2020 Cyber Weekend Discount Details.

For 2020 we will be offering a single discount of 30% on our hosting plans. The code is listed below and can be used at checkout.

Promo code: cyber2020

This promo code is available only for new accounts. If you have an existing account, please contact our sales department via a ticket for a 30% off upgrade offer on the difference between your existing and new plan.

The promo code will not be back dated and is eligible for new customer accounts only. Discounts are based on list price at the time of this post and cannot be combined with any other discount or existing account discount.

Security and performance are the cornerstones of a successful website. This holds true whether you’re an individual blogger with a single WordPress site, a multinational corporation with a vast library of online content, or fall anywhere in-between. While there’s no one-size-fits-all means to ensure sites are fast and secure, in many cases leveraging the power of a content delivery network, or CDN, is a great way to enhance speed and performance.

Website operators have realized the benefits of CDNs, and adoption has surged. During that time, CDNs have helped sites of all sizes better serve and improve user experience (UX) and search engine optimization (SEO). Several years ago even video-streaming giant Netflix recognized the benefits, and built out their own CDN to enhance viewer experience. As the amount of data we consume online continues to rise, the benefits of CDNs will become further magnified. 

In this piece, we’ll provide a crash course on CDNs. By reviewing their benefits, we’ll help you understand if using one makes sense for your website.

What is a CDN?

A CDN is a network of servers distributed across multiple geographical regions with the intent of delivering content. The physical locations where these servers are located are sometimes called points of presence, or PoPs. Built from the ground up to optimize speed, CDNs serve a variety of content including images, video, stylesheets, and more.

Is a CDN a web host?

In a word, no.

A traditional web hosting model would see all of your content delivered to website visitors from a single server. As a distributed network of servers designed to optimize the delivery of content from web hosts, CDNs aren’t web hosts themselves. The services provided by the team here at VeeroTech are an example of web hosting, while our partner Cloudflare is an example of a CDN.  In the world of CDNs, the original web server is often referred to as the “origin server.”

Impact of a CDN on website performance

With PoPs distributed across the globe serving content from an “origin server,” CDNs boast a number of benefits for website visitors and administrators alike. By serving content at PoPs that are closer to users, CDNs can significantly improve page load times and user experience.

To help conceptualize this, consider a user in London, England, who accesses a site hosted in Los Angeles, California, USA. To get the content to the PC in London, the traffic will likely have to traverse a number of “hops” across the Internet, and have a significant amount of latency. However, if the origin site leverages a CDN with a PoP in London, the data has a much shorter path to its destination, greatly reducing latency.

In addition to the distance reduction benefits of a CDN, web hosting providers also optimize their infrastructure to increase speed (e.g., by using SSDs and load balancing) and use file size reduction techniques to improve page load times. Cloudflare’s Railgun network optimizer is another example of how CDNs help further boost performance. Railgun improves the connection between an origin server and the CDN network, increasing performance by 200% on average. All these features come together to reduce page load times for users.

Why a CDN really matters

While reducing page load times is great, why should website administrators care? What’s the impact of improved performance on traffic and SEO? The short answer is, the impact of site performance on traffic and SEO is huge. For some supporting evidence, consider the following:

• Website speed is a factor that impacts both Google Search results and Google Ads. Speed has been a part of Google’s rankings on desktop for some time now. Last year, Google announced that speed will be considered as a landing page factor for mobile searches as well. If you care about SEO, you should care about website speed.
• A 2-second delay in load time increases bounce rates by 103%. This statistic comes from CDN provider Akamai and drives home just how important page load time can be to capturing the attention of your audience. If your page doesn’t load quickly, you’ll likely lose a large chunk of your audience.
• Faster pages can lead to higher conversion rates. Looking at this case study from Akamai, we can see how a mere 1-second improvement in performance led to a 27% increase in conversion rates.

Impact of a CDN on website security and reliability

In addition to improving a website’s performance, a CDN also makes a website more robust and secure. It does so by limiting the site’s vulnerability to attacks and improving its uptime and availability.

One of the biggest security advantages CDNs offer is reduced exposure to distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. This is due in part to integrated security features, as well as the capacity of CDN networks relative to the capacity of an origin server. For example, Cloudflare’s network has a capacity that’s fifteen times greater than the largest DDoS attack on record. Additionally, many CDNs offer security features that analyze traffic and proactively block threats. They also support SSL and TLS to help prevent man-in-the middle (MITM) attacks and data breaches.

While mitigating threats is an obvious way CDNs can improve site reliability and uptime, the increased network capacity has availability benefits beyond those related to nefarious causes. For example, spikes in traffic can wreak havoc on a website. CDNs reduce the workload on origin servers when these spikes occur, spreading the bursts across a network of servers. This, in turn, makes your website more robust and helps to increase uptime.

Conclusion: CDNs help you optimize your website

A CDN’s ability to reduce distance between content and users and guard against attacks will improve a website’s performance. Here at VeeroTech, we recognize the value CDNs offer to websites of all sizes. That’s why we offer the Cloudflare CDN on all cPanel accounts and integration with Cloudflare Railgun. Click here to find an NVMe Web Hosting plan that’s right for you!

It’s no surprise that shared hosting is constantly under attack for various reasons. Many of these reasons are simply false. You may find yourself on a forum, Facebook group or website such as Reddit asking for hosting advice and you’ll be greeted with some common shared hosting myths.

Your post or comment may start out with good intentions on asking for basic advice however, will very quickly get inundated with various remarks claiming shared hosting is bad, slow or that you should immediately get a VPS. A lot of this advice is really not in your best interest and should be avoided.

 

Myth #1: Shared hosting performance

The number one complaint you may hear others mention is the performance of shared hosting. You’ll often be told that shared hosting is slow, or that servers are overloaded and your website will suffer or even that the fact that it’s shared hosting just means your website will be slow.

Shared hosting performance being slow is often a false assumption usually by those who either have something to gain by pointing you in another direction or they themselves have simply had issues in the past. Generally, as long as the shared hosting infrastructure itself is properly managed by a competent web hosting company, you should not experience performance issues. You’ll want to ensure that your website is however, properly optimized and running at its best. Performance of shared hosting is one of the most common shared hosting myths out there.

 

Myth #2: Scale

Being able to scale resources on a shared hosting plan is often stated as not possible, at lease from those who are ill intended or simply aren’t familiar with the subject and/or technology. We can scale your shared hosting plan from a very small entry level plan with 512MB of RAM for a very small site to a semi dedicated hosting plan with 8GB of RAM within seconds. If your website is getting or is expecting to get a surge of traffic and/or users, you can scale up your hosting plan instantly from within your account with us.

 

Myth #3: VPS is better

This is the most common second to performance issue claims. With the hosting plans that we offer, we also offer semi dedicated hosting which is a good middle ground between a regular shared hosting plan and a full blow VPS. In many cases, we find that you mostly end up needing more resources such as RAM, CPU and storage as opposed to a whole VPS. When this is the case, a semi dedicated hosting plan is the best fit.

 

Myth #4: Security

Another misconception about shared hosting is that it’s less secure than a VPS or other hosting technology. This assumption is typically wrong and in some instances can be dangerous advice. In most cases, as shared hosting plan is usually actually more secure than trying to manage your own VPS without the proper experience. By blindly following advice to manage your own VPS when you don’t have the experience, you could actually be opening your website and server up to potential hacking and malware. Issues. We do offer fully managed vps plans for those who prefer to use a VPS that is managed by us.

In terms of security, all of our shared hosting, reseller hosting, WordPress hosting and semi dedicated hosting plans offer account level isolation by using CloudLinux. This ensures your hosting account is completely isolation from other customers, making it virtually impossible for one account to access another, including any type of hacking or malware. In addition to that, we deploy various WAF’s (Web Application Firewall) to ensure proper protection at the server level from bad actors. Lastly, our servers, network and managed services are all managed by experienced IT professionals who know what they’re doing; this is the most important part.

 

Myth #5: Uptime

The last of the shared hosting myths that we’ll discuss here is uptime. Often you may see people stating that shared hosting may suffer more downtime than other services. This really depends on the provider and the level of expertise and/or care that is provided. Properly maintained shared hosting servers really do not suffer any more downtime than any other possible service and certainly not just because it’s shared hosting. We maintain 99.99%+ and in many cases 100% uptime on our servers excluding maintenance tasks. We achieve this by ensuring our shared hosting servers are properly managed.