--- title: Web Hosting 101 date: 2019-07-02T05:30:00-04:00 author: Sean Smith canonical_url: "https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-02/episode-2/web-hosting-101/" section: Podcast --- <!\[CDATA\[YII-BLOCK-BODY-BEGIN\]\]>[Skip to main content](#main-content)![Nevin Lyne](https://website101podcast.com/uploads/hosts/_200x200_crop_center-center_none/nevin-lyne-portrait.png)Guest Nevin Lyne Co-Founder and Director of Technology at Arcustech, which specializes in high performance, fully managed virtual private servers to provide power and security for your next php/MySQL based web site or application. [ ](https://twitter.com/nevinlyne)[ ](https://www.linkedin.com/in/nevinlyne/) Season 02 Episode 2 – Jul 02, 2019 51:13 [Show Notes](#show-notes) ## Web Hosting 101  0:00 0:00 1.0x 0.75x1.0x1.25x1.5x2x [](//dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/website101podcast.com/uploads/mp3/season-02/S02-E02-Hosting-Master.mp3) Nevin Lyne and Sean discuss the ins and outs of webhosting, including shared hosting, vps hosting, dedicated hosting, and recommendations of offsite backups. ### Show Notes Nevin has been running Arcus Tech for 17 years, which makes it one of the longest running web hosting companies ever. We talk about the various types of hosting including: shared hosting, VPS hosting, and Dedicated hosting and when to choose which option for your site. Additionally we briefly go into website aging as it relates to hosting security. and then follow up about backing up your site using Cpanel or Plesk backups as well as other options for offsite backups. ### Show Links - [Arcustech](https://www.arcustech.com/) - [Media Temple](https://mediatemple.net/) - [Go Daddy](https://godaddy.com/) - [Name Cheap](https://www.namecheap.com/) - [Blue Host](https://www.bluehost.com/) - [Host Gator](https://www.hostgator.com/) - [Digital Ocean](https://www.digitalocean.com/) - [Shark Tank](https://abc.go.com/shows/shark-tank) - [Cpanel](https://www.cpanel.net/) - [Plesk](https://www.plesk.com/) - [Drop My Site](http://dropmysite.com) - [Google Drive](https://www.google.com/drive/) - [Code Guard](https://www.codeguard.com/) - [Back Blaze](https://www.backblaze.com) - [nystudio 107](https://nystudio107.com/) Powered Transcript Accuracy of transcript is dependant on AI technology. **\[00:00\]** **Sean:** Hi, welcome to the website 101 Podcast. I'm Sean Smith, your host. Today I'm joined by Nevin Lyne of Artists Tech, and we're going to be talking about all things web hosting. Nevin, could you introduce yourself to us a little bit about yourself? **\[00:18\]** **Nevin:** Yeah, I'm Nevin Lyne. I've been in the hosting industry since I first put a web server **\[00:27\]** **Sean:** up in March 1994. I've been existed in 1994. Yes, it did, barely. Yeah, it barely did. I **\[00:37\]** **Nevin:** actually was working for a pre-web online service at the time. And you know, the internet was a cool new thing. And the owner of the online service wanted us to have a website and we actually we set up Telnet for people to be able to get to the online service. So that should age how long ago this was. **\[01:02\]** **Sean:** I remember using Telnet in university. **\[01:04\]** **Nevin:** Yes, basically. That was pretty much the only people who actually used it. So that was for other the fascinating concept for an online service, a paid online service to actually implement something like that so early. But since then, yeah, I've done server consulting and obviously starting probably in right around 2000, we started offering web hosting services to our consulting clients first and then it blossomed into full-on shared hosting, starting right around 2002. **\[01:42\]** **Sean:** So, basically, 17 years now. **\[01:47\]** **Nevin:** Yes. **\[01:48\]** **Sean:** You've got to be one of the longest running web hosting companies out there. **\[01:53\]** **Nevin:** Yeah, there are a few that have been around for similar lengths of time, but there are probably few and far between. A lot of them will likely be names that everybody knows in the back of their heads, so it's a **\[02:12\]** **Sean:** small field. Can you give a couple examples of these names? I'm not sure who was around back then, **\[02:18\]** **Nevin:** so I would like name something but it could be totally off. Yeah, I'm going to say... I want to say like media temple has been around for that long. I'm trying to think of other places. So many of them have been a lot of the old shared hosting places have all been bought, so I'm not really remembering who was around since then that's okay but yeah I mean a lot of the a lot of **\[02:50\]** **Sean:** the older longer running ones have been around for that long so you definitely are an expert in web web hosting you've been doing it basically even before the internet really gained popularity back back in 94, you had experience in it and you've been running companies since 2000, you said, so yeah, 17 years of experience, serving customers, hosting, you're going to know what it is. So for the less technically savvy listener, and that's basically the target of its podcast is people who are do it yourself or kind of maybe moving from do it yourself to working with a web professional and they might not know everything that's involved in web **\[03:39\]** **Nevin:** posting or what it is. Could you define it for us? Yeah, it's realistically, it's well for us. It's a large data centers that have servers in racks. It's hard to explain. It's unless you actually can see one, but basically we're running a computer that you can place or your web developer places your website on, it's connected to large connections out to the internet and there's an address, basically there are numbers that are attached to your domain name that direct people to the server that is running your website. What that actually entails really depends on what your web developer is building for you. It could be a dynamic website like somebody running craft CMS. It could still be a collection of just static text files in the sense, but you need some place to actually push that information out to visitors and that basically is what web hosting is. **\[04:54\]** **Sean:** Okay, so what is the, when I go take a look at various web hosts, including ARCHIS Tech and other names that people might be more familiar with such as Bluehost or HostGator, they offer things called shared hosting, VPS hosting, dedicated hosting, what is the difference of these types of hosting and when would I want to choose them? **\[05:20\]** **Nevin:** Shared hosting, I would probably, I guess, clearly, or I guess easily defined is, it's sort of like a bunch of people in a room or, you know, you sitting having a conversation in a restaurant. There's a lot of people can be, you're all sharing that same space so you can get noisy people that might impact your conversation. Shared hosting is probably the, well, it shared hosting realistically would be the oldest form of public hosting for your website. **\[06:02\]** **Sean:** So shared hosting is like dozens or hundreds of people on the same computer? **\[06:08\]** **Nevin:** Yes. And there really are very few barriers between you and the person sitting next to you. So, you know, someone having a technical issue with their website, using up a lot of resources on that computer, it can impact you, sort of like a loud person in a booth at a restaurant sitting next to you. VPS hosting or virtual private server is almost the same concept. There are a number of people all sharing one physical computer along with you, but there There are actual barriers between you and the person next to you. So you have a dedicated amount of CPUs, a dedicated amount of RAM, just like you would have in, say, your laptop, except instead of being physical, it's like slicing up a room. I guess a good analogy would be, you know, some international airline flights, your seats got, you know, a little room built around it. So technically you're sharing the airplane, but you don't have to see people. Their conversations aren't going to impact you. **\[07:30\]** **Sean:** Right, I was kind of thinking it might be more like an office building where you go to a floor and there's 20 offices and so then they're having 10 VPSs in the same floor. **\[07:44\]** **Nevin:** Yeah, yeah. I say my idea like an executive suite place instead of you owning like the entire floor or leasing out the entire floor for your business you might you know basically have just one room. I guess a good analogy for that too if people use shared workspaces. I guess shared hosting would be like being out in the open desks. VPS hosting would be more like having you know one of the upgraded sort of private offices and dedicated hosting would again basically in a sense you having an entire floor in an office building. Everything's dedicated it to you. There's nobody I'm not sharing with anybody. It's dedicated. Yes. There's a physical **\[08:35\]** **Sean:** server that's dedicated just to you. Okay. So VPS sounds like it's kind of halfway between dedicated and shared. Maybe less opportunity for people to interfere with what you're doing, but can other VPS's affect what's going on on your VPS if they're on the same server? It's pretty rare. **\[08:56\]** **Nevin:** I mean, there can be, but it's much more, it much more leans towards the dedicated side than not the most of the industry now, people are going to host on some type of a VPS solution. The nice part is that, again, you get that separation that you don't get in shared hosting, but unlike dedicated, if your web developer or yourself, you decide that your website's getting more popular, and you need a larger server, and the dedicated concept, you physically need to get another computer in VPS, again, a little bit depending on the technology a specific provider is using, they can add CPUs, they can add a amount of RAM, they can add a larger hard drive with no interruption. So it gives you flexibility that you really can't get in a dedicated server, so that's really where most of the market is. is maybe you hear people talk about AWS, Amazon's big cloud hosting, the same idea. You're sharing physical servers with people in the cloud, but if you need a bigger one or you need a smaller system, they can switch that for you almost instantly or instantly in some cases. **\[10:33\]** **Sean:** Yeah, I have a server that I use for some of my client sites, and one of the clients was getting a lot of traffic all of a sudden, so I logged in to Digital Ocean, but who provides the server, and I just up the RAM and storage space and CPU five minutes later, everything was good. Yes, it was really, it was really, really easy. impact on anybody else and all of a sudden the site was running much smoother and handling that traffic in a better way. **\[11:07\]** **Nevin:** Yeah, now if that was a dedicated server, you needing to add anything would be a much bigger project. **\[11:16\]** **Sean:** That would involve like a reboot or something, some downtime? **\[11:19\]** **Nevin:** That would involve downtime where that would involve your hosting provider actually, setting up another physical server and moving all of your data over to it. A lot of places do that more than they would like physically going in and adding pieces of memory and stuff to an existing server. They may actually just move you to a larger server that's already set up. But just copy your files. But that would require downtime at some level. **\[11:52\]** **Sean:** So yeah, I can see that. So in any case, I think most people are familiar with Shared as you said, VPS hosting and you did say it seems like the market is moving more to VPS hosting overall **\[12:11\]** **Nevin:** rather than Shared or dedicated. Yeah, the big thing about Shared hosting before was cost, But the reality is is that, you know, you can get a VPS server for, you know, $5. $5? Yeah, I was going to say $5 a month. You know, arts are... **\[12:29\]** **Sean:** That's a bare bones server that requires some knowledge or integration with a provisioning service. But even then, it's going to be total of $10 or $15 a month. **\[12:40\]** **Nevin:** Yes, and even with us, we do what's called managed VPS hosting, so we actually take care of the operating system and everything, so it's almost like shared hosting to where you just log in and put your website up, we take care of everything else. **\[12:56\]** **Sean:** And what does that run? **\[12:58\]** **Nevin:** Our cheapest one is $6.25 a month. **\[13:03\]** **Sean:** For a managed VPS? Yep. That's... I should look at ARCHISTIC. That's pretty amazing. Do you get full shell access like I get SSH in and? Yes, do you have a... Does it come with your SSL certificates and things like that? **\[13:23\]** **Nevin:** You have user level access. We retain root or the lower system level access. But you do have full SSH. You can use Git for vision and control. We have people that use things like BuddyWorks for atomic deployments. We basically, in a sense, try to work with you or your web developer if you're not the one that's actually managing your site for yourself. So basically our team works as an extension of you. instead of a control panel where you need to go find stuff, you actually open a request with our team, and then our team works with you to implement what you need. **\[14:15\]** **Sean:** Right. Okay, so you can get more customized packages installed on your server than you rid with a C panel hosting or something like that. **\[14:25\]** **Nevin:** Yeah, if there's a specific image optimization library that you need installed, or your web developer needs installed. If you need an application sort of an analysis tool like New Relic installed, we can install the client for you. So, I mean, there is flexibility. there are some things that we may or may not install, usually if it's something that's available directly from the Linux distribution that we use. We usually don't have issues installing it, but again, it's more of a conversation. You ask us open up a conversation of what you need and you know, we can work with you. **\[15:16\]** **Sean:** Oh, awesome, awesome. So a lot of people that maybe be doing web hosting as a do-it-yourselfer, they probably have like a WordPress site or something like that because it's really easy to do it yourself. Is there, should they be using hosting by their domain registrar, something like GoDaddy or Namecheap, you know, you buy your domain there and they offer web hosting as well. What is your thoughts on that, Nick? I know personally, my feeling is that your web hosting and your domain registrar should be separate. **\[15:54\]** **Nevin:** Yes. I think I've found over the years that, if you look at GoDaddy, GoDaddy tries to do everything. And I think as most of us have learned, there are very few places that do everything really well. **\[16:12\]** **Sean:** Yeah, the days of a Renaissance person are long past, you can't know it all. **\[16:18\]** **Nevin:** Yeah, it's, and I mean, especially in the IT industry or the web hosting industry, more specifically, things change. Do you need to try to do everything? I think over the, say probably the last five years, you've definitely seen more of a spreading out of how people handle stuff. Where you actually have large services, you know, you're handling, you know, your domain registration someplace that does domain registration, you're likely, you know, having your website hosted on a server that only does your website. You likely have your email somewhere else. The nice part about all of that is that if you decide to change any aspect of that, you don't have to move everything. If you decide that go daddy messed up your domain registration and you don't really like them and you want to move your domain registration to somewhere else, yeah name cheap. As an example, are you going to end up now having to move your email and you're going to have to move your website and you're going to have to move not necessarily you have to, but are you going to stick with a company that you are a bad experience with? **\[17:41\]** **Sean:** If you have everything in one pot and you're not happy with that pot, you want to move everything out of it. Yes. Separation of concerns is a good thing. That's one of the reasons that I don't like having domain registration with web hosting is I had problems with a web host. This is like many, many, many years ago and they wouldn't release my domain. I lost the domain. **\[18:12\]** **Nevin:** Yes. Yes. **\[18:14\]** **Sean:** I've heard that happen. This was way back in the early 2000s and I'm not going to bring up the name of the company. They still exist but needless to say at that point, I started keeping my domains and my hosting completely separate and at a later date I also separated my hosting and my email for not for the same reason because it didn't happen but **\[18:39\]** **Nevin:** over concerns that it could happen. Yes, and that's that's realistically the point and yeah I mean with especially with especially now with you have so many you have so many different services that offer specific tasks. I mean, you have a lot of people that are using, say Gmail or G Suite for the business level stuff to handle your email and sort of **\[19:08\]** **Sean:** collaboration tools, but you're not going to host your website there. I mean, you could **\[19:14\]** **Nevin:** through Google Compute Cloud, which is sort of like AWS, but the idea is that you want to sort of pick can choose the best of each thing. And it's so much easier to do that in the last five or even 10 years versus early on. Why lock yourself into, this is what my web hosting provider provides. Yeah, so it's really, it's sort of a buyer's market realistically. **\[19:47\]** **Sean:** be smart. So it sounds like web hosting has really been commoditized. **\[19:54\]** **Nevin:** I think everything has. Email definitely has web hosting realistically has the differentiators are generally service levels. You know, are you completely managing that virtual server yourself? You set up the operating system. You're the one that monitors it to make sure that it's up and running 24 hours a day or do you go with some place that manages a lot of that for you, so there's still very specific reasons to go with specific companies. **\[20:39\]** **Sean:** Okay. I'm a small business and I'm ready to build my website whether it's going to be WordPress or I'm going to work with a web developer, what is the difference between the VPS and the shared hosting? I know you talked a little bit about there's a lot of people on it, but shared hosting is still a little cheaper than VPS. What if I'm really price-sensitive? Why would you recommend that I choose a VPS over shared hosting? Other than price, what's the big **\[21:15\]** **Nevin:** advantage for me? The big advantage is still going to be scaling. You know, you may be starting small now. And especially if this is for a business website, if you decide to run a marketing campaign, you get picked up by the local TV station or even a national TV station. I guess a good case in point we had a client. I guess it's been a couple of years now. There are these couple of guys, their graphic designers, they basically designed like this really cool sock, like socks, you know, paris socks that you wear, but they designed to their own socks and it was a subscription service. So you could sign up for min socks or women socks and they'd send you **\[22:09\]** **Sean:** the like really funky socks in the mail every month, sounds like fun. And one day they reached out **\[22:17\]** **Nevin:** and they're like we're going to be on the TV show Shark Tank and we're sort of freaking out on how do we handle the traffic to our website during the show. And if you are on shared hosting I'm not really sure there's any way of actually preparing for that without now moving your website to something else where if you were potentially impacting everybody else on the shared host. Yes, and then no place for you to go during the airing of the show because you're now impacting stuff. The shared hosting company probably isn't going to be A overly happy or B and some instances they may not care because you're impacting everybody else and it's going to take probably more time for them to help you move it to something that would support it than the length of the TV show is running. Where if you were already on a VPSer, you literally can go in like you did for your client, go in, increase the size of the system until things are comfortably running. You're not going to be impacting others. And once the show is over, you can scale that back down to where you're not spending the money keeping it large for no apparent reason. **\[23:39\]** **Sean:** Yeah, and that's, it's really not expensive to upscale your VPS for a few hours or a couple of days. It's not really gonna impact your bottom line at all. **\[23:51\]** **Nevin:** No, and not being able to do so is more likely to impact your bottom line. So, I mean, that's for your website **\[23:59\]** **Sean:** your email goes down because you've brought the server to its knees on traffic. That's going to hurt **\[24:08\]** **Nevin:** you a lot more than an extra 10 or 20 bucks. Yes. And of course, in the instance for this client is that the entire premise of their business was people subscribing to this monthly service through the website. So, you know, if you've got thousands of people visiting during the show to subscribe or let me reverse that having hundreds of thousands of people visiting during the show and thousands subscribing which was the case for them. You know you'd be losing out on a the marketing opportunity for being on the website or being on the show definitely and you'd be losing out on all of the subscription benefits you know people signing up for your service And that hits your bottom line and you wouldn't really have that. Now, again, if this is a small website, you're a local florist in a small town, you're not really hitting outside that market or you're a solo lawyer in, again, you know, any town. The odds of you ending up on a TV show having huge amounts of traffic coming to your website is probably fairly low, so, you know, if you really need to save that couple extra dollars a month, it might be worth it. The reality is that, you know, you probably spend more on, you know, a cup of coffee once a month going to Starbucks or something then you would if you you know simply use that money towards **\[25:53\]** **Sean:** it. I definitely see that three or four maybe five years ago the difference between VPS hosting and **\[26:00\]** **Nevin:** shared hosting was a lot more than it is now. Oh yeah it was probably it was probably in the realm of you know shared hosting was probably five or ten dollars a month your lowest VPS server was probably **\[26:16\]** **Sean:** $25 to $50 a month back on the before I moved to VPS hosting. My shared hosting was cost me $12 a month. I had a little bit of a bigger plan for the shared hosting. Now I do VPS and it's less than $12 a month. Yes. Yeah. And I've got more security. I've got more server resources, RAM and CPU cycles, bandwidth, all of that kind of stuff that is important for your site to stay up. For Arches Tech, we're **\[26:53\]** **Nevin:** strictly a VPS hosting provider, managed to get PS hosting. We do have a legacy product that was our brand for more than 10 years called engine hosting. I **\[27:07\]** **Sean:** I remember engine hose thing. **\[27:08\]** **Nevin:** Yep. It started off as shared. It started off as shared hosting with some dedicated clients back in 2002. And as virtual private server technology came around, and we had larger clients that needed dedicated servers, we basically ran the gamut of shared VPS and dedicated. The problem is that at this point, it's fully a legacy product. The only people that we really have left running on it are on shared hosting, right? With those clients, we still reach out to clients saying, you know, you really probably should move to our now six-year-old product that, you know, provides virtual servers. And you know, you could move from your $10-month shared hosting to $6.25 a month of virtual server. And you'd save money. And you know, for whatever reason you get people, they don't have a developer anymore. They can't move the website. They don't listen. So, you know, I guess the idea is is that not only do you not only do you want to pick a hosting that fits your needs now, but you really want to talk to you, especially if you're using web developer, you want to talk to your web developer, you know, as the product changes that they may be using to run your website, if it's a content management system, you know, as that technology changes over the years, they really should be helping you identify whether you should be moving to a newer type of hosting solution. **\[28:59\]** **Sean:** Absolutely. Your website and your business evolves and your hosting should evolve along with it. **\[29:06\]** **Nevin:** Yes. Just like upgrading your laptop or buying a new car is technology changes. Too many people think that they put a website up and the one and done. Yeah, it can sit there for 10 or 15 years and the reality is they age and generally they age poorly. **\[29:29\]** **Sean:** So that's not just cosmetically agent poorly, as a static exchange, but it's also security and features. **\[29:38\]** **Nevin:** Oh, yes. **\[29:39\]** **Sean:** The older your site is without maintenance, the more open it is to security issues and being hacked. And also, you're not going to have the ability to add in new ways of utilizing a website. you might not be able to add that new feature your competitor has because your website is dated. **\[30:03\]** **Nevin:** Yes. Another big issue especially if you get too far behind is the upgrade path gets harder and harder and it will get more expensive. I've got a few clients that I've acquired from **\[30:20\]** **Sean:** other developers and they've got sites that are unupgradable that have to rebuild it and and it's cost prohibitive, and the longer they do it, the more cost, the longer they delay, the more cost prohibitive it gets. It's like a chicken in the egg thing. **\[30:35\]** **Nevin:** We have, well, we have a lot of clients left over on the engine hosting side, where they are stuck on a version of a content management system that the only way to move to the newest version is to either step through every major version. So your web developers now doing a software grade and then doing another software grade. **\[30:59\]** **Sean:** I did this three weeks ago for a client. **\[31:02\]** **Nevin:** So you know exactly what I'm talking about. **\[31:03\]** **Sean:** Yeah, I think we're talking about the same CMS. **\[31:05\]** **Nevin:** Yes, yes, I believe we are. I will be kind and not mention it, but it's. **\[31:11\]** **Sean:** Yeah, I don't want to slide it because it is a good CMS. It's just the problem right now is older builds that haven't been properly maintained. **\[31:20\]** **Nevin:** Yes, that's key. **\[31:22\]** **Sean:** And that's not a shot at the CMS. **\[31:26\]** **Nevin:** That's a shot at the owner of the website, **\[31:30\]** **Sean:** the developers who didn't maintain it. And I include myself though, because I have clients that I didn't encourage regular updates in the past. **\[31:39\]** **Nevin:** And the funny part is that it's actually sort of a testament to that CMS in the sense that it's one of the few pieces of software that over the years has aged well when it comes to security issues. I wonder if that could be security through obscurity though. Yes and no, the thing is that the reality is if there were any known security issues and believe me there are always people looking for that in and it is a popular enough or it has been a popular enough CMS to where there have been, you know, outside companies that have found security issues with it. But the reality is, A, we're not talking about WordPress. If you don't upgrade a WordPress website, and sometimes even if you do upgrade a WordPress website, it's still going to **\[32:40\]** **Sean:** have vulnerability issues. That's a topic for another way that we could talk about is security. And I don't want WordPress lovers to feel that I'm slagging on them, WordPress is a great, it's a great system, but it's, when it's that popular, it's the target of more time. **\[33:04\]** **Nevin:** That's exactly the problem is, well, it's, you could chalk up some security to obscurity for smaller systems, WordPress is under a microscope just because of its scale of use. But that's also that sort of double edged sword is because it's constantly being said under a microscope, you can't skip updates because the second you skip an update, you're **\[33:38\]** **Sean:** vulnerable. I agree. I'd like to pull back a little bit back onto topic. The security thing is a great idea for another episode. But with website hosting, if I have shared hosting or VPS hosting, a lot of times you'll get a C panel or what's the other popular control panel system. Oh, probably, **\[34:08\]** **Nevin:** Oh, you're probably thinking of Plask. **\[34:10\]** **Sean:** Plask, C-panel or Plask, and they come with backups. Where they backup your site and your database on the server itself, what are your thoughts about relying on that sort of backup? And what do we do if we're on a VPS that doesn't have C-panel or Plask, like, say, digital ocean or vulture, which is very popular with developers. I know that was a long question with you. **\[34:45\]** **Nevin:** Yes, I was going to say a backups that happen directly on the same system you're backing up aren't backups. That's like making a copy of your car keys and leaving it on the same key ring. And then you lose your keys. It just doesn't logically make sense and it's something that a lot of people don't really think about. It's like, oh, well, I have a copy of my data. And yes, you do as long as something doesn't happen, your site isn't hacked, the data isn't corrupt, a rare event like a server losing multiple hard drives and there's data loss which **\[35:29\]** **Sean:** happen recently to digital ocean. **\[35:32\]** **Nevin:** Yeah, again, it's a rare event. It can happen to anyone. I mean, the computers you and I are talking to right now, your hard drive can fail. **\[35:45\]** **Sean:** That's why I have a NAS with dual disk redundancy. And then I back up to Google with, I have Google Drive paid account. Oh, yes. And I also have back plays. So, yeah, I'm really very much aware of backing up my data, especially anything for my company because our clients. Yes, so yeah, dual disk redundancy on my NAS. I think that's a local backup. So if my house caught fire, I would lose it. But if a disk fails, I can, I'm good. Cause it's dual disk redundancy. **\[36:23\]** **Nevin:** Right. And yeah, of course, you can look at somebody like myself that actually has data centers. So yes, I backup my primary system is a laptop. So it goes with me everywhere. So you run the risk of data loss in a multitude of ways. So not only do I have back plays as well, but I do have a NAS at home, but I have a duplicate of that NAS in one of our data centers. So the NAS replicates itself to the other network attached storage device in the data center. **\[36:58\]** **Sean:** You know, I used to do something similar when I had an office job. Once a month, I would, with a portable hard drive as I would copy all everything important. And then I would leave it at my desk at work so that was my offsite backup. But I don't, now that I work out of my home, I have to rely on things like back place. Yes. I don't have a separate physical location. **\[37:23\]** **Nevin:** And if anybody listening has not looked at backways, I'm not giving it, yeah, I'm not giving a testimonial necessarily, but I really love the product, **\[37:33\]** **Sean:** and the reality is, I will give it a testimonial. You sign up, you install their software, you tell it what to back up, and then you, that's it. **\[37:42\]** **Nevin:** And it's $5 a month. **\[37:44\]** **Sean:** And restoring a couple of months ago, So I accidentally deleted something that isn't on my regular backup to the cloud. I just went into the backblaze and I restored that specific file, or I could restore the whole computer if I want. It's really brilliant. But back to hosting. For hosting. Yeah. For the hosting side of things. How do we back things up on site if we're relying on C panel or plus backups, which are actually on the server and kind of like having, like you said, just another copy of your key in your house. It's not really backing it up. **\[38:22\]** **Nevin:** Right, I would, if you're on shared hosting, there probably are some limits to how you can back that data up, there are some great software as a service solutions. **\[38:36\]** **Sean:** I'm using one which I'll mention after you're done. **\[38:38\]** **Nevin:** Yeah, I was going to say the one that I've seen And the number of people using is a company called CodeGuard. **\[38:44\]** **Sean:** Oh, I don't know about one. **\[38:45\]** **Nevin:** CodeGuard is, it's a rather interesting product. It can be used for individuals. It can also be used for developers with the ability for them, the developer to provide each client with their own login to the web interface. That's interesting. It's a rather interesting product. a number of clients that are using it. And again, not only is it offsite, but it's also off your hosting provider's systems. The more important your data is, I mean, if you're running an e-commerce website or you're running a website that changes frequently and it's data that you really, really don't want to lose. Having layers of backups is key. If this is a website where you might make a news posting to it once a month, having even just one layer of remote backups somewhere else, or even with your hosting provider, but not on the server, I guess a good example is that is that we do what are called full-disc snapshots. So it's literally a copy of the hard drive for your virtual server. If you need something restored, it's more of an almost of a disaster recovery type concept. We replace the entire hard drive in a sense. It's not granular. You can choose just one specific file. Yes, it's the whole system back to the last point in time, which would be approximately weekly. Again, it's it's realistically that, you know, sort of Hail Mary, you know, our site was hacked probably a week ago. We'd like to go back two weeks and then they can go through and patch stuff. We have no idea what was touched. But if you deleted a CSS file on your website, this would not be the ideal way of fixing that. **\[40:56\]** **Sean:** I accidentally deleted one file, or I needed it incorrectly, then your solution isn't the right approach. **\[41:07\]** **Nevin:** Our included solution would not be the right approach. This is basically, we know that occasionally people might forget to start a backup solution when they first set up their website, or something about their backups didn't work. is sort of that fallback option. We do offer a daily file and database backups, either holding them for 30 days or 90 days and either what we call onsite, which is not on server, it's just it's backed up to the same data center or off site. It's not the same server, **\[41:44\]** **Sean:** you're getting extra security because it's not on your server. It's on site. So If you're building burned down, it would be gone, but how likely is that to happen? **\[41:57\]** **Nevin:** Not likely. We do have some clients, especially if they're financial or a doctor's office or any type of a legal office where they need to have specific assurances that data is going to be available. Our sort of higher priced backup solution actually does it off-site, which we basically and move those backups to another one of our data centers, geographically distanced from each other, which helps again. **\[42:32\]** **Sean:** Those are all really helpful. So I opened up code guard, which you mentioned earlier. And this looks like a good service. It's very similar to the service that I use for backing up my websites and my client sites, the service I use is called drop my site. Oh, I think I have heard of that. Yes. Probably because I mentioned it in the locker room that we **\[42:59\]** **Nevin:** participate in together. Yes, that definitely could be. Yes. And a couple of my colleagues **\[43:06\]** **Sean:** here in Toronto are also using it on my recommendation. So I've heard no complaints about it. They have a couple of different plans I'm looking at right now. Their base plan, which is what I'm on, is $30 a year. Oh wow, okay. And you get 10 gigabytes of storage, which is massive. I've got about 12 clients backed up and I'm only using six gigs of storage. Yeah, I can see that. And one of those is my own personal photography site, which is massive. But it's really easy to configure. It gives you file backup. It gives you database backup. You can control the schedule. What time it does the backup? So I schedule mine for one in the morning, two in the morning when there's not going to be much traffic, because all of my sites are North American based. And restoring, and I did this once, you can go into your restoration and select a specific file, which it will restore directly for you. You click a button and it FTPs onto your server and replaces it. Yes. But it also does the same thing with database backup and drop my site additionally how I site monitoring. So I've set that up where it will ping my site every I can set the time. I set it to 10 minutes so every 10 minutes it pings the site. If it fails and you can set how many times it fails before you get notified, you get an email telling you Hey, your site has failed. And it'll tell you which region it's failed in. So it has like North America, Europe, Japan, Australia, whatever, like there's a number of different regions. All for 30 bucks a year. It's a really good value. And anybody who has their own site or a developer that's looking to look for an off-site backup system, I would strongly recommend it. And I'm not, they don't have any sort of referral kickback programs, so I'm not getting anything out of it, I just **\[45:11\]** **Nevin:** a fan of the service. And you know, like we talked about, you know, a couple of other things like security being another podcast, we could probably talk for, you know, a podcast on **\[45:23\]** **Sean:** the Doos and Dones for backups. We should definitely do this, Nathan. I've really enjoyed our conversation and I'd like to hit up maybe backups and security and anything that is in your domain of expertise. I'd love to have you come back. That would be great. So I think we kind of hit everything for today. Is there any last things that were comments that you would like to say or website or articles that maybe you would recommend? **\[45:54\]** **Nevin:** I would kind of trying to think real quick. Well definitely subscribe to Chance Podcasts. If this is your first tune in, definitely go listen to the rest of them. I'm trying to think of Andrew Welch's website. He's got NY Studio 107. He has a ton of not only does he have his own podcast as well but he also has a lot of great **\[46:30\]** **Sean:** just online tutorials. Those are very high level developer oriented tutorials but I will link to his site. It's very very useful and there's some great articles on security and best practices **\[46:43\]** **Nevin:** and things like that. Yes and you know hey at least you know especially if you're if you're a person that's looking at going out and hiring a developer, you might be able to clean some good information on stuff to ask your developer just simply from Andrews. Andrews got a lot of, yeah, he's got a **\[47:04\]** **Sean:** lot of really good stuff out there, but he's one of the smartest guys I've ever met. I like talking with him. Hey, so, Nevin, where can people find you online? We talked about Arches Tech. What about your social media? Anything else that you want to share? **\[47:23\]** **Nevin:** I can actually be found on Twitter. It's my first name, last name, so it's Nevin line. Okay. And yeah, our website is ArchesTech.com. We do have an Arches Tech Twitter account, but it's mostly for clients to follow for like news and status updates. We don't really post anything necessarily useful there for not clients. If anybody is actually looking at the use of Kraft CMS to run their website, you can find me almost continuously in their community Slack channels. **\[48:09\]** **Sean:** That's right. Arcus Tech is a craft partner. Yes, we are craft hosting partner. **\[48:14\]** **Nevin:** We are one of the preferred craft hosting partners. We've been working with the guys that pixel ontonic for 10 plus years. They're the ones that are behind craft CMS. Do you have any other partnerships with other CMSs? No, not currently. I'd like to, we start like to keep, again, we don't want to do too much. You can really focus on doing a couple of **\[48:40\]** **Sean:** things really well. So you're really focused on your niche, which is VPS hosting and maybe a specific **\[48:48\]** **Nevin:** focus for craft. Yes, craft is it really hits a lot of the different types of clients that we get it. And just with our close working relationship with them, it was an obvious sort of extension from our normal managed services. Awesome. So that was really one of the key reasons why we worked with them so closely. But our normal managed VPS servers, its PHP, MySQL, so WordPress, Expression Engine, Craft, pretty much anything, Laravel. If you've got somebody that's written, you know, a custom app using a framework. **\[49:32\]** **Sean:** Right. And the big key takeaway here, everything you've heard comes from an industry expert. Here's been working in web hosting since 1994. Yes. He's got a lot of experience and knows his stuff and runs a very well-known hosting company among developers. So, Nevin, thank you so much for coming out today. This has been really great informative and I hope to have you back. Oh yeah I definitely would love to come back and **\[50:03\]** **Nevin:** touch on some of those extra subjects so thank you very much. Thank you for listening. **\[50:08\]** **Sean:** Hope you enjoyed this show. I'm Sean Smith your co-host. You can find me at my company website caffeinecreations.ca on Twitter at C-A-F-E-I-N-E-C-R-E-8-I-O-N on LinkedIn. My username is caffeinecreations or you can search for Sean Smith based in Toronto. **\[50:30\]** **SPEAKER\_00:** You should be able to find me there. And I'm Mike Mella. You can find me at my website B-Likewater.ca or on LinkedIn. My username is Mike Mella. That's M-I-K-E-M-E-L-L-A and I'm on Twitter, Twitter.com slash Mike Mella. **\[50:46\]** **Sean:** And don't forget to subscribe to the show and share it with your friends on social media, such as Facebook or LinkedIn. You can find us on Google Play, iTunes, Stitcher, **\[50:56\]** **SPEAKER\_00:** or wherever you subscribe to your favorite podcast. And we're always looking for a topic and guest suggestions. So if you have any, hit us up at website 101podcast.com slash contact. Excellent. Thank you so much for listening. Nice for listening. Close Transcript Have a question for Sean, Mike, and Amanda? [Send us an email](/contact). [![Listen on Google Play Music](/assets/images/google_podcasts_badge@2x.png)](https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly93ZWJzaXRlMTAxcG9kY2FzdC5jb20vZmVlZC5yc3M%3D)[![itunes badge](/assets/images/itunes-badge.png)](https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/website-101-podcast/id1449510012)[![itunes badge](/assets/images/spotify-logo.png)](https://open.spotify.com/show/3rmSM1R9t6q1U8DmYWJRSO?si=NrYPMgDaRV6Dd56PjEaPow)### Season 02 - 1 [ Season 2 Introduction](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-02/episode-1/season-2-introduction/) - 2 [ Web Hosting 101](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-02/episode-2/web-hosting-101/) - 3 [ How to Choose a Web Developer or Agency](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-02/episode-3/how-to-choose-a-web-developer-or-agency/) - 4 [ How Much Does a Website Cost](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-02/episode-4/how-much-does-a-website-cost/) - 5 [ Web Jargon Part One](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-02/episode-5/web-jargon-part-one/) - 6 [ Web Jargon Part Two](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-02/episode-6/web-jargon-part-two/) - 7 [ Website 101: MVP Strategy for Effective Web Development](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-02/episode-7/minimal-viable-product/) - 8 [ Copy Editing and Copy Writing](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-02/episode-8/copy-editing-and-copy-writing/) - 9 [ Photography and Stock Photos](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-02/episode-9/photography-and-stock-photos/) - 10 [ Ecommerce with Shopify](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-02/episode-10/ecommerce-with-shopify/) - 11 [ Season 2 Recap and Season 3 Teaser](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-02/episode-11/season-2-recap-and-season-3-teaser/) ### All Seasons - [Season 01](https://website101podcast.com/season/01/) - [Season 02](https://website101podcast.com/season/02/) - [Season 03](https://website101podcast.com/season/03/) - [Season 04](https://website101podcast.com/season/04/) - [Season 05](https://website101podcast.com/season/05/) - [Season 06](https://website101podcast.com/season/06/) - [Season 07](https://website101podcast.com/season/07/) - [Season 08](https://website101podcast.com/season/08/) - [Season 09](https://website101podcast.com/season/09/) <!\[CDATA\[YII-BLOCK-BODY-END\]\]>