Table of contents of the article:
Whichever hosting service you look into, you'll always find the usual self-praise with just as many claims of being the best and the leader in the business.
Everyone will be proud of having something more. Each will be the best you can buy.
If there was one that defines itself as sufficient, mediocre, or good, no, they are all the best.
But how do you navigate the vast array of self-proclaimed "best" websites? What should a user who needs to buy hosting for a high-performance website think about? How do you navigate the myriad of strange acronyms like Cache, Object Cache, Page Cache, Indexes, Apache, NGINX, HTTP2, Varnish, Memcache, and so on?
How do we make you understand that you do not have to choose guided by emotion and instinct going from the gut but go to understand some concepts (including technical ones) that allow you to choose with tranquility and competence?
The wrong choices are made because you are not a programmer or a system engineer but perhaps an administrator of some company without a technical background and you simply let yourself be drunk by the words of the salesperson on duty, by advertising videos or by powerpoint presentations filled with lots of chatter without any concept practical.
Choose hosting. Hosting is not a commodity.
Commodity is an English term that indicates a good for which there is demand but which is offered without qualitative differences on the market and is fungible, that is, the product is the same regardless of who produces it, such as oil or metals.
Although one may think that one hosting is the same as the other, this is not true at all but only the result of healthy unawareness and ignorance in the most etymological sense of the word itself.
Methane, electricity, the subscription of your mobile phone and your telephone can be commodities going in fact to offer the exact same function or at least very very similar, hosting is anything but that, especially if you have to hosting sites that require speed and need adequate performance.
Choosing a good hosting that suits your project and your needs means investing to earn more.
Case studies and customer portfolios.
The first macro indicator that should make us think is the customer portfolio and case studies. Although there are many mediocre hosting companies that sell millions of hosting plans to very small and mediocre customers (the classic bloggers or showcase sites) there are very few that have well-known brands of common knowledge in their portfolios and that can boast websites that make tens of millions of unique accesses that generate profits of tens of millions of euros a year.
It is precisely on these indicators that we should pause and ask why a company that, for example, invests one million euros a month for advertising their products on RAI or MEDIASET networks, decides to use a specific hosting provider rather than another.
Numbers and traffic.
Over 100 million visitors per month. These are our numbers. Those of our customers who entrust us with business management for millions of euros.
In this Google Analytics screenshot, for example, you see a blog that generates 31 million visitors from AMP traffic and 53 million visitors from direct traffic, for a total of approximately 85 million visitors per month.
Why are they guests with us and not with other hosting providers?
Sure maybe you may think, that they too will surely have other sites other than this one with equally large numbers as those shown in this screen, but why don't they show them then? Are they humble and don't want to show them? Or maybe they just don't have any?
So, when they offer you hosting services claiming to be the best, ask them a few questions about who their best customers are and what their best traffic performance is , but don't be surprised if they prefer not to respond, boasting about concepts like privacy, or if they reply with local sites that get a maximum of a few million visitors a month.
Perhaps certain traffic spikes cannot manage them all the hosting on the market that limit themselves to activating a hosting with a trivial cPanel, and perhaps when you reach certain numbers the server goes down leaving you with a handful of flies in your hand right on the most beautiful.
Used technologies
If you hypothetically needed a photographer to immortalize an important event such as a wedding, a confirmation, a communion, or simply a corporate photo shoot that required professionalism, what would you think of a photographer who showed up with a compact camera rather than a professional SLR?
You would most likely immediately be wary of those who would present themselves as a professional photographer showing off that yellowish compact camera in the picture and would instead trust those who show up with extremely professional equipment worth several thousand euros.
As much as we want to be virtuous and good at mastering technologies, the right tools alone guarantee half the success.
If you have a WordPress or WooCommerce site and your potential provider doesn't offer these technologies (all together, not just some): Varnish, Memcached, Redis, NGINX, PHP-FPM, it will probably be a mediocre provider and certainly isn't offering you what all those who offer high-performance WordPress hosting use.
We wrote in this article that this software stack is used by organizations such as CNN, BBC, BuzzFeed, and many other international news outlets with millions of hits per day.
The dress does not make the monk (but does say the mass).
It can also happen that suppliers who apparently have all the credentials, they all use a software stack like the one described above and therefore can also pretend to be professionals, in the same way as a braggart professional photographer who has just bought a 10 thousand euro Canon Reflex and a 5 lens and come and take photos of your important event by setting the shooting mode to automatic not having the mastery of knowing how to manage exposure and sensitivity in manual mode or depth of field.
What will come out? All quality photos, but flat, close-ups with no depth of field, no vignetting, no blur or other effects that would surely have been adequate in any noteworthy event.
In short, it is not enough to have and use the right hardware and software tools but also to have the competence in knowing how to configure and use them.
Having a software stack that doesn't update AMP pages or feeds, or sitemaps, is a good software stack that only creates huge damage that can lead to lost traffic, lost sales, lack of indexing, and even the actual death of a website that until recently had 30 million visitors per month, like this one, NOT OUR CLIENT, who thought that managing a server was easy and could be done even by qualified non-systems technical staff.
In a nutshell, this site has lost over 80% of traffic going from 35 million visitors a month to 2 million.
Go from earning € 175 per month to just € 12 per month assuming an advertising RPM of € 5 per 1000 visitors.
Prices ?
If we said that we are the best in the world and that there are only us on the market to offer these hosting services optimized for WordPress CMS we would be great liars and braggart, there are certainly a few other noteworthy realities that, however, have a quality equal to cost. significantly higher.
In fact, hearing a company tell you that what we offer for less than 1000 euros costs them 12 euros suggests the true value of our services.
We talked about costs in this article , when we pretended to be customers and asked for a quote for one of our clients from one of the leading companies in the WordPress Hosting market that uses our software stack.
You do not necessarily have to spend 200 thousand euros a year for hosting, in short, if you have a blog that generates millions of visits per month.
Put simply, choose informed
A decalogue that you can copy and paste when you ask for a quote could be:
- What are your best brands?
- What are the success stories?
- What software stack do you use?
- What prices do you have?
The answer to these questions will already make you understand who you are in front of.
If the hosting company that perhaps made a fortune by selling low cost solutions to customers such as the greengrocer near the house who needs a business card, if in front of the company that follows important and multinational customers on television, or in any case a company able to manage millionaire businesses with the quality that only system experts with decades of experience can offer you.
