Here within my concierge program, with all the sites that I manage, I have been engaged in a project lately, and that is that I am slowly moving pretty much all of my client sites out of Rocket. Net hosting and over to a very different hosting setup. And I’ve mentioned it in my newsletter a couple of times. It goes out, the WP Edge, by the way, thewpedge. Com. But I thought I would just record a quick video to also mention why I am doing this. And I will be clear, if you’re coming here thinking that this is going to be a bash on Rocket. Net, you’re definitely not going to find that in this video. I still have nothing but good things to say about Rocket. Net, but I still have my reasons why I’m going to be moving sites. So let’s go into it. Okay, so let’s talk about Rocket. Net Hosting. They are one of the best companies I have ever worked with. Their support is absolutely fantastic. Their live chat support is just… Not only are the people there, they know what they’re doing, but you can get them on the horn with you, literally within seconds most of the time.

It really is fantastic. In terms of the control panel, it’s very simple to use, and they do a good job of obfuscating a lot of the complexities of hosting, so you don’t have to think about it. And it’s because it’s a managed hosting environment. And so it’s really a nice system. They are baked in with Cloudflare enterprise, and so there’s a lot of advantages to that in terms of speed. And so Rocket is actually a pretty good name for the company because it is truly pretty fast hosting. That being said, I have my reasons for moving, and that is because of the types of sites that I manage for the most part. The thing about rocket. Net is that that they do best with sites that can be very publicly cached, and they do decently with sites that cannot be publicly cached. And that basically means blogs and that type of stuff, maybe some woocommerce stores, versus, say, membership sites, where you have a lot of people who are logged in and they’re doing things, and then you can’t cash them. When you can’t cash them, what happens is that you do potentially have slowdowns.

You have slowdowns on the site. And the thing about Rocket. Net, as many good things as I have to say about them, they are a bit of a one-size-fits-all solution. They don’t really change their hosting environment for a five-page blog versus a large Woocommerce site. The two sites are basically going to have the exact same setup. So when you have clients like I do who are running, sometimes 40 to 50 plus plugins at a time, and some of them are running something like Buddy Boss, which is already a performance hog, and you put it into Rocket. Net, it will function, but is it going to function optimally? The answer is no. When you compare that to a brochure-style site or even a smaller type membership site that just doesn’t have so many moving parts, it’ll probably still do okay on Rocket. But where this started to really show itself was in in the admin panels for some of my clients, and frankly, my own site, too, because it was hosted on rocket. Net. The admin panel, as you’re clicking around and doing things in there, would just drag. Not all the time. That’s the thing, too, is sometimes the sites would be fine.

You’d be moving around and like, Oh, this is fine. And other times it would just slow down a lot. Why would it be coming and going like that? Well, I think it’s because at the end of the day, you are in a shared hosting environment with shared resources, which means we probably have instances where we have noisy neighbors, where we have something is going on on that server that’s causing a general slowdown on the server, and there’s just no way for you to know because you’re sharing resources. Sources with a lot of other people. We don’t know who it is, but that is what is going on. And then sometimes those load times would come down and the admin panels would speed up. But I was starting to get more common, more frequent reports from my clients wondering if something was wrong because their admin panels would get really sluggish. At the end of the day, I can’t do a lot about that problem on Rocket. Net. And there’s a couple of reasons for that. One is that it obviously is a shared hosting environment. I know that their servers are pretty powerful. I think I saw somewhere they recently did some CPU upgrades, and they’re good, powerful servers.

But what I What they don’t have any information on is how many sites they pack onto one of those servers. I just don’t know. I also don’t know if they would even tell me if I asked. And so when you have people who are coming in, some with little tiny sites, some with really large, bulky sites, and they just start putting them onto these servers. I’m sure that Rocket is monitoring resources and stuff like that, but there’s also a financial incentive on their part to pack as many things as they can on there. Now, I’m not saying that they’re probably overdoing it. They’re probably not, honestly. I think that they do a pretty good job of balancing it out. It’s opaque to me. I don’t know what’s going on there. And I can’t really tweak anything with the server environment. It’s just not possible because it’s a managed host through Rocket. I can’t change anything. I have very little things that I have control over other than just putting the site on Rocket, cross my fingers, and hope for the best. And that’s really what it comes to. I will say if it was just me and I didn’t have other people to think about, I might not have moved anything.

But when you’re in the business that I am, where I’ve got clients, and I need to sometimes have different types of environments for different types of clients, I need a little bit more control than what I can get with Rocket. Net. Okay, so the next thing is, what am I doing about it? Well, I am creating my own hosting environment. I’m doing it using virtual private servers. In this case, I I am going to be primarily using a company called Hetzner. People who are in the business may be familiar with Hetzner. Actually, they’re based out of Germany, if I’m not mistaken. However, they do have other data centers. And in fact, most of my servers right now are actually sitting in the same ash burn data center that Rocket has stuff inside of. And so there’s not a whole lot of difference. But here’s the thing. I’m managing those servers through xCloud Hosting. It’s a great hosting panel, but it allows me to customize my environment. With Hetzner, I can actually get pretty beefy CPUs. I can set them up in such a way where I can control my own CPU and RAM count for the server.

I can tailor it to the types of clients that I’m running. So for example, I have got one server that’s for the more brochures, smaller sites that runs on NGINX, and they’ve got the caching on there and everything. And then I’ve got another one that I’ve got more specs on that’s designed for dynamic having membership sites, primarily the guys that are not going to be cached quite so often. I’m running that one on OpenLightSpe because OpenLiteSpe software tends to be a little bit better for dynamic than NGINX, and I can set things up in such a way where it’s going to be optimized to the types of sites that I’m running. And that really is the key there. It’s not because I’m going to sit here and say, Hetzner is better than Rocket. No, what it really comes down to is that, rocket. Net is, I will hold your hand and trust me, bro. And most of the time, they do a pretty good job. But in my case, in the business that I’m in, I could stand to have a lot more control over the hosting environment so that I can make sure that my clients have the best hosting experience and the fastest possible setup that I can give for their type of site, rather than a one-size-fits-all approach that Rocket gives.

And so I’m moving over to virtual private servers. I’m going to have a series of them for various things. I have that type of control. I can put, one, I’m going to put a good powered server over in the EU for my European clients. I’m putting a lot of my US clients in the Ashtburn data center. I can make those kinds of decisions because I can control my own hosting environment, set it up the way that I want. There are many things that I would usually have to go to Rocket’s chat and ask them to do for me that now I can just do myself because I can control all the settings rather than it just being opaque to me. Little things like making sure that the backup settings are set up in the way that I want rather than what Rocket provides. I can download it, like if you see my last video, I can set it up to where those site downloads not only are automated, but they can get backed up, even right over here, right into my own office. Not something I can do with rocket. Net. So it really comes down to the point that I have more control over the hosting environment.

I can tweak it for what me and my clients need, and the result is that things are actually a lot faster. So, yeah, let’s go ahead and talk speed and talk about the end effects here. Now, I’m not going to sit here and give you benchmarks and that crap. Frankly, those types of reviews are a little dumb because there’s so many moving parts to something like that, and so they’re meaningless. So really, what it comes down to is the real-world effect of, in my case, large sites that are running 30 to 40 to 50 plugins at a time. These types of sites are never going to feel like a desktop app when you’re clicking around. I mean, by their very nature, These are WordPress sites that have a little bit of beef to them. All I can do is provide a hosting environment that is optimized as much as possible and is dedicating enough horsepower for sites like that so that they can run as well as they can run. And I will say for the sites that I’ve moved over that are of that type of caliber, and I’ve moved them out of Rocket, and I’ve put them onto my own virtual private servers, they are definitely noticeably faster.

There’s just no doubt about it. Again, I don’t have any numbers to show you. This is just raw observation. You’re clicking around the admin panel, and it is faster. And I think it’s because I am able to dedicate more raw server horsepower to the sites, and I’m not going to be sharing it with noisy neighbors. Now, with Hetzner, they have two different grades of their virtual private servers. They’ve got ones that are the typical ones, where you are sharing it with other people with virtual private servers. But then they have what’s called their dedicated plans. That’s ultimately where I’m heading, is the dedicated plans, because those, they set up in such a way where you’re not sharing resources, which means when I put people onto my Ashburn server for dynamic sites, for things like Buddy Boss and stuff like that, the only neighbors we have are other clients of mine. We’re literally not sharing it with anybody. And then that allows me to balance things out so that I can make sure that things are not loaded down. Because if I need to, I’ll just spin up another server. It’s not like Hetsner is very expensive, frankly.

So that’s what I’m doing, and the results They’re definitely noticeable. So that leads me to comment on a few things, primarily for other agency owners. Let me talk to you guys for just a second. When you’re in the agency business, meaning that you are hosting clients for your hosting clients yourself. Rocket has the agency plans, and that’s what I have been using. I’ve been paying them quite a bit of money. I think I was paying it because I had some sites on xCloud all along, but I would think I was paying Rocket over $500 a month easily to host a number of sites with them. So as an agency, and you’re in this space, when it’s a one-size fits all type of a host, and whether I have a brochure-style site, or whether I have a Woocommerce, or something with Fluent CRM and all that running, I have to sit there and decide where to put them. Because I’ve been putting them on Rocket. Net thinking, Okay, Rocket. Net is probably going to be serving that type of site better than what I could do on xCloud. I was wrong. What it comes down to is you can customize the environment a lot better with your own virtual private server, therefore giving me more control, therefore allowing me to provide a better experience for my clients.

And so for other agency owners, I think that that might be a really good way to think about it rather than using agency plans through something like Rocket. It does probably depend quite a bit on your target audience, what type of client you typically work with. And then the other thing would be how hands-off you want to be. If you don’t know the first thing about hosting or your complete technical, you don’t know anything about it, Rocket’s probably going to be more up your alley because that’s what they do. It’s a fully managed environment, and most of what’s going on in your server, you can’t even see it. But when you do know a little bit about it, xCloud is a better fit. And I would say the same thing for a grid pain, for run cloud, any of these panel softwares where you can manage your own virtual private servers, you’re going to have more control. It’s not like the old days where you’d have to sit there and play with the command line all day in order to manage these things. It’s still pretty easy to do. But the nature of these types of panels is that you can’t control more things, and so therefore, You need to have a little bit of an idea of what you’re doing.

But then the other thing is just lastly, as an agency owner, there’s always that idea of profitability. And I will say this is not why I’m moving. However, the net effect is that my hosting bill out of pocket every month is going to be less when I’m done with this. And so from my perspective, I’m thinking, Well, hell, I’m improving the customer experience, and I’m going to cut my bill in half. And that is what the effect is going to be. I’m literally going to be paying out probably half the amount of money every month for hosting for my clients, and yet they’re all going to have a much better hosting experience, and everybody’s site is going to speed up. I mean, it’s a win-win all the way around. If I could solve this problem on Rocket and leave everything where it was, I’d be happy to pay the bill because I have plenty of revenue coming and I can afford Rocket. It’s not a problem. But it’s just that I was having this issue where people were reporting slowdowns, and I could not control I can on the new setup, and it’s just a much faster setup because of that.

One final thing before we wrap up this video. I know that I do have some people, some of my long-time subscribers and audience members and stuff like that who tend to… They’ve seen me make hosting changes before. They’ve seen me change plugin platforms, various things. I’m not one that will stay put if I find that another thing would be a better fit. With that being said, so I do think I think that there might be some people who would watch a video like this and just blindly follow and think, Okay, well, if rocket. Net is no longer any good, let me switch over to a virtual private server with xCloud. And I just want to be clear, there is nothing here where I am saying, No, rocket. Net is not any good anymore. That’s not true. They’re actually fantastic. I wish I didn’t need to move. I love working them. It’s almost at a point where some of their support people, I recognize them by name, and probably they recognize me by name now, too. I don’t really know. So it’s not like I wanted to move off of rocket. Net. I’m just literally finding everything I just As I said, it’s just faster this way.

But Rocket. Net is a fantastic company. If you want to reliably host your website and not have to think about the server stuff at all, and you want really fast access to support in short, roca. Net is still going to be fantastic. I will say the caveat of that is that if you’re going to be bringing over a site that is mostly members that are not being cached by anything, and you’re running a big pile of plugins, 30, 40, 50 plus at a time, then you might want to look at other options. It’s not because Rocket can’t handle it, it’s just that you’re going to be dealing with the one-size-fits-all aspect of it. They’re not going to necessarily treat your site any different because you’re running a site like that versus something really small. And Rocket is going to be a lot faster for you if you’re running a small site. There’s just no doubt about that. And I would say for people who are running those types of larger sites, it can sometimes pay, often pay, to take a little bit more personal responsibility for your hosting environment and customize it to your needs through a virtual private server, whether it’s through xCloud or through something else.

Cloudways, I used to use. I would go with xCloud versus Cloudways, personally. But you have to tailor the hosting to the type of site that you’re running and just make the right choice. But Rocket is still It remains to be fantastic. I love the people there. Got nothing bad to say about it. It’s just that I need more control. I need to have a little bit more responsibility for the offer that I’m making to my clients than what I have through Rocket, because at At the end of the day, I’m just another customer through Rocket. I can’t really control very much, and I’m in a position where I need to be able to control it. And so that is why I am moving sites off of rocket. Net, slowly but surely. And in case people were curious, and now others can follow along if they so please. If you have any questions about this, definitely feel free to ask me in the comments. I’d be happy to answer. You could also just shoot me a message. And then I guess I could also say, if you are not satisfied with your hosting environment, but you want to come over and have your site fully maintained and have me as your point guy, come check out Concierge.

At this point, I can guarantee you’re going to have very fast hosting. I’ll make sure of it because now I have more control over the environment. But just keep in mind, I am not a hosting company. I’m setting up a server setup here ideal for my clients so that I can provide the best service to them. But at the end of the day, people come on to Concierge so that I can be their web guy and help them manage everything. It’s not because I’m not Rocket. Net, I’m not a hosting company. I’m all the support. I can just provide really, really freaking solid hosting at this point. And I can also pretty much feel confident that I know that that promise will hold true, because now I can adjust things on my own as needed to ensure that my clients have the best hosting that their site deserves.