Fast Page Loads

Lightning-Fast Premium Web Hosting

Cheap web hosting is cheap because web hosting companies put hundreds (even thousands) of websites on a single web server. The result is an affordable, but SLOW experience for visitors. Even if you aren't expecting many visitors to your site, it will still be slow because the server is busy fulfilling requests for other websites on that server. And if you want a truly dedicated server, you can expect to pay a LOT more than for the shared hosting packages. Our web servers are dedicated to our websites—period. Sure, you pay a little more than the cheap web hosting plans out there, but you get a world of difference. You'll never have to deal with the frustrating automated phone options,  hold music, or an inexperienced person on the other end of the line. Our servers are extremely fast, redundant, backed up, secure, and monitored round the clock. So for about half the cost of most major web hosting companies' dedicated server plans, you get hosting, support, and an entire feature-rich web platform. Compare apples to apples and it's a no-brainer. Learn more about our green premium web hosting features.

Page Caching

The biggest advantage of a Content Management System (CMS) is that you have full control over pages and their content. This is due to the fact that the content is actually stored in a database. And when a page is accessed, the content is dynamically inserted into the page template and shown to the visitor as a complete page. It's great that you have so much control, but a side effect of this concept is that the web server and database are accessed every time, wasting precious processing power. Page caching is the idea that when a page is first accessed, it's dynamically generated from the database and server, however, the result is saved as an HTML file on the server. Then whenever the page is accessed again (and assuming it's not out of date), the cache file is displayed instead, greatly reducing the load on the server. The end result is a much faster page load, and a web server that is free to do other things.

Data Caching

Similar to page caching (above), whenever data is retrieved from the database, there is a great load on the server because it has to retrieve the data, filter it, and format it into a visually appealing layout. The greater the number of items in the database, the greater the delay and server load. To address this issue, the first time data is accessed, it is also stored ready-to-use, which is used from then on until something changes to the data, etc.  The end result is a much faster page load, and a web server that is free to do other things.

JavaScript Optimization (combine, compress, & cache)

Due to the nature of how browsers load external JavaScript files, there are various practices that we use to decrease the amount of data downloaded, and speed up page load times. Our web platform automatically combines separate files into one, compresses the scripts to save space, and caches the resulting script as a single file. This act dramatically reduces the overall file size downloaded, and greatly speeds the page load times both initially and when the page is revisited.

CSS Optimization

We do the exact same practice as described above in JavaScript Optimization, whereby a single, compressed, cached CSS file is created and used. Additionally, the CSS references are placed before JS references. Believe it or not, this actually has a large impact on the load time.

eTag Utilization (Browser Caching)

An etag is a unique identifier for each file requested from the web server, which helps the browser to determine whether to use a cached version of the file, or request the content anew. The web server sends the identifier to the browser, which then records the identifier for each file it has received. The next time the browser needs to access the file on the web server, it passes the id along with the request. The server then compares it with the most up-to-date id. If they are different, the server sends back the new content (because the content has been modified since it was last requested). If the id's are the same, the server instead sends a "304 Not Modified" message and the browser uses its cached version of the file. As you can imagine, this process tremendously reduces bandwidth* downloaded from the server, but also results in a nearly instantaneous loading of the accessed file.

File Compression (gzip)

All text-based files (HTML, XML, CSS, JavaScript) are automatically compressed before being sent to the browser. Needless to say, this also reduces the size of the files sent, thereby reducing bandwidth* and page load times.


* The use of the word "bandwidth" above is actually incorrect. We are referring to the amount of data transferred from the server to the browser, rather than the actual capability of the pipeline between the two. However, since most people (including web hosting companies) associate "bandwidth" with transferred data, we are also using it as such for the sake of simplicity.