How to choose a Hosting? Part 2

No matter which hosting provider you select, it’s essential to seek out the following server features to guarantee optimal speed for your website.

PHP is a server-side scripting and programming language, operating as an open-source tool predominantly employed in web development. The foundational elements of the WordPress software, including plugins and themes, are largely composed in PHP, underscoring its significance within the WordPress community. It is imperative to verify that your WordPress hosting service supports a minimum of PHP 8 or a more recent version.

Your hosting provider typically offers various PHP versions on your server, and the latest PHP 8.3, in particular, delivers substantial performance enhancements. POPACLOUDHOST consistently provides the most recent PHP versions to ensure not only faster speeds but also heightened security. You can change PHP versions with a single click

In the background, every WordPress hosting service relies on a web server to drive your WordPress sites, and the most prevalent options are Litespeed, Nginx and Apache.

We highly recommend opting for a hosting provider that utilizes Litespeed due to its foundation in optimizing performance at scale. Litespeed consistently demonstrates superior performance in benchmark tests, particularly in scenarios involving static content or a high volume of concurrent requests. This is one of the reasons why POPACLOUDHOST employs Litespeed.

When selecting a WordPress host, it may not initially occur to you to inquire or investigate the network they employ, but it is a crucial consideration. The network infrastructure can significantly influence your site’s performance, including the responsiveness of your WordPress dashboard. Some hosting providers may overlook mentioning this in their marketing efforts, opting for the most economical network to reduce expenses.

• Over which networks is data being transmitted? Is it primarily traversing public ISP networks, or is it routed through private infrastructures like those operated by Major cloud companies? These major providers boast networks meticulously designed and fine-tuned for optimal low latency and high speed.

• Are the networks in use designed with redundancy? In the event of an accidental cable cut, a scenario that occurs more frequently than one might anticipate, what are the contingency measures in place?

At POPACLOUDHOST, We employ Akamai Network for our hosting plans, which is the oldest CDN network and has a vast spread of network. Generally considered to be the largest global CDN. They have ‘servers everywhere’ and a wide range of products and services

Comprising more than 61,000 servers located across nearly 1,000 networks in 70 countries worldwide, the Akamai platform delivers hundreds of billions of Internet interactions daily, helping thousands of enterprises boost the performance and reliability of their Internet applications.

HTTP3 marks a significant advancement in the hypertext transfer protocol, succeeding HTTP/2, which gained approval in 2015. A key distinction in HTTP3 lies in its utilization of QUIC, a novel transport protocol. QUIC is specifically crafted for internet usage dominated by mobile devices, where individuals frequently switch between networks as they navigate their daily activities—a dynamic not prevalent during the initial development of internet protocols when devices were less portable and network transitions were infrequent.

The adoption of QUIC means that HTTP3 operates on the User Datagram Protocol (UDP) instead of the traditional Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). This shift to UDP facilitates quicker connections, contributing to a faster and more responsive user experience during online browsing.

Google introduced the QUIC protocol in 2012, and it gained adoption by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), a vendor-neutral standards organization. The IETF incorporated QUIC into the development of the new HTTP3 standard. Following consultations with global experts, the IETF implemented numerous modifications to create its unique iteration of the QUIC protocol.

HTTP3 addresses 2 shortcomings of HTTP2

• Decreasing the effects of packet loss
• and lessening performance impact when a smartphone switches from WiFi to cellular data.

AT POPACLOUDHOST, We support both support HTTP2 and HTTP3 over TLS 1.3 on all of our servers.

One of the initial tasks in hosting your WordPress site is identifying the primary location of your visitors or customers. This is crucial because the hosting location significantly influences overall network latency, Time To First Byte (TTFB), SFTP speeds, and the responsiveness of your WordPress admin dashboard. Understanding the geographic distribution of your audience helps optimize these factors for an enhanced user experience

Network latency: pertains to the time or delay incurred during the transmission of data across a network. It signifies the duration taken for a packet of data to travel from one point to another. Presently, this measurement is usually expressed in milliseconds, although it could extend to seconds depending on the network conditions. The lower the latency, approaching zero, the more optimal the network performance.

TTFB, or Time To First Byte: is a metric indicating the duration the browser must wait before receiving the initial byte of data from the server. In simpler terms, it measures the time taken for the server to start transmitting information to the browser. A shorter TTFB results in a faster display of your webpage, while a longer TTFB can lead to delayed page rendering. Similar to network latency, a TTFB closer to zero is considered more favorable for optimal website performance.

For the best experience, you need both Network latency and TTFB, as low as possible.

Optimize your WordPress site by implementing caching, which, in our tests, resulted in a remarkable 90% reduction in Time To First Byte (TTFB). Leverage a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to deliver cached assets from Points of Presence (POPs) across the globe, mitigating network latency for visitors distant from your host server. Maximize the benefits of the fast traffic over UDP using HTTP3 and HTTP2 over TCP , both features enabled on all POPACLOUDHOST servers.

Additionally, trim the number of external HTTP requests, as each one introduces potential latency based on the server’s location.
Recognize the role of DNS in TTFB and opt for a premium DNS provider with swift lookup times. Harness the power of prefetching and prerendering to execute tasks discreetly while the page loads. These measures collectively enhance website performance and responsiveness.

While prioritizing your visitors and customers is crucial, an often-overlooked aspect of performance is how certain decisions can influence your day-to-day tasks. The selection of a data center location, for instance, directly affects the speed of your SFTP download and upload processes (file transfers using an FTP client), along with the responsiveness of your WordPress admin dashboard. It’s essential to consider these factors not only for user experience but also for the efficiency of your daily operations.

While a new WordPress theme with the latest features may be tempting, exercise caution before making a choice. In terms of performance, every element within a theme contributes to the overall speed of your website. Regrettably, with a myriad of themes available, there exist both well-optimized ones and those that may negatively impact your site’s speed.

Choosing the right WordPress theme can be challenging, but we recommend considering one of the following two options:

1. Opt for a fast, lightweight WordPress theme that is specifically designed with only the essential features you need, avoiding unnecessary extras.
2. Select a more feature-rich WordPress theme, but ensure it allows you to disable features that you don’t use. This way, you can tailor the theme to meet your specific requirements while keeping your website’s performance optimized.

Elements like Google Fonts, Font Awesome icons, sliders, galleries, video, and parallax scripts, among others, are aspects you should have the flexibility to disable if not in use. It’s preferable to choose a WordPress theme that is either inherently lightweight or provides options to easily toggle these features on or off from the start. This approach ensures a streamlined and efficient customization process without the need for extensive manual adjustments.

While it’s often emphasized that installing too many plugins can slow down your WordPress site, the crucial factor isn’t necessarily the quantity but rather the quality of the plugins. While it’s wise to avoid unnecessary plugins, focusing on selecting high-quality, well-coded plugins is more impactful for maintaining optimal website performance. Prioritizing quality ensures that each plugin you incorporate contributes positively to your site’s functionality without unduly burdening its speed.

Research before you buy Theme and Plugins, sometimes Free Themes and Plugin can introduce performance issues or vulnerabilities.

In the next part, we will touch upon the influence of cache and so on.