Performance Hosting

Performance Hosting provides high performant webhosting for complex websites.

Contents

What is it?

Performance Hosting is a shared hosting solution running on discrete nodes with a limited number of complementary tenants. These nodes use the most performant distributed NVME storage, and provide ample vCPU, RAM, and PHP workers. The limited “complementary tenant” solution also enables the Boost vCPU feature where each tenant has a “burst time allowance:” a percentage of time in which the entire pool’s resources are at their disposal.

Who is this for?

We designed Performance Hosting for CMS users (Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla etc) with highly complex back-ends: many plugins, big media libraries, lots of custom features. These sites can experience sluggish performance due to an important limitation of modular CMS design: they read and write ludicrous amounts of data. This I/O activity tends to come in bursts that can temporarily overload resources of a regular web hosting solution. Performance Hosting is designed to mitigate this high I/O activity, especially when it comes in unexpected bursts

What are the advantages?

Put simply, more speed and responsiveness. For visitors, you will notice improved Time To First Byte, especially with websites that do not fully cache their content. For admins, editors, and other content creators, you will experience noticeable improvements when loading CMS pages, saving and publishing drafts, editing plugins,etc.

Why not a dedicated VPS?

Performance Hosting is a combination of our VPS offering, combined with our feature-complete web hosting management dashboard. The main difference with a dedicated VPS is that Performance Hosting holds multiple tenants, instead of a single user. This is actually a benefit when running complex CMS platforms: each tenant has enough dedicated resources to equal a decently sized VPS, and combining multiple tenants together means that they can all rely on extra resources for burst loads, borrowed from other tenants when they are idle. Since burst I/O loads are usually fast and sporadic, the benefits of Performance Hosting over a single-tenant VPS solution are significant.

Technical difference with traditional hosting

Our traditional shared hosting runs on a multiple-node setup using a shared NFS storage back-end. In this configuration, CPU load is distributed across multiple systems, so if a node is unavailable, another one kicks in (failover/load balancing). However, the NFS storage creates a small overhead for every file being loaded. With a simple site this is not noticeable, but with the ever increasing complexity of modern CMS systems accessing hundreds of files at once, this overhead adds up, slowing down the CMS or even making it unresponsive.

With Performance Hosting, instead of NFS we use a file system stored on CEPH block devices. This eliminates the overhead of NFS and increases performance for high-file-access workloads by a big margin. The downside is incompatibility with multi-node setups: Performance Hosting runs from a single server.

However, with the higher server capacities running Performance Hosting packages, we do not expect more risk or downtime for the website. The data itself is still stored on our distributed CEPH network, so in the unlikely event a server crashes, they are very fast to restart with our network architecture.

Performance Hosting for now uses the same database and proxy clusters as traditional hosting. With further development of Performance Hosting we expect to implement optimizations and new features in those areas as well.

The maintenance window for Performance Hosting is like the regular maintenance windows in our network. They are usually scheduled at night time and during maintenance, the website can be offline for a few seconds.