We reckon our hosting is the fastest in town, it’s about to get even faster!
In August 2019 WP Engine announced the adoption of Google Cloud’s new Compute-Optimised Virtual Machines with up to 40% faster sites. It’s fair to say I was excited as most who know me know I love to talk about how fast we can get sites to load. Then I read this was only rolling out in the US. Of course it was. Bugger!
So now you can imagine my excitement, some 18 months later, when Suzie from WP Engine casually let me know that the C2 hosting is now available in Australia! Needless to say we’re starting to migrate sites next week. For our existing clients this will require a DNS update but I’ve got your back. I cannot wait to see how this translates in real terms. I will come back to this post with an update on load times when I have the news at hand.
So, who gets access to these super fast VMs? Not everyone.
This is a case where we know we made the right decision to get on board with WP Engine because Google doesn’t allow access to their C2 servers to everyone. Thanks to the scale of WP Engine we get in first! Also because of the scale of Blue Kelpie’s hosting; we have a top level, dedicated hosting environment account with WP Engine so we can offer this to our clients – it isn’t available to WP Engine’s shared hosting clients.
Does it make a difference? Absolutely! The faster your site the higher the conversion rate. Or, rather the slower the site the lower the conversion rate. We had one client come on board last year where we improved her load times massively and increased her turnover 2-3 fold each month. Yeah, she’s pretty happy!
Did I tell you about Application Performance Monitoring?
Not only does Blue Kelpie have a dedicated hosting environment we also run New Relic’s Application Performance Monitoring. Who the what now? APM is my favourite tool, and should excite any one who loves performance and finding out how to optimise a site to absolute perfection. Another example, this one with another client where I found one plugin hidden away in the background running a really high number of Requests Per Minute (RPM). It wasn’t even a critical plugin so it was a no brainer to deactivate it.
This image shows the jump in performance when we removed the offending plugin. This resulted in a time drop by around 0.6s to under 2.5s. Happy days! APM helps us to identify the issue down to the WordPress hook, which is impossible on all other hosting.
Application Performance Monitoring is valued at $US149 per month alone and is an absolute bargain that is available at roughly the same price, available to all customers on our WordPress Care Plans.
