QiQ has been in business now for 18 years and we’ve had around 5 different websites in that time for our hosting business.
The development of our new website is always an exciting time as we take a look at what our presence should look like and the technologies available to us. In the past we have usually scheduled a number of months for the work to be completed. This year however we chose to do things slightly differently and use WordPress for the development. This has cut the development time down from months to a few weeks.
Around 25% of all websites are developed using WordPress and this is not without good reason. The ability to create pages and content in real time enables you to create content collaboratively and quickly. Further more, design templates are available that can make your content look great too. However, we still choose to use a professional designers and developers to add the finishing touches to our site, ensuring the choice of font, imagery and layout is complementary to our branding.
Our site also includes a few technical tweaks to help our order and support processes go more smoothly. For example, we have built the domain search tool straight into our site integrating with our billing and support platform. Also, behind the scenes we detect where visitors are coming from to help us display pricing in an appropriate currency. Pages also resize depending upon the resolution of the browser viewing them and images manipulated accordingly.
Where the greatest amount of time was spent was looking at creating the best hosting environment for a WordPress site. Previous QiQ sites have been static in nature, created using HTML and PHP pages. Our WordPress site is dynamic, being created from a database and changing content dependent upon where the web visitor is located. This puts extra demands on the server where the site is hosted.
Our standard shared hosting platforms host a variety of websites and therefore is configured in a general manner to meet the needs of a wide variety of sites. For the new QiQ site we decided to seek out a new hosting environment especially for WordPress. By focusing on the needs of WordPress, we have been able to create an environment that enables WordPress generated pages to be displayed quickly and efficiently.
The technology behind our our WordPress hosting environment includes:
Solid State Disk Drives (SSD)
Solid State Storage Technology to provide unmatched hard drive performance. Our Solid State Drives (SSD) offer I/O rates and access times that are impossible to achieve with a disk-based system. These drives are ideal for high availability WordPress installations because I/O wait times and bottlenecks are virtually eliminated, allowing server processing power and bandwidth to be fully utilised.
Memcached
In-memory caching system that is primarily used to speed up sites that make heavy use of databases. Managed WordPress utilizes Memcached to provide incredibly fast server responses and to reduce load times.
HipHop VM
PHP is the backbone of WordPress; if PHP is faster, then WordPress is faster. HipHop VM (HHVM) is a virtual machine specifically designed as an execution engine for PHP. Originally written by PHP enthusiasts at Facebook, HHVM provides unmatchable PHP execution speeds.
Mod Pagespeed
Making your site load faster shouldn’t be a hassle; enter mod_pagespeed. Developed by Google, mod_pagespeed is an Apache module that automatically applies web performance best practices to your WordPress installation.
Cloudflare
By utilising Cloudflare we are able to speed things up further. The distributed Content Delivery Network, Security and DNS services supercharge the speed of delivery regardless of where on the globe our visitors are coming from.
Of course, spending time researching and implementing the best WordPress hosting for our website was important but equally it is important that we share these benefits to our clients so they can amaze their customers. Our supercharged WordPress hosting environment is available for any client who wishes to use it. Simply stop by https://www.qiq.host and select ‘WordPress Optimised Hosting’ from the menu for further details.