# Since WHT isn't the same as 5+ years ago, where's all the 'good' traffic gone to?



## ItsChrisG (Mar 2, 2015)

A lot of providers say and know (at least the ones that are run by people who have been in the industry for ~10 years, so they have a frame of reference, that WHT is no longer what it was starting about 5~ years ago. 5+ years ago WHT was full of "better" traffic/client types, now its been overrun with crap both in terms of providers and the client type and overall traffic surfing the forum.

So, where did all the rest of the good traffic go? As far as I know, there is still no other board that can be compared to WHT - but I have to assume that the traffic went SOMEWHERE. Good clients didnt all of a sudden stop searching for the types of stuff they were 5+ years ago.

Where do you guys think it went, or what do you think they are doing now?


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## Profuse-Jim (Mar 2, 2015)

I think they all retired and counting their money at home.


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## DomainBop (Mar 2, 2015)

> I have to assume that the traffic went SOMEWHERE. Good clients didnt all of a sudden stop searching for the types of stuff they were 5+ years ago.


Maybe the good clients went to companies that don't advertise or participate on WHT (or hosting forums in general).  The bulk of my monthly hosting bills go to providers who aren't active on WHT, and off the bat I can think of dozens of major industry players who don't have any active representatives on WHT: AWS, DigitalOcean, Rackspace, Peer1, OVH, etc.

The decline of forums and rise of social media probably played a "minor" role in WHT's traffic decline and changing demographics too



> 5+ years ago WHT was full of "better" traffic/client types


If I had any services with you I'd be lawyering up and suing you AND filing a PayPal dispute as a result of that statement about the declining quality of clients. 

Addressing the decline in quality of clients not as a host but as someone who runs an Internet business that has been around (a few months) longer than Google: declining quality of clients isn't limited to the hosting industry.  If you were to plot a graph of "Internet penetration" vs "client quality" over the past 20 years I'm sure you would find there is an inverse relationship between the two.


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## Chatahooch (Mar 2, 2015)

Social + blogs = Different places and outlets for that traffic. WHT is no longer the "catch all" it was.


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## Francisco (Mar 2, 2015)

I think you're missing the big one - hosts paying for people to host with them. Digital Ocean, Vultr, Azure, Dell, Rackspace, OVH, Linode, etc, all more or less pay you to be their client with upfront credits with a small initial deposit.

What WHT is left with is a lot of people that have run out of credit with any of those, can't signup due to GEO restrictions, or are too cheap to put the $5 deposit in.

There's still good clients in WHT it's just there's everyone and their dog undercutting each other to get them.

I did a breakdown on WHT the other day where in a given day, non premium/corporate users always had at least as many posts as corporate's if not more. Many/most of the normal's had JUST enough to get into the ad section and maybe comment on a thread if their name comes up.

The place is just a selling floor which is fine, but Corporate's are getting the raw end since many of the corporate's have a LOT of posts in there, helping bring a lot of decent content (along side a lot of 'please check the offers section' posts).

Francisco


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## drmike (Mar 3, 2015)

I think a lot of folks miss the economic reality of the past 10 years.  You folks probably have blindness based on well to do locality you reside in.

Lots of people are out of tokens to play life.   Out of spare cash for non essentials.

Middle class (and not just in the US) has been beat down.   Income plummeted, and there is high unemployment contrary to the selective revised counting that unemployment numbers say.  I know many people who use to earn a good living who now would likely be thrilled to find fulltime at minimum-like-wage.  It's fairly brutal.

On top of that,  there is what happened with the rise of Facebook.   Facebook killed a lot of traffic to forums.   People like the lazy garbage yard of everything in one site/place.   Backlash against Facebook and people bailing out, hasn't happened quite enough yet to reverse that. It's happening, but not fast or large enough.

Other big factor, hosting things yourself was more of a necessity years back.  Today there are 100 different companies with a solution for everything.  Be it simplified web tools for your blog (Wordpress hosted) or easy site creation (Wix).  Lots of these and for nearly every niche. 

What is left of a generic market where people are buying raw resources where they must have the know how to pull all that together for their solution, maintain it, secure it, create the content for it?   Well, it's greatly reduced.  How much?  I can't really say.  

At this point in time if you are throwing ads / offers at sites solely as your means of awareness and sales, you are going to have a very hard time.  Exception is those silly low price giveaways, but they too have a finite market cap.  You will deal with mass abuse, fraud, etc. with that stuff and with no real margins, pure scale formula.

Even if you have a well thought out approach with people to manage your awareness / marketing / sales / etc.  it's still very hard and active revision approach until niche is found and traction gets going.


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## GIANT_CRAB (Mar 3, 2015)

What WHT needs is a lot more drama. I mean, just look at LET. LET don't randomly ban people for speculation and drama whilst WHT try to keep drama to the minimal and just randomly bans people. LET traffic is still kind of thriving because of DRAMA. 

Basically, WHT is now know as the "have you tried checking the offers section" place. Even when you ask for help, they'll give very brief answers or nonsense just to advertise their signature. Vpsboard on the other hand, has people that really wants to help you.


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## mprice (Mar 3, 2015)

The 'devops' term didn't even exist in the heyday of WHT.   there is a whole 'devops' industry, job title and various discussion boards to replace what used to be systems administration technical stuff that was discussed on WHT.  Most developers don't need or want the traditional type hosting products discussed on WHT, when you have the likes of Heroku, AWS, etc.  Website owners who are not developers now have many other alternatives for getting web hosting, with sitebuilder-type products bundled with their GoDaddy domain name, or Squarespace, Wix, etc.


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## drmike (Mar 3, 2015)

GIANT_CRAB said:


> What WHT needs is a lot more drama. I mean, just look at LET. LET don't randomly ban people for speculation and drama whilst WHT try to keep drama to the minimal and just randomly bans people. LET traffic is still kind of thriving because of DRAMA.
> 
> Basically, WHT is now know as the "have you tried checking the offers section" place. Even when you ask for help, they'll give very brief answers or nonsense just to advertise their signature. Vpsboard on the other hand, has people that really wants to help you.


LET has drama?  I thought they wanted no more of that   It does generate interest and there is no arguing that.  Problem is how to have drama along with healthy portion of good constructive.   Balance thing.

As far as LET thriving, well, it has seen its peak.  Arguably its time is passing.  Nearly everything fades, eventually.  Although cheap has a longer lure on folks.

WHT I don't visit much.  The random bans are infamous and I swear every other providers has prior bans there.   I find WHT to be incomplete and counter productive.   There is like with other sites, and this one included no correlation of information to folks posting ads.   You can go rm -rf servers, insult your customers, rip people off, then next week go post a WHT offer.  The first person that steps up and complains on your offer gets yanked with some moderation points.   It SUCKS.

I'd like to see WHT minus the Offers   I wonder how that would go over, just a month or three.

All of these sites bring little to the table to tie things together.   The forums use for such is incredibly yucky.


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## drmike (Mar 3, 2015)

mprice said:


> The 'devops' term didn't even exist in the heyday of WHT.   there is a whole 'devops' industry, job title and various discussion boards to replace what used to be systems administration technical stuff that was discussed on WHT.  Most developers don't need or want the traditional type hosting products discussed on WHT, when you have the likes of Heroku, AWS, etc.  Website owners who are not developers now have many other alternatives for getting web hosting, with sitebuilder-type products bundled with their GoDaddy domain name, or Squarespace, Wix, etc.


I agree with this.  However stuff like Heroku and AWS aren't real affordable usually.  Those along with Google explain just a bit of the defection to Cloud-like stuff outside of WHT.

Just look at Heroku's support pricing:



Standard Support

Business Hour Support 1

1+ Day Response Times

Free


Premium Support

24/7 Support

1-hour Response SLA

Starting at $1,000/month 2


Technical Account Manager

Includes _Premium Support_

Dedicated Technical Consulting

Starting at $2,000/month 3


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## Francisco (Mar 4, 2015)

drmike said:


> I'd like to see WHT minus the Offers   I wonder how that would go over, just a month or three.
> 
> All of these sites bring little to the table to tie things together.   The forums use for such is incredibly yucky.


I proposed turning off signatures in the discussion sections just to see what would happen but no one in administration wants to deal with the obvious fallout of that all.

Francisco


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## drmike (Mar 4, 2015)

Francisco said:


> I proposed turning off signatures in the discussion sections just to see what would happen but no one in administration wants to deal with the obvious fallout of that all.


I turn sigs off all over town....  Downside is data isn't there to make it clear at times who is what company.  Been known to turn sigs back on for a few days, get tired of what I see then turn it back off.  

Sigs mattered more when whole backlinks count was a bigger signal in search placement.  Now most of these forums software solutions are Nofollow links anyways, so less useful for that.   Another reason why fewer quality folks are showing up on forums.


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## Kephael (Mar 4, 2015)

Serious clients are using real cloud solutions that are offered by Microsoft, Amazon, and Rackspace.


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## ItsChrisG (Mar 4, 2015)

Kephael said:


> Serious clients are using real cloud solutions that are offered by Microsoft, Amazon, and Rackspace.



None of those are "real cloud", just VPS's.


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## Chatahooch (Mar 4, 2015)

Kephael said:


> Serious clients are using real cloud solutions that are offered by Microsoft, Amazon, and Rackspace.


I have tried 2 of those big 3. Namely Rackspace and Amazon and the performance was quite simply atrocious. Serious clients look beyond the brand name and go for another solution that leaves these guys in the dust in many different ways.


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## gordonrp (Mar 4, 2015)

Simply, the medium sized business type client that would previously pay $400/mo to host their Windows server for their office email is now using hosted/cloud solutions. The medium sized business clientele has definitely dried up a bit on WHT, no doubt.


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## howardsl2 (Mar 4, 2015)

Regarding the decline of WHT, this Google Trends graph says it all :

http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=web hosting talk


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## drmike (Mar 5, 2015)

More appropriate big picture view that runs 2005 to current:

http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=web%20hosting


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## wlanboy (Mar 5, 2015)

Nice topic about the decline of traditional expert forums - and traditional services.

On my daily business I see a closing gap between developers and administrators. And a closing gap between bare bone providers and service providers.

Starting with devops.

The Agile Manifesto and the DevOps story did a big bang on the way systems are developed and deployed. Even Microsoft did get that bang and moved their Azure service from "VMWare to the clouds" to a real SaaS environment.

Things like that make administrators unnecessary for most traditional jobs. They do have time for new jobs like redudancy, performance tests, penetration tests, monitoring, scaling. But they won't install servers or databases any longer. They tune them, they monitor them but they don't get paid to click on the next buttons.

Same change for developers. They don't re-event wheels but connect complex system. All about interfaces, dtos, transactions, transformations, sessions and plugin customizing. You don't start from scratch. There are systems running on the client side and you have to integrate any new solution into the allready working environment.

It is about speed too and about certifications. Project times getting shorter. Their focus changing into deep hassle-less integration. More plugins and less custom workaroud-ish code.

Pay-as-you-go SaaS is the elevator for automatic system deployments, automatic data transformation and plugin chains for integrated workflows. They need a CRM two days a week and a campain management two days a month. And they are only paying the days they are using the systems. No time and no money left to install and configure dedicated servers. No time and money to install a CRM per user. 

Braking it down to one simple requirement: They don't care about servers or software. They want a running service.

You don't build your own nuclear power plant any longer to have light at noon. You just buy the power you need. And you only pay what you use.

Departments in midsize and big corps do the same. They skip the servers, administrators, developers and just rent a CRM system or an exchange server.

They still need highly skilled administrators and developers to customize and monitor that stuff but they don't need them to run the stuff.

And even if you have to pay $50 per account per month it is cheaper. Much cheaper than 5 people costing around $15.000 per month.

Comparing wages to Rackspace, Azure, AWS prices .. hell you get a lot for $15.000 per month from them.

So selling services is much more profit-yielding than just selling servers or software.

Looking to my own habbits I am still old school and nostalgic.

E.g. I am running my own mail servers.

Paying for vps and paying for my time handling them. Second one is something that I should stop. If I think about how much money I can earn doing something for my job comparing to the time of handling the vps, the operating system, postfix, dovecot, upgrades, ...

It is my hobby. It is a good feeling to have full controll. But it is lost time doing things that someone else can handle by tools fully automated.

$40 per year for a vps or $40 per year for a fully managed exchange account.

That is the reason why I do feel nostalgic. Because it is like someone constructing his own car instead of renting one three days a month - when he really needs it.


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## Jasson.Pass (Mar 5, 2015)

I feel bad for anyone who still pays for their prem or corporate levels. It's a waste of money.


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## Kephael (Mar 5, 2015)

ItsChrisG said:


> None of those are "real cloud", just VPS's.


You can do high availability configurations with shared storage at all the providers I mentioned. AWS elastic beanstalk makes it so easy to scale your deployments it's not even funny.


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## drmike (Mar 5, 2015)

Kephael said:


> You can do high availability configurations with shared storage at all the providers I mentioned.


In theory you can HA config a box of Pi's or any collection of VPS containers.    Saying that those services bundle the tools for making HA happen automagically?


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## Kephael (Mar 5, 2015)

drmike said:


> In theory you can HA config a box of Pi's or any collection of VPS containers.    Saying that those services bundle the tools for making HA happen automagically?


Yes, but you can't quickly scale that deployment when your site goes viral on a social platform.


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## drmike (Mar 5, 2015)

Kephael said:


> Yes, but you can't quickly scale that deployment when your site goes viral on a social platform.


Sure you can.  A lot of us have been doing this for better chunk of 20 years.  

More hot-standby front ends in more DCs.  Rest of it is just strings, front ends, load balancing, whatever your approach may be.

Call me picky about clouds and all the hype.   Really aren't many people running real clouds, even big shops pretending to death they are.  Then again, the definition for such is all loose and allows anything to shoe horn itself in such.


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## Kephael (Mar 5, 2015)

drmike said:


> Sure you can.  A lot of us have been doing this for better chunk of 20 years.
> 
> More hot-standby front ends in more DCs.  Rest of it is just strings, front ends, load balancing, whatever your approach may be.
> 
> Call me picky about clouds and all the hype.   Really aren't many people running real clouds, even big shops pretending to death they are.  Then again, the definition for such is all loose and allows anything to shoe horn itself in such.


You end up paying for a massive amount of unneeded capacity that way in order to accommodate serious traffic bursts. Being able to scale your deployment in a few minutes is much different than paying for additional capacity that may never be utilized or may not be enough as you cannot always forecast traffic patterns. If you have some small operation that is cost sensitive the aforementioned providers probably won't make financial sense, but if you are a company selling high margin products/services and need absolute reliability and a trustworthy company to partner with while also offering automation to reduce IT staffing costs these companies make a lot of sense. The IT people aren't adding value in these organizations and minimizing them is a massive cost reduction.


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## Lee (Mar 5, 2015)

drmike said:


> As far as LET thriving, well, it has seen its peak.  Arguably its time is passing.  Nearly everything fades, eventually.  Although cheap has a longer lure on folks.


The numbers say otherwise to be honest, I always see the dashboard stats when in the LET admin panel it was this that prompted me to look at them more.  Ok the reliability factor will be out somewhat but since 2012 and setting aside the unfortunate event in the summer of 2013 LET has steadily and consistently seeing more traffic, posts and members.  Everything is on the up.

Now I am not trying to jump up for LET here, just saying it as I see the stats.  I can't obviously say too much of course as it's not my place.  I was pretty amazed at just how many posts there were month to month, I never imagined it would be so high.

But as you say, cheap has a longer lure and for now at least it's not peaked just yet,


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## drmike (Mar 5, 2015)

Kephael said:


> You end up paying for a massive amount of unneeded capacity that way in order to accommodate serious traffic bursts. Being able to scale your deployment in a few minutes is much different than paying for additional capacity that may never be utilized or may not be enough as you cannot always forecast traffic patterns. If you have some small operation that is cost sensitive the aforementioned providers probably won't make financial sense, but if you are a company selling high margin products/services and need absolute reliability and a trustworthy company to partner with while also offering automation to reduce IT staffing costs these companies make a lot of sense. The IT people aren't adding value in these organizations and minimizing them is a massive cost reduction.


I can simply script spin ups with containers all over.  

But your point is valid per se.  Cost bottom line is tricky and keeping hot spares isn't appealing, unless they are rather cheap (which I am quite fond of often). 

Lots of the cloud companies (even fake ones) have sticker shock if you are doing anything significant.

I am not of the school of thought that eliminating IT folks is a good idea.   Saying they offer no value is sort of funny.  The resident accountant isn't going to understand, create or deploy anything other than say Gmail or similar one off better work cloud hosting thing.   Not going to launch a dev layer and roll out code or planning (aside from the accounting aspects of finance).  Definitely not the folks playing in the cloud mass deploy.  Nor is other management or the secretary or the janitor.


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## VPS4LESS (Mar 20, 2015)

I hate WHT there well, i wont say, but ya i hate them over there


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## concerto49 (Mar 22, 2015)

Let the VPSBoard stats pick up!


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## Licensecart (Mar 22, 2015)

drmike said:


> More appropriate big picture view that runs 2005 to current:
> 
> http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=web%20hosting


Not bad, it shows if you compare to vps and dedicated servers:

http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=web%20hosting%2C%20vps%2C%20dedicated%20server&cmpt=q&tz=

VPS is stable and hosting is dying.


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## host4go (Mar 22, 2015)

Licensecart said:


> Not bad, it shows if you compare to vps and dedicated servers:
> 
> http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=web%20hosting%2C%20vps%2C%20dedicated%20server&cmpt=q&tz=
> 
> VPS is stable and hosting is dying.



Fun fact (to some, ok, me)

The news related to shared are all in english while there is none ins english related to VPS

Also take a look at the Key trends:

Google Hosting on the top.....


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## tmzVPS-Daniel (Mar 23, 2015)

The ROI at WHT is very bad at the moment. That is from sticky + corp membership. It does not pay off. 

- Daniel


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## zomgmike (Mar 23, 2015)

A lot of the classic arguments have played themselves out (i.e. every spin-off hosting related forum now has a unique definition of "unlimited"...probably due entirely to WHT debates) or the arguments are no longer relevant (i.e. power concerns in filling a rack.)  Most discussion is over before it starts.

The more low-brow stuff (i.e. "ermahgerd colocrossing!!!1") has found it's way to alternative forums that have different moderation standards.

If what I hear is correct, WHT actually asks for proof of ID when you sign up now.  If true, I don't think they're doing themselves any favors, as I certainly wouldn't sign up for a random forum online if that was required.  If they do I understand why, just saying I'd simply not join if a forum ever asked me.  I don't want to test it, lest I risk the ban hammer.


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## RLT (Mar 23, 2015)

WHT is still around? Detested their mobile site. Menus never work for me on Android. On the menu and just get a blank drop down.


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## ThePrimeHost (Mar 23, 2015)

tmzVPS-Daniel said:


> The ROI at WHT is very bad at the moment. That is from sticky + corp membership. It does not pay off.
> 
> - Daniel


I'll second that. We ran a sticky recently and the ROI was less than desirable. I mentioned this to the account executive when ending my renewal but of course, it's not WHT's fault.


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## drmike (Mar 23, 2015)

ThePrimeHost said:


> I'll second that. We ran a sticky recently and the ROI was less than desirable. I mentioned this to the account executive when ending my renewal but of course, it's not WHT's fault.


So you said to WHT rep that sales numbers stunk and they shrugged that off as your issue and not their issue?

I tell you what, if they actually queried their customers - those buying stickies in past year - and looked at cost vs. spend analysis they might lean quite at bit at Penton.  Might realize they bought a slagging asset in an industry with an identity crisis and midlife oddball phase.

Surprised, since Penton hires lots of folks to run numbers and optimize.  Real surprised, but, denial is a strong drug.


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