Table of contents of the article:
If we wanted to indicate to a final consumer why a Fast WordPress hosting may be better than a normal WordPress hosting, you will necessarily end up talking about the final results of the investment in the hosting plan.
It matters little to the final consumer of what is “under the hood”, what interests rightly is to measure performance even by eye. A site that opens a page in a second is certainly very tangible and eloquent compared to a site that opens a page in six seconds.
What in some cases can leave you perplexed are undoubtedly higher costs on a high-performance hosting, in which you can easily reach a cost of 50 - 100 euros per month unlike normal hosting, where the average cost varies between 50 and 100 euros per year.
What makes high performance Managed WordPress hosting cost 10x more?
To answer this question, it is necessary to immediately illustrate the business model of those who decide to take up the professional hosting profession. The models can basically be two and both winning if we think that by "winning" we intend to achieve entrepreneurial results with positive balance sheets, important turnover but above all satisfactory profits.
To be clearer, we can imagine two Business models, that of the Mc Donalds fast food chain and that of the Gordon Ramsey restaurant chain.
The first is based on affordable pricing with rather banal food that raises billions of dollars every year selling $ 4 sandwiches.
The second is based on a very high pricing within the reach of a few wealthy people with very exclusive, sought-after food that raises millions of dollars every year by selling dishes at 100 dollars each.
In short, they both work, but with very different characteristics and customers, as well as the dishes served, and certainly the satisfaction of the end customer that you can already guess by looking at the two dishes in the photo:
Different business models, different ingredients, different research, different obsessive care, different places, different sensory experiences, obviously different costs.
In the hosting world it works in the same way, with business models mainly of two types, low cost which punctually means low value, and high performance and high value managed hosting. Let's take a look at the two business models and their pros and cons of each respective model.
Low Cost Hosting
The business model based on low cost hosting has the prerogative of obtaining important economic results by selling many packages at low prices.
To be clear, selling 10 thousand packages at 100 euros a year can be part of a winning Low Cost hosting strategy, bringing a gross income of 1 MILLION euros.
Obviously, in that figure it will not be possible to offer ad-hoc consultancy, optimization of the server, site, tables, and an optimal caching system to obtain maximum performance.
Normally this type of service entice you with advertising advertising they bring you to their site, they put forward a list of solutions with different characteristics and prices, they lead you to add the desired solution to the cart, get paid online with paypal or credit card and immediately afterwards you will receive by email the communication with all the credentials of the purchased service and to follow the relative invoice.
From here on you are alone, you must have the skills to load your site correctly, load the SQL database dump and then try to do an optimization on an infrastructure that already basic DOES NOT OFFER any improvement in the software stack or underlying hardware, with resources often pushed beyond their limits by adopting that bad practice called overselling (of resources) which has the negative effect of making something already slower still slower.
Obviously, for the hoster it is more convenient to be able to put 100 (slow) sites on a single server and make it pay € 10 a year rather than just 20 (faster) and make it pay “only” 2000 € a year.
You often recognize them for approaching them as a Chinese "All You can eat". Offers of the "unlimited" type that promise the moon at very low cost.
The results are often deleterious both for them and for the end customers, that visitors to their sites who are on a slow and cumbersome site that will produce stress and dissatisfaction for the end user who may not complete a purchase and therefore will not make any profits. to the owner of the ecommerce who, seeing a bankruptcy activity, will soon cancel the subscription to the low cost hosting service and therefore also the hoster will lose that customer making the investment in advertising made in order to get an extra customer in vain.
Their LAMP software stack sucks
In 99% of cases, those who do Low Cost Hosting use a LAMP Hosting based on Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. Most of the time provided and managed by control panels such as cPanel or Plesk which help the user to be autonomous in all operations avoiding contacting the hoster and its technical assistance.
This may also seem good, but it certainly does not produce good results in terms of performance and possibilities as these control panels, despite being very articulated, do not really give the freedom to be able to "work in file" to make an ad hoc tuning in terms of performance. On the contrary, they manage to create problems by leaving a wide variety of options (most useless) that randomly clicked by the geek user tend to produce more harm than good such as service failure or even data loss.
To be clear here is one classic LAMP stack of a Low Cost Hosting, observe the banality of a bare infrastructure that it has no caching system to optimize performance.
One would criticize the performance of Apache rather than NGINX as we have well specified in this article .
One would criticize the choice of MySQL over a much more performing Percona Server, but above all one would criticize above all what should be present in a hosting that really works and that in this architecture and software stack (which could have been fine in 2001) today he's not here.
With a few hundred users online at most, there is a tendency to go offline with webserver errors. When Google's spiders pass during the night, the system often returns errors of type 500 due to resource saturation seriously endangering both indexing and its positioning.
High-performance, high-performance Managed WordPress hosting
The high performance Managed Hosting model has the prerogative of obtaining important economic results by selling optimized and managed solutions at higher costs which, due to demand / supply needs, will be sold less than Low cost solutions.
To be clear, selling 1000 Managed packages at 100 euros per month produces an income of 1 MILLION and 200 THOUSAND EURO a year.
In that figure, we will obviously offer ad-hoc consultancy, optimization of the server, site, tables, and an optimal caching system to obtain maximum performance, a triple backup system, active monitoring and very important guarantees. .
This type of service is characterized by the enormous human contact that takes place already in the pre-sale phase to explain well to the customer what is offered and what advantages he will obtain with a solution with certainly higher costs but with performance and quality that are worth much more than the price that the user is willing to pay. In short, the value.
Once the offer has been accepted, normally with an ad-hoc, modular contract for the service options and features subscribed, you enter a "turnkey" type service, in which the user simply delivers the credentials of the old supplier, to leave the new managed service systems engineers with all the migration, configuration, optimization and testing of the new site on the new hardware infrastructure equipped with a very advanced software stack from the point of view of the technologies involved.
Their software stack is very complex and optimized
Compared to the software stack of a Low Cost system based on just 4 components, here we count as many as 20, with specific functions including database level optimizations, static caches, dynamic caches, indexes for full text search of contents such as ElasticSearch and periodic static cache generation.
A similar stack is the flagship of sites that generate really important numbers internationally such as newspapers such as CNN, BBC, ESPN, NY Times that we wanted to mention in this article on the optimization software technologies most used by big brands, and it is also the flagship among our customers with really important generated numbers up to over 100 million visitors per month.
You often recognize them from the customer portfolio which include well-known brands and customers with important traffic in the order of several tens of millions of visitors per month.
They assure you a performance improvement that you can see visually and in the user experience right after the optimization of your site and they guarantee you a very important level of service with guaranteed uptime, and penalties in case of lack of compliance.
In conclusion ?
If you need a mere business card and have no ambition to climb the Google SERPs, to have very fast pages and to have professional assistance and tuning, opt for a low cost service, your business will not suffer. any way and you will also make a good saving at the end of the year that you can squander without too many thoughts on a holiday with your family or in some whim.
If, on the other hand, you need to be competitive online, have fast and snappy sites, have guarantees and the best professional tuning, the advice is to invest in a high-performance hosting. Perhaps you will have the wrong impression of spending "too much" compared to low cost solutions, but that expense is actually an investment you make on your site and your business, aiming to be better than your competitors and reap very important rewards that you they will allow not only the holiday at the end of the year of what you have saved from the investment, but to guarantee you a considerable economic well-being derived from the success of your business that will allow you to feel truly free and satisfied also from the point of view of financial freedom.
The important thing is to have a clear idea of what the two types of hosting mentioned above are or are not. In real life I doubt that you are exchanging a Ferrari for a FIAT Punto, and I don't see why these types of hosting should be confused, their price, but above all their value.
