Domain Registration

If your choice of CMS platform was foundational, and your selection of hosting provider important, the priority that you give your domain registrar is several orders of magnitude less important.  There are many ways to register a domain, but typically you’ll either go through your hosting provider, or one of the big name registrar’s out there like GoDaddy.

By volume, GoDaddy is the largest domain registrar in the world.  They surpassed Network Solutions nearly a decade ago, and though they’re privately owned and not obligated to do much in the way of reporting, the Wall Street Journal reported in 2011 that they sold a 65% stake in the business to a trio of big private-equity companies – KKR, Silver Lake Partners, and Technology Crossover Ventures for a reported $2+ billion dollars.  If their name still doesn’t ring a bell for you, you might recall GoDaddy from their marketing –they usually have a SuperBowl advertisement of some kind.

Being the biggest name in domain registration and web-hosting doesn’t come without detractors.  GoDaddy has been criticized over the years, often by competitors and former employees, as being in violation of various ICANN rules, particularly as they relate to domain name portability(e.g. the domain’s are difficult to port out).  Another area that they’ve received criticism for is their “upsell” approach.  If you’ve ever registered a domain name, or picked-up a SSL certificate through them, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about.  What starts as a simple domain registration, can easily (or even accidentally) become email services, web-hosting, private registration, managed hosting, premium listings, and more.  They’re also known for their coupons – nearly everything that can be purchased through them has a coupon.  None of this is necessarily a problem, but it is something folks complain (loudly) about.

As you might imagine, GoDaddy isn’t universally loved by the WordPress community.   Having a wide range of clients, we’ve worked with many different domain name registrars.  I don’t personally have a problem recommending GoDaddy for domain registration, and SSL certificates, but at the same time I’m not really passionate about registrars.   I can’t recommend them for their web-hosting, let alone managed WordPress hosting, as there are just so many out there that do it better.  Name registration, on the other hand tends to be a low-value problem to solve.  At around $15 per year, there are probably higher-value things for you to focus your attention on.  From my standpoint, I mainly care about what the Nameservers field says… this points to wherever your DNS hosting lives, and may point to GoDaddy’s name servers. Wherever those point, that’s where you can manage your DNS settings from.  By default, that will be GoDaddy (e.g. ns1.godaddy.com, ns2.godaddy.com).

Some popular alternative domain name registrars that I’d recommend considering include, NameCheap, Moniker.com, Hover.com, Gandi.net (which includes free private registration), dotster.com, in addition to most web-hosts.

Did you check out Part 1?

In a market with an almost an unlimited number of choices, why is it so hard to find the right WordPress host?  After all, aren’t all of the building blocks low, or no-cost?  Between WordPress, Linux, inexpensive computing, and an endless supply of commodity providers that all look alike, doesn’t this resemble a perfectly competitive market? At least, it seems to at a glance, doesn’t it?

But if that’s the case, why is your current host so bad?

And why are there so many articles on who to choose, and why to choose them? (FYI… most reviewers are compensated though an affiliate program.  I’m not.).

It’s with you in mind, that I put together this article.  My goal is to present the topic from 30,000 feet, help you understand where the market is, and help you make the right choice.

Small Business Owners, Freelancers, and Startups 

If this describes you, and your business is doing anywhere from zero to $30 million in sales, then you probably don’t want to host your own WordPress site.   Temping as though it may be, particularly if you have a stack of servers in a datacenter somewhere, or a huge vSphere licensing investment, it’s still probably not worth your time to do.  On top of that, I just don’t know of many startups, freelancers, or small businesses that resemble what I just described.  Is it possible for you to host your own WordPress site?  Sure, you can technically do that with your residential high-speed connection and an old workstation with a LAMP stack running on it.  In fact, I bet someone on your team already pitched that idea, didn’t they?

… and that will work just fine, right up until the time when one of a thousand things that you didn’t know to plan for happens.  Then… you’ll have a mess.

So sure, it’s possible to host it yourself.  But realistically, in the majority of cases, I don’t buy what your developer or operations folks are pitching.  Unless they have recent specific experience, and it also happens to be a valuable way for them to spend their time (now, and in the future as they maintain the site), then it’s unlikely that you belong in the WordPress self-hosting game.  Why?  For reasons that start with security and reliability, but ultimately end with the business case…. as in, do you actually have a reason to be in the WordPress hosting business?  Think about it this way… unless you reasonably stand to profit the investment you’re making in your WordPress infrastructure, why are you doing it?  Those expensive dev and ops resources that you have messing around with a WordPress VM… their time could probably be spent doing almost anything else.  After all, no matter how smart, well meaning, or capable they may appear to be, the reality is that WordPress hosting has already already been done better, and more cost effectively elsewhere, by companies that are backed with venture capital and can boast hosting north of 150,000 sites.  So yeah, your technical team might be able to get you up and running – but why are you spending your resources that way?  Sure, it’s an interesting Engineering challenge, but does it create any real value for you?  If you have developer or operations folks, the low-hanging fruit surely isn’t in reducing a cost that runs well under $2k per year, is it?  In short, it’s just really difficult to justify self-hosting in today’s market, if it’s not in some way either profitable or core for you to do so.

The Cheap way

If you’re a freelancer looking to spend less than $5 per month, then you’ve got plenty of options, my friend.  In fact, the vast majority of hosts are of the 1-click, $5 per month WordPress hosting variety.  I’m sure you’ve seen many of these names before.  Companies like…

HostGator, Dreamhost, BlueHost, 1and1.com, LaughingSquid.com, inmotion, webhostinghub, siteground, godaddy, westhost, justhost, site5, hostmonster, siteground, and on, and on.  To the tune of several hundred more.

If you thought differentiating between phone systems was hard, then hold the phone… because these companies are nearly identical.  In fact, several of them are now just brands owned by the same parent company, Endurance International Group.  Have I worked with all of them?  No… there’s just too many.  I can’t tell you precisely what differentiates 1and1.com from HostGator this week, beyond the sale that 1and1.com is running today.  But, guess what?  Their customer services folks can’t either.  Of the handful that I’ve worked with, they’re all fine and good enough for small sites, blogs, and whatnot.  Sure, their support, uptime, and responsiveness all vary wildly, but it’s all the same cluttered marketplace.  I can’t speak to which host is really the flavor of the month, because it changes that often.  But averaging them out, I’ve yet to be impressed, or surprised.  If this seems like the right fit for you – just go ahead and pick whoever is running a sale this week.  And if you stay with them for long-enough, your experience will range from good to bad, and everywhere in between.

Managed way

If you’re coming at the topic of from a clean-slate, you may already be familiar with the inexpensive commodity hosts outlined above.  Beginning around 2009, providers started offering what’s become known as Managed WordPress hosting as an alternative to shared webhosting.  Since then, several companies have come to market with offerings that recognized there was a market not being served… folks with needs well beyond what the shared hosts could, or were interested in providing.  Managed WordPress hosting is about abstracting out the hosting layer from the WordPress layer environment.  Or, if you have a networking background… if budget web-hosts live at the data link layer, Managed WordPress hosts live in and above the Application layer.  In any event, here’s the general pitch…

Managed WordPress Hosts do everything that you don’t want to do, or that you don’t know you should be doing.

Things like Automated backups, managed WordPress and plugin updates, content delivery network (CDN) integration, and seamless scaling.  Never thought you’d need to be able to handle 50 million visitors a month, did you?  Not a problem, they planned for it and baked it into their solution.  What if you don’t have a clue, and need amazing support?  They have you covered.

Here are some of the bigger Managed Hosting names:

• Pagely – A self-funded company that recently moved their infrastructure over to AWS – the original Managed WordPress host.
• Flywheel – Focused on design and ease of use
• WP Engine – Perhaps the biggest name in Managed WoWordPressosting, they’re now VC-backed, but have experienced growth-pains this year
• Synthesis – Known for security
• Pressable – Known for reliability
• mediatemple.net – Now owned by Godaddy, but operates independently

The fact that many small businesses don’t think they need some of the features are, perhaps, a different conversation.    While your site might not ever serve up the number of visitors that TechCrunch, or CNN do, many of the features that Managed WordPress hosts bake into their platform are nice to have, and given that the cost runs somewhere between $49 and $200 per month, it’s still quite affordable.  Most importantly though, they’re doing all of the heavy lifting for you.

Is Managed WordPress hosting for real?

Here are a couple of the most common criticisms of Managed WordPress hosting.

“It’s just a higher-cost version of shared hosting”.

“So you’re charging me for something I can do myself?”.

Are these accurate? Or, more importantly are these legitimate? I don’t think so.  Look at it this way…  budget web-hosts are incentivized to maximize the density of their environments, as-in stacking as many customers as possible onto a piece of hardware so that they can still profitably run those $1.00 per month promos.  On the opposite end of the spectrum, Managed WordPress hosts are in the business of having happy customers that don’t even think about “hosting”, and rightly assume that the Managed WordPress Hosts are in the business of making sure the back-end is always capable of providing their end-customers with a great experience.   Put differently, would you rather have the budget host that’s putting out fires everyday?  Or would you rather spend a few hundred extra dollars a year to not have to worry about it?  Perhaps the biggest differentiator though between Managed WordPress hosting and budget hosting is support, because they’re incentivized to deliver the best customer experience possible, in order to continue justifying the premium they charge.

Of course, it’s true that you could probably do it all yourself.  But is that really the most valuable thing you, or your team can be doing for your business?

The Hard Way

So what’s left?  Virtual Private Servers (VPS).

If you’re coming at this as a SysAdmin, a web developer, or from an Engineering background, the most tempting option is usually the hard way.  I wish I could say that I just didn’t understand the temptation… but I get it it, even if I don’t agree with it.  Before you go down this path though, think about what your time is worth.  What’s the opportunity cost to rolling it yourself?  More than that, unless you’re a Linux admin by trade, one who just so happens to also be a web developer, and loves tweaking Apache or Nginx, setting up MySQL databases, and the like… then it might just be that your time is more valuable doing something other than re-inventing this wheel.

VPS environments are pretty much what they sound like… dedicated virtual machines that you rent from an infrastructure company.  This is nearly identical to the “I can host this myself” approach to things, except that most of these providers have a solid and redundant infrastructure.  Meaning, when something breaks it’s usually your fault, not theirs.  With a VPS you get a dedicated operating system, where you have root access and can do anything you want on the virtual machine.  If you’re a SysAdmin, it’s just like logging into vCenter and deploying another instance of CentOS from a template.  The primary difference though is that the VPS instance is usually housed in a datacenter that’s built for availability, as opposed to your corporate datacenter which may or may not have things like multiple utility providers, or Internet connections.

Which VPS to choose?  Well, he’s a list of several hundred options.  If you must go down this path though, I’ve had good experiences with DigitalOcean.  From a cost standpoint, DigitalOcean competes in the same cost range as the shared web-hosts, as well as the VPS variety.  The difference though is that DigitalOcean doesn’t suck.  You can even think of DigitalOcean as AWS-lite with a cost resembling the commodity web hosts of the world.  They don’t yet have a platform that’s as massive as AWS or Azure, but you can spin-up “droplets” (VMs) similar to the way you would bring up new machines from templates in vCenter, or on AWS/Azure.  Snapshots?  Sure thing.  Backups?  Of course.  Their big differentiator though is that their VMs run on SSD drives.  And before you ask… Yes, they’re quite fast.

My Recommendation:

Why over complicate this?  A Managed WordPress host is there to take care of the details.  Sure, you can get a lower cost platform using a shared host, but your mileage will vary.  Of course, you can always build your own WordPress environment, or run a VPS instance – but it’s not usually a high-value use of Engineering resources (even if you have the technical expertise).  For managed WordPress hosting, I like Pagely based on their history, reputation, and the fact that they’re self-funded.

Back in the 90’s, before content management systems, Intranet sites, and WYSIWYG editors, web-sites were built by hand with HTML code and ASCII text editors.  Folks armed with a bit of knowledge and some patience, laboriously constructed web sites.  Even if you happened to use tools like the HotDog HTML editor, bringing web-sites to market was a time consuming and expensive endeavor.  Fortunately, that’s no longer the case.  We all know the story… web technologies, driven in no small part by the explosive growth of tablets, and smartphones, have advanced and we have a modern ecosystem that was barley hinted at in the 90s.  Underpinning much of the modern web, are content management systems (CMS) like WordPress, which enable and accelerate bringing web-sites and projects to market.

My goal with this series to essentially provide small & medium sized business with a WordPress Toolkit, arming you with everything you need to know to either bring a site to market yourself, or give you enough knowledge to make good decisions when it comes to hiring a company to partner with.

What is a Content Management System

There are probably some use cases where hand-coding web sites still makes sense.  For the rest of us, content management systems (CMS) exist to save us time, and money.  A CMS is a piece of software that manages web-site content.  Sounds simple, right?  By that definition there are hundreds of CMS platforms today, incorporating solutions as disparate as blogger.com and WordPress.  You could always choose a CMS platform and hosting option in one, putting your site on somewhere like blogger.com, or the like… but why would you opt for a free site (e.g. yousite.blogger.com), where your content is really only serving to increase the value, brand, and awareness of someone else’s property?  While you might choose to augment your business’s content via micro blogging and social media sites like Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc., your presence on those properties should serve to increase the brand and awareness of your business, and bring people to your web site.  Think in terms of your web-site as being the hub of your presence, and spokes extending out to other properties that serve to increase your exposure.

To filter down the number of CMS platforms a bit, when I talk about a CMS platform, what I’m really referring to is the mainstream open source options that are common on many hosting platforms.  The top three by marketshare are Joomla, Drupal, and WordPress.  Of those, WordPress accounts for roughly 75% of the CMS market, powering the infrastructure of more than 100 million web sites, including big sites that you’ve probably heard of like TechCrunch, CNN, TED, and others.

But what about… Joomla, and Drupal?

Both Joomla and Drupal are fine CMS platforms.  I’ve taken a look and kicked the tires a bit.  But here’s my biggest problem… I’ve only had one client ever even mention anything other than WordPress them by name.  For the clients that I work with, many have some sort of familiarity with WordPress, even if it’s just that they’ve heard of it before.  And then we talk about the fact that CNN, UPS, TechChurch, and so many other high-profile sites run WordPress… for many, using WordPress is a forgone conclusion.  Which isn’t to say that WordPress is without its faults, but it is an enabling platform that helps you bring your project online quickly without necessarily needing to dig into the code.

What are some of WordPress’s faults?

There’s plenty of naysayers out there for whatever your selection of a CMS platform turns out to be.  With that in mind, in the case of WordPress, the fact that it owns a significant portion of the market has to some extent, made it a victim of its own success.  Not unlike Microsoft’s Windows platform, or Google’s Android platform.  If you think about the economics involved it quickly becomes obvious, the biggest players in a market tend to be the one’s targeted for malware and virus exploits simply because there are large number of targets to exploit.  If I was going to identify the single biggest “problem” with WordPress – it’s that its marketshare makes it a bigger target.  That same market share is also why it gets the most developer attention and why it has the most robust plug-in ecosystem.  This isn’t to say that you’re better off with Joomla or Drupal – particularly if you don’t know much about those platforms, as each has its own vulnerabilities.  But what I am saying is that there’s a tradeoff.

Performance

Another area that you might find folks arguing against WordPress is performance.  Probably the biggest thing to keep in mind about performance is that…

1. For the vast majority of even mid-size organizations, WordPress performance isn’t something you really need to give much thought to.
2. If WordPress performance is a problem for you that
   probably means that you have enough visitors and traffic (and revenue) to deal with the problem.
3. If you’re a small site with a performance problem, your theme is probably the most likely reason.

In short though, for most folks, avoiding WordPress because of performance concerns just doesn’t hold water.  For organizations that do have real performance concerns, there are several ways to address that which we’ll touch-on elsewhere in this series.

My recommendation, of course is to go the WordPress route and make good decisions as you go.  And I’ll be here to help you make good decisions.

If you haven’t read Part 1 of the guide yet, you might want to go back and read it first.

Even if you’re unfamiliar with the work of Frank Loyd Wright, his place in American architecture, or the sheer volume of what he produced, you probably recognize Fallingwater.  It was commissioned as a weekend retreat for the Kaufmann family of Pittsburgh, and was completed in 1937 at a cost of about $155,000 (at least $2.6 million in today’s dollars).    It was built for a time, and for clients that valued quality or quantity, and appreciated Wright’s organic style.  It’s a stark contrast to the modern tract-style McMansion.  Let’s contrast Fallingwater with your investment in a phone system.

Phone Systems aren’t beautiful.

They’re not enduring.

They’re not even that unique.

Of the 150 phone systems that I’ve looked in the past year, they’re more than 90% identical. In fact, the only thing more ubiquitous than their feature-sets is the near universal contempt that business owners have for buying phone systems.  It’s not hard to see why… phone systems have a reputation of being big, expensive, and frustrating.  It’s an epitaph earned in earlier product generations.

As I alluded to in Part I, and elaborated on in my free PDF download, before buying a phone system – you should know what you care about.  Not everything mind you… you don’t necessarily need every detail thought-out beforehand (that’s part of why you’re soliciting bids, after all).  But at 30,000 feet… if there’s one or two must-have feature requirements for you, be sure you know what those are.  Otherwise, if you bring in the integrators who compete in this space – unless you have a very specific need, or have a situation where there’s a clear incumbent, you’re going to find yourself comparing apples and oranges in a market saturated with feature overlap.

Given no constraints, I’m a big fan of ShoreTel’s Unified Communications Platform.  As much as I respect Asterisk-based systems, and the contributions that Digium has made to the ecosystem, I can’t help but like ShoreTel’s platform.  To the extent that a phone system can be beautifully designed… this one is.  The platform runs on a combination of embedded Linux, and VxWorks (it’s the same OS that runs the Mars Curiosity Rover).  Interested in five-nine’s?  It’s achievable.  Geographic failover, high-volume call centers, fancy mobility features (that few people actually use) – all the boxes are checked.   In other words, ShoreTel’s platform is the phone-system equivalent to a home designed by Frank Loyd Wright.  Or if that analogy doesn’t strike you, than it’s probably the BMW of phone systems.

But here’s the thing… most of us don’t want, or need to live in a home built by Frank Loyd Wright, just most of us don’t need something like a BMW 7-series.   More than that though, even with some innovative modern takes on the Prairie style home, and renewed general interest in organic architecture – your average executive is going to pick a turn-key tract-style McMansion in the suburbs near the office, over a Frank Loyd Wright original.  Why?  Because the tract style McMansion is good enough.

Enter the tract-style McMansion of phone systems.

The Allworx Unified Communications platform was conceived of in 1998 by two engineering executives from Kodak and Xerox who formed what later became known as Allworx. During the first few years of business, while the Allworx system was being developed, the company established a presence doing consulting work for big-name organizations like Kodak, HP, Xerox, and Harris. The Allworx phone system came to market at just the right time in 2002. With the platform positioned as a turn-key VoIP telephony solution, it competed feature-for-feature with many higher-cost alternatives, which were often sold via regional telephony providers. As Allworx grew, it was acquired by a publicly traded Fortune 1000 company, before eventually becoming an asset of Windstream Communications in 2011. If this were a different company, then the story would probably have ended in relative obscurity as nameless corporate asset.  But that doesn’t appear to be the fate for Allworx with Windstream… since 2011, Windstream, leveraging their role a telephony provider in some markets, and taken clear steps to increase market penetration for the Allworx’s product line.  As a result, the Allworx platform has experienced revenue growth of more than 250% over the past year. As of last check, the Allworx division had 80 employees, and their product continues to win market share from higher-cost alternatives sold by companies Cisco, Avaya, ShoreTel, and others.

Allworx is continuing to win business away from the high-cost Enterprise-focused competitors, by providing an innovative, low-cost, and easy to manage alternative with a rapid and continuous release cycle approach to upgrades and platform improvements.

Perhaps calling Allworx the “tract-style McMansion” of phone systems is the wrong tract, as it’s clearly a low-cost platform.  So if ShoreTel is BMW, then I’d venture to call Allworx the Toyota of phone systems.  Allworx is the mainstream, mid-sized economy of boring purposeful solutions.  It’s not a kit-car, like the FreeBPBX, nor is it a BMW 7-series.  But you’ll be hard-pressed to go as far at a comparable level of cost as the Allworx platform will take you.  It’s the purpose-built and priced-right unified communications solution for small and mid-sized organizations than want reliability and ease-of-use, without paying a premium for high-end hardware, or obscure feature-sets.  Put differently, a client recently contracted me to help them with phone system vendor selection, they were a medium-sized, multi-site organization, and I brought in bids from integrators representing products from Allworx, Cisco, NEC, Digium, as well as a Cloud-based solution.

Allworx had the lowest installed cost.

NEC and Digium solutions ranged 20%-25% higher.

ShoreTel?  2.5X.

Cisco… more than 3X.

Hosted solution?  It cost more per year than the Allworx solution.

By that I mean, not only was the installed cost of the hosted solution higher than Allworx, but you could afford re-purchase the entire Allworx solution every single year, for what the hosted solution cost.   Now granted, the hosted solution could tolerate a data center failure, since it’s serviced by separate regional datacenters.  That was its primary, albeit expensive edge.

How reliable is the Allworx solution?

Availability can be measured in terms of nines of reliability. For example, the platinum standard is five-nines… 99.999%.  That’s a cumulative total outage of 5.62 minutes per year.  To put that in perspective, last year Google failed to achieve five-nine’s of availability in search.  Surprised?  Amazon and Netflix fared far worse .  In fact, even the public switched phone network fails to reliability achieve five-nines in a given year.  There are a lot of reasons why five-nine’s is hard to achieve, but to give you some perspective… the difference between four-nines and five-nines is 47 minutes per year.  The cost of targeting five-nines tends to grow exponentially as you approach it.  On the other side of the fence, phone system manufacturers love to tout five-nines.  And it’s not just a bullet point on their marketing material, because targeting five-nine’s adds complexity, hardware, licensing, and cost.  So while you may desire 99.999% availability, something to keep in mind is that even if your system can conceivably this level of availability, make sure you have an obvious business case for it.  As in, unless your business lives and dies by the phone (e.g. a busy call center), you might be overbuying.  In my experience, my clients that have Allworx systems are generally seeing around 99.9% availability in a given year.

If you require anything resembling five-nines, you shouldn’t buy the Allworx 48X.  It’s just not designed with high-availability in mind.  Allworx makes no pretense about it… there’s simply no attempt at competing in high-availability space.  Which means Allworx can spend their time and resources improving things that the target market values … bug-fixes, usability, and day-to-day feature requests.  Perhaps that’s why you can afford to buy a cold-spare Allworx 48X, along with everything else and still have a more competitive offering than the competition does, even before the competition adds high availability capabilities.

Wright’s masterpiece, Fallingwater was completed in a timespan of three years, and overlaps two other of his great works from the late 1930s.  The original sketch for Fallingwater was actually drawn up while Kaufmann was on his way to meet with Wright and review the “completed” sketches of Fallingwater.  In defense of  Wright’s genius (or arrogance), he said that Fallingwater was fully formed in his mind and that he was completely prepared for the meeting before drawing a single line.  Perhaps.  In comparison, the Allworx platform is the byproduct of more than fifteen years engineering, funded by investors focused on a building an innovative, low-cost, high-value unified communications platform that is essentially turn-key.  At the end of the day, Allworx provides you with a mainstream unified communications solution, at a price point that the competition can’t touch.

The above article is a continuation of Part I.  Some of the other platforms that were evaluated included Avaya’s IP Office, ShoreTel, Digium’s Switchvox, Trixbox, FreePBX, and Allworx.  If you’re interested more of the detail surrounding the vendor selection process, just sign-up for the newsletter here, and you’ll be able to download this article along with my deliverable (which includes some additional commentary).  I use the newsletter to send the occasional update, often with content that’s exclusive to the newsletter (e.g. the client-facing deliverable).  No spam ever.   Unsubscribe at any time.