On today’s episode we are going to dive into the different types of WordPress hosting right here on your website engineer podcast, episode #350.

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Your Website Engineer podcast. My name is Dustin Hartzler and today we are diving into the topic that is a very confusing at most and we’re going to continue this technical discussion that’s going through the entire month of August. We’re gonna be diving into different types of WordPress hosting and just kind of giving you an idea of what the differences are and how we can best choose what hosting is the perfect solution for our website and our website needs. But first, I’ve got three announcements and one plug-in that I want to share with you today.

The first announcement comes from WP Tabber, and it’s talking about the roadmap for WordPress 4.9. It’s to focus on code, editing, and customization improvements. It’s targeted for November 14th. So, that’s the tentative schedule, which is co-led by Mel Choyce and Weston Ruter. The development cycle kicked off in early August. Beta is looking at an early October date, and the official release is November 14th.

There’s a whole list of goals that they want to look on, but one of the big things is improved code editing experience by adding syntax highlighting. This is a really exciting feature for me to be adding to WordPress Core because when you move from the text tab to the HTML tab – or whatever it’s called these days – if it’s just all black text it’s really hard to make sure that you’ve got everything lined up and perfect. But with a little bit of code editing, they can make brackets a different color, they can make div tags a little different, they can just kind of make it easier to navigate through the visual eye.

So, that’s awesome and I’m excited to see that come. And then there are some Customizer improvements that are also main focuses for 4.9. So, there’s customized snapshot features and all kinds of stuff. It’s really too early to say all of the things that are coming with WordPress 4.9, but be on the lookout and be listening for upcoming shows. I’ll be sure to share updates and highlights as I know them.

And then looking ahead to WordPress 5.0 – that is with the Gutenberg Design. And that’s led by Tammie Lister. And that has a tentative date of December 2017. So, we’ll see if that actually happens and we get those three releases in 2017.

Moving on the news about Gutenberg – it is now at version 0.8.0 and it has five new blocks for categories, text columns, short codes, audio, and video. So, Gutenberg is this new plug-in that they’re working on that’s going to be rolled into WooCommerce Core. Looks like, like I said, in WordPress 5.0. And this is bringing improvements to make it easier to lay out a page by using existing blocks. And these blocks have the ability to – so you can add things more quickly and organize and rearrange.

In my mind, it’s looking a lot like a visual editor – kind of like you have in some of the themes that are already built. But this week in version 0.8.0, we’ve got new blocks so you can add things easier. So, you can add a video block quickly. You can do an audio an audio block. You can do categories. You can do video, like I said, and you can add short codes very, very quickly.

So, if you haven’t had a chance to play out with Gutenberg, I highly recommend it. Head on over to – just look in the WordPress Repository, or in a test site somewhere. Just type in “Gutenberg” in the plug-in section and it’ll come right up from the WordPress Repository.

So, those are a few announcements that’s coming on the WordPress front. Then the other piece of news that I just want to highlight this week is that Mergebot has been released. Mergebot is brought to us by a company called Delicious Brains, and they are the ones behind WP Migrate DB Pro. I did a little beta testing of this Mergebot plug-in right before I went on paternity leave, and it is super cool. I just want to explain a little bit about the differences between the two and why you may want to look at one or both of these plug-ins.

So, I’ve been using WP Migrate DB Pro for a super long time – probably three or four years. It’s another one of those plug-ins that when I get the renewal email, it’s just like – okay, I’m gonna go ahead and renew because it’s so handy and it’s so helpful. And what I use WP Migrate DB Pro for is to sync websites from place to place. So, I have a development site of yourwebsiteengineer.com and I have a live site of yourwebsiteengineer.com.

And depending on what I’m doing, all of the posts and anything content-wise or WordPress-side-wise, I do on my live site. And then anything development-wise, I do on my local site and then push those changes live. Well, WP Migrate DB Pro will allow me to – every once in a while, I hit the import button and it imports all of the data that’s out there live on my website. It imports it to my development site and it changes URL schemes and makes sure that all of the serialized data is perfect and there’s no issues whatsoever.

So, I use that a lot. Like, you can use this if you work on a site locally and then you want to push all of those changes live. You can push it from your development server to your live server, as well. So, it’s basically like manipulating databases and moving entire tables or entire websites from one place to another. It’s super cool. It’s super handy. And it’s definitely worth the $100.00 per year for the license that I pay for six sites or something like that.

Now, Mergebot is a very similar technology but it’s also very different. Mergebot is a solution that will allow you to merge and manage database changes from two different websites.

So, for example, if you pull down yourwebsiteengineer.com – you’re working locally on your computer and you work for two months, say, and you’ve got everything ready and you’re ready to go – but, on yourwebsiteengineer.com you’ve gotten comments in the last few weeks. You’ve got some new posts. And maybe it’s an Ecommerce and now you’ve got all of these changes because orders have come in and invoices have been sent, and all this stuff.

You don’t want to just push all of your changes because it will overwrite all of those orders, all of that information. So, that’s not good. And you can’t really pull in a new version to your development site because that will overwrite the version that you’ve just worked on for so long.

Well, what Mergebot does is it is a tool that goes and it watches both databases and it kind of logs everything that’s going on between the two sites. And when you’re ready to deploy, it goes in and it looks and it finds all these changes – sees all these changes and makes adjustments and changes post IDs and just makes it work – makes it merge, in a sense. So, it’s merging two databases so you’re not losing things from either end.

So, that’s what the differences are. I’ve got a link in the show notes for just a little better explanation, but this is probably the go-to plug-in – the only plug-in that I know of – to make it easy to deploy changes to a WordPress site while incoming orders or comments or all kinds of edits or changes are going on on a live site.

So, if this is ever a technical thing that you’re trying to accomplish, definitely look at checking out Mergebot. And if I remember correctly, you have to somehow initiate and say, “Okay, I’m gonna start editing now,” so Mergebot can start looking at all the changes on your development site. So, you just can’t add it later after you’ve made a bunch of changes. You have to add this plug-in and turn it on before you start making any changes. So, definitely check that out if you’re interested in Mergebot.

Alright, moving on to the “Is There a Plug-in for That” this week – I’ve got a plug-in called WP YouTube Video Optimizer. This is a brand new plug-in that’s out there, and it gives you the ability to optimize your YouTube videos on your website.

Because by default, when a YouTube video – when you have that embed code on your website – when it loads on the page, it will automatically download the YouTube player on every occurrence of that YouTube video. So, if you’ve got five or six YouTube videos, it’s going to download every time. If somebody comes to your page and doesn’t actually click on the video, then you download the player, which you don’t actually need.

So, this plug-in will show a video thumbnail on top of the viewer and as soon as somebody clicks on the play button, it will automatically start – it will download the information and start playing. So, it makes your page load time just a little bit quicker and it uses a few less resources. So, that’s something to think about. WP YouTube Video Optimizer – you can find it in the WordPress Repository or, of course, as always, you can find it in the show notes for episode #350.

Alright. Today we are going to talk about web hosting. And I’ll put a link in the show notes for some of my past episodes about web hosting. I’ve talked about it a couple of times over the past year. I’ve talked about how I’ve moved my website five or six times ever since Your Website Engineer started in December of 2010. And I’ve moved from shared hosting to VPS. I’ve never had a dedicated host, but we’re going to talk about those things. We’re going to talk about some things to think about and some things to really understand and know before you pick the right host.

I want to also highlight right now that having a specific host that – if you don’t like, or maybe it’s underpowered and it’s not giving you the performance that you need – changing hosts with WordPress is super easy. There are a few steps – and of course, I’m going to change some of my hosting companies for some of my sites, as well. It’s not hard, per se – it’s a few technical steps – but it’s pretty easy to move a WordPress site from one place to another.

So, let’s go ahead and dive in. We’re gonna talk about the different types of web hosting in a brief high-level overview, and then I’m gonna break it down and talk about the main ones in a little bit more detail. And I guess one last thing as we start – let’s first think about as you’re thinking about this – it’s better to figure out what type of hosting you need, and then look at all the different companies that offer what your hosting needs are.

So, there’s three different ways that they’ve kind of broken down. There’s three different hosting-type packages. One way is to look at the technology for each server. And it gives us categories of shared, VPS, dedicated, and cloud. Cloud’s kind of, like, out there. It’s kind of like VPS, but we’re going to talk about it.

And one way to think about these three different ones – the shared, the VPS, and the dedicated – is to think of housing. So, you think of a shared website or a shared hosting environment as an apartment. So, in an apartment you have your own little space inside the apartment, but then there are lots of other people all around you.

And then a VPS is more like a townhouse. And a townhouse may be a house that is virtually yours, but then there’s a handful of townhouses all put together. Maybe there’s five townhouses in your townhouses in your townhouse complex, like, all connected. They all at least share one wall.

And then a dedicated server – think about that as a house. It’s its own standing entity and it’s not touching anybody else, and you don’t have neighbors that are directly connected to the side of your house.

So, let’s go ahead and talk about shared hosting. That is the least expensive and it is the best for beginners. It is the budget option, for sure. It’s extremely cheap, but it’s also not that good. Let’s break that down to what it looks like in just a second. And when I say extremely cheap, like, you can get some – I think Bluehost runs specials every once in a while for $2.95 per month for the first year, or something ridiculous. You can get shared hosting for $5.00 or less per month. So, you’re talking about a $60.00 investment to run a website for a year. So, very, very inexpensive.

So, remember, a computer server in a cloud – we’re talking about these shared hosting – just remember the server is actually a computer, with resources like a hard drive, a CPU, and RAM. It’s just like your computer sitting at your desk.

In a shared hosting environment, the host puts a large number of users on a single server. And by large number, it can be over a thousand users on the same piece of machinery. Each user may have a number of sites. So, one single shared hosting environment may have somewhere around 3,000 websites. Yeah, it’s hard to believe, but that could be the case. I know with some of my shared hosting platforms, like, I’ve got ten websites pretty easily because it’s unlimited. You can put as many sites on there as you want.

The problem is that all of these websites share the same server resources. So, if one website of these 3,000 that could be on this one server has faulty code or gets a lot of visitors, and uses 75 percent of the server’s memory, then that means that the other 2,999 sites are left with only 25 percent of the RAM or the memory that’s on this machine.

So, this leads to websites going down or loading slowly without anything happening at all. Your website could be perfectly running one day and then all of a sudden it’s down for a little while later. And it’s just the nature of shared hosting. It is called the “bad neighbor” effect, and it’s one of the main reasons that shared hosting is not the best idea.

So, to be fair, most hosts of shared hosting companies try to make things better by deactivating faulty sites. Or if somebody has a high traffic level, they’ll shut them down for a while. Or they may send them an email saying, “Hey, you’ve got this much time to upgrade to a different plan.” It’s either working with those owners or disabling the sites. But in the long run, it’s not the host’s fault. It’s just a power struggle on which site on the shared server is getting the most traffic and then they’ll get the most amount of research.

So, is shared hosting a good idea? Yeah, it can be great for housing development websites or test websites or websites where uptime is not a huge bother. You can have a personal diary or a website created for a family. It may go down that few times a month, but shouldn’t have a big problem.

I have an example of – a friend of mine has a golf benefit. And we have his website on a shared hosting plan. And that website really only needs to be online for a month while people are signing up for the golf benefit. So, it’s not a big deal if eleven months out of the year that website goes down or it’s a little bit slow because we’re not really using it except for one month out of the year.

Shared hosting, again, is a great option if you’re on a very tight budget. It’s really great if you’re launching something and you want to see if the idea sticks. It’s something that you can just get out there pretty easily. And you can get that web presence in countries that it may be impossible – it’s very affordable for lower income countries. And it is an important tool for equality on the web. So a shared hosting is that provider that will allow you to get out there and set up with – get WordPress running for a very, very low cost.

Some of the well-known hosts, like I said, are Bluehost, SiteGround, InMotion Hosting. One of my favorite shared hosting companies is A2 Hosting. They do a good job of making sure that your website still runs pretty fast in this shared hosting environment.

So, the next level – so, we talked shared hosting. So, that’s kind of like the beginner, the basic level. And then the next on up is called VPS hosting. And this is more powerful than shared hosting. It stands for Virtual Private Server. And it’s probably the most popular service to upgrade to. And its probably the most balanced one, as well. It’s still a shared environment, but the way that it’s shared is very different.

A VPS server is usually limited to ten to 20 sites. Each site has its own resources allocated to it. So, if there are ten users or ten websites and ten GB of RAM and 200 GB of hard drive space, then each user will get one GB of RAM and 20 GB of space. So, it’s all split evenly. So, once you hit the RAM threshold for your site your site might go down, but the others will remain stable.

It’s called a hypervisor – one of these responsible for managing the virtual machines – that creates a separation between the servers. So, it removes almost all of the “bad neighbor” effect. It’s extremely rare that are some issues that can affect multiple users, but it isn’t really anything that needs to be worried about on a Virtual Private Server.

Another benefit of VPS servers – depending on the hosting company that you’re using – is they’re highly configurable and you’ve got a lot more flexibility. On shared hosts, you can’t modify environments because you’d be changing somebody else’s, as well. You can’t switch from Apache to Nginx on a shared hosting environment because you would change that for all 3,000 of the websites on that server. So, since your account is contained within a virtual machine, you can make a lot more changes without affecting others. So, this is something that developers are happy about.

A VPS is somebody that wants to spend about $20.00 per month. You can get a lot more expensive but there are a lot lower-tiered prices available. And VPS packages come, like I said, at $10.00, but $25.00 is kind of the average. And there are some VPSs that are dedicated to WordPress VPSs. The ones that are coming to mind are WP Engine and Flywheel and some of those DreamPress.

And there’s a handful of them out there that have these VPSs that are – they call them managed WordPress hosts. And that mainly means that they have support technicians that are WordPress specific. They know lots of ins and outs of WordPress. They will dedicate time and resources to make sure that your website is running the latest version. I know Pressable is another one that’s a good company.

I never have to update my website to the latest version of WordPress with Flywheel or Pressable because that’s automatically done. They do a good job of caching. Some of these VPSs that are managed for WordPress – they will back up your website for you, as well.

There’s a lot of flexibility and if you’re interested in a little higher package with a VPS, I would definitely search for WordPress managed VPSs because that is something that – you’ll get more bang for your buck.

If you just go out there and get a regular VPS from InMotion or DreamHost or any of these other companies, you’re going to have to set up the configuration of the server, and you’re going to have to tell it which version of PHP and MySQL to run. And It’s a little bit more daunting. And I used that for a little while and it was just kind of a pain. Like, it was a pain to keep all that stuff managed because I don’t know anything about servers and whatnot.

One other type of VPS – so we’ve talked about just regular VPS where you set everything up, the managed VPS from WordPress, and that’s where WordPress is all taken care of, and then there’s another type of VPS, and this is the Cloud VPS. And instead of having a dedicated place where your website lives, it’s hosted on the cloud. So, it’s across all of these servers all across the world. And that creates that cloud effect.

So, there’s not a lot of difference when it comes to resources-wise, but it’s just a matter of – is that something you’d rather have? Would you rather have your website on the cloud so it can be accessed from different parts of the world more quickly? Or would you rather have a more dedicated – it’s in this one location on this server and I’ve got this dedicated team of support engineers that can help me with that? So, that is VPS.

I would say that, probably, most people that are running a business or have a store on their website should be using some sort of VPS because that’s just going to give you the best performance. It’s going to keep your website up and just make sure that things are running smoothly. It’s going to load quickly. It’s going to be optimized for WordPress and whatnot. So, I recommend most people listening to the show will want a Virtual Private Server.

And then lastly, if your site exceeds more than 100,000 visits per month, then you might want to look at the dedicated hosting routes. So, this negates all the “bad neighbor” issues because you’re alone on your own server. It provides a host of benefits that come with very few downsides. So, you get an entire computer to yourself. You can customize it extensively. You can choose the amount of – type of memory, the OS to install other hardware elements that make up the computer.

You actually have to know a lot. So, that’s one of the downsides. You have to know a lot about computers and server technology. And you still have to do a lot on your own. You have to make sure the OS is updated. You have to have all the tools running to run a web server and secure scanning and malware removal and so on.

My recommendation is you only need a dedicated server if you have highly specialized needs in terms of hardware or you want a lot more control on data’s privacy than anywhere else, and/or you get a lot of views. That’s the big thing – if you get a lot of page views and you need a lot of resources to serve your web content over and over and over again, a dedicated hosted plan is probably the best.

Or if you want to really control your privacy on your server – you want to control all of the – you want to make sure you’re not getting cross-contamination from other websites on a VPS or a shared hosting environment, then the dedicated system is the way to go.

So, choosing a hosting package can be difficult. The first step, like I said, is to understand the different types that you need – the shared, the VPS, the dedicated. And hopefully this podcast helps out just kind of share the three different types and which types of websites are best for each. So, that’s my recommendation for the week.

Think about if you’re on a shared hosting plan, are you happy with the performance? Are you happy with how fast your website loads? If not, then it may be time to look for a VPS. If you’re on a VPS and you’re not happy with the performance, you’re not happy with the speed; you’re not happy with something there, then maybe go to a different VPS. Or maybe update to that dedicated server.

It’s completely up to you and you have so many flexibilities. There are thousands of web hosting companies out there. Don’t feel like you’re stuck with one of the – with some plan that you started ten years ago only because you’re dedicated and you’re loyal to that company. If they don’t provide the same, the right type of communication – like, maybe you only like to do live chat for technical issues and they only offer phone calls or email support – you can move to a company that has the technology that you need.

One last piece of information that I wanted to share on this podcast was – a great way to know how often your website goes down is a tool for inside of Jetpack and it’s called Monitor. And I turn this on for every one of my websites. And when your website goes down, you will get the email from Jetpack that says, “Hey, your website is down.” And then you will get an email when your website goes back up. And it will give you a summary of how many minutes it was down.

So, if you get one of these per year – it says that your website was down for 15 minutes – that’s pretty good for 15 minutes for the year. But if you’re getting one of these every week or a few times a month, or whatever that looks like, then you may have an over – either your website is overpowering the server or maybe you have one of those “terrible neighbors,” a “bad neighbor” and they’re using all the resources on your shared environment. So, that’s something to think about.

So, install Jetpack and turn on Monitor if you haven’t, just to get those emails and that peace of mind that – yes, you know when your website is up or your website is down.

Alright. That’s all I wanted to share with you this week. And until next week, we’ll talk again soon. Bye-bye.