You just know there’s a problem with your client’s site. And they’re upset, so you’re going to have to drop everything and spend hours fixing it. Like other agency owners, this was my reality a few years back. Unexpectedly being called in to fix client sites on weekends when hosting failed and sites went offline. It was frustrating, to say the least; it was both a pain to deal with and damaged our relationships with clients. We struggled with Managed WordPress Hosting that didn’t meet or understand our needs.
As I wrote about last week, I went on the hunt for “unicorn” hosting that could provide what I need to support my clients’ sites. I wanted to host that was redundant, provided managed backups. And could scale without costing an arm and a leg. I didn’t want to pay $400+ per month just for one site!
Ultimately, I couldn’t find a solution that provided all of these things while also guaranteeing high availability. I didn’t want to drop everything to fix client sites anymore.
So I set out to build it myself. The result is Convesio, the first scalable WordPress hosting platform powered by Docker containers.
Our platform solves the problems agencies experience with other Managed WordPress Hosting in two revolutionary ways: best-in-class caching, and removing single points of failure in WordPress.
In this post, I want to tell you more about the technology we use at Convesio. And how we deliver the unicorn hosting I wish I had years ago.
Best-in-Class Caching — No Plugins Required
Speed can make or break a website. The reality is, nearly half of web users expect a site to load in 2 seconds or less. And are likely to abandon sites that don’t load within 3 seconds. Google recommends that sites load within 2-3 seconds, and uses real-world site speed as a ranking factor.
These stats are nothing new. The fact is, ensuring your site is lightning fast is essential — sites that can’t keep up risk losing traffic, conversions, and search rankings.
But actually, achieving fast page speeds? When you’re running an agency and you’ve got a lot on your plate, it’s tricky and time-consuming to optimize a large number of client sites.
Caching plugins for WordPress can help improve your client sites’ performance, boosting page load times and the ability to serve much more traffic without degradation in performance. But as your client sites grow, there will come a time when caching plugins are simply not enough. They can’t totally be relied upon.
All it takes is a spike in traffic. If a blog post goes viral, or a client has suddenly blown up on social media, the concentrated burst of traffic can bring their site to its knees. Caching plugins often buckle and don’t offer the reliability agencies need. In the space of a few hours, a huge success can quickly turn into a performance disaster. And that would be your fault.
Every managed WordPress host claims to be the fastest and claims to offer cutting-edge technology with the best uptime. But in my experience, they don’t deliver on these promises — believe me. This kept me up at night when I was running my agency.
Convesio is different. We’ve built caching into our hosting at the platform level, ensuring your client sites load each and every time, and with lightning speed.
Our caching is completely custom built and designed for WordPress from the ground up. It’s served on the edge of the infrastructure, outside your container. Best of all, no resources are required from your WordPress install.
This means you can say goodbye to caching plugins. Convesio takes care of your caching for you. So you no longer have to waste time configuring caching plugins or pay monthly fees for premium solutions.
With Convesio, the front-end of your client sites are delivered via a custom-built caching layer in the load balancer. From the Convesio dashboard, you can easily manage static and dynamic time to live settings and use regular expressions to control page-level caching.
Our custom caching ensures your client sites are fast, and at the same time removes the unnecessary complexity that agencies face when optimizing client sites.
“No More Single Points of Failure in WordPress”
Caching is just one part of the WordPress hosting picture, and it’s a legacy part of that picture that creates a single point of failure. If your cache breaks, your whole site breaks. Agencies shouldn’t have to put up with single points of failure, and caching isn’t the only one.
Indeed, the biggest problem with WordPress isn’t in the platform itself, nor how we use it — it’s how we host it. Obviously, when you’re managing client sites, you want to avoid shared hosting. Most cheap shared hosting will have thousands of sites on each server. If any one of these sites goes viral, gets hacked, or falls victim to a DDoS attack, every site on the server is affected.
Then there’s VPS hosting, which has become the workaround solution for higher-end hosting providers. And is typically what Managed WordPress Hosting provides. With a VPS, your client sites are isolated from other sites on the server and not reliant on the mutual resources common with shared hosting. While a VPS will protect your sites from many of the problems inherent in shared hosting, it doesn’t fix everything.
For example, a VPS doesn’t protect from hardware failures, nor can it protect a site from slowdown due to the VPS being overwhelmed by another site’s traffic. The vast majority of VPS solutions still run on one server with one database instance — a single point of failure.
Where Convesio differs in its approach to Managed WordPress Hosting to ensure availability.
We actively remove single points of failure that can bring down a WordPress site. So you can finally trust that your client sites are always online.
Our platform uses a container-based approach to isolate your website resources from other sites on the server. Thus protecting you from bad neighbors, just like a VPS. But unlike a VPS, Convesio can instantly spin up new containers — complete with an up-to-date version of your client site — to load balance traffic to your site. Our platform can create containers on multiple servers, sharing the load and eliminating any single point of failure.
We’re solving the single points of failure in WordPress. If your MySQL database crashes, for example, on any other managed WordPress hosting, your client site would go down as you would only have one database instance. On Convesio, each site is powered by a self-healing, redundant Percona database cluster, virtually eliminating database downtime.
In addition to this, and for added peace of mind, Convesio provides automated backups, which you can run on-demand, or at intervals ranging from 3 hours to 15 days.
