Our shared web hosting NoLimit has over 135,000 domains (no other hosting in the Czech Republic or Slovakia comes close to this number). The vast majority of hosted domains use common content management systems (CMS). The most used ones can be installed from our administration with one click. Among them, however, one far outweighs the others – WordPress.
WEDOS and CMS
When WEDOS started, CMS were becoming more and more popular. Coincidentally, the parameters of the new NoLimit suited them perfectly, even exceeding them in many ways, so our customers could experiment with many plugins. Much of the competition has fallen far behind in this. This is one of the reasons why WEDOS was able to do so well in a very competitive environment.
However, we only realised the power and importance of content management systems a few years later. We started to participate more in conferences related to content management systems and even held our own in Hluboká Nad Vltavou. This has brought us closer to the community and provided us with many insights that have greatly influenced the development of our other services.
Content management systems and e-commerce solutions have become so dominant in our company that we have hired a skilled colleague to be our CMS specialist. He helped with common problems and advised on how to optimize websites. The interest in his help was so great that he was given reinforcements. We currently have two trained CMS specialists with several years of experience in the field. They do everything above and beyond customer support, and frankly, we don’t really present it publicly. There are a lot of requests for help and they are running out of time. That’s why we’re also planning one big news item to help everyone 🙂
We are currently finishing a special website that will serve as a compendium of knowledge not only about content management systems. We believe that we can cover all the problems of common users and a large part of the more advanced ones. We have over half a million chats and hundreds of thousands of emails where our customer support has addressed a customer issue. Whether it was resolved or was beyond support, for the new site these issues will serve as the basis for articles and tutorials. That’s a decent start, isn’t it? 😉
Of course, we will continually add content as new issues arise. For us, it is easier to solve a problem once and describe the solution in detail, which we can then refer to, than to solve it individually with each customer.
We can help with problems, optimization and security
But it won’t just be solving problems related to bugs, glitches or compatibility. For example, a large number of WordPress users do not use any caching plugin, which is essential for content management systems nowadays. That’s why we deployed proxy servers in front of the new NoLimit (set up since November 2017), which take care of partial caching of some content. However, for maximum efficiency it is necessary that the editorial system communicates with our proxy server and tells it what and how to cache. Most caching plugins can do this without problems.
A small example of how WordPress was relieved after deploying our proxy server. In blue is the number of requests the hosting had to handle and in red is the proxy server. The test was conducted between 19:00 and 23:30. It was a highly visited large Czech eshop with a turnover of about 1.5 billion crowns and operating on the classic shared web hosting NoLimit. Yes, even such websites work on our NoLimit web hosting.
Another big problem is security and underestimation of threats. After deploying our IPS/IDS protection, we were able to eliminate most of the common threats such as bots testing various vulnerabilities in known plugins and templates, guessing user passwords, or overloading your installation. However, some of our customers have gotten lazy because of this and forget to update or address security in general 🙂
Often they also load a backdoor for an attacker into their content management system themselves by downloading plugins and templates from warez sites. This practice is more widespread than you might think.
The category itself is an optimization. Especially users who have their website on HTTPS and often use an inappropriate redirection method. Instead of leaving the redirection on our webserver (via .htaccess), they handle it themselves via a plugin.
It is important to note that if WordPress takes care of the redirection, it must be completely “loaded” each time. No caching is used. So each redirect can take more than a second. Our webserver can do this in tens of milliseconds.
The same error with redirection is repeated if the webmaster defines an address in WordPress with www. and visitors enter it more often without www. There is also one unnecessary extra redirect. And if you have it defined as https://www.vasedomena… and visitors enter http://vasedomena (i.e. without www and without https), you have 2 completely useless redirects. It then takes a second instead of a tenth to generate the site.
A big problem nowadays is putting third-party scripts on the page. Social networks in particular can significantly slow down your entire website for visitors. Moreover, if you implement their scripts inappropriately, you have no control over how much your site slows down. As a result, even a single visitor can cause your website to stop rendering in the browser. Simply put, if they break something there, your website may well be completely unusable to visitors. Even a local outage of a local social network server is enough. Not to mention that social networks often customize various responses from APIs and plugins without subsequent updates to slow things down.
So choose a solution that doesn’t depend on how fast third-party servers are running. Plus, you’ll protect your visitors’ privacy and make your job even easier because of GDPR.
You can find out how much third-party servers slow down the loading of your pages with WebPageTest, a private instance of which we launched for you right here a few years ago. Test how fast your website will load. Likewise, try typing it without www, with www, without https, with https… and other combinations. And here you might have a tutorial on how to speed things up.
WEDOS and WordPress
We stand behind the quality of our hosting. We run tens of thousands of WordPress installations on our servers, including large companies. There are also websites with over 100,000 visits per day on NoLimit web hosting. Or even websites with an e-shop with a turnover of around CZK 1.5 billion.
From the perspective of the largest hosting provider in the Czech Republic, we can say that WordPress is the least problematic compared to other content management systems. Surprisingly, they make up only a small part of the queries for our CMS specialists. For example, far more of your questions are about problems with Prestashop.
We liked WordPress so much that we built our new websites on it. Take a look at wedos.cz, it runs on the classic NoLimit web hosting. We didn’t have to customize WordPress itself, our programmers just made a few custom plugins.
A few statistics
From 29.11.2013 to 18.07.2017, 42046 WordPress applications were installed in our application installer. Tens of thousands more clients have installed WordPress themselves, without our installer.
During this period, WordPress accounted for 59.89% of all installed applications.
Since July 2017, we’ve been using a new and better app installer that does much more. Thanks to it, we can detect some non-standard problems in time. Since then, 17752 WordPress installations have been added. If the customer removed the installation via the installer, it will be deducted.
What you can look forward to next time…
We will soon write some more detailed recommendations on how to speed up your website. More information about our newly prepared WMS service will follow, which will be basically a guaranteed (and not shared) web hosting with guaranteed performance for the most demanding customers.