Tag: speed

What is managed hosting?

Managed hosting is a common marketing term many web hosts are now using. It means different things to different people, but let’s explain what it means to you as our customer.

  • People. The person who you interact with will personally have the access and authority to resolve or action your request. None of our support is outsourced.
  • Product. We’re not just providing you a hosting service, we are providing you a fully managed product. You tell us what you need, we make it happen. For example you may ask: “Please duplicate this existing website of mine to a new location” or “I need a new WordPress site setup on this domain”. We do the rest.
    We don’t just give you what you asked for, we go further and setup our tools to give you what you need (as well as what you asked for) not only caring for your current needs, but also anticipating what you will need in the future.
  • Systems. We have systems in place to proactively monitor, audit and resolve any security and website issues. This is in your best interests as it means less problems (or none at all) with your websites. We know of any issues and resolve them before you even notice.
  • Speed. We want you to have the fastest loading website you can. We work with you to optimise and setup our custom caching and speed solutions. Some of these may include CDN, NGINX, FastCGI, Redis Database query caching.
  • Security. The internet is a dangerous place, so we have setups that automatically block bad traffic and malicious login attempts and well known hacks.
    We monitor live certain key files on your website to ensure that none of them have been modified without your knowledge. We update your website and any plugins (WordPress/Joomla) for you. This isn’t a paid add-on, we offer it free for all customers.
  • Backups. You’ve heard of them, have you had to use them? Was it easy? We provide free off server backups to you, so you have access to them at the same time we do. We provide you a tool in your website that allows you to restore from these backups at any time.
  • DNS and Domains. We provide a fully managed DNS service to you. You don’t have to understand DNS to work with us, we will look after it all for you. SPF, DKIM, DDNSEC, CNAME, AAAA, SSL etc, we know all this so you don’t have to.
  • Flexibility. There is no one size fits all solution, so we will tailor the hosting solution to meet you and your customers needs. As your site grows, we grow with you.

Read further details on our Cloud Server offerings here. Contact us for a custom quote.

Make WordPress Speed with a CDN

WordPress is a great piece of open source software that powers millions of websites. Not only is it simple to install, but adding and managing your own content is easy. Perhaps your own website runs WordPress already.

One of the easiest things to adjust with WordPress is to improve the page loading speed. Why should you care about this? Well for one, your Google ranking could be affected if your website loads slowly. Using a CDN can make a huge difference, perhaps as much as a 50% increase in site loading speed.

What is a CDN?

According to Wikipedia, a CDN or Content Distribution Network, is a global network of servers setup to serve your content in a high performance manner. It literally means that much of your website content, instead of being loaded each time from your server (which is usually located in a single location), will actually be loaded from a server or network very close to the website viewer. This is a good thing! This is something you should want for your own website.

How hard is it to setup?

It’s simple. Using a single plugin on WordPress, we can configure and implement a CDN in less than 30mins. While this is something you can probably configure yourself, you may need some help. Thankfully, this is something we can assist you with.

What about the costs?

It only costs a few cents per month! Even for a very busy website, just a few $$’s a month will be enough to run your own CDN. Using for example, Amazon Cloudfront (which is what we use on this website) you can see the costs listed here.

What if you don’t use WordPress

A CDN can still be setup just as easily for any website. We may cover more specifics in a future blog post.

 

Do you want to know more? Please let us know in the comments and we’ll be happy to answer your questions. Do you want us to help you setup a CDN for you? Contact us for more details.

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