ROBERT JACOBI

Industry Analyst & Strategist

Web Hosting News is a Minefield

I have many Google Alerts running, and this one caught my eye yesterday, and then the whole article drove me nuts, TechBullion, Cloud Industry Overview 2021: Web Builders is the latest tool against hypercompetition. This is the kind of post (which is getting infinitely more credit by just being linked) that is a mess of useless information that somehow gets picked up by an alert for “web hosting.”

BigScoots: Personal. Expert. Always There. That’s Real Managed Hosting.

The Site Problems

Let’s start with the nit-picky aspects of the site. A news, op-ed, every site should always have updated copyright dates. 2019? Really? It’s too easy and a pet peeve. And maybe I’m just odd for always checking but the site is built on WordPress so no excuse for implementing something so simple.

Second, the copy / paste is hijacked, I see this every so often and it is infuriating. There is no excuse except a desire for end user abuse. Copying the title text of the article is something I do for all of these types of posts but guess what happens when you hit paste, you get the title, some line breaks, and then a “Read More [url]” – it happens for ANY copied text – a simple WTF suffices at this point!

The Content Problems

I’m not going to do a full autopsy/Zapruder but by the time I’ve finished reading sentence (not paragraph) three, I know we are in trouble. I make my fair share of typos but GoDaddy is misspelled Godaddy throughout the article.

Wix is not a hosting company. Wix is a proprietary web platform. Calling Wix a hosting company would be like saying my iPhone is a hosting company. These are both proprietary and walled gardens. I can’t host my Wix site at Convesio or GoDaddy, and neither can I host something not-Wix at Wix.

Elementor is a web builder. Phew. Darnit, it’s most definitely not a host – today – ok but I don’t think it’s any state secret that there will be an Elementor cloud platform since one is already in beta. Similar companies are building are also in various levels of developing out platform solutions. WordPress.com was pretty much born as one.

Besides the litany of keyword stuffing in the article there are just so many misperceptions, that many people will take as fact. The premise that GoDaddy, Bluehost, etc. are competitors to the Cloud Three (AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud) is a complete misreading of the market. These hosts are actually some of the best clients for the Cloud Three. The web builder competition is not between infrastructure and hosts but each other.

Good Old Fashioned </rant>

Argh this whole piece gets under my skin because it’s gamed the system for SEO, popped up at the top of my alert list, and misunderstands everything about the cloud and hosting industries. A finally to the articles finale, there is no way to “avoid hypercompetition in the market.” Frankly, that’s what’s making the industry more user friendly, and economical.

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