{"id":1840,"date":"2017-02-02T11:20:52","date_gmt":"2017-02-02T11:20:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/2017.london.wordcamp.org\/?post_type=wcb_session&#038;p=1840"},"modified":"2017-09-09T12:06:43","modified_gmt":"2017-09-09T11:06:43","slug":"whos-afraid-of-the-big-bad-host","status":"publish","type":"wcb_session","link":"https:\/\/london.wordcamp.org\/2017\/session\/whos-afraid-of-the-big-bad-host\/","title":{"rendered":"Who&#8217;s Afraid of the Big Bad Host?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Shared, VPS, Dedicated, Cloud, Dedicated PS, Dedicated Cloud, Co-lo what does any of that mean welcome to the world of hosting with its bizarre vocabulary and massive amount of marketing spin. It can often be confusing just working out what hosting companies do let alone, if their products and services are suitable for your project.<\/p>\n<p>In this talk Tim will guide you through the world of hosting, looking at what the different offerings mean trying to break down the vocabulary of hosting into terms that are easy to understand. To help you find out what products and services might be right for your next site. He will go through some of the key things to look for and questions you should be asking about any products\/service. Finally he will challenge some of the preconceived notions and show how in the right services free can sometime be the perfect solution.<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<section id=\"video\" class=\"session--video\">\n<h2>Video<\/h2>\n<div id=\"v-tG4CEvcO-1\" class=\"video-player\"><iframe title='VideoPress Video Player' aria-label='VideoPress Video Player' width='604' height='338' src='https:\/\/videopress.com\/embed\/tG4CEvcO?hd=1&amp;cover=1&amp;loop=0&amp;autoPlay=0&amp;permalink=1&amp;muted=0&amp;controls=1&amp;playsinline=0&amp;useAverageColor=0&amp;preloadContent=metadata' frameborder='0' allowfullscreen data-resize-to-parent=\"true\" allow='clipboard-write'><\/iframe><script src='https:\/\/s0.wp.com\/wp-content\/plugins\/video\/assets\/js\/next\/videopress-iframe.js'><\/script><\/div>\n<\/section>\n<section id=\"transcription\" class=\"session--transcription\">\n<h2>Transcription<\/h2>\n<\/section>\n<p><strong>DAN MABY:<\/strong> \u00a0Ok welcome thank you all for joining us here this afternoon, I just want to say thank you to sponsors, big thank you to sponsors that bought boxes Timpani, WooCommerce and Jetpack. \u00a0Big thank you to the sponsors in the stalls, HeartInternet, SiteGround 34SP.com, WPengine and SiteGround, oh I am very sorry, GoDaddy. \u00a0Thank you to all the sponsors in the dress circle and grand circle ace you will find them downstairs as well feel free to mingle say hello grab some of their lovely swag. \u00a0Big thank you, balcony and patrons. \u00a0On to next session. \u00a0Our next speaker this afternoon is a, the WordPress platform lead and developer advocate for 34SP.com\u00a0which means he is a cross between a dev ops and a project manager. \u00a0On his personal site you will find a list of platforms and technologies he proficient in it&#8217;s a long list, 41 items in fact. \u00a0He also is the co-organiser of WordPress leads, contributes on the.org\u00a0support forum, a regular speaker at WordCamps and Meetups, fairly safe to say he&#8217;s a big guy here&#8217;s here this afternoon to give you talk who is afraid of the big bad host, give a warm welcome to Tim Nash. \u00a0(applause).<\/p>\n<p><strong>TIM NASH: \u00a0<\/strong>Afternoon everyone. \u00a0We&#8217;re starting 5 minutes early which is a bit weird but ok let&#8217;s start earlier before we go too far, how many people in this room actually work for a hosting company? \u00a0Ok. \u00a0Could you all then leave so we can have a proper conversation. \u00a0(laughter). \u00a0My name is Tim Nash, you should definitely trust everything I say in this conversation because I work for a hosting company. \u00a0That is actually there as a warning, you have to take whenever you are doing anything, on the internet you have to take the with a pinch of salt, when it comes to hosting, double check everything, make sure all the facts are correct but do trust me, I work in hosting.<\/p>\n<p>This talk is all about what is hosting, trying to distill it down into something that is not scary. \u00a0Because we live in a acronym driven world at the best of times, and the guys doing marketing in hosting have taken to it the next level. \u00a0Everything is an acronym of a buzz term. \u00a0You never really know quite what you&#8217;re getting. \u00a0So, I am going to try to distill it and make it as simple as possible, and I may take the Mickey out of web hosts just a tiny bit. \u00a0It&#8217;s ok because I work for them.<\/p>\n<p>What is hosting really then? \u00a0Big finger. \u00a0That&#8217;s my finger. \u00a0A real piece of hardware. \u00a0That is important because when we get right down to it, web hosting is simply about hosting sites on physical pieces of hardware. \u00a0At the end of the day your website is on something that looks like that. \u00a0If it&#8217;s on something that looks like a PC that&#8217;s really bad but there are plenty of people whose websites still being hosted on little PC under a desk in a bed r room or someone office. \u00a0They are the one that are really slow and hard to get to but most modern web hosting will look like this and have a nicely racked beautiful looking service server. \u00a0In a data centre there will be thousands upon thousand of these servers sitting in large spaces all over the world. \u00a0Data centres here in London, Manchester, any major city then have a got place like Iceland which is notorious or is data centre usage 11% of all power usage in Iceland is from data centres. \u00a0So they are absolutely everywhere. \u00a0That means you could be hosted anywhere in the world. \u00a0I was trying to find some interesting research on where the most obscure data centre was and I was like well there&#8217;s bound to be one in the Antarctic, strangely enough no. there&#8217;s racks of servers in the Antarctic but nothing that is actual lie commercial data centre so then I went up to Arctic there&#8217;s a couple in Russia which is about as close to I could get, I looked even further I did find a data centre in Sahara desert, when I looked it up a bit more carefully, realised it was primarily used for e-mailing, then I thought bit I got the joke. \u00a0Hopefully the people in Nigeria did too. \u00a0So you have got main hardware, this is what we can call bare metal. \u00a0On bare metal we normally have virtual machines, even if are some sort of the shared hosting the chance are they are not using the bare metal, some sort of virtualisation to put your data on. \u00a0Virtual machines are exactly that you get an OS for each one of these individual components, that an operating system for each one of these containers. \u00a0Then if you are on shared hosting, you have something called chroots or, jails these are individual little blocks that build up, and you get effectively one block and that one block might have your site in it so, from the metal hardware, we go all the way here, your site starts to look very, very small. \u00a0This is scaled for you. \u00a0Shared hosts can have anything between 800 to thousand maybe, 2000 sites on them depending on the hardware. \u00a0So you are sharing that piece of hardware and you are really sharing a virtual machine nearly all the way they themselves are split out with 2000 people. \u00a0When it comes to hosting in general, it&#8217;s all about who your neighbours are, so if you are sharing with one or two people, you probably, you might know them, they might be friends they might be nice people, but if you imagined you were going to set up your business in your house with 800 other people. \u00a0Sharing with one tiny house and all 800 of you piled in there. \u00a0Do you know everyone? \u00a0Are they all friendly? \u00a0I used to, and I am going to use the analogy now and then I will explain why I don&#8217;t do it anymore. \u00a0I used to use the analogy that shared hosting really was like doing business out of your house, but something called, have you all heard of house in multiple occupation, a HOMO, it&#8217;s a student homes effectively, you are in a student house you are doing your web hosting you have got you site you go into the bathroom there&#8217;s a guy making vodka jelly. \u00a0Then there&#8217;s a knock at the door, because it&#8217;s the policeman wanting to find out about the drug dealer in room two. \u00a0It&#8217;s scary, but that could be your house. \u00a0Now if we take that analogy on the web, somebody on your server, may get hacked, they maybe spamming out masses of email. \u00a0They might have malware on there or something that is nasty. \u00a0Now when people do checks, they are not just identifying that malware site they will identify or not other sites attached to that same IP on that individual server, suddenly you could be branded that way. \u00a0Because effectively you live at number 34, that place with guy who makes the vodka jelly, that might be cool, and the drug dealer that might not be so cool. \u00a0Or the murderer that would be very uncool.<\/p>\n<p>Consequently, businesses tend to want to move away from these sorts of environment and go into more specialised and systems where they come down to this virtual machine level. \u00a0With a VM, and they we tend to call these VPSs, virtual private servers. \u00a0A VPS is your own little world, you can break it, doesn&#8217;t matter, you don&#8217;t share it with anybody. \u00a0If you don&#8217;t share it with anybody, they can&#8217;t affect you. \u00a0It&#8217;s not strictly true because if they can manage to affect the server enough with actual bare metal it fallers over you still fall over with it but you are much more isolated. \u00a0Is anybody in here is running a business or is doing anything to do with anything where you have to guarantee or have some sort of guarantee, or just care that your website might be up, and that you&#8217;re not going to be in a position where you worried about the reputation of your site, you have to really be looking at a VPS or potentially the bare metal dedicated, although there&#8217;s many reasons not to and avoid shared hosting. \u00a0If you at all can.<\/p>\n<p>There are some instances where it&#8217;s ok to use shared hosting if you don&#8217;t care about the project, it&#8217;s your personal project you just want to tinker, that&#8217;s absolutely fine. \u00a0There are plenty of hosting companies that will offer you shared hosting. \u00a0There are plenty of companies that will call things like a VPS, a container, or they might call it a dedicated virtual server. \u00a0Which is weird because we call bare metal hardware, dedicated hardware. \u00a0It&#8217;s almost like we&#8217;re trying to trick you into doing something ,something. \u00a0It&#8217;s a bit scammy. \u00a0It&#8217;s all marketing, all words, buzzwords are marketing I am going to assume you have all heard some of these buzzwords, I will try to distill what they actually mean. \u00a0Blindingly fast, there isn&#8217;t a web host on the planet that has not said our servers are blindingly fast. \u00a0I caught one of our members downstairs saying it, and I wanted to strangle them, then I remembered I had this on the slide and smiled instead. \u00a0(laughter) blindingly fast, high performance, your hosting does make a big difference to performance of your site, but ultimately everybody in this room is responsible for the performance of the site. \u00a0Getting the best hosting in the world won&#8217;t make certain sites blindingly fast. \u00a0Help might make them slightly better than a snail, blindingly fast, no. \u00a0Blindingly fast normally is a marketing term but you do want to look for hosting companies that can show and prove that the time to first byte is being reduced, they know they are talking about things like transit provider having multiples, of them they are talking about whether or not they are how quickly whether they have got a link directly to the States, sometimes it&#8217;s word looking if they have got data centres in multiple countries and whether they actually distribute to those, it means they have got a copy of your website in the UK , a copy in the States, a copy in France. \u00a0Because then the local copies might reach people quickly, but on the whole blindingly fast is simply a marketing buzz word. \u00a0More importantly, what makes it blindingly? \u00a0If am blind I will probably not be running fast, I might be but it unlikely. \u00a0My favourite one. \u00a0Bullet proof security. \u00a0Again, a term that I picked, thankfully somebody else say bulletproof security I am thinking, nobody shoots bullets in data centres if they do I am not sure our servers will support that. \u00a0If they have got holes in them they don&#8217;t work. \u00a0But bulletproof security, security in web hosting is really weird because hosting companies need to do two things. \u00a0They need to keep your site up, they need to keep everybody else&#8217;s site up. \u00a0One of the horrible truth about working in a web host is that you actually almost don&#8217;t care about the customers&#8217; individual site. \u00a0If it&#8217;s spamming and it&#8217;s hacked, it needs to be fixed, not because they are having a bad day because they are and it&#8217;s terrifying and horrible in miserable we want to help them but that&#8217;s because suddenly problem with infrastructure. \u00a0Now, all of a sudden that becomes an issue. \u00a0If it affects multiple people, that&#8217;s important.<\/p>\n<p>So, on the plus side, if you ever do have security issues your web host will want to help you because it affects them. \u00a0Performance they might not be as keen, well they still want to help you because they are nice people, but they are much more keen to talk to you about security. \u00a0If you come up to web host and say please tell me how to make my site more secure, they will have someone who will come and talk to you about it. \u00a0They like you to do that before the hacked sites and most of them will help used at least with hacked sites. \u00a0However, nobody offers a cast iron guarantee of security. \u00a0If they do, that&#8217;s mental. \u00a0Because there are so many potential threats out there, hopefully all went to the TLH talk yesterday and have seen security talks in the past. \u00a0Bulletproof security is something that is a complete utter myth.<\/p>\n<p>Which then leads on to one click thing, one click WordPress, that&#8217;s always worked hasn&#8217;t it! \u00a0As anybody in this room actually pressed the one click WordPress button on a host, and it&#8217;s worked perfectly. \u00a0At least one person here built one, so I hope they can put their hands up! \u00a0Anybody in this room tried to press the one click button on Magento\u00a0&#8212; one, did it work, ooh, he&#8217;s smiling, that&#8217;s a miracle. \u00a0Most companies want to give you nice features and ease of use, no one wants to use them, yet you still want them as a feature set, one click anything isn&#8217;t necessarily a good thing, you guys are experts at installing WordPress, you will be experts in Magento, Juno, whatever it is, you don&#8217;t need the hosting company to do it, people say I love PAL, it lets me press buttons, I love CPAL, I love it you can press buttons, I don&#8217;t need to know that, I don&#8217;t want you pressing buttons, one click is a bad thing, yes it&#8217;s a marketing gimmick that everybody loves, please don&#8217;t use the one click installers they are terrible.<\/p>\n<p>My personal favourite buzz word that&#8217;s come up time and time again, is server-less, AWS has a server solution, you hear server-less, it&#8217;s like, think that through for two seconds how does that work? \u00a0I think I have an answer. \u00a0It must be in the cloud. \u00a0[<i>Laughter<\/i>].<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s got to be the solution. \u00a0Obviously, server-less, when people talk about server-less, it means they don&#8217;t pay for a specific container or package, they are paying for a basic usage of some server somewhere else, but obviously, it is not server-less, because that would be magic. \u00a0If there is a company doing truly server-less work, distributing on to things like a kettle, maybe that&#8217;s how they are doing it, if they&#8217;re doing it I want to know, that sounds cool, I can then be a product lead of magician, a way more interesting title.<\/p>\n<p>Cloud computing, another amazing buzzword that actually I generally believe that cloud computing started as a marketing term, and it&#8217;s now moved into a position where it&#8217;s actually now a real term. \u00a0Way before we were in a position to do it, marketers went, &#8220;Distributed applications&#8221;, we need a term for this, we&#8217;re not actually doing it, we just need a term for it. \u00a0Cloud. \u00a0A VPS, it&#8217;s in the cloud, shared hose didn&#8217;t, it&#8217;s in the cloud. \u00a0It&#8217;s on somebody else&#8217;s server.<\/p>\n<p>Over time we have actually started to have technology and applications which are using multiple servers, that are clustered together and your site can be distributed across that cluster and those clusters can be in different locations.<\/p>\n<p>So, we have effectively, basically created cloud computing because some marketers said it already existed, which is real sort of right but wrong, but very wrong, yet is now happening.<\/p>\n<p>If you are, if your hosting company is cloud computing, they probably mean your site is on more than one server, maybe. \u00a0They could just be telling you completely lies, because no one has defined these terms at all, at this point I should have a huge Venn Diagram up, but it&#8217;s so complicated I can&#8217;t do it, we have shared computing, shared hosting, then we have VPSs and dedicated, that&#8217;s nice and easy, bare metal dedicated very expensive. \u00a0VPS, quite reasonably priced, isolated very good. \u00a0Shared hosting, squeaky, don&#8217;t do that.<\/p>\n<p>Then cloud computing that could be anything, server less, that&#8217;s just something we shouldn&#8217;t worry about, then we have managed, managed, shall we skip on a couple of slides, oh, fully managed. \u00a0What does that mean, fully managed, it could mean we have given you a server, well done, happy days, it\u2019s a route login, that&#8217;s a way in, oh I&#8217;ve got a server. \u00a0I&#8217;ve bought hosting that is fully managed and I&#8217;ve been given a route login, so off you go, if you have any problems turn it off and on again, here&#8217;s a reboot button.<\/p>\n<p>On the other end of the spectrum have met people who have fully managed where they were actually taking the content for people&#8217;s sites and up loading it, they would install plugins and themes for you, they had bespoke stuff that they were doing, you had an account manager who would phone you up and say hey, did you want to make that button blue or red or pink and that&#8217;s, that extreme, they&#8217;re managing the content, the application, the have become an agency by accident and thought they were a hosting company.<\/p>\n<p>Most people, I think, when they see the word, &#8220;Managed&#8221;, they believe that the hosting company will do something for them and I would go with that, that&#8217;s a good thing, we can get a marketing message across, it means some things will be managed, but not everything. \u00a0Fully managed is thankfully a term that is disappearing, but we still have it coming back in a different term, managed WordPress hosting, there are no managed WordPress hosting companies here at all, are there? \u00a0Go Daddy, Heart don&#8217;t do a managed&#8230; are SiteGround here at all. \u00a0SiteGround. \u00a0Yeah, Timpani are probably here, I think I&#8217;ve named everybody, 34SP, I&#8217;ve now named all the ones that are WordCamp London, there are hundreds of managed WordPress companies. \u00a0I work for one and I don&#8217;t know what it means. \u00a0I&#8217;m the platform lead for one and I don&#8217;t know actually what the term means, because it&#8217;s so different for all of us, we all have a unique and wonderful platform that have different features and does it mean that because we all have a staging site we are managed, that seems like a weird thing to decide but we all have a staging site, so maybe that&#8217;s it. \u00a0We all install WordPress for you, except for the ones that don&#8217;t. \u00a0If someone said, &#8220;What&#8217;s is a managed WordPress site&#8221;, to me, I would have gone, oh they install WordPress for you. \u00a0I came across the host the other day, they didn&#8217;t, you have to push the button still, that&#8217;s not managed, surely, that&#8217;s the one click thing that we talked about earlier.<\/p>\n<p>Managed WordPress hosting is a complete and utter marketing name for either shared hosting or a VPS with some extra bits, the extra bits are very cool but it&#8217;s still at the fundamental level, either shared hosting of VPS, I don&#8217;t think I&#8217;ve seen [Inaudible] it&#8217;s in there somewhere.<\/p>\n<p>Which, then means that we have to lead on to how do we differentiate these things. \u00a0Obviously, this is an amazing review, it&#8217;s completely genuine I would point out, everyone in this room will have seen reviews like this, I have some of the most amazing reviews for companies, the problem is when you start looking at it more carefully, &#8220;I love them, to sign up use this link&#8221;, which is always the tell-tale sign, hello affiliate marketing [<i>Sighs<\/i>], they made a lot of money. \u00a0In web hosting we love affiliate marketers, we absolutely adore them, what we do is say, &#8220;Hey, we will give you<i> x<\/i> amount of money for every sign up that we get. \u00a0Please, please sign up with us&#8221;, they write reviews and say this company is the most amazing company ever. \u00a0The highly intelligent audience that you are, three quarters, to all of you, have signed up to hosting at some point in your life for an affiliate link because you thought the person who was writing it was being truthful. \u00a0I&#8217;m willing to put money down that in most of those cases they had never actually logged in to that hosting company&#8217;s control panel, but I entirely, our entire industry is driven, partly by these pound signs, but driven by affiliate marketing on the whole, that makes it to find really trusting reviews and really trusting information, which is so frustrating. \u00a0If we can&#8217;t actually trust what people write, then it&#8217;s very hard to make choices and decisions. \u00a0If you can&#8217;t trust the hosting companies because they are using marketing buzz words and trying to fool you into doing things, who do you end up interrupting you end up going with personal views from the affiliate, let&#8217;s face it once you have signed up with a hosting company, the first thing you do, where this is an affiliate link, I&#8217;ve just signed up for it, I better go and get my money back. \u00a0I wish had a clever answer that went, ding, here&#8217;s a chance, here you go, everyone will have individual needs and requirements, it&#8217;s so frustrating. \u00a0I really like that photograph.<\/p>\n<p>Affiliate marketing really does do everybody&#8217;s head in, it really does my head in, I look down and I read articles and I get really excited about new products, new hosting company\u2019s products and see the affiliate link and then I die inside because I know nothing of what I&#8217;ve read is true. \u00a0Oh God, that&#8217;s terrible.<\/p>\n<p>Hopefully you can see what it says&#8230; no&#8230; okay, we are going forward any way. \u00a0So, let&#8217;s start, actually drilling down a little bit, oh another buzz word just to make sure I&#8217;ve got that, the fight between managed and unmanaged, an unmanaged service is one where you do all the twiddling, that&#8217;s how I define it, I define unmanaged as you get given some sort of access level, Plesk, Panel, whether it&#8217;s off you go, you have managed, you have a hosting company doing things for you, they won&#8217;t give you route access, or if they do, they give it into some sort of way that they can do restores in some way quickly, they provide the extra features if you want a managed fight [Inaudible] create the sites and do it that way, in a managed service you probably press a button. \u00a0Managed solutions are brilliant for companies they are better for people who want to set up their website and want to do nothing else with it, they&#8217;re brilliant for companies that want to set up a website and run their website. \u00a0They are not necessarily brilliant for developers&#8217; personal websites who want to tweak every setting, ever. \u00a0An unmanaged service is perfect for those people and when they break it they are screwed and they can be left that way or the can reboot if they are really lucky they remember to take some back-ups and they can back up and restore. \u00a0If you are needing a special need and you have something specifically that needs to be done and there is no other way around it then you might have to come down the unmanaged route. \u00a0On the whole I think most people in this room should be using some sort of managed service at some level, the thing is that having just said that, most people if I say, oh you should be on a managed VPS would go, &#8220;That is so expensive that&#8217;s hundreds of pounds&#8221;, it&#8217;s like, it&#8217;s \u00a310\u00a0a month, from most hosting providers, they start roughly witness a managed VPS at around \u00a310\u00a0month at some sort of level.<\/p>\n<p>An unmanaged one you can probably get for about \u00a38\u00a0month, if you go on to some of the more interesting parts of the web, \u00a32\u00a0a month, or my personal favourite \u00a31.50\u00a0for two years! \u00a0[<i>Laughter<\/i>] In Taiwan. \u00a0It was weird because when I started looking at it, it wasn&#8217;t in Taiwan, it moved to China, but given that there is a big firewall\u00a0&#8212; at this point I started getting scared about the whole thing I&#8217;d just signed up to and was pretty sure I&#8217;d just been hacked my Russians. \u00a0So&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>If you are going to spend any sort of money, spend it on the management services unless you really, really want to tinker. \u00a0Hosting\u00a0&#8212; how many people in the room are devs and developers? \u00a0So many of you. \u00a0We love to tinker, it&#8217;s great. \u00a0You want to make the changes, you want to use the grant, gulp, power thing, no JS, PHP module, PHP7, bleeding edge version with all bugs, we should really stop doing that and remember we are going to hand the project over to someone else who doesn&#8217;t want to curate this if you are a dev and you really want to, you hand the project over to someone, please use managed hosting, please don&#8217;t use unmanaged. \u00a0What happens is when you use unmanaged you say things like\u00a0&#8212; this happened, I want to change the max post limit to 30,000, so that&#8217;s sending 30 that&#8217;s post items at the same time. \u00a0They got the response of, &#8220;No&#8221;, we&#8217;re not going to do that, &#8220;Why?&#8221; \u00a0And we showed them. \u00a0That&#8217;s what happens when you send 30 that&#8217;s posts at the same time. \u00a0You, it causes a safe fault and everything dies. \u00a0The application was wrong and you need to fix it, they still tried to blame the hosting company, no you just badly develop something, stop fiddling with stuff. \u00a0If you are developer, please try and stick to general things, you can use a spectrum of companies, it&#8217;s great fun, once you have done that for a little while come and join a hosting company and become a back-end system dev.<\/p>\n<p>When you are looking at evaluating hosting, actually look at communication, there are still hosting companies that provide telephone support, actual support where you can phone up and talk to someone, it&#8217;s scary, but there are people who absolutely love live chat, that&#8217;s how they want to communicate, that&#8217;s great because there is a hosting company who will support live chat for you, some people will only communicate via email, so that&#8217;s great, there are, I think every hosting company at some level supports sending email.<\/p>\n<p>There will be others who will let you phone, there will be some I am sure some hosting company somewhere has accepted a postal request, has opened a letter up and gone is this a support query, it will take a long time to get back. \u00a0But when you are actually evaluating your hosting company please, I am not going to say phone up the support team and ask them random questions, because I would be killed if I suggested that actually publicly, but talk to their sales team, ask them about support response times, ask them how quickly they turn round, hold them to account a little bit. \u00a0Check that that what they are saying is actually matches up. \u00a0A lot of hosting companies will use third parties like trust wave, who and similar sites so they are sites which are taking the testimonials and putting them and giving the star ratings. \u00a0Some of the third parties are obviously either affiliates or are linked in such a way they can only put up the positive stuff, but there are plenty that are, do a balanced set of reviews. \u00a0Look at those sites. \u00a0When it comes to support, I think this is the number one differentiator and the number wing thing to be caring about when picking either a managing or unmanaged host is how good their support is. \u00a0And whether their support model fits your lifestyle. \u00a0Or your work ethics, and your how you work and communicate. \u00a0If you do not like using the telephone, you do not want to start working with a web host who only has phone support. \u00a0If you are using email only, you probably ok anyway.<\/p>\n<p>Which leads us on to the wonderful 24\/7, 365 days a year myth. \u00a0It&#8217;s something that I think everybody would like to strive for, what really happens unless you are a humongously large company is that the guy who&#8217;s on at 3 in the morning, who gets almost a woken up because he was actually probably sleeping, when you ring through saying I would really like to talk to you about email will go, that&#8217;s great would you like s to submit a ticket. \u00a0And at 7 or 8 in the morning when the day shift come on and actually deal with the request, very few web hosting companies really have support that you are active and engaging with you at 3 in the morning their timeline. \u00a0They might have a first tier support level the advanced support the people who can deal with more complex queries are fast asleep. \u00a0But that said, every hosting company I hope, I think, I am going to say every hosting company then I will be proven wrong, very hosting company will have people looking after their infrastructure 24\/7. \u00a0If something goes down they will have some sort of monitoring going, get up, get out of bed whether it&#8217;s ager system or whatever it is they will have somebody monitoring the infrastructure. \u00a0The difference is to look between, read between the lines of when they are offering 24\/7 support are they actually offering it or actually offering you 24\/7 ticketing support where you can submit a ticket for tomorrow morning. \u00a0If your web host is based in the States, you&#8217;re in the UK and they only offer ticketing support it becomes incredibly frustrating. \u00a0Vice versa if you are a UK based web host you have US customers you are not answering phone calls at 3 in morning they get really frustrated as well. \u00a0So make sure that the support hours are matching your, the place that you actually want to go to. \u00a0So if it&#8217;s primarily going to be calling support 9 \u2018til 5 Monday to Friday, make sure that&#8217;s when their support team is actually there.<\/p>\n<p>But, make sure to also ask the people are engaged and are doing the infrastructure support, they will say yes. \u00a0I can&#8217;t imagine a hosting company doesn&#8217;t have someone looking at the infrastructure if it breaks, but who knows. \u00a0They might. \u00a0Look for other, I am really upset my slides are not coming out the way I wanted to, so that really is hidden. \u00a0If they after involved in managed WordPress hosting make sure they are part of the community, people you have met a bunch here, but find web host you actually know and the best way to find and engage with them is at events like this. \u00a0A good and fun way to differentiate, phone up the sales line and ask them who Wapuu is. \u00a0(laughter) because if they don&#8217;t know who Wapuu is, well wow I am boring him he&#8217;s fast asleep. \u00a0Oh dear. \u00a0I will wake him up in a minute. \u00a0But if they don&#8217;t know who Wapuu is, perhaps they might not be the right company to support your managed WordPress. \u00a0Maybe they are more a Drupal shop who knows. \u00a0Phone them up and ask them who Wapuu is if they tell you it&#8217;s a giant chicken, and when they watch this talk and we will not really tell them what it is. \u00a0Just a random goat, I thought I would put other in, I thought at this stage people would be bored, there wouldn&#8217;t be any jokes. \u00a0I am known to be entertaining and very jokey, this has turned very serious and dark, I put goat in just for it. \u00a0When I started doing this I asked people what do you want to know about hosting, it&#8217;s all based on that feedback, the one that came up over and over again it&#8217;s something that always said, SEO and hosting. \u00a0I am there going, oh I know something about this. \u00a0Because in SEO you need to have all your sites on different IPs they have got to be really fast, and this ticks lots of boxes and Google will come and you will make millions from your Googles. \u00a0Told you I know loads about SEO. \u00a0It&#8217;s all a load of waffle. \u00a0SEO as far as I seen in any actual real research, the IP you are on makes very little difference to your search results, other than the following two factors. \u00a0The geolocation of it which is become less and less as we have become more distributed anyway, so does that IP resolve to a UK based company or to a US based company, that may match through to whether it&#8217;s UK based or US based hosting. \u00a0The second thing has other sites being hacked on there and that&#8217;s primarily to avoid the big red malware warnings. \u00a0Beyond that, the actual IP makes very little difference. \u00a0Whether your sites are in consecutive IPs or not, there are much easier ways for people like Google to try to work out whether what you host and what somebody else hosts and the connections between them than looking at the IP which is a very boring way to do it. \u00a0If you&#8217;re still buying lots of bulk IPs go do some research because you probably can save useful some money. \u00a0It&#8217;s normally when you phone up and say could I have 5IPs, hosting companies say yes \u00a325\u00a0a month extra. \u00a0IPs are in really supply and demand, that&#8217;s \u00a325\u00a0extra a month. \u00a0Save yourself the money don&#8217;t actually pay for them. \u00a0Making your site really, really fast making it high performance, if you are doing this for Google you are doing it for the wrong reason. \u00a0If you think that your customers don&#8217;t matter about the fact your site is not loading, but a Google searchbot is going to care, something is disconnected and wrong with how you are thinking. \u00a0So, when it comes to SEO and hosting, I don&#8217;t think there actually is a connection. \u00a0But it ends up being a very large chicken.<\/p>\n<p>How many of you do some sort of server monitoring, do you up down IO, up time robot, Jetpack to monitor your sites. \u00a0Come on? \u00a0It&#8217;s like audience participation 101. \u00a0Cool. \u00a0Do you get regularly that your site is down and when you go to it it&#8217;s up? \u00a0Yeah? \u00a0We have all had that it&#8217;s so frustrating. \u00a0So irritating you know that your host is to blame. \u00a0Can&#8217;t possibly that the monitoring site just fell over. \u00a0Or didn&#8217;t make the connection. \u00a0The thing is that actually the internet is really complicated, it&#8217;s a distributed set of servers and between them there&#8217;s lots of various hops and places for things to go wrong. \u00a0Just a hint for you. \u00a0Use two monitoring services. \u00a0I was going to say use a monitoring service to monitor the monitoring service but that&#8217;s way more meta than it really should be, but if you are going to use monitoring please use two services, and talk to your host to make sure that they are not black listing the IPs of the monitoring service. \u00a0Or that the monitoring service is not doing something weird. \u00a0There&#8217;s a one of the big monitoring solutions, for ages the way that our fire walls were set up, we were checking the validity of the host name to make sure it was matching, and they had their set up in a really bizarre and weird way, which meant that they were inadvertently being resolved back as IP address because the host name was their internal IP which all sounds very complicated but the upshot was that it seemed to be that it was resolved coming from our network not from theirs, as we didn&#8217;t have anything there on are network in those place it went that&#8217;s strange, that&#8217;s wrong we&#8217;re going to block it. \u00a0We used to get email, after email of people saying my site has been down for two days, you&#8217;re on it right now! \u00a0How do I know that? \u00a0Because you have sent it from the support button. \u00a0(laughter) so, make sure you use two monitoring solutions if you are going to do monitoring, do, do monitoring and hold the company to account. \u00a0From a support perspective it gets really annoying and frustrating when someone e-mails in and says my monitoring solution says this, and you go well did you see that they go, well know I was in bed obviously it was 3 in the morning. \u00a0But my monitoring solution says, it but do do it because it will trigger someone to go and investigate it and there might actually genuinely have been a problem that can get fixed. \u00a0So have monitoring in place but have two sets of monitoring in place really only ask the host to check when both of them said it was down.<\/p>\n<p>Ooh, we have got to almost to the end I will do a quick recap. \u00a0Hosting makes you load of money. \u00a0No, hosting could make you and all of you loads and loads of money because pretty much every major host at some point started as a reseller. \u00a0Quite a few of the really big hosts are still resellers. \u00a0In the grand scheme of things, hosting is a big pyramid scheme. \u00a0Oh no I have gone and said that thing I shouldn&#8217;t have said. \u00a0Hosting is not a pyramid scheme at all, but you start off with the guys who have data centre and infrastructure in place, and then you go and some VPSs off him you can put your own sites on the VPS then put your clients site on then put some more on all of a sudden you can start branding yourself as a hosting company. \u00a0I am pretty sure obviously not the very first hosting company did this but pretty much every hosting company since then started that way. \u00a0Then there will buy themselves out buy the hardware, they will get their infrastructure in place, some don&#8217;t. \u00a0Some rely on suing using the service instead. \u00a0They think actually rather than worrying about infrastructure, and building out all these complicated systems, what we&#8217;ll do is just concentrate on given a good service, and relying that the police next down the chain will do that work for us. \u00a0Ultimately, ok, ultimately there is going to be someone who is stuck that who will be at the end of the chain will be a name you will have never heard of. \u00a0So with that, don&#8217;t be afraid of saying hello to hosts here, we&#8217;re all really nice. \u00a0If you have not looked at doing managed WordPress hosting please do, hopefully you have enjoyed the photographs even if you couldn&#8217;t see the words. \u00a0I hope I have time for questions, because we have run through them. \u00a0Cool. \u00a0Anybody got any questions? \u00a0(applause).<\/p>\n<p><strong>DAN MABY:<\/strong> \u00a0We do have time for a couple of very quick questions.<\/p>\n<p><strong>FROM THE FLOOR:<\/strong> \u00a0Hi Tim, thanks very much that was brilliant. \u00a0This maybe a stupid question.<\/p>\n<p><strong>TIM NASH:<\/strong> \u00a0There is no such thing. \u00a0Silly but never stupid.<\/p>\n<p><strong>FROM THE FLOOR:<\/strong> \u00a0I run about 20 plus client sites, and I am a reseller for a company that&#8217;s an off shoot of a bigger company. \u00a0This is all on shared servers. \u00a0Is it possible to have a VPS managed server, and put those 20 plus sites on one?<\/p>\n<p><strong>TIM NASH:<\/strong> \u00a0Yes, there are plenty of companies that do that. \u00a0There are several, there&#8217;s at least one downstairs that will do that for you. \u00a0Yep, just resellers can come in many forms you can have a reseller that is on shared, but there are plenty of hosting companies that will do reseller VPSs so they give you the VPS put Plesk or some sort of control panel on there for you it&#8217;s in the VPS you have got photographer site you add to that are yours and no others. \u00a0Plenty of companies do it.<\/p>\n<p><strong>DAN MABY:<\/strong> \u00a0Thank you. \u00a0Got any more questions?<\/p>\n<p><strong>TIM NASH:<\/strong> \u00a0Wow. \u00a0If you do have questions you can come the find me, ooh there&#8217;s one.<\/p>\n<p><strong>FROM THE FLOOR:<\/strong> \u00a0What is 9 across?<\/p>\n<p><strong>TIM NASH:<\/strong> \u00a0Good question. \u00a0What&#8217;s 9 across. \u00a0What&#8217;s the clue I will see if I can guess it.<\/p>\n<p><strong>FROM THE FLOOR: \u00a0<\/strong>The clue is computer error that the OS cannot easily recover, 6 and 5.<\/p>\n<p><strong>TIM NASH:<\/strong> \u00a0Oh I know what it is. Kernel panic.<\/p>\n<p><strong>DAN MABY: \u00a0<\/strong>Thank you very much, Tim. \u00a0(applause) if you have got your luggage stored it&#8217;s suggested to pick it up sooner rather than later, but other than that please again there&#8217;s more T-shirts, help as you go, thank you.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Shared, VPS, Dedicated, Cloud, Dedicated PS, Dedicated Cloud, Co-lo what does any of that mean welcome to the world of hosting with its bizarre vocabulary and massive amount of marketing spin. It can often be confusing just working out what hosting companies do let alone, if their products and services are suitable for your project. &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/london.wordcamp.org\/2017\/session\/whos-afraid-of-the-big-bad-host\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Who&#8217;s Afraid of the Big Bad Host?<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":453806,"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_wcpt_session_time":1489933800,"_wcpt_session_duration":3000,"_wcpt_session_type":"session","_wcpt_session_slides":"","_wcpt_session_video":"","_wcpt_speaker_id":[1708],"footnotes":""},"session_track":[446658],"session_category":[],"class_list":["post-1840","wcb_session","type-wcb_session","status-publish","hentry","wcb_track-track-a"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p833Rb-tG","session_date_time":{"date":"19\/03\/2017","time":"14:30"},"session_speakers":[{"id":"1708","slug":"tim-nash","name":"Tim Nash","link":"https:\/\/london.wordcamp.org\/2017\/speaker\/tim-nash\/"}],"session_cats_rendered":null,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/london.wordcamp.org\/2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/sessions\/1840","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/london.wordcamp.org\/2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/sessions"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/london.wordcamp.org\/2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/wcb_session"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/london.wordcamp.org\/2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/sessions\/1840\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3641,"href":"https:\/\/london.wordcamp.org\/2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/sessions\/1840\/revisions\/3641"}],"speakers":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/london.wordcamp.org\/2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/speakers\/1708"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/london.wordcamp.org\/2017\/wp-json\/wporg\/v1\/users\/tnash"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/london.wordcamp.org\/2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1840"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"wcb_track","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/london.wordcamp.org\/2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/session_track?post=1840"},{"taxonomy":"wcb_session_category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/london.wordcamp.org\/2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/session_category?post=1840"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}