What does shared hosting get you these days? Well, it gets you a LOT of things you probably took for granted, didn’t know that was there, or saw in some sales blurb as “available in the WordPress Pro Solution” on another providers list of shiny things. After reading some “look at the shiny” blurb from a channel giant – I thought it was about time we pointed out exactly how much bang for your buck you get these days – and here we are – let’s talk about fast WordPress on shared hosting with Hosting UK.

Plesk has evolved, Plesk has cleaned up its act, and not just embraced but extended its WordPress offering with growing it’s toolkit capabilities and integration through working alongside Automattic.

WordPress is Linux Native with its LAMP stack – so what do you get with a current Plesk Linux account with Hosting UK?

PHP 7.x;
SSD storage;
HTTP/2 via Apache2;
Let’s Encrypt free SSL support;
Web Application Firewall;
MariaDB in place of MySQL;
Gzip enabled;
Nginx Delivering static content;
Patchman vulnerabillity scanner;
CloudFlare CDN support;
*LiteSpeed for the WordPress specific packages.

Most of which will only be seen in premier packages for other providers. With our new WordPress optimized sites looking to move to LiteSpeed (with blazing fast Time To First Byte as a drop-in replacement for Apache/Nginx) and the inclusion of on-site CloudFlare RailGuns, we are not only competing with but exceeding the offerings of a lot of the bigger players.

There was a time where shared hosting was the pariah – however, these days the shared environment and hardware means the collective gets better hardware, resources, applications, and software tools – this is very much the golden age of shared.

This, of course, begs the question of why you would want more than an entry-level shared package? Well, the answer to that is capacity, space, size, number of sites.

Okay, fair play, so why would you want more than shared hosting? Interesting – I am glad you asked – well with shared you are just that shared, meeting the requirements of the many, lowest common denominators and all that. Your resources are constrained within that group – and the platform settings are ‘optimal to all’ as opposed to ‘tailored only for you’”.  Imagine if you have the same configuration for yourself… or your customers.  This is where virtual machines and dedicated servers come in.

Virtual Machines – often marketed as “Cloud” by a lot of providers, these are a matter of choosing your Operating System, memory, number of CPU cores, and how much storage you need (or one of our predefined offerings – including those with control panels) and within minutes you are logged in and working. Resilient in terms of being able to be bought up on another compute nodes, and with distributed file systems these offerings can be scaled up or down as required in terms of Memory and CPU cores on the fly in most cases, and the storage grown when required. With contracted periods being as long as the paid for period – these are superbly flexible for the agile, fast, small deployment. All backed with 10Gig ethernet, and enterprise-class SSD’s, redundant power supplies – the kind of thing that would push up the pricing in the dedicated realm.

Dedicated Servers – Sometimes there is no getting away from it – you need the physical tin to deliver the load and capacity you need, comply with regulations, or risk policies. Increasingly unusual in terms of other providers, but with Hosting UK you can order what you need, and we can deliver. While these do have longer lead times, and contracts, you can get WHAT YOU NEED, platforms as resilient as you build, as fast as you need. Backed with big brand vendor support (we only build with Dell solutions), our monitoring, within our datacentres (within the UK) and topped off with the wealth of experience our engineers can bring.

But still – the internet needs more blazing fast pictures of kittens, personal blogs, shops, businesses -and they are not going to write or deliver themselves! The rich sea of voices that WordPress has enabled through liberation from the on-staff developer…. and what better time to start, get going, shared hosting now more than ever.