Ryan Frankel, Author at HostingAdvice.com

About the Author

Ryan began developing websites in the late '90s and has personally tested just about every web host and cloud platform worth trying on the market today. With a masters degree in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Florida, he leverages his extensive knowledge of hardware, software, and their engineering relationship to inform HostingAdvice readers of the technical implications of their hosting choices. Ryan's subject matter expertise includes, but is not limited to, WordPress, cloud infrastructure management, product UI/UX design, and popular web development languages such as JavaScript and PHP.

Latest Posts

Worked On 60 Articles To Date

Vercel Gave Hosts an AI Builder API. What Can They Do with It?

Vercel Gave Hosts an AI Builder API. What Can They Do with It?

By: Ryan Frankel • 8/12/2026

Site builders and hosting providers have faced the same awkward arithmetic for the past 24 months: Spend a few quarters of engineering work to build one or let your... read more »

Is Claude Recommending Your Site? Cloudflare Now Shows You

Is Claude Recommending Your Site? Cloudflare Now Shows You

By: Ryan Frankel • 8/10/2026

Ask any site owner about what happened to organic traffic this year, and you’ll hear variations on the same story: It dropped, rankings barely moved, and no one... read more »

Can AI Build Your Site in 90 Seconds? The Easy Ones, Yes.

Can AI Build Your Site in 90 Seconds? The Easy Ones, Yes

By: Ryan Frankel • 6/15/2026

A yoga instructor types some phrases into a box: “calming location, class schedule, soft color palette and method of booking.” Eighty-six seconds later, a complete... read more »

Can SpaceX Rocket Tech Cool AI Racks Without a Drop of Water?

Can SpaceX Rocket Tech Cool AI Racks Without a Drop of Water?

By: Ryan Frankel • 6/1/2026

A 23-person startup in Signal Hill, California, has spent the past two years developing a cooling system for a data center based on a rotating compressor that spins... read more »

How Machnet Closes the Bare-Metal Gap on Commodity Cloud VMs

How Machnet Closes the Bare-Metal Gap on Commodity Cloud VMs

By: Ryan Frankel • 5/27/2026

Every conversation about low-latency workloads ends the same way. The customer asks for predictable performance, the sales rep leads the customer to bare metal, and... read more »

Apache HTTP/2 Bug Lets Attackers Hijack Every Site on a Server

Apache HTTP/2 Bug Lets Attackers Hijack Every Site on a Server

By: Ryan Frankel • 5/26/2026

Imagine a shared hosting box humming along on a Tuesday morning. Hundreds of WordPress sites are each isolated in their own PHP-CGI sandbox and separated from each... read more »

41% of Web Hosts Are Now Losing Customers to Wix and Shopify

41% of Web Hosts Are Now Losing Customers to Wix and Shopify

By: Ryan Frankel • 5/20/2026

A small business owner spends a weekend fighting a WordPress plugin upgrade that breaks her checkout page, a memory error she can’t diagnose, and a phishing email... read more »

This Surprising Industry Is The Reason Why Hosting Prices Keep Climbing

This Surprising Industry Is Why Hosting Prices Keep Climbing

By: Ryan Frankel • 5/19/2026

For the past two years, rising hosting costs have typically been attributed to “AI hardware costs,” including expensive GPUs, higher power contracts, and increased... read more »

Why Are Small Hosts Quietly Ditching cPanel in 2026?

Why Are Small Hosts Quietly Ditching cPanel in 2026?

By: Ryan Frankel • 5/18/2026

Imagine a Tier-2 reseller managing a few hundred shared hosting accounts on a cPanel Pro license. The cost of that license increased 15% on Jan. 1, 2026, and the... read more »

AWS's $200 Billion Year Is Quietly Squeezing Out Tier-2 Hosts

AWS's $200B Year Is Quietly Squeezing Out Tier-2 Hosts

By: Ryan Frankel • 5/18/2026

A single AWS campus in New Carlisle, Indiana, that stretches across 30 buildings on 1,200 acres now qualifies for 2.2 gigawatts of electricity — enough to power... read more »

A Novel 3D-Printed Copper Tree Could Cut AI Cooling by 32%

A Novel 3D-Printed Copper Tree Could Cut AI Cooling by 32%

By: Ryan Frankel • 5/14/2026

A team of researchers led by University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign professor Nenad Miljkovic and engineers at San Diego startup Fabric8Labs spent 1,000 iterations... read more »

SQLite Just Beat MySQL by 4.9x, And Hosts Are Noticing

SQLite Just Beat MySQL by 4.9x, And Hosts Are Noticing

By: Ryan Frankel • 5/13/2026

Look at the average small business hosting plan for 2026 and you’ll soon notice something missing. There’s a PHP runtime, an NVMe drive, an Nginx configuration, and... read more »

iPage Is No Longer Accepting New Customers

iPage Is No Longer Accepting New Customers

By: Ryan Frankel • 7/21/2024

In a somewhat surprising move to many, iPage is no longer accepting any new customers. As one of the larger web hosts in the EIG (now Newfold Digital) brand, iPage... read more »

32% of People Surveyed Have Been Hacked Online — Here are 5 Ways to Stay Safe on the Web

Five Expert Tips to Protect Yourself Online

By: Christina Lewis • 10/11/2023

According to our recent survey of more than 1,000 US adults, 32% of people have been hacked from visiting sketchy websites. That’s a significant concern for both... read more »

GoDaddy Officially Retires Media Temple Brand

By: Ryan Frankel • 9/20/2023

I remember when Media Temple was the premier host of the world and the place that was the first “cool” site that meant your blog was finally ready to move past... read more »

5 Best CBD Hosting Providers (2026)

Will Any Hosting Provider Host My CBD Site?

By: Ryan Frankel • 12/13/2022

CBD, short for cannabidiol, is a natural compound in the cannabis plant that’s gaining popularity for its potential health benefits. With the rising demand for CBD... read more »

Symantec’s Michael Klieman Talks "Encryption Everywhere" — How New Freemium Service Provides Security Without Sacrificing Speed

Security and Speed: Hallmarks Of Symantec's Encryption Everywhere

By: Ryan Frankel • 9/8/2016

97% of websites have no basic security in place, leaving criminals with free reign on your personal information, which can lead to potential financial ruin... read more »

"PHP Memory Limit" — How to Increase Your RAM

How to Increase Your PHP Memory Limit

By: Ryan Frankel • 8/31/2016

Sometimes while in development or production, we find that our software uses more memory than we ever expected. To keep things under control, PHP has default memory... read more »

MySQL <em>ALTER TABLE</em> Commands: How to Add, Delete, & Change Columns

How to Add, Delete, & Change Columns with MySQL Alter Table

By: Ryan Frankel • 8/12/2016

MySQL (and MariaDB) allows you to change the structure of tables with the ALTER TABLE SQL command. Using the command, you can easily change the name of your table... read more »

JavaScript MD5 Library (Plus the Perks, Uses, and Examples)

How to Use an MD5 Library in JavaScript

By: Ryan Frankel • 8/3/2016

MD5 libraries are often required by JavaScript developers, on either the client or server side, to verify file data. By far, the most popular library is the... read more »