Author Archives: Kevin Ohashi

About Kevin Ohashi

Kevin Ohashi is the geek-in-charge at Review Signal. He is passionate about making data meaningful for consumers. Kevin is based in Washington, DC.

Changing the Story, MediaTemple’s New Spin on GoDaddy’s SOPA Story

I run Review Signal to be an unbiased source of information about web hosting companies. I try to avoid injecting my personal opinions into the discussion about a web host's quality and service. I try to explain what I see in the data collected from hundreds of thousands of people.

However, there are rare moments when you just need to call a company out because the issue is so important.

Today, during a live Google Hangout Q&A, Russ Reeder, the President and COO of Media Temple said,

"The employees at GoDaddy never supported it. It was one person, who had a voice, and they are no longer at GoDaddy. It was an employee, it wasn't the core management."

I understand GoDaddy just purchased your company. I've watched your twitter account explode trying to prevent customers from leaving because of their acquisition. However, this just doesn't square with the story told during the actual SOPA incident.

Here's then GoDaddy CEO Warren Adelman's statement,

Go Daddy opposes SOPA because the legislation has not fulfilled its basic requirement to build a consensus among stake-holders in the technology and Internet communities. Our company regrets the loss of any of our customers, who remain our highest priority, and we hope to repair those relationships and win back their business over time.

And the full press release on the turn around, [emphasis added]

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. (Dec. 23, 2011) - Go Daddy is no longer supporting SOPA, the "Stop Online Piracy Act" currently working its way through U.S. Congress.

"Fighting online piracy is of the utmost importance, which is why Go Daddy has been working to help craft revisions to this legislation - but we can clearly do better," Warren Adelman, Go Daddy's newly appointed CEO, said. "It's very important that all Internet stakeholders work together on this. Getting it right is worth the wait. Go Daddy will support it when and if the Internet community supports it."

Go Daddy and its General Counsel, Christine Jones, have worked with federal lawmakers for months to help craft revisions to legislation first introduced some three years ago. Jones has fought to express the concerns of the entire Internet community and to improve the bill by proposing changes to key defined terms, limitations on DNS filtering to ensure the integrity of the Internet, more significant consequences for frivolous claims, and specific provisions to protect free speech.

"As a company that is all about innovation, with our own technology and in support of our customers, Go Daddy is rooted in the idea of First Amendment Rights and believes 100 percent that the Internet is a key engine for our new economy," said Adelman.

In changing its position, Go Daddy remains steadfast in its promise to support security and stability of the Internet. In an effort to eliminate any confusion about its reversal on SOPA though, Jones has removed blog postings that had outlined areas of the bill Go Daddy did support.

"Go Daddy has always fought to preserve the intellectual property rights of third parties, and will continue to do so in the future," Jones said.

The statement from the CEO is slightly ambiguous, but the press office statement makes it pretty clear that they were working with SOPA legislation. GoDaddy and their General Counsel were working on this, there is no mention of one employee doing this without approval. They worked for months on SOPA legislation. The original statements don't make SOPA sound like some fringe issue, they are framing it as they were actively engaged in its crafting and have changed their judgement about the content/outcome of the legislation.

I tried to get an answer from Russ Reeder and Damian Sellfors, but they ended the Q&A session right before my question.

The rogue agent story that has been passed off today just doesn't match up well. For an issue like SOPA, which is near and dear to so many internet users, this type of spinning needs explanation and clarification.

If you want to sell out your company and earn millions of dollars, that's your prerogative (and congratulations on having enough money to do whatever you want for the rest of your life). All I ask is you be honest with your consumers.

GoDaddy Acquires Media Temple: The Good, The Bad and The Business

If you are following the tech or web hosting world at all today, you've probably heard about GoDaddy [reviews] buying Media Temple [reviews] which Tech Crunch announced earlier today. The news is evoking some very strong emotions and reactions from the community.

@iamelliot Because MediaTemple are absolutely definitely going to start powering their servers by burning elephant tusks.

— Ben Hodgson (@benhodgson) October 15, 2013

But emotions are only so interesting. Let's talk about the implications of this acquisition and how people might actually be affected by it.

The Good

The obvious winners here are the owners of Media Temple: Damian Sellfors and John Carey.

One of the biggest concerns that I've seen is that Media Temple will now go downhill. I don't know that this is guaranteed and it seems unlikely to happen overnight. I only have a few years of data, and only one company jumps to mind as a good comparison: A Small Orange [reviews].

A Small Orange were acquired by Endurance International Group (EIG) in March 2013. EIG, for those who don't know is the conglomerate that owns many major web hosting brands including BlueHost [reviews], HostGator [reviews], Host Monster [reviews] and more.

Most of the EIG brands do not have a great reputation. A Small Orange has had one of the best reputations since Review Signal has launched. So, I've been keeping a close eye to see what happens to their ratings as time goes on. They've continued to operate independently and their ratings have gone up in the past few months. That is the exact opposite of what many people would expect based on the acquisition.

I only have 6 months of data to look at so far, but the trends looks good for them. There may be a decline at some point, but the idea that a company that gets acquired immediately becomes bad isn't necessarily true. Which is good news for Media Temple customers.

The Bad

GoDaddy.

When the second question in your acquisition FAQ is "What about GoDaddy’s reputation in the tech community?" you have a problem.

The answer sends some confusing messages too:

GoDaddy has been transformed in recent months and is essentially a new company. If we did not like what we have seen, we would not have joined the GoDaddy family. They have overhauled their leadership team and attracted tech talent from the best-of-the-best. We love “the new GoDaddy” that CEO Blake Irving and his team have created, especially their new approach with advertising, product focus and UX.

Though neither GoDaddy’s brand nor operations are being integrated into ours, we are excited to be a positive influence on them with how to make even more improvements to better serve the Web pro community.

It's a new company, they are great, but we won't be integrating any of that greatness. In fact, they turn around and say they hope to influence GoDaddy positively, so Media Temple is better? All the data we have would agree with that argument.

As far as GoDaddy being a new and great company?

Not seeing it. It looks fairly stable at a mediocre level. Maybe more time will change that.

Virb and Founders

Another bad signal is both co-founders are leaving. They are also buying back Virb. There are a lot of flowery words about growth, dreams and better serving customers, but the actions seem to speak louder.

The Business

The web hosting industry continues to see consolidation. There appears to be two major players for the consumer market now: GoDaddy and Endurance International Group. They both seem willing to spend massive amounts of money to buy valuable brands.

Last year Media Temple had $52 million dollars in revenue [source]. So I would expect they sold out for 100's of millions considering growth, the cost of customer acquisition in the web hosting industry and low attrition rates.

Neither seems to be aggressively pursuing the growing developer market. There is a whole different set of competitors in the space like Amazon, RackSpace, Linode and Digital Ocean. Media Temple says they specialize in serving web professionals, but that's a slightly ambiguous term. This may be a slight push in the developer direction for GoDaddy, but I am not sure that the GoDaddy brand has much of a chance at making a headway in the developer space. It seems to evoke a lot of strong emotions (both rational and irrational). Using the Media Temple brand may be their only chance at getting any type of foothold.

For Consumers

I don't expect any dramatic changes right away. Media Temple should be on their absolute best behavior considering they know how bad the GoDaddy brand is and any legitimate reason to sow doubt would be amplified by the acquisition news.

A lot of people want to move on moral principles and that's reasonable. I would suggest taking a look at our web hosting reviews.

For those on the fence, locked-in or unable to afford a move, I wouldn't worry too much. We have yet to see any change in performance, it's likely to remain stable for a while.

Keeping an eye out for warning signs of declining performance at your web hosting company is always a good idea. This applies to any company, because over time, service and quality will vary at any company.

Hulk Hogan Launches a Web Hosting Company

Friday's theme is Anything Goes Friday, and I couldn't have asked for a better story.

According to the press release published today wrestling super star Hulk Hogan is launching a web hosting company: Hostamania.

"HOSTAMANIA is already being felt across the internet – the “other guys” have just hired a Hollywood kung-fu fruitcake to be their spokesman! Not even 24 hours after I announced the world of hurt I intend to put on these unreliable web hosts and they are running scared!

Can you believe this, brother? They’ve got this little punk playing a rainbow flute on their homepage!

How do you think a FLUTE is going to stand up to these 24 inch pythons??

Weak mascots of the web hosting world – whatchu’ gonna do when HOSTAMANIA runs WILD on you?

HH"

The latest video from their blog is simply... indescribable. WARNING: Might be mildly not safe for work in a GoDaddy-esque way.

I have no idea how serious this is, but by looking at his partner, Tech Assets, it seems like it's legitimate. They own and operate a handful of niche brands including Christian Web Host and Open Source Host.

It seems like a simple branding play to leverage Hulk Hogan's awareness to get web hosting customers. Given that generic web hosting is so commoditized these days, branding is one of the few differentiators left.

Which Programming Languages, Frameworks and Databases are used at Web Hosting Companies

This is just a small piece of a hopefully bigger article analyzing what I've been looking at in the Review Signal data.

X-Axis: Programming Languages, Frameworks, Databases

Y-Axis: Web Hosting Company

Colors: The deeper the green, the more positive. The deeper the red, the more negative.

What stories do you see?

Interview: How to Re-Brand a Web Hosting Company with SiteGround’s Lilyana Yakimova

I recently had the chance to talk with Lilyana Yakimova, the Director of Marketing at SiteGround about their new branding. A few months ago, SiteGround underwent a major brand overhaul and I thought it would be interesting to learn how a large web hosting company, with over 250,000 domain names hosted, approaches such a challenge.

How has the web hosting market changed since SiteGround launched in 2004? How do you think it will evolve over the next 5 years?

Many things have happened during the last 10 years. We have seen many companies in the hosting industry rise and fall, we have witnessed the silent gathering of large number of previously independent companies under the ownership of a single organization, as most other businesses we also felt the growing role of the social media. But I think that the most important thing that have changed over the years and that has a huge impact on the shared hosting industry is the ease with which one can build a website today. With the rise of the free application like WordPress and Joomla, and the appearance of many affordable hosted website building solutions the number of people that are able to create their own web site is skyrocketing. I see this as a long lasting trend, which the web hosting companies will have to take into consideration while planning the next few years as well.

SiteGround Before (Left) and After (Right) Re-Branding

What events led up to SiteGround's rebranding process? Could you walk through how you approached the rebranding problem?

During the years we have managed to gather a very cool team of enthusiastic and extremely geeky people. Thanks to them SiteGround became one of the few in the shared hosting industry to invent its own technologies. These technologies help us achieve better quality than what is possible with the massively used ready-made solutions. To give you a small example how geeky we actually are, at some point back then, when most of the competitors rarely used server monitoring system or were extremely proud when their servers were checked once each few minutes, we came up with our own solution that checks if everything is OK twice per second. At this time this was 120 time faster than the fastest possible for the others!

This approach led to the fact that we built multiple technological innovations. However, the image of our company was completely indistinguishable from the other players on the market. We had a website that looks like all the others, our own customers were not aware of the innovations we have implemented, and as a whole no one outside the company knew what we actually do and how good it is. So this growing gap between what we really were and what we presented to the world was the main reason for the rebranding decision.

The first step, to show the world who we are, was to start using actively our blog and social media (FaceBook mainly). This was the easiest way to reach our customers, make a more personal contact with them, tell them our stories and turn some of them from users into followers. We also started attending and sponsoring many events and this was a great opportunity to spread our story even further. By the reactions we have seen on these events we knew that we are on the right track. We also changed our approach to launching new technologies. Instead of silently putting in place what we have developed, we started to create advertising and informational launch campaigns. For example, when the SuperCacher was implemented, we created a blog post, an easy-to-understand inforgraphic, detailed tutorial, informational emails for the customers and more. All of the things described above were part of our re-branding effort, though they happened long before the the website and logo redesign. Now we have completed visually the process and we have a clear general message to guide all our future communication activities too.

What is the message you are trying to communicate and who is your target audience?

The main message we wanted to communicate better was that SiteGround is a cool and technologically advanced company, which has a very unusual approach to doing things that differs from what most of the other players in our segment do. We chose to build this message around the idea of being hand-crafted as opposed to being a product of the mass production.

The shared hosting, where we compete, is the most massively used service in our industry. My favorite way to describe what we wanted to achieve with the rebranding is by using a restaurant business allusion. We and our competitors were like the fast food chains. With the rebranding we did not aim to change the segment we compete at. We are not aiming to turn from a hamburger shop to a classy French restaurant; actually we are more after the image of a boutique sandwich shop. What we sell is still a sandwich, but the bread is baked in our own oven, the lettuce is grown in our garden and as a whole what we give you is much better for you than what the mass-market competitors provide. By changing the image we aim to speak better to the same audience and attract more of the people looking for shared hosting, as they will see us as something better, no as one of many. We also aim to capture some of the audience that was previously ignoring the whole segment, as being too low, but can now see something valuable in the shared hosting too.

How do you handle negative feedback on social media and other public forums?

I strongly believe that no feedback is bad if you handle it properly. Actually, we have received some negative reactions during the rebranding process. Some of them have helped us correct some issues before launching the new site and logo, other helped us learn how to communicate change more efficiently. I think that the most important rule for handling negative feedback is to ignore emotions and get to the essence. I have learned that no matter how rude someone has been in stating his or her opinion, and no matter how much you do not liked it at the beginning, if you strip away the emotions you can usually find a valid point that can be addressed to make things better.

Do you think the rebranding has been a success and how do you measure that?

The marketing strategy we currently follow is definitely successful. The measurement is easy – since we started it we see a steady and growing increase in sales volume and revenue. However, the success is not achieved by simply changing the logo, adding a new message and re-designing the website. The strategy to start communicating more effectively our strong sides has started long before the re-design. Truth is that the visual change of the website was the climax of this rebranding and definitely led to most visible results. However, if there was no solid ground for the new message and if we have not started to gradually change the perception of the people before the redesign, the rebranding would not have been so successful.

What is the luckiest thing that has happened to/at SiteGround?

The luckiest thing that has ever happened and continues to happen each day is the fact that there are so many awesome people, who choose to work at SiteGround.

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Meet The Host: SiteGround We take a picture tour through SiteGround's facilities.

Adding Custom CSS to Menus in WordPress

It's WordPress Wednesday!

The easiest things to talk about are the things you experience yourself. Since I use WordPress for this blog, this was an issue I faced. Review Signal has a consistent theme, but WordPress runs very separate from the rest of the site. So in the Menus here I needed to highlight that you were on the blog and have it always be selected.

I created a CSS class called menuselected and then I needed to figure out how to make only that menu item have the CSS. I didn't want to hardcode it into a theme because that would mean extra work every time I wanted to change something. But it wasn't immediately obvious how I could add custom CSS to a menu. WordPress seems to hide a lot of functionality away from the user, but I found it.

Instructions

1. Go to wp-admin/nav-menus.php to edit your menus.

2. Click Screen Options and Check CSS Classes.

3. Click on the menu item and type in your desired CSS class.

That's it, your menu will now have your custom css class. Happy Hacking 🙂

How To Configure MySql InnoDB to Save Tables In Unique Files

MySql is a great database and InnoDB is one of the engines you can use; the other popular choice is MyISAM (a good post explaining the differences). If you work with large amounts of data you can sometimes run into weird problems you didn't know about or expect.

InnoDB saves all the tables in your database into one file: ibdata1 (and an ib_log file). That's all well and good, except it doesn't delete information from them when you erase a table. So your ibfile1 will never decrease in size. This only becomes a problem with large amounts of data and the use of temporary tables. I don't know why this is the default behavior, but there is a very simple solution to get around this problem: use unique files for each table.

Instructions

Make sure you backup everything before doing this and I don't recommend doing this on a live system.

1. Open up your my.cnf (mysql configuration file)

nano /etc/mysql/my.cnf

If you don't know where it is try searching for it:

find / -name my.cnf

2. Add the following under [mysqld] portion of the config:

innodb_file_per_table

3. Remove old files: ibdata1 and ib_log

4. Restart mysql (a couple examples below)

service mysqld restart

/etc/init.d/mysqld restart

MySql will now save innodb tables into unique files and delete them when you delete the tables.

Interactive Graph of Historical Web Hosting Ratings

Since Review Signal has launched we've been tracking the opinions of consumers towards some of the largest web hosting providers. Some people frequently ask how often is our data updated? Every day. How often do the rankings change? Not very often. It generally takes time or catastrophic events to shift people's opinions. I can only describe it as a mental inertia or branding. But brands do change, they evolve over time and information spreads. Today you get a chance to look into our data for yourself.

Click Here to Explore Our Interactive Historical Web Hosting Ratings

Happy Staturday!

Keeping Domain Names Separate From Web Hosting

Domain names and web hosting seem to go together like peanut butter and jelly. You buy a domain name and connect it to your web hosting. It seems natural to have the two together. But I generally advocate against keeping your domain name registered with your web hosting company.

The main reason I advocate for keeping your domain name(s) separate from web hosting is because things are far more likely to go wrong with your web hosting before your domain name. Domain registrars are at least partially regulated, by ICANN. There is only one documented major registrar failure, RegisterFly, and stricter oversight has been put in place because of it. Domain registrars aren't perfect, but for the most part they serve one purpose: managing a domain name for a small fee. The majority of them are adequate at this function. Registrars have also standardized the process of transferring domain names between registrars. So switching registrars isn't terribly complicated (get transfer code, provide to new registrar, accept transfer). The registrar also has no influence on your domain name*.

Web hosts have full control of what your website can do. Almost all of them have restrictions in their terms of service (especially shared hosting) which limit what you can and can't do. If they have your domain name too, you can't simply change web hosts in the event of a problem or dispute. Your domain can be held hostage or as a bargaining chip to make sure you renew or pay them.

There is potentially a secondary problem with a web host registering a domain name for you. The ownership of the domain name comes into question. Do they register it in your name making you the legal owner or their company's name, making them the de facto owner.

The common arguments in favor of keeping your domain name with your web host are simplicity and cost. I can't argue against the simplicity argument. If having two accounts with different companies is too difficult for some reason, there is no counter argument. The cost argument shouldn't come into play when a domain name is around $10/year. It's a fairly low cost item relative to the amount of pain it can cause if something goes wrong.

In conclusion, unless you have some exceptional circumstance preventing you from keeping your domain separate from your web hosting, the two simply don't belong together at one company.

* Some registrars do have policies restricting the type of name, the content put on the domain and the activities a domain can be used for. These generally include spamming and illegal materials.

Reverse Proxy and Cache Server with Nginx

This is one of the ways I improve performance here at Review Signal. I run an nginx reverse proxy and cache system in front of the apache server. Apache can be slow and doesn't have a built in caching system for a lot of the static content we serve. So I put Nginx in front to cache and serve all the content it can directly from memory. This improves the performance of my servers and users get their content faster. It also can help when there is a high load. If you want to see how it performs, I've included a screenshot from Blitz.io at the bottom showing how well Review Signal performs with 500 concurrent users.

The Nginx config (http, server):

http {
  proxy_redirect off;
  proxy_set_header Host $host;
  proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
  proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
 
  # caching options
  proxy_cache_path /var/cache/nginx levels=1:2 keys_zone=my-cache:8m 
max_size=1000m inactive=600m;
  proxy_temp_path /var/cache/tmp;
 
server {
  listen 80;
  server_name subdomain.example.com;
  access_log on;
  error_log on;
 
  location /{
    proxy_pass http://localhost:3000/subdomain;
  }
}
 
server {
  listen 80;
  server_name example.com;
  access_log on;
  error_log on;
 
  location / { 
    proxy_pass http://localhost:3000/; 
    proxy_cache my-cache;
    proxy_cache_valid 200 302 60m;
    proxy_cache_valid 404 1m;
  }
 }
}

Please note that only the relevant parts to this article are included (http and server). You definitely need to add more options to the config before http and in your http section. I didn't include those parts because they can vary a huge amount. See the Nginx documentation for more details and example configurations.

Configuration Walkthrough:

  proxy_redirect off;
  proxy_set_header Host $host;
  proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
  proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;

proxy_redirect off tells the server we aren't redirecting content. We actually do that later with proxy_pass. The headers we set allow you to see proper header information on the server you are proxying to. Without X-Real-IP/X-Forwarded-For the server will simply see your reverse proxy server's IP address.

  proxy_cache_path /var/cache/nginx levels=1:2 keys_zone=my-cache:8m 
max_size=1000m inactive=600m;
  proxy_temp_path /var/cache/tmp;

The first line tells nginx where to save cache data (path), the structure of the cache data (levels), names your cache and it's size (keys_zone), max cache size (max_size) and how long before cached data is expired (inactive). The second line tells nginx where to save temporary data which it uses in building the cache.

server {
  listen 80;
  server_name subdomain.example.com;
  access_log on;
  error_log on;
 
  location /{
    proxy_pass http://localhost:3000/subdomain;
  }
}

This server code creates a reverse proxy to localhost:3000. It doesn't do any caching, it simply forwards all requests between Nginx and the localhost:3000. It is listening to subdomain.example.com and any request to it (/) are passed to localhost:3000/subdomain.

server {
  listen 80;
  server_name example.com;
  access_log on;
  error_log on;
 
  location / { 
    proxy_pass http://localhost:3000/; 
    proxy_cache my-cache;
    proxy_cache_valid 200 302 60m;
    proxy_cache_valid 404 1m;
  }
 }

This server is a reverse proxy and cache. We're responding to any request to example.com. It's forwarding all requests to localhost:3000. It also is creates a cache called my-cache (notice this matches the proxy_cache_path keys_zone setting). proxy_cache_valid defines what HTTP codes can be cached and for how long. So in this example 200 (OK) and 302 (FOUND) are cached for 60 minutes. 404 (NOT FOUND) is cached for 1 minute.

Conclusion

Setting up a reverse proxy isn't too difficult. However, it can be complicated to get it working with your application on occasion. You can empty the cache manually by deleting all the contents in the cache folder. That often helps fix issues. Nginx is fairly smart and when you pass post data, it doesn't serve cached pages, but get/head data will be cached by default. This setup works great when you serve a lot of static content. I run it in front of almost everything here at Review Signal including our blog. It's easy enough to configure different caching levels for different parts of your application. And if you're ever in doubt, test the application directly, then just reverse proxy without caching, and then turn on caching.

As promised, here is what Review Signal's performance looks like when rushing with Blitz.io from 1-500 concurrent users with this nginx setup. It responds to around 300 concurrent requests without going over 100ms response time.