Faster, Cheaper, Hosting Solutions For Your Hospitality Website

Making your hospitality website lightning fast.

In this article, I show before and after examples of how I made a client’s website run 4 times faster, for half the price.
I also include a how-to video on how you can test your own website

The honeymoon with Siteground is over

As many of you know, I have been looking at alternative hosting solutions to Siteground as their prices have been going up and their support isn’t what it was (and I’m being kind there, on both counts).

After much research and testing, I’m happy to say that I have found an excellent solution.

I’ve migrated all of my site from Siteground to new hosting

I have also just migrated a site for a client and below you will see the savings in cost and the faster site speed results with before and after screenshot results.

Savings

Firstly let’s look at costs.

This particular client was using Siteground’s ‘Grow Big’ package

As you can see from the image below the cost of Siteground’s shared server hosting was $319.68 a year (paid yearly).

That’s $26.64 a month

The new hosting, on a faster, cloud server is $14.00 a month (paid monthly).

So, that’s a saving of $12.64 a month or a whopping $151.68 a year.
It’s almost half the price for a faster service.

Speed

I ran a couple of speed tests before and after moving the site.
I didn’t make any changes to the site because I wanted to see an apples for apples comparison.

The first image below is from a gtmetrix.com page speed test (later in this article, I have a video on how to use GTmetrix).

This test was run before the migration

As you can see, these are pretty poor results.

An E grade overall with 46% performance and 64% for structure.
The time to first byte (TTFB) is a very poor 1.1 seconds

Time for the site to become interactive was 3.1 seconds and the fully loaded time was just under 5 seconds
That was all pretty woeful

Once the site was moved I ran exactly the same test and you can see the results below

So, just by moving the site we have gone from an E rating to a B rating.
Performance has gone from 46% to 94% and the structure rating has gone from 64% to 75%

Time to first byte (TTFB – That’s the server response time) has gone from 1.1 seconds to just 122 milliseconds.

As a side note, this is where Siteground really piss me off because they never own TTFB. They always say that it’s nothing to do with them and they send you to links as to why it may be slow. But here we are showing that it’s entirely down to their servers.
Ok, rant over, back to the results…

Time to the site being interactive has gone from a poor 3.1 seconds down to an impressive 764 milliseconds and the fully loaded time has gone from 4.9 seconds to 1.2 seconds.

In short, the site is now 4 times faster than it was – And it’s half the price of the Grow Big package

Other things to bear in mind

As with all hosting, there’s more to it than price and speed alone.

We need to take other things like ease of use, support, extras, etc. into consideration.

Overall I found the new hosting interface very easy to use and I only needed a couple of clicks to set up the server and a couple more to install a new installation of WordPress where I could migrate the existing website to.

There’s more to it than that though but I followed a video on Youtube and all went well. All in all, it took a couple of hours.

I have moved around 5 sites now and they are all faster. Some made big gains, like the example above. Others gained less but they were fast in the first place. As I said, they all are faster now.

Support

The new hosting has one-click support where you will receive instant help, with either bot-driven solutions that link you to very well written, step by step, solutions and/or live chat sessions where I found the support staff very helpful (and patient with me).

Things to be aware of

Before moving your website make sure that you take a backup. Things can go wrong and you need to have a fallback position, just in case.

You are going to change nameservers and although this is very simple to do (covered in the video), this takes between 4 – 48 hours to propagate across the web and your site may suffer from disruptions during that time.

Cloud hosting doesn’t include email so you may need to back up existing inboxes if they are stored with your existing host.
The hosting that I’m using offers email addons that cost $1 a month (I’ve included that in the $14 a month that I quoted at the beginning).

You can add as many sites as you like for that cost but this may impact speed and maximum allowances so bear that in mind as the next package up is $27 a month (including email).
This is the package that I’m using.
I had a Start-Up package and a Go Geek package with Siteground and I was paying more than twice that with them).

Conclusion

I’m super happy with the new hosting (so much so that I’ve signed up as an affiliate). My sites are faster and I’m saving money. Yes, it took time to move my sites but by following the Youtube video I was able to move them without major heartache. When I did mess up, their support was very good. They’ll even move your site for free if you fill out a form although the form isn’t that straight forward TBH.

Where to from here?

Well, if you would like a faster website, the first thing to do is to test your site as it stands right now.
There are a number of sites that will run speed tests but my go-to choice is GTmetrix

I’ve made a short video showing how to use GTmetrix so that you can test your site right now and use the results as a benchmark going forward as we strive to make your site lightning fast for a better user experience and for better SEO ranking.

Further information

I’m now using Cloudways for my hosting. If you use the link below, I’ll be more than happy to share my package details and point you in the right direction to move your site.
Using this link helps support my research and the writing of these articles…

Feel free to get in touch with me via the contact us page