WordPress Hosting

Web hosting is where your website ‘lives’.

What is a web host?

A ‘web host’ provides the little bit of the internet where your website is stored. Your website is stored or ‘hosted’ in a web server often along with numerous other websites.

A web server uses a variety of software layers to connect your website to the internet and make it functional online.

WordPress hosting typically uses these systems:

PHP (a programming language) and
MySQL ( a database system),
WordPress Web Servers use Apache, an ‘open source’ web server system, and mainly use
Unix although there are some that use Microsoft web servers.

This typical configuration for WordPress is often referred to as a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) software stack.

Dynamic Web Server Resources

We use Cloud servers for WordPress Hosting. After years of using traditional web servers with WordPress, we have moved to Cloud Servers as they provide more robust performance features that simply can’t be matched by ‘normal’ web servers.

The cloud servers we use can dynamically increase their resources to support traffic peaks in your website. This elastic resourcing capability ensures that when people visit your website, they have a great experience. Importantly, this consistent performance level also means Google has a good experience when it visits to check on your website. As a result this will improve your website’s Google performance as well.

The traditional server is physically bound by the performance of the computer it’s running on. It may attempt to ‘balance’ resources, by throttling back some websites operating on it. If this happens to be your website, it will run slower.

Australian Web Servers

Apart from supporting Australian service providers, there’s a much more pragmatic reason for using Australian based servers: Performance and reliability.

International servers don’t have to use international cabling and infrastructure to connect with the primarily Australian website visitors that our client’s site usual target.

Internet traffic has to share these international cables, so they do tend to be busy an at times there can be congestion slowing your visitors experience with your website. Data transitioning through the inter-continental infrastructure also has inherent delays that get multiplied because of the multiple communications equipment the traffic passes through to load a web page(s) in your website.

Eliminating these delays by locating the web servers in Australia improves the overall communication performance between your Australian clients and your website.

US hosting is used by many of our competitions as it is significantly cheaper that Australian-based hosting, but there is this hidden cost of poorer Google performance due to reduced website performance.

Website Speed = Better Googlism

Its also notable that website speed is emerging as a key Google SEO metric, so the faster your site runs the better it performs in Google searches.

Users also vote for speed with their mouse.

Amazon says: “1 second of page load slowdown would cost Amazon 1.6 billion in sales per year”
Walmart says: “When load times jump from 1 second to 4 seconds, conversions decline sharply. For every 1 second of improvement, we experienced a 2-second conversion increase”

Although the hardware is extremely reliable, international connections through submarine cabling and infrastructure does fail or get overloaded from time to time. Using local Australian servers that are interconnected by local equipment simplifies the connection between Australian website visitors and local web servers.

Our competitors tend to minimise this conversation, as international web hosting is considerably cheaper than quality local web hosting services, so there is a price advantage for them to go overseas. Unfortunately, it’s their clients who pay for the disadvantage in term of lost sales.