The issue on hosting… and slow admin panels

Last week, I started jumping back into the rabbit hole of researching web hosts. It began with an observation…

Some of my clients have been mentioning that their WordPress admin panels have felt…. sluggish. It comes and goes, but… the clients with membership sites running a lot of plugins have more issues with load time.

Goes with the territory for such sites. But also… my main hosting partner has been Rocket.net. And… if my clients’ sites aren’t moving like a rocket, what gives? 😇

So, I jumped into the rabbit hole in a quest to do something about it.

What follows in this issue is what I found…. and some changes I will be making.

Even if you’re not a client of mine, you may find this interesting as it relates to your own hosting. And as always, if you have any questions at all, never hesitate to just hit the reply button on this newsletter and ask away. All replies come right to me. 😎

OK, let’s rock and roll….

Slow Admin Panels – Is Rocket Up To The Task?

I want to talk to you about slow WordPress admin panels… and more broadly about managed hosting (from the likes of Rocket.net) versus more customized hosting like you would get on a virtual private server.

Here’s the spark for this…

My primary hosting partner for Concierge has been Rocket.net. I really like them – a lot. That said, I have to admit there’s been a bit of an issue here…

Slow admin panels.

Clicking around making edits and doing work on the backend and the site feelin’ a little… soupy. 🥴

Now, couple this with the kinds of sites I am often dealing with. Membership sites where people are logged-in (not cached). Usually lots of plugins (40-50 plugins is pretty normal). These kinds of sites are just more needy. My own site right here is running 50 plugins. I also have some clients running BuddyBoss & Elementor and those two plugins are rather notorious (especially BuddyBoss).

Not all of my clients have such large sites and… their sites run great on Rocket. But, my clients with memberships do have admin panels that are a little soupy. It goes with the territory and I will say Rocket is better than most in this regard, but…. I’m the Concierge, man! 😇 I’m supposed to tailor things to the kinds of sites I usually work with.

So, I’m looking into this and deciding the best course of action. Might it be worth it to look at other hosting options?

Rocket.net is fantastic in so many ways. But, hosts like this offer basically no custom options for server or hardware configurations. The idea is to just let them handle it. Also, Rocket depends very heavily on Cloudflare Enterprise and the caching layer…. which is not something that does us all that much good when we’re talking about dynamic memberships where you have logged-in users browsing concurrently.

And then there’s the VPS route. Virtual private servers. I personally manage them through xCloud Hosting. A VPS is more work, but also more flexible. You can tailor it to your needs and you’re also not sharing resources the same way.

With a VPS, we can throw more raw, dedicated backend horsepower at a website than perhaps what a company like Rocket can do. Rocket is optimized for front-end speed, but not necessarily backend performance. While their servers are pretty stacked, they are shared with a lot of other folks. There’s no public data about how many sites they will stack on a server, but it is definitely shared. And perhaps even getting more stacked since Rocket is now part of hosting.com and, frankly, may have more pressure due to private equity.

So, it is a choice between the hands-off approach of using Rocket (which is good, but not really tailored to dynamic membership sites)…. or the “more work, but customized” approach of a VPS (where I can more precisely tailor things to the better needs of me and my clients in Concierge).

I pay quite a bit of money every month to Rocket, too. 🤯 I don’t really mind that part, but when I also have clients reporting slow admin panels, then I need to look at the situation. If I threw that same amount of money into high-end VPS servers, I’d be able to provide a much faster environment.

And get this…

A high-powered server environment built for the needs of Concierge clients…. and ONLY used by Concierge clients.

It is tempting. 😎

So, this last week, I migrated my own website – Blog Marketing Academy – to a virtual private server. I’ve done this before, so I’m no stranger to it. But, I am now testing things to see how I can best optimize for these kinds of sites. While I’m not running any BuddyBoss, I am running my share of plugins. After all, I’m the digital sovereignty guy and I like to have most things running in-house. 😇

So, I’ll let you know! But, there may be a huge change coming to Concierge as I change the hosting situation. Below, I’ll talk more about the innards of where I’m heading when it comes to hosting….

Concierge Client Update

Hosting Changes

Given what I discussed above, you can see that there are changes coming to the hosting setup for Concierge. I will talk more below about the technical setup I’m leaning toward (if you’re curious), but let’s first talk logistics here.

For a long while now, clients who I take care of the hosting for have either been with Rocket.net or on a virtual private server managed by xCloud. So far, the only site I’ve moved off of Rocket is my own. If you’re curious which host you’re on, you can always check your website profile in your account… or just ask. 😇

At this point, the only changes I have made are for clients who were already being hosted with xCloud. I have provisioned much more powerful servers and moved many clients around over the last few days.

So, for those of you with sites on xCloud, you’re probably going to notice much faster websites. 😎 Frankly, the sites in question right now are on servers that are way overpowered for what they need, so once I have all the little bells and whistles in place, your sites are gonna scream.

Now, for those of you on Rocket hosting, this is going to be a slower migration process. But, the plan is to provision some pretty high-powered servers specifically set up for dynamic membership sites. And the horsepower is going to be reserved only for clients of Concierge. This means…. we’ll no longer be sharing with the general Rocket population.

While this process will take a little time (seeing as I have a lot of projects going on at once), I fully expect your site to feel much faster once it is moved over. It may not feel like a desktop app, because a WordPress site with 50 plugins is gonna do what it’s gonna do. 🤪 But, I can tell you… I have moved BlogMarketingAcademy.com over and it is now running on a VPS. And it is noticably faster on the backend. It is much faster getting around. Not only that, it doesn’t seem to go through the ups and downs of “sometimes fast and sometimes slow” that Rocket would sometimes do due to the server load of my “neighbors”.

Lastly, for those clients who still maintain their own hosting accounts (with Rocket, Rapyd, etc.)…. obviously you’ll stay right where you are unless you wish to migrate. But, I can tell you…. I think the new setup I’m putting together here is probably going to be much faster for you. Plus, hosting is already included in Concierge anyway. 😎

WordPress News & Updates

FluentCRM Update. FluentCRM was updated to 2.9.84… and this version will be great for users of Paid Memberships Pro because now you can view members’ complete purchase history inside their CRM profile. There’s also some enhancements to the integration with FluentCart. Click here to see the full release notes.

FluentCRM 3.0. Want a sneak peak of what’s coming in the next major release of FlueutCRM? This blog post talks more about the upcoming FluentCRM 3.0. Primary improvements look to be SMS marketing (for sending text messages from FluentCRM), major changes to the user interface to bring it more in-line with the UI design of other “Fluent” plugins, and an email editor with full Gutenberg compatibility.

Fluent Affiliate 1.2. As you can tell, these “Fluent” people have been busy. 😎 FluentAffiliate 1.2 was also released, offering up full integration with TutorLMS and ProfilePress, but also new migration options from Solid Affiliate and Affiliate Manager. Here’s the full details.

FluentCommunity 2.0. Yup, this one was updated, too. FluentCommunity gets it’s first major version number change… up to version 2. And the chief addition to this one is FluentCart integration, enabling you to easily put paywalls on your courses and community Spaces and it will all be seemless. It also has duplication functions in the course editor now, making creation of courses much faster. Check out the full release announcement here. You can also check out the Youtube Live they did about the new features. The actual presentation begins around 10:30.

Learndash 5.0 Prep. Learndash 5.0 is being teased, complete with all the usual buzzphrases: “a better user experience, smarter analytics, AI-assisted course creation, stronger integrations, and a reimagined Student Management experience.” I find it funny that one of their chief selling points of this is “makes LearnDash more stable and predictable”. You know it’s a winner when they have to say it’ll make their plugin suck a little less. 🤣 I know I have some clients using Learndash, so when this one is release, we’ll need to take special care of the situation.

Security Scans Of Plugin Updates. The WordPress Plugins Team announced that they will be now doing automatic scans of all plugin updates to the WordPress.org repository for security, compatibility and compliance issues. The way it has been done, a plugin is scanned and qualified before being permitted into the repository in the first place…. but then subsequent updates were not scanned.

StellarWP Layoffs. StellarWP has laid off 36 people… about a quarter of their entire workforce. StellarWP is part of LiquidWeb now… and the brand behind Learndash, Kadence, GiveWP and others. It looks to have been quite the shakeup, too, because it looks like perhaps a few others resigned and moved onto other things. Ben Ritner, the head of the Kadence team, has decided to also leave and move onto his next thing. I don’t know the full story here, but I know Liquid Web was acquired by a private equity firm… and sometimes those firms get quite brutal in their quest to increase ROI on their investments.

When A Security Plugin Is The Security Problem. In a touch of irony, WordFence disclosed a security vulnerability in the Anti-Malware Security And Brute-Force Firewall plugin. Apparently that plugin had a flaw which exposed about 100K sites to arbitrary file reads and potentially exposing sensitive information. Just be careful what you download for free out of the repository. I mean, this plugin would have been a red flag to me just because of the amateur graphics and poor user interface. 🤷‍♂️

Automattic Spreading More Trademark Love. Looks like the trademark attorneys for Automattic are continuing to spread their love to the ecosystem… this time by sending a friendly letter to Kevin Geary about the product name AutomaticCSS. I don’t know what to make of this one, frankly. You can’t trademark a regular English word, which is what “automatic” is. That said, creating a plugin for the WordPress space and being that close to “Automattic” (with two t’s) was rather bound to get some attention eventually. Meh. As some have said on X, I’d probably just rename it to ACSS and move on with life. Some things aren’t worth the time. I’d say the same to Matt, too, but… bitching about trademarks seems to be his thing these days.

Hosting Setup (Let’s Get Nerdy 🤓)

Now, some of this could be subject to change as I test things. But, based on where things stand this morning, let me give you a little look at some of the guts of what I’m doing here…

(Warning, this is gonna get a little nerdy. 😇 )

When I say I use xCloud for hosting, realize that all xCloud is is a management panel to enable anybody to manage their own virtual private servers without a ton of geekery. And I am still using xCloud.

As for servers, I have been using Vultr High Frequency. I am now moving toward higher-powered servers with Hetzner. With Hetzner, I am able to provision servers with high amounts of horsepower and, frankly, costs are better than Vultr.

Being that I can also manage exactly what sites go on which servers, I can also take care to place sites exactly where they best belong… and in which setup. For instance, Nginx servers are excellent at serving static HTML (cached) sites… whereas OpenLiteSpeed tends to be better performance for the dynamic kinds of sites (i.e membership sites). So, I can set up different servers meant for different site types.

I also pay attention to location. My European clients are going to go on a high-powered server based in the EU… while my US clients will probably have one on the east coast and another on the west coast. I’m talking physical location of the data centers. Closer the better in terms of lower latency (and higher responsiveness).

I am going to be ensuring sites are still Edge cached using Cloudflare or another quality CDN of choice (but likely Cloudflare). While I want sites to be hosted as close as possible to their owners, we all have visitors from around the world so we need that Edge caching to help ensure fast performance regardless of location.

In terms of hardware, I’m able to stack these servers with more hardware than is likely required… plus the ability to bump it up as needed. I’m using a minimum of 8 vCPUs per server with 16GB of RAM… and my membership clients may well end up using double those specs. The thing is… that horsepower will be fully dedicated to Concierge client sites ONLY. And I will be able to ensure each server is over-juiced (and be able to actually monitor the load directly).

Let’s also talk backups…

Rocket (like most hosts) run their own daily backups. And I also use BlogVault to back up client sites every single day. Obviously, by moving a site off Rocket, we no longer have their backup layer. So, I’m setting it up with an even increased layer of redundancy….

On the new servers, I’ll be also doing daily backups of sites to Cloudflare R2 (basically, Cloudflare’s equivalent of Amazon S3). Additionally, I’m even going the extra mile of having my local NAS (network attached storage) in my local office here in Florida go out and grab those backups every morning. Which means…. all client sites will now be backed up in 3 separate locations every single day…. BlogVault, Cloudflare R2, and right here in my own office. That’s even better than I can do now.

And, I’m even considering programming up something that would enable clients to have direct access to their site backups, if they so desire. Again, I never want anybody to feel “stuck” on my hosting. Digital sovereignty, y’all. 😇

So, there you have it. That’s where I am currently when it comes to hosting…. and changes coming to Concierge. The new setup will be much more tailored to the exact needs of my clients… which is not something I can say about Rocket that treats every site exactly the same even when it has different requirements to run optimally.

I will leave you with this…

The big-name hosting companies are mostly set up for “typical” WordPress sites. It is a numbers game for them and they prioritize front-end performance more than anything. This includes Rocket. Once you add lot of functionality to that site (WooCommerce, FluentCRM, community functions, online courses, etc.)…. the needs are different. And a “one size fits all” hosting environment is not necessarily the best fit anymore.

Being able to control your own environment is better. While I can’t say virtual private servers are yet as “user friendly”, they are definitely the way to go to get more horsepower and more control for your money. And in my case, a better experience for my clients.