Why you should be using Pressidium Premium Hosting
Finding a WordPress hosting company that can be trusted and reliable can be difficult, thankfully, we came across Pressidium and never looked back. Their reliability and speed are unmatched to anything else we have found. They come highly recommended for secure and scalable WordPress hosting and for very good reason.
Even before you get started with your site being hosted by them, the first thing you notice is the amazing service received. They take the time to get to know the business. Your website goals suddenly become their website goals. It’s great to have them working with you doing all they can to help you achieve those. You’re working with actual engineers, not salespeople. They’re on call 24/7 too!
The infrastructure is unbeatable. It is designed never to fail. It was built from scratch with N-tier architecture with no single point of failure. This makes it one of the most reliable servers, offering a powerful performance with maximum security. This gives businesses like ours peace-of-mind on many levels.
Even better are the Singapore servers, giving extra back-up that is done daily. In the event of disaster striking, we’d still be up and running. In fact, Pressidium is global with different data centres around the world and even more strategic edge locations.
What also adds to peace of mind is the security, Pressidium constantly scans for vulnerabilities and malware threats. Additionally, they make the process of installing a free SSL certificate easy, with full Let's Encrypt support. This ensures website visitors keep their information secure, it also is a positive signal for Google rankings.
The servers are also incredibly fast. We’re pleased with the continued performance of our site which increases positive user experience thanks to the ease and speed of it. Pressidium does this by sending the requests to the least busy server.
Medium to large businesses will love Pressidium, including the user dashboard. It is so easy to operate and can even be worked on mobiles or tablets thanks to the responsive design. Instant backups are made so if we made a change that ended up breaking an element of the site, we can go back to an earlier version with one click. We love the cache management that allows us to clear the website’s cache easily. One of the main features we are really excited about is the option to create a staging website very easily. This allows us to do testing of new features and then push it to the live website. If it works out great, we don’t need to spend the time replicating it – we just send it to Production. The Cloning Tool helps us create templates to use again. Of course, as with the other features of Pressidium, domain mapping is made simple. All you have to do is update the DNS settings and Pressidium did the rest. Any questions we had about our site were answered thanks to the Knowledge Base.
The real-time analytics has given our team great insight into our audiences, which we have already been able to use to our advantage. Pressidium has saved us a lot of time, to say the least. No doubt that companies like ours, including the Fortune 500 companies that use Pressidium, are finding their website operations a breeze and nothing that needs to be played around with too much. It’s very straightforward and easy to navigate.
It’s apparent why Pressidium is recommended above the rest. As far as managed WordPress hosting goes, Pressidium is by far the best available. We feel completely confident that our website is in good hands. Pressidium just feels part of our brand, they work with us, to make our site the very best it can be. We don’t feel like another customer, but instead a valued client. Pressidium can do the same for you as they have done for us.
Beginning October 24th, Google is making a significant change that will see the majority of small business websites affected. From this date, the digital giants are flagging all sites without an SSL Certificate as “not secure” when a user interacts with a form on the page. If you operate a small business, there is a good chance that this will have an impact on your website and spring a lot of questions and doubts about website visitors.
SSL Certificates are small files that keep cryptographic keys of a business or organisation’s identifiable details. It creates secure connections between the web server and to the browser being used. It is commonly used for websites that might require a log-in, data transfers, credit card transactions and more recently, social media browsing. SSL will encrypt all user inputted details in an attempt to have them safely delivered to the server and is essential for protecting information from hackers and identity thieves. When you come across a website with a valid SSL Certificate, you will see a padlock in the browser.
Do I need an SSL certificate?
Yes, and Google thinks so too! All websites that require the user to put in some type of data should have an SSL Certificate. This is especially true for any sites taking credit card transactions. In this case, an SSL Certificate is an absolute must according to the Payment Card Industry (PCI) standards. By being able to encrypt and protect user data from potential hackers and identity theft, you create a sense of trust with your visitors.
How Google is taking a stand
Google will now flag up any page that does not have an SSL Certificate when a user goes to input information into any type of form. They warned site owners by sending out notices earlier this month who have not switched from HTTP to HTTPS. These warnings said that any page that did not switch by October 24th would be marked as “NOT SECURE.” Even if a user enters a website under “incognito” mode, the same message will flash up in Chrome.
This means that HTTP websites with forms with text inputs will be more difficult to find in Google searches. This change mainly focused on text input of credit card details and passwords, but it will now have an effect on those sites with search engine bars, contact forms, and login panels.
Google is making these changes to help warn website owners and visitors of the vulnerability of the web and hopes it will encourage the switch to HTTPS.
What websites will be affected by this?
A Google report last year showed that 79 out of 100 of the top non-Google websites did not use HTTPS by default, even though it is considered a fundamental security feature and a must-have. That means millions of other sites, especially those belonging to a small business, that do not have the SSL Certificate. This is usually only down to not bothering with the extra effort, as implementing an SSL Certificate is seen as just making things more complicated.
Don’t get caught out and lose potential customers! Get your SSL Certificate in place, so your visitors know their information is kept safe, giving a good sense of security and building trust with your brand. Matter Solutions are here to help sort your SSL Certificate needs. If you’re unsure where to start getting that SSL Certificate or have any questions about your site, call one of our experts today, and we will get your site safe and trusted by visitors.
Website speed is becoming an increasingly important factor when it comes to user experience. If a company want their users to have a good user experience, then they need to make their website as fast as possible, however, this is not always the simplest thing to achieve.
One of the biggest problems is that it is hard to measure just how fast a website is due to many other contributing factors that can affect the speed of a site. Things such as location, signal, computer age, browser and more can have a negative effect on the speed of a website, so it is hard to be clear about if it is the website itself that is slowing a site down.
The loading speed of a site can cause issues when it comes to customer losses, as people do not have the time to sit around and wait for a website to load. People on average are only prepared to wait around for 3 to 4 seconds before giving up and trying to find a faster website. In some cases, people are even more impatient when it comes to loading websites on a mobile phone. A study shows that 47% of people actually expect a website to load in 2 seconds or less and 52% of people claim that how fast a website load is important to how loyal they will be to the website.
A delay of just 1 second can lead to a huge loss in sales. Even if people stay around to put things in their shopping basket, if the checkout process is slow then there is a high chance that they will abandon the products in the shopping cart, an e-commerce companies worst nightmare.
So why would a website load slowly and what contributes to this loss of speed? There are a number of reasons that your website could be loading slowly. One of the biggest issues is cheap hosting. Companies may do this to save money at the start, but in the long run this could be very harmful to a business. Unoptimized images are also a huge problem if people do not know to compress them. A website full of huge images is going to struggle to be speedy in the long run, no matter what computer it is accessed on.
Flash can seriously slow down a web page because on a mobile phone it is incompatible with the majority of devices, therefore it is important for businesses to consider all devices and browsers when creating it. Using an alternative to Flash may be the best option when more and more people are turning to their mobile phones to access the internet. Even simple things such as plugins for social media can have a negative impact on website speed. Companies have a tough decision to make, they need to decide whether it is worth putting a feature on a website if it has the potential to slow it down. The optimum website will have a good balance, have enough interesting features to make for a good website, but also not too many so that load speed is not affected.
The following infographic by Skilled shows the impact of speed on your website:
Does the speed of your website actually have an effect on your sales? If surveys done by Akamai and Gomez.com are anything to go by, then the answer is yes. 47% of consumers expect a website to load in 2 seconds or less, with 40% of people leaving the website if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load. Faster speeds ensure there is still a high user experience. If users aren’t having a good experience, they’re going to leave the website and visit a competitor’s instead. In fact, a one-second delay in page load time will account for an 11 percent drop in pageviews.
So what impact does a slow website have on sales? Walmart decided to test what difference page speed made. They increased their speed performance and found:
Every one second of improvement resulted in a 2% increase in conversions
Revenue grew by up to 1% for every 100 ms of improvement.
Going by this test, it was clear there is a direct correlation between even a small improvement in website speed and amount of conversions.
Impact on Google
Page speed doesn’t only matter to the customers, it matters to Google as well. Back in 2010, Google’s algorithm changed to include page speed as a factor it measured. That means websites with a slow load speed would be penalised and see their search engine result slip. However, you don’t need to panic - the algorithm change does not drastically affect rankings, unless your website is extremely slow. After all, this is just one of the many factors that affect a website’s ranking. Other factors, such as relevance of a page, is far more heavily weighed than page speed.
Google also announced that page speed may become a factor for mobile pages as well. A future algorithm update is set to continue making websites more mobile-friendly. Businesses cannot simply think about the speed of their desktop website - they also need to consider whether they are mobile-friendly and whether this is fast and responsive. Kissmetrics found if a mobile site takes longer than 10 seconds to load, 30 percent will abandon the website. This is a huge percentage of potential customers who are abandoning a website before it’s even loaded, just because it’s too slow.
If your page is loading slowly and costing you conversions, you’re going to want to know what you can do to fix it. Some factors that cause a page to load slowly include:
Themes and plugins: both the theme of your website, and any plugins you use, can greatly change your loading speed. Make sure your themes and plugins are always updated to the latest version, that your theme isn’t too complicated and you’re not using too many plugins.
Web hosting: you get what you pay for, and the same goes for web hosting. A cheap web host could potentially lead to a slower pagespeed. When you’re looking at hosting, consider the size of your business and your website’s size and functionality before choosing a host.
Images: a website full of images is always going to be slower to load. Instead of using HD images, consider if you can compress images, while also maintaining their quality. This means your website will still look aesthetically pleasing while not compromising page speed.
Ads: not only will too many ads annoy you customers, it will also slow page speed. Consider what ads are necessary and how many you want on each page.
Once you know what you can alter on your website to improve its speed, you need to know how to measure its speed.
While your rankings won’t be overly affected by a slow website**, it will have a big impact in traffic and conversions. It’s best to continually monitor your website speed, and determine what is causing the slow page load. Doing so will ensure you have a user-friendly website which will continue to rank well and receive high conversions.
Updated March 2022
**I wrote that in 2017 when it wasn't 100% clear what Google did with the "UX data" - we now know.
Rankings WILL be affected if your website is slow and this clearly been the case for a couple of years. The User Experience (UX) of Google searchers is aggregated into "long click" and "short click" data from, this is also referred to as "dwell time". This is clearly an important ranking factor and you must consider speed as part of the UX effort to make your website as good as it can be. The Following Video from our YouTube channel explains "Pogo Sticking" the situation where Google searchers hop in and out of websites and how that can impact rankings of each website.
I came across this easy way to move cPanel accounts from one server to another.
In this instance, the original server was a re-seller account on a 3rd party server, the new server was a Dedicated server owned by Matter Solutions.
Due to limitations imposed by the 3rd party, the only option to move accounts was to do a remote backup via cPanel for each user.
Step 1
We first create a new website account on our new server (This is only temporary).
Make sure to enable Shell (SSH Command Line) access.
Step 2
Using the logins for that new account we go through each account on the old server.
Using the Backup Wizard we start a Full Site backup.
In the destination source we choose "SCP Remote Location".
We then enter in our Shell (SSH Command Line) details.
Server, Username, Password, Port (Usually always 22) and remote location (Usually had to put just a / as a blank would error).
Step 3
After clicking back, the old server then creates the full backup an transfers it across to the new server.
Now as we told it to drop it in the root folder (/) of the account we can find the files under /home/newaccuser/.
Make sure that all the backup files needed are here. (The user names are in the file name).
Step 4
Move all the backups from this location to the /home/ folder (or up one level).
as these where the only tar.gz files in the directory we where working in we could run the below command to do this for us. mv *.tar.gz /home
Step 5
Once this was completed we then ran the restoration script for each file. /scripts/restorepkg /home/backup-6.28.2013_13-17-33_username.tar.gz
(Changing the Dates an username to your own files).
This then creates the users on the new server, and then restores everything back into place.
Additional Steps for NAT
Now as our new server runs inside Amazon Web Services data center in Sydney we had to do one more step to finish everything off.
When the restore package script runs, it will replace the old IP address with the servers new IP address.
And as our server has NAT ip's the New ip it gets is the local networks (ie. 10.0.1.55).
So since we knew that these accounts where the newest on this server and would be the only ones with this IP Address,
We ran the below script to just fix the DNS records up so they had the correct NAT IP address. replace "10.0.1.55" "54.X.X.X" -- /var/named/*.db
(Here would replace the Before and After IP's with your own.)
Despite being deathly ill with some child brewed illness, I can't help but offer advice when I see people with the wrong ideas. On an email list I'm a part of, I came across someone earlier today in that category. They claimed that the minuscule page speed improvements you get from hosting WordPress websites closer to your users has no discernible impact on your rankings, I couldn't help myself.
Here is the reply I just had to make.
"The evidence I've seen shows that 20-40ms for responses from hosting in Australia compared 200ms+ for hosting in the US do affect users and this is why...
I concede 200ms is not long or at least it doesn't seem like long but when a web page loads it takes quite a few elements to make it work so you've got to consider what is happening on a microlevel.
The number of elements the need to download depend on the complexity of your website but in most cases I've seen it'd be 10-20 and as many as 50 or even 100 in some (terrible) cases.
Each element is loaded by the visitor's browser making a call to the website, the server at the website's end responds.
I'll try and do this like a "role-play"
Initial Request
Visitor - give me the home page "/"
Time passed from US: 200ms
Time passed from Oz: 20-40ms
The page's HTML downloads.
Downloading Data
The download time MIGHT be less from Oz but let's pretend it isn't.
Time past from US: n/a
Time past from Oz: n/a (but probably less than US)
Parsing
The page's HTML is parsed by the browser. The parsing time won't be any different US or OZ hosting.
Time past from US: n/a
Time past from Oz: n/a (both the same)
Download the rest
The page's HTML tells the browser to load 2 Javascript (JS) files, 2 Stylesheet (CSS) and 5 images. Totalling another 9 requests.
The browser then makes these 9 additional requests to the server but the round trip on these is delayed by the 200ms (versus 20ms).
Time past from US: 200ms
Time past from Oz: 20-40ms (but probably less than US)
These 9 requests can happen in parallel, all at once, but only when there are just under 10 requests so the result is...
Total Time past from US: 400ms + download
Total Time past from Oz: 80ms + download
BUT if I told you many web pages have 10's of request and at that volume they are queued one after another... that means the 200ms delay is magnified massively because each new batch of requests is 10x slower than it needs to be. There are work arounds for this in speed optimisation but before those some 1/2 decent hosting in Oz is the way to go.
There is plenty of good stuff out there about page speed and we (at my company) never host someone very far from their target customers for User Experience mostly and it is a bonus that this is also a plus for SEO"
We're very excited to announce we've prepared a special free web hosting offer for small Australian businesses!
You can find all the details on our Free Hosting Australia website. If you have any questions or would like a free hosting solution for your business website simply contact us!
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