Guest Blog written by: Patrick Dolan, Director of Hosting Development for Virtuozzo
My parents taught me to share, but I am tired of sharing my hosting.
As a kid, I was taught to share, and I think I was pretty good at it. Actually, I was really good at it. I was even better than most kids. As I got older I continued the trend of sharing into my business career as I started my first website on a shared hosting plan. This meant I was on a server with many other websites, splitting our resources daily.
But this is not just a story about sharing my hosting. This is an introduction to my journey as a nascent, hobbyist, and small business advocate. An introduction to my life as a friend who volunteered to build a website, who turned into a small business owner of said website, and experienced the trials of how that terribly slow website affected our business overall. The ending of that company turned into the beginning of the rest of my journey.
How has that impacted my career today? It brought me to a place where I can share my excitement for the future of hosting. A place where I can celebrate my current endeavors aimed at making sure people like myself, the expert sharers of the world, don’t have to share anymore. And though I may not have fixed every exasperating aspect that comes with moving your business online, it has been my goal over the last several years to end the frustrations that are caused by inadequate hosting.
My Meet Cute
When we set our first website up with shared hosting, we didn’t care too much about our website’s speed or how long on average it took to load. How could I complain when it seemed like I had enough time to play a game of chess while my computer was screeching at me as it tried to connect to the World Wide Web?
Now, nearly 20 years later, the world can't wait. No more discs in every magazine you buy, no more typing in “www,” and no more waiting for a new release to be returned at Blockbuster. Everything is on-demand. People want a lot of things and they want them now. A user’s attention span is measured in the milliseconds it takes to load the average website and they won’t wait long before bouncing off if their clicks aren’t answered. Speed is currency and speed is generated by having the right resources available. So again, call me selfish, but I’m tired of sharing my hosting and its resources.
I’m not saying that shared hosting doesn’t have a place in the future of hosting. The future is going to look different for every hosting product we know of today. There will be new trends and new names for old products twenty years from now. Regardless of what they are labeled today, there will always be new innovations as humanity continues to grow technologically. There is a place for every innovation from now until forever depending on the user. But for me? Shared hosting is not for me and my website. Now that I am finally being selfish about everything, I want everything now.
Falling In Love
While the beginning of my story shows some frustration in the way my relationship with shared hosting ended, I want to reflect on the benefits of utilizing it during the foundation of my first business.
It was almost twenty years ago when I first fell in love with the Internet. When I first joined my friend’s website I had an amazing relationship with hosting and the internet as a whole. For me and my beginning needs, shared hosting was amazing. The price was right and the resources were enough for our burgeoning website. We started uploading files and creating the best website we could. I remember our first encounters with FrontPage. We were just beginning to learn even the most basic CMS back then. As our business grew our shared hosting grew with it! We soon transitioned to a new CMS revolutionarily called WordPress. WordPress was our end game and I still use it today.
Back then we felt invincible like there was nothing that could get in our way. We didn’t question our security or anything else going on around us. The world was in slow motion and we were experiencing success on almost every front.
Even though I had another job and sometimes didn’t have enough time to devote to growing our site, I still was in and out of its success. Then one day I decided enough was enough and I took a full-time job working for our growing website. Over the years I stayed there, even when other jobs vied for my talents and skills. I wanted to see our project through and I had no interest in working for anyone else.
It’s Not You, It's Me
Yet, as what tends to happen in many business relationships, I grew tired of working on our site, day in and day out, when shared hosting couldn’t keep up with our advancing success. Though we did a great job of managing our growth externally, it was still hard to stay afloat with the number of resources our hosting package was giving us. We were pushing our current plan to the max and it was drastically affecting our speed and reliability. When it all finally became too much, our site shut down. We tried to get some advice shortly after, but it was too late.
It’s unfair of me to blame shared hosting as a whole. It worked for us for many years and held strong at the beginning of our success. It was our continued advancement that put such a strain on our hosting package’s resources at the very end. It only makes sense that the feeling of security that we started with began to dwindle as our company outgrew our initial shared hosting package.
Because of this, we finally upgraded our plans. It was time to ditch shared hosting and find a plan that could accommodate where our company was going. It was the end of an amazing shared hosting journey and I would not be where I am today without shared hosting and its early benefits.
My Perfect Match
So, as I said, I am done sharing. It was shortly after this switch occurred that I found, and began to work for, Virtuozzo. While Virtuozzo is helping to enable the infrastructure to simplify the life of business owners, we are working closely with Hosting.com to create a new experience from end-to-end.
We are going to be a big part of the future of hosting and together we plan to build something that is meant to last. With an amazing team you can trust for support and a process where you can upgrade with a few clicks of a button, that’s something I can see sharing with the world.
About Patrick Dolan and Virtuozzo
Patrick Dolan, Director of Hosting Development for Virtuozzo
Patrick has over 20 years of experience within the hosting industry as an end-user and as a professional that dates back to the dot-com boom where he was working for an e-commerce software startup (victim of the bust), then a large, well-known hosting provider and today Virtuozzo. Within those 20 years, he has also managed a small business which fueled his determination to support this segment. With Virtuozzo, he is focused on creating the infrastructure that will power the future of the industry and partnering with Hosting.com to help deliver an amazing end-user experience.
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