Category: WordPress Hosting
Reading Time: 9 minutes In the context of human interactions there’s a very clear distinction between an inquiry and a request, but in the digital realm there’s much less of that firm difference as it relates to web servers handling queries / requests made for a website. This is what is involved in that for laypeople who aren’t especially web-workings savvy. When you use your mouse or trackpad to click through to a website via search page results - or to move from one webpage to another once you’re in the website - there are database queries made to the server that’s operated by the web hosting provider. This starts to explain why having a good Canada-based WordPress hosting provider is a must for any small business considering all will have websites. These database queries need to be both delivered and responded to with sufficient speediness, because if they are not handled this way then user experience declines significantly. There’s much to what’s possible there, but the primary way in which the click-through person staring at their smartphone, notebook, or desktop is going to be disillusioned is with slow page loading speeds. And we’ll also skip over a lot of what else undesirable can occur and tell you directly that VPS hosting optimized for WordPress is a surefire way to ensure this doesn’t happen for your small business website. Which is plenty important, as web users and potential customers tend to be impatient and intolerant with this sort of stuff. If they’re looking for an online retailer or service provider and they’re directed towards you it is often the case that you only have one chance to make a good first impression on them. If your WordPress site is slow to load and then similarly slow to operate for them once they’re there then it will usually result in them moving on fairly quickly. If you’re in a business where there is plenty of of competition and plenty of other websites showing up in those same SERPs then it’s very unlikely they’ll be back. So what we’ll do with this week’s blog entry is discuss how slow database queries kill WordPress performance, with an...
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Reading Time: 8 minutes Traffic should only be conceived negatively if we’re talking about stacks of motor vehicles going nowhere. Whereas with traffic for a website it’s an entirely different occurrence, and one that is entirely desirable if you have a website for your business. More ‘traffic’ means more potential customers arriving at the site, and there’s everything to like about that if you’re leaning on the site as an integral part of making your business both viable and profitable. Many small businesses choose to go the cost-effective route and have their website built on the WordPress platform, and one thing that WordPress hosting Canada for high traffic sites will do is use clustering when the site on a virtual private server. Going with a VPS is going to be recommended for any site that expects to see high volumes of traffic, and there are added site security benefits too when you have a virtual private server. But the bulk of the appeal is always going to be in the way that all the server resources are made available to your site exclusively. And if you are a small business owner who’s leaning on their site just as much any other but you’re also super busy and not so savvy with webmaster tasks then it makes a lot of sense to go with Managed WordPress hosting with clustering. The term clustering may be something that’s foreign to you, so that’s what we’ll look at with this week’s blog entry. It has everything to do with facilitating better site operation, and more specifically improving the location of resources so that none of them are in position to be encumbering the server from receiving and responding to server requests. Which is at the heart of what happens when a potential customer who’s come across your site in their search results proceeds to click through to it. A request goes to the server, and that part of it will always occur in the same manner. But what can vary is how that server is able to respond to the server request based on the site’s configuration. It’s here that VPS clustering has it’s value in improving the...
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Reading Time: 9 minutes Establishing an online store in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) isn't necessarily about figuring out how to host the store; it's more about the location where the store will be hosted. For Canadian business owners launching e-commerce businesses, web hosting in Toronto is not only a matter of local pride, but also represents a conscious effort to improve site speed, SEO rankings and legal compliance through establishing a firm location to host the business. You can choose between hosted or self-hosted platforms that provide you with either more control over your backend and hosting environment (self-hosted) or a simpler way to set up an online storefront (hosted). The backend of your online store should be very strong regardless of which solution you opt to use. 4GoodHosting witnesses the effects of a local server presence on E-commerce stores on a daily basis. Lag time caused by poor performance on the web hosting provider's end has been enough to turn a simple storefront into a customer stack that has wasted many hours trying to find an alternative. With consumers expecting to receive products within hours or days, rather than weeks, this is especially important in the very competitive GTA market, where most consumers are accustomed to receiving the same level of service from Amazon and other large online retailers. In addition to receiving products quickly, most consumers do not want to have their sensitive information travel thousands of miles across country borders after every purchase they make. Local Matters: The Toronto Advantage Even if your main local targets are Ontario or Canada, your data hosted at any Toronto data center should give you a "home field advantage" that no international host can bring. This isn't just marketing; it is physics and networking at play. Speed vs. "Lengthened Latency" In e-commerce, every millisecond is worth money. When a customer clicks a product page in North York, your request travels to a server and back. If your server is in California or Europe, that data crosses thousands of miles before reaching and most missing even referring to as latency. With eCommerce hosting Toronto, you ensure the physical distance minimized. There would be instant page...
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Reading Time: 10 minutes Growth is the reason parents are buying their kids new shoes so often, and why their grocery bill is so high once those kids become teenagers. Websites are never going to have a voracious appetite in the same sense, but there are going to be instances where they do need to grow and have more resources made available to them. For business websites that type of growth is a good thing, as it means ever-greater numbers of people are finding the website. When a website needs to be ‘scaled’ that means it needs to be reformatted, and usually within the context of being bigger and more functional. It’s here that managed hosting with load balancing may be something that you want to consider. The benefits of WordPress managed hosting are quite extensive, and one thing that’s for sure is you will get real value out of your higher yearly term for this type of web hosting. Plenty of small businesses go the affordable route and choose to have a WordPress business website, and if yours is at the point where it needs to be scaled then it may also be the same point where it might make sense to switch over to managed hosting. You will always want to be assured of secure managed WordPress hosting, and we always have that assurance for everyone here at 4GoodHosting. If scaling your website is something you can do yourself then that’s great, and you’re probably a person who’s learned al lot about being a webmaster after first starting out building a Wordpress website. Either that or you were pretty darn good with this stuff to begin with, and you still chose the WordPress platform because of the simplicity it offers and the fact you simply don’t need a website with all the bells and whistles. If neither scenario applies to you and you also know nothing about PIPEDA-compliant hosting then you can opt to have your scaling taken care of for you via managed web hosting. Load balancing is an integral part of this process, and in a lot of ways it’s like your website is a small sea craft and you’re...
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Reading Time: 9 minutes Establishing an online store in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) isn't necessarily about figuring out how to host the store; it's more about the location where the store will be hosted. For Canadian business owners launching e-commerce businesses, web hosting in Toronto is not only a matter of local pride, but also represents a conscious effort to improve site speed, SEO rankings and legal compliance through establishing a firm location to host the business. You can choose between hosted or self-hosted platforms that provide you with either more control over your backend and hosting environment (self-hosted) or a simpler way to set up an online storefront (hosted). The backend of your online store should be very strong regardless of which solution you opt to use. 4GoodHosting witnesses the effects of a local server presence on E-commerce stores on a daily basis. Lag time caused by poor performance on the web hosting provider's end has been enough to turn a simple storefront into a customer stack that has wasted many hours trying to find an alternative. With consumers expecting to receive products within hours or days, rather than weeks, this is especially important in the very competitive GTA market, where most consumers are accustomed to receiving the same level of service from Amazon and other large online retailers. In addition to receiving products quickly, most consumers do not want to have their sensitive information travel thousands of miles across country borders after every purchase they make. Local Matters: The Toronto Advantage Even if your main local targets are Ontario or Canada, your data hosted at any Toronto data center should give you a "home field advantage" that no international host can bring. This isn't just marketing; it is physics and networking at play. Speed vs. "Lengthened Latency" In e-commerce, every millisecond is worth money. When a customer clicks a product page in North York, your request travels to a server and back. If your server is in California or Europe, that data crosses thousands of miles before reaching and most missing even referring to as latency. With eCommerce hosting Toronto, you ensure the physical distance minimized. There would be instant page...
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Reading Time: 14 minutes A WordPress Blog is easy to maintain, but many business owners in Toronto spend most of their efforts on website hosting, plugins, security updates, and server setup instead of building their businesses. Therefore, it is important to have a managed WordPress host when you are in Canada's largest city. What Makes Managed WordPress Hosting Different? Managed WordPress Hosting is essentially equivalent of having a professional's entourage to support your website 24/7. Unlike Shared Hosting where you're responsible for managing everything related to your site, Managed WordPress Hosting provides access to a technical team dedicated to keeping your site running smoothly. Everything from backups, security updates, and performance tuning is handled by your managed WordPress host. Using Managed WordPress Hosting Toronto companies like 4GoodHosting increases uptime and improves overall performance, and eliminates most headaches relating to managing a website. When using managed WordPress hosting Toronto companies like 4GoodHosting provides a complete solution rather than simply renting out a server space. Why Toronto Businesses Need Local Hosting When it comes to web hosting, location matters more than you think. Even fractions of a second are critical when someone in Mississauga or North York attempts to view your site. If your server is located in Arizona or Amsterdam, the additional distance will cause noticeable delays for frustrated visitors. With Canadian web hosts, there are many benefits for businesses in Toronto beyond speed. A Toronto company will have access to local servers within Ontario's data centres which are configured to have optimal routes across Canadian Internet lines. As a result, a user in Scarborough who connects to a Toronto web server will experience a significantly shorter wait time than the user would experience if he/she connected to a foreign web server. Google will recognize this difference in performance, as will your prospective customers. Working with a web hosting company that understands the Toronto business environment has its advantages. When you need assistance from 4GoodHosting, you speak to a team that understands Canadian business hours, local payments, and the unique challenges Toronto businesses encounter in the online marketplace. Data Privacy and PIPEDA Compliance One of the main places where Canadian hosting is very important is...
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Reading Time: 10 minutes In a fast-paced, online market such as Southern Ontario, "Speed" has become more than a technology measurement; it's also become the "currency" of trust. As a Greater Toronto Area (GTA) business owner, you've undoubtedly experienced first have and your local consumers expect to receive their products or services in an efficient manner - whether it's coffee quickly in the morning, timely transit systems, or instant loading websites. When a prospective customer from Mississauga or Downtown Toronto clicks on your website link, it activates a series of processes involving data transfer. So the question many business owners would like answered is how far away does that data need to travel? At 4goodhosting, we've been focused on optimizing our infrastructure for the needs of the local market for years, and the data we've been able to gather supports our assertion that out of all the factors involved in website performance, the most critical is geographic proximity. This guide will provide an insight into how fast web hosting in Toronto is the GTA business community's secret weapon to compete successfully with competitors. Online latency, the technical aspects of it, and a quick comparison of "Local" vs "Canada" High-Performance Web Hosting Standards will also be discussed in detail in the following sections of this guide. The Physics of the Internet: Distance Equals Delay A common misconception is that because we have the internet and it can be accessed from anywhere, distance does not matter. In fact, however, the internet is made up of a large number of physical networks comprised of fibre-optic cables. Even when sending information at the speed of light, it will take time for the information to travel from one location to another. This time delay for data transmission is known as Latency. You may have heard about "The Hop" Problem. If your website is hosted on a huge data centre in Virginia or California (or in another country), every time a GTA-based user requests something from your website, that request has to travel across an international border and go through a number of different network exchange points, or "hops." Each of these hops is going to add a few milliseconds...
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Reading Time: 11 minutes As an online business owner, your website is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week (this includes all time zones). It makes no difference if your customers are on the other side of the world in Toronto (2:00 p.m.) or Vancouver (3:00 a.m.), you should always be ready to assist them with their purchases or inquiries. People often associate the term "Uptime" as an indicator of how often you cannot utilize your website due to some sort of breakdown (e.g., the screen is blank; you are not receiving emails or generating revenue). The ability to maintain an ongoing presence online is not a matter of luck; it’s about the framework of support for your company’s brand. The risk of losing a customer’s trust due time (just a few) has never been greater, and this is why Managed Services are critical. At 4goodhosting, we have had the opportunity to see firsthand how the proper setup can turn a poorly built website into an impenetrable digital workplace. This guide will outline the mechanics of how Managed Services deliver a WordPress uptime guarantee managed hosting users can count on, and explain why Managed Services are the secret to reliable hosting for your business website. Beyond the Percentage: What Uptime Really Means Most of the hosting providers on the web feature a "guaranteed 99.9% uptime". It sounds nice when it's put on an advertisement page, yet let's do some numbers and reflect on these numbers for a moment. In a year, 0.1% downtime equates to nearly 9 hours of your website being completely down. For high-traffic e-Commerce businesses or professional service businesses, a 9-hour period of downtime doesn't mean a slow afternoon; you're talking the potential loss of thousands of dollars in sales, wasted resources from marketing/advertising, and a drop in your SEO ranking. Managed Hosting Services' assurance of uptime is not just a claim from the manufacturer of your managed hosting account, but the experience you will have when you have a managed hosting account. Managed Hosting provides numerous methods to avoid outages. 4GoodHosting takes a "preventative medicine" approach and does not simply allow you to fix your server after it...
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Reading Time: 9 minutes The appeal of creating a small business website with WordPress is always going to be centered on the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of using the platform. You’ll be paying immeasurably less than what you’d probably need to give to a web designer to have them build your website, and it’s really quite simple to build it yourself with WordPress. But it’s one thing to put a site together and another to have it build to the extent that you can always rely on it to be fully functioning and best serving your online business interests. A lot of having that consistent performance will be tied into high availability WordPress hosting, and it’s also good to know how to build fault-intolerant WordPress infrastructure. So that’s what we will look at with this week’s blog entry here. At any given time there’s a whole host of people who are putting together a WordPress website for the first time, and it may well be that some of them are having their website hosted by us here at 4GoodHosting. If that’s the case then we need to stress the superiority of Managed WordPress hosting for fault tolerance, as there are all sorts of areas where you’re safeguarded if you have website optimization taken care of for you. Part of receiving this service is having your host conduct regular site overviews and checking for any instances of sub-par performance or component failures. Starting at the the start it may be necessary to define what are WordPress faults and what it means to have fault tolerance for your website. These faults are everything from connection errors to slow speeds, 404 errors, and the colloquially well-known ‘white screen of death’ that can occur if a WordPress site has any type of code that becomes misconfigured after it was initially created. High availability WordPress hosting means there is less of a chance of that happening, but if you’re going to take on these issues yourself you’ll need to be proficient with debugging tools, component deactivation, and / or knowing how to increase memory limits. Tall order for some, so what’s best is to build your infrastructure to be fault-tolerant...
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Reading Time: 8 minutes Regularity is important with a lot of aspects of running a business online, and when it comes to content marketing and publishing quality content it is definitely something where it’s best to be uploading content at the same time each week. This type of consistency does factor into having better SEO for your site, and when you have a small Wordpress business website then coming up higher in SERPs with your customer base is a clear necessity. In a lot of ways the viability of your business will depend on it, especially if you are in the online retail space. The WordPress Cron system is a built-in mechanism for handling scheduled, time-based tasks and webmasters will want to be pairing it with the best hosting for WordPress cron jobs. Much of the time the answer for that will be to go with VPS hosting, and that’s because of all the many performance-enhancing benefits that you get with a virtual private server. There’s no sharing of resources as will always be the case with shared web hosting, although it’s fair to say that shared hosting will be sufficient for a lot of people who have their WordPress site for a small side venture or something of that sort. But if you’re in business and you want to make sure your site can handle changing requirements - including traffic spikes - then it’s going to better to have VPS hosting for WordPress automation. Being consistent with your publishing and ensuring it adheres to a regular timeline does require some measure of focus, and for a lot of small business owner’s that something that is spoken for in large amounts. They’re busy, and so taking advantage of WordPress cron makes a lot of sense. Further along the line of having everything taken care of for you it’s at this point that we suggest going with managed WordPress web hosting. It’s shown itself to be a really popular option for people that want to have the peace of mind in knowing that all aspects of site optimization are being handled by the web hosting provider. Indeed, managed WordPress hosting performance is almost always going...
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