Well, while we're getting our technical issues worked out, I want to thank, join Dave and Charlize and the rest of the NIH citizen science working group on thanking you for joining us this morning. Those of you here in the room with us today and also those of you out in the virtual space of the Twitterverse and beyond, very happy to have you join us. Now that you're all tanked up on your exciting bread and water breakfast and your brisk walk in the Washington weather here this morning, should be a really productive day of discussion. So I just want to give you a little bit of background on citizen science here at NIH and what we've been thinking and what we've done here over the past couple of years by way of intro to this particular workshop. So I want to start with just a little bit of a definition here just because we're often asked to define citizen science and we're often asked to delineate it from these other terms here on the slide. So for us, you already saw this in Charlize's slide, but citizen science is just at its essence an approach to research that involves the public directly in the research process. So not just as subjects of the research or advisors to the research, but direct partners and collaborators in all aspects of the research process, everything from data collection and donation or sharing of data all the way through the analysis of that data and ultimately in a priority setting and analyzing results. The other terms that I've shown on here, community-based participatory research and crowd sourcing, you know, we can haggle over the exact boundaries of this Venn diagram. It's a moving space. I couldn't quite, I'm not artistically talented enough to make a moving Venn diagram here, but it's a rapidly evolving space and these terms are sort of changing meaning over time and I think really they're converging because they're converging on this idea of a more active role of the public in the research process itself. And all three of those terms sort of share some methodologies and some tools, some data science needs. There's an increasing reliance in all of them on things like the use of challenges and games and we'll talk more about that in just a sec. So back in 2013, which seems like eons ago now in this field, which changes so quickly, we had our first workshop on citizen science here at NIH. The idea was that we had seen a lot of success in other fields, ecology and astronomy notably for citizen science and we hadn't seen a lot of activity in the biomedical space and we knew we weren't supporting very much in the biomedical space we NIH. So we reached out to the folks in the biomedical sphere that we could see were actively doing biomedical citizen science back in 2013 and they're shown here by their logos on the slide. That's who was at the meeting. That workshop was chaired by Sharon Terry and Steven Friend and it was a really good meeting. It gave us the lay of the land at the time, what was going on and what the potential was for citizen science in the biomedical sphere and specifically what the potential was for NIH supported research in citizen science in the biomedical sphere. So what came out of that first workshop were some revelations and recommendations here. The idea that biomedical research really can benefit from the creativity and problem solving skills of the public and also from citizen collected data and insights that aren't obtainable through conventional approaches. So we don't think of these approaches as displacing any of our current methods, nothing is going to replace double-blind clinical trials for example, but all of these new approaches that are emerging in the citizen science space really have the potential to enable research that isn't doable in other ways. But biomedical research poses really some unique challenges for citizen science that isn't as important in things like astronomy where stars don't really care if you share their personal information and that sort of thing. There's also some technical issues that arise in the scientific world when we think about using data collected by the public for example in terms of sort of accuracy of the data and that sort of thing and analysis. What we saw in 2013 was that the early efforts that were out there showed some promise, but that biomedical research really, and this was the thinking of the group that was here two years ago, that biomedical research, biomedical citizen science really would benefit from a more rigorous scientific assessment and that these new methods have the potential to complement rather than replace existing research approaches. And then obviously the key recommendation at the bottom here, that we needed to, before we really did too much else, we needed to really think more, investigate more, understand more the ethical, legal, social implications of citizen science in the biomedical space, thus all of you here today. So the challenges that were raised by that group, the challenges and the opportunities kind of intersect here, but the idea was that these methods are still relatively new and biomedical research is not totally clear what can be adapted to the biomedical space and what can't, what's going to work under what conditions. Our current policies, regulations and practices really weren't designed for citizen science and in particular IRBs for example don't really know what to do when investigators come to them and want to use citizen science approaches. We talked about the creation of flexible infrastructure and governance models that enable multiple levels of participation while maintaining data security, integrity and scientific rigor. So this is the idea of really putting the person, the public in the driver's seat here of deciding what to share when, how to collaborate, that sort of thing while maintaining a level of scientific rigor in the research. They said that methods needed to be developed and adapted and rigorously tested so that we know what works and what doesn't. There's a whole lot of methodologies out there and it's sort of, some of this is beginning to happen but it's still unclear which of those methods work best under, for which kinds of research questions. And they said that dissemination of tools, best practices and training resources would be critical. This is something that we've taken to heart here at NIH. We're thinking about how to make some of these methods, these resources more broadly available. I know that's also going on out in the rest of the community. Various other organizations are thinking about platforms and web resources to make some of these methods. There are new journals out there. So we're beginning to sort of accumulate all of this information in a way that people can access. And the group also showed the need for evaluation of citizen science approaches to research. So we don't really know how to evaluate and review these kind of approaches. But the opportunities are big here. For the most part, what came out of that think tank and what we've seen more generally is that the public is eager and able to solve problems, presented with the right tools and the right opportunities under the right conditions. A lot of caveats there, but you get it. Patients and healthy individuals are generally motivated to collect and share personal health data. Obviously, this varies by group. It varies by person. It varies under different conditions. It varies depending on what the disease or the condition is. And it varies by the sort of background of the individuals and thus the sort of flexible governance models enabling multiple levels of participation. All of this sort of needs to be taken into consideration when we think about how to set these studies up. But initial applications of these methods in biomedical science have shown some utility. And applied effectively, there's general agreement that there's an opportunity here to accomplish research that we really can't accomplish other using more traditional methods. So, oops, well, all right. So following up on the recommendations of the think tank, we've been doing a few things here. And I sometimes move slowly, but we move carefully. We have been following up on the recommendation to learn more from other communities to begin to leverage what else is out there. And that means other fields, things besides biomedical research, but also the community-based participatory research area that we have long supported. There's a lot of lessons to be learned there. We've become active participants in the federal community of practice for crowdsourcing and citizen science. Some of those folks from other agencies are here in the room with us today. We've learned a lot from them about how to support this kind of research in the federal space. And they are likewise wanting to hear what you all have to say here today because the ethical legal social implications are big in biomedical research, but they cut across some other fields as well. We're going to be presenting a panel with some of the experts here in the room, and again, out there in the space beyond, at the upcoming Citizen Science Association meeting. That's the meeting happening here in February. We have a panel. We'll show that all to you guys here in a little bit. And there are additional panels on biomedical research, I think, going to happen at that meeting. There's one on environmental science also, and some of the folks here in the room are participating in that one. We've done some additional investigation into some of the areas that the original think tank recommended as immediate opportunities. And one of the early immediate opportunities is this idea of engaging the game developer community and developing more biomedical research games, really leveraging the wealth of expertise and technical resources that are out there in the game developer world to bring those to bear on biomedical research in creative ways. At the time, we saw things like Folded and Cell Slider. And since then, there's been the development of additional games. Back in December, well, last month, we brought together 10 of those game developers and 10 biomedical researchers and had a very, very active and exciting discussion with them about how to bring those two communities together, how to form more partnerships, and begin to develop more of these games. A report from that will be coming out soon. We did that workshop in conjunction with the NIH Big Data to Knowledge Program. So the report will be put on their website. And then, obviously, our next step here is the meeting at hand here with following up on the ethical, legal, social implications. So there are also additional workshops and things being held by the different institutes. NIH has 27 different institutes and centers focused on diseases and organ sites and development and aging and whatnot. Several of them are following up on citizen science topics specific to their missions. So just really quickly, last slide, because I think I'm getting the wave here, is I wanted to just leave you with the idea of where we think citizen science can have an impact in NIH-sponsored research space. So NIH supports research across a wide range of topic areas. And I think you saw that in Charlize's slide earlier. And we can imagine citizen science, spoiler alert here, the answer is I think citizen science can have an impact in almost every aspect of NIH-supported research space. Certainly, we've seen crowdsourcing and challenges and things work very well in technology development, computational methods, and software. We can imagine better understanding the underlying biology of health and disease easily through things like games. But one can imagine other methods in citizen science being applied there as well. We can see potential for impact in translational research, and therapeutic development, screening and risk assessment. Certainly, areas like environmental factors have been very active in community-based participatory research and more and more in the citizen science arena, with the crossover with the ecology field there. And all aspects of epidemiology, certainly things like wearable technologies, sensors, and health, nutrition, and lifestyle, that kind of data is incredibly difficult to collect under traditional research conditions. But you can imagine that citizen science approaches lend themselves really readily to collecting, utilizing, and analyzing that kind of data. So anywhere that we can see the creativity and capabilities and the unique insights from the public coming into bear in creative ways, we can imagine citizen science approaches being useful for biomedical research. So I'm just going to leave it there for any quick questions that you might have. Otherwise, I'm going to turn it back over to Dave and Charlize to bring it back around to the ethical, legal, and social implications of all of this. Everybody's starved on their bread and water diet here.


Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Edge 2016, brought to you by IBM. Now, here are your hosts, Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman. We're back, this is theCUBE, the Worldwide Leader in Live Tech Coverage. Bernie Spang is here, he's the Vice President of Software-Defined Infrastructure. Cube alum, Bernie, it's great to see you again. Thanks very much for taking some time with us. Good to be back, great to be back. So, software-defined, what is software-defined infrastructure? Software-defined infrastructure is the topic. So, and I'm focused on software-defined computing and storage, primarily. So when we say software-defined, we're talking about software that can be deployed on a variety of servers and can work with a variety of storage media from various providers, so IBM and non-IBM providers. And we make the software available for clients to implement themselves and put them on their own servers and put it together. Or through partners or IBM integrates that software with storage and servers and sell it as a system. And we also make that software available on the IBM cloud and through other cloud service providers so it can be accessed as a service. Okay, so, we're talking off camera. Isn't that software-defined computers and what is software-defined computers? Isn't that just virtualization? So that's the easiest one for people to understand. We had early days of client server. You bought a server for each new application. We had server sprawl, highly inefficient, waste of money. We created software-defined computing in the form of hypervisors and virtual machines. And that's great. And those traditional workloads, still you want to virtualize them in those kind of environments. When you look at the new generation of workloads that are on open source type projects like NoSQL databases like Mongo, DB and Cassandra or the new generation analytics frameworks like Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark, these are scale out architectures. You don't load them into AVM or onto a server. They span dozens, in some cases, hundreds and thousands of nodes. And so now you need a software layer that can schedule the workload across your compute resources whether they be bare metal, VMs, or container environments now with the latest generation of microservices-based architectures. So you need a software layer that virtualizes that complete compute grid to run multiple workloads. It sounds a little bit, we had a term we put out a couple of years ago at Wikibon called ServerSAN. And the first instantiation most people look at is hyperconverged infrastructure. So VMware, VSAN, Nutanix and the like, they have, there's compute in there and there's storage in there, but it's distributed to architecture driven by software.  Well it depends on the workload and how you use it. So if you have a hyperconverged environment, and you're running multiple VMs and the VMs are sharing the storage, if the workloads you're putting into those VMs are traditional workloads that go into a VM, that's not what I'm talking about. Now, you could have that environment where I'm going to run a multi-node solution across my VMs in that hyperconverged environment, in which case then it would count with what I'm talking about. But now how do you schedule multiple scale out workloads on that hyperconverged infrastructure? That's what I'm talking about. It's a layer of software-defined computing above that that has to schedule the scale out workloads. Okay, and if I look at most public clouds they probably run something similar to this, correct? Yes, but you know we're finding with the new generation applications that we're working with, the cloud providers, there really hasn't been the focus on the shared infrastructure, these shared clusters if you will, for multiple workloads. So you're still seeing even amongst cloud providers a level of inefficiency because I go to the cloud, I define my 100 node cluster and I put my app on it. Now I have another app I want to do, I go to find another 50 node cluster and I put it on that. I don't have a shared environment that I'm doing on that cluster. Now we are working on the IBM cloud and with other cloud service providers like Microsoft Azure as an example to support this software layer I'm talking about to then virtualize the grid. Why the importance of, well, what does the shared environment get you? How do you utilize that? Is it a metadata sharing for high performance interactions? Is it for data protection? Talk about both how you share that data, what is that, some kind of high-speed pipe and why is it, what are you doing with that shared infrastructure? Okay, so there's two layers. There's the compute layer, what you're sharing, the spectrum computing software is scheduling the work on the compute nodes and it's scheduling the work across multiple types of work. So it's a resource negotiator. Yeah, it's a resource scheduler, right? That's time slicing, right? So it's a virtualization but for a grid, for cluster-based computing. And then there's the storage layer. So as you're doing this across this grid and the shared grid, you have to have shared access to the storage you need for that application, whether it be a Hadoop thing or a MongoDB thing or a Spark type workload, right? The Watson cognitive computing, the deep learning and machine learning type applications are also these kind of scale-out architectures. So you have to have the shared storage layer as well and that's where our spectrum scale comes in. So that's for efficiency, like you say, scale. Otherwise, I'm scaling in stovepipes and it just doesn't scale. Well, right, and if you talk about it from the compute point of view, you've got the cluster-cree problem and I've got poorly utilized clusters, right, that are sitting idle a lot of the times that aren't being shared with resource if you don't have this virtualization layer. From a storage point of view, you've got people talking about I want to create a data lake. Well, creating data lakes are all well and good but they're just bigger silos. You don't want multiple data lakes. You want your data ocean, as we've been saying. You said, you hung out with my friend, Eric Herzog. You know, I did the data ocean, brothers. That's Furrier, I think, started that. You know, you want to have an environment where all the data can be shared and accessed by multiple workloads. Well, how do you manage that, right? You can't do it with these hyper-converged clusters you have to have a shared infrastructure. The differentiation here, though, is the applications, as you said. I totally agree. Most hyper-converged infrastructure, if you took a traditional SAN and you took the HCI stuff, they're running the same apps. It's not those new applications that spark a dupe, those kind of things. Right. Where it's built out there. That's interesting. Yeah, and you know, I started this discussion with a lot of analysts six months, a year ago, at one of these conferences, about how the light bulb went on for us amongst the, what was the platform computing team? We acquired platform computing software that is now Spectrum Computing. This is software that's traditionally for high-performance computing, super-computing workloads, and Spectrum Scale, formerly GPFS, that has its origins among those workloads, too. We realize that these new generation apps and analytics and cognitive computing are just high-performance computing, super-computing workloads. It's just a new generation with a new name on it, big data analytics or cognitive computing. And it requires the IT infrastructure that you'd put under the traditional HPC workloads, not the IT infrastructure you'd put under a traditional relational database application. And the tricky thing is, most clients don't fully appreciate that yet. The light bulb, just within the last six months, the light bulbs are going off over people's heads and realizing the inefficiencies of using traditional IT for these new generation workloads. But the skill base is something we need to grow in the industry. So what's the size of the opportunity for this today? David Floyd, our CTO, has been talking about years about how HPC is going to be bleeding into enterprise. And obviously we see a lot of those interesting workloads there, but it's still a little bit of a niche in the overall marketplace, it seems. In the overall marketplace? Yes, I'd agree. But we're talking opportunities here at billions and rapidly growing. And it's really, one way you could look at big data analytics is it's just commercial HPC and A, high performance computing and analytics. It's really just bringing that out of the back rooms. And I talked to banking clients, insurance clients, manufacturing, healthcare, and we talked to their IT leaders and they're like, oh yeah, we've got that. We've got that over here. Like the genomics research guys are down the hall in a different IT infrastructure. The trading apps and analytics are a different thing over there. And it's like, you guys got to get together, right? You got to bring that knowledge base forward into the commercial analytics space. Okay, so we've tracked for a number of years how a lot of those applications don't fit in your typical virtualized environment. I gave a presentation at Interop years ago to IT people and it was like big data, why it's important, here's where it is and it's not sitting on your sand. So are things like containers going to allow us to have more of a common infrastructure or are we going to have kind of a separate form, my new apps as opposed to some of my other apps? Well certainly there's a separation of the traditional IT for the traditional apps, relational databases, sand architectures, that kind of thing. That doesn't go away. Just because there's a new thing for new generation workloads doesn't mean that the old stuff wasn't the right design point for those workloads. When you bring in containers and microservices based architectures that work with a container environment, that's yet another type of cluster or grid, right? It's just a different one. Now what we've done with Spectrum Computing and specifically the new Spectrum Conductor offering is we support the scheduling of workloads whether it's bare metal OS systems, virtual machines across hypervisors or containers in like a Docker container environment. So you can have a mix of things and this can be a heterogeneous environment and heterogeneous servers, x86 and power servers as an example. And it can be heterogeneous storage you use, the media types from flash to disk to tape and from different providers. You're doing it all at the software layer, gives greater flexibility to be able to absorb these new workloads and deploy these new technologies without having to do a rip and replace. Well we would agree the old stuff doesn't go away. At the same time, it doesn't get, captures much of the spending. If it doesn't capture much of the spending, the vendor community doesn't put as much R and D into it. The practitioners don't want to be part of that, right? They want to go on to the new stuff and it just sort of becomes this managed business. Okay, great. But the TAM for the new stuff, as you're pointing out is enormous. Because the spending shifts to the new. Oh that is true. Now, but one of the things that's exciting and why we're focused with our software-defined storage across both the traditional and the new generation is clients are still very much focused on optimizing the cost efficiency of the traditional workloads. There's a lot of cost to be taken out or reduced in the traditional environment by doing the storage virtualization, by doing the grid-based kind of hyper-converged environments where that's appropriate and by taking the cost out there, that's what's enabling our clients to be able to shift investments to the new generation. We fund that. Yeah. And how about, you and I have talked about real-time, anybody who's done any kind of analytics work is thinking about real-time and it's starting, Rosemilia talked about it in his keynote yesterday, the imperative of real-time. It's really, it's starting to happen, fraud detection, many other use cases, et cetera. So how does that fit in to the whole software-defined discussion? Well, I mean, it kind of comes back to, I mentioned Apache Spark and that's certainly one of our primary focus. In fact, our first version of Spectrum Conductor is Spectrum Conductor with Spark. We include the Apache Spark framework along with our compute and the multi-tier storage in that solution because we are seeing clients in financial services, healthcare, security and public sector moving to this environment. The real-time in-memory analytics capabilities of a Spark environment are critically important and we're seeing traditional high-performance computing analytics type applications evolve forward into versions that are written as Spark applications. Well, even traditional ETL, Extract Transform Load Software, we've seen a case where the software is now a Spark-based application to take advantage of the in-memory analytics optimization of that open framework. So I think this is going to become huge just beyond what traditionally what we think about is analytics. We got to talk to Red Bull Racing yesterday and they're one of your customers. Obviously, tons of data, lots of different sources, real interesting things they're doing. Can you share any other kind of marquee lighthouse examples that are new things that people are doing? Yeah, so the interesting thing about the Red Bull Racing is they evolve from the high-performance computing doing the design on the car to then taking that environment and appreciating the efficiency and the performance of it and then using that same infrastructure to do their in-race analytics from the telemetry coming off the sensors in the car. So that internet of things, real-time analytics of sensors and things coming off of meters is critically important as well as in financial services, the real-time trading and the real-time implications of sentiment analysis that can have. So we're seeing in financial services and there's another great case of they've had the traditional running these big complex Monte Carlo simulations for financial models and now they want to do all these new generation analytics with sensors and meters, with sentiment analysis off the internet and whatnot. Video analytics is another one, so they're bringing that forward. Healthcare life science is another one. Medical imaging, right? And not just the storage and the archiving of it but the analysis of it and then the patient analytics, other examples. You mentioned financial services, healthcare, public sector, that's where all the chief data officers are hanging out, right? Absolutely, right. We're doing an event on Friday in Boston with Bob Pitchiano's going to be there, we're going to be interviewing him and that whole compliance now becomes an issue and it's sort of the pendulum swinging back from skunkworks into traditional IT, really owning the governance and compliance and the platform, if you will. Do you see that? Oh yeah, definitely. So you need that governance and the security responsibility to centralize. You also need the virtualization that I've talked about to make it cost effective because you can't have all these skunkworks having poorly utilized IT infrastructure, so both of those factor in. And Bob used to work for Bob in the early days of Infosphere and big data analytics and our whole focus on the analytics team on working up with the data scientists and applying the software for these new workloads is important and that's an important connection for IBM and our clients and our partners that we have both pieces, including the Watson layer of analytics, but now we've got the IBM Cloud Spark service on the IBM Cloud in Bluemix and a number of the Watson services are examples of workloads that are running on our software to find infrastructure, the spectrum computing and storage infrastructure in the IBM Cloud to deliver that kind of efficiency. So there is that connection. Competition is shifting, right? We saw Dell acquire EMC, you've seen, you know, Oracle's sort of reemergence as a systems player.  When you talk to IBM, it's a different conversation.  How do you compete? What's the narrative like when you're talking to customers? Why IBM? Well, certainly, you know, at the top level, you've heard our chairman say, you know, cognitive solutions and hybrid cloud platform company, right? And it's really that hybrid cloud infrastructure that I'm focused on our part of the business, what we're talking about here at Edge from the infrastructure point of view. And then from the cognitive computing, you know, that's where these new generation analytics, cognitive computing data analytics come into play. So, IBM is a differentiator having both of those pieces being focused from an infrastructure point of view on hybrid cloud, not just cloud, right? The integration and the proper balance of on-premises and in-cloud IT infrastructure is an important part of our differentiation. So, in talking about, you say not just cloud, okay, but what about cloud? What about just cloud for a second? Are you, is your stated intention to take this software-defined architecture with the sharing architecture, which in part, as we talked about, came out of the hyperscalers, you've improved on that. Is it the intent to drive that as aggressively as possible into the software, you know, infrastructure and provide that sort of homogeneity, whether it's on-prem or in the cloud? Right. Or is it more selective than that? Well, it can be an example. I mean, this is one of our public references. There was an IBM press release about Halliburton doing analytics for oil and gas on the IBM cloud in software. In fact, doing it on spectrum computing and spectrum scale software on the software infrastructure in the IBM cloud. And that is wholly in the IBM cloud on cloud solution. So, we are seeing it cases where it's totally want to be on the cloud, don't want to have any on-premises, capital expense, some the other way. But I would say, you know, 99% of the cases, it's a hybrid cloud infrastructure. Nobody's 100% 0% in neither direction. So, the IBM cloud is a distribution channel for you, whether a customer, presumably, and you've got other cloud customers that you want to sell to, is that right? Well, yeah, I mean, in a sense, the cloud service providers are no different than the systems providers, traditional and current. So, x86 systems providers, power server systems providers, you know, the cloud service providers, they're the physical platform providers, right? Our software, as I said at the beginning here, runs on across all of those, whether it be on-premises or in the cloud, right? So, we're looking to partner with all of these players, because for our clients, that gives the greatest flexibility, right? Our clients don't want to be locked in, you know, to anything as much as they can avoid it. They want to have flexibility to do on-prem and off-prem, change service providers, they want to be open source, you know, technology-based, that's where we're focused, because that gives the client value. There's some, there's a school of thought that says, and of course it's perpetuated by Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, that there won't be many infrastructure as a service providers, there'll be a handful, maybe some could argue three, they would typically argue that. There's another school of thought that says services, cloud services, and services are global, they're distributed in nature, there's gazillions of services companies that add value in different ways, there's vertical focus. I presume you're on the latter camp, but what are you seeing in the marketplace?  Yeah, so I don't think that's viable in, for the same reason that we have channel partners, think traditional, pre-cloud, right? Channel solution partners who locally have the relationship with the client, they're the trusted provider, they bring the solutions in, they're the physical presence. Seeing a similar thing with cloud service providers, there are regional, country-level cloud service providers, you got to worry about local, you know, regulations and rules, but just customs, and then you've got the relationships with the software providers who are evolving into service providers, right? So I see that continuing, I mean, by our count there's more than 30,000 service providers at the tier two and tier three, you know, the full set globally, and we're engaged with a number of them of all sizes, not just the IBM and that Microsoft and the AWS. Well, the other wild card is SaaS, I mean, everybody's a SaaS player now, right? It's like, like Benioff says, more companies are going to be SaaS players outside of the technology than technology companies, right? So, I mean, if you're not a software company, then what are you doing? Right, well, you know, all that software still has to run on physical servers and physical storage. But to the point though, those SaaS companies are infrastructure providers, is my point. Well, yeah, yeah, though, that's exactly right. They need hardware and they need database. Well, that's right. So if you come and get your complete solution from as software as a service, well, you're actually getting infrastructure as a service within that, right? You didn't go procure it at that level, but it's baked in, right? So that's certainly true. And nobody's saying that the SaaS business is going to coalescer. I mean, that's exploding, right? No, right, exactly. I could, all right, we'll give you the last word. On edge, customer conversations, futures, fun stuff you're seeing. So first of all, a great conference. This is a lot of energy, having a lot of great discussions with clients. Like I said, the light bulbs are starting to go off over people's heads that these new generation workloads require a new generation infrastructure. And when they talk about hybrid cloud infrastructures, they've got a plan ahead for these new generation workloads. So we're seeing that come to life here and I'm looking forward to it continuing. Bernie Spang, rising through the ranks of IBM, you know, kicking by, I love it. Always a pleasure seeing you. All right, thank you guys. Thanks for coming on. All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. This is theCUBE, we're live from IBM Edge in Vegas. Right back.


U.S. House Speaker Johnson assures Zelensky of support for Ukraine. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson has pledged to President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky to do everything to continue aid to Ukraine according to Zelensky's interview with CNN. According to the Ukrainian president, when he spoke with Johnson he said he supports Ukraine. He said that he will do everything to support Ukraine and he's on our side and he understands how heroic our people, our soldiers and civilians are. Zelensky said he revealed that he reached out to U.S. President Joe Biden and Johnson to urge them to pause the differences between Democrats and Republicans to reach an agreement on Ukraine. Zelensky said that the election period is tough and he thinks Johnson as well as Biden heard the message he delivers and that's all he could do. He couldn't push the speaker. It's his decision, but I think he understands all the problems we face, said Zelensky. U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said that Vladimir Putin gains every day as the U.S. House of Representatives postpones the adoption of a new aid package for Ukraine. On February the 13th, the United States Senate supported a bill to aid Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan for $95 billion. The $60 billion is earmarked for Ukraine. However, for this bill to take effect, it must be approved by the U.S. House of Representatives and signed by President Joe Biden. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson opposed the initiative, following which President Joe Biden called on the House of Representatives to approve the bill. However, the U.S. House of Representatives announced a recess until February the 28th, thereby delaying the process of providing aid to Ukraine. Russian military starts using Elon Musk's Internet in Ukraine. The armed forces of Ukraine continue to use Elon Musk's Starlink satellite internet services, which are now provided under a contract with the Pentagon, according to Mind Media Outlet. But recently, Russian troops operating in the occupied territories have also started to use this connection. The connection works there because Starlink provides coverage within the internationally recognized borders of Ukraine. The information about the appearance of Starlink there was shared by Ukrainian TV presenter, journalist and writer Andriy Saplyenko, Newsweek reports. Saplyenko cited reports from soldiers on the front line that the occupiers have Starlink with licensed accounts. Starlink has been massively supplied to Russia via Dubai. Accounts are activated and working in the occupied territories, one soldier wrote. Another notes that Ukrainian soldiers can already see Russian Starlink adding, To be honest, I thought they would do it earlier. A specialized Russian media outlet, ComNews, also reported on the supply of working systems to the war zone. More than 10 Russian online stores have started selling Starlink subscriber receiving equipment. Unlike last year's single sales of unactivated devices, this time deliveries to Russia are on a wholesale scale and with activated accounts. The Starlink network does not work in Russia, but its signal is available in the occupied territories and Crimea. Merchants do not hide the fact that Starlink kits are addressed to the members of the military and are sold out in large quantities. Ukraine at risk of cascading frontline collapse, New York times, Ukraine's worsening lack of ammunition and battle fatigue will most likely force Kiev to abandon its current frontline positions unless it receives new aid from the West, the New York Times reported. The paper said that Ukrainian defenses near the key stronghold of Avdivka in Russia's Donetsk region are reeling under relentless attacks and Kiev's problems extend beyond one single battle. Ukrainian troops, the New York Times added, are exhausted and suffer from a lack of weapons and ammunition, especially with regard to air defense systems. According to unnamed US officials interviewed by the outlet, Kiev only has enough air defense assets to last until March unless it receives new shipments. This is far from certain. As the US, Ukraine's main backer is locked in congressional gridlock over President Joe Biden's request to approve a $118 billion security bill, $60 billion of which is earmarked for Kiev. Many Republicans have been reluctant to support the measure, claiming it does too little to improve security on the border with Mexico. Western officials believe that without US aid, a cascading collapse along the frontline is a real possibility in 2024, the article says. Nevertheless, they reportedly estimate that it will take at least a couple of months for the shortages to take a toll. According to analysts, by March, Ukraine could be struggling to carry out local counter-attacks and by summer, Kiev could find it difficult to repel Russian assaults. Without continued US support, New York Times sources say it's hard to see how Ukraine will be able to maintain its current positions on the battlefield. Ukrainian officials have repeatedly complained of a shortage of ammunition calling it a very real and pressing problem. Meanwhile, the Financial Times reported, citing a senior EU official, that it will not be easy for the Europeans to substitute for the US.


All right, thanks for coming out, everyone. Can everyone hear me? OK, great. I asked the media guy to stream, reruns of the office on the side, so you guys didn't actually have to pay attention. I think he's working on that now, so. But until that gets up, we'll go to my presentation, which is coming to terms with hosting. Basically, hosting can be super complicated. And if you're a new user, which we've all been at one point in our lives, it can be really, really confusing. In the industry, there's a lot of terms that people throw around that they just throw them around because they've been using them for a long time. But sometimes we forget that not everyone is used to all of those terms. So this is a very beginner level presentation. And it's meant to just go over the basic terms that you'll come across when you're looking at picking a host. So let's get into it. OK, so first, what is web hosting? Very basic. We've got you over here uploading files and content to your host, to a web host, which then associates that with your domain name and presents that in a consumable format to website visitors. Very simple, but that's how your web host plays into this. That's the server. That's the computer that you're uploading your files and your content to so that it can be made available in an easily consumable manner for site visitors. So before we go too much into it, I think it's very important to understand your website and what specific needs you are looking for when shopping for a host. So here's a couple of things that I would recommend keeping in mind as you're looking into it. And just as a side note, there will be a Q&A at the end of this. However, if you're here and if you're thinking about shopping for a web host, I would highly recommend writing down questions you have for web hosts. There's a bunch of web hosts here. Any of them are wonderful options. So I'd be happy to answer the questions that you come up with, but if we don't get to them or if I can't answer them, then don't hesitate to talk to any of the web hosts that are here. So something to think about, is it a personal website or is it a professional website? What kind of uptime do you need? What kind of reliability do you need? Are you going to be accepting money? Are you going to be selling goods? Are you going to be having financial transactions? Are you going to be storing data with GDPR coming out? Storing data and storing clients' information is a huge buzz topic right now. What happens if your site goes down? That can be absolutely catastrophic. If you're taking money, if you rely on your website for your paycheck, what happens if your site gets hacked? And what happens if your site gets suspended? Google, as well as most of the web hosts out there, are always trying to improve the web. So if someone is especially spammy, then Google or other web monitors or even your web host might shut you down if you're perceived as a spammy thing, as a spammy site. So be aware of what you can do to get shut down so that you can avoid it, obviously.  OK, so going on, domains. Domains is obviously a big part if you remember from that first slide. The domain is your URL. That's your home page. That's your address. So that's your personal address for your website. Whoever purchases the domains owns the right to that domain. As a quick side note for that, this is if you are building your website from the ground up. So if you're planning on doing this all by yourself and you want to buy the domain, you want to install everything, build everything, then this is for you. If you hire a developer and say, hey, I want to go out and get this domain name, if the developer purchases the domain name, they might have the legal rights to your domain name. So as I mentioned before, these are just things to keep in mind as you're going through this process. If you have a million-dollar idea that you plan on having for years to come, then if you work with a developer, you might want to make sure, like, hey, this is the domain name. I want you to buy it for me. And I want to make sure that it is in my domain name, because obviously whoever owns the domain name owns the rights to the content on that and has the control of that domain.  You can have it in two separate places. Or so you can have your domain, you can purchase your domain in one location and purchase your web hosting from a different location. Often web hosts will package that together just for the ease of the customer, but you are welcome to purchase it at different places. Moving on, so just some textbook definitions, a subdomain. So if you have mydomain.com, a subdomain is the appendage before the mydomain.com. So you can do, like, blog.google.com. And that would be a subdomain. You can also have a subdirectory. So mydomain.com forward slash subdirectory. So again, you can do mydomain.com forward slash blog. And that's entirely dependent on you on how you want to structure your site. There are arguments to be made that introducing a subdomain can interfere with your SEO, but we're not going to get too deep into that today. But just if you hear a subdomain thrown around, this is what they're talking about. That appendage before mydomain.com. DNS records. DNS records can be very, very confusing for the beginner. Basically, it's a phone book for your website. So within your website, you can have, with those subdomains that we were just talking about, you can give them a separate address for every subdomain. If someone goes to blog.amazon.com or whatever, you can have that actually load from a different IP address than your actual website. So DNS records are essentially the directory when someone goes to your website, when they hit that URL, it's the directory that says, where are we loading this content from? Where are we bringing these pieces in from? You can also specialize using DNS records. So if you want to have your website in one location and your email in a different location, hosted on a different server, then you would use DNS records to say, OK, my MX records are my mail exchange records. If someone is, for my email processing, I'm going to offload that to a separate location. By the way, if anyone has questions, we will do questions at the end. But if you have a very pressing question for what's going on, feel free to raise your hand, and I'll do my best to answer it. OK, so domain turns define IP address versus URL, IP address. This is a list of IP address. This is just basically the hex codes that they use to identify a website, that the browser is just basically an address. Who here has been to these websites? One person has. I guarantee that almost everyone in this room has, because these are the actual websites. These are the URLs that we use. So the IP address on the side, these are all the same websites. And often, you can go into your browser and type this code, and it will load that website. But if you were to buy an IP address, it'd be really hard for branding and for people to remember what your website is. So they made it in a very consumable packet so that we can have it in such a way that we can understand it and that we can use a lot easier. So IP addresses on one side, URLs on the other. TLDs. TLDs stands for top level domains. Here are some of the original top level domains. And this picture that I grabbed off Google Images is, I guess, as old as these domains. It didn't have enough pixels to make it today, I guess. But so these are the most popular ones. So we've got .com, .org, .net, .gov. I'm sure all of you have seen most of those. Within the past couple years, they have introduced new TLDs, top level domains. So now there's a whole new pile of options that you can choose from. You can get .photography, .pizza, .blog, .club. There's limitless options as far as what you can get for a TLD. Most people still stay with the main original .com, .org, .edu. However, it can be fun to use some of the new TLDs. And some of them are becoming more and more prevalent to use.  Domain privacy, this is a big one. When you register your domain, as I mentioned, if you are the person that registers the domain, you have to put your information that's associated with that domain. And you can go out and look up any domain out there to see who is the owner of that domain. A lot of people, especially on the internet, don't want all their information out there for privacy reasons. And so there's domain privacy. And if you have domain privacy, then it masks all of your personal information so that contact information is not readily available. And the reason I'm going over these, these are terms that are associated with domains, but these are also features I think, as you're shopping around for a host, it's important to know what comes with this or what is an added feature that I have to pay for. Also, temporary URLs and domains, usually this is with moving websites. So if you're migrating a website or if you're creating a staging environment, both things which we'll talk a little bit, a little bit more about in just a minute. But if you're creating those, sometimes you can come up with a temporary URL so you can see both sites, what they look like, and so that your live site can remain unaffected as you're building a new site or migrating an existing site. And this is just a big wall of text that goes over pretty much everything we just covered. These slides will be available later for you to come back and take a look at if you'd like. So let's continue on to hosting plans. Any questions so far? Question in the back? SSL certificates? We will go into that in just a little bit. Is it okay if I wait until that part to answer that? And then if I don't answer your question, just wave your hands and I wanna make sure that we get that answered. So hosting plans, there's a lot of different options out there. These are the main ones that you'll see with most of the popular hosts. You've got shared hosting, VPS, cloud, dedicated, a dedicated server, and then managed hosting. And then there's also local versus web hosting. I'm actually gonna go kind of in reverse order on explaining these. Local hosting is if you are building your website on your laptop or on your machine at home. So it's not, so if you're building a website on the web, then you're building it essentially on the server. So that means that it's accessible to anyone that can access that server, which is, if you have a good host, pretty much anyone in the world, if you're building a site locally on your desktop, then it's not accessible to everyone. So people will use that for a staging environment, for a development environment, so that they can build out their website just on their own computer. You don't have to have an internet connection to do that, but that's becoming an increasingly popular feature to have the option to build your website without an internet connection, and then when you're ready, you can migrate it onto the web so that people can view it. Managed hosting, what does it actually mean? It's a little bit ambiguous, and I think everyone has a different definition. The definition that Bluehost in particular uses is that we manage your updates for your WordPress installation. We make sure that you're on the most current version of WordPress, and we also make sure that your themes and plugins are up-to-date, and we also manage all of the backend hardware and the server side of things. But each host will traditionally have a different definition on what managed hosting means to them. So I've got a couple different diagrams to try to simplify this a little bit. With shared hosting, we've got one server with multiple websites. With VPS and Dedicated, we have one partition that has a single website. And with cloud hosting, you can dynamically expand it so you can have one or multiple servers that serve up one website. I'm a fairly simple guy, so I like to simplify it even more with something that I understand and use every day. Shared hosting is like apartment living, okay? So you're sharing resources with your neighbors, you're sharing the same building. You might even have a shared laundry area that everyone goes to. And so you have your own space, and theoretically your neighbors shouldn't really affect you, but anyone that's lived in an apartment knows that occasionally you'll get noisy neighbors or someone will have a neighbor that has an apartment that floods and that can sometimes trickle into your apartment. So it's usually a very price economic option, but it can also come with other issues such as noisy neighbors, which in hosting language, that might equal people being throttled or people's activities affecting your website as well. So shared hosting is our apartment. On the complete opposite side of the spectrum is a dedicated server. That's essentially a pile of lumber. You get to build with it whatever you want. So for everyone that's sitting here with us today, probably not what you wanna go for because you have to build it however you want. So you get to and you have to. So you can build whatever you're capable of, but for me, if I'm looking at my development skills, I'm taking a couple two by fours and I'm wrapping them with duct tape and I'm trying to build a TP. And that's not the best framework for a house or for a website. So for the advanced user, this is great because it gives them access to the server side where they can implement the different tools and the different products that they want to incorporate in their website. But for the novice user, it can be really overwhelming. Kind of a happy medium between the two is a VPS which stands for Virtual Private Server. This is like the best of both worlds where you're sharing the same hardware but you have a more dedicated space to you. It's partitioned to you so you're not sharing the same washer and dryer as your neighbor essentially. You have more dedicated resources for your activities, for your website, but it still is relatively cost efficient. And then cloud is kind of like Airbnb where it's dynamically expandable. So if you want to spin it up so that you have more CPU or so that you can handle more traffic, you can do that very quickly. So I'm kind of going back and forth between the analogy here, but sticking with the analogy, if you want to have 30 guests, you can go on Airbnb and get a couple different houses really easily to accommodate your guests. But if they're only there for two nights and then for the rest of the week, it's only you and a couple of friends, then you can adjust that and have that customized to fit your exact schedule and your exact needs in the time. Usually upon sign up, so the question was how do I know what my hosting company is using for my website? Let me answer this question real quick and then I'll get to you. So usually upon sign up, they ask you to select a plan and usually they'll present you with a couple different plans. And when you select that plan, that's when you would select either shared or VPS or cloud or dedicated. If they sent you a confirmation email with your purchase, it should be in there somewhere, like, okay, you are on this plan. Also, if you go into your account for your hosts, then it should say what plan you're on currently and give you the option to upgrade or downgrade. Does that answer your question? Okay, what was your question, sir? There's actually a website called whoishostingthis.com. So if you actually, and I've done this where I've taken over websites and even they don't know a plan they're on right away and while they're digging, I go to who's hosting this, put the URL in, and it says, okay, it's Bluehost or it's Godet or it's Pantheon or it's in motion or whoever. And it just saves a lot of time. And I just, you know, at least I know at least who they're hosted by and I can figure at that point what the plan is. Yeah, so for anyone that didn't hear that here, it's saying you can go to whoishostingthis.com and that can tell you who the company is that's hosting the website. Yeah, to my knowledge, that doesn't give you what plan they're on but that gives you a great start into knowing what company you're being hosted with. Or as- Right, yeah.  Okay, so hosting features. Space and size. What is unlimited versus unmetered? You'll see a lot of hosting companies talk about we offer unlimited space or unlimited storage. I'm no math major, but the universe is finite and so there's no way they can possibly offer unlimited storage, right? So if it's not actually unlimited storage, what is it? Oftentimes it's a way that they separate the plan. So some companies might say or some hosting plans might say we offer five gigs of storage, okay? And others might say we offer unlimited storage. They might not actually offer unlimited storage but they don't limit you to that five gigs. They don't set a cap on it. Going to a simplified example, moving truck. We got up here. This guy's packed down pretty nice and neat. We'll say if you're putting a cap on the storage, it's like saying, okay, you can pack your boxes to the level of the truck bed or to the top of the cab and that's where we cap you off. We're not gonna let you roll out of here renting our moving truck if you pack anything above the cab of the truck. And there you got unlimited. So you can do it. There's not a roof on top of the pickup bed. We'll let you roll out. As long as it's on there, you can go with it. As I'm sure you guys can guess, one of these two trucks is gonna be a little bit better to take down a highway, right? So sometimes you will see with the unlimited, you can put whatever you want and you can build it as high as you're capable of, but that doesn't necessarily mean that you won't run into performance issues or other issues that go along with stretching that out. And also unmetered is another thing. So unmetered is just basically saying, we're not, we don't care about that. We're not gonna keep an eye on that. So for example, visitors. Some companies will say, we allow you 25,000 visitors a month. And others will say, you know, you can have unmetered visitors, which is we just, we don't, we're not keeping an eye on that metric. So it's completely unmetered. Any questions on that? Cause that can be, that can be really confusing sometimes. I don't know if I just did such an amazing job explaining it, or if you guys are being quiet. I'm gonna assume I'm amazing. Unless, unless proven otherwise, which is pretty easy to do. Okay, moving on. Hosting features, traffic limits. So with limits, I wanna talk about what different limits they can implement. So bandwidth. So that's data as a resource, kind of like with your cell phone, you know, with Verizon, I've, I've got like three gigs a month that I can use. And then once I hit that limit, they will either throttle my usage on my cell phone, or they will charge me extra to continue using above my plans, above my plan. Web hosts often act the same way. They'll give you a certain bandwidth restriction. And if you get close to it or above it, they'll start throttling the usage or charge you extra. You can also be limited on your monthly transfer limit. You know, you can only transfer five gigs of data a month, or even just a single time transfer limit, a data transfer limit, meaning you can only transfer 500 megabytes at a single transfer. Occasionally, you'll also see companies that limit by unique visitors or page visits and say, as I mentioned previously, you can have 25,000 visitors a month.  Okay, hosting features. We're gonna go through these kind of quick. This is, excuse me, this is just a bunch of features that some hosts have, other hosts don't. Some hosts offer for free, others charge for them. As I mentioned in the very beginning, it's most important that you understand your site and your needs so that when you're going out and talking with a host and trying to figure out which company you should go with, you understand your needs and what you're looking for. So emails. Some hosts will limit how many email addresses you can have on your account or the size of a specific email address. You know, so if you have a company with 10,000 employees, some hosts might say, we're actually gonna limit you to 500 email addresses, so you're not gonna be able to have an email address for every single one of your employees. Or on the flip side of that, if you're the sole proprietor and you have all of your emails coming to you and you run a photography website, they might limit it and say, hey, you can only have 50 gigs of data on that email address. And each host is different. I just wanna make you guys aware of some of the different restrictions that you can see out there so that, as I mentioned, you can tailor it to what you need and what your fit is. Migration, this is a pretty hot topic right now. Migrating your website. If you're buying a website, an existing website, you know, if you're taking over a company, then you might wanna migrate it to a host that you're more familiar with or that you already have an existing and account with. Also, if you have some site that you don't wanna give up and you're ready to go to a new host, it's always important to know what migration options you have. Some hosts will do it for free, some offer it as a charge service, but it's important to know what exactly you're getting. Ease of installation. So, installing WordPress and other things, how easy is it? You can find hosting companies out there where they just give you a terminal login and you have to take it from there. For me and for a lot of novice users, that's gonna be really, really complicated. A lot of the hosts nowadays have implemented a one-click install for WordPress or an install during the registration flow, which is even easier in my opinion, so that by the time you're actually into your hosting account, you already have WordPress installed and ready to go. Staging environment. Staging or sandbox or development environment. This is kinda going back to what we were talking about a little bit with the local hosts. Staging basically allows you to take a test site, or a carbon copy of the test site, and have that copy so that you can change that. You can change the themes, you can change the content, you can change whatever you'd like, and then you can either migrate the files to the live site or the content to the live site or all of the above or the database to the live site. It just essentially gives you a developmental tool so that you can try whatever you want or try a new plugin or a new theme. As I mentioned before, some hosts offer that for free, some offer it as a charged feature. If you think that you need it, then it's just something to be aware of. Caching. This is another very hot topic. Caching is essentially implementing different tools to optimize the load speed of your website.  We won't get too deep into that today. I just want you guys to be familiar with the term caching. It's essentially compressing or, I mean it depends on the caching tool that you're using, but it optimizes the load speed of your website. Some companies have a custom caching tool. As I mentioned before, some it's a free feature, some it's a paid feature. If you're using WordPress, there's a handful of different caching plugins out there that you should definitely be utilizing. FTP access, what's your file transfer access or what's your access to your files? FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol. FileZilla is the most popular one that I am aware of. It just basically allows you to upload and download files from your computer to your server. And the SFTP is just introducing encryption. So if we don't get too much into site security, but if you want to ensure security, then you can do your file transfers over a secured port and over a secured transfer and that just makes it so that hackers or malicious users out there don't try to intercept your data or intercept your files. For most people, if you're doing like a cat blog, who cares if someone intercepts your transfers? But if you are doing customer information, if you're doing any medical stuff, if you're doing any payment processing, then that's a really big deal if someone is interfering or intercepting your data. So SFTP allows you to use an encryption to securely upload information from your computer to your server to your website. Also scalability, I used Amazon as an example.  They are no longer just a little bookstore. They are huge, obviously. And so they expanded very quickly. I hope that we're all as successful as Amazon, fingers crossed. I don't think the numbers necessarily play in our favor, but if you are going to be expanding your website, then it's good to know what your expansion options are, what kind of scalability your host offers. How easy is it to upgrade your plan, to add more CPU, to add more RAM to your existing plan. Easy to use dashboard. As I mentioned before, there are some companies out there that just basically give you shell access, which is just basically a terminal, just a line of code and you have to code everything and do everything that way. That's not an easy to use dashboard in my opinion. That's not even a dashboard, if you ask me. There's also C-Panel out there, which is a step in the right direction. And some hosts use their own custom version of a C-Panel. But if you're a novice, then it's worth taking a minute or two to see how easy their dashboard is to use. There's a million different tools out there, even in the WordPress space that you can use to build your website and to make it work how you want it to. And it's important in my mind that you know what your options are and what your resources are. And sometimes in an effort to give you as many resources as they possibly can, I think control panels can sometimes get confusing and overwhelming. So make sure that the dashboard that you're going to be using is easy to use. Backups, that's a big one. You should always be responsible for your own backups. I highly recommend downloading a backup, completely independent of your web host. However, a lot of web hosts will have like a daily and a monthly backup as well that they keep on their servers. However, I cannot stress enough, you should always take responsibility and have a private copy of your website somewhere on your files. As I mentioned before with these hosting features, I mostly want to shed light on them so that you know what you might be looking for and if you need it for your website that you can understand what exactly it is. Auto updates, some hosts will do it, others will not. Basically it's just keeping all of your plugins and your themes and your WordPress install up to date. SSL certificates, as you mentioned before. SSL certificates is basically encrypting the data that is transmitted through your website. So if you're processing credit cards, you need an SSL certificate. Google actually came out not that long ago and said they're going to start penalizing sites without an SSL certificate. So I would highly recommend getting an SSL certificate for your website. A lot of hosts are offering SSL certificates for free now. Others, it's a paid option. If you are transacting credit cards or any sort of sensitive information or data, definitely make this a high priority to see what options you have available and what you get with your hosts. PHP version and software version, just like WordPress and all the apps on our phone, PHP is constantly being developed and evolving and coming out with a newer and a better version. For, I think PHP 7.2 I think is the version that they're currently on. So just make sure that the host that you're looking into is using a current version of PHP and a current version of their software and that it plays nicely with everything that you'll be using. Hosting helplines. We've all been in this situation before. We all hope that we never have to be there but that's just a sad reality is, we've all called tech support for something or other. Maybe not even with web hosting but we've all called it before. So as you're looking at evaluating different hosts, be aware of how accessible their help is to you, what's their tech support? Are they open 24-7? Are they only emails or only online chat or can you call and talk to a person? And also make sure that they're acceptable. As we're going through this, you will probably need a lifeline at some point. So make sure that you understand exactly what your web host is providing and what they're taking responsibility for and what they're saying is your responsibility. Paid extras. We'll go through these even more quickly. Security, as I mentioned before, security is often the user's responsibility. There's a lot of companies out there that offer security. It's usually a paid extra but some hosts will give a light version or a freemium version of a security plugin. So that's just something to be aware of. Design, some companies will give design resources or have something where you can call in and speak to a designer. So that's always helpful. Storage, as I mentioned, backups. We've already talked about that. We've talked about emails. Let's see, sign up versus renewal rate. This is something I just wanted to bring to everyone's attention. Oftentimes, hosts will give you an introductory rate that is different from the renewal rate. So when you're evaluating price, be sure to factor that in and also the term length. Just like buying a car or a house, usually the longer the term, the lower the price is. But just be aware of what that translates to in the end. And that's my last slide but I did wanna finish by saying if this can be very, very overwhelming for a beginner user. So if it is overwhelming, that's why we're all here at Word Campus to help each other be successful with WordPress. More than likely you can give your neighbor some advice or if not, they can usually give you some advice. So don't be bashful to find resources right here. Also, if that's too overwhelming, there's also a ton of web development shops where they will take care of everything on the hosting end.  I would highly recommend taking your questions and talking to any of them. They would be more than happy to answer any questions that we don't get to today. And on that note, time for questions or are we done? No, we got a couple of questions but thank you, Devin. Good job. Thank you, there we go. Just time for a couple of questions. Here we go. Hey, Devin, great presentation. Thank you, Christina. Sometimes my clients ask me, do they need a unique IP or not? So when they're getting hosting, should they pay for the unique IP? What would you say to that? Do they need a unique IP or not? I would say it depends on what they're trying to do at their website. Traditionally, if you get an SSL certificate, you need a dedicated IP, which is what we're talking about. It's not necessarily the case. So I would say it depends exactly on what they're trying to do as a short answer, which is not a great answer, I'm afraid. It depends on the website, is what it comes down to. But I'd be happy to talk to you afterwards on the specific example if you'd like. Welcome, here you go. What should most beginning websites be considering in terms of cost overrun potentials? Like when you're thinking about the analogy with the truck, what are some of the factors we should be thinking about? How do we go about estimating and predicting what we might need? Are these introductory packages that most hosting providers offer? Do they have kind of a hidden danger that if we get attacked or we have a security breach or we have something, some unexpected traffic that we're gonna get a huge bill that is in addition to what we're paying? That's a great question. One that we hear a lot is which plan is right for me and if I go with the beginner plan am I kind of opening myself up to attack or a hidden bill on the backside? Honestly, that is one of the reasons that we wanted to talk about this today was so that that's something that you can go and approach a company with. Because I think it changes depending on the company. Personally, I would say if you're just beginning, if you're getting a new site off the ground, most of the beginning packages are built for that. So it depends on the nature of your website. So I'll give an example. If you're a wedding photographer and you want to make sure that the package that you purchase allows for the space of high definition images. But most hosts that I'm aware of, if you go with the beginner plan, that's a great beginning spot, they allow you to upgrade and progress as you move along. As far as overrunning your limits, what the consequences are for that, I think it depends, I think it varies depending on the host. So some will either throttle you and slow down your site, which can be super frustrating. Or others will charge you for exceeding your usage, which is sometimes more frustrating. I think they're both equally frustrating. So, but that's why I talked about a lot of the things that we did today so that you're aware when you're going and talking to the host saying, hey, this is the website I'm thinking about building. My concern is that I might exceed your storage limits. What are the consequences if that happens to me? And I know that pretty much every host out there would be happy to answer that question. One last question. Hosting feature page so I can get a screenshot of that. Hosting feature page. Are you gonna post these slides? Yes, I will post these slides. Is it this one? This one.  When I do the file transfer protocol to you, do you just need the photo or the folder of WP for that site? So, when I save it, it has a WP. I got sites and I made multiple page or websites. So, when I do the hosting with you, what do you guys need to have all those if I wanna add them? Yeah, so to make sure that I understand your question, it's when you're uploading content, whether it be pictures or something like that. I just wanna take it active. I already have the website bill on the Mant Pro. I have the WordPress, but I don't want it to be local. I wanna have multiple websites. Right, so if you've developed it local, depending on what you use to develop it locally, some will give you the option to migrate it to live, essentially. If not, then when you do purchase a hosting plan, usually you can, you basically treat it like a migration, like you're migrating it from your local machine to the server, and you can find a lot of documentation about migrating a website. I'd be happy to talk to you after this in more detail about it, but basically, you're just trying to get the files and the database onto the server, yeah. All right, big round of applause for Devin.


Hey everybody Matt here for Layton sports cards ripping two boxes for James P. We have one box of 2021 prism football hobby One box of 2021 contenders optic football hobby. Here we go. James. Good luck. We'll start off with your contenders optic Scott F is up after this. All right. Here we go. First up base Stefan digs and Kyle Trask rookie Rookie Otto Carlos boogie bash them and to 10 that is gold rookie ticket Otto Elijah Mulden You go nice gold to 10 Rookie ticket 2-2 at well that's a silver and Tom Brady winning ticket purple to 75 21 prism football hobby rookie Carlos boogie bash them and And semi fahoko green hyper James white It's the 175 and brilliant Stefan digs. Well, let's see a monster in this box Joe try on and Patrick Jones This is purple ice Aaron Jones That is to 225 and prism break rookie insert trail ants to sleep rookie Christian Barmore and Dwayne Eskridge blue wave Jibril Peppers It's the 199 and Rashawn Gary Silver See a camo.  So nice when James that is to 25 silver Van Jefferson Ojalari and a da fe away. That's rookie Green hyper Tyson Campbell 175 and rookie red wave auto Jamie Newman 149 these cards is miss cut just a little bit. That is rookie Zach Wilson and rookie Odeon bill Odeon Bo there's chase young purple So on 25 and trace sermon rookie emergent insert. This is Jordan Love blue ice 99 Anthony Schwartz rookie silver That's a rookie Sorry about that. That was Cadarius Tony and Felipe Franks All right, this is Josh Palmer rookie Tommy tremble rookie and Ed Oliver. That is orange to 249. There's fireworks Joe Burr second-year insert big hit Brock Lesnar my homes I'm your smith Marseille and Trey Nixon and this is rookie purple. I see is Ojalari It's purple prism 125 dirt brown. That's Jamie Newman rookie and Trevor Lawrence rookie Marquez Stevenson rookie blue wave That's Jalen Smith locked in silver kid reporter All right, two packs to go. Let's see something big. Let's see. I'll really low numbers rookie now There's Hunter long and Kyle Pitts rookie This is Marshall Falk orange wave That is to 60 Falk is a cult there. All right last pack the Rex Ryan rookie Dazz new some Aman Ross St. Brown rookie and orange Brian burns 249 on the back silver auto Chad Johnson nice Chad Johnson silver auto That'll do it for your boxes James. Thank you for the purchase appreciate that. We'll get these right out to you