Episode 525: SEO Hosting, Why you need it! (Interview w/ Top Sys Admin) #526

Hi, welcome to the SEO podcast, the unknown secrets of internet marketing. My name is Matt Bertram. I am your host for today. Chris is out, but I have a special treat for you. Today, we're going to be discussing hosting with someone I admire and someone who has now joined our team, formerly from Google, formerly from GoDaddy. Um, we've actually spun out a division of EWR to launch, uh, it's our own hosting platform because we feel it's so important. Uh, I want you all to welcome William. How are you doing, William? Happy to be here. Awesome. So I know you don't get in front of the camera much or on podcasts. Uh, but I think that this is a unique time to be able to ask one of the experts in the field, um, questions that are burning in maybe a lot of digital marketers' minds. I can tell you, um, hosting is something that I'm sure comes up frequently, uh, and problems and issues with hosting and how to deal with things is, um, something that I think all marketers and agencies, uh, want, uh, solved so they can get back to doing what they do best as marketing, because it certainly is a whole separate thing. Now, when you look though, from the standpoint of marketing and hosting and web maintenance of all these other things, they really come together. When you look at, um, like server side, uh, technical SEO, um, uh, or server side SEO, uh, or server side optimization, sorry. And technical SEO, I'm like mincing my words here a little bit, but, um, I thought we could maybe explore some of those topics and, uh, maybe get into the nitty gritty for people that aren't interested. Absolutely. What, uh, what part do you want to cover first? Well, um, first I want to back up and say that this episode is sponsored by AHREFs. Uh, AHREFs is a powerful and free tool, uh, to, for website owners who can't afford a marketing budget and professional SEO tool, but needed organic

traffic to the website. So, um, I'm trying to like read something here, but what I would tell you is, uh, AHREFs is an invaluable tool that a lot of digital marketers use. I think from, uh, a standpoint of link acquisition, um, looking at what's happening off your page and links that are coming into you are really important from an anchor tech standpoint, uh, something that's really important to look at what that, uh, backlink profile and anchor text profile look like. Uh, they also have great functionality on, um, uh, keywords, uh, and they're updated very frequently, uh, versus other competitors. So you can stay up to date with what's going on. Uh, there's some great, uh, auditing and analysis tools. They also do have, um, a completely free tool, uh, that is where you get most of the functionality, right? And it's AHREFs forward slash webmaster dash tools, or, um, you can go to, uh, AHREFs.com forward slash A W T, um, search engine journal, which I write for wrote that it's hard to believe that something as useful as this is free. AHREFs webmaster tools is a killer service. And I would, uh, certainly agree. So, uh, if you're out there and you're starting to get into SEO or you want to see how your website's doing, I would certainly encourage you to go check it out. All right. So, uh, William, I want to start asking you some, uh, SEO softball questions and maybe we'll get a little bit more difficult. All right. So, um, I would say that from a standpoint of where someone should spend their money first. Okay. When you're looking at your marketing budget, I would argue to say that hosting is the most important thing that you should be doing. Right. Why is that? Well, from an SEO standpoint, um, speed plays into the mix, uh, and user experience plays massively into the mix. Right. And so, um, if you're going to be spending, um, you know, thousands of dollars, hundreds of dollars, whatever, uh, have you on marketing,

you should work into optimizing and making sure your website is up, stays up and runs efficiently, uh, first and foremost. And that's where I think, uh, the dollars, uh, should go. Um, can you talk a little bit about user experience and speed of why hosting might be important? Yeah. So Google looks at the speed of a website as well as the content layer shift to the website are the two big things that they're looking forward to determine where to rank. Uh, and we've seen this in sort of like unquestionably cut and dry situations, uh, with clients that, uh, had something malfunctioning with their website, such that it loaded slowly. And when that thing was malfunctioning on another provider, uh, they went from literally middle of page one to middle of page four, uh, over the time span of, uh, two or three days, like nothing else could possibly tank a website's ranking that fast. Uh, and then once we got the website speed issues fixed, uh, they went right back to middle of page one again. I mean, Google has, uh, made it abundantly clear that speed plays a heavy role, uh, in ranking as well as, uh, mobile experience. Uh, as far as what they look for, um, I think a little bit of a misconception is that they are all about the, uh, uh, page speed score. Uh, and while they don't release the exact details of what they use to rank and only use, uh, page speed as kind of a North star, uh, what they have come out and said is that they are focused on core web vitals and page speed tips you off into what those two primary core web vitals are, uh, which are largest content full paint and content layer shift. Uh, content layer shift is kind of the more complicated one and is basically as the web page is loading is content jumping around on the screen such that you're about to tap on something and then it suddenly moves out of your way. Uh, largest

content full paint is how many seconds does it take to put up on the screen the majority of whatever is supposed to be above the full. Uh, as far as hosting plays a role into all of that, uh, having an efficiently structured website, having the right kind of optimization plugins and having a server that is able to respond to, uh, incoming connections to the website quickly is what's going to make the largest difference on, uh, especially that largest content full paint. Okay. Okay. So let's, let's break that down, uh, maybe into some different parts, right? So, um, speed is important, right? Speed's important. Um, how can you optimize or why do you need a good web hosting company? Like when you talk about SEO hosting, like what's the difference between normal hosting and say SEO hosting? Okay. Okay. Uh, so there are a number of different things that we do differently from what you would call a normal, uh, web hosting company, uh, on several different levels. And so the first one I'll get into, uh, is going to be a pretty common practice called over provisioning, uh, web servers. Uh, this is something that almost every web hosting company does out there to some degree or another, uh, and is kind of like a airline flight where they usually will sell a few more tickets than the airplane actually has room for. Uh, the difference is that with web hosting, uh, they don't give you a voucher for a later flight. If you choose to volunteer for it and said, they say, Hey, you three people are all going to have to share this one seat on, in, uh, economy. Uh, and then, so that's what happens when, uh, things get over probation. They basically will load up a web server with thousands of customers on a single server and essentially hope for the best. And just, uh, uh, connections will happen when they happen, but your page will load slowly because of that. And so that's shared hosting, right? That's what, what shared

hosting would be when people sign up, they have a business that they're launching and they're like, Hey, I'm getting hosting for, you know, seven bucks or 12 bucks or whatever. Um, it's because they're on a server or on a plane with thousands of other people that have different amounts of traffic that are going in and on the website. And depending on, uh, how many people, what time of day it is, what type of websites, all that sort of thing will, uh, dictate, um, how fast or they might throttle the website, right. From a speed standpoint. Um, one of the things that I have questioned about, uh, that might be good to know is if you're on a server with like in a neighborhood, right. In a not so good neighborhood with not so good traffic. Um, you know, is that something that Google might look at from like a, you know, a hosting standpoint, uh, or can Google parse that out? Like, or do, is that something that you need to worry about? Do you need to worry about who else you're being hosted with? I would say that a couple of things on that. Uh, I don't think that Google strongly ranks based on, if you will, the neighborhood as in like you're, you're on the same IP address as, uh, these other websites that are also on this IP address that have been, uh, behaving problematically, therefore we're going to like plague your rankings. Uh, I haven't seen a whole lot of evidence that Google does that. Um, and there are a number of situations where it would be too complicated for them to practically do that. Uh, such as any sort of like cloud, cloud-based firewall or CDN sort of provider, all of those disease technologies that show is, uh, you know, having a million websites behind the same quote unquote IP address. Uh, so I don't think that Google ranks based on that, that having been said, uh, one thing that is worth considering is that if you are in a

neighborhood that is, uh, let's say, you know, experiences a lot of break-ins, there's probably things about that neighborhood that are also going to have your house as being one of the ones that's, uh, broken into, um, as opposed to say, uh, being in a gated community. And if none of your neighbors are ever getting their houses broken into, you're probably not going to be worrying too much about whether or not your house is going to be at risk for getting broken. So you're talking about web maintenance, you're talking about keeping everything on the server side up to date. Right. Well, so web maintenance and web security, uh, both and keeping things up to date is both a performance aspect and a security aspect. Uh, but on that security aspect, um, there's certainly nothing that's going to hurt rankings faster than having Google throw up a little tagline by your website. That says, uh, proceed with caution. The site may be hacked. Um, uh, so that, that's what I'm getting at as far as, uh, the bad neighborhood thing goes, it is, is sharing a server. Uh, if your website is running perfectly fast, is sharing a server with other websites, uh, going to in and of itself be a problem, no, is sharing a server with other websites going that are regularly getting hacked, uh, cause for concern about what's on the horizon for your website. Absolutely. So, yeah, I think a lot of people don't, don't think about that. Don't think about like, if they think about a property, they maintain that property. They might not think about a website in the digital space that way. Maybe you can, uh, talk a little bit about, um, you know, just basic, um, best practices, uh, for, for, for web maintenance and web security. I know that, um, from a web security standpoint today in today's world, it blows my mind all the ways that, um, things can get hacked. I know we saw a client that came to us that, uh, was luckily paying with

PayPal, right? Um, so, so they were pushing it to a portal, but they had a functionality to, to be able to collect credit cards, but they weren't doing it. Someone had written a hack to actually catch those credit cards at like, as kind of, was it like man in the middle, right? Like we're, we're not, not, but they were capturing it as to putting it in there. Right. You know? Yeah. Basically what it was is, uh, if their site hadn't been using PayPal, the way this code would have acted is when you click the complete order button, it copies whatever you have in the credit card fields and sends it off to the bad guy. Um, and that's, uh, definitely the, uh, highest and most impactful sort of risk, uh, you know, a perfect example of what can be catastrophic, uh, especially because that kind of hack is not as likely to get flagged by Google. Um, mostly Google is looking for the kind of things where it's like you click on this link and then as soon as you try and click anywhere on the page, it redirects you to some, uh, uh, foreign website, what have you. Yeah. Um, yeah, yeah, but, but that having been said, as far as what's actually directly impactful to a business, um, you know, recovering from the, this site may be hacked thing. Uh, that's a difficult and tough road that probably is going to hurt your rankings, uh, for potentially six to 12 months after it's been fixed. That having, that having been said, having to be the guy that says, Hey, it's my bad that all of you are having to change your credit card numbers. Now, uh, that's even, that's far, far worse for my business. I'll take six months of not being able to show up on Google over having to try and explain why I'm responsible for hundreds of instances of credit card product customers. I think they're both bad. I don't, I don't want to deal with either of those things.

Um, you know, I, I, I also, um, think, you know, web security is good to bring up. Uh, there was, wasn't there a hack that you found on another website that looked really benign, uh, but was, uh, so intricate that you were connecting with the, uh, security professionals because it was kind of like a day zero hack or whatever, like no one had ever seen it before. Yeah, there was. So it was interesting because the version of this hack, uh, that I found, uh, was actually simplified and streamlined over what had been documented previously. Like this was a new iteration of code. It's sort of like, uh, imagine that you have all of the computers in the world with like windows 98 on them. And then suddenly you come across the first computer ever that has windows seven on it. And you're like, Whoa, what's this? Right. Um, it was the same, the same authors clearly, but a, uh, newer version of that code. Uh, and yeah, what they had been exploiting was there was a popular WordPress, uh, plugin that provides like add-ons, you know, it's in the same vein of things as like Elementor, Divi, that kind of thing. Uh, and then there's always add-ons for these page builders. And it was one of those that I believe was free. Uh, and if you were to just look in WordPress plugins listed and show you, it was up to date, uh, which was accurate in the sense that it was on the latest version of the plugin that had come out four years ago. Um, but that plugin had a vulnerability in it that allowed malicious actors to upload basically whatever code they wanted to the website. And so not only did they drop some of these, uh, redirection scripts and things like that on the website, uh, they also use their own sort of custom back door for the website. So that even if you went and removed the, uh, redirection code, uh, it would pop right back up because they just

log right back into the WordPress site and put it right back there. See, you know, I think that that's something that's not talked about as much. Um, uh, WordPress is open source. So anybody can write code and put code out there and, you know, from an SEO standpoint, sometimes, uh, WordPress, uh, depending on the theme, depending on the plugins creates a lot of bloat, a lot of extra code on the, on the website that really slows it down. So one of the really best practices we talk about is, um, you know, use as few plugins as possible. Also have, you know, find some ways to, to kind of look at reviews or something, you know, when was the last time they updated, like to make sure that that plugin is current. Um, and, and a lot of scripts that run, um, are unnecessary, right? It's like, you know, it's like people buying a, a really fancy race car and then they're just driving around like on the street with it. Right. They could do all this stuff, but, but do you really need all that? And you sacrifice, um, you know, day-to-day performance, uh, by not, um, by, by having the stuff that, that, that you don't need. Right. So one of the things that is really important is you need to keep all your plugins up to date. Um, you need to be vetting, uh, your, your plugins on the backend, uh, and, you know, like you need to find ways to speed up your website. So images, right. Optimizing images is, is certainly important. WebP is now, uh, out there, um, how things load. Let's talk about that. Let's talk about server, um, server callbacks. Um, how pains load, like websites. I know a lot of people go to those websites and they're trying to click on a button and the button keeps moving. Right. Uh, and, and that creates a bad user experience. And that's certainly a big no, no, uh, from what I've seen from what, uh, Google stated. Uh, can

you talk a little bit about that, of how, uh, maybe on the, the, the backend or on the server side, uh, you can, you can optimize to improve some of that, uh, experience. Yeah. So there, uh, that's a very multifaceted issue, but if we get into kind of the core of what a webpage is, uh, in general, a webpage is HTML plus JavaScript plus CSS plus images. Uh, so we'll go for the images, uh, aspect first, because that's the easiest. Uh, if you're on our, uh, any of our web hosting plans, one of the plugins you can use is called Lightspeed Cache. Uh, that's something proprietary to our servers. Uh, and that includes a lot of image optimization. Uh, there are two aspects of image optimization. The first one is it makes sure that the images are compressed to a format they need to be. Uh, the other thing that it lets you do, however, that is helpful for your web vital metrics is called a low quality image placeholder. And what this looks like, uh, is essentially it turns any of your images into a super, super small, only takes up maybe a few hundred bytes, uh, and looks like the most blurry image you've ever seen in your life. Uh, but it, it tells the browser, like, this is how big this image it needs to be. This is kind of the gist of more or less what color it'll look like. So it doesn't create that jarring visual experience. Uh, so image optimization, that's sort of the easiest one to address. As far as content jumping around, uh, usually the way that happens is that you have, uh, your HTML layout that specifies how wide and tall each portion of the page needs to be. And then you'll have CSS that loads on top of that, uh, that is called in from like a external script, uh, that says actually elements with these IDs, these need to be half the page width instead of this many pixels wide. And then finally, you've

got JavaScript that will sometimes do a little bit of shifting as well. Um, carousels are an easy one that are almost always done in JavaScript where you have images that slide across the screen. Um, and as it loads each of those things, it's getting like more details of instructions about how the page needs to look. Uh, their way you generally optimize for that is by prioritizing something called critical CSS. Uh, on a lot of web dot web optimization plans, other web hosting providers, et cetera, uh, critical CSS is usually a third party service you have to pay for, uh, with us, it's a third party service. It's free. Uh, but with critical CSS, that looks at your website and says, okay, now that this webpage is fully loaded, I understand that these are the 20, 30 rules, what have you, uh, that the browser needs to understand right away in order to display this webpage, right? And so it includes that detail at the very top of the list rather than essentially, you know, kind of having a project with, uh, 10 revisions done to it on the fly. Every time you, uh, load up a webpage, uh, instead it's like having a hard copy of the first page of the project so that as you're starting to read that your browser is getting the other nine pages ready in the back. Yeah, no, I think, okay. So like, I think everybody kind of, um, has seen that or understands that, or has been to websites recently that are still doing that. Google is dinging people, uh, for that because it produces a bad user experience. Right. And so there's probably a lot of, uh, in-house or, uh, freelance digital marketers out there that, uh, are saying, man, my hosting sucks. Um, and, uh, you know, they probably deal with a lot of, uh, more of those types of issues than they want to deal with. And maybe, uh, they might not be as, uh, technically savvy. Um, and so like when you're doing SEO,

you're doing off page, you're doing on page, and then this technical component and the server component get left out. And they're so much of the mix that, um, it really makes you have to work twice as hard in some of those other areas. Right. And, and one of the things that I certainly believe in is, um, web hosting should be the foundation before you do all those other things. Right. Like that's, there's, there's an easier way to explain that too. And I think a lot of businesses, um, unfortunately, the more I've seen it, it tends to be a, uh, bigger issue, the larger the businesses are. Um, I think smaller businesses tend to do a better job of understanding this, uh, is the importance of location when it comes to the digital aspect. So, you know, if you're setting up a storefront to sell widgets in the real world, uh, you probably aren't wanting to have the grand opening of your store, uh, be in a shed that's in the middle of the farm, middle of the farm in the middle of nowhere, because like no one will show up to your store. Right. Uh, and if they do, it'll take them way too long to get there. And are you talking about like where your server's physically located? People don't think about where your server's physically located from your geographic location or what are you talking about? Physically located to an extent, um, but also just the general environment that your server is in or the general environment that your website is in, in regards to your, um, it goes back to that kind of bad neighborhood analogy. You don't want to open up a store in a bad neighborhood either. Um, and so the digital side of that is just as relevant in that, uh, your digital experience is not like a additional store on top of whatever, uh, physical stores you might have, uh, your digital website is part of your identity as a business in the modern day world. And so

having that digital identity be maintained in a location and by location, I mean, both the physical place that your server is in, in the world, as well as the kind of server your website is on, um, having your, having your digital identity be in a, uh, what is the digital equivalent of an aesthetically pleasing and safe location, uh, is key to half of your business. Yeah. I think that that's something that not a lot of people consider, right? They just imagine it's somewhere in the cloud somewhere, right? There's all those ads that Microsoft used to run as like, what is the cloud? Like, where is it? Like, what is it? Like, I mean, I think that, that, uh, frame of mind has perpetuated. Um, how people view, uh, web hosting, right? And also, um, I, uh, know that you have a background from some of the bigger, uh, web hosting companies out there, and maybe you can talk a little bit about what your role was there, because I think we need to paint a little bit of color on how important web hosting is and web maintenance and web security. I think in today's world, it is, uh, certainly under discussed and it's under thought about. And, um, you know, I think a lot of times I see that meme of like, um, like a system admin and it's like, you know, the business owners like, Oh, you know, like, why do I pay you so much? Like nothing's going wrong. Right. And then there's another picture. And then it's like, uh, the business are going, Oh, why do I pay you so much? And, uh, everything's going wrong. Everything's going wrong. Right. Like, like, like you have a very difficult job, but you can't really win. Right. Um, because in every situation, a lot of this is, uh, obscured, uh, in the background to what a lot of people look at and see, and they're only seeing the front end of the website. And so maybe you could talk a little bit about

some of those things that, um, uh, for you, uh, you, you want to kind of bring to the forefront. Yeah. So, um, initially my role at, uh, had been, uh, doing customer service and then I transitioned from customer service, uh, to security investigation and engineering. Um, and in the digital landscape of things, I would, uh, compare it somewhat to a janitor, which makes that systems administration reference all the more apt because it's like, Oh, what do we have a janitor for? The bathrooms are always looking perfectly clean. Like, okay, there's, there's a reason for that. And that's because the janitor is going into them every hour. Um, but in, uh, the web hosting role, uh, it was mostly dealing with reports of hacked websites. Uh, in many cases, ones, uh, were reported to us by, uh, external parties. So one of the most common things, uh, for a hacked website to have is going to be what's called a phishing kit, which is that, for example, uh, your website.com forward slash OWA, instead of having, loading up anything that has to do with your website, uh, looks like an office 365, uh, login screen and is trying to get your credentials. Uh, most email providers catch those kinds of URLs really fast. And so the malicious actors out there are also having to repeatedly set those up on, tons and tons of different websites. Uh, my job at that was to, uh, deal, uh, with those, um, all day, uh, and without going into details as to what kind of numbers that entailed, uh, suffice it to say it was a all day, every day thing for a number of people. Um, like a lot of websites got hacked. It amazed me the extent to which people would set up a website, uh, and then just not touch it. Like, you know, in, in the, in the same way of thinking that they could install windows 3.1 on a computer and then just like, never worry about it. Like, what, what do you mean I

need to do upgrade on this 486? Like that, this is working fine for years. Right. Um, and, uh, so yeah, I mean, people would have ancient, you know, 10 years or more or 10 years old versions of WordPress, um, that had just never gotten updated. Um, yeah, I mean, people understand like, uh, upgrades, right. With, with maybe software, right. They understand like phone upgrades of security, like patches. Um, why do you think that on the website side of things that maybe gets overlooked by business owners or, uh, website owners? Um, I think first of all, the, one of the things I noticed from the customer, uh, experience side of things is that I've discovered a surprising number of business owners that don't actually look at their own website all that much. Um, I, when I was doing customer support, it wasn't a frequent thing, but it was not a totally unheard of thing to have someone, uh, you know, asking why their website wasn't working and turns out it was because their bill hadn't been paid in four months and they only just now notice. Um, so, I mean, like, uh, yeah, I, I, I still don't understand it, but a surprising number of business owners, uh, don't pay attention to their own website that much. Uh, the other aspect of that is that a lot of the malware that goes on. To these websites, uh, is very deliberately designed to keep itself concealed from business owners, from the people that are working on the website, et cetera. Uh, and the two easiest examples of this that are very, very common on a lot of these, uh, malware problems that websites get. Uh, the first one is that the malware is coded in such a way that if you went directly to your website, uh, it sets itself to not run. So if you go into your, uh, address bar and type, you know, www.example.com, uh, it wouldn't run. But if you were to go to Google and search for your website and then click

on one of the search listings on Google, then the code would see this person didn't come directly here. They arrived here from a search engine and then would flag to show them out. Um, the other thing that would be very common on these, and there's a number of different ways that these, uh, scripts would do it. Sometimes they do it by IP address. Sometimes they do it with cookies, uh, is they say, if this person has ever been to the website before, don't show them the malware. Like we got to hit this person once. We don't need to hit this person multiple times of the malware code because then it's way more likely that we'll get caught. Um, so don't, don't show them the malware, uh, if they've ever been to the website before. And so with those two things, you know, if you're not, uh, looking at the website under the hood, uh, you aren't having the right kinds of firewalls that keep your website from getting hacked in the first place. Uh, it's, uh, it's actually pretty easy for that kind of thing to go unnoticed. Yeah. I, I mean, I think that, um, these codes are getting a lot more elegant. These hacks are getting a lot more elegant and, um, and, uh, I think that, you know, people just don't look at, at web hosting as a critical piece of their infrastructure since COVID, right. Your digital storefront is like what most people will see. And it's where most eyeballs will be. Right. And it's like keeping your store, uh, in good working order and in good shape is to, to make sure you're doing this. And for SEO, if you get one of these hacks and Google picks it up, you're talking six months or a year, okay, like, you know, it re-indexes, it finds, uh, this Google said, Oh, I can't trust you anymore. Right. I can't show this to people. I can't show this to our visitors. And, um, you're going to be put in the penalty box

for, for a long time. And, uh, you know, a lot of people drive a lot of business from their website or even e-commerce sites. Like, I mean, it's a death blow, you know, uh, to do a large degree. Um, and if you're, uh, say a small business owner, smaller, medium sized business owner, um, you know, your website going down is going to cost you X amount of money. Right. Like, and if you're a bigger business every minute or every hour, you're losing whatever the multiple is of dollars based on how much you generate. Right. And, um, how many times. The loss on that is actually like relatively easy for a business to calculate. And I don't think a lot of businesses do the math. Uh, but you take, for example, um, you know, what amount of, uh, business for your business, what amount of revenue do you have coming in per year, um, of that revenue, what percent of it is, uh, coming in from your website? So we'll say your business is getting a million dollars a year revenue and for even numbers, 50% of it comes from your website. So that means your website's responsible for $500,000 a year in revenue. Uh, just looking at that math, like that, just a, uh, going that deep with the math. Uh, that makes a pretty clear picture that your website is a lot more valuable than people initially think it is. Uh, but then going deeper into that, uh, if your website is responsible for $500,000 a year in revenue, and it is out of operation for say a day, uh, that's $1,400 or so and lost revenue from a day of outage. Um, and if, uh, say half of the people that get to your website are coming organically, uh, and so you've been thrown back to page four for the next six months, that's $250,000 or so in lost revenue. Like it, it adds up fast, you know? Um, yeah, I mean, even bigger businesses, uh, have we not seen that they, from

a, uh, infrastructure standpoint? Um, I mean, w w you know, we're going into black Friday. I know we've, uh, have a client that, um, you know, we're not, we're not doing the, the web hosting for, um, and they don't actually have anybody internally that did it. And during a sale period, uh, their website went down for six hours and I mean, the amount of revenue that they lost from that, uh, certainly can be calculated, but it's more than enough, uh, revenue that they could, uh, be taking care of their web infrastructure properly. Right. And it's, you know, it's kind of like, why do you buy insurance? Right. You know, and, um, insurance is incredibly important. And, and so I, I think, you know, we're, we're, we're touching a lot of facets here, um, going a little bit beyond marketing. Um, but, but they all kind of layer on each other and they all are, are interwoven. Right. And so, um, there's a lot of, uh, agencies out there. Let's, okay. Let's talk about this. There's a lot of agencies out there that are using, um, some of the bigger providers, uh, out there for web hosting, and they have very limited access to their seat panel, to, uh, the backend of their website. Um, they're very limited on, on what they can do to, um, uh, affect the performance of the website that ultimately folds into SEO. So if you're, um, if you're not working with a provider that, uh, is, has SEO in mind and is doing things to optimize, uh, the backend of your website and, uh, the, the, the server side of what's happening. Um, I mean, that's a critical piece. I mean, can you, can you speak to maybe, um, you know, I know, and also like, let, let's talk about what, you know, to wrap up on the, uh, hack side of things, you know, how maybe like using cloud flare might, um, reduce some of these things. So maybe we can give some practical tips, uh, of what, what

people can do and then have them maybe explain. And, and so they understand, you know, what you're giving up essentially, um, if you're using some of these bigger providers and not only that, like I can tell you, there's certainly some headaches out there. So as you can see, I'm very biased. Okay. Of, of, of, uh, the current offerings, uh, in the marketplace, I think the current offerings in the marketplace are the same people that have been there kind of since the beginning. They're well entrenched. Um, and there's not, uh, there's not a lot of, um, you know, um, development, uh, it, into, uh, helping service some of these issues. So maybe you could speak to some of that. Yeah. So just to kind of, uh, do a ground up apples, oranges comparison. I think the majority of hosting providers out there are a setup of, sure, we'll have a place for you to run your website, um, and we'll have our infrastructure set up in such a way that it'll run a bunch of websites more or less. Or they're a reseller, or they're a reseller, right? They're just a real reseller skin, right? Yeah. Or they're a reseller. We've had, uh, uh, there, there was one client that, uh, I remember left us. And when I looked at where they were going to, I was like, I recognize this framework and do you think you're being hosted by your agency? But actually all they have is a reseller account for this other major web hosting or major web hosting company. But, um, from the ground up, you know, most web hosting companies operate off of pretty direct profit margins of like how many people can we step onto one server, um, in a way that it won't, that, that it'll be up most of the time that we won't have too many people complaining too loudly, uh, and we can bring in the next office for that. Sounds like an internet provider. No. Yeah. Yeah. I worked for one of those in the past

too. Um, it is, uh, our approach to this is that, you know, we want first and foremost to be offering a valuable service. And this was something that we were doing for our own agencies, customers, just as part of like a, Hey, this is one of the things that makes sense for you to be able to have good SEO on your other site. And we decided like, Hey, this is a service that everybody should be able to use. Not just people that are purchasing SEO services from us. Uh, and so that's why we spun it off into its own brand like that. Um, but from the ground up, uh, what people need to be doing, you know, you need to, uh, be on top of the security of your website. The easiest and most straightforward way of doing that is a, uh, make sure all your themes plugins, stuff like that are being kept up to date. Uh, and B, uh, have it, if your, uh, web hosting company does not include any sort of security features with the web hosting beyond SSL certificates, SSLs do not stop you from getting hacked in any way. Um, if your, uh, web hosting company doesn't include security features, have some sort of firewall type offering, uh, in front of your web hosting account. Uh, that can be cloud flare. If you're okay with managing your DNS settings and updating their own service, things like that, uh, that can be, uh, security, which I believe has since been purchased out by GoDaddy. Uh, security is a very reliable firewall provider for websites, uh, but have something so that like, you're not just leaving your wide open in a bad neighborhood. Uh, from, and those are the two simplest things you can do, I think, from a security standpoint, uh, and without knowing a lot of ins and outs of code, uh, that's really the only thing I think people, an average business owner can reliably do. Um, with that kind of side of things, you know, I mentioned

hosting providers that don't include security, uh, a lot of our MO is to how we designed all this is that if every business owner should be using this, we're going to include it as part of the package. Uh, so for example, with the posting accounts that are on our servers, there's a component of the server that looks at the person requesting the webpage and determines based on this IP address his reputation, are they a good person or a bad person? And then it looks at the nature of the request. Like, are, are you here to ring the doorbell or are you approaching a window with a rock on your hand or a rock in your hand, right? Like, uh, one of these is okay. And one of these we need to stop. Um, and so we include that kind of security and then we also have, uh, real time scanning, uh, anytime your hosting account is changing the files or anything like that. Uh, antivirus software looks at that, uh, identifies it has bad code just been written somewhere, uh, and if it has, it stops it, uh, that I think is the most directly actionable tip for security. What about backups? Backups. Um, yeah, that, that's, uh, that's another thing that I was kind of floored with how many people just didn't have any sort of plan in place for that. Um, uh, and of those that did, uh, the most common mistake I saw people making, uh, was putting that backup inside of their hosting account. Um, and that's kind of like, if you've got say really important documents that you, uh, need to make sure you don't lose, uh, that don't get destroyed in a fire or whatever. Uh, and so you take those documents to your all-in-one printer, you make a photocopy of them, and then you set that stack of photocopies right next to the original one such that the stack of the copy catches fire just as fast as the original stack does. Um, yeah, that, that's, uh, that's

what I see a lot of people doing with the backups on their hosting. Uh, we do two things with backups through one externalized separate location in the country space. Uh, we keep a daily backup, uh, for 30 days. So at any sort of point in the past 30 days, you can say, I need the way my files look like in my hosting account to be from 20 days ago. I need the databases to be the way they looked 17 days ago, and I need my DNS zone files to look the way they did 13 days ago, what have you. Uh, and so you can get very granular with that backup. And then we also do, uh, disaster recovery backups. The disaster recovery backups, we take a full archive of your account, uh, compress it, back it up, and put that again in a third, different, unrelated, different company, different data center, all of that. Uh, and we keep those around for twice a month for five years. Um, that's not really something that I see, uh, uh, that I know of any other hosting provider that really does that sort of retention on, um, and the way we have that done, it's set up in such a way that it's fairly pricey to retrieve that data if we ever actually need to. Um, but I saw far too many people that didn't have any sort of backup. Uh, and so they lost their entire website. Uh, like the best way that they could be helped was like, here, go to archive.org, use this as sort of a frame of reference and best of luck as you try and rebuild. Right. Um, which is kind of like saying, you know, my house burned down. Uh, well, uh, really sorry to hear that. Here's Google earth, go use these satellite images and do your best to rebuild it. Um, you know, it doesn't work very efficiently. And so we keep these backups around just because like, we know that there are a lot of things that can

go wrong. Um, there are cases where, uh, someone, maybe there's a new type of hack that comes out that security site features don't catch. Uh, maybe there was something that you realized, uh, was on your website and got wiped out. It must've been two, three months ago. But if we need to recover those sorts of backups, we can. And so that that's our backup procedure is we keep daily for 30 days and twice a month for five years. So what are the big boys do? Because people are probably listening and saying, man, that's phenomenal what you're doing. But like the big boys got me taken care of, right? Like, you know, I'm, I'm with whoever. And, and if my website goes down there, they're, they're going to find it. They're going to fix it. No problem. No extra cost. Like, you know, how does that compare from what you've seen with the bigger players? Um, what I've seen from the bigger players, uh, if you read through their hosting agreement and terms of service and all of that, uh, has legalese that basically says, uh, you're responsible for your own web hosting. And we make no promises that stuff isn't going to explode. We make no promises that we're not, that we're ever going to be able to recover stuff for you under any circumstance. Uh, if you don't have your own backup of it, uh, sucks to be. Wow. Like you, you, you look, look, look at your, uh, uh, contract with the bigger hosting providers and it makes it very clear that like, even if you're purchasing a backup solution from them, uh, they make no promises about anything due to loss or anything like that. Um, it's sort of a, if you don't, uh, we'll, we'll do this as like a hopeful convenience for you. Um, and if you're paying for this service, maybe we make that convenience a bit more frequent or a bit easier. Um, but they don't, uh, they don't really provide any sort of assurances behind it. Well,

that, and that, and that frankly, I will say is, you know, regardless of who you're, uh, who your company is that you're hosting with, whether it's us or anyone else, uh, the kind of the morality I'd say of that situation is a bit sound. Like if your website is such a key component to your business, you should have on your own USB drive or whatever, some sort of backup, you go into your hosting account and you manually take a backup of it once a month or something, but you should have, if something is so critically important to your business, you should have some procedure in place that you can. And be a hundred percent sure that you can take 100% control over recovering your data. Yeah. Well, you know, I, I, I know we've kind of jumped around and talked about a couple of different things. Right. And I didn't, I didn't have, uh, much of a, uh, agenda for this call. Um, but certainly I think that, um, what I am trying to communicate because we talk a lot about, uh, marketing, um, is this needs to be a wake up call. I think, uh, there's a lot of people out there that gloss over some of this stuff. And also they're working on other aspects of, of SEO, uh, and digital marketing, and they're not focused on, or really paying attention to the core asset in digital marketing, which should start with your website. And so making sure that your website, uh, is fast, it's hosted properly. It's optimized, um, is as you explore digital marketing, it's really where you should start. Right. And, and you shouldn't be getting, um, too fancy. Um, there's a lot of shiny objects out there, uh, in digital marketing. There's a lot of new things that are always around the corner, uh, that you think might be a silver bullet, but I'm a big proponent of, uh, really laying a strong foundation and having a good hosting provider, uh, that is taking care of you, looking out

for your best interests and has the technical capabilities, uh, to help optimize your website. And if there's an issue, they can get you out of the ditch is certainly important. Um, I believe that the team that we've built, the team that you've built is, um, invaluable. Uh, and I think it's something that a lot of other agencies, a lot of other business owners, a lot of other freelancers have been, uh, jumping around from hosting provider to hosting provider to find the right solution. Um, and, and not only that, um, you, you talked about offering, uh, a hassle-free guarantee. Um, can you talk maybe a little bit about that? Yeah. So, uh, there are a lot of hosting providers that will, uh, you know, moving a hosting account is a lot of work. Um, like it is not an easy process in most circumstances to move a website on one provider to another. Uh, and most of the hosting providers I've seen, uh, will have sort of a, if you, uh, want to come over to us, uh, we'll charge you for the work of, uh, moving that website. And if you want to leave us, uh, here's our help documentation and Godspeed. Um, we, we, we take that approach a little bit differently. We're not really looking to run, uh, a prison system of web hosting. Um, so we do charge for the work of moving a website over. Um, but on the other hand, like we want our customers to be happy. We don't want our customers feeling like they're stuck with us. And so if you come to a, if you have a website with us and, uh, say like, Hey, this isn't working out, uh, I want to go elsewhere. Uh, you can buy a hosting account with any other web provider. We'll help you move it away for free. Um, because we think that that's just sort of like the ethical way to run a business, right? It is like, if you don't want to keep doing business with us, we

will do our best to make it as seamless and, uh, painless for you to go elsewhere. Got it. Got it. Well, you know, um, I know we covered a lot, um, before we go, William, is there anything that we, we didn't cover that you want to make sure that's maybe communicated, uh, to our audience? Co, cohosted.com go there. If you have questions about what may, might be able to do for your website, open up a ticket. You don't even have to create an account to open up a ticket with us and just, uh, mention your website to us. Tell us what's going on and we'll give you some pointers if you'd like as to what we can do to help. Uh, and if you're ready to have your website run fast, plans are listed on our website. Fantastic. Thank, thank you. Um, so much, William. So if, if you're out there and you're dealing with a web hosting issue and you're frustrated, um, or you think, uh, you need to be doing better, uh, technical optimization, uh, of your website, if you're an agency out there, um, and you want access to our team, uh, we have the best team in the business. Uh, we are offering those services to the public. And so, um, that's really, really, uh, I think exciting for a lot of people, uh, because this is again, the most critical part of digital marketing and should be the foundation of what you start with. And that's why it's called cohost up, right? Because we're cohosting it with you and we're going to work with you to optimize, uh, that backend. So if you are looking for SEO hosting, go to cohost.com and check it out. Um, I can tell you, uh, we wouldn't be where we are as an agency, uh, without you and your team, William. So we very much appreciate you and wanted to give you a platform, uh, to, um, connect and communicate your value, uh, to the rest of the world. So, um, thank you so

much, uh, for coming on, uh, the unknown secrets of internet marketing. I know that this was a different format for a lot of you listening, but I think, uh, it was good to, um, change it up. So thanks so much for coming on, William. Thank you for having me. All right. And we'll see you next time. Bye-bye for now.