FAQs

Here are 7 facts that highlight our differences compared to other web hosts:

• eCommerce-focused: Convesio doesn’t offer cheaper, less powerful shared hosting plans. They are focused primarily on eCommerce, membership, LMS, and other business-critical websites that benefit from dedicated resources and support.
• Sites are crash-proof: With Convesio’s auto-scaling feature, a site can automatically handle huge amounts of unexpected traffic without slowdowns or crashing. This is called “The Shark-Tank Effect” – and Convesio has actually hosted businesses that went on the Shark Tank TV show.
• Convesio grows with customers: Convesio can scale with a business as their site gets more traffic. Convesio hosts everyone from new eCommerce stores to established businesses with millions in monthly revenue.
• Docker-based infrastructure: Convesio is built on Docker containers, an innovative new technology that allows for quickly launching new versions of an application – like a WordPress website. This makes it easy to scale your site under heavy amounts of traffic.
• Technical experts: the Convesio support team is made of domain experts with decades of experience in scaling and optimizing server infrastructure.
• Slack-based support: Convesio doesn’t start with a support ticket system or knowledge base. Instead, you can contact us directly via Slack chat, 24/7/365. This makes it super easy for us to jump in and fix any issues.
• WordPress + PHP: Convesio supports WordPress and other PHP technologies like Laravel and Bedrock

Convesio is a next generation platform for hosting WordPress sites. Unlike traditional WordPress hosting solutions, Convesio addresses limitations in shared and VPS hosting by providing a multi-tenant, redundant environment powered by Docker Containers. Each site running on the platform is backed by a redundant file system, database cluster, scalable PHP Runtime, and self healing architecture.

Shared hosting is a common entry point for creating a new website. While it’s inexpensive and accessible, it also comes with a ton of downsides. These include an inability to handle large amounts of traffic, unreliable downtime, less support, and an inability to scale – just to name a few. When things go wrong, a shared hosting plan can cost your business days or even weeks of lost revenue.

Convesio doesn’t have these issues. Our dedicated hosting plans are the perfect “next step” for sites that want to graduate from shared hosting. With Convesio, your site will load faster, be more secure, and be able to handle more traffic. If anything goes wrong, our expert team is here around-the-clock to solve issues.

Convesio’s pricing model is different from traditional managed WordPress hosting and shared hosting providers. We do not sell sites in bulk packages. Every site in Convesio has dedicated resources associated with it. We offer one flat rate price that allows you to start a site on Convesio for $150/month then scale resources as needed. With Convesio you never have to pay for more than you need and you can allocate the resources needed for each site, when you need it.

We also offer advanced configurations and options like private clusters, dedicated hardware, Slack support, and more. Please contact us if you questions regarding pricing.

First, let’s be clear about what we consider “concurrent users.” For us, this means users online at the exact same time. It doesn’t mean users per hour or any other period of time.

As a general rule, you can assume that the number of concurrent users is roughly equal to the price in dollars, per month. For example, 300 concurrent users = $300 per month. 1,000 concurrent users = $1,000 per month. And so on.

This is not an exact metric and there are a number of other important factors. Lighter, less complex sites are often cheaper. We have many clients with 6,000 concurrent users that pay between $3,000-$4,000 per month.

We have a FAQ specifically aimed at answering your questions about the costs of scaling.

Our infrastructure is highly capable of managing such traffic volumes effortlessly. We specialize in handling high numbers of concurrent users and transactions, making us a suitable choice for sites with significant traffic demands.

No, we have our own control panel. Convesio is very different from traditional web hosting providers and as such does not use conventional control panels. We are using a custom implementation of PHP, Percona, GlusterFS and other components for running a high performance WordPress site.

Convesio is Datacenter agnostic and our tech stack can be deployed on bare metal servers and cloud providers such as Amazon. We currently use Google Cloud and OpenMetal.

Currently our clusters are deployed in North America and Europe.

Other popular providers do take advantage of containers, but in a very different way than Convesio. Effectively they are using containers as the next generation VPS. All the components of your site run inside a single scalable container. This creates an environment similar to a traditional VPS with all the normal Single Points of Failure associated with WordPress. We have a container based architecture that is scalable at several different layers. For instance, your WordPress runtime, which is just your PHP Instance, can scale separately from your DB Instance and our Load Balancers. When your site comes under heavy load, these other container based systems can scale up your resources increasing RAM, CPU, etc to handle the load. Convesio’s architecture uses a scale out process to replicate your site running in multiple containers, all attached to a multi-node Percona XtraDB Cluster. The advantage of our system is we have the ability to run your site on multiple servers simultaneously, which greatly increases redundancy and scaling capacity.

Yes, a website can run in one single PHP Runtime container or multiple containers. Each container offers a fixed number of PHP Workers and vCPU’s. If your site is processor intense and has a large number of visitors you will want to run your site in multiple containers from the outset.

Yes, we support WordPress Multisite. Please read this page for more information.

Convesio uses a semi-proprietary caching implementation featuring 3 distinct layers of caching. Layer 1 (L1) of the caching resides at our load balancer layer. Layer 2 (L2) uses NGINX microcaching. Layer 3 (L3) runs inside each container with the PHP runtime of the site and utilizes Varnish.

L1 decides what will be stored on L2 and L3, based on the number of request an assets received and number of time it has been modified, during those request. This implementation enables intelligent caching that is aware of content changes at the container level and distributes load to optimize performance.

*L1 and L2 are in production with L3 scheduled for release in the near future.

Yes, our servers provide SSH access upon request. You have the flexibility to utilize essential commands like `htop` and `top` for enhanced server management and monitoring.

The hardware configuration varies depending on the selected package. Typically, our servers are equipped with Intel® Xeon® Gold 6338 Processors, ensuring high performance. This setup is specifically optimized for a clustered environment, providing dedicated and isolated resources, thus eliminating the inefficiencies often encountered in traditional hosting environments.

The initial allocation starts at 16 PHP workers. However, we can scale this number up to an unlimited count based on your specific needs. Our infrastructure is designed to ensure that PHP workers will never become a bottleneck in your operations.

Our support team is available 24/7, particularly attentive during major sales events such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday. We understand these are critical times for our clients and ensure dedicated support to achieve seamless operations and uptime during these peak periods.

Yes, integration with APM tools like New Relic is part of our service. We not only facilitate the installation of your New Relic account but also provide complimentary consulting and analysis services to help you leverage these tools effectively.

WAF rule customization is managed through our support team. Clients can easily request rule changes via Slack, and our team promptly implements custom rules on your behalf, ensuring tailored security configurations.

Yes, we do support integration with Object Cache Pro/Relay, and this feature is included in our services at no additional cost.

Our platform employs advanced monitoring tools that actively surveil for various threats, including bot attacks, DDoS attacks, and malware. In addition to in-house monitoring systems, we integrate Cloudflare Enterprise as our first line of defense, ensuring robust protection and immediate response to potential security threats.

One sentence (variants):  

• Convesio uses container technology that isolates, secures, speeds-up, and improves uptime for websites over traditional hosts.
• Convesio is WordPress eCommerce hosting built on modern, scalable infrastructure.
• Convesio is a WordPress host that helps eCommerce websites scale.
• Convesio uses cutting-edge technology to help eCommerce sites grow their business.
• Convesio helps WordPress sites scale to handle unexpected amounts of traffic.
•  

One paragraph:

• Convesio is WordPress eCommerce hosting built using modern technology. Most other legacy WordPress hosts have been using the same basic tech stack since 2005. Convesio’s infrastructure, on the other hand, was built from scratch using Docker, a new technology that makes it easy to scale a website. This means that your site can handle huge amounts of unexpected traffic without slowing down or crashing.

Our current backup provision is daily backups provided by Linode, combined with continuous backups using JetPack / VaultPress backups.

Convesio provides Daily offsite backup to Amazon S3. These can be retained by default for 2 weeks. We have clients using VaultPress, so that’s fine to keep if you would like.

Our current setup for development and deployment is via Git repositories (typically on Github) with Deploybot used to trigger deployments to our servers (via SSH / public key connections).

What’s the recommended approach under Convesio for code deployment?  Do you support SSH / public key connection to the server for deployment, or would that be via an alternative protocol e.g. SFTP?

We support SSH, WP CLI and SFTP. Here is a article on one way you can setup CI/CD with Convesio: 

https://convesio.com/knowledgebase/article/implementing-ci-cd-on-convesio-with-github-or-bitbucket/

We let clients handle their own updates. In general, we suggest a cautious approach to WordPress core and plugin updates and recommend only updating the core periodically (rather than as updates are released), and deploying all plugin updates (inc. 3rd party) from Git repositories.

To date, we conduct all our maintenance tasks, library installation, database access, etc. from the server command line.

This is the biggest departure from traditional VPS/Server processes. While you can SSH in and install apps and change configurations, this is where you should consult with us first – and proceed with caution. If a container, scaled, is rebuilt, destroyed and recreated, etc, all your changes can be lost. We are a managed service at heart, while you have access, there are limitations that we impose. 

We block external access directly to our databases, but you can access it via PHPMyAdmin.

We integrate with a number of 3rd party systems – using libraries such as cURL (via Guzzle) to access Klaviyo, Discord, and the United States Golf Association;  Incoming webhooks (e.g. from Discord and Typeform); and other integrations such as Postmark for transactional mails, MyWorks for QuickBooks, Skyverge for address validation, ShipStation for shipping, and Metorik for WooCommerce reporting.

Addtionally, this is one of the areas Convesio is different from other hosts… we specialize in the “snowflake” configurations.

If you have something that is out of the box that is needed, we can usually make accommodations for it. Many other hosts are a flat out no! Just let us know what you need and we can investigate making it happen. 

Yes, Convesio can protect folders, though they use NGINX instead of .htaccess. Specific access methods can be discussed for optimal solutions.

Updates are managed at the container level, with PHP version changes controlled by clients through the control panel. Testing on staging environments is recommended.

You can have additional users added to your account in Convesio. We can invite them if you provide their email addresses. 

Read this article to learn more about maximizing your website uptime.