Adult Site Broker Talk Episode 235 with Brad Mitchell of Mojohost – Part One of Two Part Episode

This is Bruce Friedman of Adult Site Broker and welcome to Adult Site Broker Talk where each week we interview one of the movers and shakers of the adult industry and we give you a tip on buying and selling websites. This week we’ll be speaking with Brad Mitchell of MojoHost in Part 1 of a 2-part interview. We’ve added an event section on our website. There you can find out about all the B2B events in our industry and there are discounts on selected shows. Go to adultsidebroker.com to find out more. Speaking of events, I’ll be at the X-Biz LA show January 13th through the 16th and I’m looking forward to seeing everyone there and talking some business. Contact me on our website to book a meeting at adultsidebroker.com. To register for the show, go to xbizla.com and I’m proud to announce I’ve been nominated for Community Figure of the Year at the X-Biz Executive Awards as part of X-Biz Honors January 15th. It should be an exciting night and I hope to see you there. 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Also, investing in recruiting and hiring hosts or onboarding new talent pays off instantly. If a host is added today, it is reflected in revenue immediately, only $926,000. Now time for this week’s interview. My guest today on Adult Site Broker Talk is Brad Mitchell of Mojo Host. Brad, thanks for being back with us on Adult Site Broker Talk. Hi, Bruce. I’m so glad to be here. Thanks again for having me. It’s always a pleasure to come on your show. It’s always great to have you, Brad. Now everyone in this industry pretty much knows you. Brad is a veteran of the adult industry. He’s the founder of Mojo Host. Mojo Host has been around since 1999. Since its inception, they’ve been an adult-friendly web host. They offer cloud computing, cloud storage, virtual private servers, dedicated servers, CDNs, domains and technical support. With over 2,000 customers across its multiple hosting brands, Mojo Host is the trusted home for more than 50,000 websites. Its global staff of more than 50 employees provide service via its numerous data centers in the United States and Europe. Mojo Host prides itself on delivering world-class support and has won many awards from every major industry award show. So Brad, you frequently repeat your trademark phrase, "That’s good Mojo." What does good Mojo mean to you? So to me, good Mojo started as a concept where they’re just doing the right thing, no matter what the situation. Originally, when I think the genesis for that phrase really came from something silly, it was those old Austin Powers movies. So I had always wanted to toe the line on being respectable, but fun and sexy with marketing. So that played into that a little bit. But to me, more than being an innuendo, it’s today much more representative of what we consider to be our core values at Mojo Host, which is really just doing the right thing always by the client and paying it forward and always having a longer view on how to treat relationships and situations. Support your actions with being honest and giving good value is a part of that in my view. A lot of times I feel like my journey at Mojo Host after 25 years has been quite a long one. And for much and most of that, it was never really easy at any point along the way. But there was a lot of making the harder choices, the right choices, but it’s a very delayed gratification. But it is gratifying. I feel real good about what we do and how we treat our customers. So I’m happy to be proud of that. Yeah, and if you look at the boards, and you got to take the boards obviously with a grain of salt, but when somebody talks about hosting, man, it’s Mojo Host, Mojo Host, Mojo Host. Yeah, I mean, it’s an awfully big world out there and people have hundreds, if not thousands of all different size hosts to choose from. My challenge is no matter how many recommendations we might get on boards, it’s a very large world. And so there’s just so much business at so many places. So our goal is not just to have the messaging out there, but really it ends up being the case that we get a lot of our customers from people that do research on the industry. And when people talk to that are new, usually they find somebody that isn’t new and they start those conversations. And so a lot of our business comes by way of referral from industry associates and friends or predominantly other satisfied customers. My ongoing challenge is just figuring out how to always find more, always find more people that are somewhere else, show them a new way, show them our way so that we can expand our reach because to be good at what we do, you really run it. You have to run a delicate balance of always growing because it’s technology. So over longer spans of time, I have to sell more to more customers to be able to service everybody better. And then throughout that journey, we’re always in some ways selling more for less over time. That’s just kind of the IT challenge. You know, when you think about things like data transfer and what that looks like on your cell phone in 2025 versus maybe what we used to pay for an internet connection and 20 years ago, it’s more than thousands of percent different. It’s tens of thousands of percent different. But the most interesting parts of my journey have just been how we’ve changed ourselves over the years to adapt and have a good responsible balance of being forward thinking and making investments in the right people and the right technology so that that way as we march into the future, we’ve got good relevant product and always keeping a barometer on the satisfaction of our customers and how we’re managing customer support because at the root of everything, it’s people more than it’s technology that helps me to retain clients. So that’s why I can say now still after 25 years, we don’t have any customers in contract and all of our businesses month to month. And what drives that kind of success is more than anything is just the commitment to doing well by our clients and keeping them satisfied because when you do that and you treat your customers right, you don’t need things like one, two and three year contracts to keep people customers like a lot of the other perhaps more mainstream hosting options offer when it comes to enterprise or solutions at scale. Yeah. Well, obviously, talk is cheap. You know, most companies marketing phrases or say things, but they don’t necessarily mean them. Now, it’s very obvious you live by the good mojo moniker. Give me a recent example of some good mojo you’ve provided to your customers. Sure. So let’s see what’s something really meaningful that another web host wouldn’t do. Using somebody’s price, even though they didn’t ask for it, and sometimes in small ways and sometimes in larger ways, I’m always doing that over time. And that doesn’t necessarily apply to accounts that are entry level, but when you’re servicing companies for as long as I have, like some of my clients aren’t just five or 10 years, they’re 15, 20s. I even have some 25 year clients that have really been with me that long and over greater spans of time, sometimes by choice of the customer. Usually it’s driven by the client, not by us, but sometimes people are on older platforms or older technologies. And I think one good example of that for us was the recent changes that we’ve made with our virtual private server offerings. So I would say like on the long view of mojo host, we have predominantly been a more sophisticated hosting provider where our average customers are purchasing dedicated servers, one or many of them. And so it was never a business focus from 1999 through, I would say even the late 2015 to 2020, we were never focused on selling virtual private servers or VPS, but we always did carry a small product line of that because that’s a good, appropriate solution for people that are just starting off or like friends and family, you know, if you want to set them up with some websites, it’s best home is certainly in a smaller space like that. But recently actually, we more or less uplifted and fully migrated all of our legacy VPS accounts. And I don’t remember the exact total count of instances. It was somewhere between 300 and 500 VPS accounts from all of the legacy servers and platforms that they used to be hosted on through a multiple stage migration to brand new state of the art systems that by my new designs make it a really exceptional product like head and shoulders above what every other competitor in the world was offering. So we did all of that made it completely cost neutral to every customer. So nobody’s paying more. They’re all paying the exact same of whatever they were grandfathered in that and we just map them into the sort of the new plan, you know, which is all based on the latest fastest hardware and done in ways that few of which are proprietary, but make those products faster than other competitors. So I think that’s a pretty good example. I mean, rather than, you know, the other option was to make it an upsell, you know, to ask somebody like, Hey, I don’t know if you’re happy or not, but you’ve got an option here for an extra on these smaller accounts could have been five or $10 or $15 a month. You know, we can make your storage 50 times faster and, you know, the same processing could be 300% faster. But I didn’t think that that was the right way to handle it. It’s hardly worth it, right? Well, so I ran the math on that too. And that might have been worth, what did I say, so three to 500 accounts. So yeah, I think on that I was calculating, even if I was really, really generous with charging for it, it could have been worth another $50,000 to $100,000 a year to the business. But I didn’t think that was the way to go. You know, what I really want to do is I wanted to double down, make our clients as happy as humanly possible and give to my existing customers the best of the new technology. And that’s what we did. So I think that’s very good, Mojo. Absolutely. Mojo host is financially supporting the fight against the Texas age verification bill, HB 1181, with its own lawyers to supplement the arguments made by the free speech coalition. What can you tell me about this and why did you decide to get more involved? Sure. So I think the free speech coalition is doing a wonderful job and fighting a lot of fights on a lot of different fronts. But as I understand that as it was explained to me by people that might possibly be wiser than myself, this fight in Texas in particular is of especially high value. And so I thought a couple of different things. So I guess probably the first thing that’s important to get out of the way is my very strong belief that children surfing adult material on internet benefits nobody. And I think that that’s something we can all agree to. You know, what’s disappointing me about the legislation that’s been presented in past in all of these different states is that none of it actually accomplishes its stated goal of protecting children. So that’s at the root of it. And I think that we could all, most of us might agree by some measure that what we don’t need is more laws that don’t work. If anything, we should hope for a legislation that actually does work, not just for additional legislation that is ineffective. The example for this that I would give would be that on day one, or what I guess you could call it zero day of any of these new laws going into effect, doesn’t change anything in Google. So, you know, my example, and as I explained it to my parents, you know, because they’re aged, right? And, you know, I value their opinion and I wanted them to understand what I was doing was I explained that, for example, if a minor was to go to Google and use a search engine and search for this type of material. All that’s happened with the passing of these laws is handfuls, or maybe more than handfuls, maybe it’s what’s even just say it’s hundreds of sites, or possibly now it’s thousands of sites have decided to block individual states in the United States based on IP address location. Don’t quote me on this specific example, but I think by example, if you are in the state of Texas and you tried to go to an ILO website such as Pornhub, you’re going to get something that says I’m sorry you can’t see this. Yeah, in fact, Sheree DeVille comes on and there’s a video that where she explains why you can’t see Pornhub. It’s quite brilliant. Right. But so let’s say I’m a minor and so I see that might be result number one, but then what’s result two? What’s three? What’s four? What’s five? At what point in those results, eventually what happens is you discover that there’s about a hundred million pages or billions of pages that are indexed that are not blocked. So what does this mean? What this means in my professional view as a technologist is we’ve gone and shifted the burden away from I think all things reasonable such as parenting and device access controls into something very ineffective, making it so that what really happens. So I think when you look at a business such as ILO and I’m going to pick on them because they’re very large and we all know that, so they are following the law and that’s good as to the extent that this is the law that’s what they need to do. But the problem is that those that are seeking to find such content can endlessly for more time than is left in their life go surf hundreds of millions or billions of other pages. So effectively what the laws do is they criminalize what is effectively free speech and other legal businesses by shifting the burden from the device operator, device owner or perhaps parent in charge of that over to the business owner and not really providing a viable solution. So I apologize. I feel like that was a bit long-winded. No, not at all. The state the state the stated goal is to protect children. I don’t believe that the laws protect children. I think that they infected quite the opposite. Absolutely. I think that over time what we’ll see is that traffic that doesn’t go to those sites which are responsibly following the law and blocking those states is now ending up in other places that are perhaps darker or that have worse business practices such as record keeping and 20 to 57 and age verification documents and sites that are worse than what would otherwise be the most relevant results and that accomplishes nothing in the way of protecting children. And the example I gave my parents and I give on this podcast tonight is I would know sooner give a child a computer, an iPad, a notebook, an iPhone or an Android than I would keys to a car because I think it’s while they’re two very different examples, it’s a perfect example of well, you know, in our home, that’s how we manage that nobody gets killed driving a car that they’re not supposed to drive. So I think that by whomever’s design is implementing this and I’m sure that there’s answers to that and I don’t know these people but obviously there’s a playbook because as it’s been rolled out in several many different states, I think somebody must have made the choice along the way that they didn’t actually want to solve the problem. I really honestly think that they didn’t want to have to go up against Apple and Google and all of the manufacturers of PCs because it’s a fact. If I’m using a mobile phone and I think a lot of or perhaps most of content now is accessed on mobile devices, Verizon knows that I’m an adult. Secondarily, and as I did or should have done with my children when they were below the age of consent and adulthood, the responsibility would have been on me inside of the phone to just easily turn on filtering. It doesn’t take any form of advanced intelligence. All of these devices, whether it be your Samsung TV, your Apple iPhone or my Lenovo ThinkPad using Windows, all of these devices have easy to enable parental filters and controls. And I don’t think it’s sufficient to make the argument that minors can circumvent by using VPNs or being smarter than their parents because all any good law could hope to do would be to protect the majority to do the greatest amount of good. So I think if we were able to accomplish that collectively with some smart laws, those would be laws that I would support. I think everyone in our industry would, Brad. I really think so too. I mean, there are obviously really deep and thoughtful legal arguments and this is why this issue is going to be heard by the Supreme Court of the United States. And I myself am not a scholar, but I believe that at, you know, from 10,000 feet, there’s obviously very serious first amendment issues expanding in many different directions from sexual, sexual wellness to sexual education to other forms of what should be protected free speech because again, it’s supposed to be protected for adults. So you know, the analogy here would be like, you know, again, comparing that phone to giving the car keys to, you know, a minor, both should be delivered responsibly. And so I’ve anyways, I felt it was really important to continue to support the fight. I believe that the free speech and its partners and other supporters have done a good job eloquating their arguments and giving good rationale, but I wanted to lend more credibility to these arguments in any way that I could. So I did take it upon myself and Mojo host to fund the Woodhall Freedom Foundation and you know, there’s some other parties with these documents and using those other lawyers in support of the greater argument, which has already been put out there. And I thought that it certainly couldn’t hurt the situation to have more voices being heard, you know, perhaps with the different additional, you know, or smarter justifications. I believe in the Supreme Court of the United States. I believe that they have the wisdom to make the right choices and I hope that they have both that and the courage to follow through. I’m glad you do, Brad, because as conservative as they’ve gotten, I’m not sure I totally believe in them. Yeah. So I have hope and faith that they are have will really answer the higher calling of what their position to do, which is to interpret the law as it is fairly and without bias. And it’s my hope that they will come to the right decisions, which will, I think, you know, only really after that could we find real solutions that would say further protect children. But, you know, paramount to all of this, I think the Constitution of the United States, I find that to be sacred document and everything that’s in it. And I really believe that. I don’t know when I remember actually the evening when I made this decision, I made it in about 60 seconds. I was on my kids are all graduated from high school and when my kids were in high school, they one of my sons had a friend who is now an employee of Mojo. I was just since graduated and he’s working as a data center technician. He was pretty senior on the school robotics team. And so I remember I was about to walk into the annual robotics team demonstration and on the car drive there was when I was speaking to him and I told him, I said, Corey, I want to do this. I think this is this is right for Mojo host to do. We’re the one that should do it. Because in addition to everything else, I really felt that it was important that a technologist signed onto this and not somebody, for example, and not that I’m judging them. But in terms of how we’re conveying messages of support, I thought it was really important that someone that has a very serious fiduciary responsibility and practices good, legitimate honest business for such a long period of time under a brand of technology and not specifically a brand of an adult entertainment site. I thought that it was important that we had this additional kind of support in this fight. And I felt that Mojo host was the best choice to do that. So that’s how that came about. I’m hopeful that this will yield results. I think it’s obviously very complicated. There’s still a long road ahead. There’s a lot of other states with bad laws. Tennessee is another one that I was very interested in. And there are other ones, but I mean, there’s one law. I don’t recall precisely which state. It was something more center of country, but there was one state that actually made me a criminal. I’m pretty sure it was Tennessee. I believe it was either that or one of the other ones. There was one of them that specifically in its writing removed section 230 protection, which I believe is also very important for us to be able to hold dear First Amendment rights, but actually made a criminal offense for the web host was named in the way that the law was written. And I tell you what, the night that I read that I actually cried, it was like that was a bit much for me because usually from where I’m sitting, I’m trying to make sure that we’re hosting the best customers and our clients have the best business practices. And I do everything to make it as hard as possible for bad people to not be successful on the internet. It’s a crazy place, but you know what? Most other web hosts don’t. And most turnable-eyed I. And a lot of other things are off-shored too, which none of these new laws speak to. All it does is disempower. This was the other part I was trying to remember earlier. It really lessens or disempowers the American voices and gives more, turns up the volume on the rest of the world and other jurisdictions where we can’t control what they’re publishing and also where there’s no jurisdictional teeth to an enforcement on business practices. So in my view, in terms of leading the globe by publishing of responsible adult entertainment, there are no better places for that than the United States of America and Canada. And it gets a little bit grayer the farther out you get from these places and also the European Union in terms of what sites publish responsibly or irresponsibly, of course, is what we’re all concerned about. So I’m hopeful that we’ll see a long-term resolve to this. In my long view, on my experience in adult, there were other concerns 10 and 20 years ago about obscenity and about 20 to 57 documentation. All that stuff’s been resolved, but I’m hopeful that this is just another place in time that we can move through and find a smart and appropriate technological solution. There’s a lot of different methods that have been proposed, but none of it’s very little of it or none of it is commercially viable. All of it’s an invasion of privacy and none of it serves the stated goal of protecting children. So this is why I’m passionate about our taking in this. And I think I speak for everyone when I say thank you. But we also know, Brad, that that’s not their goal. Their goal is to harm us. Well, I understand that. I tend to be an incredibly positive person. And even though it’s the case that it’s not like I’ve got any questions or interviews, but I would hope someday to have more opportunities to educate people that aren’t inside of this type of a listening audience, such as for your program, to explain to them my view because what a layperson, what a typical person is able to read through all media sources isn’t explaining to them in a way that is clear because I believe it’s really obfuscated. If it was clear to everybody that none of these laws are actually protecting children, no. They’re shutting off access to the most responsible sites that were already following all of the laws because they decided to block a geo. But the other 100 million websites are all accessible. I think if that message was conveyed in a more effective way or even the idea that there should be something that’s device-based, that’s permanent. That works. So if you’re a child with a phone or an iPad or a computer, there’s a specific control that can be enabled and everybody’s taught and educated how to do that. Those controls already exist on all of these devices. They’re just simply not in use. I think what scared me on this is it seemed to be bipartisan support for these dumb proposed legislations and that’s what scared me more than anything because I don’t think that that went really one direction or the other on party lines. I think it just went that way because the smaller soundbite is really like, "Hey, name a bill about protecting children, after protecting children, you get everybody’s support." But the question everybody should be asking themselves is, "Will it work?" And if not, then let’s go back to the drawing board together. Let’s find something that really does work. But we know they don’t work that way. The way I look at it, the right wing wants to hurt porn and the left wing isn’t willing to admit that they’re against something that is being billed as protecting children. Then their politician, political opponents can come to them and say, "Oh, so you don’t want to protect children?" And that’s the way it is, unfortunately. And it’s like Fosta Sesta. That didn’t do anything for sex trafficking. Yeah, I understand all of that. And that’s a whole other conversation of disappointment in terms of how it actually harms sex workers. But perhaps we should move on. All I can do is play my part here and I’m really hopeful that the Supreme Court of the United States will review everything that’s been presented and use their wisdom to make what I believe are the right decisions, which is that it’s unconstitutional. So you’re also in the domain business. I’m one of your customers. Why have .com domain registrations and renewals gotten more expensive over the last several years and should we expect more of it? Mocha host is always, not actually always, but for maybe the last 10 years or just less than I had added domain registration transfers and renewals as a service. And my initial goal was just to make things easier for our customers so that they could manage more of everything that they’re responsible for in one place. And so by design with this, for us, it was never a profit center. I’ve always only just kind of marked it up between 50 cents, let’s just say approximately 50 cents and a dollar. And that’s before processing costs and all those other things. So but why is it more expensive? So I was able to hold the line for the last many years I had .coms at $9.99 as an everyday price. So that’s a transfer in price. It was a renewal price and included free privacy, which is of some value. Some other places offer that too. But I thought it was really important to do that because I accidentally once registered a domain without it and I couldn’t believe how much how much spam immediately started coming in. So having domain privacy is really relevant for most domain owners. So why have the prices increased? So the prices have increased because prices are increasing everywhere for everything. As best as I can tell, you’ve got a larger global organization, which is known as ICANN that regulates all of the top level domains and TLDs. And then you have the underlying registrar or the owner of that top level domain, which I believe the owner, forgive me if I’m wrong, it’s a very signer networks, network solutions. It’s one or the other. Basically ICANN, which governs everything at some point over the last several years, they increased their fees, which then get reflected on every top level domain. And then it was also the same with the owners of .com. And so recently, so this, you know, I’m not 100% direct on all of that. You know, we aggregate our domain volume with, sorry, there’s registries and registrars. The registry owns the top level domain. Registrars are the companies that service and buy from all of the registries, right? So I do a bulk volume business with a registrar that has for the last many years been very compatible with our goals for financial solvency, privacy, jurisdiction and price. And then also the technical integration, because really that’s also very important. It’s important that my Mojo host portal connects in meaningful and smart, quick, easy ways with the registrar’s, the registrar that we work with, primarily. So I’ve done my best, but you know, to my disappointment, like I see them all as virtual assets. So I understand there might be some increased cost of doing business at, say, the ICANN level or the registrar’s themselves. I’m sorry, the registries themselves, most of those are, I guess, the probably combination of public and publicly owned and privately owned. But you know, it’s certainly the case that as we all know, you know, every publicly owned and traded company, they’re always trying to produce incrementally more profits for their shareholders and themselves, right? So I don’t have any great explanation. I would just say that corporate greed seems to be running amok globally. And as a result, we’re all paying the price. So I was really super disappointed. Like I was, it was a real gut punch to me. When I had, I thought I could stick at the 9.99 for more years, but just in the last two months, I had to raise our prices to 10.99, which is still very low. It’s lower than most, you know. And on that, you know, maybe now there might actually be 50 cents in there for me. But the truth of it is, you know, we do customer support and, you know, like someone’s got questions or they have a, they miss a renewal or they want to get a domain out of redemption or there are things where people have to touch them and it’s, it’s at least a double digit percentage of a full time employee, which on these small numbers, you know, and on our volume of 5 or 10,000 domains, I, that’s still even fractional for covering the cost of, of that. It’s more of a convenience than a business. It is. And when I look on the boards, people are like, oh, where’s the best place to go to a domain? And then, you know, I think as people in general in the adult entertainment space are pretty savvy shoppers. So it is normally the case that what I see is there are a couple of other places that people can go and register domains that may be 50 cents a dollar or even a dollar 50 cheaper than Mojo host. But that’s very advanced buying, right? And that’s really what someone needs. And they need to save that extra $6 a year or $5 a year on their handful of domains to not be my customer. Then I just, I’m happy that they’ve got a place to go do that. But when you look at the real world, like, shoot, go to GoDaddy and see what they want to charge you for a .com. Boy, I think you’re looking at $15 to $20 a year and next year or two, it might renew it more than that. And then they’re going to upsell you on privacy. And they’re always trying to upsell you on stuff, which I think is the play at the other places that sell at or near cost is their calculated offering of other products. So it would make sense that if someone’s going to buy a domain, then, you know, maybe one in five or 10 or 15 of those customers might buy a VPS, maybe. Well, yeah, they’ve got a website builder and all that bullshit. I got out of GoDaddy years ago because they were too irritating. They kept trying to sell me shit. I just got tired of it. Yeah, for me, I just consider the way that we productize that is it’s honest and it’s the price that I need to charge. It’s not really enough, but I’m glad that I have hundreds of customers that find value in having their domains with me. And I think that, unfortunately, it’s foreseeable that it’ll just continue to creep up in price year over year. You know, maybe not, you know, maybe we can stay a couple years at the price that I’ve got it at right now before I have to move the price point again. But it seems like that’s the direction it’s going. And what’s my advice? My advice is if it’s that important to your budget and you are a domainer like me who has hundreds of domains, I would give this and take the same advice and take the pill myself. I need to go delete a bunch of really unproductive domains that I’ve been holding on to for 25 years. Yeah. And, you know, as a broker, it’s kind of interesting every day people send me domains and God face point, you know, I just I see some of these domains. And first of all, for the record, I really am not in the domain business. I’m in the website and company business. I’ll take an occasional high ticket domain, but I won’t take anything that’s not valued at six figures or more. And lately it’s high six figures, but people still send me domains even though I stayed on my website. That’s not the business I’m in. People also don’t read. And I’m also if somebody contacts me, I’ll be happy to take a look at your domain list. And sadly, about 99% of them are worth the cost of renewal. So the best advice I can give people is take a really good hard look at your domain list and get rid of the ones that you don’t have for a reason. You’re not planning on doing a project and are not of a great value. And I know that’s really hard for a lot of people to do, but just start cutting them. I’ve done it. It’s very hard to do. I have trouble with that, but I’ve advised lots of people on my, you know, everyone, we’ve all got opinions, right? So I’m happy to give my opinion. If anyone was ever questioning, should they hold something or what’s the value? My advice to them would be if you have access to ask two or three people that are maybe industry veterans, if you can get two out of those three people to go to a consensus, then that’s probably the direction you should go. And because domains are very much the beauty is in the eye of the beholder. So if someone’s got a vision for it, then they have a vision for it. And if you have a vision for your domain, then stick with it. But if you’re really wondering, does it have intrinsic value, just ask a few industry experts and you’ll find out soon enough. Put a post on exbiz.net, put a post on GFY and ask people, what do you think of these domains? They’ll tell you. Email me. I’ll tell you. Brad@mojahos.com. I will tell you if your domain is shit or if it’s good. And he will say it’s shit. No, you won’t do that, Brad. I probably wouldn’t do that. I am too nice. I would probably say it’s just not worth keeping. You should delete it. I’d be more likely to say that than you would. I’m pretty frank, as you know. So I read the Web and Tech articles you write for exbiz magazine and I’ve been reading them for a long time. You do a great job. Please share with my listeners what new technologies you’re going to find interesting that are coming up and that they should be using in their business right now. Sure. Happy to. I really enjoy writing for exbiz. I’ve taken the last few issues off because I had a really long run there of doing articles every month and I thought I just needed to take a breath and round my year out with some focus. But my big takeaways from 2024 are, well, there are several, but I’ll summarize because it’s best to keep it simple and stupid. I think that’s a phrase, Bruce, that even old, I think you almost have to be in your 50s to have ever heard the kiss acronym. Keep it simple, stupid. So I think the biggest takeaways right now are first on storage. So here’s all you need to know. Storage is important. If you looked at any active web server, whether you are in a VPS or a dedicated server, all of your files are sitting in some type of stateful storage. That is one of three types of storage. It is either hard disks, solid state drives, or NVMe. The fastest, well, so let me tell you how fast is fast. So everything originally was with hard drives. Hard drives have been functionally the same speed for about 30 years. They are spinning platters that rotate at 7200 revolutions per minute. That’s how fast they spin. So that’s the speed of reading and writing data off of a hard drive. And what does that translate to in computer speak? Well, let’s assume that I’m approximate and not exact on this, but that’s what we call a few hundred IOPS. Output, output per second. So if you’re imagining that you’ve got a live website and say somebody is visiting a page and that page has to hit a database, database, you know, does 50 other queries and then renders something and loads all these other files, you think of how many things you can’t serve that page until the data has been read from the computer. Right. So when you start to think of IOPS per second is how many things can your server do per second? That is very much a derivative of your storage speed, perhaps even more so than your CPU. Really everything inside of the computer is waiting on storage. So the oldest more legacy types of storage would be hard disk storage. And why is this the most popular until the last few years? It’s because it’s cheaper. And yes, you can make hard drive systems faster by doing different RAID types or redundant arrays of independent disks like, you know, lots of clients, for example, that have big libraries of content. They might have something that looks like a RAID 10 of multiple, say like eight terabyte drives. So when you add more drives in an organizational format like that, it means you can get more IOPS, right? A little bit more performance you can squeeze out of it. So 10 to 15 years ago, solid state drives became available commercially, like and priced in a way that they were, and I would say 15 years ago, that that was where things were going. That was obviously the future. The change between speeds on hard disks and SSDs was it was a 10 X or more on speed and IOPS actually is even more than that. But there’s a lot of detail to sift through because in technical white papers are often showing hypothetical speed and performance benchmarks and not representative of real world activity. But true enough to say that when you switch from a hard drive to a solid state drive for all of your hosting and storage, it’s a massive pickup. So instead of getting a few hundred or at most maybe a couple thousand IOPS, if you had lots of hard drives used smartly in a system, maybe then you’re able to get 3,000 IOPS or 5,000 or 10,000 or more than 10,000 with a pair of solid state drives. Well now technology has changed to NVME. Well, why is that important? This is significant because now you’re more than 10 Xing SSD speeds. In fact, the most recent stuff that I’m buying is way beyond that. It’s like kind of almost 100 X. Now I have individual NVME drives that can do a half million operations per second. Some upwards of a million operations per second on reading faster to read than it is to write. But that’s what’s so significant. So what does that all mean Brad? Pull it all together. Okay, so you are hosted somewhere and if you have been hosted in that somewhere for more than five or 10 years, whether it’s a dedicated server or some VPS, you are most certainly at best on a system that is using SSDs and at worst on a system that is using hard drives or a hybrid of perhaps two storage systems, one of each inside of the same system. You owe it to yourself, to your business to get onto a new fresh system that is using NVME storage. Why? Because all of a sudden storage is functioning almost at or below like at or more than the capability of your CPU. So before your server would get busy or your CPU would be more loaded because before it could do the next operation, it’s actually waiting on a response from storage. So with all of this newer storage, it’s blowing it out of the water. So we’re seeing wins with customers all over the place. When I did that VPS change and I moved all those clients, all those clients, the oldest of the old of them, like when I say really old stuff, they might have been in rated hard drive VPS systems. Really not great performance, but the bulk of them were in systems that had SSDs for storage, right? So pretty performant. But this migration to NVME is so much faster. So storage is really, really important and the price has come down. But as with most things, the devil’s always in the details, there’s a question to ask and you’re probably not going to find it in your web host shopping cart because not everybody is informing their customers the way that I like to. But there is the first generation of NVME, which was basically PCI 3.0 NVME. So functioning at a different system bus speed and much slower IOPS. And then the second generation is PCI 4.0. This is what we have in all of our systems. And that is actually several hundred percent faster. So the goal is not just to be using and leveraging the newest storage technology of NVME, but to make sure that your host is using Gen 4 NVME, not Gen 3 NVME. And I would give everybody one more sort of easier to understand explanation. Let’s assume data just moved as fast as the pipe was big, right? We can kind of relate to that. So if you have a hard drive plugged into your computer or you have an SSD, either one of those, both of those are still connected over a SATA interface. It’s a different kind of an interface. It’s not like it’s directly inside the motherboard moving at the speed of your RAM or your CPU. It’s basically limited by the SATA connection, a SATA 2 or 3 connection, right? Well the limitation on those is 600 megabits per second. But basically your limitation on a SATA 2, SATA 3 interface is going to be 600 megabytes per second of theoretical throughput. Well, here’s the deal. That was always theoretical. What you were ever achieving on a hard drive was always only closer at best, so probably between 100 megabytes and 250 megabytes per second. And even on your really fast SSDs, best case scenario, you’re able to cap out that and you would never be able to. But then you’re limited by the speed of that interface. So when this changed to Gen 3 NVME, that then went to several thousand megabytes per second. And now in Gen 4, we’re up to like six, seven, eight thousand megabytes per second as capable potential throughput, right? So all of this stuff has changed and the IAPS have really changed. So anyway, storage is super cool. That could change your business. That’s the difference between, you know, what does this all mean to somebody when you own a website and you’re trying to deliver your best entertainment? They have a happy surfer. What that means is it’s going to reflect and help us that page is loading. Maybe you’re only measuring this in milliseconds, maybe on a complicated page or a really long page with lots of content. Maybe it might take a couple seconds for the whole page to load. Now there are other factors here like who’s your web host, what else is going on in the server, is your scripting and coding good or bad, you know, like is your web page coding efficient or not, or are you using a CDN? But at the root of all of that, you still have to access the storage, increasing the speed of that, especially when you start talking about 10x, 20x, 50x, 100x faster. It’s going to make a huge difference. You know, it’s interesting that you mentioned that as far as the page load speed, because on my website, on my main website, adultsitebroker.com, I was having some, what I looked at as speed issues, but then my dev optimized my website and I’m on WordPress. So a WordPress plugin definitely had a lot to do with it. Man, it made all the difference in the world. So people also have to look at their site and make sure they optimize it, right? Oh, absolutely. It’s very important. And there are a lot of page speed, maybe like free websites you can go to and plug your domain in and it’ll show you like how long it took what images to load and the whole total page load. And so, you know, my advice there is, you know, engage your developer, your webmaster, if they have that knowledge, if they don’t have that knowledge, engage your web host. If you don’t have managed hosting and you’re asking these questions and you got nobody to help you, you screwed up. You probably need to manage hosting. Probably need motor hosts, say it. Well, you know, maybe, listen, I obviously believe everyone would be better off as my customer because I know we do a great job for them. But the truth of it is, you know, the beautiful thing about being on the internet is you can do a lot of self-service and through control panels. But the truth of that is that at scale or with a complex site or if you get some bad plugin or inefficient plugin, you’re really in the weeds there. You might be in the weeds a bit on security, but you’re certainly going to be in there on performance and any auto deployed service that is like sort of a stock configuration like let’s say you bought a VPS from someplace and it had C-Panel and they all have default configurations on values for like how they’re addressing memory and storage and database. And the solution isn’t having somebody turn you over a virtual space that has the gears turned all the way up for max connections and all that other stuff because it will work against you. The solution is tuning once you’re in commerce and online and experience problems and being a little bit ahead of that, but always trying to find that optimum balance of what are the right system settings. And the truth is, unless you’re an experienced systems administrator, you’re not going to know how to do that. Maybe you can figure it out, but you have to ask yourself, is your time better spent figuring out how to find more traffic, convert it and retain it or to be a nerd in your server because I got news for you. You can hire my nerds or some other nerd for anywhere from 50 to a couple hundred dollars a month to give you that kind of support on demand when you need it to help you tweak your business. So that’s actually what I heard you say is that’s actually something that you will help us support them with if they have managed service. Oh, we do. That’s awesome. Oh, you’re kidding me. Yeah, we do that all day long. So like, whether you were in at our cheapest VPS with a minimal support plan or any dedicated server with either the on demand support or the complete support. So what’s good mojo? Good mojo is when you have that question or problem, we show up to answer it and it doesn’t matter if you’re on that $100 a month account, but it takes my guys five, five hours or 10 hours or 15 hours to figure out your problem. We will do it and you won’t get a bill for that. That’s what good mojo is. It might not be every month or all the time, but in your moment of need, we’re there for you. And there’s nobody there punching a clock saying, well, we can’t give him more support because he only pays us $49 a month. Exactly. So everywhere I look online and at every conference I go to, all everyone wants to talk about is AI. What’s your take on this that you’d like to share with adult side owners? My business day today ended at the office with me looking at potentially buying, I guess it was looking like a quarter million dollars worth of NVIDIA GPU systems. But anyways, those were my challenges at the end of my business day that doesn’t answer your question. I can tell you here’s what I see today and obviously I’m frequently attending the busiest conferences such as TAS and XBiz. But I would say there’s a lot of creative and interesting and developing use of AI. There’s a lot of companies that are still philosophizing or still thinking about what their strategy might be. And then there’s other companies that are sort of developing and investing or testing or building development sandboxes and playing with things. I see our clients doing lots of interesting things, everything from automating chatbots, we say chatbot, but automating entertainment with being able to, for example, using AI and learning language models, being able to say comprehend, digest, and then produce someone that’s going to chat, like for example, an entertainer that has a specific personality, likes dislikes, things they’ll say, things they won’t say. So I think there’s a lot of interesting use cases. There are others who are using it to do really creative things with image and video production. I can’t go down this rabbit hole, but I would say that there’s a lot to that because there’s a lot of laws and regulations about what you can and can’t do, what you can and can’t charge for. So it’s quite complicated. And I think we’re going to see it get more complicated before it makes more sense. So in my business, I’ve used the heck out of chat GPT the last two years to just help me to be better at what I’m doing and clean up my writing. Like I actually do enjoy writing, but when you work in a small organization, you don’t always necessarily have someone that you can tap on the shoulder to be your editor to clean up simple things, whether it’s sentence structure or grammar or complete a thought or to say something in a different or an improved way. But I would use an example of I built, there’s not much AI generated stuff in use on the Moja host website, but I built a different brand’s website with a lot of other educational material and it needed its own corresponding press releases. And a lot of some writing is really interesting to me and some is a little bit more boring. But I would say as a business operator, I was really able to effectively leverage these technologies just from a business development and marketing and administrative perspective that saved countless numbers of hours producing things. And then I think my follow up to that would be it’s only good content if it’s truly accurate. So that actually requires that you do have some subject knowledge or that you research because garbage in garbage out. If you ask questions the wrong way, you can get misinformation out of chat GPT and other things. So it’s very, very important to fact check and to use your common sense. I’ve just tried to use it because for me, I feel like at times I struggle with writer’s block. And even just as an entrepreneur’s tool to help push through those moments of like, okay, sometimes the hardest thing to do is to get the first words on the page and then I can just start writing something that’s fresh and unique and original. Sometimes it can just help me with that and that’s a big deal to me because I could stare at a blank screen for hours, but if I can figure out tools and tricks that work for me personally, then it’s better. I would tell you that from my customer perspective, I’ve got clients doing really interesting things like building, you know, intelligent search on their content websites and intelligent content recommendation for their servers based on their server preferences. And I think that there were, you know, earlier attempts years ago using other technologies that pale in comparison. And there’s a lot of interesting use of it. I think that we are still at the beginning of the hockey stick curve. The truth is it’s going to take real mature businesses years to figure out how to implement smart use of artificial intelligence in all different aspects or as many applicable aspects of their business. And that’s the case whether you’re in the adult entertainment business or you’re owning an enterprise mainstream company, you know, eventually those businesses are trying to figure out, you know, which data are they going to let it touch because there’s a lot of power in that, you know, it’s like, of course, if you had an employee that had 10,000 or 100,000 employees, you would want to develop more efficient systems to provide data to your employees to make them better and more effective at their job. But you also at the same time have to intelligently figure out how to safeguard your data. It might be the case that it’s acceptable to say Mary Jane’s worked for the company for three years and 11 months, but it’s probably not acceptable for, you know, the response to come back and tell you what are date of birth and what are home addresses. And so proceed with caution. I think it’s get creative, do some brainstorming, try to imagine ways that you could improve your product, your business or your customer experience using these technologies or your business efficiencies and then maybe rank those in order of priority or opportunity or maybe it’s multi, maybe you need to kind of rate them all on a one to 10. Like is it a great idea? Yes. Is it doable? If it’s a ton of an idea, you know, maybe it’s a two on, is it possible? You know, or how much time or hours or budget? Because there’s a real, there’s a real time implementing it and it’s not as simple as just spinning up some instances on AWS or some of the other GP providers like run Lambda Labs or Run Pod. There’s for as many hours as you might need to compile a model and it could be several hours, tens of hours, hundreds of hours to compile a model. It might take a multiple of those for the human component with the information together and to do the other part of the work. So I think it’s very interesting and we’re going to see those that are dedicated and spending the most time and effort and money. There’s already lots of product out there and we’re going to see, I think a maturation of that that’s going to be very surprising for I think one really good example also that I use for Moja Host and I take no credit for having the brilliance to develop the product, but I created a like a brand robot with this company called Synthesia.io. And so you can go to Synthesia and you can start to create like for example, I was, I’m still wanting to use this to create customer educational videos and training videos, but I thought, hey, wouldn’t it be cool if we could have a likeness of me on the screen, right? So I went to a professional studio and follow their instructions and had me recorded reading a script and the first version after I paid for all this and it was quite expensive was able to show me and it looked pretty good, but it was like their voice, right? And then on a subsequent version, I was able to redo that to improve the video output and give me a few more gestures that you could prompt in using this and even more interesting, I was finally able to clone my voice because I realized even after I got the version one point, I’m like, oh, it’s really, it’s going to feel more comfortable that they see Brad on the screen, but where the hell does that sound like? That doesn’t sound like me. That’s not good. That’s not good. So I think there’s, there’s a lot to come and we’re all going to learn a lot and you know, I’m hoping that I can productize some more things with Mojo host, but I have to be very specific about where we’re making our investments. It’s my goal that in 2025, I will have productize some things that make it helpful for people to be creative and develop in that space. My broker tip today is part two of what to do to make your site more valuable for when you decide to sell it later. Last week, we talked about converting traffic and improving user experience. Make a good offer. If you’re selling something and the offer isn’t good, you won’t make money. It’s plain and simple as that. And if your offer is to contact you or to get more information, then make the offer attractive and easy to understand. If you’re selling something, make buying easy. Show them an easy way to buy and then leave. Help them by making suggestions on what to buy. Amazon.com is the best at this. They always have suggestions on what to buy based on your buying and browsing history. They use AI to do this. There are AI engines available these days at a modest cost. Look into this if you can. Don’t clutter up your site with unnecessary items, buttons and images. Keep it as simple as possible. The best and most successful sites are the simple ones, the ones that lead you to take the action you’d like them to take. It’s not that hard. Just remember, when you’re putting together any site, try to think through the buying process like a human being. Whatever you do, don’t turn over that process to your designer. Don’t just say, "Build me a website." What you’ll get out the other end will not give you what it is you’re looking for. Give them as much direction as possible and make it easy for them to build a site for you that makes your business succeed. We’ll talk about this subject more next time. And next time, we’ll be speaking again with Brad Mitchell of MojoHost in part two of our interview. We’ll be taking the holiday off and be back on December 31st. Happy holidays, everyone. And that’s it for this week’s Adult Site Broker Talk. I’d once again like to thank my guest, Brad Mitchell of MojoHost. Talk to you again next time on Adult Site Broker Talk. I’m Bruce Friedman. [music] [end] [end] [end] [BLANK_AUDIO]