performance

Unlike other website hosts, our UK-based Linode servers are optimised specifically for WordPress with PHP OPcache, Redis, server-level page caching and cloud-based storage.

We maintain our own 100% renewable energy-powered servers located at Linode‘s London data centre1, which allows us to optimise the configuration for performance. Piggybacking on the server infrastructure used for the Huddersfield Exposed site (est. 2015), the separate managed WordPress servers are capable of handling hundreds of requests per second with sub-millisecond response times.

the WPPerformanceTester benchmarks of our most basic WordPress offering are better than the industry average (tested in December 2021)

The WordPress servers sit behind front-end Nginx web servers that deliver the static content and cache the dynamically-generated web pages for your visitors. All our servers support HTTP/2, HTTP/3 and Brotli to help ensure your site is lightning fast with a minimal TTFB (Time to First Byte).

TTFB test by bytecheck

PHP FastCGI Process Manager (PHP-FPM), combined with PHP OPcache, Memcached and Redis, helps to keep each WordPress servers’ daily average CPU load at under 5%, leaving plenty of spare capacity to cope with sudden increases in visitors to your site.

Following the release of WordPress 6 in May 2022, all sites were migrated to PHP 8.

the WordPress Hosting Benchmark tool results for our most basic WordPress offering (tested in August 2022 with PHP 8.1)2

All sites are configured to use secure HTTPS by default, and we’ll take care of the SSL certificate renewals and configuration for you.

all of the sites that we host achieve an A+ rating from Qualys SSL Labs

If your site contains lots of images or multimedia, we can improve the performance by using Linode’s European cloud-based Object Storage CDN to deliver them.

We aim to achieve at least 99.99% uptime on the WordPress servers, which equates to an average downtime of 1 minute per week.3 In practice, we regularly achieve over 99.995% uptime on our servers.

When we benchmarked one of our WordPress sites, it was capable of delivering the site’s home page 5,145 times per second with a simulated load of 100 simultaneous users (equivalent to an average time per request of 0.194 milliseconds). When the load was increased to 1,000 simultaneous users, the server was still capable of maintaining a sub-millisecond response time (0.599ms), delivering the home page 1,670 times per second.

During subsequent load testing, our server configuration outperformed a WordPress + Varnish installation on the same hardware by 31.69%.

Notes:

  1. Linode’s London data centre is operated by Equinix, which is powered entirely by renewable energy. Source: SustainableWWW.
  2. The relatively low score for the database import test is due to the use of a multi-node Galera database cluster for the WordPress databases. All writes to a database are replicated across the other nodes and then verified to ensure data consistency. However, for a WordPress site, data is predominantly being read from the database, rather than being written to it — in this scenario, the cluster provides improved performance due to load balancing and read scalability.
  3. Planned downtime is usually limited to occasional server reboots following kernel patching. Reboots usually take about 30 seconds and are typically carried out at around 2am.