Local Website Speed
LOCAL WEBSITE SPEED – December 4, 2025 – Phoenix, Arizona, USA
Myron Williamson was born to be a poet. He loved the sound of words and the feelings they pulled from his heart. They gave him more pleasure than a delicious meal or the beautiful sunsets in the desert hills surrounding his home.
Myron accepted that he was unusual and liked to say he was a “one percenter.” When other people referred to one percent of the population, they usually meant those with the most money. But Myron’s one percent meant poetry fans. Like others in this exclusive group, Myron composed his own poems. Sitting alone next to his swamp cooler, he dramatically read aloud his homebrewed poems along with his favorites from books and magazines. He was not bashful about sharing his original compositions, but only one percent of his friends and family were interested.
On one particularly inspirational day, as Myron put the finishing touches on a poem about a scorpion climbing a cactus, he was struck by the need to share it with the rest of the world. One percent of the entire population translated into many millions who would appreciate his scorpion imagery and countless other verses in his growing collection.
As Myron pondered the best way to share his poems, he happened to see an advertisement for creating your own website. Myron imagined his own spot in the internet filled with his poems and audio recordings. If the inspiration to share had not arrived simultaneously with the build-it-yourself website ad, he probably would have found existing sites catering to writers eager to post their work. Websites like Medium, Wattpad, and Reddit easily let you share text and audio with potential readers. But Myron’s inspired vision now called for his own website with a special name.
With very little idea where to start, Myron returned to the ad sponsored by the company GoDaddy. He used his laptop to visit their website and found out it cost only a few dollars per month for them to “host” a website. Myron had a vague idea that hosting meant a website lived in a mysterious placed call “the cloud” and GoDaddy would create and keep the website alive. They also let him pick out a name for his website. Myron initially wanted poems.com but found it was already claimed by someone else. He chose something related to the desert surrounding him which only cost $2 to register: desertpoems.website. Myron entered his credit card information and suddenly he owned and controlled a private piece of the web.
If Myron knew how much work he had just created for himself, he would have stopped right there. He discovered that adding content to a decent looking website was not easy. He followed GoDaddy’s advice to use something called WordPress to handle the layout and design, but was quickly confused by formatting decisions and which buttons to click. But he did not give up. He read online tutorials and watched explanation videos. He treated his website like a giant puzzle and put it together, piece by piece.
When things looked halfway decent and Myron added his first poems, he excitedly shared the website name with acquaintances. “There it is!” he said proudly when they typed the name into their phone and his front page popped up. “I made that!”
“Pretty nice. What’s it for?”
“Mostly poems. I’ve got some on there you can read.”
“Okay. Hmm. Let me save this for later.”
Myron knew very well that most people would not return to read, but he was not doing it for most people. He added more of his original poems and poems he considered classics that were written by other authors. Then he recorded some of his dramatic readings and posted them as downloadable audio files. He convinced some of his artistically minded friends with interesting voices to make similar recordings and he added those to the website too.
When he started the project, Myron could not say how long he intended to give it attention. After six months, two hundred poems and sixty audio files, he became too invested to stop. He constantly thought about his website and thrilled when a new poetry lover found it and left a comment on a post. A few people asked if they could add their own poems to his collection. Bit by bit, a small community formed around the desertpoems nucleus.
A year after his initial inspiration, Myron could count around 300 people regularly checking his website, but he wanted more. He made sure to put up new poems and sound files every week and worked to ensure Google and other search engines easily found them. He grew obsessed with whether the website was up and running. Sometimes it was fast and would appear on his web browser in only a few seconds. Sometimes it took much longer to load. And sometimes it did not load at all.
GoDaddy had a number to call for technical support. Myron ended up dialing it a lot to report his site was offline or running especially slow. He talked to call-center operators with foreign accents and names like Sunita and Santosh. When he asked where they lived, they told him about cities in either India or the Philippines. They were always courteous and eager to help. Often that meant passing a message on to software engineers who never communicated directly with Myron. He assumed they also lived in India or the Philippines and eventually they fixed his problems. His broken website always mysteriously worked again.
Two years after the desertpoems.website was born, it got almost 2000 visitors each month. Myron felt more obligated than ever to keep it running and growing. He loved the ready outlet for sharing chosen poems, but when the site slowed down or broke because of software updates he did not understand or control, his day became miserable. He chatted with the cheerful call-center team about the problems but resented being at the mercy of remote engineers living in “the cloud.” He cursed GoDaddy as a faceless, spaceless entity making his live unnecessarily hard.
“GoDaddy is holding me and desertpoems back,” Myron said to himself. “If the site wasn’t so slow, it would have a lot more visitors.”
He read online articles about making a website faster and realized that high speed and reliability required money. His low-cost GoDaddy plan was for “shared hosting”. This meant his website’s data was stored on a computer with data from lots of other websites and they all competed for attention and computing resources. If he left his website the way it was, it was never going to be fast or be able to handle many simultaneous visitors.
After his research into shared hosting, Myron realized for the first time there was a single computer located somewhere in the world storing all the information that made his website. He naturally assumed the computer was far away, just like the call center. He also wondered whether it was worth it to upgrade hosting plans. His website did not generate any money. He kept it as a something like a hobby or a service to the world. Was it important enough to devote more money to it? He was not rich. He could use the extra money for eating out or a vacation. Myron agonized for a week and then decided the website was now a big part of his identity and legacy. He liked to think he was brightening peoples’ days. He liked the way it stimulated his poetry. He would make the sacrifice.
Myron called up GoDaddy. After verifying the particulars of his account with an operator, he asked about upgrading from a shared hosting plan.
“Absolutely sir. We can move you to a dedicated server that will always be fast.”
“How much will that cost?”
“If you choose to upgrade now, I can give you one year of hosting for 50% off. After that, it will renew at $100 per month.”
“So you’re saying it costs $600 for the first year and $1200 per year after that?”
“Yes, that’s correct.”
“Oh, that’s a lot of money. I need to think about it.”
“Absolutely sir. We’re always available to help.”
“By the way, where are the computers you use for shared hosting?”
“In the U.S. I believe in the city Phoenix.”
“Phoenix? That’s where I live! I thought they were somewhere halfway around the world.”
Myron ended the call and searched on the internet to find the exact location of GoDaddy servers: 1402 Buckeye Drive. Myron stared at the address in amazement. Buckeye Drive was only one street over from his house. The GoDaddy computers were less than ten miles from where he sat.
Myron got in his car and drove to the exact address. He found a large, two-story white building that stretched the length of an entire block. He had driven past the spot hundreds of times and there were no signs to indicate who owned it or what went on inside. He pulled up to a locked security fence feeling practically breathless. His entire world view had changed. He had attributed the joys and pains of his website to some nebulous, faraway cloud, but instead it lived on a computer inside a building down the street. It was like discovering he was related to a politician he complained about.
Myron was so struck by the strangeness of his discovery, he told everyone he knew. A majority of people did not seem surprised. It was no secret to them that GoDaddy was headquartered in Phoenix and kept a lot of their computers in the city.
“How did I miss that?” Myron asked his sister.
“I dunno. But I think our cousin, Gabriela, works for them.”
“Since when?”
“Since forever. Maybe she can help you with your website instead of you making all those calls you complain about.”
Myron and his sister had a good laugh about the situation. He pictured himself calling his cousin’s cell phone instead of the GoDaddy helpline whenever he had a problem. At first the idea was appealing, but the more he thought about it, the more it bothered him. He could not understand why. Then he remembered an adage he used to repeat: “Never do business with a relative.” Myron realized he was more comfortable dealing with a far-off, faceless entity than with someone close to home. When the inevitable problem came up, he did not want to blame and hate anyone specifically, especially someone he might see at the supermarket or at family gatherings.
Myron did upgrade his hosting service, but he did it with one of GoDaddy’s competitors. When speaking to their sales representative, the first question he asked was, “Where are your computers located?”
“Mostly in Texas and Utah.”
“I guess that’s far enough away. Okay, tell me about your dedicated servers.”
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