Ever since I started kc web design kent our website has been hosted on an eco-friendly server in the US by AISO.net. I try to be as eco-friendly as possible at home and with the business and I love the idea of our website living on a server that is completely powered by renewable energy sources. Unfortunately, living and working in the UK means we’re a bit short of solar power which meant we had to use a hosting company in California. For a long time it was perfect BUT over the last few years the I’ve had problems with the site being slow and unavailable during UK business hours.
I’ve spent hours, even days, trying to fix and optimise the site so it was faster but it seemed that the latency involved in hosting across the water was just to much. I tried CDN hosting, Cloudflare (which did make a difference) and all sorts of WordPress cache plugins but nothing really made a significant improvement. After monitoring the site for a few months it also came to light that it was down a lot during UK business hours which isn’t good for a UK web design company. AISO said the website uptime was good but I suspect maintenance was done during their night time which happens to be our day time. Anyway, after a lot of deliberation I decided to move the site to a UK host.
I’ve used TSOHost before on a few WordPress projects and their dedicated WordPress hosting is very good so I bought some hosting and moved the kc web design kent website over to them. Wow! What a difference! With no changes to the site at all, and even removing Cloudflare, the difference in speed was incredible. After adding some good WordPress caching the kc web design kent website now loads in around a second or less. With the old eco-friendly hosting I wasn’t getting anything less than 6 seconds so it was a huge improvement. Google webmaster tools still says my average page load is 6 secs so it will be interesting to see this figure come down over the next few weeks. Who knows, it may even improve search rankings!
No, I’m not saying eco hosting is bad, but if you’re a UK company you need to be careful where you host your website. Hosting in the US didn’t work for me. Hosting in the UK has been much better. It also keeps money in UK businesses, is cheaper than my old hosting and I can claim the VAT back. Win, win, win!