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All of WordPress’ Problems Can Be Solved with Non-Terrible Hosting

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Both of these problems – speed and security – can be solved by investing in innovative, next-generation hosting instead of relying on low-quality hosts.

Two of the biggest WordPress problems are speed and security – and I bet you’ve experienced both of these issues. WordPress is notoriously slow, often due to poor hosting, and it’s the most-hacked content management system (CMS), too.

When a website takes more than 5 seconds to load, 38% of visitors will leave without waiting any longer. In our own testing of almost 1,500 agency websites, we found that every single site took more than 2 seconds to fully load, with many of them taking 5 seconds or longer. To compare, the recommended load time is 2 to 4 seconds, max.

agency performance analysis

 

Overall, these findings are way too slow. By switching to Convesio, you can improve your load time by approximately 160% or more – just like these brands did. Just about every one of these Convesio-hosted sites fully loads in the 2-to-3-second window.

load time improvements

Furthermore, the 2018 Hacked Website Trend Report from Sucuri reported that 44% of WordPress hacks are due to outdated sites – an incredibly easy fix if you know what you’re doing. And on average, a website is attacked 94 times every day.

Both of these problems – speed and security – can be solved by investing in innovative, next-generation hosting instead of relying on low-quality hosts.

Today, millions of WordPress websites are delivering awful user experiences. What could be worse than a super-slow website that spreads malware?! Low-quality hosts are to blame, and they’re doing nothing to solve the problems they’ve created. Luckily, high-quality, next-generation hosts are helping.

We can’t say it enough: you can solve just about all of your WordPress problems (which are also your business problems, if you’re being honest) with better hosting. In this article, we’ll go over cPanel and why it’s a terrible hosting option, talk about the drawbacks of relying on a legacy host and explain how investing in a quality host will help your business as well as the WordPress industry overall.

The WordPress industry needs innovation to grow and evolve, which is why it’s so important to support a premium host that’s doing something fresh. Get behind companies like Convesio, Kinsta and Pantheon, all of which are creating advanced tech and elevating standards to move the industry forward. That’s the only way to solve your WordPress speed and security troubles.

Why You Should Avoid cPanel and Other Low-Quality Hosting

Supporting cPanel or an off-the-shelf shared host only makes hosting more of a commodity – and a poorly-performing commodity at that. These hosts have done very little to make WordPress better, but they’ve done plenty to make it worse. While cheap hosts may make WordPress more prevalent, those websites have huge problems, particularly when it comes to speed and security. Let’s dive in.

What is cPanel?

cPanel is an online interface that serves as a control panel for hosting providers, and the idea is that it’ll make website and server management simpler – but “simple” is relative, because cPanel also comes with a lot of drawbacks. Essentially, cPanel is used by a lot of hosting companies as a sort of default, one-size-fits-all dashboard.

It sounds good at first, though. With cPanel, you can:

  • Manage domain names
  • Publish a website
  • Keep web files organized
  • Create an email account

A lot of hosting companies offer cPanel to customers as a standard part of their service package. The customer is in control of the user interface (typically powered by cPanel), while the host is in charge of the server interface. As the customer, you just see cPanel.

cPanel is prevalent because it is moderately easy to use, has lots of functionality, and can be rolled out by shared hosts at scale. cPanel makes it fairly easy to install WordPress (although it has no loyalty to WordPress — it can also be used to install plenty of other CMS platforms), but it typically just offers you regular WordPress.

If your host uses cPanel to offer you regular WordPress – and nothing more – they’re leaving you high and dry when it comes to speed and security. Remember how we mentioned that WordPress is the slowest and most-hacked CMS? You can undeniably draw a straight line between these problems and low-quality hosting.

What is a legacy host?

Legacy hosts have been around for a long time, which gives the impression of quality. You may think, “They’ve lasted this long, and a lot of clients trust them, so they must be great!” However, many legacy hosts haven’t innovated in all the years they’ve been in business, and while they may still be powering a lot of sites, how well are those sites performing? (Not well at all.) Whether or not legacy hosts use cPanel – and many of them do – they often have the same exact issues: poor speed and security.

Problems You’ll Face with Low-Quality Hosting

  • It’s super slow. Users are responsible for optimizing their site, which they don’t have the experience to do. On the other hand, next-generation hosts know how to do this for you.
  • You have to use caching plugins. This is totally unnecessary, as caching can be built right into the host’s server structure.
  • Uptime is unreliable. According to research from Hosting Facts, downtime takes the average website offline for three hours every month.
  • Support is, at best, antiquated. The “modern” customer support that legacy hosts offer is live chat, which just means long waiting queues. Otherwise, you’ll have to submit a support ticket – and wait who knows how long for an answer, let alone a solution.
  • Pricing is set no matter how much you do (or don’t) use. This means you and your clients will be paying for unused capacity. You’ll have to charge every client the same amount, which means smaller clients will be over-paying.
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About The Author
Tom Fanelli

Tom Fanelli

Over my career, I have worked in both small business and Fortune 500 companies. I have had the honor of being a presenter for organizations like Microsoft, Intuit, Sage Software, RealPage, NARPM, NAA, and the Small Business Administration. Most recently I completed my first ebook, Infographics in Action, which teaches exactly how to create and market with infographics. Currently, I work in San Francisco and reside in the bay area with my wife and four children. Feel free to drop me a line, I would love to hear from you!
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Convesio is not just another hosting provider. Our infrastructure was designed from the ground up for hosting high performance, scalable WordPress sites.

How Does Next-Generation Hosting Fix These Problems?

To put it in perspective, let’s go over next-generation WordPress hosting and highlight how it differs from cPanel and legacy hosting. With next-generation WordPress hosting, you get:

  • Hosting that’s been specially designed for WordPress
  • Better performance, security and support
  • WordPress installation and core updates
  • Pages and page elements that load faster
  • Server-level caching
  • Automatic updates and daily backups
  • Support from WordPress experts

When you use Convesio as your host, you’ll be able to take advantage of top-notch technology like SiteLock, a company we teamed up with to offer advanced WordPress security to our customers. With Patchman from SiteLock, security vulnerabilities are auto-detected and patched. Plus, malware detection is always on, and if malware is found, it’s immediately removed from all servers. Since keeping core, theme and plugin files up-to-date is the best defense against security breaches, if affected files are found, they’re quarantined and then replaced with clean versions. The best part is that your site won’t experience any downtime as all this takes place.

The main difference between low-quality hosting and next-generation WordPress hosting is that your host won’t just be managing the server environment; they’ll take care of the website environment, too. You’ll never find cPanel available with next-generation hosting, either – it’s a one-or-the-other deal. High-quality WordPress hosts use their own control panels, not cPanel. That’s why they’re able to prevent all of those problems that low-quality hosts cause. Your website will be higher-performing than cPanel-run site, and that’s what’s required to deliver a great customer experience.

The Future of the WordPress Industry

Today, hosting innovation is more important than ever. By continuing to give your business to the lowest-cost provider, like one that relies on cPanel instead of a quality platform, those hosts get billions of dollars and still don’t have to innovate or make WordPress hosting a priority. Hosting is a $100 billion per year industry, and a whopping one-quarter of that is going to shared and VPN hosting. If even 10% of that $25 billion were reallocated to modern, innovative WordPress businesses, there’d be a tremendous and positive effect on the industry as a whole.

Support a premium host that’s already going above and beyond the standard to create a new (and greatly improved) industry standard. Companies like Convesio, Kinsta and Pantheon are creating differentiated tech that is moving the industry forward. If you want to see the WordPress industry – and your own business – grow, it’s time to support hosting companies that believe in evolution and modernization.

Final Thoughts: Put Your Trust in a Premium Host and Solve Your WordPress Problems

When it comes to cPanel, they have no loyalty to WordPress; they’re not all-in on WordPress in the way that next-generation hosting providers are. Furthermore, if you’re only able to pay for low-cost, shared hosting, you’ll be faced with a ton of problems, including lots of downtime, extremely slow websites, and difficulty when migrating to another server.

When it comes to the snail-like pace with which your websites will run, that isn’t just something that will impact the front-end – it’ll cause you a headache with the backend, too. It will take forever to backup or edit the sites, and you’ll watch the minutes tick by as you try to install plugins.

The cure for all this is switching from the low-quality hosting you’ve been struggling with to a next-generation host that’s already fixed these issues.

At Convesio, we’ve done a ton of work to ensure your websites stay safe and continue to serve visitors. Benefits of working with a quality host include the following:

  • Built-in caching means faster caching – and faster-loading pages.
  • Scale your site when traffic surges, then back down when traffic subsides (and pay accordingly).
  • Isolate each website so that if one has a problem, it won’t affect the others.
  • Trust that the latest security protocols are used (encryption, firewalls, etc.).

Plus, Convesio doesn’t charge separately for enhanced security protection – it’s included in our standard package. We take responsibility for your website’s security, and we’ll fix it no matter what it takes. We also make sure that every customer has cache and speed-enhancing technology as part of their plan, which is why we include must-have tools like Cloudflare into all of our packages.

Once you iron out the wrinkles, offering hosting can be a big benefit to you. Not only will you close clients who are looking for the full package, but offering hosting means recurring revenue, even when the site doesn’t need regular content or design updates. There’s a lot of stability that comes with that, even as your other projects and workload ebb and flow.

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About The Author
Tom Fanelli

Tom Fanelli

Over my career, I have worked in both small business and Fortune 500 companies. I have had the honor of being a presenter for organizations like Microsoft, Intuit, Sage Software, RealPage, NARPM, NAA, and the Small Business Administration. Most recently I completed my first ebook, Infographics in Action, which teaches exactly how to create and market with infographics. Currently, I work in San Francisco and reside in the bay area with my wife and four children. Feel free to drop me a line, I would love to hear from you!
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