Toby Cryns (00:00)
Welcome to the Agency Action Show, starring Kurt Von Ahnen and Toby Cryns Kurt, tell me about WordPress hosting. What's the deal?

Kurt Von Ahnen (00:09)
Well, first off, we teased everybody and said we would talk about WordPress hosting. And then I think we held people captive and said, you got to like, share and follow before we'll talk about it. And I saw some liking, some sharing and some following. my real question is, is like, what makes, what, what are the earmarks of a great hosting option? this, this comes up all the time. So, you know, I run the live calls with lifter LMS. I, I,

talked to Jonathan Denwood at WP Tonic endlessly about hosting and hosting options. And recently I've seen a ton of people moving over to a German bare metal server and then managing that server through ⁓ X cloud or something like that. And, ⁓ you know, some people in my, in my immediate circles were doing that, but then I started looking and there was a bunch of other people I knew that were doing that. And then

I interviewed someone from Pressable you know, Ben and Chase over there at rocket.net. think those guys are awesome. that, that put what hosting.com into the picture when they did that coming together with rocket.net. I mean, let's just be honest. We, we seem to have friends or peers at all of these things. Like I was with Bluehost for like 16 years when I launched my agency and I liked the people at Bluehost. And then one day I got a surprise invoice.

And I said, I'm not paying this like that's, you know, I thought I was grandfathered in on some amazing deal and apparently my amazing deals no longer valid. So I had to find something that was more is performative. The word I'm looking for. I need to find something that was more performative and budget friendly, like at the same time. And I was able to find that I was able to, I was able to find something that performed better and cost me less. and since then I've jumped, I've jumped host two or three times with me and all my clients.

again looking for performance and budget. But it makes me wonder what makes people make the choice because we have we have hundreds of choices.

Toby Cryns (01:56)
I think like there's a number of scenarios that are potential. I'm just thinking like us as agency owners, operate, you know, our, our reasons for choosing a host are probably different from, you know, small mom and pop looking for a host. I, know, I think you had listed some things that in our, in our preparation doc that were, ⁓ that could be important, like things like support speed, customized set up.

Kurt Von Ahnen (02:06)
Yeah.

Toby Cryns (02:19)
dashboards and tools, where's the server at? Do they have a CDN built in? Security? backups? Do they have a staging site? What does managed mean? Are you sharing resources? Are you not? ⁓ Yeah.

Kurt Von Ahnen (02:21)
Yeah.

What does manage mean that? That's a good question, cause everyone's got a different, a different story for men.

You got me there. I thought I was over the flu, but you squeaked a cough out of me. okay. So, I'll throw some names out and experiences, right? when I got started doing this game and I was in blue host, the pricing was amazing and I had like a control panel.

Toby Cryns (02:38)
Yeah.

Kurt Von Ahnen (02:51)
and one click installs for a lot of different tools that I sampled or played with or used and, tried to figure out like what services do I even want to offer my clients? Right? Like I remember I was getting started and so there were all these things I could like one click install, you know, a photo gallery, one click install a shopping cart. I, and I got to play with things and learn as I went and it helped me understand what I was, what I was going to offer in the future as I grew my business. Right? So I really credit, I, it sounds weird because people go

bust on me for promoting Bluehost, but Bluehost really did give me an education on tool sets and support and how to do things. Again, it was just unfortunate that it didn't work and stay that way very long. By very long, mean 16 years. I think that's pretty long. I moved on to Cloudways directly after Bluehost and that was talk about a culture shift.

You know, I had to go in like set up the server. There was no like, there was no one click install email addresses. That's for sure. I had to get an account with rack space and then figure out how elastic email worked. And then, you know, ran into limitations on a couple of website builds and then figured out, I gotta go into the settings in the server. You know, I gotta change the, I gotta change the maximum file upload number. I've got to change the PHP memory. I've got to, so you again, learning curve.

big learning curve had to figure out how all that stuff worked. And one of the things I liked about cloudways was I could just slam URLs in there. could just slam hosting packages into that platform. Right. But then I wasn't really tracking bandwidth and usage per package. And some of my sites started to, to, ⁓ hurt a little bit from that. Right. And then I was like, well, I gotta do something better. And then for me anyway, and, and, you know, I've

jumped a couple of times, but right now, personally, we're with 20i and I'm really happy because I'm getting the support that I want. I've got a couple of different hosting packages there. So I've got some of my projects on reseller hosting and some of my projects on their cloud hosting, which is a little more performative, but I've got that. have a stack panel, they call it, and I'm able to go in and manage things directly through the stack panel and find a way to usually do what I need to do pretty quickly.

And they've got good support, like really good support.

Toby Cryns (05:02)
One thing about support that is interesting with from company to company, from hosting company to hosting company is how do you want to contact support? ⁓ Phone, email, real-time chat, ticket system. Everyone has a different preference. Sometimes as an agency, if it's not urgent, I'm just like, I would love to support a ticket, but sometimes the hosting company doesn't support tickets. They're like, no, you have to either call us or live chat with us. And there are companies that

Kurt Von Ahnen (05:17)
you

Yeah.

Toby Cryns (05:28)
Basically you have to call, which might be a huge, maybe you're someone who's like, yeah, I love calling and talking to people. And there are companies with that infrastructure built. There are companies with none of that built. You're just talking with AI, like some AI bot that's not at all helpful. And by the way, and by the way, price point, it's not necessarily an indicator of how you're going to interact with their support. Like some, you know, some companies you pay a lot and you get very little support. And this gets back to like.

Kurt Von Ahnen (05:42)
Not a fan of that.

No.

Toby Cryns (05:55)
As an agency, you're going to have specific needs. You're going to have specific teammates. ⁓ If you have somebody who on your team who knows servers and all that, you don't really need a lot of support maybe from a hosting company and you can choose your infrastructure that way. But if you need support, if you need a lot of support, you're probably going to need a company that can support you in that way. And I've been all over, I've done the kind of like the bare metal type of thing where I have.

was running the server myself and I was not qualified, is decades ago, but I'm like, I realized pretty quick, I'm like, I cannot run the server. ⁓ exactly. And so I hired someone to run it and I'm like, this is too complex. And so like, we ended up going, you know, moved to some shared provider and now we're, we have a different setup, but yeah, there's just like all these considerations and.

Kurt Von Ahnen (06:31)
And that was back before you could ask Claude the question, right?

Toby Cryns (06:47)
Let's say you're, Kurt, you're talking to somebody who maybe they're a client or maybe they're, you're onboarding them as a client. They're like, we have an e-learning site. Uh, it's getting the job done. It's paying the bills. It's slow. You know, maybe the SEO is okay. Like how do you approach the hosting conversation? What questions might you ask them?

Kurt Von Ahnen (07:06)
When it comes to projects that we build or where tools are required, we include, you know, agency access to our plugins through our hosting packages. And so if you're hosting with us, we're going to support your, your license and we're going to do your, your updates for core and for the plugins, we're going to manage that for you. So that makes that kind of an easy conversation for us to have, because we're able to come in and say, if you're hosting with us, we can X, Y, Z, and take care of this thing.

Not all of our clients are hosted with us. To your point, someone comes in with some pre-existing hosted package. We've got one on WP Engine right now, right? And they go, they go, well we're on WP Engine. We just prepaid for the year. But we want to add these features, these features, these, you know, these things. Okay, great. So do you want us to provide that for you and pay us support to manage that in that environment for you? Or do you want to buy those?

buy those things, have us configure it, and then it's yours to manage after that. And so we have that conversation. But if they have a conversation about it's slow, you know, that comes down to a, you know, kind of a paid discovery kind of event. We're going to want to, you know, analyze how is it built? What kind of plugins are weighing this thing down? I just, just as a story, I went into a customer's website, pre-existing website two days ago. First time I go in.

they had bought Lifter LMS and they bought Lifter LMS Infinity. Lifter LMS is one of these plugins kind of like Groundhog where you have the main plugin and then each of the add-ons is another plugin, right? Some people love it, some people hate it. Well, a lot of customers buy the Infinity with Lifter and they just install all the plugins. So I go into the guy's website and he's got like the Ninja forms add-on, the WP forms add-on, the Gravity forms add-on. It's like, dude,

Toby Cryns (08:47)
Yeah.

Kurt Von Ahnen (08:50)
Dude, they're all activated. I'm like, I'm like, we, we, gotta, we gotta clean this up. Like we gotta clean this up. And then he's got three caching tools. Well, two of them, two of them gotta go, you know? And so we will do that, you know? And so some of it's paid discovery. Some of it is site cleanup. And then you and I, we could be real on the show. How many hosts just plain suck? Well, not many like

Realistically, if someone's on WP Engine, the site's going to work. If they're on cloudways, it's going to work. If they're on Kinsta, it's going to work. It's, but then you have to make up your mind as an agency. What's my comfort level in this new management space? Like how do you manage that website? Like, the whole Hetzner I think it's called Hetzner, the German server bare metal thing and the X cloud combination. there's some ins and outs to that.

Right. And so if a customer came to me with that, I have to decide, well, do I want to become an expert in that environment and manage that for them? Or do I want to try and convert them over to Manana to the mosque hosting?

Toby Cryns (09:50)
Yeah, there's, know some people who own WordPress agencies who you can only work with them if you're willing to migrate to their hosting and it it's like, yeah. And it's there's good reasons and you know, pros and cons, of course. another thing that came to mind too, that we promote, in fact, I was on a call today. I was on a call last week and, so I'm on a call last week with a tech team, an IT person from the client end and they were.

Kurt Von Ahnen (09:59)
That used to be us.

Toby Cryns (10:15)
they had their domain registered at one of the big registrars and their name servers were pointed at that registrar. And basically there are no features. They couldn't delegate access. So I was just on a conversation with their IT team. And sometimes these, you never know what you're going to get with an IT team conversation. But I was like, I would like to migrate their name servers to our CloudFlare account. And I didn't know what to expect with their IT teams. Like, thank you.

That would be wonderful. they, they just like for that. And like, you never know. Sometimes IT teams are like, no, no, never, you know, like we wanted it go daddy or whatever. Um, but like, think of DNS is another decision agencies make can make. Most people don't make the decision like small businesses. In fact, most, most companies, I was talking to a company today, their DNS is also on go daddy and they're a big company, like a big international company. I'm like, and so I'm talking to them again. I'm like,

I would like to migrate your DNS to our Cloudflare account. We will delegate access. like, yeah, that sounds great. And what's that bring? It brings potentially speed, reliability, more data centers, security. so there's, I think like the hosting conversation's bigger sometimes than we think.

Kurt Von Ahnen (11:24)
Well, I don't want people to, I'm not looking for a way for us to rip people off. So I never want that to be our messaging, but there is a huge upsell opportunity in the support and maintenance that we can provide if we're more involved in the conversation. I talk to a lot of startup agency types, like through post status and stuff. They'll hit me up on DMs. And a lot of times they're too timid. They're like, I'm helping this nonprofit that's,

You know, they've got their site on GoDaddy. So I'm helping them this, that, and the other thing. And then two months later, I hear him go, I'm helping this other customer. They're on, they're on a dot com account and they're just X with that. I'm like, you're missing all of that. You're missing the recurring income from the hosting, from the maintenance, from you're missing all of that. And realistically your customer wants that service from you. Like it's, it's, it's weird. Like we're afraid to sell it, but the customer wants it anyway. It's, it's such a bizarre

relationship that we find ourselves in until we get more seasoned in what we do. I've been getting more bold with expanding what our monthly services even look like. And I know that you do that too, cause you're involved in SEO and stuff like that. But I've been looking at like, let's bring people in and help them with, know, SEO content development. Let's help them with curriculum development. Cause I do a lot of e-learning stuff. we had a client, we just were talking and like you said, you never know until it comes up.

Toby Cryns (12:18)
Yeah. I would, yeah.

Mm-hmm. Yep.

Kurt Von Ahnen (12:40)
When she found out that we would be willing to voice over their e-learning, you know, videos and presentations, I thought she was going to give birth right there, man. I was like, Oh, and then you multiply that by the agency rate, how long it takes to do voiceovers. And all you're doing is reading a script and you're getting paid. Like that is a, that's a profit center.

Toby Cryns (13:02)
think to your point, people, mean, I think when I started, I was afraid to upsell hosting. Cause I was like, well, you know, let's say they're on some cheap post and I want to charge way more than that for hosting plus whatever service I'm going to provide, which is kind of hard to explain. But I think people generally need it. Like they're going to call you when the site's down. So what I tell people in this, I have a case study on my website on the themightymo.com where.

we're comparing the downtime for our service to one of the main providers in the WordPress space and our uptime with one case. It was one case. So I don't know how widespread it is, but I was like, our, our uptime is way better. Like, and here's just data, you know? And I, I think the upsell not only is the upsell people, you're right. People want to go with you because you're going to be the person they call. so, but it's, it's easier for us to manage.

when they call or if they call or hopefully we're preventing a lot of issues anyway. So they're calling less because we don't know what some of these providers are doing. Sometimes they cause problems that impact us. And I think you're right. Like there's a lot of room to really add. We'll call it adding value. I think that's what it is. A lot of times, at least that's what we do is like we're a person to call. ⁓ and that's what I tell people like, you want to call us sometime maybe in the future that some undetermined date. Yeah.

Kurt Von Ahnen (14:00)
Yeah.

Toby Cryns (14:21)
Come on to our hosting plan. We will answer the phone for you. We'll have a long conversation. We won't charge you for it. You know, like that sort of thing.

Kurt Von Ahnen (14:28)
Yeah, I have AI hasn't made me very happy on the hosting side. On the hosting side, I used to get support on a chat with a person. Like I like, I like chat support. Now you don't get chat with a person you get chat with AI. And then when AI gets frustrated, it says, I need to forward this. It either says, I'm going to convert this chat to a, to a support ticket and someone will email you later.

Or I need to afford this to an actual person that will come on and help you. But now, you know, they've laid off 90 % of their support staff, right? And so you end up waiting forever to get actual real assistance.

So for me, from a customer's perspective, being able to pick up the phone and get a human in the loop is a huge benefit. Huge.

Toby Cryns (15:08)
Yeah,

I've seen one of the providers I saw recently, I was on their dashboard and it was a hosting company and on the dashboard it has, it's a big provider and they have like AI is now integrated with our hosting stack. I'm like, this is cool. And so I think I asked it to like do something basic. was like increase my PHP memory limit or something, you know, and it's like, well, I can't do that. The AI, I'm like, well, what can you do? Like aren't you supposed to like, that's just simple. Like what are we?

Kurt Von Ahnen (15:32)
Get back!

Toby Cryns (15:37)
What's AI? What value are you adding?

Kurt Von Ahnen (15:39)
Well, I think again, from the customer's perspective, right? So one of the things when I, when I shop for hosting, this, comes into the pricing, the cost is like a lot of hosts are advertising, you know, per site or up to three sites or up to five sites. And when you're carrying kind of this fluctuating inventory of sites somewhere between 35 and 45, right? You're just carrying this fluctuating list of websites.

when you start trying to add up, well, how much is this really going to cost me? It starts to get like, that's more than I was looking to do, you know? so then you start looking at websites where it's like, you're paying for the server and you can put in as many as you want, but then, you you can expand your memory and all that stuff. And so there's, there's that way to go. But then you have the conversation where like, if you were a mom and pop, you're running a shoe store, a local bar, a food truck, whatever.

If you start adding up like a so hosting one site, 50 bucks a month, 35 bucks a month, whatever. And then you're like, but I want a blog vault to help me with security. I want patch stack to give me some of this. I want, you know, pardon me. I want to do this, you know, backup solution. And you start looking and per site, it's very costly. And so that puts us from the agency perspective. We can say, well, I've got a 50 site license for this CRM tool. I've got a 50 site license for.

a patch stack, I've got a 50, you know, 50 site license for this. That puts us in into the realm of saying, okay, if you did this by yourself and you're going to host it and put these tools on your website, you'd be looking at 300 bucks a month to support, you know, your food truck. We can host this and manage this for you for 65 bucks a month, 70 bucks a month. And we're still coming out. Okay.

Toby Cryns (17:20)
I've been surprised. I recently did a cost analysis at the mighty Mo of how, what our actual expenses were for just maintaining our clients, just an average client on like our normal hosting plan. And you're right. have backups. have a admin tool that sits in the cloud. have actual human maintenance. We have patch stack. have other features. It was way more than I thought in my head. I thought it was, I thought we were like,

you know, go into the bank with this, but I'm like, we're actually losing money on some of these. I was very surprised at how much those costs added up for us and still are adding up. And I'm not gonna cut services, because I think they're all, well, I don't know, I'll review it, but I don't think we're gonna cut any of those services. It just means our hosting business isn't as profitable, hosting maintenance isn't as profitable as I thought it was.

Kurt Von Ahnen (17:46)
BAM!

Yeah.

you

So that's when you know I circled my wagons last year and I said I just got to raise my rates. I got to raise my rates. I mean I've got some people grandfathered in at $55 a month but I my new people are coming in at $99 a month and right when someone listens to this podcast and goes that's crazy we have to remember that these are the same customers that are shopping to host their own website and seeing 35 to $55 a month with nobody to

to call, nobody to add plugins to their website, nobody to support them with security and things like that. That's, are all add-ons on top of that hosting. So, so I think the value is there. And if we treat, you know, the relationship, the human in the loop relationship is, is irreplaceable, but that kind of drags me to another element. And I think we got to handle this one quickly.

In relation to the hosting and I mentioned it with all those duplicated plugins I saw on that customer's website. On one hand, you know, we're talking about performance on my side is slow this that and the other thing we want a clean website. But as an agency, when we're managing a website for a customer, we seem to be adding a ton of stuff. At least I feel like we're adding a ton of stuff. Where are you at with all the crud you're adding to the back end of somebody's website? What's the plugin rate over the mighty mouth?

Toby Cryns (19:23)
funny you

mentioned this. have a plugin that I install, historically I've installed on every client site and it's hosted at GitHub historically. And I've had to install a GitHub updater plugin. So now we're talking two plugins to maintain one plugin. But however, this is just one example. This is one

win for AI. Just yesterday, spent, I don't know, an hour and a half, because I asked AI, can we just kind of merge this into one plugin, basically? And it did. So now I just one plugin. So in theory, there's less weight there. I don't think, you know, honestly, our plugin weight is dwindled over time. So we install a form plugin from one of the main, probably a sponsor of this show.

We use Gravity Forms primarily. So we install that and probably an add-on or two with that depending on the need. have our, a lot of sites we plug in to manage WP, so there's that. And so now we're at the two plugins. Sometimes we'll do a, well, we'll do the Cloudflare plugin on most sites. There's three.

I didn't even think of that. There's more too. and then we have a caching plugin, a speed up plugin, but that's more weight. Sorry, really speeding it up. I'm sure there's a couple other too, but you're right. And that's just us. That's not even like functional website stuff. Well, the forms is, but like a lot of, we're actually adding plugins just to, so it has a, so we're able to like secure it and maintain it. security. Word fence. There's another one. They didn't ask, but we're going to put it.

Kurt Von Ahnen (20:27)
Yeah, there's more!

⁓ Yeah, we didn't even get to what

the customer wants yet.

Toby Cryns (20:52)
Yeah,

exactly.

Kurt Von Ahnen (20:54)
So I was trying to look at this because I feel like such a hypocrite. know, I go into a customer's website and there's just the one where I said she was excited I would do the voiceovers and all that. Like I looked at her existing website and I just told her, I said, look, I just did a cursory overview of your website. You have 22 plugins that we need to seriously discuss deleting or, and we got to clean up the data on the backend too. I can't just have this stuff floating around in your website.

Either that or we're going to rebuild your website and not use these things. But it's like all this legacy crud that they sampled and didn't like or turned on and turned off. It's just all this stuff is in there. And then I think about if I take over this account and I get rid of her 22 plugins, I'm going to add 12 of my own right back in. You know, and it's like, that's, kind of a hard pill to swallow.

Toby Cryns (21:28)
Mm-hmm.

yeah, and here's another one similar to your friend who activated every add-on for Lifter. ⁓ If anyone has Elementor or like element add-ons for Elementor, any of those plugins, there's probably like 50 plugins in that one that are all packaged together and they have on off switches, but odds are they're all on even if they're not being used. Exactly. Yep.

Kurt Von Ahnen (21:46)
Boop boop boop boop boop boop.

Woo, commerce is the same way, right? Cause

it, you want WooCommerce. Now you've got subscriptions. Now you want to do gift cards. Now you got it. And it just goes on and on. If you're to do authorized.net, that's another plugin. It just, it stacks up fast. And so part of me is, like, so periodically, especially with dynamic websites, you know, when, we do the community or the learning stuff, there's conflicts with these things that pop up and it really adds to.

Toby Cryns (22:05)
Mm-hmm.

Kurt Von Ahnen (22:25)
the burden of maintaining the site because you know, turn off all the plugins, see which ones, know, turn them on one at a time, see which one causes the problem. It's like your con and then you have to fix whatever that issue is, right? Roll it back, roll it forward. You know, shout out to WP Rollback, I suppose. But for me, I really feel challenged by the whole hosting question.

And, I am I challenged to the point that I, you know, I'm in the fetal position and can't make decisions as an agency owner. No, it's not that level, but it, but it's, it is a concern of mine. Like, I always wonder, am I hosting with the best combination of, of cost and support and services to me? Are my clients happy with the product that we're providing? And then what I go to wait with that plugin weight. like that term, right? What weight.

Am I putting on the site with all of these features I'm trying to bake in? And is it really, is it really required? Is it really necessary or am I over killing it?

Toby Cryns (23:19)
Yeah. And, and I was just pricing out a custom VPS for a client in the cloud and fully managed, but like, this is the question I was asking. Do they really need eight, eight gigabytes of Ram? You know, sometimes they might, who, know, like I don't, nobody has all the info to make the perfect decision. And, at some point you got to like, just, and this is what, you know, as a business owner, you're just.

Kurt Von Ahnen (23:27)
Fully granted.

Toby Cryns (23:41)
You have the information you have and you make the best decision you can with it. And ⁓ that's kind of the peril of being a business owner. Cause if you work at a company, can oftentimes shirk that decision to someone else, your boss. That's their problem.

Kurt Von Ahnen (23:47)
Yeah.

So it's interesting, you we've had this long conversation and the answer is no answer. You know, it's use case dependent. What's your taste for risk? Are you risk averse or not? And what relationship do you have with your clients that you can keep them happy? Because I'll tell you, I think they get really nervous when you start migrating them around when you can't make up your mind. So you've got to make a decision.

Toby Cryns (24:16)
Yeah.

Kurt Von Ahnen (24:19)
And then you have to have the fortitude to stick with that decision for a determined amount of time.

Toby Cryns (24:23)
Yeah. Right. There there's been, I think though, also like part of this is, is just, communicating a lot of this is about communication. Even if you did have to migrate and migrate, like, did you communicate that upfront saying, Hey, we're going to test it out, see if this can handle your site. And if it turned, you know, if you communicate all that upfront and they know it's might be coming, you know, then it's not really a problem. It's just a matter of planning it and being thoughtful, but

But yeah, I, I, is lesson I learned over and over and over again is a business owner is like communication is that's what we're selling is, you know, the good communication is really our product. And by the way, we don't always succeed in that. That's why right now I'm in the midst of fixing our core business problem. We, a very specific communication problem and like, you know, that's the bulk of my time this past month has been addressing a communication.

issue at The Mighty Mo.

Kurt Von Ahnen (25:15)
Yeah. Well, when I'm doing business consulting in the power sports and Marine industry, 80 % of what we're working on is not process. It's communication and leadership, you know, and it's amazing how business to business, those themes are super consistent. Speaking of communication, people should like share and follow.

Toby Cryns (25:29)
Yeah. All right. We're okay.

Yes, definitely. ⁓ Listen to our other family of podcasts on the WP minute plus. This has been another agency action show with Toby and Kurt. Kurt, how can people get in touch with you?

Kurt Von Ahnen (25:45)
LinkedIn's the best way. I'm the only Kurt Von Ahnen on LinkedIn, just as you're the only Toby Cryns on LinkedIn.

Toby Cryns (25:50)
Yes, thank you. So thanks, everybody. Comment, give us ideas if you have them. We'd love to hear them and always consider them for inclusion in the show.

Kurt Von Ahnen (25:57)
Fantastic.