Adult Site Broker Talk Episode 282 with Brad Mitchell of Mojohost
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 Mojo Host in part one of a two-part interview. There are some upcoming events we'll be attending. December 3rd and 4th, I'll be at Affiliate World Conference in Bangkok. December 7th through the 9th, I'll be sponsoring AW Summit Elite in Ko chang, Thailand. And to start the year right, I'll be in Hollywood for XBiz LA. I hope to see many of you at these events. If you'd like to sit down and discuss business at any of these shows, contact us at adultsitebroker.com. We're proud to announce our latest project, thewaronporn.com. You'll find articles on age verification laws and other attacks on our industry. It's to raise awareness of our industry's plight in the war on porn. You'll find all that and more at thewaronporn.com. Now time for our properties of the week for sale at Adult Site Broker. We have a premium AI companion platform focused on emotional realism and deep memory. Users interact with lifelike companions that remember every detail and respond with real emotion. We have a network of BDSM subreddits. It has over 1.49 million users, over 3.8 million posts, and almost 45,000 comments. There's a porn picture site with both a Web3 and a Web2 domain. The keyword of the domains is one of the most globally recognized in search terms in the world, porn. We have a buyer who's looking for dating and lifestyle sites in Europe. They would also consider other geos. We're offering a strip chat white label. The average user spends 24 minutes on the site. We have a network of interracial reality hardcore sites. The main site has reality hardcore porn with amateur girls as well as some porn stars. There's a unique platform that bridges the gap between mainstream social link services like Linktree and adult content creators on platforms like OnlyFans. They combine a bio link with the ability to send virtual gifts. We're offering a growing free porn gaming site with adult sex games. The site is owned by one of the top entrepreneurs in our industry. And there's a highly active, organically grown Reddit community centered around the stocking and foot fetish niches. For more information, go to our listings page at adultsitebroker.com. If you have any questions, please contact us on our website. Now time for this week's interview. My guest today on Adult Site Broker Talk is our returning champion, Brad Mitchell of Mojo Hosts. I just stole that from Bill Maher. Brad, thanks for being back with us on Adult Site Broker Talk. Hey Bruce, pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me again. That's four times, Brad. You're very brave. I thought the third time was a charm, so... It was a charm. We'll see if I can be charming again for a fourth. You always are. Brad's the president of Mojo Host, a world leader in hosting for more than 26 years. Under his leadership, Mojo Host has become a trusted partner to over 3,000 adult companies worldwide. Update me if my numbers are off at all. Delivering unmatched reliability and service while always leading by example. Today, Mojo Host is trailblazing the future of adult tech infrastructure with its new Mojo AI offerings while continuing to set the standard in cloud hosting, content delivery, and high-performance servers. With state-of-the-art facilities in Michigan, Florida, and the Netherlands, and a talented team of nearly 60 professionals, Mojo Host stands as the industry benchmark for innovation, performance, and support. Brad's leadership and dedication have been recognized with more than 70 adult industry awards, celebrating his honesty, hard work, and Mojo Host's commitment to excellence. Beyond business, he plays an active role in shaping and supporting the community, serving on the boards of the ASACP and Pineapple Support, while also being a proud supporter of the Free Speech Coalition. With a legacy of trust and a future defined by innovation, Brad and Mojo Host continue to embody the standard of That's Good Mojo. Brad, Mojo Host has been a leader in hosting for over 26 years, and now you're really trailblazing with Mojo AI. Can you share your journey of discovering an AI? What inspired you to enter this space? And how do you see Mojo AI shaping the future of adult tech infrastructure? Well, Bruce, that is quite the introduction and a terrific first question. So, you know, my journey with AI has been, I would say, kind of a cautiously long one. I think like everybody else in the world, we understand that we're at the dawn of something new and different and the world's changing in ways that's very important. It's definitely a paradigm shift. And so, you know, being a technologist and a web host, obviously, this is right up my alley. But it's not easy to be a web host and have so much servers and infrastructure and keep the business decisions balanced with, you know, revenue and profits. So for quite a while, I've been sitting on the sidelines and trying to be studious, watching other companies playing in the space with service offerings and hardware. But, you know, for me, really, I think some of the most interesting and exciting parts of my journey is just when I'm connected with clients and I can see the things that they're either doing with it or dreaming about doing with it. And when we have that opportunity to go to conferences, it's no time like the present because there's so many different conversations and so many new people to meet and so many more new ideas. Yeah, so basically I kind of latched on to a couple different entrepreneurs that have been developing products and services using AI. And by when I say latched on, I don't mean I'm nipping at their heels or following them. But, you know, it's been like keeping and staying an active conversation. Right. So, you know, there's one gentleman in particular, young, brilliant. And so we befriended each other pretty quickly through some Moja host clients as shared friends. And honestly, the conversation, I saw two different opportunities. One was, I think he was, he's at a very interesting business crossroads with his own journey, which was longer than mine and far, far deeper with having developed and launched product. But it seemed like he could really have benefited. I found myself giving him some advice, and then that turned into some regular calls where I was kind of happy and excited to be doing some business coaching. You know, like, tell me what you're up to. What are your challenges? What are your goals? You know, tell me what's really going on. on behind the scenes. And, you know, if I can help you in any way, I'm happy to do that. So I did that. And then, you know, before, long before we announced having any relevant product or service for AI, I had some different and specific inventory in hand. And so what I had done earlier on was I assigned some of the different hardware to a bunch of the companies that were already clients or that were already friends of mine so that they could experiment so that they could run benchmarking and tests against other hosting providers so that I could get feedback. And, you know, really it was in learning about what their journey is and what their frustrations were with other companies that helped me more confidently formulate like a plan for Mojo Host and I guess what we're calling Mojo AI. And so once I knew that I could lend value to the situation, then I set out on my mission to productize it. So, you know, when you first look to bring a product to market and hosting and we host, we have a full suite of products, right? So cloud, content delivery, storage, servers, multiple locations, lots of technology, support, all of those different things. But when it came to this, I realized that the numbers were very different. And I'm also sort of as a hobby, you know, I'm very I'm active in the stock market and I like to read the news a lot. So I'm a real avid reader of articles and the news and researching other companies. And so in all of that, you know, if you read any financial news, everything is AI this, AI that for, you know, the last couple of years in the news cycle. And then obviously all the crazy numbers we see in the stock market. And so as I was crunching the numbers, I knew there was more for me to figure out because I know how to work with banks. I can go and borrow money and buy servers and buy GPUs and all these different things. But what I needed to convince myself of first was that if I did that, A, can I sell them? B, can I make money? C, but really to do A and B, you need to be something different than what already exists in the marketplace. Of course. I think that's the biggest mistake other companies make. They just do it because others are doing it. And they don't come up with a unique selling proposition. Well, and I see a lot of that in the web hosting world. I mean, I've been doing this for 26 years now. And as you know, there are tens of thousands of companies that sell or resell servers. But really, there's only dozens to hundreds, maybe, of companies in the world that are my company's size or bigger. That becomes a much smaller space. And what I immediately realized when I was crunching the math on ROI, and usually in hosting, We look at depreciating assets over five years, so maybe perhaps financing purchases over five years. And what I noticed was that the numbers were very different, but everything made sense to me because what do you have? You have something that's a hot topic. Everybody wants it, right? So it's a super gross space. And what happens when the world changes in a way like that is you have a lot of startups and private equity and other companies that pump money into ventures that don't make money, but that have product and sell products. So what I very quickly realized is that the margins and the space of selling a GPU compute are very different from hosting. And it's not really surprising because when I looked at the space, what you see is a lot of companies that are essentially web hosts, but they don't have all of the other, they're not selling web hosting like web hosts do. They basically, they rent GPUs. So within that, I knew that we could really bring a lot more to the table because as a web host for 26 years we're just simply adding a new product line how are the margins different are they better are they worse they're worse okay they're worse because really what you have in it in a gpu is a is a product with a shorter life cycle so they will work and function on the shelf and they will have but they will have like a depreciating like a lessening value so like when the newest latest greatest comes out in year one it'll rent for its highest number, you know, and then perhaps two, three, four, and five. It's like a very much a sliding scale. So you got to be careful how much you buy. Correct. And you've got to understand how they're going to be used, you know, how they'll be given back to you, you know, are you going to have clients sign contracts to use them? And so I basically felt, ultimately, I felt comfortable enough to make our own investments. And so, you know, that's what I guess has led me to today, which is more the official start of my Mojo AI journey, where now we have product. It's live. We're ready. We're selling. And I'm excited for what's next. Yeah, I remember we talked, I don't know how many months ago. I want to say about six, seven months ago. And yeah, you said, yeah, I've got a call. I just had a call with somebody selling GPUs. And I said, were you going to do it? You said, no, I don't think so right now. And then not long after that, the PR came out about you offering Mojo AI. And I'm like, ooh, that was fast. Well, you know, if you give me a problem, I'm going to figure out how to solve to it and probably in record time. So the really interesting thing about GPUs, by comparison to all of the other products that we offer as a hosting company, is that they use so much power. So for example, if I said I'm going to buy something today and today it's going to rent for, I'm just going to make numbers up. Today it's $1,000 a month. Next year it might be $750 a month. The year after that it's going to be $500. The year after that maybe it'll be $300 or $250. Well, so the one thing that hasn't changed during the whole life of the product is how much power and cooling it requires in the data center. So that's a constant. And the cost of that, it's not as simple as what's the cost from the power company. It's that plus your multiplier of how much power does it take to cool it. And then really what it is is, well, you know, how dense is your data center? What did that cost to build? Because the data center part wasn't free, right? So the good news is I didn't realize I was making such a smart decision when I built my own data center. But, you know, we started doing that in 2019, 2020 and brought it online shortly thereafter. And I built a very state-of-the-art data center with really high power efficiencies and tremendous cooling and using all of the best technologies. So we're really in a perfect position to go into this green space and bring something new to the table. That's cool. Another question. As new iterations of GPUs come out and they improve, does the power that they draw go down? No, it doesn't. So that's at least not that I've seen yet. So yes, of course, there are differences between different GPUs, but from one generation to the next to the next, unlike CPUs, it's not really working that way. They're not as energy efficient. They are the same energy efficiency. Okay, got it. Well, and I think at this point, you know, like NVIDIA, for example, has such a leader in the market with, I'm not exactly sure the market share, probably 80 to 90% of all GPUs being sold. The way that most people are using AI, they're kind of locked into using NVIDIA technology because of CUDA, which is proprietary, right? So unlike the processor wars for CPUs for the last many decades, it's not the same Moore's law that is applying here. There's not the competition. They're focused on making tangible improvements from one generation to the next. And they're certainly working on power efficiency, but it's not the case that they, like when you get the next GPU, yes, it's faster, but maybe it's using the same power as the one before. That makes sense. Do you see them having a major competitor anytime soon? Well, I think what the stock market's been gambling on is that AMD will very much be that competitor because really they're producing fabulous technology. I'm a big fan of AMD CPUs and all of our latest generation equipment is all powered by AMD. It's not powered by Intel for the last few years. So I think competition breeds better product for the consumers. And I hope to see them successful because that would just make it better for the world, better on pricing. Competition is healthy because, you know, right now I think what you've got is you've got a company that's riding on very, very, very, very, very, very high margins. It's a virtual monopoly right now. Well, because we're recording all of this, you know, I very much appreciate the partnership that we have with them. I don't know that I would necessarily call it that, but they have the best product on the market. And this is what everybody is developing on. So, of course, people look to them to lead. Okay. Okay. We'll leave it at that. So when introducing Mojo AI with new GPU server hardware and offering AI SaaS software solutions, what surprised you most about the challenges of developing meaningful AI solutions for your clients? And how did your experience in hosting guide you through that process? So I was really surprised to find out that a lot of these web hosts that are renting GPUs aren't very talented web hosts. Did that really surprise you? Well, a little bit because they have so many more zeros behind their company than mine does. I mean, we're not a small company. Oh, so these were large companies. Yeah, there's a lot of very large companies. I mean, you've got lots of different groups throwing hundreds of millions of dollars or, you know, obviously the biggest companies are throwing billions at it. But I was really surprised to see that there were some very core failures, in my opinion, like network performance, for example. I hadn't imagined with all of the complexity of things to solve that in our own real world testing, my clients would A, B test Mojo Host to other providers to find that the throughput from my servers and through my network was up to 10x faster. I don't know how they're doing their network engineering, but clearly there's some things they haven't figured out. You know, I think What else surprised me is that there's a lot of capable web hosts, but that more of them aren't actually selling GPU and AI solutions. Because it seems like that would be the natural place to add, you know, when you've got success in this realm of providing service, like it would make sense that you would want to add in a product line. But I think really what happened is there's just an awful lot of other startups and less experienced companies doing this because, frankly, it doesn't matter if those entities ever make money. Those operators and investors will make money from the stock market. That's how they get their payday, not by actually having a positive EBITDA. You know, and I think the last thing I would say on that, you know, when we start talking about SaaS or software as a service solutions is I was surprised, you know, and I think I had a lot of conversations at even some of our industry trade shows when I was meeting different companies that were marketing solutions as being AI or AI powered. A lot of it was really lipstick on a pig. You know, there's a lot of companies selling product that didn't actually do the real engineering work, you know, to ground up build or, you know, they're putting wrappers around things that they don't understand that aren't well thought out that isn't ultimately quality product. That doesn't surprise me. Everybody's looking for the next big thing and they don't necessarily do it right. Yeah, but you can't blame people for hustling, right? are trying to be early to market and maybe they've got a product that's not the greatest. But I think that there's a fine line between overselling things or describing them inaccurately. It's certainly something we've never done, but we're known for good integrity. Yeah, absolutely. So I guess in part of my journey, a lot of the differences between good AI and not so well done, those were really highlighted to me by the guys that are working all night writing code that have product. Like when they stop to show me and give me demos and say, well, see, look, mine does this, this, this, this, this, and these other products, they don't do these things or they're not maybe as safe or compliant. And that's very much of a concern to me because I think in all of the use of AI, whether it's for entertainment or in other applications, I believe governance is extremely important. And I think it's especially important when we're talking about sensitive adult material or whether it's for copyright or for child safety or anything else in the realm. I mean, even using a simple example of there's a lot of different AI personality software conversational things for entertainment. Yeah, don't I know. Just look at my listings. Yeah, I mean, but it's certainly the case, and I'm sure you're very well aware that if there were a performer or creator that was trying to use one of these outside services to increase their revenue by using some assistive AI for chatting or for other purposes, they would probably be mortified if they saw where there aren't guardrails that should have been there. Because everybody's a real person, right? And has likes and dislikes. Well, theoretically. Well, theoretically, right? But even in the celebrity space, right? So there's probably a uses. And it would certainly be the case that people would want to put walls around the kinds of conversation that could or could not be had in their name. That's really important. So in that way, I'm learning all the time and I've seen some really impressive product. And so when we talk about a Mojo host AI SaaS marketplace, what that is, and it's new and I'll be discussing this at the show's coming up. I look forward to it. It's on my calendar. Have you seen what Lightspeed AI is doing? Yeah, actually, we're in pretty regular conversation. Oh, I'm sure. Steve's a throwback, man. We're all veterans, you know? We're all veterans. We had lunch last time I was in Arizona. I'm sure we'll do it again in the spring. Oh, hey, something else that's burned a question from your last answer. You were talking about public companies. Do you ever see a day where Mojo goes public? You know, it's possible. Don't forget those friends and family shares, Brad. So it's not something that we're working on currently, but what I've always strived to do year over year is to up our game and be prepared and ready for the future. And in the ways that we can do that now, and we're doing that. So, you know, this year, for example, we're actually going to change by the end of the year from cash-based accounting to gap rural accounting. It's just different accounting standards. So it's not something that's required of a U.S. company unless revenues are beyond 20 million. And we're not quite there yet, but we're not really that far away. That is so awesome, Brad. I'm so proud of you. I've known you for so long. To hear those kinds of things, it just blows me away because I knew you when. And I'm proud of my friends who are successful. And God, you've been successful. Well, I appreciate that. And I appreciate your support over the years. We're not that large, but if things continue to go as they will, perhaps this year we'll do 13 or 14 million, which is, I think, a pretty respectable number. And I think it was almost three years ago, we started the very cumbersome process of achieving SOC 2 Type 2 compliance, which is for accounting and business practice standards and security. And so those are the kinds of prerequisite, that and the accounting and some of the other things, or some of the prerequisites that someone would want to have to do bigger and more business. And so I have a little bit of a vision for that, but I'm also, it's important to me to enjoy the journey. Yeah. You don't want to be beholden to shareholders or a board of directors. I was talking to somebody today who is, and it's not a good situation at times. That's unfortunate. Well, it can be very difficult. It's certainly anyone who's ever been in a partnership knows that that can be very difficult. I know for a very long time, I've had multiple business partners over the years and I'm in a good place now as the sole owner at Mojo. But I'm open-minded to it. And like I said, I'm not specifically on that journey, but I have a vision for it. And if part of my Mojo AI endeavor, if that were to get more air under its wings, really anything's possible. I'm sure you'll do it well. You shared with me that you've made a serious investment in new hardware. So what does that mean to you? How much money did you spend on it? What are the risks? What is Monahadrohost doing differently and better than the rest to compete against giants like AWS and Runpod? Yeah, this year it was a little bit capital heavy. Not a little. I mean, a lot. So on to about three and a half million in new hardware. And, you know, that's not a small number. I mean, really, in the scheme of things, just to give some perspective, I would say, I don't know the exact number, but since I started in late 2019, buying infrastructure items for the data center, before I even had a plan, I was putting orders in for generators. But, you know, really in the last five years, you know, we've spent more than 20 million, you know, to build a data center, buy servers, new network, all these things. And so, you know, the investment this year was significant because, you know, as somebody who manages to the bottom line, I feel very responsible to all my employees for the success and health of the company. So I wanted to be very strategic. So it's finally the case that all of the original financing that I did for the data center, one contract at a time, they're all paid off. I built all of this infrastructure on a very short, basically five-year schedule of payments. Most large businesses obtain much longer term 7, 10, 15-year loans through the SBA or through other areas. But I basically took it upon myself to do it in a very unbanked way. And I use dozens of banks. And so for that, I'm real happy. But as it came to be this year, there was a point where my spend was around $2 million. And that was the point at which I said, well, you know, realistically, I can either pay myself and my teams more or we can just take the next step and invest more in Mojo Host's future with, you know, hopefully you put the money out there and then, you know, you hope to bring the cows in from the pasture, right? I'm sure you're not paying yourself much based on everything you're telling me. You'd be surprised. And that's maybe a whole other conversation that I don't want to get into. But I had this. It'll just depress you, right? Well, listen, I'm certainly a very blessed guy. I've got a successful company. But I guess what I would say about pay is that I had this moment in the last few years where I realized I was really getting close to 50 years old and that I had been doing this for so long. And somewhere in my brain, I wasn't really giving myself raises over very long spans of time. And then I had to contend with myself. Like, do I have enough of my retirement? No. I thought I was making a lot of money. Do I make a lot of money? Well, I guess maybe, sure, by comparison to the rest of the world. Not compared to a company that's CEO of a company that's sold or a company that's making $13 million. Well, I don't know. So I guess here's what I do know. I know that Mojo Host is great because I always reinvest in the company and in my staff and I take care of my people. I give very rich benefits and we're very generous in that way. Your people love you. That I know for sure. Yeah, I mean, we're great to our clients. We're great on technology. I'm always looking ahead for the clients, for my staff, for the company. And so, you know, I guess the upside is, is that we are positioned the way that we are today, which is very strong. We've got great product. We have a great team. We have great process. And so we're really ready for any amount of growth that I can bring to the business right now. And maybe we, I don't, I can't honestly say that that would necessarily be the case if I had seen every opportunity to squeeze money out of the lemon for myself and done it. Because in doing that, I would probably have less of the value team that we have today. And you'd pay a lot more taxes. Well, listen, so there's always taxes. So if I do anything well, I pay my taxes. Well, but what I'm saying is if you greatly increase your compensation, you're going to be paying a lot more to the government. Yeah. But my point, though, is I've lived a happy and fulfilling life. I've raised a family and had lots of love in my life. And so I'm thankful for that. And those are the things that matter the most to me. And I'm happy that however the cards have fallen here, the company is healthy and my clients are happy. I believe they're happier than ever. So, you know, we'll see what happens next. And as I'm turning 50 and like, what is this, a week and a half now? Oh, wow. That's a milestone, bro. Can see 70 in the distance here. So 67. So, yeah, that's a distant memory. So you had asked a question to me, what are we going to do different or better to compete against Amazon and companies like RunPod? So, you know, like I said, I basically, I got feedback. I talked to my customers. I talked to my customers that were paying other companies and I asked them what they didn't like about where they were buying, how they were buying and what the experience was. And they told me their complaints. And so I built a product that answered to it. What else do we do different? I'm not focused on fly by night customers that are going to rent GPUs by the minute or by the hour or take up a bunch of technical time, but not really know where they're going. We have a certain set of deliverables. We're really good at delivering them. And I'm making sure that quality is, is, you know, the most important thing. And with Mojo hosts, they're going to get a great relationship. They're going to get people like they can talk to me, they can talk to Natalie, they can talk to James, you know, we've got a wonderful team. And that's very different from the approach online where everything is self-service, nameless, faceless. The larger companies require contracts. You know, we're going to do what we've always done, which is win for our clients. And that's winning for us. So, you know, I don't need you to sign a contract if you want big infrastructure from me. You know, we both need to do what we say we're going to do. I'm going to deliver proper service and you're going to pay your bill. And you're going to do business the right way because, you know, if we get complaints, that's a problem, you know, and we're accountable to that. So you don't have an agreement with your clients? With clients? Well, we have all, we have very, we have, if you go to mojohost.com and you go all the way to the bottom and you click on the legal link, you will see that we have a very rich set of documents. So guided by a massive service agreement. So you base it on the terms and conditions. Service level agreement. But we're not, I've never been in the business of making clients sign one or multi-year contracts for receipt of service. Hey man, if it's good enough for Corey, it's good enough for me. yeah well you know most web hosts don't function that way especially when they're giving you a bunch of stuff but we do because we believe good you know good mojo for us is we're going to follow you all the way up and we're going to be fair and honest the whole way and you know what when you're challenged we're going to show up and if your business ever decreases it's not going to be like pulling teeth to get what you need like we're going to meet you right exactly where you need to be met and big companies just simply don't do that as evidenced by all my suppliers Oh, God. Yeah. Branding and intellectual property have always been a big part of Mojo's story. With Mojo AI, how are you positioning this brand so it stands out in a crowded marketplace? What can you do with AI that will support your core values and your trademark slogan? Also, there are a lot of client education needs. How are you fulfilling those? So my vision came together for all of this after being slow and working at it and thinking about it, not just jumping into buying a bunch of stuff. So what I've done is, and I think by the time that this interview is published, it'll be press released. We have actually acquired Mojo.ai as a domain name. And what I will be doing on that domain, it's still, of course, Mojo Host, but what I'll be doing on that domain is I'll be building out and from even from today's date, it's going to be sometime after September or later that we announce that, that we have the public site ready. But what I really want to do is I want to build a rich educational site that's focused around the AI products and services that we sell that is conducive to supporting a developer community and that has a lot of great educational materials. Because what I'm finding when I talk to, you know, there's so many entrepreneurs in small and medium business that are using these services and they just don't understand why they're having the problems that they have. So some of this stuff just needs to be explained. So, for example, there are an awful lot of companies that are using the lower end consumer model GPUs. Why? Well, they're using those because the truth of it is they had to get repurposed after people stopped using them for Bitcoin mining. Or because, yes, of course they can get the job done, right? But there is a big difference between using consumer GPUs and using enterprise grade GPUs. There's a difference in the silicon. There's a difference in some of the power management. There is a difference in how memory, when we talk about memory, think of RAM, right? So GPUs have RAM, and the RAM in GPUs is absolutely critical. Yeah, and Brad, every time there's a new product, doesn't it leave the old one in the dust? So that's not exactly the case. So I'll explain that in a moment. But I guess my point, though, is that what I was finding in a lot of conversations is some of these really smart people that I met, they didn't understand some very fundamental differences in the hardware. So basically, they were explaining to me, well, Brad, so what I do is I rent this list of GPUs from company A, and every time a server goes down or offline and we're not sure, we basically, we release the server, we give it back through the customer portal, and then we grab a new one, hoping it's on different hardware. Like, well, why would you want to do that? What does that actually cost your business? Customers. Well, right. So how does that change the customer experience or what happens when that happens in the middle of the night when you're sleeping? But, you know, some of the things they just really aren't aware of. I mean, fundamentally, the problem is they use lots of power and they create heat. Right. So what's the problem with using a consumer GPU? Well, the real problem is thermal because a consumer GPU, you imagine you're looking at a PCI card. Right. Think of the green board. Right. It's flat and it's sitting on the motherboard. That's a PCI card, right? So imagine that's a GPU now. So the problem with consumer hardware is it's got fans on the side of the GPU that are blowing air from the side. That doesn't work that way. It doesn't work that way anywhere. Like, you know, heat wants to rise. Cold air wants to fall down. So the first fundamental difference between consumer and enterprise GPUs is that you need front to back air motion. need a blower motor that is essentially taking the coolier that would come in through the front of a server and then bring it through the card and then push it out the back. And so what is on top of the GPU inside of a GPU card, where the blower motor is, is what's like a heat sink, like what's on your computer CPU. So that has a lot to do with what's the reliability, why do those servers go down a lot? And then there's another significant thing, which is that consumer GPUs aren't given error correcting RAM. That means in a dumbed-down way, like 1 plus 1 might sometimes equal 3. So, for example, Bruce, I know you've got as much time on computers or more than me. I'm sure you've seen a blue screen, right? Eh, Macs don't really get those. But anyway, go ahead. Okay, but before you had one of those, did you ever have? Yes, yes, yes. inside a PC. Yeah. So the problem with consumer hardware is that when there is a memory error, it basically freezes. And so the difference between consumer hardware and enterprise hardware and enterprise hardware, all the ones and zeros in the way that it's all put together, it's essentially redundantly designed so that that way it will actually correct the error. But the other thing that will happen is if it does result in like a system failure, It's logging that somewhere. And a piece of consumer hardware, whether it's the actual computer or server that something is in or the GPU card, you're not going to really necessarily know what the error was or even that it was a memory error. So you can't troubleshoot it. So that's why it's really important in a proper hosting environment that everything is enterprise. And that goes for motherboards, super important, you know, the networking cards, the GPU cards. So, you know, one of the other differences is when you're buying enterprise grade GPUs, they have different drivers that work better. And sometimes, no, they don't work better, but they have different drivers. And so there's different expectations placed on those. Yeah. So, you know, in terms of supporting core values, what are we going to do? We're going to do the same thing we've always done. But now we're just going to add, you know, GPUs and other AI products and services. We're going to continue to teach our clients, try to show them the light. Some people, you can lead them to water, but you can't make them drink it. And that's okay too. But the truth of it is what we're looking for is we're looking for the guys and the ladies that are in development with good product or they're coming to market or they've just come to market and now it's getting important because it's either making them money or it's losing them money. And we know that when we do things right, we can show them the way to be better at it. If I can help people make money, that's good mojo. You can help people make money. You make money and everybody's happy. That's what it comes down to, right? Yeah. My broker tip today is part five of how to buy a site. Last week, we talked about how to determine the value of a site, how to negotiate the sale, and how to get to the point of drawing up an agreement. So now you're talking to your attorney and you're having them draft an agreement. What should be in it? Well, your attorney should guide you through the legal side, but here are some considerations to keep in mind from a buying standpoint. what's the date you'd like to close? Make sure you know you'll have the money to either pay the deposit or the entire amount of the purchase by that date. I've had buyers who aren't ready and that just causes issues. Make sure that all of the assets you're purchasing are in that agreement, such as every domain included in the sale, processing and payment accounts, relationships with vendors, all records including 2257 data, software to run the sites, and any other assets such as source code for the sites. Of course, it should spell out any payment schedule if there is one. Who's responsible for closing costs, such as paying for escrow? And there are always terms that are unique to yours in the seller's situation. This assumes you're the party responsible for drawing up the agreement. If the seller is drawing up the agreement, then it's important that you express all of this to your attorney so they can check the seller's agreement see if any changes are necessary. We'll talk about this subject more next week. And next week, we'll once again be speaking with Brad Mitchell of Mojo Host in part two of our interview. And that's it for this week's Adult Site Broker Talk. I'd once again like to thank my guest, Brad Mitchell of Mojo Host. Talk to you again next week on Adult Site Broker Talk. I'm Bruce Friedman.
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