We’ve been setting up our own hosting for hundreds of clients since 2004. WordPress theme building, fixing and maintaining sites is our specialty. But we can also take care of the hosting side too, allowing us to better optimise site speed, security and traffic potential.
Our fully managed WordPress hosting services are restricted to our own clients and to members of our Auckland WordPress Users Meetup Group obtaining a 15% off our normal pricing. We do not provide hosting to the general public or web designers we don’t know. This is an invitation-only service. We like to get to know our clients first. Talking through their concerns, then matching their budget and performance needs is the goal.
Accelerated – To succeed online, average performance isn’t enough
Check out this excerpt from a developer conference. A review of Amazons popular EC2 [DIY] ‘cloud’ solution and why he moved back to significantly faster, less expensive traditional hosting options. To be fair, he could have been discussing almost any of the mainstream host providers. Regardless of the sales pitch, most large web hosts setup their systems for the average user and average performance. However like most host companies, their sales pitch says the opposite…
As James noted, average or ‘fast enough’ hosting provided by the likes of Amazon, are quite inadequate if you want to really succeed online and keep customers happy. Fast websites will simply retain users better, make more money and rank higher in search results. (Full review video here)
“Performance is not a feature, it’s a requirement…”
Yet most people select a host company on close friends referral or fancy features. But price seems to be the driving factor. Then there’s all that enticing ‘unlimited’ space or domains [which is seldom needed]. Plus the hype around ‘cloud’ hosting not helping, with even experts like the developer above, being sucked in. But nice guarantees, features, freebees or unlimited this and that rarely helps site speed or response times that visitors and Google expect.
And WordPress itself can place big demands on hosts too. Dependent upon your site content, coding and plugins, WordPress can become very resource-hungry as your site grows, slowing it to a crawl. (Large eCommerce or directory sites a special challenge). One client example we reviewed recently – An underpowered host destroyed site speed, Google indexing and traffic potential – Issues that our faster host platform instantly resolved.
Better performance starts with much faster servers
Like your PCs at home, new ones are usually quicker than those you’ve had for several years. More powerful CPUs, more RAM, plus solid state drives (SSD) can make a big difference. These drives especially give an instant boost, up to a 300% improvement over standard drives. Here in NZ, under one per thousand domains are utilsing this ‘new’ technology. Yet this same performance-boosting hardware Apple have used in their laptops for many years.
Better Host Software, Fully Optimised for WordPress
For the ultimate performance, we’ll provide a scalable VPS, local cloud or dedicated server, running php 5.4, Google Pagespeed caching, cPanel as standard, Incapsula (NZ) CDN + security filtering, even NGINX acceleration options, being similar to what WordPress.com use.
Such super-performance, high reliability, high security configurations are not overly costly, yet seldom employed in WordPress sites and never in those cheap shared, reseller or offshore cloud accounts most people signup to.
Fast Hosting + Expert WordPress Support included
Yes, most hosts tell you that provide ‘support’. But they don’t cover the web app you’re using, in this case, WordPress. They don’t (or can’t) sort out specific performance, security, theme or plugin issues.
Our Managed hosting package means we’ll advise and help setup your themes and plugins. We even bundle in Gravity forms for free, as well as stepping in to help if things go wrong or you inadvertently break stuff and your site ends up showing odd errors or a white screen due to a bad theme or plugin you were testing.
The cost? Yes it is 3-4x more than those cheap popular shared hosts like net24, openhost, freeparking, hostgator etc, but the difference can be quite dramatic. Our goal for client sites is a 0.5-2 second page load time, vs an 8-12 second one many sites started with. Sometimes speed is also compromised due to the site content, the way it has been designed and/or the plugins used. We can help sort out these issues too as part of our managed hosting fee. Independent speed test data available upon request.
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