Ryan Frankel

CTO and Contributing Expert
Ryan Frankel
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 62 Articles To Date
WP Engine Frees Its AI Search to Chase the Agent-Ready Web

WP Engine Frees Its AI Search to Chase the Agent-Ready Web
By: Ryan Frankel • 8/17/2026
For 13 months, one of the best reasons to pay for WP Engine hosting was a search bar. Then on August 11, the company gave it away for free. Smart Search AI, the... read more »
Chromium Was Built for Humans. Cloudflare's New Browser Isn't.

Cloudflare's New Browser Is Built for AI Agents
By: Ryan Frankel • 8/13/2026
The question no one had ever considered until agents started doing the browsing was: Why does software need to scroll at 60 frames per second? The reason is because... read more »
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 »
End of an Era: GoDaddy Officially Retires Media Temple Brand

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 »