Potent Web Hosting

We specialize in high-performance and high-availability web hosting. At Potent Web Hosting, our servers are designed to handle well over 10k simultaneous requests and remain up even if a datacenter goes down.

Contact us at contact@potentpages.com

High-Performance

We use clusters of servers to provide extensive load balancing and processing capacity. Each group of servers is focused on a sepecific job, and all are designed for reliability and speed.

Performance

The Potent Web Hosting servers are configured to provide both fast load times and the ability to support a large number of visitors. Our servers can handle tens of thousands of simultaneous requests on each server, and we have multiple servers for each site.

We work with clients that run ads sending millions of visitors to their sites per day. We help clients that run up against the limits of mass-market hosting providers. Our hosting is designed to handle this traffic.

Caching

We have multiple "front-end" servers that save static resources (images, CSS, Javascript, etc.) and individual webpages. This allows your sites to load quickly without forcing your visitors to wait for the same page to generate again and again. These saved files will automatically clear after a period of time (that can be set to whatever you want), and can be cleared manually when needed.

High-Availability

We use multiple servers across multiple datacenters to ensure uptime and increase efficiency. Everything is configured so that even if one goes down, your site will stay up. If a server or datacenter runs into issues, we have our servers set up to simply switch to the next one in another datacenter or location.

This means that when we're doing maintenance, or if there's a networking issue from our providers, your sites remain up.

Also, if your site ends up with a configuration error after you make changes (say a WordPress update causing a 500 server issue), the cached front-end files remain. This will help keep your site up, even if an update causes problems.

Pricing

If your site receives fewer than 3M requests/month (100k requests/day), under most circumstances your cost will be $50/site/month.

There are situations where you would need to pay for one of our more expensive plans, for example if you need more than 140 active MySQL connections simultaneously. Most sites never use this though, including ones receiving 1M+ visitors per day.

Comparable Plans

The caching and load balancing provided with this hosting is similar to Cloudflare's Business Plan, currently available for $200/month/site.

The hosting we provide is comparable plans offered costing more than $100/month/site. Some other hosting providers with high-availability hosting include:

Technical Details

Web Hosting Servers

These servers run Nginx with extensive custom configuration. They will pass the requests to Apache servers. We use Apache to ensure that any .htaccess files still work if you're running WordPress. Each site still has its own Apache vhost Apache configuration file, cron support, and php.ini though.

If you need a custom docker container for your site, please contact us. We can provide custom server configurations for individual sites, since each one is managed separately.

Caching Details

We configured our Nginx "front-end" servers to avoid caching any requests from your WordPress admin section. If you're logged in, you will always see the most recent version of your site. It will be a bit slower than the cached version that your visitors see though.

Docker Containers and Security

All sites are contained within their own Docker containers. The folders are secured so that if any site gets hacked, it is completely isolated from anything else.

Dev-Ops and Automatic Deployment

We can set up automatic deployment of your sites if you're using git. After you do a git push, we can deploy any custom theme changes to your site automatically.

Access

We provide FTP and MySQL access to your sites. We don't provide SSH access since your site isn't on "one server", but on multiple in a synchronized cluster. You'd need to make updates on all of them at the same time and that tends to lead to a mess.

SSL Certificates

If you provide access to your DNS (or permit us to host your DNS records), we can provide you with a free wildcard SSL certificate through Let's Encrypt. This means that you can have your domain and any subdomains under one certificate on our systems without any separate charges.

Versions

  • PHP: By default we provide PHP 7.4.x, although this can be customized if needed.
  • HTTP: We serve all sites via HTTP2 by default.
  • MySQL: We use MariaDB with a Galera cluster for reliability and speed.
  • Object Caching: We provide object caching with memcached by default. On server updates, keys salts are changed automatically to avoid conflicts.
  • Compression: By default, requests are gzipped to provide improved site load times.