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 57 Articles To Date
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 (May 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, &amp; 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 »
13 Best WordPress Website Builder Options

13 Best WordPress Website Builder Options
By: Ryan Frankel • 6/9/2016
A WordPress website builder sounds like the best of both worlds, combining the world’s most popular content management system with ultra-simple, drag-and-drop web... read more »
How Incapsula Protects Your Site Against DDoS Attacks While Boosting Performance &mdash; Progressive Challenges, CDN, &amp; Custom Software

Incapsula: DDoS Defense & CDN Speed Boosting
By: Ryan Frankel • 5/13/2016
No one is immune to the havoc that follows a Distributed-Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack — that helplessness that you feel immediately after a hit as you watch your... read more »
Thoroughly Impressed By DreamHost: How We Launched, Scaled, &amp; Tested an Infrastructure Using DreamCompute

DreamHost Part 2: Our Team's Testing of DreamCompute
By: Ryan Frankel • 5/10/2016
Every developer and DevOps master dreams of having simple, fine-grained control of their environment with the ability to scale up and down at will and a defined... read more »