EP480 – It’s Giving Server: The New Era of Hosting

[00:00:00] Jason Tucker: This is episode number 480 of WPwatercooler, it’s giving server the new era of hosting.

[00:00:16] Sé Reed: 10 guesses who made that.

[00:00:18] Jason Tucker: I’m Jason Tucker. You can go find me on my non WordPress website over at jasontucker. blog.

[00:00:24] Sé Reed: Oh, look who’s throwing stones. Hey, I’m Sé Reed. I guess my website, the, here’s also not a WordPress website.

[00:00:33] Jason Cosper: And y’all know who it is. It’s your boy, Jason Cosper, back at it again on the world’s most influential WordPress podcast. And yes, my site is hosted on WordPress.

[00:00:43] Jason Tucker: You can find us wherever it is that great WordPress podcasts can be found and hang out in our WPwatercooler slack. lol where you can hang out with us in our discord.

[00:00:54] Sé Reed: Yeah, just make sure you hang out in the right spot.

[00:00:57]

[00:00:58] Sé Reed: Don’t go into Slack. You’re like, we actually had a Slack. I think we

[00:01:01] Jason Tucker: We did.

[00:01:02] Sé Reed: So don’t go into the Slack and think that no one, everyone’s ignoring you or something. Cause that’s

[00:01:08] Jason Tucker: they are, cause we’re not there.

[00:01:10] Sé Reed: No, that’s just a joke for us, ourselves.

[00:01:13] Jason Tucker: showed up to the party and it’s at the wrong house.

[00:01:16] Sé Reed: I actually had some people do that for the first time ever. I’ve been, hosting shindigs for a long time, professionally, like personally and literally this past birthday, my friends showed up like the day afterwards. We were like in the yard, like cleaning up the chalk, and they like walked up and was like hey, you know what, this is a great, okay, this wasn’t planned, but this is pretty awesome when you think about hosting parties, and we’re talking about hosting.

[00:01:48] Jason Cosper: Yeah.

[00:01:49] Sé Reed: I love a good segue.

[00:01:52] Jason Cosper: Yeah. I was going to say, I accidentally showed up at somebody’s house one time, the day after the party, we thought it was good. They said the party was Sunday. It was like a three day weekend. We showed up on that Monday because we thought, Oh, like it’s going to happen on

[00:02:07] Sé Reed: The Sunday of the weekend. Yeah,

[00:02:10] Jason Cosper: Who has a party on a Sunday?

[00:02:12] Jason Cosper: If you’ve got a three day weekend, do that shit on a Monday.

[00:02:16] Sé Reed: especially if it’s a daytime party. No, but wait, I have a question. Did you hang out with them?

[00:02:22] Jason Cosper: we they were just like, come in. We have so much food and everything else left over and

[00:02:28] Sé Reed: That’s what we did.

[00:02:30] Jason Cosper: Yeah.

[00:02:31] Sé Reed: We totally did. It was, we were actually coloring with the things, cause four year old. And we’re like, come on over, we can hang out, we’re already in the yard. There’s no bounce house, unfortunately. But no this is a great segue, unless, Jason, you have about arriving.

[00:02:51] Sé Reed: No you’re so like, you’re good at following your rules. Okay. Jerk.

[00:03:01] Sé Reed: that wasn’t meant that wasn’t intended as a dig. That was an admiration for your brain and how functional it is.

[00:03:11] Jason Tucker: like last episode, which you weren’t here, but I don’t know if you listened or not, but last episode we talked about with like consolidation, doing some consolidation work on my end of just like a bunch of websites that and clean up a bunch of domains and all that fun stuff and figuring out what I want to keep and what I don’t want to keep.

[00:03:29] Jason Tucker: And I don’t know, it just felt like it was like spring cleaning. And it was like, Oh, I got to do this whole spring cleaning thing and figure it all out.

[00:03:36] Sé Reed: quick question, because I didn’t listen to the show. I am so remiss. Everyone else should definitely listen to it, because I bet it’s amazing. And I just would probably be jealous that I wasn’t there, because I’m like, oh, I want to say this. But see, and then, or just I’d be like, oh, I forget what I want to say here at this point. I wanted to ask if you talked about spring cleaning in terms of domains.

[00:04:01] Jason Tucker: Yeah.

[00:04:01] Sé Reed: of, I don’t know, reconsolidating domains

[00:04:05] Jason Cosper: Yep.

[00:04:07] Sé Reed: and moving

[00:04:07] Jason Tucker: much so that I’m like making directories that have WordPress installed in them just so it’s like, all right, this crap can just live here and even thinking about like just making everything static just so the thing can still exist on the internet, but not After that episode, I have taken what I think is a complete inventory of my domains. I have and, oh

[00:04:34] Sé Reed: Wow, that’s so like amazing.

[00:04:36] Jason Cosper: I have a spreadsheet.

[00:04:37] Sé Reed: Wait, this was a dev branch though, right? Wasn’t it? Or was this a regular

[00:04:40] Jason Tucker: a dev

[00:04:41] Jason Cosper: Yeah, it was a Deborah and we got into it. We got into, Just because I don’t want someone who’s listening to this to be like, wait, that wasn’t the last episode on here. They

[00:04:50] Jason Cosper: right.

[00:04:51] Sé Reed: back one episode. So it’s on dev branch, which you have to subscribe to separately.

[00:04:55] Sé Reed: This is not an intention to get you to do that, but that’s a pretty good linkedIn

[00:04:59] Jason Tucker: Dang. Yeah. Wow. I just can’t help it. I just, merc it as a personality.

[00:05:07] Jason Cosper: Yeah, absolutely.

[00:05:10] Sé Reed: I think that’s why I’m so

[00:05:11] Jason Cosper: And subscribe. Exactly. All right. Anyway. So you

[00:05:18] Jason Cosper: No. So

[00:05:19] Sé Reed: all your domains. Or you logged them.

[00:05:22] Jason Cosper: I logged them all and I am

[00:05:24] Sé Reed: Did that hurt? Like when you did it, did you feel like, wow, I have

[00:05:28] Jason Tucker: you wanna share the number?

[00:05:30] Sé Reed: some stuff that I should not be paying for? Nope. Cause, cause people can do a math and then they’ll be like, so 8 a year, 12 a year now times X years equals, and then they will come back at you with an they might be like, that’s X number of dollars that you spent on air.

[00:05:52] Jason Tucker: it’s nice to not drive that car, but you could have bought that car,

[00:05:58] Sé Reed: Oh, yeah. All right, I’m gonna, oh, look at this. Courtney, friend of the show, Courtney is literally commenting on my microphone while she’s just, she’s it’s her, amazing at this.

[00:06:14] Jason Cosper: She’s not on the show and she’s still being helpful.

[00:06:18] Sé Reed: I know. It’s my

[00:06:21] Jason Cosper: So it’s, it

[00:06:21] Sé Reed: is marketing. Her personality is helpfulness. It’s wild. Just absolutely is.

[00:06:27] Sé Reed: Baked in. Is this better? Is this better?

[00:06:29] Jason Cosper: It’s much better.

[00:06:30] Sé Reed: Okay, great.

[00:06:31] Jason Cosper: No, but I, I.

[00:06:33] Sé Reed: beforehand.

[00:06:34] Jason Cosper: I, I do I did take a whole inventory. I won’t get into how many domains, but I also I’ll like the spreadsheet. I know that I markdown, you use markdown for everything. And I know Sé has a problem with markdown. We won’t get into that. We’re already seven minutes in and we haven’t even started talking about the topic yet.

[00:06:54] Sé Reed: Okay. But I don’t have a problem with markdown for people. I have a prob problem for Mark with markdown for users as a default.

[00:07:02] Jason Cosper: sure. Okay. Yeah. But I added columns to be like, okay, here’s what’s running on the site. Here is where the site’s hosted everything else. And I am, I basically been going through, this is going to be like a weeks long, like casual project to try to bring everything in line With okay, this is where things are hosted.

[00:07:29] Jason Cosper: And like Tucker I have a few hosting accounts and I’m just trying to consolidate things as much as

[00:07:38] Sé Reed: y’all. I have. I have a legacy HostGator account.

[00:07:44] Jason Cosper: yes,

[00:07:47] Jason Tucker: I

[00:07:47] Jason Cosper: I don’t.

[00:07:48] Jason Tucker: you.

[00:07:48] Sé Reed: sorry.

[00:07:50] Jason Cosper: It’s okay.

[00:07:51] Sé Reed: It’s really sad. I managed some on it’s funny, I put Bluehost and HostGator in the same bucket. Are they’re both owned by the same company, right? I think or no, maybe is Bluehost owned by EIG? It’s not, right? No. Anyway I don’t know all the hosting so much has gotten bought, boughten up by the larger hosting companies.

[00:08:15] Sé Reed: It’s hard to know which ones are which anymore. But whoever is owned by HostGator, I feel like it’s like this legacy. It’s been around for so long. And then I think of Bluehost, which has also been around for so long. But I’ve used, so I’ve used for a long time all of these different hosts and I still have accounts.

[00:08:40] Sé Reed: Even if I’d never put a client account on there I still have all of these accounts, so it’s like the evolution of the UIs and the services and the management. It’s just, it’s really been an epic journey.

[00:08:59] Jason Tucker: Yeah.

[00:09:00] Sé Reed: Recently, this is a kind of over to you, Cosper. I recently noticed that DreamHost has really streamlined their UI.

[00:09:09] Sé Reed: This is not a paid commercial for DreamHost. But it’s like websites are just like in one spot. And other things are just, it’s so simplified, and I think to like, it’s not even to the days of the cPanel, because I’ve used cPanel recently

[00:09:27] Jason Cosper: right.

[00:09:27] Sé Reed: on Bluehost but even the cPanels are different now they’re like, got like a, I don’t know, like a rounder They’re rounder,

[00:09:39] Jason Cosper: Sure.

[00:09:39] Sé Reed: UI is rounder and less less Windows looking like Microsoft Windows looking.

[00:09:47] Sé Reed: DOS, less DOS looking.

[00:09:50]

[00:09:51] Sé Reed: I was this, oh sorry, go ahead, yeah,

[00:09:54] Jason Cosper: No I was going to say one we have in the chat people pointing out

[00:10:01] Sé Reed: are people chatting in the chat? Oh, chat in the chat.

[00:10:04] Jason Cosper: Oh yeah. That Bluehost is the IG,

[00:10:08] Sé Reed: see, I thought it was.

[00:10:10] Jason Cosper: EIG is now Newfold Digital.

[00:10:12] Sé Reed: Oh, wow. Thank you for the corrections in the chat because I obviously, again we do this water cooler from our soul, our hearts, and our souls, and not necessarily from our Google research. These are not pre research topics and we’ll tell you when we don’t know.

[00:10:31] Sé Reed: But so thank you for providing that information. I can’t even wrap my mind around how much stuff EIG owns. I don’t even know how to quantify that. Newfolds, sorry, Newfolds.

[00:10:47]

[00:10:47] Sé Reed: Gosh.

[00:10:49] Jason Tucker: We wait long enough. It’ll be old fold.

[00:10:51] Sé Reed: Will it? I don’t know. Okay. I, besides me freaking out about just the swallowing of the, of all the things, you remember a

[00:11:01] Jason Cosper: The consolidation. Yeah. Oh yeah.

[00:11:03] Sé Reed: Small Orange? It’s just such a unique name, and when they got bought, which was ages ago, I just it was just like,

[00:11:12] Jason Cosper: It

[00:11:12] Sé Reed: like the nothing from the what’s it called?

[00:11:18] Jason Cosper: got juiced

[00:11:20] Sé Reed: It got juiced! The orange juice

[00:11:22] Jason Cosper: and speaking of juiced Yoast got bought

[00:11:29] Sé Reed: By New Full Digital.

[00:11:31] Jason Cosper: as well.

[00:11:32] Jason Cosper: The aristocrats, right?

[00:11:36] Sé Reed: They’ve been able to at least maintain their community care, or like Yoast Cares grant, so that’s a good thing. And obviously Bluehost is tightly affiliated with WordPress. I don’t know if anyone caught this the other day but there was actually a change to the hosting page in Bluehost, who has been on there for quite some time.

[00:12:05] Sé Reed: They changed their description. And no, I’m not talking about how anyone gets on the hosting page right now, for anyone who’s alarmed. But if you want to look into that, you should probably look into that. That’s not

[00:12:17] Jason Cosper: I’m going to have to opt out of this conversation.

[00:12:20] Sé Reed: I know, I’m not, no, I’m telling you, I’m not having that conversation.

[00:12:24] Sé Reed: Don’t get alarmed. I can feel

[00:12:26] Jason Tucker: we can put the train back on the track and talk about the subject at hand.

[00:12:30] Sé Reed: No, this is relevant.

[00:12:32] Jason Tucker: be easier.

[00:12:33] Sé Reed: This is relevant. The change was that the text, it was just changing the text for Blue host’s description on the word ha wordpress.com. dot.com ha. The WordPress dot orgs hosting page and it changed the text and the intro was blue Host is WordPress’s, longest running partner. That was the intro. It changed some other things and I was like, that’s interesting since we don’t necessarily have definitions for partner. But, It was also updated shortly after that, so it no longer says that. Anyway, you can go look at what it says. There’s a meta track for it.

[00:13:21] Sé Reed: This is public information. I’m not saying anything controversial right now. I’m just telling you what it says in the track ticket, which is what we do here. On the watercooler, we read track tickets.

[00:13:32] Jason Cosper: So Tucker hosting.

[00:13:36] Jason Tucker: I don’t know. I only got like 20 minutes to talk about it, All right. No, look I can pull it all together. It all matters. What I’m saying is that you’ve got Bluehost, which is E I G, which is Newfold, which is HostGator, which is a smallest orange. And then you have the WordPress behemoths. We’ve got GoDaddy, we’ve got Dreamhost what. We’ve got, Just WP Engine, lest I forget, right?

[00:14:07] Sé Reed: We’ve got these major WordPress players, and that’s not even to talk about externally to the WordPress world, which is what would that be, 57 percent of the internet?

[00:14:20] Jason Tucker: Right.

[00:14:21] Sé Reed: hosting looks like, but on our side of the internet, I think that per our title, we are really entering a new era of hosting.

[00:14:31] Sé Reed: It’s been a long and interesting journey, but we’ve got managed hosting, which has become a whole world

[00:14:42] Jason Cosper: Yeah

[00:14:42] Sé Reed: And it’s funny because something so simple, right? As space on a server is actually. Like exponentially complicated and has all of these different nuances. And I’m just talking about for WordPress stuff, right?

[00:14:59] Sé Reed: Like keeping up with, for example, 6. 5. 2 and not 6. 5. 1 and like putting out keeping all the stuff updated. across the shared host, the shared servers, like my old HostGator account, or the managed servers, like all my beautiful DreamHost accounts, DreamPress accounts, I’ll say. Mhm. But, it’s just, it’s, how does one tell the difference, let’s say, between Hosts at this point when everything is I don’t know it’s, they’re very streamlined and packaged, but you can’t just it feels like you can’t just go spin up hosts the same way you could, or you can, but it feels dangerous somehow.

[00:15:50] Sé Reed: Like you’re going to have all these cost is definitely going to be like a good indicator of lease, like the range, cause they’re all going to compete with each other. So if you’re paying zero to actually not even zero, if you’re paying like a dollar to say 15, you’re probably in some type of shared hosting situation.

[00:16:13] Jason Tucker: And then once you get from 15 to 50. You’re in like the smaller managed maybe, and then in the middle there between those kind of overlapping that, that whole thing is those it’s like a semi shared dedicated hosting.

[00:16:33] Sé Reed: Wait, no,

[00:16:33] Jason Tucker: Yeah. Where it’s VPS.

[00:16:38] Jason Tucker: hosting, but it’s still virtual.

[00:16:41] Sé Reed: have never understood shared dedicated hosts. Servers. And because I, there was a long time back in the day, not now, I get it now, but I thought that’s what shared, I was confused at some point about what like the shared dedicated server was versus like the shared hosting.

[00:17:02] Jason Tucker: Yeah.

[00:17:03] Sé Reed: I, I don’t even need to worry about that in terms of like distinctions anymore, because I don’t want to do any of that work.

[00:17:10] Sé Reed: I want Cosper to do all of it.

[00:17:13] Jason Tucker: It’s like bare metal. And then there’s like a virtualized bare metal. And then there’s cause if you just get, you walk into a room and it’s like, all right here’s your office space, feel free to build things

[00:17:27] Jason Cosper: And

[00:17:27] Jason Tucker: Oh, here’s all the furniture and it all has WordPress branding

[00:17:30] Sé Reed: analogy. I love that. Yeah.

[00:17:33] Jason Cosper: the other side of it as well is think about like VPS has become this like weirdly loaded term because some VPS is okay you can host your websites on more dedicated hardware, the

[00:17:53] Sé Reed: dedicated. It’s been

[00:17:55] Jason Cosper: That, that we’re like, the resources are shared, but like you have a guaranteed amount of RAM and hard drive space, et cetera where like on a shared server it’s like moving from say a shared server is an apartment where you have to deal with your noisy neighbors somebody throw in a party, yeah,

[00:18:21] Jason Tucker: yeah, totally does.

[00:18:23] Jason Cosper: And then moving to a VPS is like moving to a condo. You still have neighbors. They may affect you, but for the most part it’s quiet because there are rules. There’s an HOA that says, Hey, you’re getting out of line. Stop. And you get, yeah. And you get in trouble for it.

[00:18:47] Sé Reed: Yeah, okay, but what about, what would you consider, is it like is managed hosting like the Airbnb? Is it like a furnished hotel room? Because like managed hosting actually, it’s not Airbnb, because at Airbnb, you have to do your own cleaning.

[00:19:03]

[00:19:03] Sé Reed: So it’s like a hotel suite?

[00:19:07] Jason Cosper: that, that also all depends because there are some hosts that when they say that they’re managed WordPress, it’s that they manage core updates, they manage security, they put caching at like the server

[00:19:23] Sé Reed: ears. I love saying, I love it when you say these things are handled.

[00:19:27] Jason Cosper: However there are some and not all but there are some managed WordPress hosts where you are effectively on shared hosting and you’re back in the apartment building, but it’s a nicer apartment building.

[00:19:44] Jason Cosper: You have a doorman.

[00:19:46] Sé Reed: the

[00:19:46] Jason Cosper: You. Exactly. You have This is important to me.

[00:19:52] Jason Cosper: you have a cleaning service that comes through. You have a doorman, you have someone to sign for your packages like that. It to, to keep the metaphor going.

[00:20:02] Sé Reed: Yeah, I like the metaphor.

[00:20:05] Jason Cosper: yeah. So you’re back in an apartment, but it’s a nice apartment.

[00:20:09] Jason Cosper: It’s a high rise apartment. It’s one of those,

[00:20:12] Sé Reed: And it’s furnished.

[00:20:13] Jason Cosper: It’s furnished. Things are, you can bring in whatever you want to bring in. But Wait, but on managed hosting, you can’t actually bring in whatever you want to bring in.

[00:20:26] Jason Cosper: as far you’re not locked down to unless you’re hosting particular places, you aren’t locked down to particular plugins or anything else. You can still bring your site. You can still bring your WordPress site in as long as it’s WordPress, bring it on it. If you’re. If you’re at a

[00:20:47] Sé Reed: you don’t get access to the plumbing. If there’s a problem, you call the super and they fix that. You’re not packing your own little plumbing under the sink. I did it. I extended the analogy. Ah, I’m so happy. I love it.

[00:21:01] Jason Cosper: so that, that really, but to get back to VPS that’s a loaded term. Cause sometimes when people offer VPS service, they offer service that has like root access, so you can install extra packages and stuff like that. But I disclaimer hashtag not sponsored. I w I work at dream host, but like our VPS doesn’t have root access.

[00:21:27] Jason Cosper: It did briefly, but not enough customers were actually using and requiring root access. We found it Better for customers to just basically have here are your dedicated resources and you can go a step further and get a dedicated server, which is an actual server in an actual rack somewhere.

[00:21:51] Jason Cosper: Not like a cloud server.

[00:21:53] Sé Reed: That’s so intimidating to me,

[00:21:55] Jason Cosper: Yeah. And,

[00:21:57] Sé Reed: think of big hacking. And then it’s wait if you have a dedicated server through a big host like DreamHost. Do you still I would assume you still, but what level of protection do you put on that server? You’re not just here’s your server, go to town, connect to whatever, right?

[00:22:18] Sé Reed: You’re still like, are there some parameters? Maybe we shouldn’t answer this.

[00:22:27]

[00:22:27] Sé Reed: I was like, is this a bad question? It’s

[00:22:31] Jason Cosper: It’s to, to keep the house analogy going. It’s especially the

[00:22:39] Sé Reed: a

[00:22:39] Jason Cosper: us it’s the three of us we live in Southern California, like in Hollywood, like when a star gets a mansion, you get big enough as a celebrity, you get like a mansion with a property it’s fenced off and has a staff.

[00:22:58] Jason Cosper: It has a staff to keep your party analogy going or to keep the party analogy going, like you can throw a big party, like this Jay Gatsby style party and people can come and show up and everything else. They might trash the house a little bit, but that’s fine. You have staff to clean that up.

[00:23:20] Jason Cosper: Now dedicated servers aren’t,

[00:23:23] Sé Reed: My question, do you have to hire your own cleanup staff for the dedicated servers? Got it.

[00:23:29]

[00:23:29] Sé Reed: Provide perimeter security?

[00:23:32] Jason Cosper: Dedicated servers aren’t managed like a lot of managed WordPress hosts are. Really, word you learn in LA, by the

[00:23:45] Jason Cosper: there’s no concierge to handle stuff for

[00:23:49] Sé Reed: Okay but you are, you do handle big stuff? Or is it really just is there a parameter, a perimeter, a security perimeter around that giant mansion where you can do whatever you want? Or is it really just like It’s on BLM land, and it like, or no laws apply to it is it?

[00:24:16] Jason Cosper: You’re not you’re not taking the yacht out into international

[00:24:20] Jason Tucker: you put a

[00:24:20] Sé Reed: Okay, yeah, so is it an island?

[00:24:23]

[00:24:24] Sé Reed: Do a what there?

[00:24:25] Jason Tucker: to a rave and can you make

[00:24:26] Sé Reed: A rave. I am asking about a rave. That’s what I really want to know. Where is the rave? I actually don’t want to go to the digital rave because that is probably some dark web raviness and that’s just I don’t know enough to protect myself from that level of the internet.

[00:24:44] Jason Cosper: right. You have to install special browsers. Yeah. All the domain names look weird and end in dot onion, forget about it.

[00:24:53] Sé Reed: Yeah, I’m not interested. I rely on people to tell me about their sojourns into that world. But so pulling it back from that madness, right? So you are still monitoring what’s going on your servers. This actually ties in, I didn’t know this was going to tie in, but I recently saw a post.

[00:25:14] Sé Reed: Somewhere, probably on Twitter or X that was talking about someone got a cease and desist, not a cease and desist. That’s something else. A Ending of services letter from Jetpack that said, you are hosting content that was like a, it was a sex worker, oh,

[00:25:40] Sé Reed: hosting content that violates our terms of service, which they’ve recently updated.

[00:25:45] Sé Reed: And so this isn’t even hosting, right? But this is Jetpack. So I guess they’re using it as a CDN or for Photon. Is that Photon’s a CDN, right? Yeah. So anyway, they were dropped from their Jetpack connection for that content. So I think that’s really interesting. And we have been talking in the discord lately about just where where a lot of sites are hosted with questionable content and where who’s doing that now.

[00:26:18] Sé Reed: So I always wonder, are those on dedicated servers? So they have minimal. Management and supervision, or do these things happen mostly on I can’t imagine someone logging into their DreamPress with their I don’t know, all depends on how your host, especially a us based host, upholds their particular like first amendment. Stuff I, I know and personally I can only speak about the hosts that I work at, but at DreamHost there have been cases where there was back during the prior presidential administration they were trying to get, you IP addresses of people who were visiting a particular site who were people against that administration and DreamHost had to go to court saying, Hey, we’re not going to turn this data over because it is within their free speech rights.

[00:27:28] Jason Cosper: There are other

[00:27:29] Sé Reed: to visit a website is what we’re talking

[00:27:31] Jason Cosper: To visit a, yes to visit a website to and,

[00:27:35] Sé Reed: but also, of note, that’s recorded, so that it existed to have to defend against. So that’s interesting. Quick question, and I, a lot of this is public documents, so I know this is a court, public court case. Was that site that was in question on a dedicated server, or like on a VPN?

[00:27:59] Sé Reed: No, so it wasn’t on a dedicated server. If it was on a dedicated server, would those IP addresses have been collected?

[00:28:06] Jason Cosper: Yeah. Of course, cause that is how, like when your

[00:28:10] Sé Reed: it all.

[00:28:11] Jason Cosper: yeah. When your site is served up, like there are server logs those logs are retained for a number of days and get rotated out. It’s they’re not like held on to forever. But still, but either way, like that was one example, but we have sex workers dominatrixes eh, like all sorts, but, and they’re

[00:28:43] Sé Reed: I’m sure they’re coming from all over the place.

[00:28:46] Jason Cosper: Yeah, absolutely. And it’s people who are doing it like adult sites things like that. It’s a matter of what the host is comfortable with. And in a lot of cases and in this ends up being most cases, like what the. The backers of those hosts are comfortable with.

[00:29:13] Jason Cosper: So you have hosts that are backed by venture capital, things like that. And they’re like, Hey me. Maybe no porn sites on this web hosting, maybe no. But it’s adult sites or adult sites. What happens in the privacy of somebody’s home, that’s their own business. As long as it’s not something completely disgusting and illegal, like there are hosts out there that will do it.

[00:29:43] Jason Cosper: Allow this content, but you have to make sure just like if you’re selling adult content, not all credit card providers are going to want to accept your business if you’re selling adult

[00:29:55] Sé Reed: Same thing with cannabis in California. I’ve, I have a lot of conversations with folks about there’s the, there’s a I was all, how do you tell the story? Basically like point of sale systems in cannabis shops change frequently. And in discussing why those things change frequently, it’s because they’re not they’re various banks or whatever that host Those point of sale systems change their terms of service and then they’re like, oh, we can’t have your type of business.

[00:30:24] Sé Reed: So it’s this kind of constant, like a constant refinement of what that means and what’s acceptable and all that.

[00:30:33] Jason Cosper: I have a friend Derek, who does it’s federally legal. He has a cannabis business and one of my old coworkers over at WP Engine Shada Tarabi, has a cannabis business that’s running out of Texas all the time. They’re having to deal with and but it’s a cannabis business where they sell CBD, something that is legal at the federal level.

[00:31:02] Jason Cosper: But there are still businesses that because it is weed, they don’t want to touch it. They don’t want that money going through. They don’t want some new law to be enacted and then. They have to like cut people off. So they’ll just cut people off proactively. And Yeah. Block it from the thing instead of dealing with it or coming up with a nuance, a nuanced policy. That’s if it’s federally legal, it’s okay. They just lump it all together and say, none of all of this, none of this entire subject or whatever it is. Yeah.

[00:31:41] Jason Tucker: Can I introduce one other,

[00:31:43] Sé Reed: Yeah.

[00:31:44] Jason Cosper: Please.

[00:31:45] Jason Tucker: one other type of server that we didn’t discuss yet? Sorry. Sorry, Sé. Okay.

[00:31:50] Sé Reed: No

[00:31:50] Jason Tucker: The last one is the one that I hate the most. Which is called serverless hosting.

[00:31:57] Jason Cosper: Oh

[00:31:57] Sé Reed: Do tell. Do tell.

[00:32:00] Jason Tucker: the idea of serverless hosting is that a company provides like the infrastructure and everything. And they, that infrastructure that’s provided is being paid for by their bigger customers. And then the smaller customers, the UNI type folks that just want to host like some little whatever website, they’ll provide you with the infrastructure to be able to just put up.

[00:32:26] Jason Tucker: You’re small little website on there that could have some functionality in it. Typically it doesn’t, it’s usually like pretty flat, just pretty basic static site, but being able to host that on something like Netify is one of them. There’s a whole bunch of these types of serverless hosting companies,

[00:32:42] Sé Reed: Is that what the

[00:32:42] Jason Tucker: it’s good for just like spinning up a thing and throwing it on there and using it.

[00:32:47] Jason Tucker: But it’s it’s different.

[00:32:51] Sé Reed: What’s the difference? I don’t think I’ve used one of those.

[00:32:56] Jason Tucker: Yeah, they’re like I’ve never built anything that I used in production for it. I’ve used it for just like small little website for myself, just to play around with it. But I’ve never used it like to scale to be perfectly honest, have Cosper, have you touched any of that?

[00:33:15] Jason Cosper: I, I know of I’ve played around with a little bit of it. However there, there is currently yeah They end up the serverless stuff is where a lot of static sites are stored, where it’s like you can spin up and tear down a server, like instantly on demand. So you don’t basically

[00:33:43] Sé Reed: That did DigitalOcean. That did DigitalOcean.

[00:33:45] Jason Cosper: Running in the background, not even DigitalOcean, this is the serverless stuff really happens on an Amazon AWS level on Google cloud, things like that. I do know

[00:33:59] Sé Reed: So it’s basically cloud, cloud, but it’s still the server. It’s just an like

[00:34:06] Jason Tucker: Oh yeah. It’s poorly

[00:34:07] Sé Reed: server. It has to it has it has, this is what I was thinking. It was like how like WP Playground is like in the browser, like does that doesn’t have a server, right? That’s, I was thinking that was more like serverless.

[00:34:19] Sé Reed: Is that totally a different thing? Because it’s not storing it anywhere, so it’s not actually serving up anything, right? It’s, I don’t know, I don’t know. This part’s confusing, because what are we talking about? Air?

[00:34:31] Jason Tucker: a poorly named thing.

[00:34:33] Sé Reed: Computers? I don’t even know what we’re talking about anymore.

[00:34:36] Jason Cosper: I will say there is an interesting thing. There’s an interesting thing. Carl Alexander has built this service and I always butcher it when I pronounce it. It’s YMIR, that is,

[00:34:52] Sé Reed: that. Why mirror?

[00:34:54] Jason Cosper: it is a serverless WordPress and the things that he’s done. I think the things that they’re doing there are like fairly impressive.

[00:35:03] Jason Cosper: But it’s something basically he’s figured out a way to serve up WordPress like in a way

[00:35:14] Sé Reed: is what they’re saying. Oh, like e mirror. I get it. That makes so much more sense now. I’ve never understood why it was called that. It’s like mirror, right? So it’s serverless. Is that mirrored stuff?

[00:35:28] Jason Cosper: Zach, and in the chat is saying like serverless just means you don’t have to worry about the servers because they’re abstracted away. It’s the cloud,

[00:35:38] Sé Reed: Exactly. They’re cloud servers. exist. You just are like connecting through other pipes. Everything is so poorly named these days. It’s just aggravating. Like I just

[00:35:51] Jason Cosper: We ran out of names.

[00:35:54] Sé Reed: But other languages put more words together and create more words. Serverless just doesn’t even make any sense. Because there’s still a server. I’m like, what are we Serving. This is why this title is so perfect. It’s giving server. That’s, maybe that’s what serverless is. It’s giving server.

[00:36:13] Sé Reed: It’s not actually a server, it’s just giving server.

[00:36:17]

[00:36:17] Sé Reed: Or it’s like the LaCroix of hosts.

[00:36:22] Jason Cosper: right.

[00:36:23] Sé Reed: of server.

[00:36:24] Jason Cosper: yeah. Yeah. The pommelmousse lacroix, it was introduced to the idea of a grapefruit, but there is actually no grapefruit flavor in there, right?

[00:36:38] Sé Reed: Okay. I have I know we’re over time and I know this is such a huge topic in general, but when we’re talking about I just really needed to talk about quick install. I just needed to talk about it. Like quick install via the cPanel, like who made that? Is that from cPanel? Who made the quick install for

[00:37:02] Jason Cosper: Oh, like one, one click install.

[00:37:05] Sé Reed: Yeah it was literally within cPanel, right? And it was called quick install for whatever and then it’s, now it’s just one click. If you’re on a DreamHost shared server, which I have some of those too you just click your install WordPress.

[00:37:21] Sé Reed: So it’s like quick install, but it’s I’m assuming you make it yourself and it just adds some files. It adds a file structure, right?

[00:37:31] Jason Cosper: I, I will not claim that DreamHost invented this but around a very similar like timeframe there were hosts that kind of came up with a one click install

[00:37:48] Sé Reed: Yeah. The one click

[00:37:49] Jason Cosper: easy. Yeah. Cause I used to teach, I used to teach the famous five minute install that existed on the sites for way too long and show people how to upload those things using like FTP, pre SFTP and set these different things like that I would teach people how to set up. Walk them through it. Like I did a talk on it at a WordCamp in 2014 or something. It’s not even that far off, right? That it was, that you were uploading your own files. You would get some server space, here’s your server space, and then you’d upload your own files. And then the whole quick install thing, little button started showing up in the C panels.

[00:38:32] Sé Reed: Was that, so that you were like the Tesla and the Edison of the quick install.

[00:38:38] Jason Cosper: I believe to borrow from the illustrious one time poet laureate Ray J we hit it first. Okay. But so when now it’s essentially it’s the same thing, right? That’s what we’re talking about. And so all you’re doing in a managed host,

[00:39:09] Jason Cosper: But the one

[00:39:10] Sé Reed: host, but okay.

[00:39:11] Jason Cosper: The one click install has been around since 2005, 2006. That is how,

[00:39:18] Sé Reed: don’t have the timeline

[00:39:20] Jason Cosper: The WordPress the five minute install where it’s like, you can do all this and you can do it through FTP and et cetera, et cetera. It’s a five minute install. Has not been a five minute install since 2005, 2006 when one click installers Exactly!

[00:39:37] Jason Cosper: It, yes, in, in the grand scheme of things, on this long timeline we have had a quick install and yes, managed WordPress is effectively a one click installer. Like they’re,

[00:39:54] Sé Reed: its own protections and its own auto updates and

[00:39:58] Jason Tucker: five minute install defines itself, just like PHP defines itself.

[00:40:05] Sé Reed: I love it when you like weigh in and like some philosophical with some philosophical moment. It’s

[00:40:13] Jason Cosper: over here.

[00:40:17] Sé Reed: the best. So

[00:40:19] Jason Tucker: I come in clutch sometimes.

[00:40:21] Sé Reed: The so that we’ve got the quick install where you would do that stuff. And then the managed hosting and we’ve got. Serverless stuff happening over here. All that stuff still exists. Something I think is really interesting is that WordPress the famous five minute install was around for so long.

[00:40:42] Sé Reed: I think even because of the quick install and the one minute install button and whatever existed is because WordPress, the software, needed to provide a way to do it that didn’t rely on something like. I’m going to show you how to install a host with cPanel, or a a one click install button, like it, it was like server neutral, right?

[00:41:11] Sé Reed: Or like host neutral, in terms of, you get yourself some server space, and then you do this to it, and that’s how you can install this. No matter who your host is in theory, right? That was, and so I think it had to be around for a lot longer without doing that. I don’t I haven’t checked in a really long time in the docs, certainly since we’ve moved from the codecs, but I wonder what it says right now in the docs about how to install, because we know the hosting page is its own world of interesting, but I think that’s something people should go look at.

[00:41:51] Sé Reed: Also not pre researched, Okay,

[00:41:54] Jason Tucker: I will say that a lot of those like one click install setups were like cruft installers. It was almost like buying a windows computer from like Walmart and like all of the Walmart companies that Walmart worked with. Has all that software installed. So like you get the free trial of the Sims and the free trial of the this and the free trial of that.

[00:42:19] Jason Tucker: And then there’s the icons on the desktop that don’t have programs installed. It’s just an icon that goes to walmart. com and it goes to their streaming service and it goes to their whatever services. When you go log into WordPress, you get this thing in the corner that says this. You got the notification bars that are going to constantly be bothering you.

[00:42:36] Jason Tucker: You’re going to have some goofy caching plugin that also provides some other type of thing. And you get all this craft. And we used to say going,

[00:42:47] Sé Reed: it’s not

[00:42:47] Jason Tucker: was going to the early on with our our WordPress meetups, I’m like, I would never use one of those one click installs because that one click install installed like everything that ever existed all the, your themes, all the everything themes got all installed on there.

[00:43:05] Jason Tucker: And we would do this whole like best practices thing where it’s oh, you should never have anything installed on your website that’s disabled. Yet the web host is installing all this crap that is essentially disabled. Like you’re not using any of these pieces. And so it, I don’t know, there was always this contradiction that it’s if you took the extra time to actually do the installation yourself, one, you know how the things installed, two, it’s going to make it a lot easier for you to migrate later, if you’re going to have to manually migrate your website.

[00:43:37] Jason Tucker: And three, you understand the difference between the database And the files,

[00:43:42] Jason Cosper: right.

[00:43:42] Jason Tucker: these are two separate components to the website.

[00:43:46] Jason Cosper: So

[00:43:51] Sé Reed: WordPress that’s a crisis? I don’t know if it’s a crisis, but that like Gen Z and Gen Alpha are facing is that, or at least I’ve read, is that they are so abstracted from the thing itself that they actually don’t understand computers that well, because they’re not looking at it.

[00:44:13] Sé Reed: It’s like a car engine these days. You can’t necessarily look at it and take it apart. It’s just a bunch of sealed electronic gadgets, which is interesting. Cause I always struggle to start our newer RAV4 hybrid, which I like cannot figure out how to start the dang car half the time.

[00:44:33] Sé Reed: And I’ve got my old Versa, I’m just, it just starts up. I’m like, and I’m turning a key and the engine is coming on. And the difference is I can’t you can’t even look at the engine and figure anything out

[00:44:49] Jason Cosper: I had a Datsun in the 1990s that the starter went bad. And instead of Oh no, now I have to replace this computerized starter for it. Cause I was broke. I couldn’t even afford a hundred dollars for a

[00:45:06] Sé Reed: mean you were driving a Datsun, so that kind of explains it.

[00:45:09] Jason Cosper: exactly driving a Datsun that I

[00:45:12] Sé Reed: I know that, and I know nothing about

[00:45:15] Jason Tucker: Unless it was a 280z, then you’re, then you were cool.

[00:45:18] Jason Cosper: I’ll get, but let me get to this. I was in, in order to start my car. Yes. I had to put a key in the ignition and everything else. But I also had to pop the hood and arc the starter with a screwdriver.

[00:45:34] Sé Reed: Oh, so Yeah.

[00:45:37] Sé Reed: your own car,

[00:45:38] Jason Cosper: Yeah, I it’s like shorting the car so it would start. That.

[00:45:44] Jason Cosper: right,

[00:45:45] Sé Reed: you could get in there and do that. And that’s exactly what that server access allocated

[00:45:51] Jason Cosper: For six months, I

[00:45:54] Sé Reed: Every time you started your car.

[00:45:56] Jason Cosper: Every single time I started my car. Mika, coming in hot in the chat comments. Woo!

[00:46:08] Jason Cosper: Tucker Don’t miss out on that

[00:46:11] Jason Cosper: about pre installed themes and everything else. And I know I shouldn’t say this because One of one of my higher ranking coworkers has shown up in the chat. Brett hi Brett. Please don’t be mad, but DreamHost was guilty of shoving a lot of themes into

[00:46:36] Jason Tucker: It was a checkbox.

[00:46:38] Jason Cosper: Yeah.

[00:46:38] Jason Tucker: Yeah. I think maybe now it’s a

[00:46:40] Sé Reed: host? I don’t think it was dream host. Someone had a partnership with Inuit, it was like red branding. I don’t remember Inuit, I can’t remember who it was. All right, they had, they installed, if you did see DreamHost, you can do the deluxe version, which is here’s all our partners that you’ve ever met.

[00:46:59] Sé Reed: You have now a gift basket in your hosting. Or, here is a basic install.

[00:47:06] Jason Cosper: now clean it all up.

[00:47:08] Sé Reed: Yeah the only

[00:47:10] Sé Reed: The, I actually have sent cli. I would be like, send clients go do go install this, use this, whatever. And for a long time I, I hadn’t gone through that process when it was added. And so I didn’t realize, oh, by the way, you need to check this button to make sure.

[00:47:27] Sé Reed: I was like, just put your card number in, send we’ll get the credentials like, but as I lo open it up and I’m like, oh.

[00:47:35] Jason Cosper: We’ve,

[00:47:36] Sé Reed: Delete

[00:47:37] Jason Cosper: We have gotten a lot better about that. We only install like one theme now besides whatever 2020 is coming with like your version.

[00:47:49] Sé Reed: Love that. Yeah.

[00:47:51] Jason Cosper: See, I just made the content evergreen by going 2020. You could watch this in 2026 and no, but

[00:47:59] Sé Reed: You are watching it.

[00:48:01] Jason Cosper: It’s like that and Astra and that’s it.

[00:48:04] Jason Cosper: But and this is something that I know that other places are doing now. We’ve refined the one click installer a little bit where it’s like, Hey, you can have just the raw thing, but we ask like what you’re trying to do with your site and

[00:48:21] Sé Reed: saw that recent onboarding. Ugh, I love onboarding. I’ve been talking about onboarding. Actually, this is so amazing because I was going to mention when you brought up Brett that Brett and I have the distinction of having been on the Possibly mythical, sometimes I think it might have been mythical Growth Council, WordPress Growth Council, Consumer Growth Council back in 2018, I believe.

[00:48:46] Sé Reed: And we talked about WordPress onboarding back then. A

[00:48:53] Jason Cosper: Yeah. So

[00:48:54] Sé Reed: year ago?

[00:48:57] Jason Cosper: feel like we’re at a point now.

[00:48:59] Sé Reed: Six years. Sorry.

[00:49:01] Jason Cosper: I feel like we’re at a point now that if something gets pre installed on WordPress there you can’t just throw a maybe you can throw like a form plugin or something, but if you’re doing like, Hey, we’re going to put this caching plugin in place for you like Tucker said, that has stuff like, Hey, let’s. Let’s put let’s put like a pre configured like best practices in place because you put something like WP super cache in place and nobody knows how to configure WP super cache. Most people. I see who are running WP super cache, which is a great plugin. Do not have it configured correctly.

[00:49:51] Jason Cosper: They just turned it on and then they’re like, okay, my site’s cached. No, your site’s not cached.

[00:49:56] Sé Reed: That’s like turning on Yoast and being like, my site is SEO’d.

[00:50:00] Jason Cosper: Exactly.

[00:50:01] Sé Reed: But to that end, there can be some benefit in just turning it on. So it isn’t, it is better than nothing in some cases. But I think the pre configured, pre installed stuff is really great. Because of exactly what you just said.

[00:50:19] Sé Reed: That would, so just to extend the analogy to the end of the show, that would be like you get a furnished apartment, but it’s customized to your tastes versus just getting a furnished apartment that’s here’s the furniture you get, right? You get to select it from a catalog in advance and maybe there’s five, five different versions and you pick the mid century modern one instead of the like rococo grandma style one.

[00:50:50] Jason Cosper: Or Boho

[00:50:53] Sé Reed: Oh, you’re shabby chic.

[00:50:55] Jason Cosper: right. Max maximalist. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:51:00] Sé Reed: I want a mid century modern one.

[00:51:02] Jason Tucker: Come on.

[00:51:04] Sé Reed: Anyway, I think it’s really interesting. I think there’s actually so much more to talk about that we are definitely in the new era, but I think that the we didn’t even get to talk about the future of it, which is the differences. The differences in hosting, so maybe we talk about this in a future time, the differences in hosting in the future are are going to be things like, do you get to select your starting palette even in so far as how themes are going to impact that what’s the start, not just the starting theme, but the starting collection, and there’s a lot of different a lot of different hosts have been buying up little not little, but more like theme shops or block shops and I think that is part of the, what can we offer you as part of your baked in what are the amenities of our building?

[00:52:00] Sé Reed: Is there a pool? Is there a hot tub? Are there multiple like common areas?

[00:52:06] Jason Cosper: Are you getting what block patterns are you getting when

[00:52:10] Sé Reed: Exactly. Yeah. That’s, that, that is more. You’ve got your onboarding, which is like what type of site, which you guys are really getting to, or you folks over at DreamHost, which is I really love that approach, personally, because it’s really more like just giving you, I don’t know, a like a A selection that seems somewhat customized, right?

[00:52:36] Sé Reed: It at least makes you feel like I didn’t go through all the different options and say oh, they’re actually all the same and they just start collecting data. I’m assuming there’s some difference in terms of what you’re putting in there at the end. And I think that as we like I said, as we de theme as block, blocks and patterns and AI, Like for content starts to feed into this.

[00:53:04] Sé Reed: We’re really talking about a new level of website building, and that really rests on the API. Even more on top of website hosts, right? That’s really so it becomes like what flavor are you starting with? And that is really, I think, going to be more of a consideration, at least for WordPress, specifically, not.

[00:53:33] Sé Reed: Excluding all the other sort of things, but for especially managed hosting, or one click hosting, shared, whatever so than competing on the price, like 7. 99 versus 9. 99 versus whatever I think it’s really going to be about those partnerships, like

[00:53:52] Jason Cosper: The value add, right?

[00:53:54] Sé Reed: actually the value add, what are the amenities of your building if they’re all on the same street and they’re all whatever?

[00:53:59] Sé Reed: What is, what are we, what are you gonna get?

[00:54:02] Jason Cosper: Yeah. So let me try to, let me try to bring this home. It home.

[00:54:07] Jason Cosper: that Tucker, get that outro button ready. I have been working in web hosting since 2006. And eight, almost 18, it’ll be 18 years in June that I have been working in web hosting just a year less than I’ve been actually like doing WordPress stuff.

[00:54:26] Jason Cosper: And really in that time, and it continues to be especially with consolidation of plugins and things getting rolled up especially with new server technologies people modifying. Things and getting continuing to tune WordPress as we get the performance group doing things, stuff like that new like server and service technologies playground and instas and

[00:55:05] Jason Cosper: Playground Instinct, yes, but we’re no longer using Apache most hosts and we’re moving to Nginx and there are things beyond Nginx And whatever MySQL Lite, what, whatever pipe dream that is. I don’t know if that’s still a thing. We were

[00:55:21] Jason Cosper: Oh yeah. S SQL light, all of these things

[00:55:25] Sé Reed: my anymore? Did they de MySpace? I’m sorry.

[00:55:28] Jason Cosper: no SQL light is different than my sql. It’s, there’s no relation between the two. It’s, they’re both databases. Yes. We can get into that later. Please say, let’s not keep it going any

[00:55:40] Sé Reed: Sorry. No, that’s a future dev branch.

[00:55:43] Jason Cosper: Yes,

[00:55:43] Sé Reed: Your sequel or my sequel? I just named it. There you

[00:55:47] Jason Cosper: we go.

[00:55:48] Jason Cosper: But yes Tucker. Where I do the ad copy for the Squarespace ad? I just wanted to make

[00:55:55] Sé Reed: No, this is where you put the dev

[00:55:57] Jason Tucker: real quick here.

[00:55:58] Sé Reed: This is where you put the dev branch promo.

[00:56:02] Jason Cosper: Right.

[00:56:03] Sé Reed: I opened with promoting dev branch and we’re closing with

[00:56:06] Jason Tucker: ad. Copy if you need me to.

[00:56:08] Jason Cosper: No, that’s okay.

[00:56:09] Jason Tucker: All right. Just want to make sure. All right. Here’s our outro.

[00:56:20] Jason Tucker: We’ve got going on over there. We stream at all the places. Sometimes these places change cause things happen and that’s it. Thank you very much for hanging out with us. We really appreciate it. Talk to y’all later and see us in our discord. Bye bye.

[00:56:34] Sé Reed: love ya, happy weekends, trails.