Peace of mind. That was the immediate response when I asked James Laws, my boss and CEO of WP Ninjas, why we use Pagely for web hosting. “They know servers as well as anybody. They know WordPress. They manage our sites so that we can focus on managing our business. Server hardware, network, updates to core and plugins, security, it’s all taken care of. With Pagely we have the peace of mind that our sites run on the most secure, up to date, fastest hardware and software possible and that we can trust them to continue to manage that for us.”
What I’m about to share with you are the factors that give us that peace of mind, and why WP Ninjas recommends that you too give Pagely strong consideration for your web hosting needs.
Who is Pagely and What Do They Offer?
If you head on over to pagely.com and check out their site, the first thing you’re going to see is a couple of claims right off the bat.
The most scalable WordPress hosting platform in the world, a fully managed WordPress host, powered by Amazon Web Services. They’re not kidding around. Let’s break this down.
Amazon Web Services
What’s so special about Amazon Web Services? AWS is the world’s largest web hosting provider, supporting over a million active customers in almost 200 countries around the world.[1] You might recognize some of their other customers: Dow Jones, Conde Nast, Adobe, Pinterest, CDC, USDA, FDA. Their services are distributed across 30 zones worldwide with 1-6 data centers in each and 50,000 – 80,000 servers per data center.[2] They are huge, but they’re also incredibly reliable: AWS leads their industry with a mere 2.4 hours of downtime in 2014.[3]
Fully Managed WordPress Hosting
So, why did we choose Pagely and not just cut out the middle-man and go with AWS? Pagely harnesses the broad potential of the AWS cloud and molds it specifically to the WordPress environment. Where AWS is a wide ocean of options for any and every platform, Pagely has taken that enormous expanse and pulled out the best of what works for WordPress. They have optimized AWS’s capabilities to work for you as a WordPress admin, from the servers to the dashboard: networking and server management, updates, security, customer support, site backups. It’s all managed for you.
Why the WP Ninjas Use Pagely
Our former web host’s inability to scale service as our company grew led us to look for another hosting solution. Downtime is anathema for an internet company. It hurts general perception in the marketplace and loses customers that may never come back. With Pagely this isn’t an issue: 2.4 total hours of AWS downtime in 2014 and the scalability of the cloud insure that we can handle any fluctuations in traffic and are always there for our customers.
Onboarding with Pagely was extraordinarily simple. We didn’t have to do anything: they migrated our first site from our former web host to their own servers painlessly. We elected to manually migrate a second site just for the sake of experience, and their support team was incredible when we ran into questions. They were happy to work with us and help us learn.
We’ve been onboard with Pagely now for just shy of a year, and we couldn’t be happier. There are several areas where we feel Pagely especially shines:
- Infrastructure. Pagely’s caching and distribution service is spread across the world, meaning service is faster and more reliable. Our sites are served faster than ever before and with better stability. Downtime almost a year in is zero.
- Business friendly. With auto-updating services and lightning fast load times we don’t have to spend time updating our sites and our customers don’t have to spend time waiting for our pages to load. When websites are running smoothly and pages load quickly, visitors are more likely to stick around to do business. To quote WP Ninja CTO Kevin Stover: “From a business standpoint, having all that off of our plate means we can actually focus on running a business.”
- World-class support. Our experience with Pagely support has been second to none. They have always been prompt and considerate with us, and willing to go out of their way for us even when we’re being purely experimental. They have demonstrated an outstanding level of professionalism and knowledge of their product.
- Feature-rich control. Our VPS-1 service tier gives us fine grain control over our websites with WP-CLI command line access, staging sites, private database instances, SSH database access, and more.
- Peace of mind. Pagely knows their business, which means we don’t have to be experts on the AWS cloud for our site to run beautifully, and that leaves us time to be experts on form building. To quote James Laws again, “The greatest benefit of Pagely managing our hosting is that we just know our services work. It is mission critical to have someone there watching, to know we have an expert team making sure our system is always up.”
Why You Should Consider Pagely Too
Pagely’s decision to go with AWS not only means that they are able to offer the most reliable service in the world, but also the most scaleable. Pagely has the vast platform of AWS in play for their customers, meaning if unexpected traffic floods into a Pagely managed site, the site scales to handle it rather than being overwhelmed and going down.
For you and your website, that means extraordinary reliability for your users without paying for service you don’t need every hour of every day. With Pagely your website has the same scalability as some of the world’s most successful names: Disney, Microsoft, eBay, Twitter, Facebook, and more all put their trust in Pagely.
WordPress core updates, plugin updates, backups, and speed optimization are all handled for you by Pagely. They handle server and network management and maintenance for you so that you can focus on your business. They manage your security with PressArmor, a custom built, comprehensive defense system that actively monitors all elements of the WordPress environment from the network itself to hardware and apps. When you contact Pagely support you are dealing not just with a knowledgeable web hosting support staff, but a team of experts on the WordPress environment.
There’s a whole world full of $5 web hosts out there. They meet a lot of people’s needs. You have to ask yourself what your customers need, and unless you’re a web host yourself, managing a server probably isn’t the answer. You need to be spending your time on creating useful products and services for your customers, not managing the intricacies of your websites. Let Pagely take that torch for you, and take the time you save to get down to what you’re good at!
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