Hey, Miles Becker here, and this video is about web hosting. The goal of this video is to help you understand what web hosting is and how the web hosting industry works, so you can be sure to align with a quality web host that’s gonna be there for your long term success.
Now, there’s a lot of misunderstanding about what’s going on in the web hosting world, and you have affiliates who are promoting what I would consider subpar web hosting companies, because they pay out big-time commissions.
And let me explain how I know all of this and kind of dig a little deeper.
So, first and foremost, what is web hosting? Web hosting is like the virtual real estate that your website lives on. So if you’re building a WordPress website, you’re, going to need to have web hosting and web hosting is the space on a server in a data center that is maintained and managed professionally, and it’s online 24 hours a day, seven days a week. So if someone goes your website at 3:00 in the morning and your home computers off, your websites still online because it’s living on a computer in a data center, that’s always online, and these aren’t just regular computers, right, this isn’t like your laptop or your desktop at home.
These are highly efficient web servers. They’re designed to be incredibly fast and really have a lot of resources compared to what our home computers have. So the way it works on a web server is generally you’re gonna start with a shared web hosting, and what this means is they’ll partition out one web server and they’ll, give maybe 500 or a thousand different websites an equal amount of said web server. So you’re effectively sharing the resources of that computer.
Now, the benefit of this is it’s incredibly inexpensive to start, but the challenge of this is that you get kind of stacked on there with other people. Someone might be a resource hog or someone might be spamming or doing something a little bit shady, and your IP address will be similar since you’re in such close proximity to where their websites are stored, and that could negatively affect you.
I know all this because I worked in the web hosting industry for about a year from 2003 to 2004. I did sales for a web hosting company and while I was there, something really interesting happened.
My little kind of mom-and-pop web hosting company that I was working for got bought out by this larger conglomerate, known as EIG, and right now there’s two big conglomerates in the web hosting world buying up every little web hosting company.
They can and they kind of squeeze them to maximize the profits. Godaddy is one of them. I do not recommend GoDaddy. I don’t recommend them for domain names, hosting, or nothing… stay away.
The other one is this company EIG.
So here’s what happens. So mom and pop start a web hosting company. They build it up through great service. They don’t overload the servers. Everyone has a really good experience and when they submit a ticket, mom and pop are there to take care of their customers and boom… the problems get resolved quickly. Everyone’s happy.
Mom and pop get a multi-million dollar offer for their web hosting company, and they’re like “that’s it, I’ve made it” and they cash out. EIG moves in. EIG does three things almost every single time, and I tell you I witnessed this because I worked at a company that went through this.
Number one, what had happened is they gutted the support staff. The fastest way for a bigger company to make more money off a smaller company is to reduce the amount of staff. You see it in hostile corporate takeovers all over the world, and this is exactly what EIG does, so support wait times can go from seconds and minutes to 20-30 minutes or an hour plus.
When I started working with this company, your tickets would be answered within about five to ten minutes. When I left that company, it was literally an hour wait time to speak with someone in support and that’s not even getting your problem solved. That’s just to explain your problem.
So if your website went down, it would take you an hour to get on the phone with someone who would then be able to potentially research and rectify the problem and get your website online. Terrible, terrible, terrible.
The number two thing that EIG does every single time, and GoDaddy every time they do it with their own servers, they do it when they do a buyout, is they double, triple or quadruple the number of individuals on every single shared server. And what this allows them to do is service the same amount of customers with a lot less resources, saving more money.
So you, the end customer, get less resources allocated, which means your website slows down and the chances of you being cuddled up with a spammer and getting your website blacklisted, because of the actions of others, goes up significantly again.
They come in, they walk in the door, pay a million dollars, they’re gonna go get their money out as quickly as they can. Labor costs and servicing the customer fees are the first two things to go.
Number three, what they do is they increase the affiliate commissions to a point. That is absolutely ludicrous, so you might notice, and maybe you’ve seen, some of these income reports by people like Pat Flynn. Pat Flynn is so proud of the fact that he makes $34,000 a month from Bluehost. Bluehost is a terrible host at this point in time. They used to be the mom-and-pop hosting company that cared about their customers and offered good service, but they have been bought out by EIG and now for a $70 sale, they’ll pay Pat Flynn $125 to $150, so they’re, paying him double.
So he’s financially incentivized to recommend this company that has service and really isn’t there for the customers. It’s, a big numbers game. So when he’s, rubbing in the fact that he’s making $ 40,000 a month referring hosting clients to this subpar thing, he’s literally rubbing it in people’s faces that he’s promoting something that is subpar. He’s doing it for the money he doesn’t really care about you, but he’s making his money.
Hostgator used to be great. I used them back in the day. I-power, it used to be good back in the day they’re all falling apart, because they’ve been bought out by these big companies and the squeeze is on.
If you’re just getting started out and you’re looking for a host to build your WordPress funnel and your WordPress website, A2 Hosting has a WordPress hosting system that costs literally like four dollars a month.
I think it’s, four or five bucks a month. It’s incredibly inexpensive when you buy it, they install WordPress for you, which just saves you a few confusing steps and they do something that’s called hardening your WordPress installation and hardening your WordPress installation is essentially doing some security patches to your database names and they just make sure it’s locked down to make it as difficult as possible for hackers to try to get in and get access to your website. That’s a really key, an integral part, A2 Hosting is still owned by a private company.
A2 Hosting is in it for the long haul they have years and years and years of great service under their belt. Their support answers quickly. They will help you out with problems and they’re one of the good guys and that’s who I recommend.
So I’m personally, consciously, specifically choosing to recommend a company that is in your best interest. Not my best interest and very few people seem to be doing that online.
If you’re going with WordPress, you need web hosting. It’s pretty amazing and how inexpensive it is to build an internet business in this day and age. Now, one last thing: you only need A2 Hosting’s base version, which is good for one website. You don’t need to upgrade right away for anything.
You can always upgrade with a phone call in the future. A2 Hosting provides free SSL certificates.
With hosting, be sure you’re in alignment with a company that has integrity, because that means they’re in it with your best intent with your kind of like best goals and needs and desires in kind of, in their best intentions.
And a lot of these companies don’t do that it’s kind of shady. Interesting that I used to work for a company that went through this, and I saw it happen. Very frustrating experience to go through as an Individual when I was a part of them.
