By When it comes to website hosting, does your business feel the need? The need for speed?
While speed might not be a good thing when driving your car on a busy city road, when it comes to opening a website, it is one of the most important factors that helps determine authority.
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The faster a website loads, the better the consumer experience is and the higher the domain authority will be. And if you’re a business that has an ecommerce website, nothing sounds better than raking in some quick dough from those customer transactions.
According to Google’s research, the probability of a bounce increases by 32% once the loading time of a webpage increases from 1 to 3 seconds. The same probability figure touches 90% when the time increases from 1 to 5 seconds and a staggering 106% for 1 to 6 seconds.
At Vendasta, we know how important that concept is for businesses and, therefore, are always looking at ways to improve website speed and performance for our partners and their customers.
In addition to empowering digital marketing agencies to build secure and beautiful WordPress websites for their customers, we’re also dedicated to providing them with value by offering the fastest hosting speed for their websites.
How does Vendasta offer the fastest website hosting?
The answer to that question is that we recently migrated the infrastructure of our Website product to Google Cloud Platform’s next-generation compute-optimized (C2) machines.
In addition to these machines offering the highest performance per core that Google Cloud Platform can offer, they are also optimized for compute-intensive workloads.
Well, that’s great. But what exactly does that mean? In layman’s terms, it means that our machines have the ability to handle even the most demanding WordPress websites built.
Therefore, it doesn’t matter whether your business has a light-load website like a blog or a heavy-load ecommerce website that demands tons of concurrent users online. What matters is that every business gets to reap the benefits that this change has to offer.
How does this impact your business?
While having speed and enjoying a faster website hosting experience is surely a good thing, the question that arises is how does this change actually impact your business in the real world?
To answer that question more effectively, let’s take a look at a real-life example.
Imagine that you’re shopping at one of the big grocery stores like Costco or Sobeys with 10-15 different checkout lanes. Now compare that with a local grocery store that has just one.
It goes without saying that those big grocery stores will allow more customers to purchase their items faster as compared to the local grocery store due to the presence of multiple checkout lanes. Therefore, in the same time period, a Costco will do more business than a local store.
This could spell doom for the local grocery store since customers will not only have to wait in line longer, but could potentially even leave without purchasing anything from the store.
Ecommerce websites fall in the same category. Businesses that have an ecommerce website must ensure that their customers are able to purchase items from their store with ease. And a big proponent for this is the ability to check out without running into any latency issues.
With the introduction of the new Google Cloud Platform machines, Vendasta’s Website product can take that small local business and turn them into a massive Costco.
We’ve been rigorously testing these machines for quite some time now and the results have been staggering. In addition to seeing performance improvements of up to 60%, we’ve also witnessed that sites can handle 30 simultaneous requests with a response time of 1.3 seconds.
And that’s not all. We further witnessed that Vendasta’s Website product has the ability to handle more than 200 requests in a response time of just over 4 seconds, without hitting a snag.
That’s 200 customers simultaneously using the checkout lanes at your grocery store in just over 4 seconds.
What’s interesting to note is that we ran our tests on our busiest cluster, which means testing the conditions when the demand and traffic is the highest and most unfavourable.
The best way to imagine that is to imagine the rush in a grocery store on a weekend or holiday as opposed to the emptiness midway during the week. Being able to check out 200 customers in less than 4 seconds on a weekend is a way bigger deal than doing so during a weekday.
How does Vendasta stack up against the competition
Now that we know that Vendasta offers great speed, let’s get down to brass tacks. While speed is good, how does the product actually fare against some of its competitors in the market today?
To prove that the ecommerce websites being hosted on our machines work better and faster than the competition, we ran a bunch of real-world tests to test our infrastructure.
We migrated the same set of ecommerce websites on some of our competitors like FlyWheel and WPEngine, and compared the results with our own data. We found out that while Vendasta can serve 35-100 requests concurrently, the competition fails at 3-10 simultaneous requests.
Going back to the grocery store analogy, if you’re having a sale and are not using a Vendasta product, you can’t have more than 3-10 people in your store at one time.
However, using Vendasta’s Website product, businesses can now host their ecommerce websites to operate 35-100 simultaneous checkout lanes, which is equivalent to five Costcos.
This combination of having an ecommerce website and great speed will empower your business to drive more conversions and sales because a slow website will hinder the customer experience that could prove to be a costly affair due to increased customer acquisition costs.
More reasons to choose Vendasta
While speed sure is an important factor when it comes to making a decision about choosing Vendasta’s Website product to manage your WordPress hosting needs, cost is another factor.
While the pricing for the competition falls in the range of $30-$40 per month, if you’re a small business that runs an ecommerce website and wants to challenge the big guns, you'll have to shell out around $200-400 each month for increasing the bandwidth and scaling your business.
However, with Vendasta’s cost structure that provides virtually unlimited visits and bandwidth each month, we empower agencies to wear a suit of armour and give them a fighting chance to give the established players in the market a run for their money.
In addition to that, Vendasta also offers you an integrated single sign-on (SSO) functionality, which means that never again would you have to bear the burden of remembering passwords. Using the competition, however, means tracking multiple passwords for different purposes.
Another benefit of signing up for the Vendasta platform is that it allows agencies to maintain their own brand equity by utilizing our white-label value proposition -- a feature that either has a cost associated with it or is not available altogether when you choose the competition.
Furthermore, Vendasta is an end-to-end commerce platform that provides the best-in-class digital solutions to agencies. This means that, in addition to fulfilling your website hosting needs, you can also get access to quality sales, marketing, and project management solutions.
In conclusion, if you’re looking for an affordable hosting solution that offers your customers the sublime combination of speed and powerful ecommerce, choose Vendasta’s Website product because the faster your website is, the more likely your customers will stay.