Building Australia's fastest WordPress hosting.
- Eru
- 4 days ago
- 3 min read
My largest client started off as an eLearning site built with BuddyBoss, but pivoted to become the communication platform used by New Zealand's largest childcare centres. But they were running into serious scaling issues. Despite being hosted on rapyd.cloud - one of the fastest commercially avaialble web hosts, built specifically for complex BuddyBoss sites.
I had done all I could, and they were already on rapyd's high performance plan, I told them I would look into a high end VPS.
After setting everything up, I realised we had a big problem, after setting up a 16CPU VPS for $1000/month and installing a test site, it was still slower than rapyd.cloud.
This sent me down a WordPress performance rabbit hole, I investigated different web servers, custom builds of PHP, proprietary caching connectors, all aiming to beat rapyd.cloud at performance and cost.
After doing everything I could with the software stack, I had an important realisation. WordPress performance is driven by single threaded CPU performance. It doesn't matter how many vCPU cores you rent, it doesn't matter how many GB of memory you allocate, what matters is the model of your CPU and its clock speed.
Using sites like https://www.cpubenchmark.net/ I found the CPUs with the highest single threaded speed, and rented an entire dedicated server with those CPUs installed. This cuts out any overheads and ensures that I get the fastest single threaded performance that money can buy. I also used what I'd learned to build a very efficient PHP hosting stack, relying on the latest PHP with all performance optimisations, running behind litespeed enterprise web server which in my testing outperformed Nginx significantly.
After setting up this server and a test site, I found it was dramatically faster than rapyd.cloud. Pages were loading in about half the time, I was also empowered to make other improvements which sped up certain pages by approximately 10x. This is compared to one of the fastest hosts in the world! And my service was 2x-10x faster.
Joyfully, I wrote up my performance testing results and sent them to my client. It's one thing to build a great system, it's another to sell it... Despite my detailed results, their eyes glazed over. What looked like technical excellence to me looked like complexity and risk to them. I don't blame them for not going with me, at the time I was a one man band who had set up a custom server, and just because it was faster, that doesn't mean they could trust it.
Since then I've pivoted my business, I went down a WordPress security rabit hole that was even deeper than the performance one. I've also lucked out and managed to employ an incredibly talented young man who represents the University of Queensland at competitive hacking competitions. Together we offer a fully managed WordPress service: security hardening, plugin updates, uptime monitoring and incident response. Basically the fastest, and most secure managed WordPress that money can buy.
While I'm still building up my reputation, I've been selling fully managed hosting for A$75-A$249 per month, I've been able to grow quicklly and already have serious and complex clients. My latest client is a WooCommerce store doing 7 figures of annual revenue. He was paying ~A$700 a month for high performance cloudways hosting. After moving to my service his site is loading almost twice as fast and hasn't gone down once versus every couple of days or so beforehand.
I say that my service is the fastest in Australia, because I know it's faster than anything running in the cloud (most modern hosting companies), and my CPUs are still the second fastest commercially available. I'm sure someone will set up the very fastest CPU on dedicated hardware, and if they've also done the software optimisations that I have, ok they could be faster. But compared to what's out there commercially, it's night and day. The average client site that migrates across has their loading speed halved.
So after all that, a massive investment leading to rejection has also led to me building the fastest, safest, and best supported hosting option in Australia (that almost nobody knows about yet)
So please spread the word.
My performance test results, it's about as fast as it can be:
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