Website hosting has gotten a lot more complicated over the years.
Back when I started in the tech business, websites were strictly HTML with a few image files, and the occasional dynamic page to collect information from the user.
Flash forward to today, and most sites are run using a content management system (CMS) like WordPress. Although these CMSs give the average user a lot of power to keep their site up to date, it comes at a price. These CMS websites require more web server resources to run them.
Blue Zoo does a number of things to ensure your website hosting operates efficiently.
1- To help our sites load quickly, we install caching technology on every site. This makes your souped up CMS act like a simple HTML/image only site from the days of yore. Caching works by creating the content stored in the CMS as just HTML and images ahead of time. When a visitor comes to your site, they get the simple HTML files. That saves the web server the huge overhead of running a complex CMS every time someone wants to view a page from a site.
2- We use third party programs like Google Page Speed and CloudFlare to increase the speed of the site. Google Page Speed shrinks down elements of your site so there’s less to download every time you run the site.
CloudFlare also takes pieces of your site and spreads them around the internet. That way your sites loads the data from the closest physical location which speeds up load time. CloudFlare also creates a copy of your site to access for the rare downtimes we may experience.
3- Blue Zoo creates multiple off-site backups as part of all of our hosting packages. That way we always have a snapshot of previous versions of your site in case disaster strikes. For most sites, we keep monthly backups spanning a year just in case you’ve accidentally deleted something six months ago and need it again now.
4- We add extra layers of security to our websites. WordPress keeps a close eye on it’s security and releases regular updates. When a new version of WordPress is released, we update the sites we host right away so you are protected. Additionally, we add an extra layer of server security that ensures no core files are changed and shuts out attackers that try to access your site.
5- And Blue Zoo includes mechanisms to keep spam comments off your website. We ask site visitors to prove they’re human by requiring captchas and using other tricks to make sure commenters aren’t computer programs.
If you’d like to know more about the hosting options we provide, please contact us and let us know how we can help.