Intro

Jesse Friedman: Welcome to Impressive Hosting, where we seek to uncover the core tenets of great WordPress hosting. I am Jesse Friedman, your host, and with me today is Christian from I2Coalition. I wanted to have Christian on because not only is he doing some great work out there, but he and I have actually been working more together Christian founded, and now I am also a part of the Secure Hosting Alliance. Christian, thank you so much for coming on. Tell us about yourself.

Christian Dawson: You also helped us bring the idea into reality, so I’ll give you a little bit more credit for it than just coming on after it was created. And we can tell a little bit of that story now, but it’s been great to work with you and I’m happy to be here.

Jesse Friedman: Yeah, thanks. Tell us a little bit about where you’re from, the I2Coalition, which is behind all this stuff.

Christian Dawson: I’m excited to be able to talk about hosting because I’ve been doing hosting for my entire career. My background is in web hosting. Before,13 years ago I helped co-found this group I2Coalition, which stands for Internet Infrastructure Coalition which was originally designed to help web hosts, and it eventually expanded so that it covered all of the Internet’s infrastructure.

So a little bit broader. It’s the whole hosting ecosystem. All the people that we collaborate with to make websites work. And so we’ve been running that for 13 years now.

The Secure Hosting Alliance

Christian Dawson: And then the Secure Hosting Alliance we’ll get into, I’m sure, but that’s the new project that I think is gonna help take hosting to the next level.

Jesse Friedman: That’s awesome. Yeah, that was what intrigued me right away when you reached out about having Automattic join this new alliance. Was this idea that we could bring hosts together for a common goal to help improve the internet, to help improve the way in which people gather data or the internet or whatever.

And so there’s a variety of ways in which I2Coalition of bringing folks together, one that we are working on together most closely is the Secure Hosting Alliance. Why don’t you tell me what made that, what was the genesis of it? Where did it come from?

Christian Dawson: Okay. So I don’t know whether to give the short version of the long version, but…

Jesse Friedman: The long version and I’ll interrupt you when we get too far down the road.

Christian Dawson: That’s cool. So let me just start 13 years ago. Just to give you a little bit of perspective on I2C and why we were founded and then why this is a natural next step, even if it did take 13 years to get here. From my perspective, coming from a hosting company and specifically a hosting company that was on the smaller side, we had like 60 employees.

We built I2Coalition in order to try and make sure that companies like ours could survive and thrive. And what we ended up doing, I2Coalition’s primary role now within the ecosystem is to teach legislators and regulators how our industry works, so they don’t do stupid stuff to mess it up.

We have developed all these educational materials. We get involved directly with them when they’re trying to work on and pass laws and potentially try to do things that sort of change the way that we as providers can provide service. We’ve built this thing and it’s really successful.

But it was only one possible way of us bringing the community together to fight for things that help the industry grow. And it’s really useful. It’s one of the most important resources that I think exists in the internet ecosystem and the hosting ecosystem. But we kind of realized that there’s so much more that we can do with this collective voice and this collective gathering that we’ve built to try and make things better for everybody.

And that if instead of focusing on educating people about what we are already doing, what if we got everybody together to do an internal check to make sure that the entire ecosystem is making the right decisions and even to sort of align around what those, I don’t wanna use the word ethical behaviors because ethical is a loaded word, but those proper business behaviors are what does it take to be a responsible, that’s a good word, a responsible hosting provider.

What does that mean? What does the industry collectively think is a responsible web hosting provider. What if we get together and we all decided that? And how could that help us raise the bar on how everybody’s behaving in this space. So those are the kinds of things that we’re gonna explore with this new room.

Jesse Friedman: There’s a lot of areas you can cover in that if we’re talking about being a responsible host is everything from your sales tactics to the way in which you secure customer websites, to the tools and things that you bolt on, how much you’re charging, the list. So where is your primary focus in helping to shape the responsibility there?

Christian Dawson: We’ve brought on a team that’s being led by David Snead. David Snead is a lawyer in this space who’s been in this industry for as long as I have. And David is guiding all the participants of this group in a discussion to outline exactly where the group wants to go.

Because it’s driven by the people who are in there making the decision. I’m not choosing which of those things. We are going to focus on the group itself is deciding which ones we wanna focus on. But what I can say is that I think that there’s an interest in starting to talk about how we’re dealing and handling dealing with and handling anti-abuse.

I think that’s an early early thing that we can collectively talk about to make sure that we are all achieving some baseline that’s making things better. From there, it, we’ll see where the group goes and we’ll see how the group evolves as other hosting providers in this space take a look at what it is we’re doing and say that they want to join and be a part of this initiative.

They can help chart the trajectory of it themselves.

Jesse Friedman: This podcast is primarily focused on WordPress, but this initiative is really for anyone, any hosting company that’s offering hosting solutions across static websites, open source, closed source, whatever it might be.

Christian Dawson: Yeah. I will say though that a significant portion of the hosting ecosystem these days is driven by or certainly incorporates WordPress. And whether you’re talking about how WordPress interfaces with anti-abuse or whether, or cybersecurity or any sort of ethical behavior, it’s all a part of the same ecosystem.

The fact is that there’s a lot of people who are leveraging your type of infrastructure, WordPress infrastructure that are at the table and that are eager to try and raise the bar for everybody or in some circumstances highlight the good things that they’re already doing. What we’re finding in early conversations is that for a lot of providers, it’s less about trying to sort of raise the bar, but trying to identify the good they’re already doing, and outlining it in a way to try and be a rising tide lifts all boats force for the rest of the industry.

Jesse Friedman: Yeah, no, I would agree with that. There’s a lot of companies out there doing a lot of good things, and sometimes it just takes a solid voice to make people more aware of those opportunities to mimic that or do the same thing. And one of the things, you mentioned the WordPress infrastructure working on WP Cloud or Jetpack at Automattic, it’s afforded me the ability to talk to a lot of hosting companies and to help them to understand that we as members of a ecosystem, WordPress and the companies that distribute that product, we can come together similar goals, even though that has been working with hosting companies when they may have competing objectives. They’re trying very hard to work against each other, to steal each. Do you feel like it is as aggressive as some people make it seem to be?

Christian Dawson: It’s a great question. I think that one of the reasons why I2Coalition has been successful for 13 years, when a lot of groups have come and gone who have tried to sort of bring a team of rivals together to work collectively, is that we’ve learned a little bit how to navigate those types of conversations.

Jesse Friedman: Sure.

Christian Dawson: We’ve tried to put some real firm guidelines around how people communicate in these groups. Tried to make sure that we listen to people about what it is they collectively need and try to choose topics that everybody sort of agrees they wanna work on. And then we manage the conversations in what we call a rough consensus manner.

And rough consensus means that like most of the people need to be on board with the direction the conversation’s going. You can have an outlier and an outlier. One group that says, Hey, I don’t wanna do that. Can’t throw off the entire progress of the entire group. But we’re not going to pick directions that are like 60-40.

We’re not gonna take on issues that are really divisive or we’re not gonna drag the industry forward kicking and screaming. And I think how that works, it works well is that when we are working with potential members and we’re talking to them about how we’re really trying to raise the bar for the industry and do good things for the industry we get a lot of companies who have good intentions within their own ecosystem. They still want their customer’s business, they still want their competitor’s business, right? But they also want their service to be good, to have high quality of service, stuff like that. So they’ve got good intentions and we can bring them to the table. And just say, Hey, assume the best intentions in others and we’re gonna work on projects in which a rising tide lifts all boats.

And so come work with us collectively and everybody’s gonna get more customers as a result. And a lot of people buy into it. I say this to a lot of people now, let me say this because we talked about how a lot of people are doing really good stuff in this industry. Not everybody is. There are lots of people who are less than well intentioned in their offerings. They don’t tend to be the ones that show up to engage in a group like I2Coalition. But what’s interesting is as we start to see outcomes from the Secure Hosting Alliance, as we start to put together a list of principles that come out of these types of conversations that we’re having with all of these providers about what we see as responsible behavior in hosting, I think it’s gonna be easier to identify the types of companies that are below the bar that the industry decides to set.

And it might be harder for the less ethical providers to continue to operate effectively after the industry said, we consider ethics to be operations above this line.

Jesse Friedman: Right. mentioned that there’s a lot to work on and so you’re giving the hosting companies, you’re working with an opportunity to kind of really define where to work, and that’s probably because there’s enough to work on for quite a while. focusing on where their priorities are and motivations are is probably gonna be helpful in moving that forward.

It’s not too in the conversations that we have when we’re talking about partnering with hosts, which is that there’s enough WordPress for everybody. We don’t need to be cutthroat Competition. Competition can be healthy, it can drive innovation, it can drive people to create unique solutions for things, but it doesn’t have to be cutthroat. one of the things to realize here too is that we have a responsibility to our customers and hosting companies have a responsibility to the ecosystem. The same way that Pepsi and Coke could probably get together, around some regulations around the creation of aluminum cans, right?

Because if it starts making people sick they’re not gonna just look at it as just Pepsi or just Coke. It’s probably gonna be soda as a whole is scary or gonna cause a problem. So this is an opportunity for these companies to come out and say, we need to create a foundational layer of what’s right and what’s beneficial to the ecosystem. To improve it for everybody.

Christian Dawson: Yeah and Pepsi and Coke all really benefit if they collectively get together and make it so that people are more comfortable. Going out and buying a soda and especially if they’re working on making sure that you know, a small percentage of the soda isn’t poison, things like that.

Jesse Friedman: Right.

Christian Dawson: It makes a difference in making sure everybody’s comfortable existing in this ecosystem, and that’s ultimately what we’re trying to do. We think we are we think what we’re doing is gonna grow the market for everybody.

Global Influence and Legislation

Jesse Friedman: And so is the alliance working primarily in like the North American region? Is it global? Like how are you defining, your landscape?

Christian Dawson: The Secure Hosting Alliance operates as a division of the Internet Infrastructure coalition, internet infrastructure. And so I’m gonna give the same answer for both organizations, the Internet Infrastructure Coalition and the Secure Hosting Alliance. They’re a United States based business, but the goal is to have global influence.

We as an organization when we work with, for instance, legislators and leg regulators in the I2C side of the house we are actively working with legislators all over the world. We are talking with governments in Pakistan and India and France and Spain and Italy and in Brussels and in, Canada and the US.

A lot of our infrastructure’s in the US but we try to go where we can be most helpful around the world. That being said, most of our influence and most of our efforts center around our work in North America and some in Brussels, simply because the vast majority of our members are based there.

Jesse Friedman: Sure.

Christian Dawson: Not Brussels, but the, not Brussels, but the EU. You know

Jesse Friedman: right. Right, right, right. Yeah. Yeah. When you talk about legislation when I think of legislation that relates to the work that I do every day, the first things that come to mind in the past were like, SOPA or net neutrality what’s top of mind for you right now?

What’s something that we need to be thinking about?

Christian Dawson: SOPA, you’re talking about a story that’s now 13 years old, and I mentioned that we started 13 years ago. So again, I’m gonna answer in a kind of a long way by saying that was our inciting incident and why we got together to fight PIPA. To fight PIPA and SOPA.

I was president of a web hosting company called Servant. We have since sold the LeaseWeb but I was running my hosting company and my co-founder David Snead, who is now running the daily operations of the Secure Hosting Alliance. He came to me and we took a look at this and we saw that SOPA and PIPA were gonna be devastating to the web hosting industry.

And we decided we needed to do something to try and address that. So we went down to Capitol Hill because I was based in Reston, Virginia. It was like 45 minutes away and we sat down with Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon and he was putting a hold on this bill. And we were like, Senator Wyden, what can we do about this?

We gotta stop this. It’s gonna kill the hosting industry. What do we do? And he said, get more of you.

Jesse Friedman: Yeah.

Christian Dawson: And so, it was his idea to go ahead and have us do a campaign. We ended up having a letter, write a campaign against SOPA that was 200 hosting providers, CEOs strong, something like that at the time.

It’s a million years, it was so long ago. And then we did all these sorts of big pushes on Capitol Hill. Really helped influence the defeat of SOPA PIPA in a really weird, real way. And that was the first thing that we did. And then we looked around and we were like, this happened because people didn’t understand what hosting was, not because they wanted to kill hosting, but they didn’t get it.

They didn’t know what it would do. Right. And we were like, oh, this is gonna keep happening. They’re gonna keep on having this issue because what we do is largely invisible to most people, unless there somebody sits them down and tells them how it’s gonna work. So then our job became, okay, let’s do this anytime that our industry is wrapped up into how legislation is affecting us.

The Importance of Section 230

Christian Dawson: You’re right that net neutrality is a big one, but the main mechanism that they were trying to mess with SOPA was Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which they sometimes call the I forget the 23 words that invented the internet. And it’s just this simple concept that you can touch the content of a user without being considered the publisher of that content.

Right. And that was made for us and a whole bunch of other sort of intermediary providers. And it’s now a hot button issue again, because of issues around content moderation, because people don’t like what the social media companies do, so they want to tear down. So Section 230 is still the main mechanism within the United States for hosting providers to not get sued for the actions of their customers, right?

Jesse Friedman: Right, right. And what we’re not talking about here is like illegal content or anything…

Christian Dawson: Of course.

Jesse Friedman: But it’s the ability to have freedom of speech to express yourself.

Christian Dawson: You’re absolutely right. There is no defense of illegal activity. What I think that some these intermediary protections do is they allow hosting providers in an environment in which they can be reactive to illegal content and not have to be proactive.

You don’t need to scan the content if you have your users and make sure that you know in advance what they’re doing and to try to guess whether they’re doing stuff that’s illegal or not. Right.

Jesse Friedman: Yep.

Christian Dawson: An important protection that we need to preserve.

Jesse Friedman: So, I mean, in practice that could look like having to WordPress.com or BlueHost or some other hosting company would have to review the content that you’re publishing on your blog before you actually hit this, the publish button. and think about the bottleneck that that would create. Would you actually put that into practice, right? You’d have to probably pay some additional fee to have your content reviewed regularly, fast, whatever it might be. Which is literally putting a choke on your ability to just have free speech on the internet.

Christian Dawson: I couldn’t agree more. I also envisioned that should that happen, it’s gonna change the idea of who can be a host and who can’t, because that’s something that would be difficult to do at scale. So a lot of the smaller providers would be pushed out. You so like legislators, this is a key example because legislators who wanna affect change on Section 230, they’re thinking of how it will change things for Facebook and Meta or X or Google or Apple, right?

They’re not thinking of how it affects the small WordPress provider, but the small WordPress provider’s probably the first to go if broad base 230 reforms happen and we lose those kind of protections.

Jesse Friedman: We actually interviewed a company called Iva Pix. They’re WP Cloud hosting company. They’re a small group who are really trying to focus on building a wonderful user experience, and they leverage WP Cloud because it provides the infrastructure underneath everything for them so they can actually do more with less, right? They can have more people focused on that end user experience. But if they suddenly became responsible for approving and esponsible for the content of their customer’s websites beyond what we’re talking about, like illegal stuff that no one wants on these websites.

Christian Dawson: Right.

Jesse Friedman: They would immediately have to rethink everything. They would have to outsource that to some third party, some AI driven tool or something along the lines that kind of mitigates their risk. But you’re gonna see the increased costs for that immediately in your websites,

Christian Dawson: Yeah. Couldn’t agree more. And so it’s hugely important. What we’re doing is hugely important and important to be able to continue to support the small to medium businesses in the WordPress hosting space. That’s who we’re fighting for primarily, to be honest and then let me transition real quickly to say how Secure Hosting Alliance plays into that, because we’ve now been doing this with legislators for 13 years and we get listened to a certain extent.

They don’t know the information that we’re providing to them. They’re not looking necessarily to throw us under the bus. But after developing long-term relationships with logic legislators and regulators that a lot of them are coming back now and saying, yeah, well there’s still a lot of bad that happens on the internet, and so what are you doing about it?

Right?

Jesse Friedman: Right.

Christian Dawson: And so then if industry wants to be responsible and industry wants to be in the driver’s seat and not have legislators propose bad ideas about how the rest of the problems that we’re not taken care of get resolved. We should be putting our heads together to figure out whether we’re doing the best stuff we could be doing to make a healthy ecosystem,

Jesse Friedman: I like that. So you’re approaching it from two angles, right? You’re helping to inform the legislation, you’re helping to inform the hosting and companies around these things so that you can attack and defend in that area. But you’re also saying to the hosting companies. If you don’t want a target on your back, if you don’t want the attention of this legislation, you need to be doing something so that they don’t have these concerns around the content that’s being published on the internet.

How do we work together to try and combat some of that?

Christian Dawson: That’s right. Because we’re not gonna be effective long term just being the no guys with legislators.We need to be solutions providers too. And industry should be solving problems online. And I think individual companies are individual companies are. The issue is that like the hosting companies aren’t talking with one another, and that’s.

Fine. Like hosting is a relatively…it’s a business where there’s a lot of we don’t have any central regulator and so there’s not been a lot of reason for us to come together as a community to talk. We don’t want a central regulator. I think it’d be bad if we, there was some central regulator like there is for the domain industry.

So it’s cool that we’re fiercely independent for the most part, but there’s a limit to it. Because there’s a lot we could learn from each other if we sat down to learn the good stuff that we were each doing so we could all use the best of it to make sure everybody was doing collective good on the internet.

Jesse Friedman: Yeah, that’s a great point.

How and Why to Join the Secure Hosting Alliance

Jesse Friedman: So when we talk about bringing hosts together, who is a part of the Secure Hosting Alliance, and also how do you get to hear more about this? How do you become a part of it? How do we bring more of these hosts in in to understand how this is all working.

Christian Dawson: So that’s a great question so that I don’t miss anybody I’m pulling up the list that we launched with which was just at the end of last month. So the companies that we launch.

Jesse Friedman: real quick. You launched a website, where is that hosted right now?

Christian Dawson: That website is proudly hosted by WordPress. At WordPress by WordPress, and we are very excited. WordPress.com?

Jesse Friedman: Cloud. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Christian Dawson: Yes.

Jesse Friedman: We’re self-serving that real quick.

Christian Dawson: Oh my God, we love working with you. It was the easiest thing in the world to collaborate with you and it, and it produced really good results.

The specific website is hostingsecurity.net. So go there

Jesse Friedman: Yeah.

Christian Dawson: And you’re gonna see a list of the launch hosting providers, GoDaddy, DreamHost, Cloudflare, Automattic, SiteGround, Newfold Digital, Hostinger, WebPros, Raksmart, Recorded Future, AltusHost, Green Olive Tree, Blacknight Solutions, Patmos, SharkTech, CTM360, Abusix, IPXO, Name.com, 20i, Peta Express, BigScoots, Xilo, and Tucows. Just to start out with.

Jesse Friedman: Yeah.

Christian Dawson: Just to start out with, just to get us kickstarted towards where we can eventually head,

Jesse Friedman: That’s amazing that you were able to bring those people together. So let me ask you this. If someone isn’t involved in the actual alliance right now,

Christian Dawson: Yeah.

Jesse Friedman: and we need to start rallying some troops, how are you communicating with hosts that are outside of this but maybe don’t necessarily have the time or the means to be a part of the Alliance?

But they could still be a voice, they could still write a letter, they could still…

Christian Dawson: Sure. So we’re, there’s, that’s a great question. I2Coalition has got a pretty good network of hosts that they speak with that aren’t necessarily part of our membership. And when there is a need to really raise the red flag, we can go wider than our standard membership.

But we could really use the help of expanding our network. And so we’re doing some outreach to not just get new members, but make sure that we grow our ecosystem. So we want anybody, even if they’re not necessarily immediately interested in joining a membership, because we are asking for financial contributions to become a member, we are investing time and resources and efforts into building these things and it takes money, right? You gotta keep the lights on. You gotta hire experts. You gotta hire lawyers to draft the law and to understand the legislation. Like you’re not gonna just do this out of the back of your garage trying to figure out how to transform and…

Christian Dawson: Yeah.

Jesse Friedman: And improve the internet, right? You need to have some support.

Christian Dawson: We are doing it out of the goodness of our hearts. But it takes that plus a list of resources that all have bottom line,

Jesse Friedman: Yeah.

Christian Dawson: …the things that we need, bills that we need to pay. If you wanna reach out to us and even if you go onto hostingsecurity.net, you give us your name and email.

You’re on our list for updates, whether you end up deciding that you want to join and financially contribute and have your logo on as a participating member, and join our monthly calls and join our working groups in order to help drive forward what the principles will ultimately be coming out of this group.

One of the ways that we are trying to do outreach for this effort is we’re going around to a bunch of trade shows and we’re gonna be talking about the initiative and what it is we’re trying to do there and try to get people interested in helping us grow the network there.

The first one is Cloud Fest and we’re gonna have a launch party because we haven’t all been together to go raise a glass and have fun together. And so the launch party is coming up in a couple of Mondays and I can’t wait.

Jesse Friedman: I can’t wait. I’m gonna be there myself. But actually, let’s take a quick break here and talk about Cloud Fest in our next episode. I think that we can continue conversation, but we’ve already gone to 30 minutes and I want to be thinking about how we can put this information out there in bite-size formats.

Everyone at home, we’re gonna continue this great conversation with Christian, but we’ll be back in our next episode. Thank you, Christian for joining us today.

Christian Dawson: Thanks, Jesse. See you in part two.

Jesse Friedman: All right.