10 minutes between now and the next one so stretch your legs