Plesk Official Podcast

Key Takeaways

• People need lower entry barriers to set up and run websites, especially if they are not web professionals. The process is long and expensive, and that needs to change.
• Hosters must provide quick, simplified, ready-to-use solutions to compete against Facebook and other instant platforms. 
• Instant builders often come with several templates, creating an off-the-rack look. WordPress offers so much flexibility but is harder to handle —or is it?
• Many new solutions are, well, new and have yet to prove their robustness and quality. WP Squared is based on the well-established WP Toolkit, which is stable, secure, and high-quality. WP Squared is designed to remove as many steps as possible and can be set up within one afternoon. It has zero-barrier integration and flexible customization. 
• Security is the biggest concern for most businesses. They need safe, resilient websites and secure plugins because breaches and downtimes can have massive consequences. Virtual patching and WP Guard are the perfect lines of defense.

In this Episode: Where the Web Hosting Industry is Going

So what were the web hosting trends for 2022? Are we continuing to see unprecedented growth in ecommerce? Or are consumers once again heading out to brick and mortar stores for their purchases. 

What can providers do to help SMBs get back into the swing of in-person commerce, and how can they stay ahead of the curve in the ever-changing online landscape? We look at everything from usage trends, to working remotely, to environmental impact. 

Key Takeaways

• The hosting industry continued to see growth in 2022, but it has slowed down. This makes sense as the market begins to saturate a little.
• That said, things are not going back to the way they were before. More people have gotten used to using eCommerce from a convenience and comfort standpoint, and we can’t take that away from them now.
• Growth is still happening because there are still businesses realizing the customers aren’t coming back and they need to act.
• The truth is even if you don’t provide curb-side pickup anymore, You still need some kind of web presence to survive in today’s market.
• As ARM processors become more prevalent, servers will use less energy and should become more affordable for services providers and users alike. 
• As a result of ARM processors becoming more popular, Intel is working hard to make their chips more energy efficient.
• This will accelerate another growing trend with availability. Soon, we’ll be as close to 100% up time as humanly possible with all servers being managed remotely and having fallbacks. 
• Speaking of remote work, most services provides are doing all of their work remotely now. This was another trend that accelerated during the pandemic and is here to stay.
• How is WebPros keeping up with all of this? They continue to improve their infrastructure, but they also added a lot to their product offering for 24/7 monitoring and logging, as well as full site checks, SEO, and much more. 

In this Episode: Learning, then Teaching WordPress Development

Carrie’s path to WordPress was an interesting one. She started in web development doing ASP.net, before quitting that and going to work at a Starbucks. She went there because she had aspirations of opening her own coffee shop, and thought on the job learning was the best way to do it. 

While she was there, her managed introduced her to WordPress. She started freelancing, and was easily able to replace her Starbucks income with freelance income. 

From there, she dove into Lynda.com (now LinkedIn Learning) courses to learn WordPress, and eventually started teaching there herself. Her approach to teaching develop is fantastic – definitely worth having a listen just for that! 

Key Takeaways

• One of the most rewarding things about being a freelancer is helping different companies work through a solution. By mixing up your client base and not just taking the easy jobs, you get to solve different problems. 
• When it comes to teaching WordPress (or anything), start with an assumption about the learner. What do they know? What do they need to know? What’s the primary outcome for the course? 
• Learn something like you’re going to teach it. Don’t just know how to do it – understand the “why” behind the “how.” Even if you don’t make courses or do talks, this skill will help you with coworkers and clients. 
• There’s a lot of knowledge to share! Don’t keep things to yourself for “job security.” 
• Use the tools that work best for you. For Carrie, VS Code, GitHub, and WP-CLI are invaluable. 
• Don’t just use tools because they’re shiny and new. Determine if you need them and what you need them for.  

The Official Plesk Podcast: Next Level Ops Featuring

Joe Casabona

Joe is a college-accredited course developer and podcast coach. You can find him at Casabona.org.

Carrie Dils

Carrie Dils is a Frontend Developer and LinkedIn Learning Instructor

In this Episode: Using Your Skills to Forge Your Own Path

Tracy got into websites in the mid-90s, when everyone had a “home page.” In college she was really into engineering…but she was also really into art. Because of that, her teachers wrote her off for not being focused enough. 

That trend seemed to continue through her agency work. She enjoyed the work, but wanted variety. And the thing that gave her that variety was WordPress. Learning, and committing, to WordPress allowed her to combine all of her skills into what she does today: a mix of UX Design and Frontend Development to deliver really killer results for her clients. 

Key Takeaways

• Know your worth. Don’t be cheap just because people think you should be. 
• As Tracy says, “I know I’m not cheap, because I don’t do cheap work.”
• WordPress is a great networking tool. Use it to meet new people, agencies, and potential clients. 
• As you’re developing a solution, answer this question: “Does this solve the problem for your user?”
• Working for yourself has its challenges. One could be distractions. Tracy turns off all of her notifications…a benefit of working for yourself.
• If you want to level up, learn the “Soft skills” of working with people. Learning body language, negotiating – they are soft.  They are really crucial to working with clients.
• A great book on learning negotiation is Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss

• The WordPress Dashboard is a typical GUI with specific use-cases in mind. CLI is way more expressive
• It’s also a much more scalable solution because you’re not dealing with the assumptions of Core developers. You can create anything you’d like.
• When you’re running a Dashboard solution, everything is a standard web request. With WP-CLI, you run the commands through shell.
• It doesn’t just allow easy scripting, but for a normalization layer. If you have a common set of tools and settings you use for each site, WP-CLI can normalize the installation process for you. 
• You can start off simple, updating Core, themes, and plugins, and then move on to more complicated actions. There are very powerful commands to do imports and exports, combined with search and replace.
• This allows you to have fully automated site migrations.
• WordPress has been changing rapidly, and WP-CLI is trying to keep up. They’re working to make sure everything works with Gutenberg. 
• They’re also working to ensure WP Scaffold, a feature that allows you to spin up new plugins and themes, works properly. 
• Any plugin can integrate and support WP-CLI by adding their own set of commands. For example, if you use a Forms plugin to gather submissions, you can use WP-CLI (integrated with that forms plugin) to gather all of the data, and create beautiful reports and charts.
• The possibilities are endless with WP-CLI. It’s really the most uninhibited version of WordPress you can get.

Key Takeaways

• Hyperscalers are cloud-based infrastructure that can easily and quickly scale-up in response to heavy traffic.
• Digital Ocean offers infrastructure as a service, meaning that SMBs don’t need to keep and maintain their own servers, or understand hyperscalers at all.
• When we talk about scaling up, we’re talking about computability. The example used in the episode is if a group of students on a college campus all decide to start mining Bitcoin. A hyperscaler can respond to that much more quickly than staff can.
• For devs and sysadmins, the better your tools, the more time you have to focus on what you need to focus on.
• Management consoles like Plesk fit in really well with hyperscalers. They are a tools that sits on top so you don’t need to understand Linux commands to do basic things (like install WordPress!)
• Where big providers focus on feature expansion to appease their huge enterprise customers, Digital Ocean takes a different approach: simplicity.
• SMBs are also concerned with scaling rapidly, but may not have the staff or resources to fully understand a solution from the big providers. Digital Ocean’s focus on simplicity means they don’t have to.

Links

• Darian Wilkin
• Digital Ocean

A high level overview of what we'll cover: 

1. What node.js is
2. How it compares to PHP and Ruby on Rails
3. How to Install it using Plesk Obsidian
4. Working with Dependencies
5. Debugging
6. Installing it on Windows

Show Notes

1. How to Host Node.js Applications on Plesk Obsidian
2. PHP vs Node.js: Which is better?
3. Node.js vs Ruby on Rails: Which to Choose
4. Phusion Passenger
5. iisnode
6.  

Show Notes

• Anne McCarthy
• How to Test Full SIte Editing
• Museum of Block Art

Key Takeaways

• Anne started out as a Happiness Engineer at Automattic, which gives her a unique look at problems users were having and how people were using WordPress.
• At the root level, web development has gotten harder. There’s a bigger learning curve to getting started. BUT theme development, and creating without code, has gotten a lot easier as a result. 
• Part of Anne’s approach to testing Full Site Editing is thinking of “all the people I can’t see” and how it’s going to affect them. This keeps her grounded and driven to make sure the software is as good as possible before it gets merged into Core.
• Keeping an open mind definitely helps with this. Don’t get too attached to the work, and don’t take criticism personally. 
• As for testing with a wider audience, people in the WordPress space are going out into their communities and doing group testing. This gets people who may not be checking the WordPress Slack (and might not even know it exists!)
• Engaging and listening to users is SO important. “We need to listen to the core audience, the biggest supporters if we want the edge users to believe we’re listening,” says Anne. In other words: why would lesser-known users want to help when they think the biggest voices in the space are being ignored?
• As for how you can test better: work with Designers. They think about users and interactions different and can provide a different perspective. 
• Break things into smaller chunks, and as you see patterns, document them!
• Having several ways to test at varying degrees helps. 
• When it comes to getting feedback, have a structure to get good feedback, but don’t create too much friction. Having a way to get “bad” feedback makes way for a fruitful conversation. 
• You want people to feel heard, but guiding them towards the right channels is something you should actively pursue. 

In this Episode: Mitigating quickly, Log and Blacklist monitoring

So much effort often goes into building a website or project, creating content, keeping the site secure, backing it up and all of the other tasks it takes to keep a site running smoothly. Thus we tend to overlook the best way to mitigate a site going down or slowing down: monitoring. 

Vincent Van Megen, Head of Monitoring for Webpros, is here to tell us what site and server monitoring are, why they are important, how they work and the best way to set up monitoring for your site. 

We also dig into 360 Monitoring, a new offering from Plesk/ Webpros that really lives up to its name. On top of site and server monitoring, it also offers log monitoring and blacklist monitoring. 

Plus: what you need to do when you get a dreaded downtime notification.

Key Takeaways

• You want to be aware at all times what’s going on. At the website level, there are so many things that can go wrong, from expired SSL certificates to an outage at Cloudflare.
• Downtime means additional expense. Some estimate that a website being down can cost a company $5,000/hr. 
• When it comes to server monitoring, you want to be sure your website is performing properly. Server monitoring will check things like memory, speed, MySQL queries and other metrics that could affect performance.
• So how does it work? The monitor sends a request to the site every few minutes. It gets the HTTP response and measures a whole bunch of metrics, like time to first bite, to make sure everything is loading properly and quickly. 
• You also want to check at locations around the world.
• If something is determined to be down, you will get a notification (email, Slack or even webhook) to let you know. Then you can mitigate from there.
• Mitigating quickly is super important for two reasons: 100% uptime is a myth, so you need to be ready. It’s also much easier to lose trust than to gain it again. So showing visitors you’re reliable will help gain and keep trust.
• 360 Monitoring by Plesk is designed to make monitoring as easy as possible for the user. It even includes log and blacklist monitoring. 
• Blacklist (email/ spam) monitoring is super important because it can be super hard to detect. People won’t necessarily know if they don’t get an email from you. 360 Monitoring keeps track of hundreds of MX blacklists.
• 360 Monitoring isn’t only for Plesk customers either. You can get 1 site monitored for free and you can install everything with a single installation command from your server.

The Official Plesk Podcast: Next Level Ops Featuring

Joe Casabona

Joe is a college-accredited course developer and podcast coach. You can find him at Casabona.org.

Vincent Van Megen

Vincent is the Head of Monitoring at WebPros.

Emily shares her story with us – how she got involved with WordPress, and how that led to interviewing and managing developers. While she wasn’t always interested in technology, her degree in journalism helped push her towards doing more tech… specifically with HTML, CSS, and working with analytics. 

Now she’s COO of GoWP – a business that transitioned from agency to servicing agencies. She runs (as her title implies) the operations, which includes vetting developers for their dedicated developer program. This program helps pair agencies with long-term, qualified contractors to help with development work. 

Emily tells us what to look for when hiring a developer, as well as what developers can do to make their lives easier!