WORDPRESS HOSTING
FULLY MANAGED PERFORMANCE WORDPRESS HOSTING
Managed and Maintained WordPress Hosting
Our hosting and maintenance packages are built on secure foundations and incorporate a combination of additional maintenance and security features that we think you won’t find elsewhere.
Our long experience and detailed knowledge of WordPress has taught us how to optimise for maximum performance and how to harden security and make it as difficult as possible for hackers to compromise your website.
In addition to many small tweaks to the WordPress installation, optimising the plugin and theme set up, and file access and permissions, we utilise multiple firewalls and malware scanners to keep your WordPress websites safe.
Everything we do is completely transparent and recorded. Once your site is hosted on our servers, you will receive monthly reports outlining everything that has been done, your site’s uptime and current status.
Servers Built and Configured for WordPress
Most hosting companies don’t configure their servers specifically for WordPress. Apart form the fact that you might be sharing a server with 100s of other sites, you may be in the company of static HTML sites, Drupal sites, Joomla sites, Magento Sites, and any number of other sites built on old or out of date platforms.
Why does it matter?
WordPress has a very specific set of requirements to make it rock. Our servers are configured to make that happen, and we believe that we have the perfect server set up for high-performance WordPress hosting.
Introducing NGINX
Most shared hosting platforms use Apache as their web server. We and a few other specialized WordPress hosting companies use Nginx. But why?
“Nginx was written specifically to address the performance limitations of Apache web servers.”
For speed and performance, Nginx is the obvious choice. It is built to offer low memory usage and high concurrency. Rather than creating new processes for each web request, Nginx uses an asynchronous, event-driven approach where requests are handled in a single thread.
Nginx often outperforms other popular web servers in benchmark tests, especially in situations with static content and/or high concurrent requests, because its roots are in performance optimization under scale.
For speed and performance, Nginx is the obvious choice. It is built to offer low memory usage and high concurrency. Rather than creating new processes for each web request, Nginx uses an asynchronous, event-driven approach where requests are handled in a single thread.
Nginx often outperforms other popular web servers in benchmark tests, especially in situations with static content and/or high concurrent requests, because its roots are in performance optimization under scale.
Performance and Caching
Object Caching
An object cache stores database query results so that instead of running the query again the next time the results are needed, the results are served from the cache. This greatly improves the performance of WordPress as there is no longer a need to query the database for every piece of data required to return a response.
Clients that move to us often see a 50-100% increase in site speed before we have done any optimisation.
Page Caching
Although an object cache can go a long way to improving your WordPress site’s performance, there is still a lot of unnecessary overhead in serving a page request. For many sites, content is rarely updated, and inefficient to load WordPress, query the database and build the desired page on every single request.
Nginx allows us to automatically cache a static HTML version of a page and subsequent requests to the page will receive the cached HTML version without ever hitting PHP or MySQL.
The Company Your're In Matters
Unless your site is a large ecommerce store, the chances are that you will be on a shared server. If you go to any of the household names for hosting, that will undoubtedly be the case, and it’s true at thewppeople too. However, the way we share our servers is different.
Firstly, we have a limit on the number of sites on any server. That limit depends on the type of server and the type of WordPress sites that we are hosting on it, but as a rule of thumb, there will be no more that 20 sites on any server, and often as few as 5.
Secondly, we group similar sites together. We will place a number of sites that are simple brochure sites together on one server, but we wouldn’t place 20 Woocommerce stores on the same server. In fact, we wouldn’t ever place 5 Woocommerce stores on the same server and sometimes we recommend a site has a server to itself.
Keeping WordPress, Themes and Plugins up to Date
WordPress is the most popular Content Management System in the world, and reputedly powers more than 30% of internet sites. Its core software is also entirely free and issued under GNU public licence.
The fact that it is free is a huge factor in its popularity however it also makes it attractive to hackers. Over time vulnerabilities are discovered that could potentially be exploited by hackers, and software is released to patch these vulnerabilities, and it is vital that security updates are patched.
Although many themes and plugins are premium (paid) software, over time they also release patches to deal with potential vulnerabilities and also add features and improve performance.
All software on a WordPress website should be kept up to date to:
- Keep your WordPress site secure
- Benefit from new WordPress features
- Provide faster WordPress / better performance
- Ensure a bug-free WordPress website
- Futureproof compatibility
At thewppeople we carry out updates daily. Any security releases are patched to all the sites which we look after immediately, and all other updates are rolled out over a 24 hour period. Often a major software release has bugs and we generally wait for bug fixes before applying to all sites.
At the end of every month, you will receive a comprehensive report detailing everything that we have update on your website and confirming uptime.
How will you know that we are keeping your websites maintained and secure?
Simple: Reporting.
As part of our onboarding, we install software on all WordPress websites that we look after which records every action that we take on your site and more, every change made and every update completed. You will receive a monthly report which tells you:
- What plugins have been updated and when.
- What themes have been updated and when.
- What updates to the WordPress core have taken place and when.
- What backups to cloud storage have been taken.
- The uptime for your website.
Separately you will receive a Virusdie report confirming that your site is clean, and confirming threats that have been found and cured in the period (if any).
Insurance for Your Website
We believe that this combined package is essentially insurance for your website.
You probably insure your laptop, your mobile phone, and even the chair you’re sitting on is probably insured somewhere. And yet you haven’t insured the tool that brings you business, that magnetically attracts leads, and in the case of Ecommerce businesses, actually pays you your income.
Isn’t it time you did?