Do Traditional Hosting Companies Have a Future?

Traditional hosting companies face extinction—or do they? Discover why some are thriving while others struggle to survive the cloud revolution.

In this eye-opening video, we explore the evolving landscape of web hosting. Are traditional hosting companies still relevant in an era dominated by cloud services and DIY platforms? We delve into trends, emerging technologies, and customer preferences to determine whether traditional hosting has a viable future or is on the brink of extinction.

This Week’s Sponsors

LifterLMS: LifterLMS

Rollback Pro: Rollback Pro

The Show’s Main Transcript

[00:00:22.160] – Jonathan Denwood

Welcome back, folks, to the WP-Tonic show. This is episode 117. We’ve got no guests for this particular show, so it’s going to be a chat between me and Kirk. We’ve got a juicy subject. Do traditional hosting companies have a future in a world of AI? You know, with products like Lovable and similar AI page builders, I actually think they do. So does Kirk. Bit of a giveaway, but things are changing and I thought this would be a great discussion to highlight how hosting and how WordPress is adapting to the world of AI. And I think it’s quite exciting. I’ve been looking at some products and some of the great influencers in the WordPress community that are doing some excellent videos on this subject. So Kurt, would you like to quickly introduce yourself to the tribe?

[00:01:21.120] – Kurt Von Ahnen

Yeah, Jonathan, my name is Kurt von Ahnen. I own an agency called Mañana No Más, and we do a lot of great work with the great team over at WP-Tonic and LifterLMS.

[00:01:30.980] – Jonathan Denwood

Yep, and it should be a great show. Before we go into the meat and potatoes, got a message from one of our major sponsors. I’d like to say we’ve got some new sponsors coming up on the show. I’m really excited, um, really great new sponsors. Um, got one that’s staying with us, but we— that should be starting sometime this month. Um, great news. We really do appreciate the sponsors. Um, without their help, we couldn’t actually produce this show. So we will be back in a few moments, folks.

[00:02:05.150] – Kurt Von Ahnen

Hey, running a business is tough. You shouldn’t have to worry about your website too. With Kinsta’s managed hosting for WordPress, you get lightning-fast load times, enterprise-grade security, and 24/7 expert support from real humans. Switch to Kinsta and see site speeds improve by up to 200%. With effortless migrations and powerful, easy-to-use dashboard. Join over 120,000 other businesses who also trust Kinsta. Get your first month for free at kinsta.com. That’s K-I-N-S-T-A.com. Kinsta, simply better hosting.

[00:02:38.550] – Jonathan Denwood

We’re coming back. Wanna point out we’ve got some great special offers from the sponsors, plus a curated list of the best WordPress plugins and technology and services all in one place. Um, you can get this great free resource by going over to wp-tonic.com/deals. wp-tonic.com/deals. You’ll find all the goodies there. What more could you ask for, my beloved tribe? Probably a lot more, but that’s all you’re going to get on that page. So, um, so it’s a kind of clickbait title. Um, do do traditional hosting companies have a future? And in a way, I suppose they don’t, because I think they’re going to have to adapt as well. I think a lot of them are. But I do really see a divergence on how hosting companies cope in the new world of AI and the new reality of using AI to build a website. Um, so Kirk, what, what’s your own feelings around this as well?

[00:03:53.280] – Kurt Von Ahnen

I was reflecting back on my own journey with hosting, you know, as I’ve run my own, my own thing, and then of course grown into Mañana No Más. And I, I think my path was a lot like what we see with the clients that we deal with, Jonathan. They, you know, they’re not— nobody really knows what they’re supposed to be doing, so they start like jumping in saying, what’s, what’s a good place to put a website? Where’s this? Where, you know, Then they start saying, oh well, some of these are $100 a month and some of these are $10 a month. Why would I pay $100 a month if I could pay $10? And then, you know, they, they start, you know, they start trying to weigh risk and reward without understanding what the risk and reward is. And I did that. I ended up using substandard tools for a good many years, and, and things functioned and things worked. And so I thought that I was doing the right thing, but then when I upgraded, I was like, oh my gosh, I should have done this 5 years ago. And then I upgraded again and I was like, I should have done this 3 years ago.

[00:04:52.640] – Kurt Von Ahnen

And, and, uh, and right now we’re in the same space where we are examining the hosting that we provide our clients. We’re looking at page speed, we’re looking at different performance, uh, issues, and we’re saying, okay, on the platform we’re on now, is this where we want to stay with our people, or do we want to move to something that’s, you know, more modern, more performant, and things like that? And I think that’s like a never-ending thing.

[00:05:15.940] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, I think we’re going to be doing a show tomorrow, folks, around 8 AM, which is called the Membership Machine Show. And that’s, that’s really more aimed at end users. This particular show is aimed at WordPress professionals or power users. And obviously you’ve got, if you’re offering ongoing maintenance and hosting, white-labeled hosting, even that’s changing. That’s becoming more of a hybrid itself in some ways. But it— but then you add AI to the mixture, don’t you? And I was telling Kirk when I was doing some research for this show, a couple of people that I always follow, you know, Paul from WP-Tuts, who does a fantastic job, and Dave Froy, Froy, F-O-Y, Froy. I kind of butchered his last name, but he does a great job. And they were doing it, they’ve done some excellent videos, which will be in the show notes, folks. I’ll go to the WP-Tonic website and next week the show notes should be up. And I’ll make sure all these links are in there. But they’ve done a couple of videos lately where The stack they’re using is they’re using Bricks, which I really like. I think of the non-Gutenberg solutions, I think Bricks is one of the best out there.

[00:07:00.900] – Jonathan Denwood

And then they’re using Automatic CSS, which is a framework product, which I think is excellent as well. But then they’re combining it with an MCP. This is a, this is what is called a Model Context Protocol. It enables you, it’s an open source product and it enables you to work with various large language models like all the leading ones. And But the problem has been, folks, is that you build a website, you use your prompts, you’re in Claude using prompts, typing them, or you’re using— I use an excellent product called Super Whisperer. There’s a couple of these that enables you just to talk to Claude, you don’t even have to type. And then it builds. One of the problems is that if, and I think I might consider joining Dave Sfroy’s next course because he does say, does an excellent course as well because he provides a kind of framework to, because if you don’t provide a outline, a build to Claude, it will just go out and build something and it could use modern standards. It could use something that came 8 years ago. And what it tends to do is it mixes it all up in one, not very tidy bundle, um, but, um, using the MCP and then a third-party plugin called Nova Media Pro— they do a free product, but it’s, uh, Nova Media Pro, um— this enables you to— at the present moment, it only works with Bricks and Elementor It doesn’t, I think I’m correct, they don’t offer a Gutenberg solution yet.

[00:09:37.000] – Jonathan Denwood

It’s, so you build the initial website with a framework which Dave and other people seem to be providing. So you don’t get this jumble, but then you can import it and using Bricks, you can actually visually edit the website instead of having to rebuild the whole thing and import it again. It’s a little bit off topic, but I’m going to get back to why I brought this up. But what’s your initial response to what I’ve just outlined, Kurt?

[00:10:16.910] – Kurt Von Ahnen

So when I watch these things, and you see these people, you know, talking to their computers. You know, I do stuff with Emily at LifterLMS and she’ll talk to Claude and make magic happen. People that are proficient at it, they have a way of making it look easy. And then people that are new to the space or not as confident in the space, you can see the struggle. I mean, there’s, there’s a marked difference between this.

[00:10:45.420] – Speaker 3

This is—

[00:10:45.920] – Kurt Von Ahnen

it’s like sports. Um, you know, when I was racing motorcycles, Jonathan, I, I could win a regional event, I could come home with trophies and feel really great about myself, and everybody would say, you’re so fast, you should go race nationals. And then I’d sign up for a national and promptly come in last, you know, and the only time I was on camera is if I was getting lapped. It’s like if you were a professional, like if you were to run marathons locally and then sign up for the Boston Marathon, you’d feel like you were walking a race by yourself, right? It’s, um that level of difference, I think. And I think there’s a huge gap between these people. So I’m going to put Kevin Geary in this too, because Kevin Geary does this AI thing with, with Etch as well. And so you have that, yet you have this Bricks example. You’ve got stuff that Emily’s done in SkyPilot with that theme. And it’s interesting, but I also think it’s largely intimidating to the average user or even the average freelancer.

[00:11:43.070] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, I think, you know, if you go and watch Paul’s excellent latest video about this, it is, it’s not beta, but it is, well, it’s, it’s very early days with Nova Media. It’s been out for a little while, but it’s still early days. But I think it’s great news for the WordPress community that these products are being developed. Because I really, this is, I might be totally wrong, but I see this as the clear roadway for WordPress in the next couple years. Now when it gets back to hosting, there seems to be a kind of divide here with hosting providers and they’re not all doing it. I don’t know if WP-Tonic’s doing this or or Kinsta. I know some other services, Cloudways, um, um, at WP-Tonic we use xCloud, they do this, but most of them are doing this at a slightly extra charge. And what I mean is that they’re providing an MCP service, a server, and most of them it’s a small extra charge, to run an MCP server. And if your hosting provider does offer that, um, then you could look at something like Nova Media Pro. And I know that there’s a couple competitors.

[00:13:24.810] – Jonathan Denwood

I’m just pointing out because, um, the videos I watched, it looked pretty cool to me. And they’ve got a year or lifetime deal, um, Now the divide is that there’s a, and I’m sure there’s a number of hosting companies that are offering NCP server. But then there’s another group of hosting providers that are not really aimed at the WordPress agency freelancer power user. They’re aimed at the consumer to some extent, and they’re offering an integrated— well, I say that, they do have sections where they are, you know, one of them we’re gonna be talking about is 10Web. They do have a white-labeled product which they aim at agencies and freelancers. And Hostinger, I think they do the same, don’t they?

[00:14:32.930] – Speaker 3

It—

[00:14:33.530] – Jonathan Denwood

so there’s a small group that are offering an AI website builder. Some of them are based on WordPress, and there’s a lot of overlap because Elementor offered their own hosted AI solution, don’t they? I forgot the name of it, Kirk. What’s it called?

[00:14:57.930] – Kurt Von Ahnen

I think that’s Angie.

[00:14:59.270] – Jonathan Denwood

That’s Angie. And yeah, I think you’re right there. And so some of the website builder solutions are offering a hosted solution as well, aren’t they? But the 3 that I’ve got on my list is, um, Hostinger, uh, 10Web, but then I’ve got GoDaddy, Aero. Well, that’s not based on WordPress, is it? That, that’s their own That’s their own system, isn’t it? So what’s your thoughts about some of these hosting providers providing their— seem to be their own platform, don’t they?

[00:15:40.220] – Kurt Von Ahnen

You know, Jonathan, I’m looking at this and I’m just trying to— I’m trying to layer things in. I have kind of like a logical brain, right? Like first this, then this, then this, then this. And, and I know sometimes when people listen to me, especially over time, it can seem like I have a lot of irons in the fire. But when it comes to the— when it comes to the hosting, I, I still prefer a more simple approach. So, and here’s, here’s where I’m going with this. Like, when you factor in MCPs and AI and all that from the hosting perspective, What’s that doing to bandwidth and to usage and to server resources and overall costs that you’re going to incur on these platforms? These platforms all seem to have a certain trend, and, and I don’t mean to sound negative because that— this is not— I’m really not trying to sound negative, but usually it’s attractive to buy in, uh, hosting companies around for a year, 2 years. Everyone rants and raves about how fast and amazing it is. Everybody signs up, and then 2, 3 years in all the prices go up and the server resources seem to dwindle down a bit.

[00:16:53.380] – Kurt Von Ahnen

Um, and that’s just the nature of business, especially if private equity gets involved, right? Because, you know, now squeaking out every last margin percentage is going to be the priority. So as we add these complexities to the hosting, I feel like— and again, I’m going to go back to people that are people that are newer to the space, you could be a professional freelancer, but you’re newer to the space. It gets overwhelming and confusing. So when people start talking about layering, you know, Cloudflare and NPCs and DNS management and email inboxing versus, you know, Google Workspace or something with Zoho, it just starts to get all these pieces that begin to fragment your approach. And when you’re an agency or when you’re a freelance person offering hosting services, your goal is to provide like the simplest solution to your client. And I’m not seeing us go in a simple direction. I’m seeing us go more fragmented and more overwhelming as time goes instead of better. Uh, you had mentioned xCloud and I’m just going to be, I’m going to throw it out there. I, there’s a lot of people in our circles, Jonathan, that love xCloud.

[00:18:06.390] – Kurt Von Ahnen

Um, But for a new person going into xCloud, it’s like, you can connect any server to this. Oh, we have our own servers. Oh, you want to be on our cloud service? Oh, you want to be on our managed service? You want to be— it’s like, people don’t know how to pick these things, and they don’t know how to look at differences. And, and so, like, some, some value-based servers, when you see it, they’re going to say, oh, we’re Apache, we’re Lightspeed, we’re this, we’re that. And then you look at other things and they go, well, you know, we have NGINX, we have We have this, you know, we have this version of cash versus that version of cash. And I feel again, I feel like maybe, maybe in some cases we’re paying for goods and services that shouldn’t even be offered anymore. They’re outdated, they’re slow, and they don’t work well. And then we have these new products, but we don’t really understand what they are and how they work.

[00:18:57.400] – Jonathan Denwood

Well, I don’t totally agree with you, but I understand where you’re coming from. From. Um, but I, I think you’re spot on. There’s a lot of divergence, and a lot of it, it’s only going to accelerate. Um, but I think it’s a good time for us to go for our break, and when we come back, we can continue the discussion. Um, also, I, I think this, this has been— if you’ve been in this game for a while, you’ve seen this happened before, and I’ll delve into a bit of that in the second half as well. So we’re going for a break, folks. We will be back in a few moments.

[00:19:36.790] – Kurt Von Ahnen

Updating plugins and themes shouldn’t feel risky. That’s why over 300,000 WordPress users trust WP Rollback. With just a click, you can safely roll back any plugin or theme. No manual file uploads and no downtime. And with WP Rollback, Rollback Pro, you can download premium plugins and themes, tools like Elementor, Gravity Forms, more. Track every rollback you do with detailed activity logs. Protect your workflow and take the stress out of updates. Learn more at wprollback.com.

[00:20:13.930] – Speaker 3

This podcast episode is brought to you by LifterLMS. The leading learning management system solution for WordPress. If you or your client are creating any kind of online course, training-based membership website, or any type of e-learning project, LifterLMS is the most secure, stable, well-supported solution on the market. Go to lifterlms.com and save 20% at checkout with coupon code WP-Tonic. Podcast 20. That’s podcast 2-0. Enjoy the rest of your show.

[00:20:51.720] – Jonathan Denwood

Also want to point out that you can join us live on the podcast. Um, you can either join us on LinkedIn or YouTube. We try and do the show at 11 o’clock on Thursdays. Um, that’s Central Daylight Time, 11 AM. And we love you to join us and have a discussion with us during the recording of the show. We’ve got some people with us now, got Dave1790, and we had a good crowd joined us last week for the roundtable show. So we love you to join us. So let’s, let’s go straight into it some more. I suppose because, um, I saw this with one of the areas you’ve got to be a bit careful about, um, but it can be overstated, is the ability to just move from one host to the other. Um, that’s, that’s been there, but the ability to move from one page builder to another, to, to change from one starter website or theme, whatever you want to call it, and Um, when you actually build out a site and it’s running for a while, that’s the reality of moving away. It’s a lot more different than the propaganda, as I would call it.

[00:22:17.710] – Jonathan Denwood

But, um, I do understand what you mean, because basically you, from a hosting provider, all you really want is the best performance and, and decent support. But it is difficult, isn’t it? Because where does a hosting provider— you know, you’re the freelancer, you’re the, you’re the agency, you’re the one, you should be supporting it. Um, if you’re asking it, you know, um, where does your responsibility start and where does hosting providers’ responses, you know, And it’s just, you know, normally when they are dealing direct with customers, not freelancers or professionals, the hosting companies always has to make that decision. You know, are they going to provide quality live support 24/7? Is it going to be a ticketing system? You know, where are the, where are the barriers? Where, where, where do, where do they help with other plugins, with plugin conflicts, stuff that doesn’t really— it’s always been a bit of a nightmare, isn’t it, Kurt?

[00:23:39.960] – Kurt Von Ahnen

Yeah. Yeah. Well, and then, you know, some of these hosting companies have their own plugins, you know, that they must use plugins or install, like some have their own caching plugins or things like that. And it’s interesting to know, like, so, so where do you, where do you fall on that? Right? Like, so are you a product company? Are you a hosting company? Are you, are you both? And I’ll tell you, like, I have used a couple of hosts and even some of the bargain hosts where everyone said, oh, don’t go there, that’s junk, right? I was on the junk for a while and I still got what I thought was good support. I’m usually pretty self-sustaining. Like, I’ll look up the documents and I’ll look up things and I’ll, I’ll put some due diligence in. But if I, if I hit a roadblock and, and hit support, I’ll say, this is what I’ve looked at. This is what I’ve done. This is what I tried. This didn’t work. Can you help me?

[00:24:30.420] – Speaker 3

Boom.

[00:24:30.580] – Kurt Von Ahnen

And I always get great support from, from, from hosting, which I think is, I think it’s more than what I paid for, to be honest with you, in those regards.

[00:24:41.470] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah. Um, and I was like, I was watching, um, I know with Elementor, they’re, um, with their version 4, you know, I was watching a live discussion that Paul on WP-Tuts was having. Um, and, um, they were saying in the Elementor community, and I do have, um, one of their old licenses. And we got some clients that we built websites on Elementor, and I’ve got the old 1,000 website license for $199 a year. But we no longer promote it. We will, we will host websites if somebody’s built one and we will continue supporting. We haven’t told these people that we’re going to be rebuilding their website in 4 because it, we just can’t do that. Um, but, um, it is, uh, absolutely fine. Sorry about that. It is, um, it is a difficult situation, but they have, they’ve been having their own problems with Elementor. For. Um, and then I think in the mix, a lot of the WordPress community haven’t warmed to Gutenberg. Another part of the community is totally committed to Gutenberg. I try not be more pragmatic about the thing, um, not be so tribal, but it is difficult because, you know, if somebody’s a freelancer, they really got to choose their stack, haven’t they?

[00:26:33.450] – Jonathan Denwood

If they, they can’t be using 3 or 4 main tools because that would be inefficient, wouldn’t it? Oh, you’re, you’re, you’re muted. I think you’re muted. I’m not hearing.

[00:26:50.180] – Kurt Von Ahnen

As we focus the discussion on hosting, again, from the, from the freelance perspective or agency perspective, I talk to people that literally have things spread out over 5, 6 hosts, or they have a client, they go, well, this client was on WP-Tonic, so I got them over there, and I got this one on Cloudways, and I got a couple of people on Bluehost, I got a couple on Hostinger, and it’s like, whoa, whoa, like, that’s, that’s a lot of things to try and figure out. Uh, I took on more of a freelance task last year with a driving school, and they were like— it was a Lyft or LMS thing where they’re like, we just need help with our Lyft or LMS stuff. And I was like, okay, well, I’m a pro in that space, I’ll help you, sure. And I shortcut some things, Jonathan. Normally I’m like, we can migrate your site, we can put you over here, we’ll give you a hosting package, we’ll do the maintenance for you. Normally that’s the deal, but it was like, nah, this should be straightforward, it’s a simple ask. Boom. Well, the reason they hired me is because they were on DreamHost and there was all kinds of conflicts between stuff they had done previously and plugins they had removed from their website but didn’t completely remove from their website and the LifterLMS stuff.

[00:28:01.530] – Kurt Von Ahnen

So there were conflicts, but because it wasn’t my hosting, because I wouldn’t have full control over the stack, it was, it was not an easy task and it turned into an absolute nightmare that we ended up losing money on. It was just a— because you want to be familiar with— to your point, you build your stack, you build what you’re efficient and you’re competent in. And when you start jumping out of your comfort circle into these other areas, you open yourself up to potential losses.

[00:28:31.540] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah. And then we add, we add to the hosting mix AI, don’t we, as we were talking about in the first half. It, it, it’s, there’s so many, you know, you got products like Divi, you got products like Breakdance, um, you got products like Bricks. And of the non, um, Gutenberg solutions, I like Bricks the most. Um, I think they found the right balance and, um, I think people that in the WordPress influencer community, like Paul and Dave, they, they push, um, obviously Paul’s made his feelings clear about Gutenberg. He’s not a big fan of it, so he kind of pushes Bricks. And Dave, I think, is the same. I, I shouldn’t put words in his mouth, but These are, I think, pretty quality people that have got a good track record. And it’s really interesting to see, um, I’m not saying Elementor is a bad company, but, um, because I’ve not been actively in that community for a while, it was the main tool when I was actually designing and developing sites for people. It was the main tool I was using. Um, and, um, version 3, they seem to do a good job of cleaning that up to a certain degree.

[00:30:10.790] – Jonathan Denwood

But what I’m hearing is that version 4, it hasn’t gone— it’s not gone that well. Um, and then you’ve got this whole business about what the, you know, who they’re aiming their product up, but On the other hand, and it’s not known, but I think there are a lot of people say they’re running like 15 to 20 million websites. So they’re not, they can’t adapt as quickly as something like Novomedia Mira Pro or something like that. But I think it’s really good news that these products are appearing because Like I say, I think using Claude, I’ve been playing around with it a little bit. It is impressive what it’s— when it comes to actually build, you know, you give it some examples, you can say build 3 versions, provide like 3 pages, these main templates, give us 3 versions, blah. It does save an enormous amount of time, but you do need to be able to put that into an editor of some kind like WordPress. And I think it— I think what people are doing in this area, it’s reassuring really, because I think it will keep WordPress— it just assists WordPress to keep it relevant, basically.

[00:31:44.430] – Jonathan Denwood

What do you feel?

[00:31:46.300] – Kurt Von Ahnen

Well, I’m listening to you talk and about these different tools and channels. And the thing that resonates in my mind is just kind of the way that You know, Spencer Foreman frames it when he’s on the, on the, on the panel show, right? WordPress is the box. And then there’s, you know, all these other things that we can do with that as the core piece of the, of the platform. And it makes total sense. It’s where I get lost is, is when you were describing earlier, I’m not going to say lost. Lost is weird. It’s that it— there’s a lot of moving pieces. So when I have a— even in the Bricks example, so I’ve got a few websites in Bricks and automatic CSS. I mean, that really changes the whole experience in Bricks quite a bit. And so, you know, it does automatic spacings and, you know, headline above and below, and it does a lot of things for you automatically, which is cool. But then you throw in an MCP in there and you start getting Claude talking to your website and I think things could get, things could get hairy for some people pretty quick.

[00:32:51.840] – Jonathan Denwood

Oh, I think I’ve made it. I would never, never put this on a production website. Never.

[00:32:59.000] – Speaker 4

Okay.

[00:32:59.480] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah. Never put this on a production website. That’s bonkers stuff. Um, I would, you need a staging site and you never connect AMCP to your production website, folks. I would never suggest that. Um, this is really clearly a staging, local staging, and you, you know, and then because as what Dave does really well in the video I watched is that Claude, it does jumble like inline CSS. That hasn’t— it jumbles percentages with pixels still, you know, where other people are going on the leading edge of CSS, that not even using percentages or ems, or gone on to another level where you find with something like Claude, unless you give it a real structure and real instruction about what technology and what framework it’s gonna use, it will just go out and take a bit here, take a bit there. And just put it all together into a pretty hot mess. What I’ve seen, and I think a lot of people that have been kind of pushing Claude and Claude, you know, you can get a $10,000 website in 20 minutes. I think that’s great click for YouTube, but it’s not great advice really for the, for people trying to build a real business in web design or development or a business in general.

[00:34:48.140] – Jonathan Denwood

What do you reckon, Kurt?

[00:34:50.010] – Kurt Von Ahnen

Well, we’re now, we’re diving back into one of my, one of my points of contention. So I’m an expert in LifterLMS, right? And so I sound like a, I sound like a broken record here, but Now when we sell a package to a new client, we can build the framework to that website with placeholder content for them and everything. Like, like we can get them like a, like a sample ready to go the same day the contract is signed. And that’s when I, when I talk to other people in the space, they act like that’s some kind of a surprise. And so I think there is so much value to being an expert efficient at what you do to the point where, let’s be real, Jonathan, if I had to open up Claude and say, oh, I want to make an e-learning website, right? Like, to me, it’s just easier to open up WordPress, install LifterLMS, put in the theme that I want to use, put in some, some content that I’ve got, you know, some, some structure, some placeholder content. And then I’ve got a sample to show the customer that we can say, okay, here’s what we’ve got so far.

[00:35:56.780] – Kurt Von Ahnen

Right? Because seeing is so much different than discussing it with clients. Clients don’t have the— they usually don’t have that mental imagination, right? So you got to show them something and you go, okay, so we can, you know, we can move this heading, we can change this picture, we can take this section out, we can add a section. And then at that point is when I see like, okay, if I was in a staging environment or a development environment and I leverage some MCP AI tools to help with that level of adjusting, maybe that would be the efficiency that comes in. But it’s— I think everyone’s workflow is different and I don’t think that AI or these other tools are a replacement for being a professional that’s efficient and competent.

[00:36:45.120] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, it’s a hard thing to say. Well, I think Matt Matthias from the It’s also talked about this, um, where, where is this boundary where it’s just going to be easier just to install WordPress, start a website, a theme, whatever you want to call it, and then use a bit of AI, then, then try to build the whole thing. And I think that’s what you’re expressing as well. And that, that’s where the balance is going to have to be found. It’s just that, um, there’s a lot of confusion, confusion, misguidedness. Um, I think things are balancing out a little bit, but I, I really do see hosting really, um, divert— breaking into two paths, paths that we have just talked about, um, in the first half of the show where they’re offering their own integrated AI building system, right? And that, and they will use, just like you said, that some hosting providers bought plugins to, um, and they bundled them to, um, make their hosting more sticky and more defendable to build a bigger moat, moat around it. Well, that’s what some of these hosting companies are doing with AI. They’re providing their own AI solution.

[00:38:21.750] – Jonathan Denwood

Some of it integrated WordPress, like GoDaddy’s Hero. It’s not WordPress at all. And then you’ve got other hosting providers through MCP, um, they’re going to offer the basic tools, but then you’ll have the choice to integrate Claude, whatever large language model you’re gonna use, Codex, whatever you choose to use. But don’t do it on, the main thing is not to do it on the production website. I can’t be that clear. All right, Kirk, I think I’m waffling now, but at this end of the show, what’s the best way for people to find out more about you and what you’re up to, Kirk?

[00:39:05.200] – Kurt Von Ahnen

Well, uh, Kurt Von Ahnen on LinkedIn. It’s a great way to reach me. Uh, I’m the only one there, so I’m easy to find. And then, uh, Mañana No Más is the business name, and it’s our call sign on all the socials.

[00:39:17.300] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, and if you found this topic interesting, um, best way to give us some comments, some input, is go to the WP-Tonic YouTube channel, leave a comment there. Did we do a good job, a bad job? And also think about joining us live on Thursdays. We’ve got one or two people that joined us today. It’s always great when people join us and be part of the conversation and part of the community. We will be back next week with hopefully a great guest. We’ll see you soon, folks. Bye.

[00:39:48.000] – Speaker 4

Hey, thanks for listening. We really do appreciate it. Why not visit the Mastermind Facebook group and also to keep up with the latest news, click wp-tonic.com/newsletter. We’ll see you next time.

WP-Tonic & The Membership Machine Facebook Group

Why don’t you sign up and be part of the Membership Machine Show & WP-Tonic Facebook group, where you can get all the best advice and support connected to building your membership or community website on WordPress?