hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr1584.txt

Episode: 1584
Title: HPR1584: An interview with Josh Knapp from AnHonestHost.com
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1584/hpr1584.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 05:20:54

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This episode of HBR is brought to you by AnanasThost.com.
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HBR15.
That's HBR15.
Better web hosting that's Aniston Fair at AnanasThost.com.
Hi everybody, my name is Cam Talon and you're listening to another episode of Hacker
of the Grady or today I've got an interview with you with one of our own hosts, Josh.
How are you doing, Josh?
I'm doing good.
Do you want me to start?
Sorry, go ahead.
Do you want me to restart my recording too?
No, that's not necessary.
I just restarted it to sync up and make editing easier.
I don't like editing as everybody knows.
You might remember Josh from such exciting episodes as 740, DDoS.
What is it and how to protect yourself which was an interesting episode and it is your
only episode, Josh, very sad, very sad.
However, I can't be too annoyed with you because as many of you know, Josh is the person that is
behind the hosting, very generous hosting that we have here at HBR and it's basically about that
that I wanted to talk to you about him.
So you're going to, can you just tell us a little bit about yourself, Josh, and what you do
for daily living and that sort of thing?
Yeah, so we are actually starting to branch off myself in a couple other of my co-workers
at the current location.
We started seeing some things that we thought we could do better as far as providing hosting and
and unfortunately, it's divergent from what our current job details or entails, excuse me,
it's still very early here for me.
So what time is it over there?
Uh, it's 9am and I went to bed roughly about 2am, so.
Oh, the youth, I never did such a thing.
It's more to relate to work than anything, unfortunately.
It's nothing so much fun.
Okay, so you work at a hosting provider which currently hosts a BinRab stuff on the HBR
on the HPR website?
Correct, and so we are actually branching out, um, providing more optimized service and that's where
we're moving HPR and all the BinRab family sites over to that environment.
What's that called?
Uh, it's called an honest host.
ANH and ESTHST.com.
Correct, correct.
So, um, so what are you planning on doing over there?
Um, realistically, the name kind of says itself.
We plan to be honest with our customers from everybody in a shared plan all the way up to a
dedicated cluster, uh, instead of going off and trying to
while people with unlimited for a really low price, we're actually going to go off and
price things out based on resources that people get access to.
Uh, so instead of, oh, get free hosting for just the like and ends up being something ridiculous
like the only gig gig, um, we are free hosting. We say, okay, this is, uh, WordPress plan,
you get 256 megs, uh, of storage based when we support it by ads.
We're very upfront about that. Um, one of the biggest things that shared hosting, uh,
has right now. I mean, if you go to GoDaddy, if you go to anybody, you see
unlimited packages for 495, 695, start your hosting for penny, that's where I think that's not
honest hosting. Uh, when they say unlimited, there's no way for somebody to give unlimited
resources. If that were the case, uh, Netflix would not have to pay as much as they do Amazon for
their cloud services. So instead of going off and being like everybody else saying, we'll give
you unlimited for this low, low price. We have that low low price, but then we have resources
attached to it. This is how web hosting was 10, 15 years ago, uh, where you paid for the resources
that you had. And then somebody in marketing department said, well, why do we have limits?
And yeah, we got stuck where we're at right now. And that was probably the reason why we wanted
to branch off is because we were seeing so many people upset that why I paid for this unlimited
plan. If it wasn't unlimited, why'd you sell it as unlimited? And people don't get that in the
terms of service. They hide things like, oh, you can't use over certain miles CPU. You can't use
this storage space for anything except web services. It's all hidden and it's not very obvious to
the customer. So we want to change that. Okay, super. Um, listen, the, um, yeah, it's not like mobile
phone operations. Also do the same thing, I guess. Exactly. Really annoying me very much.
So you're offering right now, uh, three different services. Um, so you've got the WordPress
under the WordPress hosting. You've got ad-supported entry, blogger, and advanced just for people
you get an idea. So I'm going to round it up to the nearest dollar. So four dollar a month
for the entry. That's one giga space. And um, which everything has access to one WordPress multi-site
sub domain and access to all on a source themes and plugins with no ads. So then one gig is four
dollars, three gigs is seven dollars, and six gigs is ten dollars a month. That seems pretty fair
actually. Yeah, it really is, I mean, based on the resources that we have available on the system.
So we took what it cost for us to have the system up, what it cost for us to maintain. We add a
little bit of a margin on it for our profits and for expanded growth. And then that was it. We
don't try and gouge the customer or anything like that. We're managing the WordPress environment
for them. So there's no issue of somebody going off in no crap. I just got hacked because I
didn't update. We do all the updates. We make sure that all the plugins are updated. All the themes
are updated. That WordPress plan, you literally only have to worry about managing your content. We
manage the plugin updates. We manage the WordPress updates, the system updates, everything is managed
through us on this plan. And that's part of what we do across all of our plans. All of our
plans have managed hosting. So we cover the kernel updates. We cover the system updates with the
WordPress plans. The only one that we actually update a software application as far as a web application.
But our shared and dedicated and seem to be our VPS will all have the ability,
have a program called install a tron inside C panel that will automatically update your plugins
and your WordPress for you and make a backup beforehand. So we've got some pretty awesome tools
at our disposal. One thing that you don't mention, just in case people think this is an advertisement
for Anonymous Toast, it kind of is. You guys have been supporting HPR for so long. And I think
it's no harm for people to get a view. But I do want to go on to some of the technical aspects
with relation to the bin web projects and stuff later on. But I am kind of interested here in
what mount a bandwidth limitations there are because that's not mentioned on the site.
So our partners, we have a couple different partners that we work with. Realistically,
we start with the WordPress hosting. I doubt anybody is going to be pushing 20 terabytes
of bandwidth a month. And that's actually where we're at as far as our limit is 20 terabytes of
server. And any customer like is a dedicated server or something like that, they're going to be
getting that same limit. Now, with the WordPress plan, anybody that was to that point of trying to
use 20 terabytes of bandwidth, it's been my experience. They haven't been only using six gigs of
resources. So there was some math done in there. It's like, if they're doing that much and it
may come down to a part of our customers' rights, we will be upfront with them. We will say,
okay, we see that you're using this much resources as far as bandwidth. And while we can go off and
support it, we would much appreciate upgrading to a better plan. And if it's not in their cards,
then we can make adjustments accordingly. It won't take the site down, but we can actually slow down
the site if necessary to protect everybody else. Yeah. So basically what you're saying is,
if I've got a $4 a month plan or better yet, some friend of mine asked me where can I host my
website? I can throw them at you. And if for one day their website goes to one gig a month,
then that's going to be no problem whatsoever. Right. There's no problem. Absolutely excellent.
Okay. I'm going to look at some more of the hosting. Sure. Can you tell people the difference
between just to make this more kind of generic episode than the blatant advertisement that we're
doing so far? What's the difference between shared hosting and dedicated hosting and then
BBS hosting as well? So shared hosting is a server that we set up. We manage. We install
C panel and each user gets a C panel user access. And they can log in and manage their emails,
things like that from in that panel. So I'll just go through the plans here. The base is the base
starts at five dollars. Then jump is 10 advanced is 20. And that goes from four 20 and 50 gig storage
to gig bandwidth, 10 gig bandwidth and 25 gig bandwidth, five email accounts, 10 email accounts,
25 email accounts, two databases, five databases and 10 databases, and CPU average,
one percent, four percent and 10%. Hey, CPU average. That's pretty good. What happens if they go
above these limits? So that's weekly average. So if they burst and they don't have a high usage
the rest of the week, nothing. They don't even get a notice from us. It's based on weekly averages.
We have configured the servers in a way that actually would prevent a single user from
taking down the server without actually having to install something like cloud Linux or anything
like that because of how we configure the server with Apache 2.4 using a fast CGI password to PHP
FPM. And then each FPM pool is a per user pool. So you have so many workers that can run in the
background. I have so many workers that can run the background. We've configured it so that no one
user with all their workers could actually take down the entire server. So we take a look at your
usage average. Obviously, if you've got an entire day where you're just pegging the CPU for your
system or for your users, you're going to be over your weekly allotment. Then we send an email saying,
hey, we know you're above your allotment. And as long as you're not taking down the server,
we don't actually suspend. We may tweak your users or the number of processes that you can
spin up again to slow down the performance and stabilize the server if there is an issue,
but usually we'll just send out an email and say, hey, this is where you're at. This is how much
above you're at. This is the plan that we recommend you move to if you're expecting this kind of
traffic regularly. So no additional bills? No. Okay, and what happens if you go over your monthly
bandwidth and you know, bandwidth pretty much? We send out notices at 75, 80 and 90 percent
notifying that there is a bandwidth usage going on. At 100 percent, then we slow the site down
to a crawl. We don't completely disable. We slow it down to a crawl. Unless we get a no bill,
yeah. Right, no bills until we get a confirmation that you either want to purchase more bandwidth
or they want to move up to a higher tier plan. Okay, and then what's always concerned about that,
I think that's ideal because I don't want to build. I always get terrified if somebody
compromises my site or is doing a DDoS on my site just trying to rack up my bills for me.
Right. Just say, somebody's been attacked. Is there anything that you can do to help or are
they left on their own? And that's actually something that we partnered with CloudFlare for.
CloudFlare does really well with DDoS mitigation back to my last show. They essentially put
into place what I was discussing about in the show. They have engine X servers all over the world
and then they manage the DNS to pass through those engine X servers. They're basic or they're free
plan is pretty decent for moderate small attacks. They say that they give minimal, but it's actually
fairly decent. I've had to use it myself a couple times. Then they do the CDA optimization,
things like that, but they're also the ones that were responsible for filtering out, I believe,
of spam-hoss. They were getting a really massive attack a year or two ago, and they filtered
that attack and realistically that said something about how they do their infrastructure and
kind of gave credence to what I said in the HPR episode because they're doing exactly what I
mentioned in there as far as mitigating the deal, distributing the attack. It was really
quite cool to see. We partnered with them and so all of our servers by default have CloudFlare
enabled. They can click to enable that. They have to need more services through CloudFlare. It's
very easy for them to upgrade and change that right through their control panel interface.
Okay, and the other thing that you have available is dedicated hosting. I've got to the plan
one is $350 a month, and two is $500 a month, and plan three is $750 a month, and the difference
between those two is Xeon QuadCore, 33 gig Xeon, 8 core, 2 gig, dual Xeon, hexacore, 2 gig,
one, one, and two gig storage, where that's red 10, four IP addresses, four IP addresses,
four IP addresses, 16, 32, and 64 gigs of RAM, and you've got, on all the plans, it seems to be
20 terabytes, 100 gig, C panel, ruthless kernel upgrades, and naggios monitoring.
Those are not bad prices actually. Yeah, I'm mildly internally.
Right, but what is included with it, we were trying to make it, so that was a fair balance for
the customer and for us. Like I said, we aren't trying to gouge a customer. We do have a little bit of
profit margin in there specifically, because we do have costs that we have to cover, and then
on top of that, we have to eat. But we don't gouge the customer, so we want to make it something
that's respectable for the customer to say, hey, you know what, I like this, and it's not
bad price, and that part of that is I went to our partners and said, hey guys, I need to make
a profit on this too. Let's work on something that's going to be beneficial for both of us,
and so that's, I got a little bit of discount from my providers, but now a lot, especially starting
out there like, oh, we'll throw you a little bone here, and if you do something, then we'll
talk later. It seems to be always the case with bigger companies, but starting out, it's enough to
get everything rolling. I want to mention that each one of these is an actual hardware raid,
so it's a raid card with a battery backup. I've noticed that a lot of hosting providers say,
oh yeah, it's got a raid, but then you get into it, and you realize it's Linux software raid,
or it's a firmware raid that doesn't have a battery backup on the raid card itself, so
you run into the same issue you would have ran into if it was just a single drive a lot of times.
Okay, and you don't have as yet the PS hosting, what's your kind of plan for that?
I'm actually writing the API system, well, writing the hook into my provider's API system,
so what I want to be able to do is when they click it, it automatically provisions. I may just add
the VPS to the site and have manual provisioning until I get the automatic piece finished. They've
got a nice API. It's just sitting down and finding the time to write all that code, and that's
well, there's going to be about a month before this is released, so you've got some time.
Can you have price plans available and what the differences are between them?
I'm still working on all those. I'm actually working on getting a better pricing point.
They're pretty good already, but I want to get them even better realistically,
because I've got to compete with people like Hostgator and
software and all these guys who use just absolutely ridiculously large servers, and I don't want
to do that because it becomes an issue of if that server goes down, I have a ton of people down,
and that's part of the reason why I'm including those backups is I don't want to have somebody go
off and say, oh my gosh, my entire business is down right now because the server's down,
so it's really one of those things.
I'm there in folks, and my experience over the last two, three years, Josh.
Three years, yeah. In dealing with you, people say, I'm the email person behind the admin,
that's Hacker Public Radio, but that is purely from an administration point of view. The actual
administrator behind HPR is and continues to be Josh, and the service that he has given us
has been absolutely phenomenal. There's been a lot of stuff going on in the background that people
don't realize, moving servers, putting up VPSs, increasing disk space, problems with C panel,
problems with some of the scripts we're trying to run, and every step of the way it supports
has been absolutely fantastic, so I would have no hesitation whatsoever in sending you over to
this website and experiencing what it is that these guys do. Thank you for that plug out.
So there you go, I sold out, I sold out to the man, but yes, so I guess when are you still working
for the other company, and when do we need to update the intro and outro biscuit?
You guys can do it as soon as possible, because I'm actually in the process of moving you guys over
as we're speaking. That was what I was doing before. I hopped on here. I upgraded your guy's server
to the latest version of C panel. I put in the Apache 2.4 and the PHP FPM, had a customer that
was at another hosting provider, got some really big name musicians for a show tweet about his site,
and he was getting over 10,000 simultaneous views. It was crashing a server.
Apache can stay started. We put the method that we're using for all of our shared servers,
all of our dedicated all of our VPS servers with the Apache 2.4 event, NPM, PHP FPM,
and a dual core server actually managed to stay online while serving about 10,000 simultaneous views,
which is insane. So can you explain a bit about the technical cavities behind that?
So PHP is in its current form in Apache, you're looking at a single thread process.
Going to something like EventView allows for it to go multi-threaded, but if you do just
straight fast CGI, you lose security. So a lot of people have sacrificed performance
for security and going to something like suPHP or modRUID, and those are single-threaded
processes. To my best of my knowledge, modRUID is still single-threaded,
but you get some amazing performance from using fast CGI. So I was trying to figure out a way
to kind of marry the two and get it to work, and I had been testing this for a while using
Apache 2.4 with the proxy pass-through. The first thing I ran into was I could only pass through
to ports, and when you start talking shared servers, you run up. Well, you don't run up ports,
but it's a bad idea to have a bunch of open ports, because people can crash your server that way.
So I was like, okay, what can I do? What can I do? So I looked at EngineX, and EngineX got some
amazing performance, absolutely amazing performance. PHP, FPM works beautifully with it. You can do
multi-threaded, absolutely amazing, but then you lose the ability to use HT access.
So anybody who's using WordPress or Jumla or has pretty URLs, you'd have to literally change the
config for every user that wanted to have rewrite rules. And that wasn't really feasible for a shared
server. So I was kind of feeling a little bit defeated, and I started going through looking at the
roadmap for Apache, and I found that in 2.4.9, they had added fast CGI pass-through
to a socket, and they didn't really announce it that much.
And what does this, what would that mean for incoming?
So instead of having to pass through to ports, I now pass through to socket, so each user has
their own independent socket, and it's just specified to them. So I get the security of
suPHP, your mod, your mod, RUID, but we still get the performance enhancement of the FPM,
and fast CGI. Also allows us to do multi-threaded handlers like EventViewer, or EventMPM,
which is way better on resource usage than the old worker, or what's the other one?
Worker, or in this is the one that I used, give me a second, I actually got Google search
it, because it's been a while since I had to use it.
Yeah, no problem.
Pre-Fork, I should have known that one, pre-Fork MPM.
And mod 7PM is temper?
Multi-process manager, I think is what it is, multi-process manager, I'll double-check that.
Multi-processing modules as close.
Okay, cool. So an incoming call, does it go through NGNX at all now, or is it just strictly Apache
N10? It's strictly Apache N10, I love NGNX performance, I just didn't love the idea of having to
change the config for every single rewrite that somebody wanted to do, unfortunately, so.
And this seems to be working out well pre-N real work.
It's been working beautifully. I did do a lot of testing initially beforehand,
and some of my clients that I've worked with in the past, I've done a rendition of it
without the socket, we were doing ports, but there were only a couple sites, so it wasn't that
big of an issue. And the performance is night and day, we see on average between 30 and 70%
performance increase over a suPHPR, mod our UID, iteration, and that puts us close to
on par to a straight NGNX and PHPFPM model, and we still get all security and compatibility.
Fantastic. I must say, quite a lot, that's gone over my head. It's, yeah, I'm glad that you
know what you're doing because I'm glad I don't actually have to do the administration work on
HPR. Yeah, and that's, go ahead. No, no, you go ahead. Yeah, that's what I do on my free time,
so it's like, I really need to get out more. How big a size is HPR, Ben Rev, etc.
They have some fairly good size sites. Ben Revs had a following for years now. HPR, I know you
guys have a pretty active community. This space wise, you're not too terrible. The new server
is more than capable of handling what you've got. Backups is what's going to be the fun bit,
though I've written a script specifically for that purpose, so we'll have that, and then
I'm using the ZFS backing it up as well. Well, I'm a big proponent of having multiple backups.
I've lost external hard drives and just weep because I thought I had a file someplace else,
and then I have to go rewrite my entire thesis paper. Yes, folks, if you pull nothing away from
this episode, you don't have a backup until you can restore the file. I mean, we're talking before
about some of the consolidation stuff we want. Are we still going to have a VPS? Are you
our own play around server? I can do something with that. Yeah, that's definitely a possibility for
you guys to have. It's not going to be in a public cloud. It's just going to be a slice of the
existing server. Mostly what you guys are going to be seeing is the web services for all the
bin ref sites are going to be consolidated again, but you guys are going to be isolated still because
of the FPM pool handling, and we're actually going to restrict access for each user in regards to
kind of jail-shelling. Even if you need SSH access or something like that, we'll jail-shell each user
to prevent if one account for big gets compromised, which I'm going to do my damnedest to secure
everybody. I've done a fairly good job. I know that we've got some new sites that are being developed
in the process too, and I've had to put my foot down about some of the designers wanting
to have root access. I'm like, no, I'm sorry, no. One of the things that we wanted to do was
copy over, you know, share the repository, the apps repository where all the actual files are stored
so that we could keep, so we could access those from the BPS directory. We'll have to be possible,
no? It should be, I just need to know which folders you need to sync over, and yeah, that would be
feasible. I really wish that Citrix would pay attention to one of the features that they added
in Zen Server 6.1 and then didn't announce it and then removed it almost immediately in 6.2.
It allowed me to hook up two virtual hard drives to a VM, or one virtual hard drive to VMs.
There we go. I could share data across them if I use a cluster-aware file system.
Oh, very nice. Like CFS or?
GFS2 is the one that, yeah. Those guys are that. I use that with an iSCSI connector on one of my
other clients, and it makes life so much easier. I was using NFS before using GFS2, and
it's pending the earth. NFS doesn't do real well with a lot of connections, and so when you start
dealing with people who do realistically anywhere from 8,000 to 20,000 simultaneous connections,
Apache can't access the file because NFS can't serve the file.
Yep. So that's when we started talking and looking into, you know, I say we use me and one of my other
partners about doing iSCSI connector directed to the VM, and then having that GFS2 module, or GFS2,
and having those two servers see the same drive, and it's worked beautifully.
I throw tons of stuff at it, and it doesn't even blink.
And does that, is that now included?
Well, and it requires some setup, so we're not doing a cluster setup for any of the HPR or
bin ref sites right now. Oh, it's not something we need to immediately just, just, we kind of get
around us all the ways. Exactly. Yeah, it was basically when people upload the shows that we could
transcode them on the other server, and then, you know, send them back, but that's, again,
everything we do, we're just very grateful to have, and what is a massive amount of storage and
massive amount of bandwidth available to us to do this, and it's been donated by yourself.
And I think Stank is still throwing some cash, you know what I mean?
It's really just me at this point. Originally, we were hosting with my original company,
and all those services were kind of swept into what we considered the marketing piece.
Now, it's me running the marketing for this company, and so it's just, it's coming out of
my pocket initially, until we get some drive, or not, in any shape, like a bad situation,
but it's just me at this point doing this as far as financial, and my partners, of course.
But, do we, um, can we not set up some sort of donation button or something for sure?
If you quit your way, I mean, I've been asked a few times by people if they could donate
to support that. Oh, yeah, if you guys want to do that, that's awesome. That definitely
take some burden off of me, and like I said, I'm nowhere near to the point where I'm
asking for handouts or anything like that, but if you guys want to do that sort of thing,
the biggest thing that somebody could do is sign up for hosting, or give good word of mouth,
because I've got to compete with guys like GoDaddy and Rackspace. Well, not so much Rackspace.
Rackspace is, if I ever get to that point, I'll be taking you out, and we'll be having a couple
beers, but at this point, I'm direct competition with like GoDaddy, HostGator, the shared hosting
providers, and the guys who are starting to get into the VPS and dedicated.
Um, yeah, from my experience with the one with those guys is, I can see where your philosophy fits
in, uh, uh, honest host would fit in nicely in there. Okay, so I will, uh, from my point of view,
what I'll do is, uh, I'll go and edit the, um, all the shows that have been posted, uh, from,
I won't go back to the ones, but, uh, new shows as they come in, I'll be adding your
mention for you guys, and, um, we'll, uh, submit a new intro and outro up on the website for
everybody. We'll see how it goes. Yeah, um, probably actually give me a second here, and I'll actually
have a coupon code for people who want to sign up, who actually listen to the show, uh, they can
use and get like 15% off of, uh, the shared hosting dedicated. I don't have that much margin,
but shared, I definitely do. So if you want to ask more questions or want me to rambulant about
something else, I can't want to create that code. No, I'm just, uh, trunk head silence. Okay.
I think I've been pretty much, um, talked out, uh, from my point of view, uh, I got your email in,
and, um, you've been doing a lot for the community. It is coming out of your own pocket, and, um,
I think, uh, if nothing else, if people want to donate, uh, to HPR or at least support HPR,
um, I mean, the simplest thing you can do is, uh, you know, send a, we'll, I don't know, um, send
outward amount and, uh, spread the word. If you're, um, thinking of putting up a, as I mentioned
earlier, if you're thinking of putting up a, a website for, I don't know, your, your cousin or
something who, uh, has heard your int computers and wants a website put up, then, uh, having them
go to a third party that, you know, you can trust and, you know, four dollars a month,
so that when you're on vacation, that, um, the thing crashes or the website, whatever, you don't
need to deal with it. Josh and his team are there, and they will take care of it, and it's nothing
that you ever have to worry about, and you don't need to worry about them getting charge extra,
extra money, even though that, you know, there'll be about four visitors who will ever come to
this hubby site. It's still going to, um, it's, uh, I, I ran my own servers for the family, uh,
ran them out of my, out of the end of a connection here in the house, and everything works fine,
right until you lock your front door to get on the airplane to go on your holidays, and then always,
always, always always something goes wrong, and for that reason, I outsource my, all my, uh,
families email hosting and web hosting for that very reason, and right now here is another
place that I can send people to this, uh, um, you know, with support with, uh, honest face behind
I guess, I soak it this whole advertising thing. Well, I'd rather somebody who can honestly say
something positive about it, or even if it's negative, I mean, that's another thing that's
a little bit different from us is we will listen to what our clients are looking for and want,
and we can review, hey, does this work in our business model? If not, we take a look and see,
okay, where's this request coming from? How can we make this, uh, something that's feasible?
I, you mentioned email, I do want to make a mention that we do do outbalance spam filtering.
You were mentioning about getting hacked and somebody eating through your bills and things like
that earlier. Yep. We scan all of our shared servers email for spam, so if somebody does get
compromised, because people forget to update things, or they don't want to use our tools that
automatically update things, or they wrote a code, and I thought, oh, nobody's going to know the
look for mailerscript.php, and they get compromised and start spamming. That's one of the biggest
things people complain about is, oh my gosh, my shared server has been blacklisted because
so and so spammed, and now I can't send an email, we protect from that. All of our shared servers
are set up to first scan an email before it gets out onto the public internet to protect
the emails that are clean and good going out of the server. Would you contact the administrators if
they are sites to compromise like that, or are you tech to compromise? Yeah, if we see that,
that we've got a lot of email coming from a certain account, it actually shows us which account it is,
and we go from there, notifying them, if we have to disable an email going off the server,
I've seen some pretty ugly mail scripts ago, but typically we just contact the user either
via email, which is part of the reason why we don't like to disable email,
or if they're in the United States, or someplace that I have a decent Skype rate, I will try and
give them a call. That's fantastic. Okay, Josh, I think you're off the hook for another year
for doing a show, unless you actually want to do some shows. Well, that's I'm planning to,
as soon as I actually get time, that part of the part of my drive for actually starting a business
the amount of time I was spending, I wasn't having much say in the existing company,
and I think doing this is actually going to give me more time, which is strange. It's usually the
opposite. He ended up dealing with starting a company and losing time, but everybody around me
said, when I focus on my company or our company, we're actually doing things right so we don't spend
time going back and fixing stuff. Yes, I know what you mean. I know what you mean.
And that code that I was talking about, it's 15% off on any of the shared plans,
so they sign up for one month or 12 months. It doesn't matter. They're going to get 15% off.
It's HPR 15. They pop it in at checkout and they've got 15% off on the sign up right there.
Cool. Can I put that on the bottom on our website? Yeah, that's fine. It is only four of the shared
plans right now until I can maneuver a little bit more breathing room on the dedicate. There is
an a whole lot of room to give a discount on the dedicated at this time though.
Yeah, I know that's understandable. Also, the dedicated is in its serious business.
You're talking about people who have a serious business. They have a commercial operation.
I think the shared plans are ideal for the hobbyist who are listening to this and want
basically want a honest to goodness hosting you. Right. Exactly.
The only thing about that to be named is it sounds a little too spammy. I just host my friend.
You can come on. It does, but it was also so the name originally generated it was going to be
honesthost.com and this was after we had just dealt with some really, really nasty bits of hosting
and we're going to be doing some more blogs and discussing that because people don't realize that
hosting is kind of cutthroat and people are really vicious and they'll say just about anything.
Think of it as use car sales of the IT world. That's really what it feels like working here in
in this business. You start seeing people like, oh yeah, I can get 30 miles to the gallon.
Even more if you have it on a tow truck. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's stuff like that that really
burns me and I think I had had a few too many drinks with my friends and we were all talking about
this idea of getting it started and what we wanted to call it and this just kind of stuck after
we had had those drinks and we don't get bledred but we were pretty pissed off.
No, I can completely understand that and you know that works two ways. It's good to see that on
your side that's frustrating with it. I think everybody has been called with a hosting provider,
you know, even as simple as domain registration and then trying to move it or trying to do anything
or there's a problem and trying to get in touch with anybody and you just go right, okay,
enough of this. I'm going to pay at two dollars extra month and just not have to worry about that
crap anymore. Right and that's that's really what boils down to and our prices for the hobbyist
is actually going to be less expensive than what say GoDaddy or HostGator are going to have
because they're $4.95 a month plan requires you sign up for two years. Okay, that's our monthly
price and we actually give discounts as you sign up for longer periods so that's that's our monthly
price. Granted, it's not a lot of resources but for the hobbyist like you said that are going to
have for the 10 people that's more than ample and gets their name out there and they can go off
and play with stuff and we have the tools to go off and say oh wait wait wait that script you
wrote up there that you thought was going to be no load whatsoever. It's doing this and we do have
tools we partnered with New Relic so we have some basic views into our system as far as what the
scripts are doing so say somebody's got a awesome script that they wrote back in 2004 and they
think it's going to work great and then it doesn't work so great. We can help pinpoint where
that issue's at. Okay, cool. While you've convinced me, you know what we should do is we'll put
this out we'll discuss them on the community news because there's some some actual movements and
stuff that we're going to need to do. There's some work in your part a lot more in your part than
my part and but let's get you on again once you've got your feet ready to go when you got those
VPS plans ready and we can do another quick episode just on what you're doing behind the VPS
is what your pricing are is and sort of what the technology is that you use in behind that as well.
All right that sounds good. We can open as well to taking questions and I know a lot of people
be interested about the nitty-gritty of of how hosting is done and you know
fielding that sort of questions how you scale up a hosting. I would welcome them because
questions lead to more educated people and what one of our goals is educating our clients so that
they can make informed decisions. I may even take some of the questions and post them on our
blog. I really want to make it so that when somebody's buying hosting even if it's not with us for
whatever reason that they are making an informed decision about what they're doing because the
internet's kind of important for businesses at this point. If you don't have a website people
kind of look at you like oh so you guys are just starting out. Do you have yeah exactly. Do you
have SSL TLS on many of your sites that cannot be configured by the way? Yes we do have add-ons
and things like that so the shared plan we charge for the IP address and the SSL all at the same time
for the year and the SSL again is good for the year we can install it on the server in your set to go.
All of our stuff if you go to us.com by default it routes to the HTTPS our billing system everything
like that is all secured down so we take security very seriously. Can you also register domains with
you guys or not? Yes we go through name cheap specifically we use their API. There is a slate
markup again I have to cover the costs of the charge transactions and things like that but then
it's all manch right through WHMCS I think it's less than a dollar that I've increased the prices
from name cheap idu.com.net.org.us and .ninja because .ninja is cool. You are correct of course.
Now I'm just thinking from the point of view again going back to the use case of the cost of
new ones just up up their business or hobby sites that you can point them to this and make sure
that the bills for everything gets redirected to one place so the domain registrations in the one
place they the SSL is in the one place and the web hosting is in the one place so they get one bill
and that's it and there you go you'll need this this and this set it up and then it's a recurring
payment payment forever in a day and that's it everyone's happy. Right exactly and then on top of that
we do offer inbound spam filtering too so if they are worried about getting spam or things like
that we use an open source technology called barua and all we charge for is the monthly cost
of the system that's running on we don't charge a license fee for barua or anything like that
we just do it based on resource usage for that so that's why we're considerably less expensive
than some of the commercial products like mxlogic. Okay cool stuff okay Josh I'm going to let you
back to migrating our site. Are we going to have any downtime around anything like that?
Not immediately I want to get stuff copied over initially I will send out an email saying hey don't
make any change or make any changes there we go um during this time because DNS is going to be
propagating but once we reach that point we'll be all copied over and we'll actually be able to
put hpr behind cloudflare so site will actually see a performance increase too. That will be
that will be good. Okay I think is there anything I missed or are we good to go? I think we are
set thank you very much. No thank you very much and again I really do appreciate it if you can
work up some sort of donation button that would be great and that we can put on our site and that
other people can put on their sites would be fantastic. Yeah I can definitely do that um do you
want to do it through PayPal or do you want to do it how do you want that done because I can do
it through I could even set up a product on the page that's hidden um and then you guys so it's
really depends on how you guys want to process it. Well how about just a regular link that is in
the JavaScript link um donate and then there's lands on the page on this hosting support hpr and
been read projects blah blah blah and then okay you'll click here to donate something like that.
Sounds good I can definitely do something like that and get you the link because I would prefer not
to be in the loop with regard to financial transactions so I know I think it would be better if
at the donate button physically went over to your site because that way then there's a separation of
of uh of roles right right now I can definitely get that going super duper now get back to work
yeah exactly exactly I will uh talk to you later then thank you very much for the interview
not a problem and tune in tomorrow folks for another exciting episode of Hacker Public Radio brought
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