High-Performance Managed Web Hosting
Website hosting capable of sub-1 second load times.
You likely just spent somewhere between two and fifty grand on a brand new website complete with meticulously written copy, clean code, gorgeous images, and compelling testimonials about your business. You’ve made a real investment in your business to put your company’s best foot forward on the web. The only thing is if your site loads any longer than 3 seconds, you’re going to lose a significant number of people’s attention and with it the chance to win their business.
If you’re wondering why 3 seconds is the magic number for page load time, you’ll see in the chart below that after 3 seconds load time, the number of people which “bounce” off a site goes from 9% for 3 seconds to 38% for 5 seconds.
“From the above graph, we can see that the average bounce rate for pages loading within 3 seconds is 9%. As soon as the page load time surpasses 3 seconds, the bounce rate soars, to 38% by the time it hits 5 seconds!” – from Pingdom’s blog post titled “Does Page Load Time Really Affect Bounce Rate?”
The difference between a site that loads within 3 seconds and 5 seconds is losing 29% of your visitors. Imagine spending $20,000 on a website just to lose 29% of your visitors and subsequently your revenue because your site is slow.
The point is that web hosting is NOT the place to go cheap. Two mere seconds may seem small but it can make a big difference to your top line revenue.
It’s not just about speed either. Keeping your site backed up so you can restore it in case of a server crash, or even just human error is a must. I’ve seen 2 clients delete pages inadvertently.
What I offer to address your business' Need for Speed
Web Hosting is technically a service but what you’re actually buying from me is a result. The result of having a web server that’s secure, reliable, and of course fast.
What you get with my professionally-managed web hosting is nothing short of the state of the art. I use enterprise cloud infrastructure, the same grade and caliber as the Fortune 500.
Truth be told, there are hundreds of datacenter infrastructure providers out there. I’m sure you’ve heard of the big guys like Amazon’s AWS, Google Compute Cloud, or Microsoft Azure. The funny thing is bigger doesn’t necessarily mean faster or cheaper. If you’re looking to save money and get the best bang for your buck when shopping for groceries or clothes, Wal-Mart is probably you’re best bet. That’s not the case with datacenter infrastructure.
Where the big guys excel at is offering a wide array of micro-services. Nobody offers the incredible selection of them like AWS BUT if you need a typical virtual machine to run a webserver with incredible performance specs, they aren’t your best bet.
That’s where Vultr comes in. Vultr is an American-based infrastructure-as-a-service provider.
There are I use the world’s fastest cloud servers from Vultr as our primary web servers in combination with the world’s largest cloud provider (Amazon AWS) for content delivery and site backup storage. Additionally, we use ServerPilot’s industry-leading server management software to configure, secure, and manage our primary web servers.
Keeping WordPress sites fast and secure is not a one-time job either, with our professionally-managed web hosting, we manually perform bi-weekly WordPress, theme, and plugin updates to ensure no errors have occurred during the update process. We also hand-tune your WordPress site with the leading WordPress database optimization software and CSS + JS concatenation software.
Once that’s all done, your site’s content is offloaded to each of Amazon’s data centers across North America and Europe so your visitors download images, videos, CSS, JS, font files, and more all from the closest Amazon AWS data center.
Last but not least, we backup your site 3 different ways. We perform daily off-site database backups as well as monthly off-site file backups. On a server level, we take snapshots of our servers every Sunday night.
My Data Center Providers
Why I Use Vultr for my primary Web Servers
As the old adage goes, your computer is only as fast as it’s slowest component. That component for any user over the age of 30 has always been their storage device (hard drive). Servers are no different as they are still a computer with components including a motherboard, CPU, memory, and storage device.
In the early 2000s, many websites were just static HTML, CSS, and Javascript files. That meant, web hosting servers didn’t require much processing power because all they did was serve static files to client machines (desktop computers, phones, etc.) Today’s websites are built with applications like WordPress which not only require a fair amount of CPU and memory to run efficiently but also a storage device fast enough to load databases from storage into memory within milliseconds. What this means is that WordPress not only needs ample CPU and memory resources but also a high-performance storage device which allows MySQL (database software) to query databases extremely quickly.
While there are plenty of gargantuan virtual server providers out there like Amazon AWS, Google GCP, Microsoft Azure, Digital Ocean, Linode, etc., no one touches Vultr’s performance.
Industry leading IaaS marketplace analyst VPSBenchmarks.com has chosen Vultr five times over as having the fastest VPS on the market.
Technical Information for the nerds
Core Web Server Specifications
- Los Angeles or Chicago-based Ubuntu Linux 22.04 LTS server.
- Software stack is a Linux, NGINX front facing web server, Apache back-end, MySQL 8, PHP 8.x software stack specifically optimized for WordPress
- All servers are configured to be automatically updated with security updates from the Ubuntu security repositories as well as the ServerPilot repositories. These updates are signed with the Ubuntu and ServerPilot GPG keys, respectively.
- Servers kept updated with latest Ubuntu LTS release
- SHA-256 (SHA-2) SSL Certificate from Let’s Encrypt included
- Server size maintained with ample CPU and memory to ensure sub-40% typical memory usage and sub-30% typical CPU utilization for ample headroom
- Server snapshot backups taken every Sunday evening
- Server is configured with an iptables network firewall. This firewall only allows TCP ports 22 (SSH), 80 (HTTP), 443 (HTTPS), and UDP port 68 (DHCP).
MySQL Server Tuning
I use a MySQL Server tuning software called Releem to ensure MySQL runs optimally. While this seems like minor, this plays a critical part in keeping a site performant.
Content Delivery Network Included
- Static site assets (CSS, JS, images, fonts, etc.) offloaded to Amazon AWS Cloudfront Content Delivery Network (CDN) across North American and European data centers for rapid content delivery included
WordPress Application Maintenance Included
- Bi-weekly professionally-performed WordPress + theme + plugin updates included
Site Backup Services Included
- Weekly off-site database backups to Amazon S3 included
- Monthly off-site file backups to Amazon S3 included (on-demand file backups available at no additional charge)
Domain Services Included
- Professional Domain Management Services included
- Professional SPF/DKIM DNS Record Configuration included
Site Migration Services Included
- Website migration to our server included
WordPress Security Modifications Included
- WordPress XML-RPC disabled
- WordPress login URL modified
- Manually confirm WordPress wp-config.php file permissions set to 600
- WordPress Brute Force Prevention plugin installed and configured
WordPress Performance Optimizations Included
- Browser Caching configured
- Malicious WordPress comments auto-deleted bi-weekly
WordPress Database Optimizations Included
- Bi-weekly database optimization includes
- Converting MyISAM tables to InnoDB tables
- Clean duplicate post-meta
- Optimizing database tables
- Cleaning post revisions older than 2 weeks
- Clean auto-draft posts which are older than 2 weeks
- Clean trashed posts older than 2 weeks
- Remove spam and trashed comments which are older than 2 weeks
- Remove unapproved comments which are older than 2 weeks
Google Analytics & Search Console Services Included
- Google Analytics Tracking Code installation included
- Google Search Console Sitemap Submissions Included
- Facebook, Google Remarketing, etc. and other tracking code installation included
Additional Available Services
- Site Malware Remediation Services available
- Image file size optimization services available
- WordPress domain change services available
Pricing
Monthly plan
$75/mo
No contract, month-to-month
Cancel anytime
Annual plan
$750/year
(2 months free)
No contract, year-to-year
Cancel anytime
Let's Work Together!
If you’ve made it this far, I’m guessing you’re at least somewhat interested in working with me. If that’s the case, let me offer this.
I hate being “sold to” just as much as the next guy. Instead, I just try to offer value in my initial consultation in two ways.
- Point out what I think is holding you back (which you probably have some inkling of but want a second opinion)
- Offer actionable advice on how to address these issues.
That’s it. No pressure, no obligation, no spam. If that sounds good to you, let’s chat!