by: AskPat 172 Episode Transcript
Pat Flynn: Hey, what's up, everybody? Pat Flynn here. Welcome to Episode 172 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me.
If you'd like to join me on social media as well, here are the two spots to do it: Facebook.com/smartpassiveincome, or you can find me on Twitter, at the handle @patflynn. I'd love for you to come on by. Check it out.
Let's get to today's question from Kristin.
Kristin: Hey, Pat. Kristin here. My question is about a comment that you made in one of your podcast sessions. You noted that you'd outgrown Bluehost to host your website. I was just wondering what that meant, or what it looked like, and how do you know when your site has outgrown its hosting company? Is it about the number of visitors within an hour, or within a day, or a month? And then, when you transition to a different hosting company, what is that like? What's that process like? Is the price point much different if you're going to a company that can house more traffic and content? Thank you so much for your time, Pat. I can't tell you how much I appreciate all that you do for all of us listeners out there. My website is called Will Travel For Vegan Food, and I'm happy to report that I've just wrapped up two years living out of a van, traveling around the country, inspired so much by you. Thank you again for all that you do. Catch you later. Bye.
Pat Flynn: Hey, Kristin. Thank you so much for your question today. Before I get to the answer, I just want to thank you so much for what you said there. First of all, thank you for giving me a little bit of credit for what you've done. But, just, thank you for taking action. I think that's the biggest thing. I'm here to guide people. I'm here to answer questions, and I'm here to provide all the information I can, but nobody finds success without the action that's taken, or the execution. Kristin, as much as you want to give credit to me, I have to give credit back to you, because you were the one who actually implemented. So, congrats to you; congrats to everybody else out there who's taking action. I mean, that's what it takes to succeed. I'm just inspired by that, Kristin, so thanks.
To answer your question, what does it mean that I've outgrown Bluehost? Yes, I've mentioned that a few times. What that basically meant was, I was at a point where I had optimized my website for speed, yet I still was getting a little bit of slow-down. It was due to the fact that I was getting a ton of traffic. I had my setup for a couple of years, using Bluehost, which was great. It's the hosting company I recommend if you're first starting out. If you'd like a special price, go to AskPat.com/bluehost; you'll get it for $3.95 a month, I believe, which is hardly anything at all. I got to a point where my business was growing, and knew where it was headed in the future, and I wanted to be smart. Before any incredibly, just downer outages, I thought I had, and I was like, you know what, it's growing, I'm not really exceeding my bandwidth, but I'm getting close. I had thousands of people coming to the site a day. I just knew. I just kinda knew it was time to upgrade. So I upgraded. The logical steps coming out of shared hosting, which is the Bluehost … I will say, at the time, Bluehost didn't offer these other things I'm going to be mentioning, in as far as upgrades. But they do offer them now. They have dedicated servers, and things like that. If you are already on Bluehost, you can upgrade within Bluehost, which would probably be the easiest transition. I will talk about the transition out of Bluehost, into another server later. I still use Bluehost for a lot of my other sites. A lot of my niche sites and stuff, that's not getting as much traffic as Smart Passive Income.
With Smart Passive Income right now, I am using Linode: L-I-N-O-D-E.com. That is for dedicated server. Which means, there's one server at their location hosting my site. That's it. It's not sharing it. You know, like Bluehost, if you're first starting out, your host server might be serving many other websites, including yours. You're all sharing that bandwidth that comes to that one host. If you have a dedicated server, you have just one box that is dedicated to your site. You have increased resources, increased speed, and capabilities with that, but of course, increased costs as well. To save costs, before you go from shared to dedicated, you can go from shared to what's called a virtual private server, or a VPS. Coming into Bluehost, I went to a company called Servint: S-E-R-V-I-N-T.net. They were great. Things were good. The virtual private server was fine, then I kinda outgrew that. I could tell, because, again, I was optimized on my site for speed, but the speed was so slow, because it just wasn't able to keep up. I went to a dedicated server on Servint.net, as well. I switched from Servint to Linode, because of some things that happened in regards to a site outage. It's not very common with this company. Servint.net is a great company. For the time I was there, it was amazing. I know a lot of other people who use that same company, so that's one you can go to if you want. However, I had some issues with their customer service when my site was down. It took a week to get my site back up. That never happens, they said. But it happened to me, so I just had to leave. I just couldn't—I just was not happy at that time. This was March 2013, and I remember it, because I was in San Francisco shooting video for my book Let Go. I was just so concerned about my site the whole time. It was down for a week. Everything else that was on that server, was down as well. Then I lost about $12,000 to $15,000. I just couldn't have that. But again, servint.net was a great company. They have since put things in place to stop what happened to me, from happening to other people. I was sort of happy to be that person to make that happen, so everybody else wouldn't have to go through what I did. I just went to another company. Linode.com is where I'm at now.
Anyway, the transition, whether you're going from Bluehost, or any other hosting company to another one, it's a little bit difficult. My best advice to you, is to have somebody help you, or tap into those customer service people in those companies to help you as well. Servint.net helped me transition really easily from Bluehost to Servint.net. The same from Servint.net to Linode, with the guys at Linode, although I did have a person helping me on my team at that point, so it was even much easier then. It kinda works like this: You have your host on company A, right? It's hosted there, and your site's up. Basically, you create a duplicate site on host B. It's the exact same thing. Maybe you change things around if you want to do a design upgrade or two. I wouldn't do that. What happens, is, you essentially just copy the whole thing on to this other server, on this other company. It's the exact same thing. Currently, the Internet, quote, “The Internet is pointing to site A.” Anytime someone goes through your URL and that address, they go to the server that's hosted on A. It does this using DNS, or domain name servers, which, then, it maps the IP addresses. It's a little technical. I say it's a lot technical, so I'm not going to get into that. Essentially, you change your DNS to point from the old IP address, with a old server A, to the new IP address on server B. That's the transition. That's essentially how it works. Again, it's a little bit technical, and I've had issues in the past, although, if it's a good hosting company, they will help you. In most cases they will, because they want your business. That is how the transition works, and that's what I mean by outgrowing … Sorry, I just dropped something, my pen. I just outgrew these companies.
If you're looking ahead, and your business is growing, and you know that you're going to be serving a lot more people, you're going to have a lot more intricate design, perhaps, or you just know that there's good things happening for your business in the future, it's better to look ahead and think about what might happen in terms of your site and its capabilities. It's always good to upgrade. It also gives you a lot more motivation too, because you're going to be paying a lot more money. Currently, I'm paying hundreds of dollars a month for a dedicated server. But of course, I'm at a point in my business now, where it makes sense to do that. It might not make sense at first to do that. You have to be a little bit smart, and you might have to just see how you feel, see how your site feels a little bit. You definitely want to upgrade if your business and your audience is upgrading as well.
So, Kristin, thank you so much for the question. I really appreciate it. An AskPat t-shirt is definitely headed your way. Can't wait to potentially see a picture of your wearing it; that'd be awesome. We've gotten a ton of people, actually, sending pictures in, which is so, so cool. Thank you so much for the question. For those of you who have a question you'd like potentially featured here on the show, just head on over to AskPat.com and ask right there on that page. It's that easy.
As always, I like to end with a quote, and that is a quote today by Nelson Mandela. He says, “It always seems impossible, until it's done.” It always seems impossible until it's done. I love this. This makes me think of the four-minute mile. Everybody thought it was just not possible, at all. Until one person did it. Then all of a sudden, loads of people started breaking that record, you know, the four-minute mile. Same thing happened when we went to space, and all this other stuff. It always seems impossible. In your mind, a lot of the stuff that you're working on in your business, might seem impossible to you. But once you do it, and it takes action, like what Kristin's doing, in order to do it. Or it takes examples and motivation from other people who have done it before, to know that you can do it. It's always going to seem impossible, but you also have to believe in yourself. Also, have to believe in yourself.
Cheers. Thank you so much. I appreciate you. If you have time, leave a quick review on AskPat at iTunes. That would be really helpful for the show, and also I read those. It's quite motivating for me as well. Thank you. Thank you so much. I appreciate you. Take care, and I'll see you in the next episode of AskPat.