What Is “Fast Hosting” And What Does It Depend On

It’s no secret that website loading speed is very important. According to research, a visitor will not wait more than 3 seconds for a site to open. Fast rendering is also one of the factors that determine the position of a page in Google SERPs.

In most cases, the site opening speed depends on the code of the page itself. The maintainer of the site must ensure that the code is optimized, that the latest version of the software is used, and that the site itself is not overloaded with unnecessary plugins and unoptimized images.

In addition to the program code of the site, the hosting on which the site is hosted plays an equally important role. A good analogy would be a fast car and a road. The speed of the car corresponds to the program code of your site, and the road corresponds to the hosting. In order for a fast car to develop maximum speed, you need an excellent road. Likewise with a website – if it’s fully optimized, it’s important to make sure it’s hosted on a server that meets its capacity requirements.

In this article, we will consider what is important to consider when choosing a server so that it has a positive effect on the speed of its operation.

Hard disk type

There are two types of hard drives – HDD and SSD.

In a server that uses hard disks, information is stored on magnetic disks. When a specific file needs to be retrieved (for example, website image files), the disk physically spins until the file is found and accessible. This may take a few milliseconds, but if you are accessing a lot of files at the same time or running processes that require a lot of disk resources, the site can slow down.

SSDs use memory chips called flash memory. This allows you to write and retrieve data much faster.

IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second) is faster when reading or writing data on SSDs. For comparison, conventional HDDs have an IOPS of 80-180, while SSDs can have an IOPS of up to 75,000.

Solid state drives also provide faster file access. This is especially true for dynamic sites that write and read very large amounts of data, such as large e-commerce, classifieds, or media sites that need to process very large amounts of files to render.

RAM

RAM is the short-term memory that temporarily stores data. When using RAM, data does not need to be read from disk each time, it is transferred to the processor faster.

RAM can be used to cache site information using various caching systems or plugins (e.g. Redis, Memcache). This allows you to speed up page loading times.

An adequate amount of RAM allows you to smoothly perform complex code tasks when multiple processes are running on the site at the same time.

RAM is also required for data import operations, which is especially true for large online stores that need to regularly import data, for example, from a warehouse or a supplier’s system.

CPU

The Central Processing Unit (CPU) is essentially the brain of the server. It performs basic logical, arithmetic, input, and output operations, which are then passed to the software as commands.

The main role of the CPU is to provide communication between the various components and perform the calculations necessary to support the software.

Splitting the central processing unit into multiple cores is now common, allowing systems to run more efficiently. When using multiple cores, processes can run on the second core if the first one is busy. However, four cores should not be expected to be four times faster or more efficient than a single core. There will be an increase in efficiency, but not four times.

Static sites don’t require a fast processor because they don’t contain code that needs to be interpreted or executed. If the site is created without a content management system or framework, and the content itself is static, then it is not so important what the processor power of the selected server is.

Bandwidth

Throughput is a measure of the maximum amount of data that can be transferred in a given amount of time, usually measured in gigabytes or megabytes per second.

A common parallel to describe bandwidth is a pipe. The larger the diameter of the pipe, the more water can flow through it at the same time. Bandwidth works on the same principle. The greater the bandwidth of the communication channel, the more data can be transmitted per second.

High bandwidth provides the fastest access to the page during peak hours. An analogy is a wide multi-lane highway and a narrow single-lane road. During peak hours, the capacity of a wide multi-lane road will better accommodate fast traffic. Likewise, higher throughput during peak hours provides sufficient data capacity.

Hosting type

Shared Servers

Shared server hosting plans allow you to host from a dozen to several dozen sites. All sites share common resources allocated to the server and can affect the load on the server. Often these hosting plans do not allocate a separate processor, RAM, or similar resources.

The plans created on these servers are priced lower, making them ideal for small to medium sites. These servers are also a good choice for start-ups when the site is not yet getting a lot of traffic, and it is not known if it will need dedicated resources.

As your site grows in popularity, and you find that there are not enough shared server resources, it may be worth moving your site to private servers.

Private servers

Private servers include dedicated servers (VDS) and virtual private servers (VPS). Compared to shared servers, private servers are more expensive and require special maintenance, but they are much more powerful because the resources of the entire virtual server are allocated to one client and not distributed proportionally among other users. Increasing power and memory will allow your server to process requests faster, resulting in faster site open times. This type of server is an ideal solution for hosting resource-intensive and high-traffic sites or projects.

Server location

When a visitor tries to open a site, a request from their browser is sent to the server, and upon receiving a response, information about the page is returned and displayed in the browser. If the site is visited mainly by visitors from Ukraine, and the server is located in a data center, for example, in the United States, then it takes more time to send a request across half the world and receive a response than if the same site is hosted on a server in Ukraine. In this regard, the server that hosts the site and the potential visitors to the site should be located in the same country.

CDN (content delivery network)

In a global world, it can be difficult to limit yourself to just one country from which you expect traffic. If you expect to receive traffic from all over the world, using a CDN service is a good idea. CDN is a system of geographically distributed servers that helps ensure fast page opening by reducing the physical distance between the server and the visitor.

When using a CDN, the site is opened from the closest point of presence (POP) to the page visitor through geographically distributed data centers.

Conclusion

The choice of server should depend on the type of site you plan to host. For a static, small site, hosting on shared servers is sufficient. It is also important that the server is located in the data center as close as possible to site visitors. In the absence of this, the site will work faster from anywhere in the world if you use a CDN.

For large, dynamic sites with a lot of changing information, or where large amounts of information need to be cached regularly, you should choose servers with sufficient RAM.

For a site with a lot of writes and reads, it makes sense to host the site on a server with solid state drives.