hosting

  • Beware of hosting company practices

    I had a troubling exchange with a hosting company yesterday that I feel is worth sharing. A new client with a smaller site has been paying ~$60 monthly for a 4GB (RAM) virtual private server. It’s large for her use (compared to the 2GB server that I run my own sites on). She pays for…

  • Onboarding WordPress VIP Go

    I recently helped migrate a client into WordPress.com VIP Go enterprise hosting. This hosting is for larger sites with hosting budgets starting around $25,000 per year. It’s an opinionated platform that applies perhaps the greatest degree of WordPress management available. Here’s notes I took on the process: For more details on WordPress VIP, see their…

  • Avoid WooCommerce staging environments

    Over the years I’ve faced lots of problems with staging environments. A cure-all for me has been deleting them and using LocalWP for local sandbox environments. Plus it adds so many useful features! I’m inspired to write this post because to this day I hear technical support representatives ask to try something on staging, or…

  • Big WooCommerce stores

    WooCommerce is known as the leading eCommerce platform for having millions of installations worldwide. It’s had a reputation for scaling challenges. Not any longer! A recent official blog post covered this topic and included examples of six larger WooCommerce stores and a link to the official showcase of sites by category. Scaling is defined there…

  • PHP 7.4 is here and performing well

    WordPress hosting companies are notoriously behind in upgrading PHP – the web service that processes a website’s data and logical code into HTML output. The cost of this delay is enormous in terms of website maintenance and performance. The jump from PHP v5 to v7 was a big one that required software updates and often…

  • Fixing time-to-first-byte TTFB

    Time-to-first-byte (TTFB) is one of the most useful website performance metrics. It’s also one of the hardest to improve. Caching plugins can’t do much for it; actually they contribute to it. Caching plugins don’t fix cache warm-up, authenticated sessions, submissions / processing, and administration. To improve those you need to get TTFB in range. The…

  • Cleaning up your WooCommerce database

    There’s lots you can do to improve database (DB) performance, but each change comes with risks. Always thoroughly test changes in a development environment first before making permanent database changes in production. Growth in data requires a growth in hosting to handle the scale of database size and queries. There’s only so much you can…

  • Speeding-up WooCommerce sites

    Performance is a priority for all website administrators these days. As traffic scales, so too will your performance bottlenecks.

  • Official hosting for WordPress sites

    The WordPress.com Business Edition hosting service by Automattic could be the best option for hosting your WordPress sites.

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