#33 - When Bad Practices Collide: The New Web Crisis No One’s Talking About

The web is changing fast — faster than most agencies, hosting providers, and developers are ready for. In this episode of Over the Bull, Ken Carroll from Integris Design talks about the rise (and fall) of “managed” WordPress hosting, why piecemeal systems are killing efficiency, and how outdated thinking is costing businesses real money.

From the honeymoon phase with WPEngine to the rough patches with Kinsta, and finally finding a solid partner in Pressable, this isn’t a hit piece — it’s a reality check. Ken shares the lessons learned from a decade of agency experience and the surprising truth about what actually makes hosting stable, scalable, and sane.

You’ll also hear how today’s perfect storm — made of AI shifts, bad tech habits, and patchwork infrastructure — is reshaping the web, and what agencies must do if they want to stay afloat in 2025 and beyond.

Key topics:
•Why “managed hosting” doesn’t always mean managed well
•How the web’s evolution has outpaced agency infrastructure
•The hidden cost of bad plugin culture and stack sprawl
•Why unified systems are the future — and duct tape is not a strategy

If you’ve ever asked “Why is my site breaking again?” or “Why are we paying for hosting that’s slowing us down?” — this episode gives you the answer (with a little humor and a lot of truth).

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:02

You're listening to Over the Bull, where we cut through marketing noise. Here's your host, Ken Carroll.

SPEAKER_01: 0:09

How not to turn the car around on this episode of Over the Bull. Thanks so much for tuning in. I appreciate it. You know, when uh my kids were young, the one thing that I never wanted to do was have to turn the car back around to go turn something off or get something. You know, it's like we're we're getting ready to go on that vacation. And as we're traveling and we're getting down that road, you know, and then somebody, I can still, you know, hear, oh, I think I forgot or I needed this. And uh no matter how many times, you know, we had to uh or we asked, you know, there was always a chance we had to turn around. Now, in your uh business life, more of you than you think are going to be turning your business around and having to start over. Um, I know this sounds like it could be hyperbole to you, but but it's reality. Okay, I'm seeing it in real time. So, what I want to share with you today is just kind of talk to you about what's going on with the internet, and then what I want to do is transition that to a story about um a review about hosting that I think would kind of crystallize this whole thing and kind of button it up. So, what do I mean by turning the car around? Well, when you um when you have a business, there are certain things that can help your business move in the right direction, and there's certain things that can help your business move in the wrong direction. Your business never gets to a certain point, and then you're done building credibility. Building credibility is constant, consistent, and requires best practices. Now, for the last since the internet basically popped into existence, there have been people that have been trying to gain the system. And there have been other people who work from a little bit of knowledge that have created some success but some problems. So the the issue with the web is that now we're hitting a storm, and this storm is actually getting worse for several reasons. Now, the first is that the competition is really kicking up a notch with the advent of artificial intelligence. We talked about um Atlas last week, a uh a new browser by uh OpenAI, the folks that make Chat GPT, and it's pretty impressive. Now, the one thing that uh Google wants to do is maintain its authority on the internet, and we are seeing some slight percentage drops in terms of usage, and we are seeing AIs being widely adopted. And so with this fight on the internet for uh Google trying to remain at the top, and then these newer, younger, uh arguably more efficient systems are popping up, um, they're fighting for that. Now, what this means is that content uh that is created in bad ways, in bad practices, are falling under the microscope. Now, here's why that's happening. Because relevancy in search results is more critical than ever for these companies to remain relevant. What that means is basically you go type something in a Google search, you need the most relevant results at the top. You don't want to filter through a bunch of junk, a bunch of generic AI-generated blog articles. You don't want to filter through that. You want accurate answers, so you can make a decision. That is a search engine's value proposition. When I say search engines, I mean like like Google, for example, is a search engine. Well, with people, uh agencies and freelancers, what they've done, and they've a lot of them have always taken shortcuts. Okay, and the problem is some of them believe in myths that simply aren't true, but they've had success with them in the past. So if you could imagine you've got freelancers with limited experience, you have freelancers that are building WordPress sites with templates and free plugins, and you have agencies doing this too, by the way. You have these piecemeal systems, and they've built entire companies around these piecemeal systems. Think your do-it-yourself website builders, and now all this stuff is coming to the forefront. Google's fighting to remain on the top, these other guys are fighting for them, and the best search results have to be at the top, which means they have to start pushing things that are shortcuts down to the bottom and bring up the best of the best to the top. Now, it gets a little more complicated than that. Uh, I've been talking to you a while about a principle called EEAT. Um, this is really important because it appears that artificial intelligence does not like artificial intelligence content. And so original, human-curated, human-touched content appears to be the gold standard, while all the junk content appears to be uh falling to the wayside. So think that when you're creating a blog article using AI and you're and you're not putting in the right systems in place to have it human-touched, just think that Google's going to devalue that. Just think uh, like I've talked about YouTube, uh, it came across my desk uh several months ago now, where they're devaluing AI content. Now they didn't devalue AI content because of it's uh it's incredibly valuable and people love it and they want to see more of it. It was because it was making the searches on YouTube less credible and people were not wanting to use it because they really didn't want to see a fake celebrity generated through AI saying things that they never said. I mean, that just creates this state of confusion. And who wants to quote something that artificial intelligence said someone said when they didn't say it? I mean, you can come across really foolhardy if you were to fall into that and then start quoting it. So as you can imagine, this storm is really intense. It's like everything's coming together. The the technology companies, the big tech companies, the freelancers are uh and the and the agencies are heavily invested in their piecemeal systems. And then you have the business owner. So let's talk about you as the owner of a business. You know, it's always been where the owner of a business, there's certain things that we just know about people who own businesses. Number one is when things get lean, they usually cut the marketing budget. We know that. So they we know they cut the lifeline of their business as things start to get lean because they think that's an easy place to do. It's always happened and it's always been a bad decision. But more than that, business owners, especially small business owners, they want to cut as many corners as they can. And so oftentimes they'll hire a freelancer, a cheap agency, or they will try to do things on their own. So then they start to incorporate products like Canva or uh do-it-yourself website builders or different things like that. And so what they do is they throw together this piecemeal uh system that hasn't been properly thought through, and so they're already off on the wrong foot. So if we if we back the internet up, say 10, 15 years, the uh you could get away with some of this stuff. You could get away with being a little more sloppy than the average bear. There were other things that you know really needed to be done, but not on the level that it does today. So think in terms of like your uh your nap score, your nap name, address, phone number, uh score, and optimizing that. Now you could do it kind of in a small version, and some could get by maybe with a very limited version, but now that score is more important than ever. It's a have to, it's not a want-to. So when we see businesses start to pull away from like our nap optimization uh tool, we know that that's a fundamental block in the foundation that they're ignoring. So you as the owner want uh as cheap as you can get it, a piecemeal system, some of you. Um some of you are hiring people that aren't qualified to do the job. The people that are selling you the product, they think that what they're selling you is something good and efficient. The agencies and the freelancers that are abusing artificial intelligence think that somehow they found a way to shortcut everything so they can make more revenue and make it appear as though they're doing more work than they can. The um the software companies are invested in text that agencies use that is becoming quickly irrelevant. These these big institutions, I mean, just think of the the do-it-yourself website builders that are on the uh the Super Bowl and all these other locations. I mean, they're quickly becoming incredibly irrelevant. And then of course, now we've got another factor, which is how do you use artificial intelligence to begin with? I mean, using putting people through an AI system when they want to talk to a human is bad. I mean, it's it's kind of like they're they're trying to replace uh the poor and fortunate people uh in these call centers overseas that are having to grab calls and take the abuse of frustrated people with these AI systems. But here's the thing the customer still doesn't like it. Okay, it's got to it's got to be better and more efficient. Now, what's great is there are some really great tools out there. I just experienced one uh yesterday, as a matter of fact. It was an incredible product, and then of course the 99% are horrible. Okay, so let's move and turn the corner and look at this from a whole different direction. Artificial intelligence is gobbling up a lot of tasks that were once valuable that can be automated. And it's just a fact. And so what we're seeing are a lot of white-collar jobs and different jobs that are basically becoming obsolete because they can be performed by artificial intelligence. So some projections are saying that people are going to have to move to a whole other industry and try to figure out a way to provide for their lives and their families and things like that. And so they're going to be moving from their white-collar jobs to maybe other jobs. So think, for example, uh white-collar guy sees the writing on the wall, and he goes out and says, I'm going to invest in an electrical company or a plumbing company, or maybe I'll start building websites. And so now what we're going to see is an influx of people trying to survive. So, what this means for you is your competition levels are going to increase. It also means that the number of people that are going to start building websites, selling themselves as digital marketing experts, taking these weekend courses or these uh six-month courses, and then going out into the world and then trying to present themselves as experts, those things are just going to increase. Now, guys, let me tell you something here. I know of an agency right now that's been around for over 10 years, and I can tell you that I've seen the work that they've done, and it's horrible. It's it's it's absolutely just destroyed this one company's reputation. Now, I can tell you that if someone in a white-collar world who's got a little bit of a grasp on how business works, and they get just the pieces up to start starting a um an SEO company, uh digital marketing agency or whatever, they're gonna put a shine on that, and it's gonna be hard to tell who the good guys are and who the bad guys are. And so this is going to add a whole other element to this game and make it much more complicated for you as an owner of a business to one compete, because now your marketing budget's gonna have to increase. Other things are gonna have to increase for you to compete against all the new people coming into your markets. But more important than that, now you're gonna have freelancers and agencies and people who can say the right things who may be polished salesmen, and they're gonna come to you and start selling you products in which they are not capable of producing. Now, this is the state of the internet. This is where we are at this time and space on the web. And for you to sustain yourself, the very first thing you have to do is equip yourself with the reality of the web. Um, for us as an agency, we're moving toward a model where we need to handle pretty much everything from beginning to end with clients, including uh consultations, um, directions, looking at data. Uh, you name it. We're we're trying to move into a model where we're kind of doing all that holistically because look here, okay. Let's talk about a television channel, uh, you know, TV and newspapers. Okay, so let's let's move here for a second. They they started losing their readership, they started losing momentum. You know, it's um almost like the phone book, you know, 2.0 situation. And so they're they're trying to survive too. Well, these organizations, what they've done is moved into digital marketing, they're trying to leverage their previous reputation, piggyback a legacy product, you know, and then they're what they're trying to do is move into digital marketing and do that in order to sustain themselves. Okay, I can tell you firsthand that they are not equipped in the cases I've looked at to manage this market. They are reselling a product on a very high level that is inefficient at best, but it looks good numerically. So, you know, part of the problem, I'm sure you know this as the owner of a business, you get into this stuff and you start looking at it, and then you start getting these numbers, and you're like, well, what does that number even mean to me? Well, how does that even equate to business? And then you start getting these nebulous definitions. Well, that's going on on top of everything else. So as an owner of a business who doesn't live in this field, you may be chasing numbers that really are completely irrelevant. Now, this speeding up has been going on for some time. Okay, uh in the uh in the Bible, you'll get to uh these things must shortly come to pass, and there's a term in there called tacos, which uh uh it basically means like a revving up when it talks about shortly, like things are speeding up, a tachometer, so to speak. And so when we're looking at what's going on in the web, this tachometer has been increasing. Now, as an agency, we have a whole other undercurrent because if you're a reputable agency and you're trying to stay on top of the game, it's a little bit of a game of frogger at different points because you're always trying to find the best solution that is good for a client, and then you're watching the deterioration of certain companies that appeared to have been good at one point. Now you're trying to figure things out and move in a uh another uh direction in order to remain relevant. And you know, certifications, best practices, not trying to cheat the system, uh, building a plan that's holistic, overall credibility, all of these things tie in to building a plan. I mean, everything down from uh how long you register your domain to your hosting to all these complexities that business owners, um, you know, it's just a lot. I mean, we're in it full time, and you know, I'm here early in the morning on a uh a Wednesday just to get the podcast in due to all the things that go on within an agency. So I really strongly recommend you start taking some of this stuff to uh to heart. So let me let me share a journey with you. And, you know, as many of you know, our agency, we've been building off WordPress for 20 years. Okay. And so let me talk to you about hosting solutions from the perspective of an agency. Now, before we get into it, let's talk about what hosting is as a recap because I know you own a business and you're you're likely not like well in, you know, you don't live in these waters. So hosting is basically where all the stuff that makes up a website resides on the internet so that it can be uh properly found. I mean, I guess that's the easiest way to say it. So just think uh it's like this this place on the web uh where you store all those files, and then when they're properly structured, they make a website, and there are good neighborhoods, there are bad neighborhoods, there are pl uh just like you would in real life. There's there's efficiency, there's uh stability, there's a lot of factors that go into uh just the idea of hosting, I mean, security alone. I mean, you want to talk about everybody talks about how great AI is. You should look at the uh the undercurrent of the AI war and all the wasted energy that goes into all the bad guys trying to hack and use AI for malicious reasons, and then the good guys trying to combat the bad guys by putting in new processes and steps, and then what do you do? Now you have 500,000 two-step authentications you've got to go through because of uh all that war going on in the undercurrent. So there's all that stuff that goes into uh good hosting, and of course, you know, um the people that sell the very low-end hosting want you to think that hosting is hosting is hosting, and they're just trying to get it at the bottom dollar, while those of us on the inside understand that hosting is foundational and and good hosting is non-negotiable. We need to move to the places where it's going to give us the best overall performance uh for our clients. I mean, when you're on the end, you know weird things. Like you know that you typically have less than 10 seconds to get someone's attention on the web. People have become very, very impatient. I mean, if you want to talk about a whole other layer, we could talk about the impatience of people and the conditions, conditioning of people and what they expect. Um, it's a lot different. It's a lot different. Your 35-year-olds today are a lot different than your 35-year-olds of just five, 10 years ago, just from the expectation uh with some of this technology. All right, so let's get back to this. So this is I want to take you on this journey of what we've experienced with our hosting. And I'm just going to read this article because you got to be careful when you write things, uh, reviews and things like that. And you kind of need to stay to uh a script, and you you know you don't want to be um mean to people or whatever. This is this is my personal journey through our company with hosting, and we're going to kind of walk through that a little bit. So here we go. I'm going to read. Uh WordPress is the most popular content management system on the planet, which means it's also the most misunderstood. Okay, so CMS, content management system. It's basically just a way for you to log in and manage your website. Just think of it kind of like that. And it also gives features, uh, different things that kind of help with that website experience to customize it for your business. Uh with this open source freedom comes a flood of freelancers, agencies, and enterprise-level hosting companies, all promising the same thing: speed, security, and support. Okay, we got another word there, open source. Open source just means you can download all the code. Okay, so there's two flavors of WordPress: WordPress.com, where you have limited access, and you have WordPress.org where you can build it and have all access. Every competent agency or freelancers I've ever met uses WordPress.org. That's my opinion. In reality, many of those companies land somewhere between almost there and are you kidding me? Subagencies cut corners with bloated themes and questionable plugins. Some hosts claim unlimited everything until you actually use it. Meanwhile, business owners are left with websites that look fine on the surface, but are built on quicksand. Now, this is absolutely true with what's going on with WordPress today. And while everyone debates plugins and page builders and all those critical, uh all those uh most critical parts, hosting gets overlooked. It's almost like, well, where can I stick this website? Where can I get cheap hosting? You know, it's the same thing. Business owners want something cheap. Everybody's trying to do something, you know, and and think that they're going to uh kind of cut corners in the system and do as good. Um let's be honest here. No serious agency is throwing client sites on shared hosting and calling it a day. You want a strong infrastructure, consistent performance, and a support team that won't ghost you when things go sideways. I mean, you guys know this. You guys have seen it where you get in and all of a sudden you're confronted with some kind of ticket or forum or someone that doesn't quite understand you or whatever may happen, and now you're stuck, and then bad things just continue to cascade in the wrong direction. So for us at Integrate Design, that search for a truly reliable premium managed host has been a long and winding road. We've been through WP Engine, we've been through a company called Kensta, and we finally found something that actually feels like home by a company powered by automatic called Pressible. Now, let me say a few things about this. This journey has, remember, I told you things speed up and we're seeing it happen more. Other things, there's a lot of factors that are going in it that are making us test it and move in this direction. So it's really kind of important because even though we're talking about hosting here and you probably want me to cut to the chase, it's not the where we're landing, it's the journey. Because in your business, everything from every component actually, if it's not working together holistically, then it's going to fail. This is just an example. It's the journey, not the destination here. So if you run or own an agency, because I'm writing to agencies here, um, I think our last decade of hosting headaches might save you a few years of frustration, some oxidative stress, and maybe a little bit of hair. For those who know me, I shave my head. So there is a little joke there. Um So the early days, when hosting was simple, and then it wasn't. Back in the day, um, we started with smaller hosts, the kind that were great before being swallowed up by mega companies. For a while, everything worked fine, but over time, the industry changed. Today, picking a host is a bit like shopping for healthy food at a grocery store. The shelves look full of options, but once you read the labels, you realize it's mostly the same fluff and different packaging. And yes, for those wondering, we've been through the VPS phase, CPanel, Plesk, and I'll just manage my own server chapter in the business evolution. Uh now, some of this is fine when the business was slower or the web was slower, not business. But these days, between AI-driven systems and shifting STO algorithms, running your own box is like a phone, uh, a flip phone in the age of satellites. It's just it's not as there's much more important things for a lot of agencies. So, what I'm trying to tell um the agency here and what applies to you as the owner of a business is there's all these decisions that have to be made. Like, do I manage my own um virtual private uh uh solution or do I a server is what that stands for. Or do I do this or do I handle it this way? And what I'm basically letting people know is we've been there and done that. And so as we moved along, we saw kind of uh the writing on the wall and how important it is to have a team that kind of complements your team. So, first of all, let's land on WP Engine, and this part of the uh the section is called the honeymoon that didn't last. Uh, when we first joined WP Engine, it felt like the real deal. The onboarding was smooth, the portal was very clean, and we thought finally a grown-up hosting experience, something where we could focus on the things we're really good at, and we'll have a partner to help us through some of those uh trickier spots. Uh support initially seemed responsive, and we love that we didn't need third-party tools uh like uh main WP, things like that. For a brief moment, it felt like we found the one. Then came the following years. Support responses, they slowed down, performance dropped, and our enthusiasm quickly deflated. Now, I'm not saying it coincided with their IPO, uh, but the timing didn't exactly inspire confidence. It was like being in a great relationship until you realize your partner's been seeing 10,000 other agencies on the side. So what I'm doing here is uh initial public offering, that's a business concept. You know, you can Google that, and if you if you don't know what that is, it's not related to uh technology. I mean, we get hit with with all these acronyms, and we think, well, that acronym uh that's obviously a web, it's not a web thing. Um, so uh transparency became an issue too. We never got clarity on what was under the hood. Plans were based on site counts, not specs, which made optimization for us feel like guesswork. And then later, uh, we heard talk about artificial intelligence dynamically allocating resources. Um that sounded fancy until we realized it might mean doing more with less. And when our livelihood depends on uptime, AI throttling did not exactly spark joy in the midst of everything we were seeing. Eventually, support tickets went unanswered long enough for us to write blog posts between replies. Um, that's when we knew it was time to move on. Now, of course, I'm I'm using a little bit of humor in the article. Um, let's move on to uh the rebound relationship, which uh is a company called Kensta. So enter Kensta, the exciting new player that promised everything WP Engine wasn't. They were this scrappy eager company, and they told us very convincingly that lots of other agencies were making the switch to them because they were experiencing the same thing we were experiencing. Of course, it was probably, you know, we don't know, was it? Sales pitch, was it not? At first, it was great. Support was sharp. We had a dedicated advocate. And I even felt I even felt so good about it that I wrote a glowing testimonial, which shortly after I asked them to remove due to issues, and they didn't respond and made it a headache. So once they got us to to write up, you know, everything, it just uh they they refused to pull it back down for or they didn't communicate with me that they uh were doing that unless I missed something obvious. Uh after the honeymoon phase, the same pattern started to show, slow response time, vague answers, and the occasional we'll look into it that never went anywhere. Uh we had a few serious issues that for professional sake I'll just describe as unresolved mysteries. Even our advocate admitted she really wasn't an advocate. She was more of an order taker. Um that was honestly refreshing, but also it was concerning. I mean, because keep in mind we we manage a lot. I mean, and to have someone where all of a sudden we're moving from the standpoint of an advocate and someone who's trying to help us out to someone who basically says, I'm here to change your order whenever you need something, that's a lot different relationship. Now, to Kence's credit, they eventually allowed a prorated early exit uh when we decided to move on. We didn't get to take advantage of that because we wanted to do a bunch of homework before moving on. Cause this is a big decision. I mean, it's like breaking up the foundation of a house and moving it six feet. Uh, but between unexpected uh overage charges from what look like bot traffic and awkward Cloudflare conflicts, uh, it was clear we needed to uh find something sturdier. So uh Cloudflare to you who own a business, it's just a uh it's a piece of uh between your domain and your hosting, it's just uh an extra layer of security and stability that uh is pretty universal. So let's talk about common issues with both Kensta and WP engine. To be fair, both these companies have their strengths, uh, but also consistent hurdles that make life harder for agencies like ours. Smooth onboarding, rough middle ground. Uh the first impression is great, the follow-up, it wasn't so great. Complex issues rarely got real solutions. Uh if a fix wasn't in the script, it usually led to a dead end, or it led to so much homework that you just kind of gave up. Uh too much do-it-yourself support, many solutions required us to do dozens of extra steps on our end. That's kind of what I meant. Like, you know, being asked so many questions that are so complex that, you know, or not complex, but it's just so detailed that you you literally don't have time to do all the work that they want you to do. Uh Middleware Headaches, uh, both of these companies, uh, from my understanding at the time use Google uh cloud, which sounds great in theory, but introduced some weird quirks. Like uh we had problems with SFTPs in some cases, some real sluggish dashboards, and just different little weird problems that seemed to uh pop up a lot. Customer uh support have felt uh reactive and not proactive. Every ticket felt like a fresh start sometimes with a new rep. It was like, or you would you'd be on this chat for you know a long time as a reading through old notes, but even then there were some trip-ups and it almost felt like I had to recycle part of the conversation. Uh so in short, uh, we spent uh more time managing the managed part of hosting than actually working on client sites. And uh I felt like our reputation was starting to take some dings there too, even though these were not our issue, they are our issue because our clients trust us to make good decisions. And so in order for us to be a good steward of that trust, we have to make the right decisions. And so these are big moves, is where I'm driving at. So when you're talking about uh, well, I've used this same guy for this long, or my Google Ads is working great, why would I want to uh switch that? Or, you know, you're sticking all these things that are probably bouncing around in your head. But here's the deal we're having to make these moves because it's no longer relevant. If you're on that do-it-yourself system and you're doing piecemeal systems and your branding is disjointed or your messages uh aren't good or using blog content, keep in mind that this change is happening, whether you want it to or not. This change is happening. And for people who are resting on what they've always done, thinking that it's always going to be, that's a that's just like confirmation bias, more or less. Uh or it's not it's a normalcy bias, not a confirmation bias. And a normalcy bias makes you think that things are just going to continue the way they are. Uh sorry, uniformitarianism loses its legs really quick. Okay, so let's talk about Pressible, the calm after the storm. And then came Pressible, the automatic. Yes, that automatic, the folks behind WordPress.com and WooCommerce. So now we're it was a great, it was a great initial conversation. But here's the interesting thing. We started cautiously migrating a few sites as a test. Now, in this case, it wasn't perfect at first. Um, there were some redirect quirks, some migration hiccups, uh, but the difference was immediate. Okay, it was real people, real support, and real infrastructure. Now, the big win, um, they're on their own stack. There's no middle layers that eliminated many of the mysterious issues we've seen before. They also offer 90-day backups, while the other systems, to my understanding, are still around 30-day. Um, they do have multiple data centers, and um, it's the most consistent support team I've worked with. I mean, it's it's just been incredibly smooth. And they they wanted our business, which is something that um I almost found shocking, to be honest with you. It's almost like when you start working with some companies, you know how it is, like you get on board and they act like they don't care whether you stay with them or not. I mean, I know you know what I'm talking about. Well, this company seems to care, and that's not waned a bit. And so um, if you use page builders uh with your WordPress environment, now this is for the uh the agency folks, uh you'll appreciate this. Kinstas caching often uh broke our page previews. Now, what that meant was you'd go in to edit a uh a site visually, and then it would just kind of everything would jump all over the place. So for us, we kind of know that that exists with some caching. Uh now Pressible fixed it. Now it's it's maybe a little bit slower on the back end, but the stability and predictability and performance beats those random issues because now our creative folks can focus on being creative. After two months, uh we connected directly with their automatic team and started having regular check-ins with someone who actually knew our setup. Now imagine that. A host that knows who you are and wants to know your business is succeeding. Now that's what we're getting with um uh with them. And uh, you know, our our person out there is just an amazing guy. And uh when he comes in, he comes in prepared. He knows where we're at, he knows what we're doing, he's asking the right questions, he says, do you want to meet more often, less often? It's just incredibly different. So since moving, we've probably saved, no joke, 30 to 50 percent of the time we used to waste chasing these bugs, clarifying tickets, or waiting for someone to escalate our issue into oblivion. And honestly, after years of frustration, this is feeling like a vacation right now. Okay, so here's the verdict. No host is perfect. Every platform has trade-offs, and what works for one agency might not fit for another. But after more than a decade of experimentation, we've landed where stability, transparency, and partnership seem to finally align. So if you're an agency that values real support, competent infrastructure, and a partner that doesn't vanish once your credit card clears, then my vote heading into 2026 is going depressible. And if you've ever had that hosting horror story, just remember you're not alone. Every agency has one. We just decided to stop collecting them. Now, here's my disclaimer: this article reflects our personal experience and opinions at Integris Design LLC. Your experience may differ. All company names and trademarks are properties of their respective owners. Now, so you see here as an agency, this is this is actually a real thing that happened. And so we're constantly working to solidify, get better, stronger, tougher, learn AI, when to use it, when to not, how to tie the whole thing together, and all these pieces. And yet we're still playing frogger with some key components of our business, trying to find the best solution that's going to help us in the most meaningful ways possible. So, you as the owner of a business, the problem is you may be happy and not know things aren't going well. You may not be happy, you could be in a lot of different spaces. But I can promise you that moving forward, the more holistic your plan is and the more comprehensive your plan is, considering all the little minutiae that goes into marketing, you're going to be more successful long term. And there's nothing more frustrating than having to sit with the client, and we look at them coming to us or wanting to talk to us, and they express how they've lost all their momentum, they express how their ads are no longer working, they express how their organic traffic has fallen through the floor, and they just want to be back where they were. Okay, they don't they don't care about making progress, they just want to get back to where they were, and they wonder what happened. Well, it's all the stuff, all the stuff that's been going on for the last 20 years, all these bad practices, all these uh hacks, all these get, you know, uh get you know success quick schemes that are backfiring because of the perfect storm that's here. Your business cannot afford to wait uh for those signals. And so you need someone that could audit. We do offer auditing uh solutions, we can help you out with that. We're in the middle of revamping uh all of our site and everything, but if you go to integrisdesign.com and you just kind of want to talk about it, feel free to book. Now, we are a boutique agency, and we do have limited offerings because we believe in being personable and comprehensive and understanding one business at a time and all that. And so if you do want some help, we may have a slot, we may be able to sit down and talk with you and be able to go through your data and then help you understand exactly what's going on. And just if you're on a trend, you know, are you are you holding uh par? Are you uh are you falling behind? Are there signals to showing that you're probably got some things that need to be fixed? We could help you with that, but you need to find somebody that can do that and work with you. Okay, uh, I think I'm gonna wrap it up at that. Uh thanks again for tuning into Over the Bull. I do hope this helps you out. I know this isn't as much of a deep dive as it is just kind of letting you know what's going on with the internet today. And uh this internet of uh moving into 2026, guys, it's changed 60 days ago. And uh practices that were good eight or nine months ago are completely irrelevant and are going the wrong direction. So be careful. The decisions you make today are going to dictate whether you're going to fall behind or actually jump way ahead with the advent of artificial intelligence.

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Thanks for tuning in to Over the Bull, brought to you by Integris Design, a full service design and marketing agency out of Asheville, North Carolina. Until next time.