This article was something I have been meaning to write as an opener to the year however I have gotten super busy with actually doing what the content of this post is about ironically. 2025 in my opinion is going to be a great year, one of growth and prosperity for all of us. I really feel optimistic about it. With growth comes change however and we’re experiencing quite a bit of that and possibly more than I’d like all at once but I won’t brush away change and progress. It’s a good thing.
What’s New?
The changes that we have been seeing in the industry have been mostly based around automation, bots and AI. Three things that can be good but also can wreak a lot of havoc to our sites as small businesses.
On the side of the small business we like to have automation, maybe some bots, and AI well maybe in 10-15 years when it figures out what’s actually going on. One thing that we have gotten really good at is making things automated so that our clients can worry about other things than having to do the same mundane task over and over again. Workflows, whether it be for your ecommerce store or even your simpler sites have been our favorite things to do.
Bots on the other hand are good in the right circumstances. While they can serve a purpose, they are as always only as good as their programmers and can never replace that human touch that can really make a clients day. There are several places that we use bots but in most cases they aren’t directly on our sites in a public facing fashion unless it’s directly requested by our customers. In most cases we are using them in our discussion boards, chat rooms etc. They can be super useful however in my opinion I want to be super careful in how customer relations are handled and make sure they know their getting the best experience possible rather than being given to the bots to handle their queries; it’s one of our best qualities.
AI is an interesting topic that has it’s place as well however I don’t believe that it’s ready for widespread use yet. It does some great things in terms of putting together some writings based on the LLM that has been trained but in terms of things that are more creative or require unique and or more accurate things I would say that it’s out of the question. There have been plenty of times that I have used it to help my development and even write plugins but it definitely has a ton of flaws. The best way I could describe AI is an enhanced search engine and nothing more. It can get the juices flowing, find some good pieces to kick start a project but overall it falls vastly short of being able to create a coherent piece that can be used in a widespread production manner. There have been countless times that I have used different AI tools and really didn’t have an overall winning benefit from using them sometimes spending the same amount of time testing, tweaking, and re-prompting to get to where the project could be mildly useful and tweaked for it’s unique use case.
How It’s Effecting Us
All of that being said, let’s look at how the above has changed webhosting since that is what this article is about. Since the beginning of the year and closer to the end of January the bots have risen. With everyone and their sister needing to train their LLMs for their specific AI tools, and other bots being developed to simply scrape sites for other reasons hosting has become a little harder.
Specifically what we have noticed is that the bots are scraping sites very thoroughly and in most cases Amazon is hitting ecommerce sites SUPER hard. In the case of sites that are non e-commerce bots come in do their scraping and leave. The rough part of this is that there seems to always be another bot. There are the usual ones but as I continue to watch things there is new bots popping up all the time. In terms of e-commerce Amazon is just being the worst, and constantly hitting sites over and over to check for pricing so they can bleed out the small businesses if they didn’t do that enough on their marketplace when selling there. To me this is just an awful practice because the intensity that they use on each site causes the sites to slow down while they gather data for their own uses and also degrades the experiences for the customers that were looking to shop there as a non-Amazon alternative. To make matters worse the conventional mitigation techniques for bots only work in some cases because while bots are supposed to respect the rules on things like a robots.txt file there are some that actively ignore them (ahem-azon).
What Are We Doing to Help?
To wrap this up let’s talk about what can be done to make this all work as we see this change in landscape. The best things revolve around software that does the job of keeping everything in it’s lane and we use two different kinds because this isn’t just silver bullet kind of scenario and I don’t ever think that it will be. First we always make sure that we use Cloudflare on all of our sites to make sure that everything is being served at the top speed to users. Our second form of mitigation relies in our carefully hand picked combination of herbs & spices (plugins). With all of our sites that purchase our maintenance program, we install our pro plugin packages and make sure to tailor a specific plan to make sure each site is running it’s best at all times.
While the above sounds exhausting, rest assured that it is, but that’s what we do. We go to all lengths to make sure that your end users are getting the experience that they should be. Making sure the site works at it’s best isn’t our only achievement in the industry but our pricing as well. We guarantee to beat all of the competitors and have been since the beginning of our time in the industry.
We support you and your small business because we are a small business too! We will always support other small businesses because as mentioned above the threats of the giant corporations are never ending and together we can prevail. Small businesses are amazing and really provide that personal touch that you can’t find at a large corporation. Remember the last time you called the giant corporate overlords? How long did you wait on hold? Did you get to speak to a bot? You won’t find that here. Even if everything else were to fail you can bet there Black & White Standard and Dog Ear Marketing will be here by your side. We promise.
Do you know someone that could use a good boost in their website? Send them our way! There’s always room in our network as we’re always happy to help and better online presences. We do give referral credits for all signed accounts that our current clients send us.