Performance Hosting

Current Content Management Systems, such as Wordpress, Drupal or Joomla, grow ever more complex, with countless plugins, big media libraries and lots of custom features.

Their modular design has one major limitation; these sites read and write very large amounts of data, which can lead to sluggish performance, as the high input/output activity tends to come in bursts that can temporarily overload resources of a regular web hosting solution.

To improve performance for such sites, we designed a custom solution; Performance Hosting.

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What is Performance Hosting?

Performance Hosting is designed to mitigate high input/output activity that comes with websites using a complex CMS, especially when it comes in unexpected bursts.

Performance Hosting is a shared hosting solution running on single nodes with a limited number of users. One node ("slice") has room for a maximum of 10 users. Each user is assigned ample vCPU, RAM, and PHP workers, but to accommodate for burst usage, idle CPU-resources on the node can temporarily be used to handle peak demand.

What are the advantages?

Put simply, Performance Hosting offers more speed and responsiveness than traditional hosting:

Visitors will notice improved Time To First Byte, especially with websites that do not fully cache their content.

Admins, editors, and other content creators will experience noticeable improvements when loading CMS pages, editing plugins, saving and publishing drafts etcetera.

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 through failover and load balancing. However, the NFS storage does create 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 we use a file system stored on CEPH block devices, instead of NFS. 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 which means that if the server were to go down or needs a reboot, the website would temporarily be unavailable. 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, the servers and sites can be restarted very quickly with our network architecture.

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. Beacuse of the single node setup, the website can be offline for a few seconds in such a maintenance window.

For the rest Performance Hosting is pretty much the same as regular hosting: It uses the same database and proxy clusters as traditional hosting, and can be managed through the same Service Centre interface.

Why not a dedicated VPS?

Performance Hosting is a combination of our VPS offering and our web hosting management architecture and dashboard.

The main technical 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 user 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 users 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.

Specifications

Package PH1 PH2 PH5 PH10
Monthly price (ex VAT) € 54,08 € 84,52 € 216,30 € 432,60
Disk space 50 GB 80 GB 200 GB 400 GB
Dedicated memory 5 GB 8 GB 16 GB 20 GB
Dedicated workers 50 80 200 400

How to order

At this point, it is not possible to directly order Performance Hosting through our website, but please contact us if you are interested or for any further information.