The Transcript

How to Pick the Right Hosting Company for Your Website

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Scott Ellis: Today’s guest is my good friend, Mr. John P. Most of you know John as the host of GeekBeat.TV, a show that I also take part in and occasionally host, but John is also a former telecom executive and was the CMO of Layered Technologies, which is a host and data center provider here in the Dallas area.

John has a knack for explaining the topic of hosting in a way that makes it interesting and easy to understand. The importance behind this episode is that hosting is something that many of us get wrong. You’d think it’s an easy decision: I go out, and I find a plan, and I put my website on it. I don’t have to worry about it, right? They do all the backups.

Well, there’s a whole lot of other things that come into play with hosting that can have very serious implications for your business if you’re doing any kind of business online or aspire to.

Some of the things that John is going to share with us today may get you to rethink your approach to hosting. If you happen to be a technologist, and maybe you do something like I do, building websites for a lot of clients, you probably have the hosting discussion pretty often. It s not always easy to walk your customers through the things that they need to know. This episode is going to arm you. If nothing else, you can just send them this episode and let them hear about it from a true expert.

Let’s get in and see what John has to say about hosting.

I’m here with Mr. John P. How do you say your last name?

John Pozadzides: Pozadzides.

Scott Ellis: Pozadzides.

John Pozadzides: Just P.

Scott Ellis: That’s why we call you John P.

John Pozadzides: Even Greek people refuse to say my last name.

The Basic Types of Hosting

Scott Ellis: We’re going to talk a little bit about website hosting today. This is the Technology Translated podcast, so our entire goal is to put this into terms that anybody can understand. This is a technical podcast for non-techies.

John Pozadzides: Wait a minute, you want me to explain web hosting to people who don’t understand web hosting?

Scott Ellis: That’s exactly what I’m asking you to do, and I don’t know anybody that does it better, because I’ve heard you talk about this stuff before.

John Pozadzides: That is a sad state of affairs.

Scott Ellis: You’ve done a good job of making it easy to understand, so we’ll put you to the test again today.

John Pozadzides: We shall endeavor to do our best.

Scott Ellis: Do not let me down.

John Pozadzides: Yes.

Scott Ellis: You do a lot of things. You’re probably most well-known now as the host of GeekBeat.TV, out of retirement.

John Pozadzides: Yes indeed.

Scott Ellis: A very short retirement. I hope it was fun. But you were, once upon a time, also the Chief Marketing Officer for Layered Technologies.

John Pozadzides: I was indeed, and also before that, I spent a better part of a decade doing all manner of infrastructure-related stuff for companies like GTE and SAVVIS Communications, so I do have quite an extensive background when it comes to things like data centers and Internet connectivity, security systems, et cetera. Basically, all the underpinnings — the things that make the Internet actually work — I grew up with that stuff.

Scott Ellis: You’ve known that stuff for a long time, and you have a knack for explaining it in very easy-to-understand terms.

John Pozadzides: That’s just because I can t understand it myself, so I make smart people tell me, and then I just regurgitate.

Scott Ellis: There you go. Well, get ready to throw up all over the microphone.

First of all, let’s go into talking about the different types of hosting, because there are multiple different types of hosting that people can choose from. The price points are all over the place. If I don’t know what to do here, I don’t even understand my options.

John Pozadzides: Let’s just start off by saying, hosting — there’s really just one kind of hosting in the universe, but you can get different sizes of it. Wherever you host your website, you’re basically putting a bunch of HTML pages on a server that’s connected to the Internet. How big of a server you get, how old of a server you get, that’s going to determine how responsive the site will be, how fast it will be, and your costs.

It s just like having a desktop computer. My grandmother might have an old 286 laying around that barely functions.

Scott Ellis: Does she still use that?

John Pozadzides: I don’t know. Some people have a Commodore 64. That’s okay. And then some people go out and buy the latest, greatest thing, and obviously the newer stuff is going to work faster and better with less waiting than the older stuff.

The question is, what’s the difference between, let’s say, a free or almost free website hosted at GoDaddy or HostGator or one of these guys versus a big server farm that Google uses? Really, the difference is that instead of getting an entire computer dedicated to yourself, you’re just getting a little timeshare on one. You’re getting a little tiny piece of one.

We categorize different types of hosting as shared hosting, meaning that instead of having a server all to yourself, you’re going to share it with other people. Then, you could get virtual servers, which means that you could take one physical computer, and you can run virtual machines on it. Those are like a fake computer running inside a real computer, but it allows you to have multiple instances of an operating system on one computer.

Scott Ellis: It’s like having your own computer, but there’s a bunch of them on the same hardware.

John Pozadzides: That’s right. Because if you think about it, if you are just using your computer at home and you’re surfing the web or manipulating some images or things like that, most of what you’re doing is sitting there reading the screen, and the computer’s waiting for you to give it input. It’s got a lot of spare cycles.

So if you could find a way to let multiple people run across the same hardware platform, then everybody uses the CPU and the RAM at different times and the hard drive at different times, so they’re sharing it. That’s the way virtual machines tend to work.

Then you could get your own dedicated server, so now you’ve got a box all to yourself. No one else can touch it.

And then, beyond that, you would scale into a situation where you have multiple servers, so you would employ additional technology — for example, a load balancer. A load balancer would allow you to take two or three different servers, and using a box that sits in front of those servers, you send the request to that box, and then it round-robins or distributes the load between multiple servers.

The Cost of Different Types of Hosting

John Pozadzides: As you can imagine from the things that I’ve just described, every step up is more costly. What people don’t know is if we go back to our shared server situation, these things may cost $2 or $3 a month for hosting your website. That sounds really attractive.

Scott Ellis: That’s pretty cheap.

John Pozadzides: I mean, I’d like to host GeekBeat for $2 or $3 a month. That would be nice.

Scott Ellis: Good luck.

John Pozadzides: The problem is that when you get into one of those very low-cost hosting situations, you actually have not tens of other people on the server, not even hundreds, but usually thousands. It’s not uncommon to see, let s say, 2,000 websites hosted on a single server.

Scott Ellis: That’s getting crowded in there.

John Pozadzides: Yeah, but if you think about it, you want to be that web host. It may cost you a couple hundred dollars a month to run that server, but if you’re collecting 2,000 times $2 or $3 a month, that is a high-margin business to be in.

Scott Ellis: It’s a very high-margin business to be in. And most of those websites are probably not getting that much traffic, right?

What Types of Sites to Put on What Types of Hosting

John Pozadzides: That’s the thing. If we have a website that gets five or 10 page views a day, and it’s on a server with 2,000 others, what are they getting — 20,000, 30,000 page views a day? That’s nothing for a server to handle. That’s really not much. A well-optimized server can handle a million or more page views a day, so they really load them up.

But what happens is, when you have your site hosted on a machine with 2,000 other sites at any given time, it only takes one of those sites having a really popular article of some sort to bring a killer amount of traffic and crush that server and take down 2,000 websites, essentially.

If you’re going to host something on a $2, $3, $5 a month shared hosting plan, just make sure that it’s not anything critical. If you want to put your family’s personal website that only you and your relatives look at on one of those cheap ones, go for it. It’s a great place for that. But if you want to put a business on there, don’t plan on being in business very long.

The SEO Impact of Hosting and Why Good Hosting Drives More Traffic

Scott Ellis: I will say that, from the standpoint of working with a number of clients who have web hosting on a variety of types of servers, that usually we see in those shared instances that sites do not perform as well. That does have some downstream impacts, as well, because Google can see how your site performs. Now, granted, we don’t really get to see behind the curtain of Google’s algorithm, but what we’ve been told is that site performance is definitely a factor in SEO.

John Pozadzides: It is, absolutely. Not only do you care about placing business accounts on servers that are going to be reliable and stay up so people can visit your website, but the faster your page loads, the better it performs in search results. Google has been very, very clear about that, and that’s a principle that’s been going on essentially since the beginning of time. And there’s a very practical reason for it.

If you think about it, if you’re Google, and you send someone to a website and they can’t even load the page — let’s say that you’re on a little shared web server and you write a really good article and 10,000 people want to read it all at once — Google knows that that shared web server will go down. It cannot handle that traffic. So they’ll start sending traffic to it, but as they see people bouncing back to Google, they’ll figure out that the site’s not up, and they just stop sending traffic.

The faster the site responds, the more Google trusts that site’s ability to handle essentially any amount of traffic you send to it. We all want to have a ton of visitors come to our website, right? It’s like, “Oh, it will make me feel really good if I write an article and 100,000 people read it. It feels good, warm, and fuzzy.” You probably didn’t make any money off of it. Who cares? You feel good.

But you don’t think about the fact that you have to have underlying infrastructure to support that number of visitors. It’s like saying, “I’m going to build a bar out in the middle of the woods, and I’d really like to have 300 people come drink at my bar, but there’s just a muddy dirt road getting to it.” You can’t get 300 cars down the road, okay? You can have a dream, but if you’re going to have that dream, you ve got to put the infrastructure in place to support it.

The Advantages and Disadvantages of Different Hosting Types

Scott Ellis: The other concern I have with shared hosting is — and we’ve actually seen this happen in a couple of instances — if a site becomes infected with malware. Depending on how that server is configured, it can become easier for other sites on that same server to also become infected, and it can run away very quickly. I’m speaking directly from experience of having to clean up some sites where that was exactly what happened.

John Pozadzides: Yeah, unfortunately, no matter how good the host is — there’s a lot of very reputable hosts that handle shared hosting — 1and1.com and Bluehost and DreamHost, there’s a lot of them. But the problem is that there are always people discovering new vulnerabilities within the underlying software architecture that the server itself runs on.

If one flaw is found in the OS, one security hole, then it doesn’t take much before somebody hops on that server and does actually do damage to thousands of sites, all at once. And they do it because it’s fun. They do it because it’s a challenge.

One way of protecting yourself from that is to step up from the shared hosting space into a virtual machine of some sort. You can actually do searches for virtual server hosting, and now you’ll see a different set of price points. But usually, these price points will start in about the $20 range. One of the cool things about virtual machines is that generally, they actually run on equipment that’s higher-end, so they’ll put up a much bigger, meatier server, and they’ll run these virtual machines on it.

You have the ability to start off with a certain level of hosting, and then as you need more power, you can go into the website and turn up the juice. If you need more RAM or need more CPU, you go into a control panel, and you say, “Give me some more.” Then it takes five minutes to reconfigure, and you don’t have to move to another host. You just get more power with the existing host by running a virtual machine.

Also, you have your own dedicated operating system instance, so if there was some kind of vulnerability, then they would have to attack your virtual machine specifically, which is a lot less likely. A single site sitting on a virtual machine is not going to be generally as big a target as going after a machine that has thousands of sites on it, unless your site is big and popular. GeekBeat, it doesn’t matter where we put it. It’s going to be a target, so we have to stay on top of the security aspect.

That actually brings up one other factor here, which is, are you actually capable of running this thing yourself? Do...