Web Hosting Options in 2020 for Wordpress Websites

Stephan777

Stephan777

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Hi everyone!

Joined mybroadband just so that I can hopefully get answers to these 3 questions: :unsure:

1. What is the best option when it comes to Speed, Local hosting, Support & Cpanel interface between:

a. Xneelo (formerly Hetzner)
b. Domains.co.za
c. Absolute Hosting
d. Any other suggestions?

Need to move about 15 sites over from Bisnet, Afrihost, and GoDaddy.

2. What effect does Page Speed have on Google rankings when it comes to Mobile vs Desktop?

I get good scores on GTMetrix, Pingdom and Google on one of our sites: https://www.selfiebox.co.za on Desktop, but it is really poor on Mobile. As I understand, Google uses Mobile page speed lately (Smartphone crawler) over Desktop page speed.

Disregard Keywords, Backlinks, etc - my main concern is Page speed effect on Google Search / ranking.

3. Will moving to Xneelo / Domains.co.za drastically improve FCP and LCP?

Current Mobile First Contentful Paint 3.3s and Largest Contentful Paint 3.4s.
Google recommends under 2.5s.

Thanks in advance! :)

Stephan
 
Good morning Stephan,

1. Obviously I would be biased and recommend myself as a host first, then Absolute Hosting and then Domains.co.za :)

2 & 3 has more to do with your website development than the host your are using. PageSpeed Insights does reflect this information for you. Are you asking because you are worried about SEO?
 
Morning, thanks for the info!

Any reason for not recommending Xneelo?
 
Morning @Stephan777 - thanks for the consideration.

Here is some info based on Litespeed vs other web servers

WordPress Benchmarks - LiteSpeed Technologies

Compare WordPress performance on LiteSpeed Web Server Vs. Apache and Nginx using LSCache, WPRocket, W3TC, and FCGI cache solutions.
www.litespeedtech.com www.litespeedtech.com

Considerations when choosing a hosting provider
  • Make sure that your host is known for good support levels - the forum is an excellent gauge of this
  • If WordPress is the intended application (as in your case), then choose a host that uses LiteSpeed web server and not OpenLiteSpeed - if unsure, then ask them
  • Use a host that owns their own servers
  • Price - everyone has a budget - so shop around
With regards to page speeds - you will see an increase in TTFB due to latency between test servers and SA - how ever the offset is an increase in SEO gain for geo targeting.

As @EasyUp Web Hosting pointed out, no amount of hosting is going to resolve your mobile theme / development issues and those would need to be addressed and resolved by something familiar with such.

If you decide on Absolute Hosting then we would handle the migration of your sites over to our servers at no cost.
 
Last edited:
AWS
Azure

No contest.

Load-balancing, CDN on demand, staging and a host of workflow integration tools as well.
 
Stephan777 said:
Morning, thanks for the info!

Any reason for not recommending Xneelo?
Click to expand...

I am not a huge fan of konsole and transferring clients from them is never a fun experience. :p

Jade @ Absolute Hosting said:
/snip

As @[B]ExclusiveWebHosting[/B] pointed out, no amount of hosting is going to resolve your mobile theme / development issues and those would need to be addressed and resolved by something familiar with such.

If you decide on Absolute Hosting then we would handle the migration of your sites over to our servers at no cost.
Click to expand...

I pointed it out. :crying: :)
 
Stephan777 said:
Hi everyone!

Joined mybroadband just so that I can hopefully get answers to these 3 questions: :unsure:

1. What is the best option when it comes to Speed, Local hosting, Support & Cpanel interface between:

a. Xneelo (formerly Hetzner)
b. Domains.co.za
c. Absolute Hosting
d. Any other suggestions?

Need to move about 15 sites over from Bisnet, Afrihost, and GoDaddy.

2. What effect does Page Speed have on Google rankings when it comes to Mobile vs Desktop?

I get good scores on GTMetrix, Pingdom and Google on one of our sites: https://www.selfiebox.co.za on Desktop, but it is really poor on Mobile. As I understand, Google uses Mobile page speed lately (Smartphone crawler) over Desktop page speed.

Disregard Keywords, Backlinks, etc - my main concern is Page speed effect on Google Search / ranking.

3. Will moving to Xneelo / Domains.co.za drastically improve FCP and LCP?

Current Mobile First Contentful Paint 3.3s and Largest Contentful Paint 3.4s.
Google recommends under 2.5s.

Thanks in advance! :)

Stephan
Click to expand...

  1. There is no single answer for such an open question. It depends what your goals are. For WordPress-based hosting, I'd say your best bet right now is almost certainly a VPS from Absolute Hosting. They use Intel hardware, which performs better for PHP and MySQL workloads related to WordPress. Their support is great. Prices are great. You can't go wrong with Absolute. As a general rule, I wouldn't consider any hosts other than Domains.co.za and Absolute Hosting.
  2. It has been 100% conclusively proven that PageSpeed/Lighthouse benchmarks have no impact on search results whatsoever. The impact comes in with your conversion rates, as it has also been 100% conclusively proven that every few hundred milliseconds in unnecessary load times materially decreases your conversions. It also impacts your brand image.
  3. If your hosting currently sucks, you should see metrics improve across the board with competent hosting. Probably not so likely to be a big difference with bottom-end shared hosting. The primary determinant is always going to be the state of your actual website. Was it built with a bloated page builder? Does it have a million plugins? Are some of those plugins bloated? How have things been optimised for speed on-site? Are images compressed and not excessively large? Hosting is a big part of the picture, but it cannot overcome the issues that come with a bloated site.
Oh, and cPanel sucks. Don't use that as a requirement for anything of quality.

Stephan777 said:
Morning, thanks for the info!

Any reason for not recommending Xneelo?
Click to expand...

Imo, Xneelo hosting sucks unless you're on a very expensive package. Performance is so noticeably sluggish compared to alternatives and their KonsoleH control panel is the worst s**t in the world.

Excellent customer support though. But there are other hosts who also have excellent customer support. If you're looking for colocation, Xneelo are great I'm sure. Heck, probably a lot of web hosts in SA going that route themselves.

rustypup said:
AWS
Azure

No contest.

Load-balancing, CDN on demand, staging and a host of workflow integration tools as well.
Click to expand...

I have a 2-core, 4GB memory EC2 instance in Northern California due to the hundreds of dollars in AWS credit I have. Performance is about the same as DigitalOcean and Linode servers, and worse than Vultr High Frequency. If you have a solid hosting setup with Snapshot Failover or High Availability, I'm not sure that the extreme premium that AWS charges for comparable specs is worth the money. Especially at scale. Downtime almost never occurs with the less-costly major cloud providers. Maybe once every two years there is 30-60 minutes of downtime for some reason, which can be easily mitigated in most circumstances. More frequently than that is a few minutes every few months, and for some locations only.

Before taking out any server from a major cloud provider, you can check uptime on Cloud Harmony's status page. You can see the dodge locations a mile away. Obviously not applicable to AWS, Azure and Google Cloud though as they have 100% uptime.

Load balancing, CDNs, premium DNS, failover DNS etc. can be had from more cost-effective sources like BunnyCDN and DNS Made Easy.

Kevin Sihle said:
Truehost Africa may be the most underrated web host here in South Africa. Y'all should check it out. Affordable packages from as low as R7 per month. https://truehost.africa/
Click to expand...

If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. There is only one reason you can have ultra-cheap hosting - a gazillion sites per server.
 
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@Stephan777

:crying: what about us

1. What is the best option when it comes to Speed, Local hosting, Support & Cpanel interface between:
Click to expand...

There are a lot of good hosts out there. Luckily cPanel & Direct Admin are very popular and make it easy when migrating websites between the two control panels meaning that you can migrate from Direct Admin to cPanel and vice versa.

You want to make sure that your host provides you with a few performance features, at TeraHost we include LiteSpeed, Redis & Memcache for free.

2. What effect does Page Speed have on Google rankings when it comes to Mobile vs Desktop
Click to expand...

As @Bryn said that page speed does not impact search results but if your page takes 10s to load your visitors won't wait for it and will click off of the website resulting in higher bounce rates which impact your overall SEO score.

3. Will moving to Xneelo / Domains.co.za drastically improve FCP and LCP?
Click to expand...

I'd say anything under 3s is a good load time, caching your page will make it load instantly anyway (it should, if not your not caching your site correctly). Highly recommend that you use LiteSpeed with the LiteSpeed Web Server plugin for WordPress. I wrote an article on how you can improve your WordPress loading times:

1. https://terahost.co.za/how-to-speed-up-wordpress-with-litespeed/
2. https://terahost.co.za/how-to-make-wordpress-faster/
 
ExclusiveWebHosting said:
Good News everyone :) quic.cloud will be production-ready by Q4 2020.

In other news: We have made an arrangement with Litespeed to deploy our very own Optimizations Cluster in Cape Town before the end of 2020. I am sure the other hosts in this thread will agree that using LSCache is great but waiting for images etc. to be optimized and sent back can take a long time. Once the cluster is up and running all South African hosts who use Litespeed will receive their Image Optimisations, etc. straight from the cluster in Cape Town instead of the current clusters located in EU & US. This will greatly benefit us all as only South African Litespeed users will be using the local cluster and it will not be open to international users :)

My apologies for hijacking the thread, I just wanted to share considering there are a lot of local hosts present :)
Click to expand...
You are hijacking the OP’s post now - why not provide updates in your other thread about quic?
 
@Stephan777

We did not make the list. :(

I see you are moving sites from us. What happened? Did something go wrong?
 
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Ruan @ TeraHost said:
@Stephan777

:crying: what about us

There are a lot of good hosts out there. Luckily cPanel & Direct Admin are very popular and make it easy when migrating websites between the two control panels meaning that you can migrate from Direct Admin to cPanel and vice versa.

You want to make sure that your host provides you with a few performance features, at TeraHost we include LiteSpeed, Redis & Memcache for free.

As @Bryn said that page speed does not impact search results but if your page takes 10s to load your visitors won't wait for it and will click off of the website resulting in higher bounce rates which impact your overall SEO score.

I'd say anything under 3s is a good load time, caching your page will make it load instantly anyway (it should, if not your not caching your site correctly). Highly recommend that you use LiteSpeed with the LiteSpeed Web Server plugin for WordPress. I wrote an article on how you can improve your WordPress loading times:

1. https://terahost.co.za/how-to-speed-up-wordpress-with-litespeed/
2. https://terahost.co.za/how-to-make-wordpress-faster/
Click to expand...

You only offer shared hosting though. Performance on those accounts may be fine for smaller sites, but for online stores, slightly bigger businesses and beyond, and anyone looking for max speed, they're going to need a VPS or cloud server. I don't have any sites that take more than 2 seconds to load. Most are around 1 second or under. This is with a LEMP stack btw - not LSC.

I have major doubts these days about LiteSpeed. One of my Facebook groups is purely about self-managed servers and more than a few folks have shown Closte sites (the peak of LiteSpeed performance imo - their platform flies like little else I've seen) and others managed with CyberPanel falling to pieces in heavy LoadStorm tests. Whereas hardened and optimised LEMP stacks are still around when the dust settles. So these days I'm not just concerned about how the site performs for 1 person running the same simple benchmark over and over again, but how it would perform if a site trended on Reddit. I can't imagine a client having a shot at glory and my hosting costing them everything.

When it comes to any sort of SEO impact from load times, I don't think it occurs at all. People won't be bouncing that fast.

AfriNatic said:
@Stephan777

We did not make the list. :(
Click to expand...

No offence - I have Afrihost Pure Fibre and love you guys - but the hosting pages on the Afrihost website are abysmal. Hardly any meaningful, concrete info about anything. Think of who your target audience is; 50+% of such people will just abandon your site.
  • What processors are these?
  • What are the addons?
  • How much are the addons?
  • "HDD" - what in the actual hell
  • Where is this actually hosted?
This is why I use Domains.co.za. They know the sort of person browsing their VPS page, and they provide the info upfront.
 
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Bryn said:
You only offer shared hosting though. Performance on those accounts may be fine for smaller sites, but for online stores, slightly bigger businesses and beyond, and anyone looking for max speed, they're going to need a VPS or cloud server. I don't have any sites that take more than 2 seconds to load. Most are around 1 second or under. This is with a LEMP stack btw - not LSC.

I have major doubts these days about LiteSpeed. One of my Facebook groups is purely about self-managed servers and more than a few folks have shown Closte sites (the peak of LiteSpeed performance imo - their platform flies like little else I've seen) and others managed with CyperPanel falling to pieces in heavy LoadStorm tests. Whereas hardened and optimised LEMP stacks are still around when the dust settles. So these days I'm not just concerned about how the site performs for 1 person running the same simple benchmark over and over again, but how it would perform if your site trended on Reddit. I can't imagine a client having a shot at glory and my hosting costing them everything.

When it comes to any sort of SEO impact from load times, I don't think it occurs at all. People won't be bouncing that fast.



No offence - I have Afrihost Pure Fibre and love you guys - but the hosting pages on the Afrihost website are abysmal. Hardly any meaningful, concrete info about anything. Think of who your target audience is; 50+% of such people will just abandon your site.
  • What processors are these?
  • What are the addons?
  • How much are the addons?
  • "HDD" - what in the actual hell
  • Where is this actually hosted?
This is why I use Domains.co.za. They know the sort of person browsing their VPS page, and they provide the info upfront.
Click to expand...

I understand your frustration. Due to various factors with old servers and new ones coming online posting every servers specs isn't always possible but I do get your concern regarding this. When it comes to dedicated or cloud servers we have a dedicated team member available that looks after these clients but support is also able to assist.

Addons can also vary in price and the frequency they change. Like a static IP address. Afrihost is struggling with IPv4 exhaustion so the price of a static ip might change so always changing the website is labour intensive.

All our server are hosted at MTN Gallo Manor data centre. We have our own hardware and all is hosted on our own network. We have a large section in the Data Centre that is only hosting our hardware.


Most clients that want to host a blog don't usually care much about all this. They want their website to be hosted on a fast and reliable server. We promise 100% uptime because things do go wrong that might cause some downtime but we do aim to keep that number as close to 100% as possible.
 
AfriNatic said:
All our server are hosted at MTN Gallo Manor data centre. We have our own hardware and all is hosted on our own network.
Click to expand...
That’s your first issue - Gallo Manor has been down more than it’s been up. I wouldn’t host my laptop in there, let alone an entire environment.
 
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