#1017 - WP-Tonic Show: Do Traditional Hosting Companies Have a Future?

Speaker A: You're listening to the WP tonic, um, WordPress and tech focused on building a successful business in WordPress aimed at the WordPress professional and power user. Join Jonathan Denwood and Kurt Von Ahnin as your host and co host as we bring you great discussions from around the globe.

Speaker B: Welcome back folks to the WP Tonic Show. This is episode 117 episode. Um, we got no guests for this particular show so it's going to be a chat between me and Kurt. We've got a juicy subject. Do traditional hosting companies have a future in the world of AI? You know with products like Lovable and similar, um, AI page builders. Um, I actually think they do. So does Kirk. Bit of a giveaway but things are changing and I thought this would be a great discussion to highlight how hosting and how, how WordPress, um, is adapting to the world of AI and I think it's quite exciting. I've been looking at some products and some of the great influencers in the WordPress community that are doing some excellent videos on this subject. So Kurt, would you like to quickly introduce yourself to the tribe?

Speaker A: Yeah. Jonathan, my name is Kurt Von Ahnin. I own an agency called Manana Nomas and we do a lot of great work with the great team over at WP Tonic and Lifter lms.

Speaker B: Yeah and it should be a great show. Before we go into the meat of potatoes, got a message from one of our major sponsors. Like to say we've got some new sponsors coming up on the show. Um, really excited really. Um, great new sponsors, um, got one that's staying with us but we that should be starting sometime this month. Um, great news, we really do appreciate the sponsors. Um, without their help we couldn't actually produce this show. So we will be back in a few moments folks.

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Speaker B: We're coming back want to point out ah we've got some great special offers from the sponsors plus a created list of the best WordPress plugins and technology and services all in one place. Um, you can get this great free resource by going over to wp-tonic.com deals wp-tonic.com Deals. You'll find all the goodies there. What more could you ask for my beloved tribe? Probably a lot more, but that's all you're going to get on that page. So, um, so it's a kind of clickbait title. Um, do, uh, do traditional hosting companies have a future? And in a way I suppose they don't because I think they're going to have to adapt as well. I think a lot of them are. Um, but I do really see a divergence on, um, how hosting companies cope in the new world of AI and the new reality of using AI to build a website. Um, so Kirk, what, what's your own feelings around this as well?

Speaker A: I was reflecting back on my own journey with hosting, you know, as I've run my own, my own thing, and then of course grown into Manana Nomas. And I think my path was a lot like what we see with the clients that we deal with. Jonathan, they, you know, they're not, nobody really knows what they're supposed to be doing, so they start like jumping in, saying, what's, what's a good place to put a website? Where's this, where's you? Then they start saying, oh, well, some of these are 100 bucks a month and some of these are 10 bucks a month. Why would I pay 100 bucks a month if I could pay 10? And then, you know, they, they start, you know, they start trying to weigh risk and reward without understanding what the risk and reward is. And I did that. I ended up using substandard tools for a good many years and things function and things worked. And so I thought that I was doing the right thing. But then when I upgraded, I was like, oh my gosh, I should have done this five years ago. And then I upgraded again and I was like, I should have done this three years ago. And, and uh, and right now we're in the same space where we are examining the hosting that we provide our clients. We're looking at page speed, we're looking at different performance, uh, issues. And we're saying, okay, on the platform we're on now, is this where we want to stay with our people or do we want to move to something that's, you know, more modern, more performant and things like that. And I think that's like a never ending thing.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think, um, we're going to be doing a show Tomorrow, folks, around 8:00am um, which is called the Membership Machine show and that's. That's really more aimed at end users. This particular show is aimed at WordPress professionals or power users. Um and um, obviously you've got. If you're offering ongoing maintenance and hosting white labeled hosting even that's changing. That's becoming more of a hybrid itself in some ways. Um, but um. It. But then you add AI to the mixture, don't you? And I was Tony telling Kirk, um when I was doing some research for this show, um, a couple of people that I always follow, you know Paul from WP Tuts, he does a fantastic job and Dave Fry Fry Fo y Froy. I uh, kind of butchered his last name but he does a great job and they were doing it. Uh, they've done some excellent videos which will be in the Show Notes folks or um, go to the WP Tonic website and next week the show notes should be up and I'll make sure all these links are in there. But they've done a couple of videos lately where the stack they're using is. They're using um, Bricks which I really like. Um, um. I think of the non um Gutenberg solutions, uh, I think bricks is one of the best out there. And then they're using Automatic css, um, which is a framework product which I think is excellent as well. Um, but then they're combining it with an mcp. This is a. Is. This is what is called a model context protocol. Um, it enables um, you. It's a open source product and it enables you to um, work with various large language models like um, all the leading ones. Um and um. But the problem has been folks is that you build a website, you use your prompts, you're in Claude using prompts, typing them or you're using I use um, excellent product called Super Wispier. Um, there's a couple of these that enables you just to talk to Claude, you don't even have to type. Um. And then um. It builds. Um. One of the problems is that if. And um. I think I might consider joining Dave's Freud's ah next course. Um because he does say. Does an excellent course as well. Um because he provides a kind of framework with. To. Because if you don't provide a outline, a build to Claude, it will just go out and build something and it. It could use modern um standards, it could use something that um, came eight years ago and what it tends to do is it mixes it all up in one not very tidy bundle. Um, but using um, the MCP and Then a third party plugin called Nova Media Pro. They do a free product, but it's, uh, Nova Media Pro. This enables you to, at the present moment, M. It only works with bricks. And Elemator. Um, it doesn't. I think I'm correct. They don't offer a, uh, M. Gutenberg solution yet. Um, it, um. So you build the initial website with a, with a framework which Dave and other people seem to be providing, so you don't get this jumble, but then you can import it and using bricks, you can actually visually edit the website instead of having to build, rebuild the whole thing and import it again. Um, it's a little bit off topic, but I'm going to get back to why I brought this up. But what's your initial, um, response to what I've just outlined? Kurt?

Speaker A: So when I watch these things, um, and you see these people, you know, talking to their computers, you know, I do stuff with Emily at Lifter LMS and she'll talk to Claude and make magic happen. Um, people that are proficient at it, they have a way of making it look easy. And then people that are new to the space or not as confident in the space, you can see the struggle. I mean, there's, there's a marked difference between this. This is, it's like sports. Um, you know, when I was racing motorcycles, Jonathan, I could win a regional event, I could come home with trophies and feel really great about myself. And everybody would say, you're so fast, you should go race nationals. And then I'd sign up for a national and promptly come in last, you know, and the only time I was on cameras, if I was getting lapped, it's like if you were a professional, like if you were to run marathons locally and then sign up for the Boston Marathon, you'd feel like you were walking a race by yourself. Right. It's, um, that level of difference, I think. And I think there's a huge gap between these people. So I'm going to put Kevin Geary in this too, because Kevin Geary does this AI thing with Etch as well. And so you have that. You have this bricks example. You've got stuff that Emily's done in Sky Pilot, uh, with that theme. And it's interesting, but I also think it's largely intimidating to the average user or even the average freelancer.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think, you know, if you go and watch Paul's, um, excellent latest video about this, um, it is, it's not beta, uh, but it is. Well, it's, it's Very early days. Um, Nova Mia it's been out for a little while but it's still early days. But um, I think it's great news for the WordPress community that these products are being developed because um, I really, this is, I might be totally wrong but I see this as the clear roadway for WordPress in the next couple years. Um, now when it gets back to hosting this there seems to be a kind of divide here with hosting providers and they're not all doing it. I don't know if WP engines doing this or, or uh. Kinsta. I know some other services, Cloud, um, um, Cloudways, um, um at WP Tonic we use xCloud they do this but most of them are doing this at a slightly extra charge and what I mean is that they're providing an MCP service, a server and most of them it's a small extra charge um, to run M MCP server. And if your hosting provider does offer that um, then you could look at something like novame Pro. And I know that there's a couple competitors I'm just pointing out because um, the videos I watched it looked pretty cool to me and they've got a uh, year or lifetime deal. Um, now the divide is that there's um, and I'm sure um, there's a number of hosting companies that um, are offering NCP server, um but then there's another group of hosting providers that are not really aimed at the WordPress agency, UM Freelancer, power user. They're, they're aimed at um, the consumer to some extent and they're offering a integrated. Well I say that they, they do have sections where they are you know um, one of them we're going to be talking about is 10 web. They do have a white labeled product which they aimed at agencies and freelancers and the hostinger I think they do the same don't they? Um, so there's a small group that are offering a AI website builder. Uh some of them are based on WordPress and there's a lot of overlap because Alamata uh, offered their own hosted AI solution don't they? I forgot the name of it Kirk. What's it called?

Speaker A: I think that's Angie.

Speaker B: That's Angie. And yeah I think you're right there. And so some of the web site builder solutions are offering a hosted solution as well aren't they? But the three that I've got on my list is um, hostinger, uh 10 web but then I've got GoDaddy Aero. Well that's not based on WordPress is it that, uh, that's their own, that's their own system, isn't it? So what's your thoughts about some of these hosting providers providing their, seem to be their own platform, don't they?

Speaker A: You know, Jonathan, I'm looking at this and I'm just trying to, I'm trying to layer things in. I have kind of like a logical brain, right? Like first this, then this, then this, then this. And, and I know sometimes when people listen to me, especially over time, it can seem like I have a lot of irons in the fire. But when it comes to the, when it comes to the hosting, I, I still prefer a more simple approach. So, and here's, here's where I'm going with this. Like when you factor in mcps and AI and all that from the hosting perspective, what's that doing to bandwidth and to usage and to server resources and overall costs that you're going to incur on these platforms? These platforms all seem to have a, uh, certain trend. And I don't mean to sound negative because this is not, I'm really not trying to sound negative, but usually it's attractive to buy in, uh, hosting companies around for a year, two years, everyone ransome raised about how fast and amazing it is, everybody signs up and then two, three years in all the prices go up and the uh, server resources seem to dwindle down a bit. Um, and that's just the nature of business, especially if private equity gets involved. Right. Because you know, now squeaking out every last margin percentage is going to be the priority. So as we add these complexities to the hosting, I feel like, and again, uh, I'm going to go back to people that are, people that are newer to the space. You could be a professional freelancer, but you're newer to the space. It gets overwhelming and confusing. So when people start talking about layering, you know, Cloudflare and NPCs and DNS management and email inboxing, uh, versus, you know, Google Workspaces or something with Zoho, it just starts to get all these pieces that begin to fragment your approach. And when you're an agency or when you're a freelance person offering hosting services, your goal is to provide like the simplest solution to your client. And I'm not seeing us go in a simple direction. I'm seeing us go more fragmented and more overwhelming as time goes instead of better. Uh, you had mentioned xCloud and I'm just going to be, I'm going to throw it out there. There's A lot of people in our circles, Jonathan, that love xCloud. Um, but for a new person going into xCloud, it's like you can connect any server to this. Oh, we have our own servers. Oh, you want to be on our cloud service. Oh, you want to be on our managed service. You want to be. It's like people don't know how to pick these things and they don't know how to look at differences. And so like some, some value based servers, when you see it they're going to say, oh, we're Apache, we're lightspeed, we're this, we're that. And then you look at other things and they go, well you know we have nginx, we have, we have this, you know, we have this version of Cash versus that version of Cash. And I feel again, I feel like maybe, maybe in some cases we're paying for goods and services that shouldn't even be offered anymore. They're outdated, they're slow and they don't work well. And then we have these new products but we don't really understand what they are and how they work.

Speaker B: Well I don't totally agree with you but I understand where you're coming from, from, um, but I, I think you're spot on. There's a lot of divergence and a lot of it. It's only going to accelerate. But I think it's a good time for us to go for our ah, break and when we come back we can continue the discussion. Um, also I, I think this, this has been if you've been in this game for a while, you've seen this happened before and ah, I'll delve into a bit of that in the second half as well. So we're going for our break folks. We will be back in a few moments.

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Speaker B: this podcast episode is brought to you by Lifter LMS, the leading learning management system solution for WordPress. If you or your client are creating any kind of online course, training based membership website or any type of e learning project, Lifter LMS is the most secure, stable, well supported solution on the market. Go to lifterlms.com and save 20% at checkout with coupon code podcast20. That's podcast2zero. Enjoy the rest of your show. Also want to point out that you can join us live on the podcast. Um, you can either join us on LinkedIn or YouTube. We try and do the show at 11:00 o' clock on Thursdays M that Central Daylight Time 11:00am um and um, we love you to join us and have a discussion with us during the recording of the show. We've got some people with us now, got Dave 1790 and we had a good crowd joined us last week for the round table show. So we love you to join us. So let's um, let's go straight into it some more. Um, I suppose because um, I saw this with one of the areas you've got to be a bit careful about. Um but it can be overstated is the ability to just move from one host the other. Um that's, that's been there but the ability to move from one page builder to another to change from one starter website or theme, whatever you want to call it and um, when you actually build out a site and it's running for a while that's the reality of moving away is a lot more different than the propaganda as I would call it. But uh, um I do understand what you mean because basically you from a hosting provider all you really want is the best performance and, and decent support. But it is difficult isn't it? Because where does a hosting provider, you know, you're the freelancer, you're the, you're the agency, you're the one you should be supporting it. Um if you're asking it you know, um, where does your responsibility start and where does hosting providers responses, you know um. And it's just you know normally when they are dealing direct with customers, not freelancers or professionals, um the hosting companies always has in to make that decision. You know, are they going to provide quality life support 24. 7 Is it going to be a ticketing system? Um, you know, where are the, where are the barriers? Where, where, where do, where do they help with other plugins with plugin conflicts? Stuff that doesn't really. It's always been a bit of a nightmare isn't it Kurt?

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Well and then you know some of these hosting companies have their own plugins, you know that they must use plugins or um, install like some have their own caching plugins or things like that and it's interesting to know like, so, so where do you, where do you fall on that? Right, like so are you a product company? Are you a hosting company? Are you, are you both? Um, and I'll tell you like I have used a couple of hosts and even some of the bargain hosts where everyone said oh don't go there, that's junk. Right. I was on the junk for a while and I still got what I thought was good support. I'm usually pretty self sustaining. Like I'll look up the documents and I'll look up things and I'll, I, I'll put some due diligence in but if I, if I hit a roadblock and, and, and hit support I'll say this is what I've looked at, this is what I've done, this is what I tried, this didn't work. Can you help me? Boom. And I always get great support from, from, from hosting which I think is, I think it's more than what I paid for to be honest with you in those regards.

Speaker B: Yeah, um, and I was like, I was watching um, I know with Animator there, um, with their version four, you know, I was watching a live discussion that Paul on WP Tuts was having. Um, and um, they were saying in the Elementor community and I do have um, one of their old ah, licenses. Um, and we got some clients that we built websites on Animator and I've got the old thousand website license $199 a year. Um, but we no longer promote it. We will, we will host websites if somebody's built one. Um, and we will continue supporting. We haven't told these people that we can be rebuilding a website in four because it, we just can't do that. Um, but um, it is uh, absolutely fine. Sorry about that. It is um, it is a difficult situation but there have, they've been having their own problems with Animator, uh, for um. And then I think in the mix a lot of the WordPress community haven't warned to Gutenberg. Another part of the communities is totally committed to Gutenberg. I try not be more pragmatic about the thing, um, not be so tribal but it is difficult because you know if somebody's a freelancer they really got choose their stack, haven't they? If they, they can't be using three or four main tools because that would be inefficient, wouldn't it? Or you're, you're, you're muted, I think you're muted

Speaker A: as we focus the discussion on hosting again from the uh, from the freelance perspective or, or agency perspective. I talk to people that literally have things spread out over five, six hosts. Or, or they have a client, they go, well, this client was on WP Engine, so I got them over there and I got this one on Cloudways and I got a couple of people on bluehost, I got a couple on Hostinger, and it's like, whoa, whoa. Like that's, that's a lot of things to try and figure out. Uh, I took on more of a freelance task last year with a driving school and they were like, it was a Lifter LMS thing where they're like, we just need help with our Lifter LMS stuff. And I was like, okay, well I'm a pro in that space. I'll help you. Sure. And I, I shortcut some things. Jonathan. Normally I'm like, we can migrate your site, we can put you over here, we'll give you a hosting package, we'll do the maintenance for you. Normally that's the deal. But it was like, nah, this should be straightforward. It's a simple ask. Boom. Well, the reason they hired me is because they were on Dreamhost and there was all kinds of conflicts between stuff they had done previously and plugins they had removed from their website but didn't completely remove from their website and the uh, Lifter LMS stuff. So there were conflicts, but because it wasn't my hosting, because I wouldn't have full control over the stack, it was not an easy task and it turned into an absolute nightmare that we ended up losing money on it. It was just a. Because you want to be familiar with, to your point, you build your stack, you build what you're efficient and you're competent in. And when you start jumping out of your comfort circle into these other areas, you open yourself up to potential losses.

Speaker B: Yeah. And then we add, we add uh, to the hosting mix, AI, don't we? As we were talking about in the first half, it, it, it's. There's so, you know, you got products like Divi, you got products like Breakdance, um, you've got products like Bricks. And of the non. Gutenberg solutions, I like Bricks the most. M. I think they found the right balance. And um, I think people that in the WordPress influencer community like Paul and Dave, they, they push. Um, obviously Paul's made his feelings clear about Gutenberg. He's not a big fan of it, so he kind of pushes Bricks. And Dave I think is the same. I, I shouldn't put words in his mouth, but these are, I think pretty Quality people that have got a good track record and it's really interesting to see. Um, I'm not saying Animator is a bad company, but, um, because I've not been actively in that community for a while, it was the main tool. When I was actually designing and developing sites for people, it was the main tool I was using. Um, and um, version three, they seem to do a good job of cleaning that up to a certain degree. But what I'm hearing is that version four, it hasn't gone, it's not gone that well. Um, and then you've got this whole business about what, you know, who they're aiming their product up. But on the other hand, and it's not known, but I think there are a lot of people say they're running like 15 to 20 million websites. Um, so they're not um, they can't adapt as quickly as something like Nova Mira Pro or something like that. But I think it's really good news that these products are appearing because like I say, I think using an Claude, I've been playing around with it a little bit. It is impressive what it's. When it comes to actually build, you know, you give it some examples, you can um, say build free versions, um, provide like just three pages, these main templates, give us three versions, blah. It does save an enormous amount of time, but you do need to be able to put that into an editor of some kind like WordPress. Um, and I think it, I think what people are doing in this area, um, it's reassuring really because I think it will keep WordPress, um, it just assists WordPress to keep it relevant basically. What do you feel?

Speaker A: Well, I'm listening to you talk about these different tools and channels and the thing that resonates in my mind is just kind of the way that, you know, Spencer Foreman frames it when he's on the, on the uh, on the panel show. Right. WordPress is the box and then there's you know, all these other things that we can do with that as the core piece of the uh, of the platform and it makes total sense, it's where I get lost is, is when you were describing earlier, I'm not going to say lost. Lost is, is weird. It's that it, there's a lot of moving pieces. So when I have ah, even in the bricks example, so I've got a few websites in bricks and um, automatic css, I mean that really changes the whole experience in bricks quite a bit. And so, you know, it does automatic spacings and you know, headline above and below and it does a lot of things for you automatically which is cool. Uh, but then you throw in an MCP in there and you start getting Claude talking to your website and I think things could get, things could get hairy for some people pretty quickly.

Speaker B: Oh, I, I think I haven't made, I, I, I would never, never put this on a production website. Never. Okay, yeah, never put this on a production website. You, that's bonkers stuff. Um, I would, you need a staging site and you never connect MCP to your production website. Folks, I would never suggest that um, this is really clearly a staging local staging and you, you know, and then because as what Dave does really well in the video I watch is that Claude, it does jumble like inline CSS that hasn't jumbles percentages with pixels still, you know, where other people are going on leading edge of css, um, that not even using percentages or ems or gone on to another level, um, where you're fine with something like Claude, unless you give it real structure and real instruction about what technology and what um, framework it's going to use. It will just go out and take a bit here, take a bit there to and just put it all together into a pretty hot mess. What I've seen, um, and I, I think a lot of people that be kind of pushing Claude and Claude, you know, we, you can get a $10,000 website in 20 minutes. Um, um, I, I, I think that's great Click um, for YouTube. But it's not great advice really for the, for people trying to build a real business in web design or development or a business in general. What do you reckon, Kurt?

Speaker A: Well, now we're diving back into one of my, one of my points of contentions. Um, so I'm an expert in lifter lms, right. And, and so I sound like a commerce, I sound like a broken record here. But now when we sell a package to a new client, we can build the framework to that website with placeholder content for them and everything. Like, like we can get them like, like a sample ready to go the same day the contract is signed. And that's when I, when I talk to other people in the space they act like that's some kind of a surprise. And so I think there is so much value to being an expert and efficient at what you do to the point where let's be real, Jonathan, if I had to open up Claude and say oh I want to make an E learning website, right. To me it's just easier to open up WordPress install lifter, lms, put in the theme that I want to use, put in some content that I've got, some structure, some placeholder content and then I've got a sample to show the customer that we can say, okay, here's what we've got so far. Right? Because seeing is so much different than discussing it with clients. Clients don't have the, they usually don't have that mental imagination, right? So you got to show them something and you go, okay, so we can, you know, we can move this heading, we can change this picture, we can take the section out, we can add a section. Um, and then at that point is when I see like, okay, if I was in a staging environment or a development environment and I leverage some MCP AI tools to help with that level of adjusting, maybe that would be the efficiency that comes in. But it's. I think everyone's workflow is different and I don't think that AI or these other tools are a replacement for being a professional that's efficient and competent.

Speaker B: Yeah, um, um. Well, I think Matt Matias from the um. It's also talked about this, um, where, where is this boundary where it's just going to be easier just to install WordPress, a start, a. Start a website, a theme, whatever you want to call it, and then use a bit of AI then, then trying to build the whole thing. And I, I think that's what you're expressing as well and that that's where the balance is going to have to be found. It's just that um, there's a lot of confusion, confusion, um, misguidedness, um, I think things are balancing out a little bit. But I, I really do see hosting really, um, Diva breaking into two paths, paths that we have just talked about, um, in the first half of the show where they're offering their own integrated AI building system. Right. And that, and they will you just like you said that some hosting providers bought plugins to um, and they bundled them to um, make their hosting more sticky and more defendable to build a bigger mole round it. Well that's what some of these hosting companies are doing with AI. They're providing their own AI solution, some of it integrated WordPress like GoDaddy's arrow. It's not WordPress at all. And then you've got other hosting providers through mcp. Um, they're going to offer the basic tools but then you'll have the choice to um, integrate Claude, whatever large language model you're going to use, Codex, whatever you choose to use. Um, but don't do it on. The main thing is not to do it on the production website. I copied that. Clear. Right, Kirk, I think I'm waffling now, but let's end the show. What's the best way for people to find out more about you and what you're up to, Kurt?

Speaker A: Well, uh, Kurt von Ahnen on LinkedIn. It's a great way to reach me. Uh, I'm the only one there, so I'm easy to find. And then, uh, Manana Nomas is the business name and it's our call sign on all the socials.

Speaker B: Yeah. And if you found this, uh, topic interesting, um, best way to give us some comments, some input is go to the WP Tonic YouTube channel. Leave a comment there. Did we do a good job? A bad job? And also think about joining us live on Thursdays. We've got one or two people that joined us today. It's always great when people join us and be part of the conversation and part of the community. We will be back next week with hopefully a great guest. We'll see you soon, folks. Bye. Hey, thanks for listening. We really do appreciate it. Why not visit the Mastermind Facebook group and also to keep up with the latest news, click wp-tonic.com forward/newsletter. We'll see you next time.