High Performance WordPress Hosting

In the previous installments, we discussed the two pillars of Enterprise Architecture, High availability and Security, and how these impact your business. In this article, we will talk about the third pillar which is performance  (always a favourite topic of everyone, alas the cause of many misunderstandings). 

Enterprise Architectures offer unparalleled performance and speed,  however, it needs to be understood that this is only one characteristic of these architectures and not their sole purpose. Enterprise performance shines under very heavy loads of traffic. If you have a simple website with low traffic that is not highly demanding, you probably will not experience a major difference.

The 4 key design principles of high-performance architectures

Enterprise architectures implement four key designs that contribute to serious performance gains. Let’s review them one by one:

Horizontal Scaling

Plainly speaking, this is the ability to add more servers to a cluster, thus decreasing the response times in periods of heavy load, and being also able to handle more traffic. There is no theoretical limit to the number of servers you may add in contrast to vertical scaling; adding more memory and CPU power to every server has a hard limit.

Caching

Caching is a mechanism with which you save the most frequently used or accessed data usually in memory. There are also certain caching methods that use the disk; the idea is to store the data in some medium that offers you a throughput advantage. By doing so you gain advantages in speed. Caching can be implemented in every tier, in accordance with its function.

Load Balancing

These are servers that are on the frontlines, so to speak, that are responsible for receiving the incoming requests of web visitors, and then forwarding them to web clusters in order to distribute the load.

Parallel File System

This is a design that enables all nodes in a cluster to have a shared file system. It is a distinctly faster and more robust solution than using NAS/NFS topologies.

Our High Performance WordPress Platform

We built on the previous “keystone” designs and expanded them with our own expertise. We sincerely believe that our design is an excellent yardstick to use when searching for high performance WordPress hosting solutions. 

Dynamic Load Balancing

Our Pressidium Platform Load Balancers are not only highly-available, using the same cluster design that we use everywhere, but dynamic too. This means that they are smart about where to send each visitor request, depending on current node load. If node A is busy or seems overworked, then the request automatically gets routed to node B.

High-Available SSD Storage

Our own parallel file system implementation uses SSD-based storage that enables access to files from multiple nodes. This is designed according to the “shared-nothing” topology, offering profound speed gains in comparison to conventional network attached file systems. In a NAS configuration, you may experience bottlenecks since there is one server that shares the filesystem to everyone. In a “shared-nothing” topology, there is no single commonly shared component, the data is replicated to all nodes.

Multilayer Adaptive Caching Engine

We’ve taken Varnish as our building block and built a unique two-layer adaptive caching engine: There is a “hot” cache layer that stores all frequently accessed data in RAM and a “warm” one that stores the less frequently used on SSD disks. Taking it a step further, we implemented our own adaptive mechanism that profiles your website’s traffic and applies the most efficient caching rules.

HTTP/2 powered CDN

Our Content Delivery Network is comprised of local edge nodes at 22 strategic locations spread across the entire globe. This ensures that assets are retrieved every time from the closest server according to your location.

PHP OPCache

PHP code is pre-compiled into bytecode at runtime and henceforth executed from memory, leading to significant performance gains.

SSL Acceleration

Instead of taxing your busy servers with the constant and burdensome encryption/decryption SSL handshakes, we offload the process to separate and dedicated servers.  As a result, you gain the benefits from SSL and mitigate the performance penalties.

Global data center location choices

By choosing the data center that is closer to your preferred geographical region, your website experiences fewer network delays while having snappier response times.

Automatic Image Optimization

All images that are uploaded to our Platform automatically go through a lossless compression and optimisation process. This leads to faster loading times.

In Closing

High Performance WordPress hosting depends on many different variables. Being conscious of your needs along with the right knowledge will help you make an informed choice as to which hosting provider and solution are the best fit.