News

Today, we are starting a phased rollout of a major change in our hosting infrastructure designed to speed up web content delivery.

On top of our new hardware platform, based on the latest Intel Xeon processors and Linux KVM virtualization, we are introducing PHP FastCGI Process Manager (PHP-FPM) paired with OPcache.

PHP-FPM speeds up PHP-based websites by maintaining pools of PHP worker processes that can handle incoming requests. This optimization technique not only significantly reduces the server response time (TTFB), but also allows websites to handle more requests compared to the traditional CGI execution scheme. PHP-FPM is paired with OPcache - a caching system that keeps precompiled script bytecode in the server memory, which further boosts PHP performance.

Will this speed up my site?

Website speed is a complex issue that cannot be solved entirely by using server-side mechanisms, but with PHP-FPM, and proper website caching, the server part of the equation should be taken care of. For more information about the full process of optimizing a website, you can check our detailed YouTube video and blog post that show you how to get a nearly perfect score with a WordPress site on GTMetrix and Google PageSpeed Insights:

How to Speed Up WordPress in 10 Steps

How to Speed Up WordPress and Get Top Results at Speed Tests

We have tested our new setup with a plethora of web applications to ensure full compatibility; however, it is still possible that some software, or some specific application feature, may be incompatible with it; for such cases, we are keeping the standard CGI execution mechanism, and you can always switch to it if need be.

Rollout schedule

PHP-FPM will be available to all hosting plans in all data centers, at no extra cost, immediately after the completion of the phased rollout.

As of today, PHP-FPM is available in the European data center. It will be followed by the Hong Kong data center, and the final stage will be the US data center. We expect the rollout to be fully completed before the end of the month (July, 2020).

New accounts on PHP-FPM-enabled servers will have it turned on by default. Existing accounts on such servers can be easily switched to PHP-FPM via the hosting Control Panel > PHP Settings section.

Stay tuned for the upcoming news about the availability of PHP-FPM and other advanced server technologies that are still in the works.